Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I can’t just take a chance,” says Patrick, loudly. “It’s not some fun game, I need this to work out. For my family. I can’t just laugh about it falling apart, I need it to work. Don’t you? Do you get offered so many parts these days?”

  He thinks for a moment that he’s gone too far, been too rude, but Cassidy is still listening, watching him intently with a sharp look on her face.

  “So what’s the plan?” she says.

  “If someone like you, someone indispensable, went with me,” he begins, unconvincingly, “we could confront them about all these irregularities. Make them tell us the truth.”

  “Haven’t you ever watched my show?” Cassidy laughs a little. “You don’t just show up and demand the truth. You need some leverage.”

  “Okay, forget that. Instead, we follow the money trail. We look into how much of the budget is going into the film and how much is going…” He pauses. “Elsewhere. We look into the investors. Into Brenda and Jay’s relationship, who knows about it, and what their plan is. And when we know something, we’ll make our ask.”

  He pauses. In his fist, the luxurious, empty bottle feels cold and sad, like a secret. “I want to understand what’s going on, at least,” he says, half pleading. “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe. It’s a nice idea. It sounds like a TV pilot. You could pitch it.”

  He’s surprised to see her eyes shining, both darker and brighter than they had been a moment before. It could be a scrim of tears, but her voice is steady and certain, pulled as taut as plastic wrap.

  “You know,” she says distantly, “it takes strength to believe in what’s not there. To insist that something is true when your eyes and ears and brain and heart tell you it’s not. It’s what I do in front of the camera. If I were better at it, I’d play my part all the goddamn time, and I’d be so much happier. Brenda, Jay, my agent, my trainer, all my quitter assistants, my fucking herbalist—everyone on that set, giving you their applause only because you pretend too. They act like they love you, and they don’t really love you. But it’s better when you believe they do.”

  Cassidy gives Patrick a filmy smile. She seems suddenly different, bereft of gusto, her beauty fragile and real. To Patrick, it’s as though she’s been replaced, part by part, with an entirely new person—a Cassidy with an only familial resemblance to herself, like a sister or a distant cousin. As if the person he saw all those times earlier was a photograph, a sketch, an estimate reflected back in an unsteady surface—and now the actual person has arrived. Less beautiful, he thinks, but more touchable somehow.

  “Okay,” she says, soberly. “I haven’t been a kid detective in a long time, but the first thing I would do is find out what’s inside those packages you pick up for Brenda. If there’s a list or a schedule, you should make a copy of it. Have you done that yet? We can investigate tomorrow, after my scene wraps.”

  Something shivers close to his heart. Patrick reaches down into the shirt pocket over his left breast, draws out the heavy, trembling rectangle. A small procession of pictures crosses his screen, one photograph sliding onto the display only to be pushed off by the next. The photos are from Alison’s phone number, but there are no words, no explanation. There is only the image of a broad, thick-trunked oak photographed from below, so that it towers, its bulk, its eerie largeness, overfilling the frame. Then a smear of deep-green foliage, something pink blurred within it so that each pink smear trails a tail like a comet. Another out-of-focus picture, of soft-sided blocks, cabins maybe, the right angles unnatural and therefore human. He can’t tell if these photos are meant to be terrible, or if they are actually the best she could do. A final image pops up on-screen, and he recognizes Nora’s small, poised hand pointing up at the sky: at the end of her fingertip is a wild, whited-out hole, a swallowing gap that could only be a bright, full summer moon. He knows that its bulk is immense, its brightness immeasurably far away—but as he peers down into the thin-glassed window to nowhere, it looks small enough to crush in his palm.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  In second grade, Cassidy Carter owned a parakeet named Charlene, a candy-colored creature that lived in an aquamarine cage. Though its entire body was barely six and a half inches long, counting the soft-edged tailfeathers, it could pronounce several humanlike sounds—not whole words, but soft coughs, whistles, and a noise exactly like a shy teenage girl’s “um.” After school, Cassidy and June would sit at the square table, doing homework, while the bird mumbled to itself nearby, flying from one short bound of the cage to another. Then, one day, the bird was dead. Cassidy searched the internet for answers: a budgie could die from dehydration, stray airborne molecules of frying-pan Teflon, paint fumes, caffeine, peanuts, avocado, parrot flu, tumors, direct sunlight and heating vents, eating too much fruit too fast, and countless other causes. “This is the whole problem with a bird,” her father said. “They don’t know how to ask for anything, can’t call for help. Listen, that’s why animals die so often, because they are no damn good at getting anyone’s attention.” Charlene was buried in a handkerchief beneath a purple-painted rock, never again to blink her blue-skinned eyelids in lizardlike quickness.

