She went up to the exhausted metal desk which had been shoved up against the wall at the end of the hallway and leaned in politely to make sure the girl sitting there saw her. The girl was wearing a pink sweater and had loads of Hello Kitty paraphernalia cluttering the corners of her desk. She was all impatience, and elbows.
“Hi,” Alison started.
“Just a minute,” said the girl, who held up a finger as she made notations down the side of a page filled with names. Alison did as she was told and waited patiently until the girl looked up, sudden. “What’s the name?” the girl asked.
“Alison Moore,” Alison told her politely.
“We have you down for eleven,” the girl reported, reading off the page. She glanced up at the industrial wall clock bolted to the wall right above their heads, which reported that it was only 10:50. The girl at the desk looked at Alison with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh!” said Alison, startled at the accusatory nature of the glance. “Yes, I realize I’m early.”
“We’re backed up as it is,” the girl at the desk reported, as if this fact were also Alison’s fault. She ran her pen down the second page of appointments until she found Alison’s name somewhere near the middle. “There’s no contact information. Who made the appointment?”
“Ryan Jones, from Abrams,” Alison stated with brightness and confidence. She was just repeating what Lisa had told her to say.
“Is he representing you?”
“He’s hip-pocketing me right now,” Alison stated. She barely knew what that meant, but the girl at the desk accepted it and wrote it down. “You have a head shot?” she asked.
Alison dutifully handed over her head shot. It was easily the most beautiful picture that had ever been taken of her. Her long bangs hung perfectly over the startling intelligence of her green eyes, and the way her cheekbones tilted toward the light made her look like she might carry some sort of Cherokee blood in there with all the Irish-English-German–Eastern European mutt that the rest of her was. Her smile was wide and joyful for once, rather than cocky. She looked like a movie star; it was the smartest $1,500 she had ever spent. The girl at the desk didn’t even glance at it. “They’ll call you when they’re ready,” she informed Alison. “But like I said, they’re already way behind.”
Alison nodded politely at this and scooted herself down the hall, to the first open chair that she spotted. She ended up sitting between an ill-tempered Hispanic girl and one of the Goth chicks, the one with blue streaks in her hair. Hispanic girl in a bad mood wouldn’t even look at her. Goth chick grinned, hapless, and stuck out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Rae,” she informed Alison. “Are you reading for the witness?”
“Yeah,” said Alison, appreciating the gesture of camaraderie. “There are a lot of people here.”
“For a fucking two-line part! Like, how much are they going to pay if you get it, even, seven hundred bucks? Bite me with your seven hundred bucks.”
“Well, I’m just glad they’ll see me,” Alison admitted. “I’m pretty new here.”
“Oh no, totally, you got to do it. Got to be seen. Those fucking agents, they’ll drop you like you got the plague or something, if you can’t even get seen for this shit. It is such a cataclysmically shitty time. They keep using this shitty economy as an excuse to drop people, my agency, they just let half their client list go. I’m, like, fuck, what the fuck! I don’t know why I’m still on the rosters. Last year I had a good year, I ended up with a four-show arc on Blood Brothers, that might be why they haven’t axed me yet. Who knows. I hope this Goth thing works. It’s a totally retarded look I’m well aware but I had to give it a shot. I have got to land something.”
It was a lot of people running, there was so many people, Alison thought. She watched the far end of the hallway, where a tall skinny blonde in six-inch platform heels swung out of the doorway, looking like she was trying to not look unhappy, while behind her some guy in jeans and a crummy blue windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap, leaned over the girl at the desk to see who was his next victim. “Maria Isabella Rodriguez!” called the Hello Kitty assistant. The Hispanic girl to Alison’s left stood slowly, stretched, took a piece of gum out of her mouth, and deliberately stuck it to the bottom of the folding chair she had been sitting on, before strutting down to the waiting auditioners.
“She’s going to get it,” Rae informed Alison under her breath. “Everybody wants Hispanic right now. Nobody wants a white girl. You would not believe how many times my agent told me, you had that except they wanted to go Hispanic. That’s why I went for this Goth thing. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you got to have a look or thing, something they can buy. You can’t just be white. I mean, I’m sure you’re good? But you got to know what you’re up against.”
“Thanks,” Alison said. She had been glad enough when she first sat down that this person seemed like a friendly chatter, but now she wished Goth Girl would just shut up. For an instant Goth Girl oddly reminded Alison of her mother, who, the one time she had visited New York, had talked to absolutely everyone she sat down next to on the subway. Rose even showed photographs of all her children to the elderly black woman seated across from her.
“I’m just telling you don’t take it personally if you don’t get it. That’s what I learned from experience, don’t take it personally,” Rae continued, biting her thumbnail with a worried glance down the hall. The door swung open and the Hispanic girl swished out, moving quickly past them with that continued sour look on her face. “Well, guess that didn’t go so good,” Goth Girl muttered, clearly pleased. “They don’t always go for the Hispanic thing. I mean, it’s not like you can count on that. You have to be good. As long as you have a look, something that pops you out, and you’re good, you got a shot.” She was clearly talking to herself now, and had been all along. It was a lot of people running, there were so many people, Alison thought. The journey is the goal, and the goal is the journey.
