Amy Sohn - The Actress

They walked underneath a green awning into a yellow building. Inside was a warm-toned room with low ceilings and a fireplace. At their table, the waiter brought menus that said LOCANDA CIPRIANI. “Steven knows it’s one of my favorite restaurants in all of Italy,” Juhasz said. “Many luminaries have dined here, Kim Novak and Charlie Chaplin. Most famous was Ernest Hemingway. This was his inspiration for Across the River and Into the Trees. Widely considered his biggest failure.” Maddy giggled. “Even so,” he went on, “I would rather have a Hemingwayesque failure than a Juhaszian success.”

Soon there was food on the table: the famous carpaccio; risotto alla Torcellana; and lagoon shrimps. Steven had ordered Prosecco for all three of them, and though she was wary of getting tipsy, she liked it as much as she had at Steven’s party.

“Do you mind if I ask what inspired the screenplay?” she asked Juhasz, hoping he would give some indication as to whether he had cast her.

“As I age, I keep returning to the subject of women. And jealousy. It is the most destructive of human emotions because it has no utility.” He had to be talking about his first wife, who had made him so jealous that he’d left the country.

“I disagree that it has no utility,” Maddy said. “It crystallizes feeling.”

“For whom?” Steven asked across the table.

“Well, both people. I was thinking of the Bardot character in Contempt. To me, it’s about a relationship that ends because the man wasn’t possessive enough. A woman needs to know she is wanted.”

“And what about your boyfriend?” Juhasz asked. “Is he a jealous man?”

“How do you know I have a boyfriend?”

“He directed that Vermont movie, no? If he were a jealous man, he would not have abandoned his girlfriend in a palazzo of a major motion picture star, and taken her matronly chaperone along with him.” Maddy was surprised that Juhasz knew so much about the situation.

“Dan wants me to succeed,” she said. “He believes in me.”

“I feel the film is less about jealousy than triangles,” Steven interrupted cheerfully. “Louis loves Ellie even though he doesn’t know how to make her happy. Ellie loves Paul. And Paul, in a certain way, loves his brother. He wants the approval of his brother but can’t figure out how to live in the world. The triangle is a really interesting place of human interaction.”

“I love triangles,” Juhasz said. “The three of us are a triangle right now.”

“How so?” Maddy asked.

“Mr. Weller needs me to legitimize him, I need you to challenge him, and you need him to make love to you.”

Maddy blushed. She was struck silent, momentarily, by the accusation, and could not summon the words to protest. How had Juhasz gotten this in his head? Had Steven said something? Was her attraction so obvious?

She realized she had focused so much on the “make love” part of the sentence that she hadn’t paid attention to the rest: I need you to challenge him.

“Mr. Juhasz,” she said, “what did you mean about challenging Steven?”

“I want your Ellie to really draw out the best in him.”

“I have a callback?”

Juhasz looked at Steven, his mouth wide and delighted, and back at Maddy. “You have the part. You did not know?”

“How would I know? You never said it.” She was so relieved, she wanted to cry.

“I am sorry, my darling,” Juhasz said, patting her hand. “I thought it was clear this was a celebratory meal. We’ve read many major actresses for Ellie, but none of them was right.” Maddy got a strange feeling when he said it, as though her Prosecco had been drugged. “The role is yours. Congratulations.”

She could feel herself floating to the ceiling of Locanda Cipriani and over the island of Torcello, above the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, who was cheering as if at a boxing match.

She had gotten it. A real, legitimate feature role, shooting with one of the greatest living directors opposite a Hollywood icon. And she was the lead. It was Ellie’s movie more than Louis’s or Paul’s. If her Jury Prize had been the equivalent of putting her foot on the pedal, now she had pressed it down.

The men held up their glasses by the stems. “To the birth of new talent,” said Juhasz.

“To collaboration,” said Steven, looking at Maddy.

Maddy was on the stairs of the palazzo. Juhasz had retired to his room, and she had started up to her bedroom to call Dan when Steven, tending to the fire, said, “Stay with me a little.”

