Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  We were flanked by walls of overpriced designer fabrics and tailoring that glimmered at every turn. I peered over her shoulder, anticipating a tray of designer earrings or, say, some very expensive shoes.

  She handed me a pair of Spanx.

  *

  I should say that everyone from the director to the actors to the prop stylist was extremely welcoming and kind. Both because it’s true and because I should say it. For as small a world as New York is, Gossip Girl is even smaller. There are so many people involved with the show, it’s rife with awkward intersections that really should not happen in a sane universe. Acquaintances of mine are friends with the cast. The music supervisor used to live in the same building as one of the actors. A friend used to write for the show. Once, I had seen a couple of the stars make out with each other on the swanky sofa of a swanky apartment while I scooted to the edge of the selfsame sofa. It’s not that my points of connection are particularly elite. It’s that Gossip Girl has been filming in New York for exactly the right amount of time to make it a cottage industry. It’s the Law & Order of my generation, destined to pop up in Broadway Playbill bios for years to come.

  I did have one very concrete connection to the show, but I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. As I walked out of the wardrobe trailer to the van with the blacked-out windows that would drive me to the set, I prayed that Chace Crawford (who plays the show’s handsome sheepdog, Nate Archibald) would not be in it. Five years prior I had sat across from Chace at the Empire Diner in Chelsea because a men’s magazine had sent me to profile him. I held a microcassette recorder purchased from RadioShack for the occasion, and I watched him order an apple. A whole apple on a little plate. The magazine strongly encouraged me to make him address rumors of his having a romantic relationship with a former NSYNC member. I waited until the end of the interview and, not quite being able to pull the trigger, abruptly asked him to play “fuck, marry, or kill” with three men, one of whom was in a certain boy band, one of whom I can’t recall, and one of whom was Burt Reynolds.

  “I can’t do that,” he laughed. He was eager to set the record straight, but not that eager.

  “Well, it’s that,” I said, gesturing at a bulldog tied to a tree outside, “or I ask you to kick that dog.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, I’m just trying to think of something you’d rather not do. Sorry again.”

  “I’m not going to kick a dog, though,” he deadpanned.

  As we parted ways, I went to hug him. Realizing that ours was not a hug-appropriate relationship, I squeezed his arm instead, using the hand with the tape recorder. It dropped and broke in front of him.

  That was the end of the interview.

  *

  When I crawled into the van, Matthew and Kelly were already running lines with each other. Kelly twisted around in the front seat and said hello; Matthew was instantly charming from the back row. I felt like we were all about to go on a field trip. For the briefest of seconds I forgot where I was and thought, Good god, these people look familiar.

  “You’re the author, right?” said Kelly.

  “I’m an author,” I said, stating the facts. “I’ll be one on the show.”

  “You write books, though?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I did.”

  “But you don’t anymore?” Matthew’s voice came from the backseat.

  “No.” I could feel myself being unnecessarily confusing because of my own inability to say the words. “I will. I am. I’m a full-time writer.” So I clarified that, yes, “I am the author.”

  It was the first time since quitting my job that I had said it with such authority. Or at all. I imagine it’s the same frame of mind women are in when they tell their manicurist they’re pregnant before they tell their own family. Here is a safe space to test out who you are, to see how it sounds. By leaving my career in publishing, I assumed that if I simply eliminated one reality, the remaining one would take over by default. But it turns out that identity is one of those things you have to fight for, even in your sleep.

  “So, do you want to run lines with us?” Kelly asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I like your glasses,” Matthew said. “I’m in the market for new glasses.”

  “Who’s in here?” came a perky female voice from the open passenger-seat window, saying, “Hi hi hi bye!” before it bounced down the street.

  “Who was that?”

  “That was Leighton,” said Kelly, referring to Leighton Meester, who plays Blair.

  I almost stole your bra, Blair.

