Amy Sohn - The Actress

The French doors opened, and she could hear his steps on the patio. She buried her nose in the book. He sat on the chaise next to her. Kissed her on the cheek.

“How was your day?” he asked, lacing his fingers through hers.

“Tell me about Alex,” she said, pulling her hand away. She would have to bluff a little.

“Alex who?” he said, his face betraying nothing.

“From the theater.”

“Where did you get this?” he asked. He seemed to be working hard to see just what she knew.

“Julia was at the ball. She said you used to go off with Alex.”

“The ball? I didn’t see her. What did she say to you? She was in an institution. You can’t trust a word out of her mouth.”

“She told me about Alex. So I know. He was at the Duse Rep, and there was something between you.”

She waited for him to correct her, say Alex from the theater was a woman, but he said nothing, only sighed, stood, and paced by the edge of the pool. Then his shoulders slumped and he straddled the chaise, facing the water.

“When I was in my mid-twenties . . .” He drew in a breath and started again. “When I was starting out in my career . . . there were a lot of gay men at the Duse. There was no line between work and fun. We were all passionate about what we did and about each other. Alex was in the company with me. I knew he was gay, and he knew I wasn’t. We were friends. I went to gay bars with him as a lark, and sometimes he came to straight bars with me, trying to guess which women I would hit on. He’d had a difficult childhood, too, and we talked about it. We were very close. And then one night we had been out late, drinking, and we were back at his apartment and . . . we slept together.”

She was almost relieved that he had finally told her; she was getting to it at last. All day she had heard the inscription in her head. The words he had taken from another lover and used on her. To seduce her. This was what shook her more than Alex’s gender: the idea that the proposal hadn’t been genuine, that she was a stand-in for someone else.

“Was he the one on the phone in your study?” she asked.

“I told you, it was Vito.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, you should. I don’t even know where Alex is these days.”

“How long did it go on?”

“It didn’t. It was just that one night. It was confusing. He understood that I was straight. That it could never be. It messed with our friendship. We didn’t speak for a while, but then we made up. After I married Julia, sometimes he and I would hang out. She thought I was still seeing him. I wasn’t. He was my friend.”

“In London I asked if you had been with men. And you said no.”

“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t get it. You’d— Most women think if a man has been with one man, he’s gay.”

“Are you?”

“No, Maddy.” He said it like she was stupid. “Are you?”

“No!”

“You slept with a woman.”

“We made out a little! It was mostly kissing.”

“And you enjoyed it. And I didn’t judge you. You’re a hypocrite.”

“You lied to me, and now you’re calling me names?”

She raced up the lawn toward the house. He followed and pivoted her toward him roughly. “Maddy. It was only Alex. One night and one man. I’m not gay. The line between friendship and attraction—it’s—it can be complicated. You know that.”

She wondered where Alex was now, even if he wasn’t the one in the photo. Maybe he was dead of AIDS and Steven missed him. Or maybe she was being stupid to think any gay man in the ’80s must have died of AIDS.

He put his hands on her shoulders. “It was a youthful indiscretion. I was going to tell you about him. I was just afraid of how you would react. And now . . . I feel like I was right to be.”

“I went into your study,” she said. She waited for a lecture on the importance of privacy, the terrible invasive thing she had done, but he was listening, as though he understood that Julia had shaken her. “I was so upset last night. I felt like I didn’t know you. I went to your bookshelves, and I was thinking about how you love Henry James, and I took out The Ambassadors and there was an inscription . . . from Alex.”

“Yes, yes. A quote from the novel.”

“But you used that quote when you proposed to me!”

“Because I believe it. Alex did, too. I want to be someone who embraces life. For so many years I’ve been about work, and that’s something I’ve wanted to change. To soak up the world, to appreciate my good fortune. Even though he gave me the book, we had discussed those lines before that, the words Strether speaks. You should read it, you would like it. When Alex wrote that, he knew the quote had meaning to me, and it still does. It’s not about him, it’s about Henry James.”

“Henry James was a closeted fag.”

His eyes widened. “Is that the way you think of gay men? You won’t get very far in this industry.”

“You weren’t proposing to me. You were proposing to Alex. I don’t even know if you love me. Why did you have me sign that agreement?”

