Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  Jasper was upstairs when Quinn got back. He was Pakistani, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, dark brown eyes like a dog’s, and an accent Quinn could mimic perfectly. He and Baby-Sue looked like a car wreck together—she was a big-boned redhead with rabbit teeth and an overbite—but they had a good time. They’d been living together for a year. Sometimes Quinn tried to imagine what their kids might look like. Then he usually gave up.

  “Hey, bud,” Jasper said when Quinn came in. He was sitting at a card table eating Chinese takeout from Win Sum Yum around the corner.

  “Hey.”

  “Man, I aced my audition. I’m going to producers with this one, baby. Morty’ll be happy.” Morty was Jasper’s agent.

  “So that’s good,” Quinn said, even though he didn’t really care. Jasper wasn’t even SAG yet. All his gigs were nonunion and paid crap. The only reason he had an agent was because Mimi had begged a favor while she and Jasper were still on good terms, which now they were not. Quinn had seen him act once or twice in Mimi’s showcases, and he was okay, but between the accent and the skin tone, he was doomed to play ethnic forever. At least that was one problem Quinn didn’t have.

  “So what have you been up to?” Jasper said, chewing vigorously. He had pink, pink fingernails. Some of the skin around them was very dark, darker than the rest of him, like the pigment had leaked out and pooled there. His palms were pink, too. Next to Jasper, Quinn looked like he was terminally ill, and Baby-Sue looked like she’d been boiled. She called her complexion peaches and cream, but Quinn just called it blotchy. “You been doing anything?”

  “Nah.”

  “Yeah,” Jasper said sympathetically.

  “I’m in a showcase at three, though.” It was two now. “You going over Laurel Canyon?”

  “I could be. Sure. I need to reorder headshots. I’ll go to ISGO. How long’s the showcase?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on when I’m up.” They both knew Mimi didn’t make up her mind about that until right before the showcase, so you never knew where you were in the lineup.

  “Well, at least I can drop you off. I’ll probably be done before you, though.”

  Quinn shrugged. He hated that he always had to beg rides places. You could tell Baby-Sue and Jasper weren’t parents. Parents fussed over you about stuff like whether you had a ride home. Even Nelson did that much. Quinn decided he would try to talk Nelson into buying him some beater car once he had his license. If he’d just do that, Quinn would be set. He wouldn’t need Baby-Sue or Jasper or anyone.

  Chapter Five

  DILLARD BUEHL HAD MADE HIS FORTUNE SELLING BOILED peanuts at state fairs from Gatlinburg to New Orleans. By his own admission he was the purest form of cracker, a plain old South’n boy who was light on education and long on talk and hard work. He adored and worshipped his wife and little girl, so when Angie said she wanted to take Laurel to Hollywood to try her hand at fame, what could he do but pull together a little bank account, drive them out there in his brand-new Hummer, and settle them into a two-bedroom apartment? He couldn’t be gone too long because he didn’t trust his partner, Bobby, even if he was Dillard’s brother, so he installed a GPS system for the snappy Hummer H3 Angie chose off the lot, put the Thomas Guide to LA in the driver’s-side door pocket, kissed his little girl, and wished them well. He’d miss them like crazy, but he wanted them to be happy, and once Angie got her mind fixed on something, well, that was that. And his little peanut was beautiful and talented and had a voice as rich and sweet and smooth as caramel. She’d started singing at church when she was five, been competing in beauty pageants since she was seven, and people hearing her sing for the first time fell in love with her there and then, that’s how good she was. But no church or pageant was big enough to hold her, not anymore.

  And while Dillard might be a cracker, he was nobody’s fool. He knew there were wives who went to Los Angeles and never came back except to make an appearance in divorce court. They got a taste of the glory life—movie stars and expensive clothes and shopping for jewelry on Rodeo Drive—and they grabbed hold of it and went for a never-ending ride. If that happened to his Angie it would kill him, just kill him, but he was wise enough to know that you couldn’t get between a woman and her dream. The day you did that, you stopped being a husband and started being a jailer. Dillard was no dream-slayer and he was certainly no warden. He wanted his girls to be happy, and if he had the means to bring that about, why, he was duty-bound to do it. Money could be its own burden that way. It gave you choices when sometimes you were better off without any.

