She heard footsteps coming from the house, and a moment later, Steven Weller was sitting opposite her. She had no idea what to say. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
The silence was uncomfortable. He just looked at her, so she pointed at the sky and said, “That’s the Little Dipper.”
“I know. And Orion. And that’s the Big Dipper. I’m from the Midwest.”
“Oh.” Silence again. She had known he was from the Midwest. She’d known his entire bio since she was a teenager: One of two sons. Polish family. Weller wasn’t his birth name, but she couldn’t remember the real one. “Kenosha, Wisconsin,” she said, trying to recover.
“Yep. On Lake Michigan.”
There was a matchbook on the table, and Weller tore off a match. He held it up between his fingers and said, “One, two, three.” On three, the match vanished.
“How did you do that?” she asked, impressed.
“A magician never tells.”
“Please? One more time!”
He did it again. She puzzled over it and then took the match, fumbling with her fingers, unable to figure it out.
“I meant what I said about your performance,” he said. “You were stellar. Truly.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that. Thank you so much.”
“How’d you get bitten? By the bug?”
“I was a shy kid,” she said. “My mother died when I was young, and it was hard for me. My dad got me into acting. I think he realized it could help. When I acted, I didn’t feel shy. There’s this Danny Kaye movie I saw as a kid. Wonder Man. He’s escaping from gangsters, and he winds up on the stage of an opera, mistaken for one of the performers. Every time he looks in the wings, he sees the gangsters waiting to get him. He’s only safe as long as he’s onstage. That’s kind of how I felt.”
She told Weller that when she was nine, her father had told her to audition for Elmer Rice’s Street Scene at the Potter Players, their local theater. A small role, just a few lines, but she loved every moment of the rehearsals, the blocking, the lights, and later, the period costume. When she walked onto the bright stage on opening night, she got a rush. The thrill of the moment, the potential for mishaps, the breathing of the audience, whom you could see. There was a murder toward the end of the play. Backstage, she could smell the smoke.
After the show closed, she asked her father if she could take acting class. He shuttled her to a children’s theater in Lyndonville, where she did improv drills, Shakespeare scenes, theater games, and original monologues. He suggested she try an arts camp in upstate New York. The other kids had names like Masha and Pippin and did unironic productions of Agatha Christie. In the company of these weird precocious kids, she wanted to be better.
Throughout her childhood, during school vacations or over long weekends, Jake would drive her the long six hours into the city, where they would check in to a hotel and see plays. Shanley, Ives, Albee, Wasserstein, Durang. Stephen Schwartz and Jonathan Larson, A. R. Gurney, musical revivals. Actors could create worlds out of nothing, summon real tears. They could turn psychology into behavior.
“What does your father think of the movie?” Weller asked on the patio.
“He died right after we wrapped. A heart attack.” He had been cross-country skiing alone. A guy on a snowmobile had found him.
Weller reached forward and put his hand on top of hers. “Maddy, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She didn’t like saying that, but she didn’t want to talk about it.
The day she got the call from Tanya O’Neill, their next-door neighbor, she had been on her way to an audition for a regional Room Service revival. She was walking in midtown when her cell phone rang. Tanya said only, “Your daddy . . .” Maddy knew immediately. The word “daddy.” Maddy felt like she had been shot. Because her mother had died young, it had never occurred to Maddy that her father could go early, too.
To change the subject, she said to Weller, “How did you get into acting?”
“Tenth grade, I got a knee injury during a football game,” he said. “Had to quit the team. Started getting into trouble because I had too much free time. My English teacher suggested I try out for the school production of Our Town. I read George’s monologue to Emily in the soda shop. I was blown away by the writing. That was it. I auditioned. I got George. Later, when my knee got better, I tried to do both football and acting, but I kept having to miss practice. My coach said, ‘Steve, you gonna play football or you gonna do that fag acting?’ ” Weller laughed. “I said, ‘I think I’m gonna do the acting, Coach.’ It was no contest. Acting marshaled me.”
Marshaled. Acting had marshaled her shyness, and it had marshaled his energy. He understood. Acting could save you from the pain of being yourself.
“I love acting,” he said, “but I hate most actors.”
“What’s wrong with actors?”
“Aside from the falsity and braggadocio? Most of them lack personhood. They’re stunted. And prone to illeism.”
“Illeism?”
“They speak about themselves in the third person. People who do that are missing an ‘I.’ They don’t know who they are. I prefer people who know who they are.” He was looking at her like he wanted to eat her. She looked down and then up again so she could catch her breath.
“Bridget offered to sign me,” she said. She wanted to know everything about Bridget. Whether he felt he owed his career to her.
“And what did you tell her?” he asked. His smile had deepened.
“I haven’t made up my mind. Maybe Bridget’s too big for me.”
“She wouldn’t want to work for you if she weren’t committed to helping you.”
Work for you. It was so easy to lose sight of this simple truth: If Maddy signed with her, Bridget Ostrow would be working for her, not the other way around. “Bridget was the one who discovered you, right?”
“Yep. It was the 1980s and she was one of the few women in the talent department of OTA, and she saw me in Bus Stop at the Duse Repertory Company on El Centro. That was where I got my start. We used to do eight shows a year. I learned everything from Shakespeare to Beckett to Inge. She waited by the door, and asked me to have a drink. I said no, since I was supposed to be meeting a bunch of guy buddies to watch a Tyson fight, but she went along with us. Spent the night at a sports bar. When the last friend left, she said, ‘I want to work with you.’ ”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘You’re a woman. How do I know you’ll be aggressive?’ ” He chuckled. “She loves to remind me of that. I was young. I had no experience with powerful women. She said, ‘I’m twice as aggressive as any man,’ and I signed with her a week later.”
Though it seemed the kind of thing a 1980s Steven Weller would say, Maddy didn’t like that he had been so openly sexist. Maybe he enjoyed the story because it had an arc to it, or maybe he’d never said it. Celebrities told the same stories again and again, in interviews, to mold the image they wanted. At a certain point, they probably couldn’t even remember what was fact and what was fiction.
“Anyway, I hope you go with Bridget,” Weller said, getting out of the chair.
“Because you think she’s the best?” The moon made a halo around his head.
“Because then you and I might work together one day. And I’d like that.” His gaze held hers. It was an expensive gaze to put in a movie and one that looked very good blown up a thousand times.
He went inside. She turned the matchbook over in her hand but couldn’t get the trick.