“Okay! Well, maybe we’ll talk next week,” Rose replied, careening instantaneously into an attitude of maternal good cheer. It was one of her most inexplicable tricks but she used it often, when caught in a bind with one of her children: Just pretend that nothing upsetting was happening at all. Be positive. That was all anyone could do. “You should see Megan!” she announced, falling into the second default position: Change the subject and talk about one of the other kids. “She’s really showing now. Those babies are on their way!”
“Yes. Yes, they are.” Alison sighed. “Bye, Mom. Bye. Tell Dad I said hi.” Panicked now, she felt terrible for having been mean to Mom. It wasn’t her fault, she knew. This is all your fault, and you know it. “Tell Megan I can’t wait to meet the twins!” She wanted her mother to know she cared, she really did. “Another baby, that is going to be so fun. See you later, Mom. Bye. Bye.” She hung up.
She glanced back to the hallway, hoping that neither of her largely invisible roommates were in the apartment and listening to her pathetic phone call. There was unfortunately no actual door in the doorway to her room—some previous tenant had made off with it two years ago, for unknown reasons—so the empty door frame stood open to the hall and the small kitchen and living room as well. Which meant, among other things, that you had to keep your voice down if you didn’t want anyone overhearing your calls. Unfortunately, Mom was already losing her hearing and when you tried to talk softly she would just say, “I can’t hear you!” or “These cell phones are terrible! Can you not afford a real phone?” and then Alison would have to repeat everything extra loudly anyway. Sometimes it bothered her, and sometimes it didn’t. Tonight, even though the apartment was practically ringing with its own emptiness, it bothered her a lot.
It was all context. The previous weekend, Lisa’s parents had come into town from Philadelphia; they had an extra ticket to a Broadway play and Lisa had invited Alison along. It was a startling gesture of generosity—Alison was well aware that those tickets were worth more than a hundred dollars apiece, which was why she could never afford to go see a Broadway play on her own nickel. But Lisa’s date had fallen through at the last minute and they couldn’t return the ticket and, Alison realized, she had somehow become Lisa’s pet project, her neophyte friend who needed help adjusting to the trials of a famously difficult city. The invitations from Lisa always came with little lessons about what this event or that gesture meant, in the social fabric of New York. A free ticket to a Broadway play, which would have seemed excessively generous, even unacceptably so, in Ohio, was nothing here. Everybody of a certain class tossed Broadway theater tickets about willy-nilly. To offer to pay for it would be not so much an insult as a faux pas.
So Alison had, after some coaching from Lisa, accepted the extra ticket with good grace and found herself treated to dinner as well, at a rustic and expensive restaurant on a seemingly shitty block of Forty-sixth Street. The decor was unprepossessing but the food was spectacular, and Lisa’s father, a tall man with a full head of steel-gray hair, ordered a bottle of Barolo which cost more than eighty bucks. Her mother, who insisted that Alison call her Sally instead of Mrs. Hastings (making Alison feel briefly like the rube she was), wore a sea-green raw silk suit which managed to look both casual and chic. There were no matching shoes or excessive strings of pearls, and her easy grace made her seem almost a regal presence in that crowded eatery. The waitstaff allowed her to change her order four times, one waiter even laughing as he trotted back to the kitchen to stop the chef from tossing her salmon on the grill because she had changed her mind yet again, finally settling on the halibut. Her husband, Alan, was clearly annoyed but he did nothing more than gently chide her by sighing her name, “Sally!” on the fourth go-round.
In between discussions about the wine and the penne arrabiata and the salmon and the halibut, Alan and Sally chatted energetically about art and politics and the foibles of the money market and the disasters emanating from Washington in the name of public policy. They inquired about Lisa’s boyfriend, who was in a permanent state of evaporation by that point, which Lisa didn’t bother to lie about. Both Alan and Sally expressed complete support for her. They asked about the rounds of auditions Lisa had made in the past few weeks, which were significantly more numerous than Alison’s. They expressed more interest in the theater auditions than the television ones, because those were more serious, although even if Lisa landed one of those parts it wouldn’t pay her a penny, really. Sally was reading a new novel which had gotten a terrific review in the New York Times. She frankly found the book disappointing but wanted Lisa to look at it, to find out if she just wasn’t getting something. They talked about the play they were going to see, and how they preferred straight plays to musicals, because the musicals were all so banal and geared too blatantly to the tourist trade.
Next to these people, her own parents were, Alison knew, unsophisticated and boorish. She had never thought of them that way—they were from Cincinnati, for crying out loud, not some hick town in Nebraska—but their suburban manners and Catholic values marked them as surely as one of those Cockney accents leaping like a curse out of the pages of a Dickens novel. She felt mean and disloyal even acknowledging it to herself in her secret heart, but in the circles to which she aspired in New York, her parents were an embarrassment.