  *

  I was immediately at ease upon entering the apartment. This was because it was shockingly well scouted, a real ringer for a space in which one might hold an old-school book party. Especially one for a buzzy book. It was a large four-bedroom Upper West Side apartment with lots of quirky oil paintings and dark bookshelves and beat-up area rugs. It looked like the kind of place the editor in chief of an independent publishing house might have bought for $100,000 in 1970. We were ushered down a paper-taped hallway as extras and crew members pressed their backs against the wall. The rest of the actors were already stationed in the living room.

  Leighton wasn’t in my scene. Nor was Blake Lively (who plays Dan’s ex, Serena) or Jessica Szohr (Dan’s childhood friend, the biracial daughter of Vermont hippies, whose mom is a dead ringer for Maya Angelou) or, thankfully, Chace Crawford. But Ed Westwick, the stylish Brit who plays Chuck, was. During the long breaks between takes, in which the women lay on the master bed like mummies, lest they ruin their makeup, Ed chatted with concern about riots in London that had been dominating the news. Then he showed me a video of a horse being hit by a truck on a country road. The truck plows beneath the horse’s legs and the horse goes flying over the hood of the truck. Magically, he lands on all fours and trots away. It was violent and horrible and unexpectedly funny. I laughed disproportionately. It’s possible I said the words Oh, that’s so wrong. Kelly opened her eyes on the bed and raised her eyebrows at me.

  I couldn’t help it. They were all just so nice, asking me where I was from, what I wrote, and where I lived. They genuinely wanted to know about me, a path of conversation that ran in direct opposition to my understanding of the day—that I wasn’t quite me.

  “Are you working tomorrow?” Ed asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m on deadline.”

  He studied my face. What he meant was: Was I coming back to the set? It was a lovely misunderstanding, one that made me feel as if I had temporarily transcended my walk-on complex. Was I one of them? A natural after all?

  By two o’clock we were halfway through filming and I was starving. In a last-ditch effort to do what a real actress might, I had skipped breakfast. I assumed Breakfast Pastry Heaven would await me after shooting. But somehow, either because I missed seeing craft services while running through the rain or because the kitchen was filled with sound equipment, I found myself begging mints off a lighting guy. The prophecy of my line had come to pass: I really was in search of cake.

  I nonchalantly expressed a desire for food to Kelly, knowing she is a mom and assuming all mothers know where the closest food is.

  “You’re hungry?” she asked, mulling the word over. “Huh. I’m not.”

  This is the kind of digestive narcissism that makes people hate actresses.

  Off camera, I eyed the tray of real hors d’oeuvres meant to be part of the background to the party. Once the coast was clear, I quickly consumed a pecan, trying to keep my jaw still and eat at the same time.

  “They spray those with poison, you know,” said Matthew, who had witnessed my entire operation.

  “Yeah, right.”

  I ate a second nut.

  “No, really,” he said, gesturing at the spotlights in the corner. “It’s so they’ll pop on camera.”

  I spit a little wet pile of masticated nut mess into my palm.

  “I’m kidding,” he said.

  He was a very good actor.


  *

  The actress who played the literary agent and I became friends. We had to stand uncomfortably close to each other for much of the day, because that’s how we were blocked. It turned out we lived a street away from each other in real life. While the director spouted off terms I had never heard before, embedded in instructions I was meant to follow right now, she took me under her wing and explained everything to me. She told me when we were rolling, what was practice and what was real. She explained that a “side” was a portion of a script. All the while being directed herself in her first multi-episode role on the show. She would not go back to being some other self tomorrow. This was her real life, her career, her paycheck—and I, the lowly walk-on, was threatening it with dumb questions. Yet she was selfless in her assistance.

  To celebrate her inaugural appearance on the show (she appeared in one episode before mine and five after), she had a party at her apartment. Someone handed me a glass of wine and we settled on the couch. As the lights were dimmed, I quickly grilled her about the rest of the party scenes, about what happened to the characters in the days after I left. Late in the game, I had become a Gossip Girl addict.

  “Whose apartment is it supposed to be, anyway? Your boss’s?”

  “Mine.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes,” she insisted, as if it were really hers, “it’s my apartment.”

  “No. That can’t be.”