  When Cassidy refused to sit for dinner that night (how could she eat when Charlene would never eat again?), her mother accused her of pretending. As Rita Carter would explain it to her own mother, she was blessed with one daughter who saw life as it was, and burdened by another who couldn’t help but spin a web of drama around every little thing, however minor and insignificant. The first one was happy to sit silently in church, tracing the lines on her palm with a fingertip, while the other sighed and wriggled and complained of being strangled by her clothing, being about to pass out, about to have a seizure. Even at that age, she could fake a grand mal with enough gusto to stop the sermon in its tracks, lolling on the ground and shaken by invisible hands; she had learned the signs from a rerun of ER. Cassidy saw shallow performances all around her, and she knew that she could do better, given a chance. At home, her mother marched through scene after scene, argument and reconciliation, and her father seemed to forget his lines, going out to the garage to smoke when he couldn’t think of any way to respond. She wished they would put more effort into their craft, pretend at something bigger, act out some facsimile of love until it conjured the real. But at least there was June, who could tell when Cass was putting on a show and when the real feelings were breaking through; June, who made Cass feel less fake. You only needed one other person to see what you were seeing in order to make it real: two people seeing the same thing, in fact, was more real than a whole roomful of people seeing it and sneering. After dinner was done, June brought peanut-butter toast on a plate, sprinkled with sunflower seeds, to their bedroom doorway. “I know you’re really sad,” June said, “but this was Charlene’s favorite food and she’d want you to eat it.”

  At age nine, Cassidy had five auditions a week, and they were for speaking parts, multiple-sentence roles for characters written into the script with full names. When she walked into the audition room—a similar room every time, half empty and containing too many chairs—the faces turned toward her, smiling. A woman might come over, pick up handfuls of flossy blond hair, and hold them piled on top of Cassidy’s skull in an ephemeral topknot, saying something like “Very pretty. With a little makeup she could play thirteen, fourteen.” Later, when she was thirteen, they would tell her she could play middle-schoolers, high-schoolers, cheerleaders, and troubled teens. She auditioned for Camp Do-What-Ya-Wanna with a bit she had put together the week before in the two-room apartment she shared with her mom and sister. In the bit, she plays the part of herself practicing a hammy version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for an audition, and also the part of her sister, bursting into the room to ask a series of humorous but increasingly dark questions about parakeets—Do parakeets sleep? Do parakeets sleep lying down? Do parakeets breathe when they sleep?—until it becomes appare
nt that the parakeet is dead. A hush falls over the room as the realization clouds her face, and then young Cassidy solemnly breaks the fourth wall: “That afternoon,” she says, “my father sat me down and told me an important lesson: he said you have to hold on to life while you have it, but when it slips away, that’s when you hold tight to the memories.” Before leaving the room, the casting director exclaimed that Cassidy’s emotional range was “elastic, like Silly Putty. She’s Lucille Ball with the face of a future Ten!”

  Cassidy waited in place as the casting director came back with one group of watchers after another. Some were older men, expensively suited, others twentysomethings in jeans and hoodies. In front of each new group, she was asked to deliver her parakeet speech with a different spin: shaky and uncertain, bold and righteously angry. “Now can you do one,” the director of the film asked, straightening his glasses, intrigued, “where you don’t even seem to care at all?” Cassidy nodded slowly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Charlene was a distant memory to her, a childish story retold by a parent decades later to a little girl that no longer existed.

