Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  —VEE VELMAN

  Chapter Seventeen

  TWO OR THREE TIMES NOW, QUINN HAD DREAMED ABOUT hands. Disembodied hands that stroked him lovingly—his arms, his legs, his back, his head. Especially his head. He didn’t think they were Quatro’s hands, but he couldn’t tell for sure, since he didn’t really know what the stylist’s hands looked like, only the way they’d felt. This stroking wasn’t sexual; it was almost parental, or at least what he imagined parental hands felt like, since in reality his mom had a tendency to slap rather than stroke. In his dreams he was unconcerned with how long the hands would stay because he just seemed to know that they’d be there as long as he wanted them to be, maybe forever.

  He hadn’t been back to the hair salon or the Laundromat in a couple of weeks. Though he passed the salon every day, he didn’t look in—he struggled not to look in—but just went by at a normal walking pace, which he figured was slow enough for Quatro to spot him, if he was looking, and come to the door before Quinn reached the end of the block. He hadn’t come out, so Quinn assumed he either wasn’t looking or didn’t care or both. Fuck him.

  And anyway, he was busy. Last week he had gone to a mix-and-match and then on to network for Bradford Place, the babysitter pilot. Then Mimi had gotten a call from Evelyn Flynn with the news that the network had decided they wanted the babysitter to be a girl: too many sponsors had thought there was something creepy about a seventeen-year-old boy who chose to spend his time looking after little kids. Quinn was bummed and Mimi was bummed, too. Though the show was a total piece of crap, Mimi had negotiated a deal that would have paid him twenty thousand dollars a week for a twenty-two-week season—and, much more important, it would have launched him, been his ticket at last to the party that was episodic TV.

  But Evelyn Flynn had given him something even as she was taking something else away, because in the same phone call to Mimi, the casting director had offered to coach Quinn on the lead role of Buddy in After, the feature film that Bethany and Allison had auditioned for before Thanksgiving. It was highly irregular for a casting director to act as a coach, and even more so when she wasn’t even casting the project.

  When Quinn called her, as she’d asked him to do, she told him to print out a full script for the feature film, read it through, put it away, think about it, read it again, and then come see her on the Paramount lot this coming Saturday. Evelyn Flynn was old and a little scary, but she was also a goddess, at least in Hollywood. He didn’t know why she was taking an interest in him, but he also didn’t care. Whatever her reason, Buddy was a lead in a Gus Van Sant film, and Quinn would kill, literally kill, to get it.

  So he’d gone over and over the script and was now walking onto the Paramount Studios lot with the script in hand. Being here on a weekend felt different from being on the lot during the week. Many of the soundstages were still working, but the suits—the accountants, the executives, the salespeople—were all at home in Toluca Lake or the West Hollywood Hills or wherever, pretending to have a home life. It was peaceful, almost like being in school on the weekends, at least from what he remembered—he hadn’t been in a real school since he’d come to LA.

  “Well,” Evelyn Flynn said when he came into the darkened outer office. “It’s Quinn, is it?” She said it like she hadn’t been expecting him, but how could that be? He’d called ahead and left a message. He might be sloppy with the rest of his life, but he was very careful when it came to talking to people who could make a difference in his career.

  “Is this okay?” he said.

  “It’s what I told you to do, isn’t it?” She walked behind him to close and lock the door, saying, “It’s Saturday. I don’t normally see anyone on Saturdays, ever. I also don’t answer my phone or my e-mails. You let your guard down and this business will eat you alive.”

  She didn’t volunteer the reason she was breaking her own protocol for Quinn, and he wasn’t about to ask. He didn’t want to jinx anything.

  She led him into her office, but instead of sitting behind the desk, she sat on the couch, patting the other seat cushion to indicate he should sit beside her. He sat.

  “Now tell me about Buddy,” she said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “Couldn’t I just show you?” He wasn’t big on developing a whole character biography, giving a character a favorite color and a horoscope sign and crap like that, the way some of his acting teachers had wanted him to. He usually just got that stuff intuitively as he went along.