  With a quick snip, my one tether between reality and Gossip Girl was cut. A twenty-seven-year-old literary agent does not live in that apartment. She just doesn’t. Even if she’s descended from titans of publishing. I didn’t need Gossip Girl to be realistic about books or writers or parties. Or pretty much anything. The show features a lot of usurping of fashion shows and sabotaging of record deals, for example, and I assume these are not pitch-perfect representations of their respective industries. But there is one realm in which I know too much about the reality to remain silent about the fantasy and that realm is real estate.

  After the screening, I walked home, remembering the very last moments of my scene. You can’t see it on TV, but what happens is this: I deliver the last of my few lines, excuse myself to hunt for cake, and rush to get off camera as quickly as possible. What with the director, the assistant director, the makeup artist, six cameramen, and so forth, there are about forty people in the living room at any given time. I duck under a boom microphone, squeeze between two cameras, and find myself released into a dining room visible in the background when the show airs.

  The room is filled with extras, split into gesticulating clumps. A couple of guests in the corner absolutely light up upon seeing me enter the room. I feel the same comfort I might feel upon entering a party alone and spotting friends. They mouth, “Hello.” I wave and whisper, “Hello,” back. The camera is still rolling in the next room, but I am no longer acting. I cross over to them, brushing past other extras, who also aren’t saying much. I want to find out how I know this couple. Once I arrive, I see their lips are moving, but they are not actually speaking. Their champagne is flat. There is blocking tape at their feet. Embarrassed, I stand there, leaning on bookshelves filled with prop books. It’s not me they are happy to see, it’s me.

  You Someday Lucky

  My new coworker and his wife are obsessed with a personality-diagnosing system called the Enneagram, which originated in fourth-century Alexandria and gained popularity in America during the 1970s. They are both from Boulder, the Bennington of the West, so their affinity for a numerically based wizardry system makes sense. It also makes sense if you’ve never heard of the Enneagram. Studies show that only 15 percent of people already making their own nut milk have heard of it. It’s too complicated to be confined to a place where you might have noticed it, like the back page of a magazine. It makes astrology look as precise as a fortune cookie, numerology as helpful as a mood ring. It makes the Myers-Briggs test look like someone ripped it off a cereal box.

  One night after work, I go over to their apartment so they can figure out my personality number. This is a fantastically indulgent exercise, like a four-handed massage or group therapy in which only one person’s problems are addressed. Over the course of several hours, they ask me all sorts of questions, some personal, some philosophical, some mined from their many books on the subject. Scenarios presented involve hypothetical reactions to crowded parties, animal attacks, solitary confinement, and statements that describe me best. Information that should take years to impart takes minutes. In the end, I will fall somewhere on a scale between one to ten. Though “scale” is not quite accurate. Every personality number is an equal to the next, numerically labeled for ease and not hierarchy. We eat homemade chocolate cake and ice cream from a tub and compare my test results with the Enneagram chart. This is an open circle overlaid with hexagonal shapes. It bears more than a little resemblance to a devil’s pentagram.

  After much deliberation, the two of them come to the conclusion that I am a nine. They smile because they, too, are nines. Though she is a nine with four tendencies. They look at each other like this is a point of contention in their marriage that has calcified into a private joke. I feel in on the joke, too.

  At work the following week, my coworker and I have our first fight over something minor. I interrupt him in a meeting or he interrupts me. He takes credit for my idea or I take credit for his. I undermine his authority or he tramples over mine. The fact that I can’t remember tells you just how minor it was. Either way, we are both royally pissed. We had ordered Chinese takeout for lunch but we don’t eat it together even though it was my idea to split an order of scallion pancakes and now the pancakes are in his office and I can smell them from here.

  “Your behavior,” he types from his office next to mine, “makes me think maybe you’re not a nine at all.”

  In our private hippie language, this is the single most cutting thing he could say.

  “Then what would you suggest I am?” I type back, loud enough for him to hear me clacking.

  “A six.”