  In any event, today was his last day in Los Angeles before he turned his Hummer around and pointed its nose toward home. It might be September, but there were still county fairs going on all over the American South, and Dillard needed to be there. He should have gone home yesterday, but Angie begged him to stay so he could see Laurel in a showcase. From what Dillard could make out, the showcase let Mimi Roberts’s kids perform for a few talent agents and casting directors. Laurel already had an agent—they’d had a $175 lobster dinner to commemorate the occasion—but Mimi had said there’d be a casting director there today from Disney. Mimi had told Angie and Angie had told him that although she was on the old side, Laurel would be perfect for Disney because of her looks and her voice. She’d been a Little Miss Georgia runner-up two years in a row, too, so she was seasoned. Today could be her day, Angie said, and they’d both feel a lot calmer if Dillard could be there.

  So here he was at the studio, his broad backside perched precariously on a tiny plastic folding chair, trying to shrink the big man he was into a smaller facsimile because the room was that small and that packed. Angie was fidgeting until he took her hand in his big paw and settled her. From the waiting room where they kept all the kids—greenroom, he was supposed to call it, though it was more like the color of old athletic socks—he could hear muffled laughter and chatter and nerves. And then it got quiet all of a sudden, and Mimi came in leading the two sequestered talent agents and one casting director to a place of honor in the very front of the room, where wooden TV trays had been set up to hold stacks of carefully ordered headshots and résumés and feedback forms. Mimi took her seat at the back of the room, lifted the first set from her pile, and announced the performer. Angie’s hand tightened in his and the showcase began.

  The first two children did TV commercials for kids’ Crest and Pull-Ups, respectively. They couldn’t act worth a damn, of course, but they were cute and perky in exactly the way Laurel had been at that age, and the casting director and agents wrote energetic notes on their feedback forms. Ten or twelve kids followed, doing scenes from actual movies and sitcoms. And then, by the painful pressure Angie’s hand was suddenly exerting on his knuckles, he could tell that Laurel’s turn must be next. The last trio of kids went back to the greenroom, a parent keeping watch out there said, “Shhhhhhh,” and Laurel emerged wearing a gossamer pink outfit that reminded Dillard of the inside of a seashell. Angie had bought it for her at Barneys yesterday. He knew because they’d brought him along for his opinion, which was sweet, given that his approval was guaranteed. She could have been wearing an old wrestler’s uniform and he would have said it was beautiful. She had that much power to move him.

  LAUREL STEPPED ONTO THE LITTLE PLATFORM THAT SERVED as a stage and brought a wooden stool into the middle. She moved slowly. She didn’t want to start; at that moment she would have given almost anything not to have to start. She sent up a little prayer for help. Then she settled herself, hooked her heels over the bars of the stool, smoothed her skirt, and raised her eyes to Angie’s in the second row of seats.

  Then she began to talk. Her voice sounded fragile, almost ghostly, as though at any minute she might just stop; around the room people leaned forward in their chairs. She stared into Angie’s eyes without blinking.

  “The day my mother found out she was dying she asked me to go out and buy her these clear glass marbles. Dad and I hadn’t even known she was ill.”

&
nbsp; She took a deep breath. In the audience she could see Angie mouthing the lines, as though she could will Laurel through the performance.

  “I brought her the marbles and she counted ninety of them out and put them in this old cut-glass bowl. Apparently the doctor had given her three months.”

  Laurel could feel Angie breathing with her in perfect synchrony. Laurel gave a little sob, just one, like a cough.

  “All day, every day, she would hold one of these marbles in her hand. She said it made the day longer. After the third or fourth day I saw one on the floor and started to pick it up but she said, ‘Leave it.’ She said she was learning to let go.”

  Laurel’s chest heaved with the effort not to break down. Tears spilled over, though. Around the room people were gasping. Laurel’s eyes were fixed on Angie’s like a lifeline.

  “I was in bed two weeks ago Wednesday toward dawn, when I heard this sound of falling marbles. Dad and I ran in there. The bedside table was turned over and she was gone. Dead. When the emergency medical people got there they found this.”

  Laurel opened her trembling hand to reveal one clear glass marble, which she held out toward the audience like prayer. “The rest spilled when the table fell, but this one was still in her hand.”