“I was going to make a phone call.”

“Not even a few minutes?”

She came down a few steps. Sat next to him on the couch. She kept flashing back to the moment when Juhasz had said, And you need him to make love to you. It was embarrassing that he had said it, out in the open.

Steven rang a bell, and Vito brought two glasses of a dark brown liquid. “Cynar,” Steven said, moving toward her. “It’s made from artichoke.”

She sipped. “I like it.” They sat in silence, watching the flames. “This has been the oddest evening,” she said. “I feel like Walter’s going to come down those stairs any minute, and I’ll find out I was on a candid-camera show.”

“I told you he would love you.”

“I never thought this would happen. Any of this, not Mile’s End or this. Until now, the biggest job I’d gotten was a Foxborough revival of Barefoot in the Park.”

“Pay attention to what you’re feeling right now. You’re so open. Try to remember this moment.”

He was close, his face inches from hers. She could smell the Cynar on his breath. His eyes were gleaming. The light on the irises, the way they always seemed alive, no matter what emotion he was playing. Steven had an abundance of personhood. This was why he was successful. He lived too fully not to do so on screen.

“I wanted to be alone with you tonight,” he said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t possible.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said carefully.

“I wanted to take you around the island. Show you the Basilica. I love being alone with you. You make me selfish. When I saw you at that party at Mile’s End, it was clear.”

She saw her hand trembling before her face. “What party?”

“Opening night. I knew I would fall in love with you.” So he had been looking at her. She hadn’t imagined it. She had been strapped into a roller coaster and the car had started to move. She could hear the irreversible clacking on the tracks. “The past couple of years, I’ve had a feeling something was about to happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was, but I was waiting. When I saw you, I understood that you were what I’d been waiting for.”

His breath was hot as he leaned in and kissed her. She had never been kissed like this. His lips were soft but deft. And then he was on his knees, his body between her legs, his strong arms moving up and down her back. She touched the hair on the back of his head, so much softer than it looked from far away. The kiss went on through entire decades of cinema: She was every actress who had ever kissed Steven Weller in a movie, and she was Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth, and the kiss was nothing like the ho-hum kisses Dan had given her lately; it had personality and confidence, and she offered her whole mouth, her self, to him.

When she finally opened her eyes, he was scooping her up without a grunt. He carried her up the grand marble stairs.

His bedroom was dim and huge. On the bed, she could feel his hardness against her and it thrilled her, his desire for her. She had done this to him.

He kissed her for a long time, moving above her. She craved life and Steven was life and she would be doing this even if Dan had not left for Bulgaria, even if he were sleeping in her bedroom in the palazzo right now.

She felt powerless. She was Steven’s. She had been avoiding this truth since he looked at her at the Entertainer, but now it was unavoidable. He had enraptured her with his mind and his notorious grin and she was as unable to resist him as the millions of American women who had tuned in on Thursday nights to see him arch his eyebrow in close-ups or who had cheered in cineplexes when he appeared shirtless from the heat in his Louisiana law office.

He moved his mouth down her body, sighing loudly when he unclasped her bra and her breasts came free. It defied rationality that a man with the undoubted sexual experience of Steven Weller could caress her body with an expression of such wonder. He moved his hand on her belly and hip bones. His mouth was on her, what was he doing, fingers inside and wetness, and she was coming. His pants were off and his nakedness rubbed against hers. There was a question in the air and she said, “I’m on the pill,” and with that she took him in. Things were as they were supposed to be, there was nothing between them. She was not making love to a movie star, there was no world but this, it was only Maddy and Steven, not Steven Weller but Steven. As he rocked, he hit a place deep within her, and they were like this for how long she couldn’t guess because there was no time, there was nothing, there was no room and no place, just them.

She was coming again and he kept moving and his warmth was inside her and he kissed her as she cried out, and made a strange noise, touching her tongue. He would never soften, she was made to have him inside her. Then his expression changed, it didn’t cool, exactly, but he became separate again, and she felt the tragedy of the moment being over and he was out, examining her features, moving his finger along her mole.