That night after hiking, and dining on the island, they made love in the cabin twice. He was so good at touching her; the way he made her come was unlike the way Dan had. He was focused on her, picking up on the tiniest gradations of pleasure. She loved his hands on her, wherever he wanted to put them. Afterward, the boat moved gently in the current. He ran his finger around her nipple and said, “You’d look good nursing.”

“How do you know I plan to nurse?”

“You have arms that were made for it. You could hold twins in those guns.”

“What about my boobs? You didn’t say I had boobs made for nursing.”

“I like that they’re small. Big ones scare me.” He kissed her and pushed her hair from her face. “Do you want kids?” Her body tingled, less at the prospect of being a mother than at the prospect of him loving her enough to make children with her. Which he had never done, not with any woman. “How do you feel about it?”

“Oh, Steven,” she said, and began to cry.

He put his thumbs on her cheeks to blot the tears. “If you want to wait, that’s okay. If you don’t, it’s okay. Don’t you understand, Maddy? I want to make you happy.”

“Do I not seem happy to you?”

“I want you to have whatever you want. Feel taken care of. I want to take care of you, whatever that means to you.”

“You do,” she said. “You already do.”


“So has L.A. gotten the better of you?” Zack asked Maddy on the phone. She had said she was in her car, on the way home from spinning class. He had never imagined her as the type of girl to spin. It was for gerbils.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“Weekly mani-pedis?”

She laughed. “Only twice a month.”

Zack swiveled in his chair and looked up at the painting on the wall behind his desk. He had recently moved into a bigger office, and though it was only slightly larger, it was a symbolic victory. After attending an art opening on Hudson Street with a colleague, he’d sprung for a small painting of a Jewish English boxer from the 1930s, Jack “Kid” Berg. Berg had Hebrew letters on his shorts and was posed formally, fists up, small but tough.

Zack’s actors were working consistently, some getting second and third leads in big-budget movies, the kind that garnered entire-paragraph digressions in reviews. Kira had already shot a pretty decent indie drama. For the first time, he was feeling like an agent and not a servicer. But he had called Maddy because an agent had to think constantly of all the clients he was going to sign, not just the ones he already had. If his fervor for her was greater because she was his mother’s client, he tried not to think about that.

“You’ll go weekly soon,” Zack said. “Most men in L.A. get their nails done. One of the reasons I can’t stand it there. Seriously, how has the transition been?”

“The hardest part is the driving,” she said. “The GPS makes it simple, but I have no conceptual sense of the layout. I read Steven’s old Thomas Guide at night, and he calls me a Luddite. I tell him I want to have a sense of east and west.”

Zack had not been surprised when he’d learned about Maddy and Steven. His mother said the two of them were “blissful,” but Bridget massaged the truth for a living. He wondered what Maddy’s day-to-day life was like in that creepy mansion, which seemed like the kind of place where you would be murdered in your sleep with a pillow.

“So do you know what second position is?” he asked her.

“No.”

“The second-position agent is the one who’s waiting in the wings. The one who didn’t get the client. I’m yours. Which means you can call me and talk about anything you want, your roles, your jobs, your representation, and I’ll listen. You don’t have to worry that I’ll blab, and I’ll always tell you the truth because I don’t work for you.”

“You mean that the people who do work for me lie to me?”

“Absolutely,” he said, running his hand over the surface of his desk. He liked to keep almost nothing on it. He had always been neat, even as a child. When his mother gave him presents, he would fold the opened wrapping paper into squares before giving it to her to throw out.

Work was the most important thing in his life. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t enjoy other things, like the yoga he took regularly at a studio in Tribeca or the occasional lecture at the Open Center on being present. He wanted to be a good businessman but not a bad person. To that end, he hadn’t done coke since he’d been at Mile’s End.

Sometimes his mother could be a bad person; as a kid, he’d hear her screaming on the phone, and afterward she would say something innocuous about what she was making for dinner. She was like two different people.

“As second position, I have a question for you,” he said to Maddy on the phone. “I was talking to the casting director on Freda Jansons, and he said you hadn’t come in to read. I was surprised because it seemed right up your alley. They’ve been searching all over the country. Kira auditioned here. What happened? Did you not like the script?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never heard of it.” Her voice was tinny and afraid.

