Starry-Eyed

by Ted Michael

  “You always say I have no sense,” Liv reminded her father.

  Jesse did not think much of his eldest daughter, who tested through the roof, wanting to become a dancer. Even though the director of Liv’s school said fame was waiting in the wings for her and it was clear that she loved it, their father stayed focused on how a dancer’s fame was fleeting.

  “Today you do,” Jesse said, and then to Lena, “This is a bad idea.”

  Lena, her half smile firmly in place, shrugged lightly. It was the great and infuriating thing about Lena; she rarely got upset or overly involved in family decisions (from what to eat to where they spent vacations). Megan could never tell if her mother didn’t care what any of them did or if she simply found their deliberations pointless.

  “It might be, but it’s not my idea or my decision,” Lena told Jesse. “Neither is it yours.”

  Watching Erika listen to her parents, Megan wondered what it would be like to watch people who were looking, for once, at her. She thought she might see herself in a new way. She had not yet had her growth spurt and was, as far as she could tell, hopelessly ordinary while also being unlike anybody else at her small, private school.

  “I think we should say no,” her father said calmly, as if perhaps Lena had mistaken his displeasure with the idea for agreement.

  In a month, Megan would enter seventh grade, and was more interested in horses than boys. Her uncle owned a farm in North Carolina, and Megan loved taking care of his horses, mucking out the stalls, and cleaning their hooves with the sort of enthusiasm with which smart kids played chess and superpopular ones listened to music. She had friends (she belonged to a mildly popular group that held bake sales, got involved in Yearbook, and handed in homework on time), but Megan knew she had no real desire to spend time with any of them.

  “Yes, you have been clear on that,” Lena said. “Nevertheless, it’s up to the girls.”

  Of course, none of the facts she could point to (loving horses or being neither an overly smart kid or a superpopular one) explained how deeply odd she knew herself to be.

  “I’ll do it,” Megan said, unable to stay in her thoughts any longer.

  Surely a camera held by the unusually beautiful Erika Bauer would produce a photo that would show how she belonged, not just to her family, but in the world.

  “No,” her father said, as if her wishes didn’t matter. “You will not.”

  “But I want to,” she told him, scrambling for a reason that wouldn’t reveal anything too embarrassing. “I’ve always liked hearing about Mum’s other life and this way I could see it for myself.”

  This, at least, was true. She was curious about what a photo shoot was like.

  “Models are stupid,” Liv said, rather pointedly looking at their mother.

  “Beauty is a form of genius,” Megan shot back, not sure where she had heard that, but fairly certain someone important had said it.

  “I doubt Oscar Wilde had clothes and silly pictures in mind when he wrote that,” Jesse Walker said.

  Erika Bauer laughed, a rich sound that traveled right into Megan’s bones. She looked at Megan as if she were seeing through her. As if Jesse had not spoken and as if neither Lena nor Liv were of any importance to her.

  “If your father will let me,” Erika said, “I will turn you into a genius.”

  . . . . .

  Megan did not turn into a genius, but a photo of her and Lena made to look as if they were sitting at a café table in Rome sharing a coffee with the Lena of twenty years ago ran as a two-page spread in a lot of magazines. The campaign was written up in one of the city’s daily papers, and that was how Megan got a manager.

  Her uncle told her that the horses would wait for her until all this silly business blew over. Jesse, still dead set against it all, insisted that Megan promise to quit the minute her grades fell.

  “And you need to take typing,” he said. “Every actress has a second job”

  “Okay, I’ll take typing,” she said, trying not to laugh.

  A second job? She barely had a first.

  “And we’re going to the theater more often,” he said. “There’s no point in having you grow up thinking actors only work in front of a camera.”

  Megan nodded. Sure. She had always loved everything about going to the theater. The seats that looked comfortable but weren’t, the silent darkness that held stories, costumes, people, sets, and light that pooled on the stage and bounced off the actors, making them pale but also very alive.

