“Boot camp?”
“It’s an intensive program Mimi holds twice a year for kids who are new to Hollywood. By the end of ten days, the kids hit the ground running.”
“And is that a good thing?”
“What?”
“Hitting the ground.”
Ruth just shot him a look.
ONCE THEY’D DROPPED RUTH AT THE APARTMENT BETHANY gave Hugh directions to the studio in what sounded to him like a new, grown-up voice. How had she learned this? In Seattle she didn’t even know the names of the streets between their house and her best friend Rianne’s, and she’d been traveling that route since preschool. Now her directions even included what lane he needed to be in.
At the studio, Hugh followed her into the greenroom, where a dozen or so children were milling around. Three girls were huddled on a sofa looking at something. They barely glanced up when Bethany came in.
“Guys! This is my dad. Daddy, this is Reba and Allison and Hillary.”
The girls had already turned back to Allison’s video iPod.
“Hi,” Hugh said.
“What are you watching?” said Bethany.
“A commercial. It’s Quinn. He’s supposed to be a brain cell or something.”
“A synapse,” said Hillary. “He’s a synapse. It’s for Sparkz.”
“Sparkz?”
“That new energy drink,” Hillary said. “It’s union, and it’s national. He’s making a wad.”
“He should be,” said Allison. “I mean, he looks gay in that suit.”
Without a preamble of any kind, a small man with wild white hair burst into the greenroom, took a stance, and yelled, “Are you ready to work those chops?”
The kids yelled as one, “We’re ready!”
This apparition was apparently Smidge Robinson, a former child actor and now one of the most sought-after kids’ acting teachers in the business, someone the girls were lucky to work with, Mimi had assured Ruth, for just $225 apiece. Hugh tried to identify the man’s accent. It had a vague Southern twang, but actors put on and took off dialects like sweaters. Hugh thought with sour satisfaction that he’d probably come straight from the heart of Brooklyn.
Smidge swept the kids ahead of him into the classroom. Bethany had explained excitedly at the Farmers’ Market that for the class’s four hours, they got to say or do anything. The idea, apparently, was to get the kids to stop being themselves, so they could be other people. As she explained it, this was a guerilla acting class with no holds barred, and if they broke down and cried, they’d get one of Smidge’s famous tin stars, which he would pin onto their clothing personally as a rite of passage. A lot of them hadn’t cried yet, Bethy had said. She had, but only once. She said she thought about Zippers, their tuxedo cat, who had died a year before. She said some of the kids thought about grandparents and stuff, old people they knew who’d died, but since she didn’t know anyone, she’d had to make do.
Now, in the sudden quiet, Hugh took a minute to scan the headshots of children and teens taped to the walls.
“The ones way up there aren’t clients anymore,” a girl’s voice said from behind him. “Mimi gave them their starts, though.”
Hugh turned. Which girl was this? She’d been one of the kids Bethy had introduced him to when they first came in. He found her headshot lower down on one of the walls: Allison Addison. She was a dark brunette and strikingly, almost shockingly, beautiful.
“They have other managers now,” the girl said offhandedly. “We’re okay with it, though.”
“We?”
“Mimi and me.”
Was this girl Mimi’s daughter? But he’d never heard anything about a daughter, and this girl, given her beauty, couldn’t possibly have sprung from those loins. He sat on one end of the greenroom sofa. “Aren’t you supposed to be in there?” He nodded toward the classroom.
“We’re doing a game where one of us has to leave the room. They’ll call me back in pretty soon.” She circled the room languidly, tapping each photograph with her finger until she stopped directly in Hugh’s line of sight with her back turned. Striking what he was sure was a pose, she lifted her shiny hair high off her neck and then released it so it spilled down her back, shimmering. Then she turned and plopped down on the couch beside him, crossing one long, thin leg over the other. “So you’re a dentist,” she said.
“I am.”
“She talks about you a lot.”