“Rae Leavitt,” called Hello Kitty assistant girl. Rae stood up and straightened out her skirt, revealing a massive hole in her black wool stockings. She was wearing worn-out red Converse sneakers as well. The Goth thing she had going was a whole look, top to bottom.
“Wow, look at you,” said Hello Kitty. “Rich said you were going for something different but he didn’t say what.”
“Yeah, I thought it might be kind of fun to just switch things up,” Rae told her.
“Absolutely,” Kitty girl agreed. There was an easy familiarity between them which Alison envied. Goth Girl wasn’t, as it turned out, some kind of nut; she was an old hand, just as she had intimated. Alison felt her confidence in her own ability to at least make an impression seep away. The goal is the journey, she told herself, but the mantra was wearing thin, a magical spell that was losing its potency through overuse. She looked up at the clock. It was only 10:57.
Even though her appointment was for 11 a.m., they still had not called her name at 12:13. By then the hallway had been drained of its myriad bouquet of female witnesses, and had refilled itself with potential uniformed officers. There was apparently no age or weight restriction involved in the casting of this part—Alison couldn’t help but notice that all the actresses who were up for the part of the witness were young and pretty, and all the actors who were up for the uniform were not necessarily either. She knew very well that a television production office was no place to ponder the unfairness of gender politics, but you couldn’t help it when the thought wafted through your head, How come the girls have to be pretty and the guys can look like gargoyles? One of the gargoyles caught her glancing over at him and he smiled at her, shy and nervous, and she felt a pang of guilt for envying him his bulbous features. He was just another dumb actor who somehow thought that hanging around in a dirty hallway all morning in the hopes of landing a two-line part on a cop show would somehow eventually add up to a life. In other words, he was just like her, only with a big nose.
“Alison Moore.” Alison jumped, feeling both f
rightened and oddly reassured by the sound of her own name floating down the hallway.
“Oh yes, that’s me!” she called back, immediately feeling like an idiot. Hello Kitty assistant didn’t help matters any by raising her eyebrows in a gesture of obvious sardonic ridicule at how eager this girl without an agent was willing to let herself look. But there was no time, frankly, to worry about whatever the casting assistant might or might not think. The guy in the jeans and baseball cap was hanging in the doorway again, smiling at her. “Hi, Alison,” he said, as if there was no one on earth he would rather see. “I’m John Maynard, I’m directing this week’s episode. Thanks for coming in.”
“Oh, thank you! I mean, thanks for seeing me,” Alison replied, fighting her Midwestern impulse to seem overly grateful for absolutely everything. It didn’t matter; no one was really looking at her anyway. “This is our producer, Dan Chapek, the writer of the episode, Bill Wheedon, and our casting director, Leslie Frishberg.” John the director rattled off the names quickly, as if he assumed she would have no need to remember any of them, but Alison glued the names into her memory nonetheless, nodding quickly to each face at the table with what she hoped was professional charm. The casting director, the only other woman in the room, glanced up from the sheets in front of her.
“Ryan Jones from Abrams is representing you?” she asked, blunt.
“He’s hip-pocketing me for now.”
“I just saw him yesterday, and he didn’t mention you were coming in.”
“You’ll be reading with Michael,” the director noted, uninterested in the casting director’s clear if unspoken suspicions. Whether or not Alison and her friend had figured out a clever way to sneak her past the gatekeepers of the casting office to get her a reading for this unbelievably minor part, it wasn’t worth the time it would take to call her out on the lie. The crowd of actors waiting in the hallway was, in fact, enormous, and growing by the second. They had to move this ship along.
“Great,” Alison nodded, turning her attention to Michael in the corner. He was sitting next to a camera on a tripod, and he looked bored out of his mind.
“Can you slate yourself?” he asked rhetorically. She nodded. “Good. Whenever you’re ready.” There was no friendly eye contact or extraneous banter. He tapped a button on the camera and flicked his gaze at her, impatient before she had given any cause for it.
“Alison Moore,” Alison stated clearly for the camera. Bored Michael looked down at the half page of type in front of him.
“She saw something? That’s what she says,” he read, and then he glanced up at her, expectant. After all the waiting and hours of obsessive preparation Alison was not, in fact, ready. The stupid jerk had read the two lines together, as if it were one person’s line instead of two lines, from two different characters. It threw her for a moment, and she paused, trying to figure out why her cue wasn’t the same line she had had memorized. Then when she realized what he had done she had to take a moment to reconfigure how she was going to respond and just say the first line. It was just some people, people were running, she thought, but that wasn’t it, she knew the rhythms better than the words themselves by this point and those were off; she had momentarily forgotten the lines. And now the whole thing was going too fast. It was only two lines. How could she make two lines work? How on earth can you be an actress, she thought, when you only have two lines? No wonder her mother thought she was a moron. She was living like a hermit, or a rodent, in a hellish little apartment and spending her whole life worrying about two mediocre lines for an audition for a bad scene in a mediocre cop show. At least in Seattle she was actually acting. Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and even some Molière, plus all those bad readings by hapless playwrights, which were actually about something even if they were unintelligible. She hadn’t been making enough money to feed herself in Seattle, but she was getting out there and putting some art into the world, even if it was bad art. Now she was doing—what was this, anyway? She felt a tremor run through her body. She had given up everything for this, and this was truly idiotic, New York City was filthy and the people rude and spiritless and this whole enterprise was just fucking stupid from start to finish.