  She wept—she couldn’t help it—but for just a beat or two. Then she forced herself to go on.

  “I keep it.

  “I keep it in my hand all day.

  “It makes the day longer.”

  Finally it was over. Laurel, stunned, just sat there. Everyone in the room was standing up; several people were fighting back tears, but not Angie. Angie was dry-eyed and resolute: Eyes on the prize.

  Laurel wiped her nose with a tissue and fled the room. When Angie reached her in the parking lot, she was still trembling.

  “Oh, God,” she said, and her voice was still unsteady and nasal.

  “That was brilliant,” Angie said softly, massaging Laurel’s shoulders. She was smaller than Laurel, so she had to reach up. “You. You were brilliant.”

  Laurel toed a bubble of tar into a crack in the asphalt. “How could you have sat there? How could you stand it?”

  Angie smiled gently. “I could sit there and watch you act all day. You know that.”

  “It wasn’t acting.”

  “It was acting,” Angie said gently. “It was someone else’s story, honey. You just delivered someone else’s story. You can walk away from that.”

  “I didn’t think I was going to get through it.”

  “But you did.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” Laurel sought out Angie’s eyes. Looking for truth and finding it there, she nodded and pulled a soggy wad of tissues out of her pocket, holding it out mutely and laughing. Angie smiled and pulled Laurel into a one-armed hug.

  “So do you think they thought it was good?”

  “They didn’t think it was good, darlin’, they thought it was great. You could see it. Daddy about popped with pride.”

  Laurel nodded, knowing who got the real credit: God. She had faith that He was guiding her. Her mother wanted her to be a star, and that would be wonderful, of course, but that wasn’t what was driving her. What was driving her was the thought of Angie seeing her win major movie and TV awards like Emmys or Oscars; of Angie at her wedding, seeing her first grandchild. That’s what she wanted. And if God would grant her that, she would do whatever it took for her to be the star she knew Angie so badly wanted her to be.

  IN THE GREENROOM, BETHANY WAS WATCHING ALLISON delicately stroke on face powder with a badger brush and then refresh her lipstick. She had pulled her hair back from her face with a bright pink silk hair band that perfectly matched her pink capris and ballet flats. She wore a contrasting Juicy Couture T-shirt, and Bethany thought that either her breasts were growing quickly or she was wearing a Victoria’s Secret gel bra. Either way, she looked gorgeous. When she was finished she took a long look at herself in the huge hand mirror Mimi kept in the greenroom so they wouldn’t all crowd into the bathroom, which was tiny and had only two stalls, one of them for handicapped people even though no one had ever actually seen a handicapped person in there.

  “Do you want to know why you didn’t book it? Because I can tell you exactly why,” Allison said to Bethany, handing the mirror to her. Bethy handed it straight on to Hillary, who was fumbling with her bangs and a curling iron. Bethy had been saying how disappointed she was that she hadn’t gotten a call-back for a costar role on a new, prime-time sitcom for which she’d been able to audition because of her brand-new status as a member of SAG. “You want to know why? You wanted it too much.”

  Bethy just looked at her.

  “I’m serious. The thing is not to care,” Allison said, impatiently taking the curling iron from Hillary and going to work on the girl’s bangs. “They can smell it a mile away if you care too much. The more you want to book a role, the more you’re not going to. If you go in there with the attitude that you don’t give a crap, they’ll be all over you. And even if you don’t book it, they’ll remember you.” Expertly she curled Hillary’s stick-straight hair. “You know Quinn? He auditioned one time to play this gay kid, which he’s really good at because, you know, he looks kind of gay and everyone’s always asking him if he is, which I don’t think so. Anyway, he gives this awesome read, and on the way out the door he takes the casting director’s hands”—and here she took Bethy’s hands in hers—“and whispers, ‘Have a really perfect day.’”

  Bethany’s mouth dropped open. “No way.”

  “Way.” Allison fluffed Hillary’s bangs with a brush and handed back the curling iron. “You don’t know him because he’s not around that much right now, but he used to live at Mimi’s, too. He’ll do anything.”

  “So did he book it?”