“Does she?”
The girl nodded. “Sometimes we get sick of it, but usually it’s okay. I mean, you’re her father, so.” She caught up a handful of hair and began searching for split ends. “I’m Allison,” she said. “You’ve probably heard about me.”
Had he? Conceivably. Ruth and Bethany talked about so many people he couldn’t keep them straight.
“So I’m guessing you’re not going to stay very long,” she said.
“Probably not. Bethy’s mom and I have to run some errands while—”
“No, I mean in LA. The fathers never do.” She picked up his BlackBerry from the sofa cushion between them and pushed a few buttons.
“Well, some of us have jobs back home,” Hugh said. “Does your father live here?”
“Nah.” She let her knee brush his leg. She was sitting too close. Hugh pushed himself farther into the sofa arm, opening an inch or two of space between them. There was something unnerving about the girl; she gave off energy and heat.
She held his BlackBerry, stroking the screen with her thumb. “So do you like being a dentist?” Her knee was grazing his leg again. He had nowhere left to go.
He cleared his throat. “I do, yes.”
“I wouldn’t want to have someone’s tongue touch me. I mean, they touch you with their tongues, right, when you’re in there drilling or whatever?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“Gross.”
“We wear rubber gloves.”
“Yeah,” she said, and tossed his BlackBerry onto the sofa.
The classroom door opened and Bethany poked her head into the greenroom and called to Allison, “Smidge says to come back.”
Allison hopped up and trotted to the door. “Bye-bye, daddy-o,” she said over her shoulder, and followed Bethany. Once the door had closed behind her, Hugh smoothed his hair and then his trouser legs, feeling vaguely uneasy. This girl, he was sure, was capable of causing trouble.
From another room he could hear a woman—Mimi, presumably—whining, “I know that, but he’s funny-looking. Funny-looking kids play character roles or they’re in commercials. They don’t play leads. I’m telling you right now that if he really looked like Zac Efron, things would be going a lot better. And you need to get him coached because the last time I saw him, he was still doing that thing with his mouth.”
Hugh followed the voice and poked his head into Mimi’s office.
“A hundred and twenty-five dollars,” she was saying. “No, twenty-five. And she won’t take a check, so make sure you have cash.” Mimi looked at Hugh and gestured at the sprung, grimy armchair beside her desk. A malevolent-looking terrier in a dog bed stared at him from under Mimi’s feet. Hugh vaguely remembered Bethany saying something about a dog that didn’t like men. He sat down.
“And tell him he needs to be off-book today,” Mimi was saying. “Tell him he’s not fooling anyone.”
She hung up the phone and sighed. “That’s what happens when the parents are delusional,” she said. “That child has the worst chin I’ve ever seen on anyone except maybe Chelsea Clinton. If they know what’s good for him, they’ll get him a chin implant. Of course, that still leaves the nose.”
Hugh didn’t know what to say.
“So,” Mimi said, cutting her shrewd old eyes at him. “Is this about the money or the pressure?”
“What?”
“When parents come talk to me, especially new parents, it’s usually either about the amount of pressure the kids are under or how much money they’re having to spend. I’m guessing with
you it’s about the money.”
Hugh bristled. “It’s not about the money. Well, it is about the money, but it’s not primarily about the money.”
“Then you feel we’re pushing Bethany too hard.”
“Well, I do think we need to keep in mind that she’s only thirteen. It’s all well and good to be talented and to want to be an actress, but she’s also a kid. It’s not normal to come down so hard on them. Not at that age.”
Mimi smiled thinly. “If you want normal, you should take her back to Seattle.” She shifted in her chair, resettling her substantial haunches. “You have to change your thinking. I don’t run a day camp. This is an employment agency. That’s the first thing.”
Hugh just looked at her.
