Amy Sohn - The Actress

“Don’t say you loved me,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have betrayed me.”

“But I do love you. I wanted it to be enough. I kept thinking, hoping, that I had changed. It happens. For thirty years you think one thing about yourself, and then you meet someone and you become someone else. But no matter how much I loved you, there was this longing for something different. So I tried to be two people at once. I had my . . . other world, and I had you. I told myself that with men, it was transactional. Physical. Scratching an itch. Sometimes I could believe it. But it became harder. To keep lying and lying. Each time I took out Jo , I would say it was the last time, but it never was. You don’t know what it’s like to have to hide all the time.”

“You ruined my life. At our wedding, you vowed you would be true to me and loyal.”

“I kept thinking I could get control over it. When I met Ryan, it was confusing. It was different from the other times.”

“Ryan said you told him sex with me disgusts you.”

“I never said that. I never spoke that way about you, Maddy!”

She didn’t know what to believe. She trusted Steven even less than she trusted Ryan Costello. “What about Terry? Was he your lover, too?”

“Never.”

“You were with him on that trip to Cabo after your bad reviews.”

He shook his head. “That was someone else.”

“Who? Actually, don’t tell me. What if I had called Terry or Ananda to check on you?”

“They always had instructions.”

“So they know.”

“They love me. And they understand that this part of me doesn’t have to do with what I feel for you.”

“They were at our wedding. They were in on this, and she pretended she was so happy for me.”

“I told them it’s an addiction. It is an addiction. I keep trying to fix it, but—”

“That guy, Christian Bernard from the old yacht club. You did have an affair with him, and you did coke and poppers and all the stuff the story said you did. Even though you say you hate drugs.” His shoulders slumped. “I did those appearances to defend you, and it was true all along. I asked you to tell me the truth, and you looked right into my eyes and lied to me.”

He said nothing. She remembered the blue dress she had worn to Harry, the roaring elation of the crowd when she’d said he was the best lover she’d had. She had been an actress for her husband, and she had been good at it. Bridget had plucked her for that very reason. “You made a fool of me!”

“I didn’t want any of it to be true. No one knows, Maddy. You did such a good job. You changed the tide.” He sat next to her on the couch and put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.

“Who are you?” she said. “Do you know?”

“Sometimes I think I do.”

“Do you even like Biedermeier? Did you ever read Nelson Algren, or do you just quote him?”

“Of course I’ve read Algren.”

“Why do you keep a photo of Alex in a box in your drawer?”

He looked as though he was about to protest, to attack her for snooping, but he must have seen something in her face. He couldn’t manipulate her anymore. And then he seemed to give up. “I have my things. I had a life before you.”

“You think that if you keep a part of yourself in a box, then it’s not really who you are, but that’s not true. Who took the picture of you on that boat?”

“Bridget. We were all on it together.”

“So she knew.”

“She thought Alex and I were friends.”

“It’s not possible. She must have seen the way you . . . She knew. It’s why she wanted you to have a wife. So she went and found a director she could manipulate. She knew Walter needed her, wanted his work to reach a larger audience. You used me. You had me sign the postnup because you knew one day you would be done with me, and you wanted to protect your money. I had an expiration date from the very beginning.”

“Maddy,” Steven said. “When I married you, I wanted it to be forever. It was Bridget who suggested the postnup. I didn’t care about the money. I was prepared to give you whatever you wanted if it didn’t work out, because I wanted it to work out. I love you. And I love Jake. The sex with you . . . It wasn’t fake. We could have more children. We can make this work.”

“You’re just saying that because Ryan broke up with you. You’re crawling back to me, but only because he’s through with you. If he wanted to keep it going, it would go on and on like this. You would play with Jake in the house, be the all-star father, and then go to the guesthouse at night to be with Ryan. Where am I in that picture? Am I just Jake’s mother? Where were you the last couple of days?”

“On the boat.”

“With who?”

“No one. I was alone.”

“I don’t believe you’ve been alone on that boat once since we met.”

“This time I was. I was trying to figure out what matters. It’s you. You’re all that matters. We can stay together.”

“No, we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have no respect for you anymore.”

Steven nodded at Maddy and went to the bookshelf, running his hands down the first editions. These were the books that Alex had read aloud to him in bed so long ago, and he had wanted to read them to Ryan, but now Ryan was gone, and he would never get the chance.

The night in the pool, when they fought, he could feel him slipping away and wanted to stop it but was angry with Ryan. For not loving him. And he yelled. Ryan had asked to crash but it turned out that he was dating someone, an architect; the guy was working on his house. Of course it was an architect. Ryan was always talking about Julius Shulman and the Stahl House and Richard Neutra, and when he read books in bed, he would put on a pair of reading glasses, though Steven tried them on once and couldn’t detect a prescription.

Steven had sneaked on the boat to see him as often as he could after Office Mate , but then Ryan broke it off. When he called again and wanted to see Steven just before Jake’s birth, he had been excited. Ryan loved him again. That was why he had taken Ryan on Jo . They had talked about their future. He said Steven’s “choice” was the problem. Steven had said that Ryan was making a choice, too, coy in interviews about his romantic life, escorting pretty young women to premieres. When Ryan said that he was just waiting for the right time to come out, Steven didn’t believe it.

Ryan said that if Steven lost the franchise, it wouldn’t matter, because he’d already made two Tommy Halls and it was dangerous to get typecast. As for Maddy, he said, “You gave her a perfect life.” Steven didn’t like discussing Maddy with Ryan. When he was with Ryan, he wanted it to be the two of them. And on the water it was. He could picture Ryan’s back as he stood out looking at the blue, so healthy and tan, two dimples on either side of the spine, above his board shorts. Now it was over and he had lost Ryan, and from the look on Maddy’s face he was about to lose her, too.

“I loved you,” Steven said in the study, turning to her.

“Did you use condoms? Have you made me sick?”

He had been waiting for this. “I’m clean, I’m careful. I never wanted to hurt you. When you got pregnant . . . I thought I could stop all of this. And I will stop. Ryan was the last. I’ll be a good husband to you. Not like before. Let’s work on this. It will be different. Better.” He went to her and embraced her, ran his hands through her hair, began to sob. She looked at him as if he frightened her. He could see the hate in her eyes.

She told him to get his things and go. He headed up the stairs to the bedroom. As he was climbing, he heard her talking and he stopped. “All these years I thought I was the better actor between us,” she said. “But I was wrong. You are.”