“The postnup? I thought it was what you wanted.”

“It was your idea. I was afraid you’d leave me if I didn’t.” She hadn’t admitted it to herself, but she had believed if she fought him, he would end it. She had wanted so desperately to please him. “Was it because you don’t love me, because you don’t think we’ll last? Was it because you still love Alex?”

“Of course I love you. The books a person gives us, they last longer than the relationship itself. Alex was a very important person to me. He introduced me to James, and now James is mine, like he belongs to so many others.”

“But it wasn’t just a friendship,” she offered.

“Are you going to be haunted by this man whom I literally have not spoken to in decades? Dan was important to you. You said he turned you on to Walter Juhasz. And to Lubitsch and Sturges. I’m not angry about that. It doesn’t make me love you any less.”

He was right. You took words and poems from one lover and shared them with another. It wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t deception.

He knelt on the grass as though proposing all over again. “You have all of me now. There’s nothing hidden. If you want me to, I’ll tell you everything I did with Alex.”

“That’s the last thing I want to hear!”

“I just mean I won’t hide from you again.”

“I’ve never kept secrets from you.”

“But you’re so much younger than I am.”

He stood and cupped her face. She was afraid of his power. She needed space. “I think I want to be alone for a little while,” she said, going to the lounge chair and fetching her book.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Daphne du Maurier,” she said. “It’s a collection. I was reading it on our honeymoon.”

“I didn’t notice you reading,” he said.

“I did after you were asleep. You always fall asleep before I do.”

“Tell me about one of the stories.”

“A woman arrives home and finds these strange people living in her house. She tells them she lives there, but they won’t believe her. They act like she’s insane, when they’re the ones who are acting crazy.”

For the next few nights, they saw little of each other. Both were working long hours on their films, and at night Maddy would retire to one of the guest rooms, trying to make sense of everything. She was more hurt that he had lied than that he had slept with one man.

Surprisingly, Steven gave her space. He didn’t ask if she’d forgiven him. He seemed to want to allow her the room to be hurt.

And when she took a pill each night at ten P.M., or sometimes earlier, because it was better than lying awake for three or four hours and then taking it, she came to feel she was being too hard on him. She understood why he hadn’t told her about Alex, and she even understood why he had used the line from The Ambassadors to propose. She didn’t want to let Julia Hanson put a spear through her marriage. Terry had warned her to have walls and windows. She hadn’t built enough walls.

On the fourth night, around eleven o’clock, she went into the master bedroom. Steven was reading a script about James Earl Ray. He put it down beside him and pushed his glasses to the top of his head. “I tried not to love you,” she said, “but it didn’t work.”

He pulled her toward him, held her face. “I feel lucky,” he said.

“Promise you’ll never lie to me again.”

“I won’t,” he said, kissing her. She looked in his eyes while he moved in her and got on top. She wondered what he was thinking about.

But he didn’t have to tell her. Not now that she knew. If he thought about men, that was all right. She thought about Kira sometimes and didn’t feel the need to tell him. They were closer now. Wedded. She felt a surge of love. The man inside her was more complicated and thus more real than the one she had known before.

The premiere for I Used to Know Her was held in September at the Chinese Theatre. Zack, Kira, and the other cast members did the red carpet, along with all of the VIPs Maddy had asked Steven to invite on her behalf. Sharoz was in Austin on an independent thriller, but Kira had flown in from New York with her new girlfriend, Reggie. Reggie wore cat’s-eye glasses and a geisha dress, and Maddy liked her immediately. Dan came with the screenwriter Oded Zalinsky; he and Rachel Huber had broken up.

Maddy walked the press line with Steven, less nervous than she had been at the Housing Project USA event that spring, now that she’d had more practice. She wanted the film to do well because she believed it deserved to, and she knew Steven’s presence would ensure maximum publicity. All the reporters wanted to see her engagement ring and wedding band. The press had dubbed them “SteMad,” and some reporters even called out the name, which she found bizarre. Steven was game on the press line, indulging but never overshadowing Maddy, standing behind her. The questions about the movie were the usual idiotic ones, but Maddy had learned how to answer them. You had to be brief and positive, and you had to act like each was being asked of you for the very first time.