Mimi sighed. “New parents always get to this point, and I always tell them the same thing. There are two kinds of people. There are the ones who don’t take this business seriously, and they usually don’t stick around; and then there are the ones who buy into it one hundred and ten percent, and are willing to go to hell and back if that’s what it takes to have a career in acting. I can’t tell yet which one Bethany is—which worries me, frankly, because I’m not willing to work harder at this than she is—but your wife is definitely in the second category. Mothers like your wife will cheerfully kick other mothers in the head if they think it will improve their kid’s chances. And I mean that as a good thing. There is no other way to make it. None.”
Hugh felt a growing sense of vertigo. Could this woman possibly be saying about his gentle Ruthie what he thought he was hearing? Impassive, Mimi picked something out of her teeth with her fingernail and flicked it onto the floor. Hugh ran his palms down his thighs. “I must say that I also have concerns about how you’re treating her religious affiliation.”
Mimi looked amused. “What, you mean her being Jewish? I have nothing against that. A lot of my clients are Jewish, but their stage names aren’t Bernstein or Lefkowitz or Shapiro. Their names are Burns and Lawford and Pearson. I will admit that Roosevelt might be overkill, but I stand behind it. If you want her to scream Jewish—the name, the hair—she’ll never work unless someone remakes Fiddler on the Roof or an Israeli SWAT team action movie, and Fiddler’s already been made and she’s too young to be on a SWAT team, which means at best she’d play a bombing casualty with one line about how much she wants her mother to live, and that’s it for the movie, which means there’s an excellent chance she’ll end up on the cutting room floor. Does that sound better to you? Because that’s the way it works.”
The woman had conviction, he’d have to give her that much. “I’m just saying I don’t want her to be ashamed of her heritage, like it’s something to hide. We’ve worked very hard to make her proud of what and where she comes from.”
“Look, you’re in charge of her heritage. I’m in charge of finding her work, and I won’t find her work if she’s too Jewish—which I worry about, frankly, since we’re calling her Rabinowitz again—and if I can’t find her work you should know that I’ll drop her as a client and so will her agent.”
Hugh could hear his pulse in his ears. Mimi’s e-mail had continued to ding continuously as though signaling incoming mortar rounds. She swiveled, checked the screen, typed something, and sent it off before she turned back. “Do we have a problem? Because if we do, tell me now. I like your daughter’s look and she’s got potential, but I don’t need her. There are a hundred more out there just like her.”
“No, she’s here now,” he said.
“Then let me be clear. I didn’t invent the entertainment industry, I’m just telling you the rules. And rule number one is do whatever you can to find your clients as broad a niche as possible and then fill it. Rule number two is be realistic about the kind of work you’ll get. I can get her commercials. I can probably get her costar roles.”
“Costar?”
“Parts with maybe three or four lines. And she won’t even book those until we’ve seasoned her. So I’m submitting her for everything and pitching her for student films. They won’t pay, but they’ll give her respectable credits, so that’s where we start.”
Hugh looked at her. “Do you have children of your own?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
And with that, there was nothing left to say.
IN THE DANK LITTLE LAUNDRY ROOM AT THE APARTMENT complex, Ruth stuffed their whites and darks together into the single working washing machine, which she’d been grateful to find empty. Screw it—if the whites got a little dingier, they were pretty dingy anyway, and most of what was dingy was underwear and unless they were in sudden need of an ambulance, who would see it? She just couldn’t be expected to work miracles down here. She couldn’t. She was on the edge of exhaustion and if her marriage was a bond, its rating would have just been lowered from an A ranking to a low B. She could just hear Hugh’s mother Helene’s voice in her head: What, you can’t keep up with the laundry now? Is it really that hard living down there, that you can’t wash some panties in the sink? This is how infections happen. You get some kind of bacteria growing and next thing you know you’re peeing in a cup. Could that possibly be true? It sounded true. Ruth turned the water temperature dial to hot/hot. It couldn’t hurt to be careful.