  “And don’t think that just because Erika gave you that absurd camera that you know a thing about photography.”

  Megan nodded again. She and her father had been over this many times, starting when Erika, before flying home to Berlin, had a well-padded package delivered to the apartment with a note: Dear Megan, I enjoyed your curiosity. May this be of use to a fellow traveler through all that is strange and beautiful, EB. Inside, surrounded by bubble wrap, had been a camera. A Minolta XD-11, Megan learned, studying the almost incomprehensible instruction booklet that read as if it had been translated one too many times.

  Jesse had wanted Megan to give it back, saying a twelve-year-old girl couldn’t possibly use such an expensive camera.

  “What could Erika be thinking to spend so much money on a child?” he asked Lena.

  “I’m sure the camera company gave it to her,” she told him. “For what she does, she’s very famous, and she is always being sent equipment to try.”

  “Her camera is one that there were only nine thousand made,” Megan told her father, having found during the shoot that the best way to spend time with Erika, instead of the hair and makeup people who flocked to Lena, was to ask a lot of questions. “She said that the best way to become a photographer is to pay attention to what you see.”

  “Of course she did,” Jesse said. “You are not to take that thing all around the city or to and from school. You’ll get mugged or you’ll lose it.”

  Megan said yes, okay, she would use it on weekends and pay attention on other days. She would have agreed to anything if it meant she had a chance to be one of Erika’s fellow travelers. Whatever that meant.

  . . . . .

  The manager, whose voice sounded like it was two octaves too low for her, sent Megan all over the city to meet with people. After school, when her classmates had tutoring, music lessons, or some sort of athletic practice, Megan had auditions, go-sees, and every now and then, callbacks. The auditions were for the acting part of her career. She would read from a script and make smalltalk with a casting agent or director. The go-sees were the same as auditions, but for modeling jobs. She didn’t have to read a script, but had to make awkward smalltalk while being stared at by casting agents, magazine editors, art directors, or catalog houses.

  Casting agents were a nuisance, as it was their job to figure out why you weren’t good enough to be hired, but they were, her manager said, important people to impress. Megan had heard a rumor that casting agents knew of every single actor and model in the city. Sometimes Jesse would take a train home in time to meet Megan in the lobby of whatever building her audition was in, but most of the time she went by herself.

  Eventually, it all became routine. At auditions, she signed in, handed over her headshot, and waited. Go-sees were boring and the most anyone asked her to do was walk up and down or turn this way and that. She preferred being asked to do something, even if it was only reading from a script. Jesse not only took her to a lot of theater (they even went to Brooklyn to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Richard II), but she signed up for an acting class that met on Saturday mornings at the Neighborhood Playhouse on East 54th Street. There she learned how to break down a script, identify motive, and establish character.

  The other students were either other actress-models or older teenagers hoping to get into Juilliard. Megan felt somewhat fraudulent in a room full of such seriously ambitious kids, but she loved the class. It gave her hope that if she simply worked harder, she’d do
better at her auditions. And if she didn’t get a job after an audition, at least the decision was partly based on something other than her looks.

  She could still go to the theater with her father and to acting class no matter what happened at auditions. Not getting a job after a go-see felt awful since it was entirely based on what she was—her height, shape, face, hair. When she told her manager she only wanted to be sent out for acting jobs, the woman said,

  “Honey, you’ve got height now, you’re flat, and your face has good bones, are you sure?”

  Megan was sure. She knew she was tall, she was indifferent to her bra size, and her face’s bones, no matter how good, would never rival the perfection of her mother’s. She shed the modeling part of her career and turned toward acting and theater with more care. Even though she was unsure about wanting to perform, she continued chasing the possibility that she would find a way to see herself through the process of other people seeing her.