“It was just people running,” she said. Her own terror and disappointment at the mess she had made out of her young life mysteriously entered the room and hung there. Her weariness was tangible. “There were so many people.”
“You see a gun?” Michael asked, completely uninterested.
“No. Just everybody running, and yelling.” She felt the tears rise to her face. Why was she crying, why now, why did this have to happen right now? She wanted to scratch her own eyes out but instead she just blurted out the rest of the line. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she informed the camera, defiant now. She really did; she just wanted to get out of there.
There was a moment of silence. “Thank you,” said Leslie the suspicious casting director, dismissing her. Two fucking lines and she hadn’t even watched, Alison felt sure.
“That was really great,” piped up the writer. “Seriously, that was fantastic.” He turned to the director. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he informed him, firm. “It’s only two lines but there has to be stakes.”
“No, I get that,” said the director.
“You can’t just throw some Goth girl in this, just so you have something to point the camera at,” the writer continued, as if he were in the middle of a private discussion with the whole room. “She’s the first indication we get, the way she is acting is the first time McMurtry gets the scent of what might be going on here.”
“If it’s that big, then everybody gets the scent,” the director said, annoyed to be having this conversation at all, much less in public.
“What would be wrong with that?” asked the writer. “It’s a triple homicide, hello, it’s going to make the Daily News. There’s a whole crowd watching, we’re supposed to have something like twenty extras that day.” This was important to that guy. Those two lines were everything.
“I just don’t see the point of giving the whole show away in the teaser,” the director announced. He turned back to Alison, pointed. “Thank you, that really was terrific.”
“I’m not saying—that’s not what I’m saying,” said the writer, frustrated.
“Thanks,” said the casting director, as she stood. Alison was clearly being dismissed. She turned, relieved, ready to bolt out of there.
“No, that’s—could you wait?” said the writer. Alison looked back, confused. She looked around at the others. Was he talking to her? “Yes, you, I mean you, you should wait. Just wait outside the door for a moment, please,” he ordered her. He stood himself, heading toward the closed door with a purposeful authority. “That was terrific, really just wonderful, Alison. I want you to wait right here.” He waved his hand vaguely as he opened the door. The gesture would have been dismissive if what he was saying wasn’t so pointedly not. As she stepped outside he continued to talk. “The last three episodes came in short, and we’re getting hammered by the studio, they want us to come up with scripts that are closer to sixty pages and I think that to do that we have to bite the bullet and . . .” The door slammed shut behind him. Alison stared at it, wondering how they were going to bite the bullet. Hello Kitty girl looked up at her.
“He asked me to wait,” she told her.
“Yeah, fine,” she said, impatient again. Two looming potential cops hovered over them both, trying to sign in. “I don’t know where you’re going to sit, though. There’s some room down there, you can stand down there.” Alison glanced to where she was pointing; it looked like it was in Siberia, it was so far down the hallway. There were at least twenty-five actors in folding chairs, leaning against doorways, a couple sitting on the floor. The place was starting to smell a little too strongly of human sweat.
“She can sit here,” said the guy with the big nose, standing politely and offering her his folding chair. Hello Kitty girl shot him a glance.
“I can stand,” Alison informed the guy. Why was he being so polite? She wasn’t an invalid.
“No, please,” he said, bashfully. Then he shrugged. “I’m from the Midwest. It’s what we do.”
four
“ALISON MOORE IS going to be on television tonight, did you hear? I saw Eleanor Dilmeyer at Kroger’s this afternoon, she heard about it from her mother. They’re real excited about it. Alison’s hit the big time I guess.”
Kyle listened silently as his sister, Susan, puttered around their mother’s kitchen, gossiping about his least favorite subject in the world.
“Be careful with that, Kyle, you don’t need to murder it,” Van chided. “My doctor husband doesn’t always know his own strength!” She turned to the room with an adorable smile. “Dad, can you do it?” She had recently taken to calling his father “Dad.” Kyle found it affected but how would you tell her to stop? His father nodded politely and took the bottle without comment, completing the final two turns of the screw and easing the cork out with a quiet pop. Then he picked up the bottle, leaned over to the counter, and gave it back to Kyle. It was a small, easy gesture but there was no mistaking its intent—don’t embarrass Kyle in front of his folks, now—and Van didn’t mistake it, as a sudden blush rose up her neck. It was a delicate moment, as at times Van’s insecurities could be volatile. Before he could reassure her, she went code red, latching on to Susan’s news with an excruciating brightness.
I'm Glad About You Page 4