  “No, but only because he didn’t look old enough. They wanted someone to play eighteen, and he looks more like fifteen, even though he’s really sixteen and a half. Oh, and listen to this. One time we were doing a showcase and somehow Mimi got an agent from CAA to be there—which never happens because they’re one of the big-time agencies and they don’t need to shop for clients—and Quinn was doing this scene where he plays a younger brother with a crush on his big sister’s girlfriend. He’s supposed to answer the door and she’s there, right, and I don’t remember the line anymore, but he’s trying to get her attention. Leave them alone.” She whacked Hillary’s hand with a hairbrush so she’d stop fooling with her bangs. “Anyway, in the scene, he’s just gotten out of the shower, so he’s got a bathrobe on, but Quinn changes in the greenroom where Mimi can’t see him and he comes out in nothing but a towel, this ratty old bath towel that he’s holding together, and when he answers the door and sees the girl standing there, he lets go of the towel. I’m not kidding. I thought Mimi was going to pass out. She has high blood pressure, and seeing that towel drop—hoo. Do you remember that?” she asked Hillary.

  “It was the best thing ever.”

  Bethy stared. “So was he naked?”

  “Nah,” Allison said. “He had on a pair of boxers. But you couldn’t tell until the towel was off.”

  “Did the agent like him?”

  Allison shrugged. “I don’t remember. I know CAA didn’t sign him, but the next day one of the casting directors who was there called him to go straight to producers for something. The guy was probably gay because, you know, tons of them are.” Hillary was fidgeting with her bangs again, and Allison slapped her hand. “Stop. You’re going to wreck them.”

  Bethany knew that some of the girls didn’t like Allison just because of the way she looked, but she thought Allison was fun and funny and in a good mood a lot of the time, despite the fact that her mother gave her away to Mimi and she’d never even met her father. Hillary had told her that no one even knew who Allison’s father was, not even her mom. Bethy couldn’t imagine that. She couldn’t even imagine having divorced parents, and just about everyone she knew had parents who were divorced except her. She knew Ruth and Hugh mi
ssed each other a ton, because sometimes Ruth got very quiet after hanging up the phone, like she was upset about something. When Bethy asked her, she just said she got homesick sometimes, but Bethy didn’t think it was that simple. She knew they didn’t agree about her being in LA. She knew Hugh thought it was a bad idea to have her put her education second by letting her be homeschooled like all the other studio kids. He thought she should still be back home at McClure Middle School, doing Seattle Children’s Theatre classes and maybe auditioning for commercials or indie movies that were being cast—nonunion gigs where you hardly got paid anything and you couldn’t ever book a TV show or a real movie, only stuff that someone was producing in their garage. She and Ruth had both told him it would be too late if they waited until after college, but he didn’t believe it because he wasn’t down here watching much younger kids book episodics and movies, even now leaving Bethy further and further behind.

  “You’re on deck, you two,” said somebody’s mom, checking off an item on her clipboard. Bethy closed her eyes for a minute, smoothed her ponytail, straightened out the kicky little skirt she and Ruth had found on the clearance rack at Forever 21, and ran her tongue over her teeth in case there was some last-minute lip gloss on them. She and Allison were doing a scene from an old episode of That’s So Raven. She loved doing scenes with Allison, because, like Quinn, Allison would do absolutely anything, where Bethy still held back sometimes. “Commit!” Dee always hollered at her in class. “You’ve made your choice, so what are you waiting for?” Bethy took a deep breath and so did Allison, and then they burst into the showcase like gunslingers.

  BEFORE JASPER HAD EVEN PULLED INTO THE STUDIO PARKING lot, Quinn could see kids swarming around outside. Little kids, mostly, seven years old, nine years old, mostly girls. Mimi always had a ton of girls. Thank God she didn’t pair him up anymore, except with Cassie Foley, who was only eleven but was a great, even a superb, actor. She had credits as long as your arm already, mostly TV episodics. If Grey’s Anatomy was looking for a kid to play a terminally ill or molested character, Cassie was on the short list. She’d had guest star roles on almost every major dramatic episodic there was. She had a perfectly heart-shaped face and a widow’s peak and big blue eyes and she smiled all the time and she meant it. She was a sweet kid, and she liked Quinn, too. Not that many kids did. Hardly any kids did. People thought you didn’t know that kind of thing, but you did. He did.