“Did you want to get together? Today, tomorrow? Is everything okay?”

Ask her. Just ask her.

But if she asked and Ananda said the men were on the boat, then Ananda would tell Terry and Terry would tell Steven. Steven would know she hadn’t trusted him. He wouldn’t like that. It would embarrass him, especially given how painful the Christian Bernard mess had been.

If there was some way she could ask Ananda without asking . . . “Yeah, everything’s fine,” Maddy said.

There was a loud giggle in the background, but it was a woman’s giggle. “What?” Ananda shouted. “I’m sorry, my sister’s in town, and we’re having drinks and—”

“Oh, have fun with her. I have a really early call time tomorrow anyway. We’ll talk soon.” Maddy clicked off, listening to the awful birds, the birds that reminded her that it would be hours before it was dark.

She smoked five more cigarettes and felt nauseated and wondered why she had done it. In the kitchen, she ran the butts under the faucet and threw them in the kitchen garbage where he wouldn’t see them; he hated cigarettes almost as much as he hated pills. On her way to the stairs, she stopped at his study door, but it was locked. He was pushing her out of his life and if she told him she had noticed it was locked, it would only prove to him that he had been right not to trust her.

Upstairs, she went into her study and shut the door, even though she was alone. Her fingers typed swiftly in the search field, “Alex Duse Repertory Company Steven Woyceck.” She paused a long moment before hitting enter.

The first few hits were duds. A guy named Alex Duse who blogged about a theater in Kentucky. A mommy blog by a woman in Duse, Idaho, named Alexandra Woyceck.

She tried “Duse Repertory Company,” and an amateurish-looking Web page popped up. The title was “Duse Repertory Company, 1965–1991.” It had a gallery of photos organized by year, with all the different repertory companies. Production photos and candids. Awake and Sing! Othello. Little Murders. Bus Stop.

Steven was in a lot of the photos, looking young and confident, with longer hair and softer eyes. The last one, at the bottom, was marked, “1984–1985.”

She enlarged the thumbnail. The actors looked attractive and hopeful, with large 1980s hair. She was able to locate Steven quickly. He had his arm around the blond guy from the snapshot taken on Jo. She scanned the caption, the names, “L. to R.” “Casey Landis, Steven Woyceck, Alex Pattison, Mason Rose.” The faces were so innocent and young.

In the search field she tried “Alex Pattison Duse.” Nothing. “Alex Pattison theater Los Angeles.” A listing popped up in seconds. Professor Alex Pattison, Theater Arts, Los Angeles College. The page included a photo, his CV, his building with room number, office, and phone number. She grabbed her cell phone, stared at the page on her laptop, and back at the phone. What if the professor were there and he told her some version of events that didn’t gibe with Steven’s? If a journalist hadn’t already hunted him down in the fifteen years since Steven had become famous, then most likely there was nothing to tell.

In the bedroom, she put two pills under her tongue and waited for them to work. It was only eight o’clock and she usually didn’t take them this early.

She lay in the blackness, thinking about that Danny Kaye movie she had seen as a child, a video rental with her father, who had loved Kaye. Wonder Man. Every time he tried to go offstage, the thugs were waiting for him, so he stayed onstage, not for joy but for survival. Offstage was death; onstage was life.

She and Steven had talked about the film on Bridget’s patio in Mile’s End, the night everything began. She was afraid of Steven now, didn’t trust what he told her. She had been reckless in her love for him. Leaving New York without a second thought, leaving the stage. Steven had been her stage. With him, she’d felt safe and protected, no matter how rash it had seemed to Irina or Kira. Now she thought of everything, everyone, she had left behind. She had been afraid that if she took things slowly, he wouldn’t want her at all. All this time she had been thinking that Steven was the stage—when maybe he was the gangster waiting in the wings.


Steven was already home when Maddy returned from set the next night at eight-thirty. She bounded into the house. He called out to her from his study, and then he was opening the study door before she had a chance to try it.

She threw her arms around him. “You’re back!” she said, going in for a kiss.

“You kiss so openmouthed,” he said.

“You never had a problem with my kissing before,” she said.

“I never said anything before. Your mouth, it’s so open. I like it softer. Gentler. Like this.” He kissed her, but she was self-conscious. His eyes looked different. His hair was sandy and his face was tan but unkind.