“It’s directed by Tim Heller, who did Grande Dame. The screenwriter, Erin Hedges, is going to be one of the top”—he started to say “woman” but stopped himself—“screenwriters in Hollywood in another year or so. It’s about an autistic scientist and her relationship with a little boy. Kind of a Miracle Worker set in the ’fifties. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t seen.”

“Maybe Bridget’s going to send it to me,” she offered.

“It’s already been cast. Lael Gordinier is Freda.”

“What? Well, maybe the problem was Nancy. Maybe she never got the script.”

“Nancy had to have gotten it. Everyone saw this.” It was exactly as he’d suspected. Bridget was withholding information from her own client. Representatives did it all the time, but not the ones who really cared.

“I’ll call Bridget,” Maddy said.

“Don’t tell her we spoke, okay?”

“Why? You don’t want her to know you’re trying to get me as a client?”

“No, I don’t want her to tell George. You see, I’m helping you, and the number one rule of agenting is ‘Don’t work for anyone who isn’t paying you.’ ”

It was a lie, of course. Bosses loved employees who wooed clients from rivals. But he wanted to make Maddy feel that he was putting himself out in order to call her. If she did, she might become loyal, and loyalty would get him halfway to his goal.


After Maddy hung up, she couldn’t shake the jumpy feeling in her chest. She couldn’t fathom why Bridget hadn’t told her about such an important role. Wasn’t Bridget’s whole job to be her client’s eyes and ears?

She tried Nancy first. “What can I do for you, Maddy?” she asked. They had seen each other only a few times since Mile’s End; most of their interaction was by phone. Nancy had a well-modulated voice, like the ones you heard on yogurt commercials.

“What do you mean you never read it?” Nancy asked after Maddy told her.

“I just heard about it now, from a friend. Steven doesn’t like me reading the trades.”

“I sent it to Bridget, God, it must have been last month. I can look it up. She said you loved it, but it conflicted with Husbandry. I’m sorry for any miscommunication.” This was a classic Hollywood coping mechanism, Maddy had learned. CYA. Cover your ass. She couldn’t tell whether Nancy was being honest and it occurred to her that she might need a new agent. But before she could make a decision like switching agencies she needed to know what Bridget had to say.

“Honey, I didn’t send it because the shooting dates conflicted with your commitment to Walter’s film,” Bridget said.

“But maybe we could have figured it out. I mean, at least if I’d seen it.”

“Not really. You had signed the contract by the time I got the script.”

“Can’t contracts be broken?”

“No, it’s more difficult that you would think. Look, the last thing in the world I want is for you to dwell on this. There will always be projects you lose because you’re too busy. Hollywood history is made on the basis of who’s available when. Frank Sinatra almost played Dirty Harry. And Steve McQueen was going to be Butch Cassidy.”

“That makes me feel worse. Lael Gordinier might make history doing that role, and I didn’t get a chance to go in.”

“You’ll make history doing Husbandry.”

“Why did you lie to Nancy?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you tell Nancy I loved the script when you knew I hadn’t read it?”

Bridget had handled these situations before. The key was to be calm and never admit you’d done something wrong. “Honey, I just didn’t want to get into it with her. I’m sorry. I was only trying to protect you from being disappointed. One thing you should understand is that you can’t be two places at once.”

“Don’t lie to my agent, Bridget. And don’t hide scripts from me. Are we clear?”

“Of course.”

Maddy hung up feeling uneasy. She wanted to trust Bridget, she had to, but this was not the kind of thing a manager was supposed to do. Especially not in the beginning. Bridget had encouraged her to do the psychological thriller and then Jen, and both had worked out well. Now she wasn’t sure she had an ally. She thought she heard a call coming in on the dashboard phone, but it was only a horn beeping from far away.


As she and Steven were lying in bed reading, she told him she’d heard “from a girl I see at auditions” that Tim Heller was casting a movie called Freda Jansons, and Bridget hadn’t sent her the script because her Husbandry contract was signed. “I thought a manager was supposed to relay all the phone calls,” Maddy said.