It was a horrible thought, but not an inaccurate one. During one of those interminable phone calls from her mom shortly after she had moved to New York, Alison had allowed herself a moment to wander down the hallway, only to catch her two roommates rolling their eyes at each other in comic dismay. Alison might not have put it together even at that point, but when she hung up the phone, Roger the gay chorus boy who had the biggest bedroom actually laughed out loud. “Who was that, your mother?” he said. “She sounds like a nightmare.”
“Oh! No, she’s all right,” Alison said, startled at his assessment. Ginger, also a chorus animal albeit of the busty slutty type, snickered and tossed her gorgeous red-blonde mane about like a pony. Nothing more was said, but Alison tried to keep phone calls from Cincinnati out of the living room after that. She didn’t care if they made fun of her mom behind her back, but she didn’t want to have to watch it.
They were never there anyway. “We’re musical theater gypsies; we’re never home,” Ginger reassured her. “You’ll get tons of privacy.” This turned out to be essentially true. The place was small and the public spaces of the building were dirty and ill-maintained but her share of rent and expenses usually didn’t top $950, so the room actually was a good deal. Plus, even though it was way over on the west side, it was still in Manhattan. So many of her equally desperate peers had to schlep in from Brooklyn and Queens, which clearly made a schedule of running from one dispiriting audition to another even more exhausting and hopeless. Consequently, until the road tour of A Chorus Line burned itself out and their real roommate wanted his shitty little room back, she was one of the lucky ones.
And she did, as it turned out, really have the whole apartment to herself, as Ginger had promised. There was no telling when she or Roger might show up for a few days, gossiping incessantly about what new musical got creamed in San Francisco, and who was having a boob job, and what talent-free television hack had most recently snuck into town and stolen what part from what long-suffering New York actress. They arrived without notice and then disappeared as quickly, leaving leftover macrobiotic takeout, dirty dishes, and quite a bit of smelly laundry in their wake. The first few times it happened Alison was bemused at their careless assumption that she would clean up their abandoned messes, but then she realized they didn’t actually make those assumptions because they didn’t bother to think about things that deeply. They came and they went. If they arrived home to find mold growing in the sink they would be pissed off, but they never put two and two together in terms of the causal effect of their own inability to clean up after themselves. But the fact was, neither one of them ever missed a rent check. So after they breezed through, Alison
cleaned up the kitchen, lugged their sweat-stained leotards and yoga pants down to the laundry room, and, like them, didn’t think much more about it.
Truth be told, even though they had virtually nothing in common, Alison came to enjoy the chaotic interludes when her wayward roommates managed to show up. Ginger was correct when she told her that she would have a “ton of privacy”; she had not told her how lonely she would be. Especially now that she didn’t have any place she really needed to be, first thing in the morning. Once she had dumped her horrible job answering phones for a bunch of crooks masquerading as real estate agents, she took Lisa’s advice and signed with Ponce Gourmet, a specialty gourmet food shop that also booked semi-swank catering gigs in the financial district. Lisa had explained how advantageous such jobs could be for a New York actor, since they booked you only for late afternoon or evening events, leaving the better part of the day available for auditions. Plus you didn’t even have to agree to the shifts they offered you—the arrangement was more or less built on your availability.
The downside being, of course, that when they didn’t call, Alison had nothing to do all day. More drastically, she also had no income. She had been too shy to mention this concern to Lisa, or the weirdly cheerful booking agent at Ponce Gourmet, because she had already figured out that people in New York actually didn’t want to know how poor you were. Being poor was dreary and problematic in this expensive city; you simply had to have money. Everyone was so stressed out by the noise and the crowds and the cars and the enormous buildings and the anonymity of it all that whenever you landed in a restaurant or a store you had to buy something, just to calm your nerves. And there were so many wonderful overpriced dresses and shoes and cocktails and meals to buy. The times she had gone shopping or had a drink with Lisa and her New York posse she was truly alarmed at how casually everyone flashed their credit cards about; most of these women were actresses like herself but they behaved as if they all had trust funds that would never run dry. Occasionally she’d hear one of them worry about cash flow but no one seemed to be constantly reworking the numbers in their heads the way Alison was, wondering if she was going to be able to have enough to pay for her cell phone, apartment, and grocery bills at the end of the month. She couldn’t even let herself wander down to a bar for a drink when she had no catering gig, no roommates, and nothing to do on a Thursday night. Her pragmatic brain and what it knew about the basics of economics—do not run up those credit cards—wouldn’t let her.
There was of course that scene to prepare. That might take four minutes. She had exaggerated—or, in other words, blatantly lied—to her mother when she called it a “big scene.” It was a little scene, a scene so small any bonehead you picked out of a crowd on the street could feasibly do it. It didn’t even take up a whole page:
EXT. STOOP—CRIME SCENE—DAY
Small groups of bystanders, milling about. McMurtry wanders through, looking for his witness. Spots the Uniform holding her to one side. He gestures them over.
McMURTRY
She saw something?
UNIFORM
That’s what she says.
WITNESS
It was just people running.
There were so many people.
McMURTRY
You see a gun?
WITNESS
(scared)
No. Just everybody running, and yelling.
Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.
McMURTRY
Sure.
