Bridget was very still as the new couple embraced. It was incredible to see the leap of faith they were taking when they had known each other only several months. Steven was stubborn and did things at his own pace. It was one of her favorite qualities about him: that he was not beholden to conventional ideas about men. It had been thrilling to see the changes in his personality, especially after he realized he might lose Maddy and became a better producer, a more attentive costar.

But in that historic room, Bridget knew her relationship with Steven had changed. They had never been deep friends but their intimacy surpassed friendship, it was a meeting of the minds, sometimes an ESP. All that would change. Maddy was the marker between the present and the future.

Bridget had never wanted to marry; as a child in 1950s Flatbush, she had been bored by her friends’ endless wedding enactments. As a teenager, she had visited Coney Island with her friends, and they’d all written with sticks in the sand their plans for their future. Every other girl wrote about the man she would marry. Bridget wrote, “I want to work.”

For almost twenty years, singlehood had been something she’d shared with Steven. “Maybe both of us were meant to live alone,” he had said after one breakup. She had been the most important woman in his life. She had even been his date when he needed one, and many times he had stepped up to assist her. Now he would no longer need her escort services. He had a booster, acting partner, and consigliere in one package.

Someday these two would have children, and Bridget would know these children forever, even if she could not say the same of Maddy. (Bridget had been urging him to get a prenup, but he’d refused. He wanted to marry quickly, he said, and he wanted there to be no doubts. She was holding out hope for a postnup, which was better than nothing.)

She could imagine the baby’s face. A girl. The baby would be good-looking, for sure, and one of the most photographed in entertainment history. Maybe they would make Bridget a godmother and she could bring presents and take the baby to the parks, though God save anyone who mistook her for Grandma. She liked the idea of being a beneficent aunt. Not the mother. She had no desire to be a mother again.

For a while she had dreamed of another baby. When Zack was ten, she was dating a college math professor named Clark who had silver hair. He had been scarred by his divorce, and he thought Bridget was beautiful and powerful, and in bed he wanted to bury his face in her.

They dated on and off for about a year. She loved the sex, but he didn’t feel comfortable at industry events, and sometimes it was easier to leave him home. They spent much of their time together at his house, because she didn’t want Zack to get too close to a man who might not stay. And then one month her period never came. She had been forty-six. Clark wanted her to keep the baby, but by that point she had made her peace with having only Zack. It was already difficult enough to be a good manager and try to be a good mother, see his school plays, check his homework, be home in time for dinner on weeknights.

And she had been old, and she didn’t want to go through all the testing just to find out there was something wrong, then have to end it. She didn’t tell Clark until after she had gone to the doctor, after it was all over. He was stunned and hurt. “You should have talked to me,” he kept saying. They tried to make a go of it for a few more months, but when he broke it off, saying she had betrayed him, she was relieved.

So Zack had been the only, and now he was ungracious and he blamed her for his problems. It started when she changed the contingency age in the trust and now it was continuing, with his jealousy regarding her client. He avoided one-on-one time and refused to live in L.A., despite or perhaps because of the pain this caused her. If Steven and Maddy had a child, the child wouldn’t resent her. Children only resented the mother. If it was a girl, they could go out to lunch and get their hair done and Bridget could visit her in college and tell her she could be whatever she wanted to in life.

Maddy and Steven were exiting the room. Bridget remembered the rice—she had brought rice for everyone—and she threw it at them, beaming at Terry and Ananda on the other side of the aisle. As they passed, Steven smiled at Bridget, and the smile took over his face.

5

After the newlyweds returned to L.A., they were eating dinner one night when Steven wiped both corners of his mouth and said Edward Rosenman had been nagging him about a postnup. Maddy shuddered, remembering Sharoz’s warning. They had just spent a week at the Ritz, mostly staying inside the room, and Steven had been so warm, so gallant. Now he was talking about this cold, ugly document.

“Those are for people who don’t love each other,” she said. “People who are using each other.” She had lost her appetite and pushed her lamb away.