  For a year or two, she got enough work, and the money went into her college fund, making it all seem worthwhile. She kept mementos of auditions, slipping them into her schoolbag on the way out. She’d save a page of the script, some girl’s discarded headshot, or simply a note she had written to herself describing one of the other girls waiting to audition. She told herself that it was a way to pay attention to what she saw, good training for when she did use the camera (very carefully and only of her family or certain favorite parts of Central Park).

  Her father said a real photographer developed her own photos, but that the ones she was taking had real coherence of image and were not at all terrible. Megan knew he meant it as a compliment, but she wished she could take the camera to auditions and record what she saw at them, instead of collecting bits and writing herself notes.

  Long fingers, does she play piano? A note might ask. Or one would say, Wavy hair, green eyes, hoop earrings. Megan stashed the notes, the saved head-shots, and script sheets in a file that she kept in her locked desk drawer. The key was in an old pair of socks.

  She knew there was something more than private in the way she hid the file, something furtive, only she wasn’t sure why her collection made her feel so guilty and anxious. Maybe, she reasoned, it was because it held evidence of how little she was like the other girls auditioning for the same part.

  In the waiting rooms, Megan gave the men a cursory look, but intensely examined the women and the other girls, perhaps hoping to discover what she herself must clearly lack. Not just as an actress, but as a girl.

  At school, Megan had a much better sense of why she didn’t fit in with the girls who giggled, tossed their hair, and used the words so gay and lame as if they were weapons. Those were the girls whom the cool boys in eleventh and twelfth grade wanted to spend time with and date. Megan had friends who were boys in both of those grades, but they were not the boys you dated. Even if you had wanted to, they were busy doing things (like studying chess or prepping for debate club), not hanging out being cool.

  At Megan’s school, no one had to be cool to be popular, which was, Liv liked to say, lucky.

  For the most part, Megan understood life at school and where she belonged in it. Auditions were much harder to gauge, and during the last six months of her career, there were no jobs and almost no callbacks. Casting agents were forever talking about her appearance, as if she were at a go-see. If it hadn’t been for the times she met with directors, Megan probably would have told her manager she was quitting.

  Directors asked questions that she answered with a great deal of care, as if they were guests at her parents’ dinner parties instead of men asking her to read from a script, saying, Go ahead, I’ll read with you. Gabe here is just going to tape it. Casting agents, on the other hand, looked from her to the headshot and sighed, saying, You grew. She was, they said, too tall for how very young she looked. The directors never commented on her appearance, content just to chat.

  They listened to her talk about school, laughed at her various trials and tribulations with homework. Sometimes directors had seen the print ad Megan was in with her mother and therefore put together who her mother was, but if so, they always asked about Lena Legarde very nicely. As if the connection made Megan an old friend instead of the puzzling offspring of a woman famous for her beauty.

  “God, I haven’t read a book in years,” the director of a movie about eight orphans in Kansas said, after Megan told him her English teacher’s obsession with Great Expectations. “All I ever look at are scripts.”

  “Well, that’s part of your job,” she said politely, feeling somewhat triumphant that she was always reading a book and not only as part of her homework.

  “You realize, don’t you,” the director said, “that girls like you grow up to be women who don’t know what a novel is.”

  Megan was reading for the part of the sixteen-year-old orphan whose first boyfriend is the son of a bank officer intent on repossessing the home where the orphans lived. She’d gone to the first audition to read for the twelve-year-old tomboy orphan, but had been found wanting.

  “Too tall,” the casting agents had said when she read for the tomboy. “But she should come back and read for the older girl. Hal might love her look for that part.”

  So for this callback, in an attempt to look as old as she was tall, Megan had blown-dry her hair and used mascara. She did not ask Hal (the directors always went by their first names) what he thought of her look, but she read for the part, relieved not to be in a room with casting people. It wasn’t until she was on the M10 bus home that she thought to wonder what sort of a woman didn’t know what a novel was.

  . . . . .