Ruth had been over it and over it in her head: on the one hand, a mother’s obligations included helping her child achieve or even exceed her goals. Everyone said how talented Bethany was, and they’d been saying so for years. Ruth took this to mean that Bethy had what it took to go all the way to stardom, be it on Broadway or in Hollywood, if—and granted, this was a huge if—she had the focus and opportunity to prove it. But since you never knew when the big break, that single key moment, might come around, you had no choice but to be ever ready and make sure your child was, too, which meant that sometimes your child was working twice as hard as the kids around her. It meant treating every audition like the most important one of her life, treating every new casting director like the one person to whom Bethy had to prove that she had not only raw talent, but the stamina and nerve to deliver on set. Which was, as it turned out, much tougher than Ruth had originally imagined. When you watched TV or a movie, it always looked like the actors were alone, had been caught by chance in the eye of a single, lightly manned camera. But now she knew the truth, that there were dozens, even scores, of grips and gaffers and sound guys and script supervisors and people whose only job was to remember that the girl at the counter in the diner had had a barrette on the right side of her part and that the older actor playing the has-been detective had had a bottle of schnapps that was not quite half full in the scene filmed two days ago. All these people watched, and all their livelihoods depended in a very real way on whether Bethany or any other actor did her job well—which was to say flawlessly—because if they weren’t delivering that level of excellence, other actors every bit as good and just as hungry were standing right behind her in line.
And that was what Hugh didn’t understand. He still lived in a world of school plays and pageants where whether your child was likable and earnest was every bit as important as whether she could act; where turning out a child with a strong self-image was more important than her actual talent. In LA the state of your ego meant bupkes, and good enough got you a ticket straight back to Seattle. Ruth had known what was what from the first week they’d been here. The problem was getting Hugh or anyone else from the normal world to know it, too. And if they didn’t know it, it made Ruth look like Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother. The Ghosts of Stage Moms Past dogged her constantly. It was impossible to tune out the background whine of the devil’s question: Who was driving whom, the mother or the child? Ruth had heard of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a grotesque mental illness in which mothers made their children sick so that they, the mothers, got attention. Could there be such a thing as an actress by proxy?
But Ruth could take only so much self-incrimination. She fled the laundry room for the courtyard, sat in one of the sagging p
ool chairs, dug up her cell phone, and called Vee.
“Hugh’s here.”
“Here where?” said Vee. “Are you at the apartment?”
“I am. Hugh’s at the studio.”
“Is Bethany there?”
“No, she’s at the studio, too.”
“Then why are you whispering?”
“Was I whispering?”
“You were.”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said, sighing. “Probably because I feel like a fink.”
“Really?” She could hear Vee perk up. “There’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“The poor man is here for the weekend and I sent him to deal with Mimi alone.”
“That wasn’t nice,” Vee agreed.
“I can’t imagine what he’ll say to her. He thinks we’re down here reinforcing the wrong values.”
“Really? Is he Mormon?”
“With a name like Rabinowitz? Why would you think Mormon?”
“I don’t know. He could have converted. I thought Mormons talked a lot about the right values for girls. Though I think that’s because Mormon girls don’t automatically get into heaven like the men do. Save a soul and you’re in. No soul-saving, no entrée. It’s a pretty savage religion, when you think about it.”
“Well, he’s not a Mormon. We’re not.”
“Huh,” said Vee. Ruth could hear her sucking deeply on a cigarette and exhaling straight into the mouthpiece. “Too bad, though. We could have had some fun.”
“Right now it’s hard to imagine ever having fun again. Do you know what I think about now, when I think about fun? I think about taking a Vicodin. Hugh has some left over from muscle spasms in his back.”
“Yum,” said Vee.
“Really?”
“Hey, don’t knock drugs,” Vee said. “I only survived the last year of my first marriage because I was stoned out of my mind on Percocet. I told the doctor I had sciatica from being pregnant with Buster. I bet I still have a couple in an old shoebox somewhere.”
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