“I’ve always felt the same way. I told Edward I had no interest in it. I said I was going to be with you until death and knew you weren’t marrying me for money.”

“Of course I’m not marrying you for money. How could anyone think that?”

“Because there’s such a discrepancy between us, in terms of earning, he thought it was a good idea to put some stuff on paper. He keeps saying it’s good for both of us.”

“No, it’s not. It would be good for you. Don’t you trust me? I would never try to take you to the bank. Never. Even if you got tired of me one day.”

“I’ll never be tired of you,” he said, placing his palm on her neck. “But what you just said isn’t true. These agreements actually protect both people. Someday you’re going to be making more than I am. I really believe that. I’ll be old and poor and unemployed. You don’t want to protect the money you’ll make when you get really famous? You want me to come after it?”

“Yes, if you were unemployed,” she said. “I’d let you have it.” She shook her head at the ridiculousness of the conversation. How could they be thinking about the end of a marriage when it had just begun? “I don’t want to think about any of that stuff. I’m in love with you. I’ll never leave you.”

“If you don’t want to do it, we don’t have to,” he said. “That’s what I told Edward. In the end, it’s up to us.”

But later that night, awake in bed, she found herself worrying. Though she wasn’t some chippie after his money, she liked the idea of protecting herself as a creator, an earner, an artist in her own right. A few days later, she made some phone calls and spoke with a family lawyer, a pretty, middle-aged woman who had photos of her kids and husband. Lisa Burns Miller. She said, “You have just married someone who has a lot more money than you do. If you had called me earlier, I would have recommended a prenup, but at least this way you’ll have something. You need to protect yourself.”

“From what?”

“From a marriage that leaves you with nothing.”

“But I don’t want his money. And it’s not going to end.”

“What if you have children and you stop working to care for them, so he can make movies, and your earnings go down and then it’s hard to work? Wouldn’t you want to be compensated for that? You know how brutal your industry is on women. A postnup doesn’t mean you’re planning to divorce. It means you two are being mature adults who have a plan for if things change between you. No one can be certain of anything in life.”

With a large dose of ambivalence, Maddy retained her, and over the course of a week, Lisa and a matrimonial lawyer hired by Steven went back and forth, negotiating language. The basics were: In the first year, only ten percent of Steven’s wealth was community property, but each year it bumped up, until after ten years, it was a hundred percent community. Maddy’s income would never be considered community even if she became wealthy, and it didn’t get factored in to compute support. If they divorced, she would get $1 million a year of spousal support for each year they were married, and $50,000 a month of support per child, which would be adjusted according to the visitation schedule.

The day they went in to sign the documents, there were video cameras set up in the attorney’s office. Her lawyer said they were for documentation, to show that there was no duress, but they made Maddy feel like the whole thing was a grand performance. After they finished, she cried in the elevator.

“Don’t feel badly about this,” he said. “We decided this together. It makes us stronger.”

“I know, but I don’t ever want to look at those papers again,” she said.

“We don’t have to. Not once. I love you so much more that you did this.”

“Why?”

“Because it means you believe in yourself as much as I believe in you,” he said, and they walked in the bright sunlight from the building to the car.


One of the biggest social events of the L.A. fall season was the World Children’s Welfare ball. The guests were a combination of star-studded Hollywood and charity circuit: Steven always insisted that the key to progressivism was to make it sexy. He was devoted to doing his part to eradicate poverty, both domestic and international, and through his fame, he had gotten a number of young actresses and actors involved with WCW.

The ball was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The newlyweds shared a table with Terry and Ananda, Bridget, and others in Steven’s circle. Steven was shooting a remake of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Maddy had begun production on Line Drive, about the relationship between an Iowan sportswriter father and his daughter. It was strange to make all these movies that no one would see for close to a year, which was why she was looking forward to the release of I Used to Know Her in October. Dan would be there, and Kira, though Maddy was more nervous about seeing Kira. She and Dan emailed from time to time and she considered him a friend.