She ducks away. A street tough in a sweatshirt waits for her, puts his arm around her, and walks her off. McMurtry looks to Ramirez, who has approached.
McMURTRY
She saw something but she’s not talking.
RAMIREZ
No one is.
Alison was auditioning for the part of the witness, a character so unimportant it didn’t even have a name. And yet it was a big deal that they had agreed to see her for it. She didn’t yet have an agent and no one—not even the girl who sits at the desk outside—would talk to you unless they could see on the list in front of them that you had been submitted by Abrams, or Innovative, or Paradigm, or Writers & Artists. The fact that she was being seen for this lousy two-line part was all due, again, to Lisa, who had called her agent and asked him to get Alison an audition, as a personal favor.
“It was just people running. There were so many people,” Alison murmured to herself, to see if there was a rhythm to the language that she might exploit. There was something there, she thought, something deceptively simple but humming with fear. “It was just people running, there were so many people,” she said, louder. The grammatical inaccuracy of “it was,” the image of the spilling, panicked crowd, then the repetition of that simple word “people.” When she tried it a third time, “It was just people—running. There were so many people,” she felt the whisper of this girl’s fear start to curl around her brain. Her eyes drifted down to her next line. “No. Just everybody running and yelling.” A breath, a shift. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Was he really her boyfriend? He was the source of her fear, that’s for sure. But that “no” was important; it was the place where she shut down. It stopped her, turned her in a different direction. She was scared of one thing on the first line, and something else on the second. The fear on that second line was a different kind of fear, something more personal and threatening. “NO,” she repeated, abrupt, a bit too forceful. Then, with an edge of defiance, “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Alison thought this chick was stupid talking to the cops like that. She toned it down to something more approximating a whine. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Made her sound like a moron. Alison hated playing scenes like that. Plus it honestly didn’t feel right. This girl was scared, first of what she saw, then of something worse. She didn’t have the self-control to try to manipulate the cops. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she insisted, out loud. Forceful was better. She really shouldn’t talk to the cops like that, but the fear was fueling it.
Was she making this all up? The scene really seemed like nothing when you just looked at it as a whole. But then when she considered her little piece of it, those few words and what she felt when she said them, it seemed clear there was more there. All those coaches and teachers and directors and acting classes told her the same thing over and over: Let the words do the work. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Law & Order, the words are going to teach you everything you need to know about what to do. That wasn’t always true—back in Seattle she had slogged her way through dozens of bad new plays by half-baked young writers who thought they were deconstructing reality when really all they were doing was writing incomprehensible bullshit. In those cases you couldn’t let the words do the work because they were never doing anything but floating around the page. But this really did seem like it presented her with something to play. Not much, but something.
She thought she might actually have a shot at landing this one. There were only two lines, and she had heard through Lisa that usually in these situations they let the casting agent just hire a friend, that’s how insignificant these throwaway parts were, just a step up from extra work. If they were going to go through casting on a two-line part, they certainly weren’t going to waste a ton of time on it. They couldn’t possibly see more than three or four girls for something this minor. She might actually get it.
Alison took great comfort in this rigorously argued line of thinking while she channel flipped between news stations (the apartment came with basic cable, and nothing more), then went to bed. She woke early, went for a 7 a.m. run up the West Side Highway and back down Riverside, went home, took a cold shower, ran over the lines again, blew her hair dry, chose a sexy little camisole top to wear over jeans and heels—completely inappropriate for a street kid who maybe witnessed a murder, but she knew not to be stupid and to just wear the sexy outfit—went over her lines again, put her makeup on, and went over the lines again. By that time she was practically chanting them: “It was just people
running, there was so many people. It was just people running, there was so many people.” It seemed an appropriate mantra for the three blocks she had to walk to the subway, where everybody was, in fact, running, and there were so many people.
When she walked into the holding area for the auditions—a long hallway, Formica floors, plasterboard walls, fluorescent lights, metal folding chairs—her heart sank. So much for her theory that they wouldn’t spend an unnecessary amount of time auditioning twenty-something actresses for a two-line part about people running. The hall was lousy with girls of every stripe and color. Tall, short, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, redheads, blondes, brunettes, a couple with crazy pink and blue streaks in their hair and pierced tongues and noses. As a white girl standing five foot ten, with long shaggy brown hair and a camisole top over jeans and heels, Alison was most definitely among the more conservative choices in this group. She felt her palms start to sweat. Oh well, she thought, just get it out of your head that you could land this. Just do a good audition. Just get them to remember you. It was pathetic making yourself feel better before you haven’t gotten the job, but at the same time it helped. Her brother Andrew was obsessed with basketball, and there was a period of time when he just kept lecturing everybody on the fact that the journey was the goal, and the goal was the journey. Megan and Jeff finally got sick of hearing about it and yelled at Andrew anytime he brought it up, but that deceptively simple idea had entered Alison’s spirit and at times it peeked its head out, when she really needed it. The journey is the goal, and the goal is the journey, she told herself. It did; it made her feel better.
I'm Glad About You Page 3