  Getting the part meant going to dinner with one of the producers, the casting director, and his assistant. Her mother chaperoned, while her older sister, June, stayed at home alone, watching the Thursday-night movie on TCM, sipping from a jumbo-sized bottle of Fanta. At the tablecloth restaurant, Cassidy watched her mother pick at a loose thread just out of view as she spoke rapidly about the differences between life in Haywood and life in Los Angeles, and the friendly community of child actors and actor parents they were getting to know at the Yucca Heights Apartments. How in the community building there were always free pretzels and, on the weekend, free acting lessons and seminars for the kiddies, so that the adults could finally have an afternoon alone to paint their toenails and watch a program from beginning to end. The movie people sipped from glasses of water, their faces fixed and polite, and Cassidy understood that they were not enjoying themselves at all.

  She told a sad story about her father being diagnosed with lung cancer, which had never happened, and they murmured condolences. Then she made a joke from it, and they laughed. They smiled as she told a funny story about the summer she watched Sister Act every day, because it was the only movie they owned, making up little games to try to make it feel new, like pretending that Whoopi Goldberg’s character was a double agent and inventing a whole new situation around that once-familiar moment. She knew by some deep-lodged instinct to keep changing the mood, to offer them new pieces of her, one after another, like a tasting menu. Any actress might hold the spotlight for a moment, but keeping it meant constant change, restless shifting, becoming a plastic person, sleek and glossy, with the 360-degree flexibility of a gooseneck clamp lamp. When the waiter came, Cassidy asked in a smooth, calm voice for a double espresso, and when it came, she sipped from the bitter cup and made it look as though she loved the taste. She knew her mother was watching her from across the table, drinking deep from a glass of white Zinfandel, her stare hard enough to bruise the skin.

  Cassidy looks out at the set of Elsinore Lane, at the assistants and techs, and sinks her fingers into thick inches of newly purchased foreign hair, feeling its fake heft slip slightly atop the genuine hair, coiled beneath. For this scene, where the audience first understands that her character is a demonic being in cahoots with the evil uncle, her look is a sort of 1960s beehive with a supernatural lift to it, an ethereal figure in a girl-group minidress. Cassidy practices a big smile and then a scowl, a big smile and then a scowl. Switch on, switch off. She didn’t need June to say it anymore: it was second nature. Going into a scene, she should wear an expression that is tender and pliant, like a soft red skirt steak; she should feel at one with her famous face, her famous features, but she should never, ever touch them or brush her own hair out of her eyes or scratch an itch, or she might wreck the makeup department’s hard work and have to go back in the seat. My face is a toxic zone, she tells herself to strengthen the injunction. Sometimes she imagines her face as a layer of Cassidy-shaped armor, the real person beginning a few millimeters down. A few millimeters down, the real her could be wearing its real expression, whatever that was.

  She hears her name and walks up under the bright, hungry light of the set, her lips dry and tight with nude-colored lipstick, her eyelashes heavy with mascara, their downward drag a little like falling asleep. She shouts for someone to bring her a bottle of water, and a couple figures scurry off into the dark. A short guy in a tight black tee tells her the role of the uncle is being recast, and they may just end up CGI-ing him in anyway. He stands a six-foot-tall metal pole in front of her. There’s a tennis ball glued to the top. He points at the green sphere and tells her that’s her target, got it?

  “Got it,” she says. “I’ll talk to the tennis ball. Listen, my copy of the script only has my lines, it doesn’t have whatever the uncle character says in response.” The photocopied pages malinger under a pox of question marks and hand-scrawled TBDs. “How do you want me to handle that? I know between the lines you’re supposed to be filming my reaction, but how should I react when I don’t know what he’s going to be saying?”