  At his house, we had speculated about the people we knew in common. Our boss was a three. His boss was a four. My coworker’s wife was raised by two sevens. It’s a miracle she’s not in a mental hospital. As far as I know, we don’t know any sixes. I have not begun to defend myself when another text bubble appears:

  “Hitler was a six.”

  I mutter an expletive at my screen. Stupid system. Stupid new friends. Who needs them? I take my food out of the bag, grabbing the fortune cookie first. My whole life, I have eaten the fortune cookie first. This is because they’re not real dessert and Hitler probably ate his fortune cookies first. I tear open the plastic wrapping just as my coworker knocks on my door frame. Startled, I drop the cookie into a mug of cold coffee, which splatters onto my shirt. We frown together at the drowning cookie. He has come to give me my half of the pancakes, a peace offering.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, and returns to his desk.

  By the time I rescue the cookie, the fortune is blurred and so are the lucky numbers below it. All that’s legible, in red ink on the left-hand side, are the words:

  You

  someday

  Lucky

  I pin it to the wall until it’s dry. Then I stick it in some underutilized crevice of my wallet, where it will remain until I quit my job, leave town to find myself, and lose the wallet in a foreign city. Why, it could be there still.

  Such a nine thing to imagine.

  If You Take the Canoe Out

  The strongest impulse I’ve ever had to ride a baggage carousel was at the airport in Santa Rosa, California. What we’re dealing with is a flat loop, very unassuming, that curls through some rubber curtains. Candy Land to LaGuardia’s Chutes and Ladders. At New York airports, you’d have to not care about germs or physics or dignity to ride a baggage carousel. They’re made of overlapping metal scales meant to withstand bodily fluids and bombs. Ride one a
nd you might go to airport jail. Probably not. But the idea of jail is never great. Also you might get a tuba dropped on your head. But the Santa Rosa baggage carousel looks like a kiddie ride. Like you could just pop on and glide through the plastic curtains. Maybe a TSA guy gives you a high five and a doughnut hole on the other side. Maybe the whole doughnut. It’s California. Anything’s possible.

  An hour’s drive north of San Francisco, the Santa Rosa airport serves the people of California wine country. The building itself is just a sliver of brick that separates the pavement where the cars park from the pavement where the planes park. Inside there’s a soda machine, a lost-and-found, and a wall featuring the airport seal: Snoopy the dog, dressed as Amelia Earhart, navigating his doghouse through the clouds. At this advanced point in our aeronautical history, I am not comforted by Amelia Earhart as a mascot, never mind a cartoon of a dog dressed up like Amelia Earhart. And yet I keep coming back. I go to Northern California for the same reason Charles Schulz, Snoopy’s creator, went—for the same reason Hunter S. Thompson, M.F.K. Fisher, Jack London, and Mark Twain went—to write. Or, in my case, to try.

  There is a fantasy known as “the writing life.” Inasmuch as it’s any kind of life at all. Or any kind of fantasy at all. The average person will spend more time over the course of his or her lifetime wondering why marshmallow is spelled like that than they will wondering how writers write. But at some point, you may have asked yourself: Who gets up early? Who writes standing up? Who unplugs the television and throws it in the closet? I never see musicians get asked about their habits. Answer: Bad ones? Same with actors. Not too many hard-hitting questions about line memorization. This is because those artists go public with their craft in a way that gives their audience an inkling of their rehearsal process, of how the sausage gets made. Writers like to keep our sausage in our pants until the last possible second.

  Which means, if you’re trying to be a writer yourself, there are scant examples of how—and really? This is not a crowd you want to see pantless and typing. Therefore, when it comes to one another, we find it easier to fantasize about location instead. No one believes that using the same pens as Toni Morrison will make you Toni Morrison, but looking at the same view, breathing the same air? It’s better than nothing. Which is why we are the most famous for running away from home. You don’t have to be rich. You can apply to a writer’s colony or sublet your apartment for a week. You can stockpile vacation days, hire a sitter, and go. Anything for a change of scenery, anything for no distractions. Anything for the ideal conditions. We become increasingly particular about our conditions until part of us can’t help but think of all the work we’d get done if only we were buried alive.