  One night late in October, Megan’s manager called. The casting people whom she’d seen the day before (and who had not mentioned her height) thought she might be a good fit for the daughter of the lead actress in a sequel to a movie about a football-playing detective. The callback was for tomorrow at four. Megan wrote down the name and address—it was a building on Broadway in the 40s that she had already been to many times.

  As descriptions went, daughter of the lead actress didn’t offer a lot of clues about what they were looking for. To auditions that might matter, Megan tended to opt for a pair of jeans that had cost an obscene amount of money, but which Lena had said made her legs look long and shapely instead of just long. But they were in the laundry so she pulled out a favorite black skirt that was sprigged with green flowers and had flounces and lace. She had a scoop-neck sweater that matched the green of the flowers, and with a pair of flat shoes and black tights, all that was left to worry about was her hair.

  Megan could never tell if she looked older with her hair up or down, so she usually compromised by pulling the top part back into a barrette so that all of it hung down her back. She aimed for neat, but curly hair had a way of doing what it wanted and she had long since made peace with the fact that it would never look like her mother’s.

  Even before reading the scene, Megan knew she wouldn’t get the part. The waiting room was full of girls auditioning for the daughter, and they each looked like perfect, delicately formed versions of a type. Half of them were short and curvy (and dressed in short skirts and plunging necklines) and the other half were tall and willowy (and dressed as if their jeans and sporty tops had been ironed onto them). Nevertheless, she signed in, handed over her headshot, and got the pages she would be reading from.

  As she had guessed, the daughter was described in ways that might as well have said NOT MEGAN WALKER. After familiarizing herself with her lines, Megan began her usual study of the other girls. She let her eyes wander from the bare knees of the girls looking to play the daughter as a vixen to the covered shoulders of the ones looking to play her as a tomboy.

  One girl stood out from the others, keeping a hold on Megan’s attention. Her hair was as neat, straight, and gleaming as the rest, but it was cut short in such a severe way that it made the girl incredibly pretty. Her thinness was not like Liv’s (delicate, graceful, commanding). In
stead, her body (lean, strong, elegant) made Megan think of Erika Bauer’s hands. It was ridiculous that they were auditioning for the same part.

  She wished she had the nerve to switch seats and see what color eyes the other girl had. Instead, she wrote, Sharp, clean, thin, on a folded piece of notebook paper that she stuffed into her bag.

  Eventually, well after the girl had gone in for her audition and left, Megan’s name was called. She picked up her schoolbag, jacket, and script and went into the usual sort of room. In it was a table with two men sitting behind it, a couple of empty chairs, and, in the corner, a big, black camera balanced on a sturdy tripod.

  Megan smiled at them and started to answer their questions (school, had she enjoyed shooting the pilot, what did she do for fun) when she thought about the girl in the waiting room. That girl had stood exactly here and done the same thing Megan was doing. In fact, all afternoon, girls would smile and chat and read and for what? The chance to play a character with no name, but described as, Coltish, sullen, blooming.

  “This is silly. I’m not what you’re looking for,” she said, not wanting to point it out, but unable not to speak. “I’ll read and you’ll tape me, but it’s pointless. I’m not it.”

  The man who had been asking the questions (he’d said his name was Steve. Or was it Mark?) started to laugh, saying, That’s a new one. He also turned to the other man and said, She’s telling us that she’s not it.

  Megan realized what she must have known for months or years since the first time she’d seen what was inside Lena’s hat box. That what everyone was always looking for was an it.

  “So let me ask you, um,” Steve/Mark looked down at the papers on the table. “Megan, let me ask you, how did you get into this business?”

  She had a simple answer to this question and it had the advantage of being true, but mentioning her mother and Erika in front of a director was not something she had ever willingly done. She thought of telling him why she liked her acting class and going to the theater (her father had taken her to see O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness the previous weekend). She thought of saying, I love to watch acting. I love how a character made of words is turned into a living, breathing person with gesture, posture, and clothes. I love being part of the magic, even if it’s only by watching.