He sat on the couch. She climbed into his lap. “So did it fly by?” he asked. “Like I said it would?”

“No, it seemed like you were gone forever. I was so lonely.” She kissed him again, trying to be conscious of how he said he liked it, and though he kissed back, he seemed distracted. She ran her hand down his cheek and noticed a small red mark near his carotid artery. Broken blood vessels.

“I’ve been doing some thinking while you were gone,” she said, “and I want to move into the new place soon. I don’t want to wait a year.”

“It’s not ready. I told you, it’s hell to live in a place that’s being renovated.”

“But that house will be ours. This one is yours. I’ve never been comfortable here. When you were gone—I feel like this is haunted.”

He lifted her gently off his lap, stood up, and went to the window, his hand on the drapes. He stood in profile as though looking at something very far away. “Maddy, I love you very much, and it’s because I love you that I’m saying this.” He was going to tell her that things would change. There would be no more boat trips, and he was sorry he had been cruel after the Husbandry reviews came out; they would take a trip to Palazzo Mastrototaro. He turned to her. “You don’t seem well.”

“I am well,” she said, astounded. “It’s just hard for me. We’ve been apart so much the last year, with you off in Prague all that time. I know you’re busy, but sometimes it seems like you’re avoiding me.”

“This is our life. It’s the work that we both want to do. No one said it would be simple. I love you very much. But you’re not the woman I fell in love with.”

The rage rose from her belly to her throat. He was accusing her of being crazy. The last few days, she had felt crazy, but before that, she hadn’t been conscious of it. And he hadn’t said anything about this before. They were separated more than they were together. If, on the phone, she often said she missed him, it wasn’t unusual. It meant she loved him.

“You have something on your neck,” she said.

He moved his hand daintily to his neck and went to a mirror on the side of the room. “This? We went swimming by a reef. I got stung by a jellyfish.” He seemed cool, collected.

“It looks like a hickey.”

“You think this is a hickey?” he asked. He said it as if he found the word hilarious.

“How am I supposed to know? The boat was where Christian Bernard said everything happened. And I think it’s weird that you never take your phone.”

“You’re bringing up that gold-digger again? After a year?”

Every month or so, when she was feeling lonely or bored or some combination, she would go on her laptop and type in “Christian Bernard.” He had become a celebrity in his own right, even though he’d gone back on his story. He had shot a porn video, and he had a manager, and you could book him for $350 a half hour for a private video chat. He appeared to be living in Vegas. She would stare at the gallery of photos, examining his dark eyebrows and full lips, and scroll through them, imagining him and Steven together in the main cabin. After half an hour or so, when she could no longer take it, she would turn off the computer and vow never to do it again, until the next time she got bored or lonely and did it again.

The day the retraction had come out, Steven had invited some people over, Bridget and Flora and some staff from Edward’s office. It was festive, and in a quiet moment she pulled Steven aside and asked whether Edward had paid Christian Bernard. “Of course not,” Steven said. “He threatened to sue, and that was enough to make Bernard realize he would lose in court.”

“So no one bribed him to say it wasn’t true,” she had said.

“No. He knew it was all over.”

Now, in the study, she felt she had been a moron to believe that no money had changed hands. “Were you really with Terry the last couple of days?” she asked.

“Of course I was.”

“Are you having an affair with him?”

“You want to know what Terry and I did this week? Why don’t you call and ask him.” He went to the phone on the desk, picked it up, and held it out in front of his body as if it were a gun. “We played guitar, we cooked, we listened to baseball, played cards, and talked. Drank Scotch. Okay? You want a minute-by-minute itinerary?” That nasty tone in his voice, that obnoxious, patronizing tone. He put the phone in its cradle but didn’t come to her. “I wanted you to come with me on Jo. I begged you. But you cared more about your career than our marriage.”

“That’s not true. I just didn’t want to break from production!”

“You see how angry you’re getting? This is exactly what I mean. It’s not good to be this angry. I’ve noticed a change in you. In Prague, when you came to visit, you were rude to Corinna.” His love interest in the film was played by Corinna Mestre, a beautiful Spanish actress with a Jessica Rabbit figure and a thick accent. Maddy didn’t like the way she looked at Steven during breaks. “I’m not rude to your costars, am I?”