  “I’d need to check with someone about that,” he says stiffly. “Can you just do a sort of generic reaction in the meantime?”

  “You mean nodding and smiling or something like that?”

  “Yeah, perfect,” he replies.

  Cassidy gives him the look of someone watching a very stupid thing happen, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “The director wants a few different takes,” he adds quickly, “a spooky one, a moody one, and then a more defiant, pouty one. A sultry, sad one—and then, just in case, a ‘happy-go-lucky’ version.”

  Cassidy nods once and looks around. “Who’s the director today?” she asks. “Is he around here?” But the tee-shirt guy has already left. Surrounded by bright soundstage lights, she is half blinded: she can see the crowd around her, their sneakers and legs gray-scale and dim, but there are no faces. Where the director usually sits she finds a naked spotlight pointed in her direction; when she looks toward it, it leaves a neon-green bruise on her visual field, a blot she can’t see through or around.

  As a voice to her far right calls “Action!” she steps forward, looking the tennis ball square in the eye.

  “I think he’s begun to suspect what I am. What we all are,” Cassidy says with an eerie slowness. She pauses, tilts her head to indicate that she’s listening, then continues. “And yet,” she says with a faraway tone, “something in my mortal form still remembers him. Loves him. Knows him, though I no longer know myself.”

  Ugh. The lines seem bad to her. But it’s not worth fighting over: clock in, clock out, she tells herself, bank your water and pick your moment. The far-off voice yells, “Cut, reset!” and she looks down at the floor and back up again with a neutral expression in place. She knows all the shortcuts: to tear up, she thinks of Charlene the parakeet; to cry, she imagines the blade of a bulldozer tearing into her beloved swimming pool, halving the baby geese; and to summon a fierce expression, she thinks of her ex-manager, Toby, who dropped her and then sold photos from her invitation-only nursery-rhyme-themed birthday party to TMZ. There’s a spidery feeling in the back of her throat, something she’d like to cough out or drown in water, but the water she asked for still hasn’t materialized.

  “I think he’s begun to suspect what I am. What we all are,” Cassidy purrs dangerously. She’s done sexy so many times in the heavily mocked second half of her career that it’s second nature: just a matter of acting a little bit sleepy, a little bit mad, and breathing exclusively through your mouth. “And yet,” she continues with a petulant tone, “something in my mortal form still remembers him.” The passage would be better if the lines were half the length, she thinks, but the film is already hemorrhaging words, the script shorter and shorter each day and containing more effects-loaded vi
sual sequences that will only be assembled in postproduction. On set, the effects guys have been blocking out action zones with colorful tape, pointing into the vacant air to illustrate which figures might enter from where for the big fight scene. She watches them as they discuss in serious tones the thing that does not exist, indicating its shape and size, bringing it into hazy being through their collective belief.

  Cassidy delivers her lines two more times, but as she turns to leave, they tell her the camera wasn’t running and she’ll have to do it all again. She curses and calls into the darkness again for her glass of water. The lines are stupid, but she can bully them into some semblance of life. “I think he’s begun to suspect what I am,” she says with a haunted look, as if there’s a scary monster hiding in her bedroom closet. “I think he’s begun to suspect what I am,” she says with an eerie moan. The grips and gaffers stir in the background, their motion a whisper. “I think he’s begun to suspect what I am,” she says with a note of plaintive, naïve longing, a Haywood girl hoping to make it onto big-city TV so everyone back home will see who she’s become and why she will never ever be coming back. She’s looking for an opening, someone she can enfold in a public scene, a distraction to give Patrick time to carry out their plan. “Is that mine?” she asks, pointing at the cup held by that skinny Latino kid Patrick is always talking to, and as he nods she lifts it from his sweaty hand and calls for a five-minute break.

  As the liquid touches her lips, she flinches and drops it suddenly, as though it contains something disgusting; the cup skids across concrete. She gasps, then coughs several times, with increasing intensity. The laces of Horseshoe’s vintage trainers are dark with liquid.