  She narrowed her eyes at him for a minute and then said, “Fair enough.” She stood up and retrieved a copy of the screenplay from her desk blotter. “We’ll do the audition scene—at least, it’s what Carlyle auditioned with, so I’m guessing Joel Sherman will have you do the same one.” She picked up her script. “Page ten.”

  He knew exactly which one it was, even before he got there. It was where Buddy and Carlyle are talking about the candy machine at the hospital. He’d read it so many times he was already off-book.

  “Do you want me to start?” she asked him. She asked him. How weird was that? He nodded.

  They ran the scene.

  BUDDY

  I’m not buyin’ it.

  CARLYLE

  What do you mean, you’re not buying it? It’s the truth!

  BUDDY

  Yeah? So where’s your wand?

  CARLYLE

  (with infinite weariness)

  Buddy. That’s only in Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a book.

  BUDDY

  So show me something. If you were a real witch you’d be making something happen!

  CARLYLE

  (sweetly)

  I am. I’m making us argue.

  BUDDY

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  CARLYLE

  So, okay. Do you remember before, when Nana left her dentures in a glass and the next morning they were blue?

  BUDDY

  Yeah.

  CARLYLE

  That was me.

  BUDDY

  That was food coloring!

  CARLYLE

  Then why didn’t it wear off for six days?

  BUDDY laughs.

  CARLYLE (cont’d)

  You know, we should really be nicer to her, now that she’s living here and everything.

  BUDDY

  Aw, c’mon on. We’re nice to her.

  (a beat)

  A witch, huh? So can witches go back and fix stuff that’s already happened?

  CARLYLE

  Like what?

  BUDDY

  You know. Mom.

  CARLYLE

  No one can keep someone from dying, Buddy. Only God.

  BUDDY

  Yeah, well, to hell with God.

  (a long beat)

  Do you think she knew I wasn’t there? When she, you know—

  CARLYLE

  I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.

  BUDDY

  (bitterly)

  I do. I think the last thing she ever thought about me was that I was down the hall beating the shit out of a candy machine. When all those Mars bars and M&Ms and crap came flying out it was like I won the goddamn jackpot, honest to God. By the time it stopped, you couldn’t even see my shoes. I looked like a fucking Easter basket.

  CARLYLE

  Everyone understood.

  BUDDY

  Not her. If she had, she’d have waited five more minutes. Five stinkin’ minutes and I would’ve been back. I would’ve been there. Why didn’t she wait for me?

  CARLYLE

  I think maybe she just couldn’t anymore. You know how when you’ve been hanging off the monkey bars for a long time your arms get so tired and suddenly you weigh a hundred thousand pounds and you just have to let go? I think that’s what happened to her.

  BUDDY

  She fell off the monkey bars.

  CARLYLE

  Yeah.

  BUDDY

  And that’s supposed to ma
ke me feel better?

  (visibly pulling himself together)

  Some magician you are.

  CARLYLE

  Witch. And I never said I could make you feel better.

  BUDDY

  So how come you are a witch, anyway?

  CARLYLE

  I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m not strong enough to break a candy machine.

  BUDDY

  Nah, you’re strong. You’re like her. You remind me of her.

  CARLYLE

  I do?

  BUDDY

  Yeah.

  (a beat)

  Except she would’ve used yellow.

  CARLYLE just looks at him, not getting it.

  On the dentures. Then everyone would have thought Nana had liver failure. She drinks, you know—she drinks a lot. I’ve seen her.

  CARLYLE

  That’s orange juice.

  BUDDY

  That’s vodka.

  CARLYLE

  She misses Mom too, you know. Sometimes she cries at night.

  BUDDY

  He’s heard her, too.

  Yeah.

  (a long beat)

  Think you can make it all go away? Make it just seem like she’s at the store for a minute or something, like she’s coming back?

  CARLYLE just looks at him. They both know she can’t. Suddenly he’s pleading.

  But hey, you could try, right? I mean, you could try. You could just try! You don’t know.

  CARLYLE comes around behind him and puts her hands gently over his eyes. The hands are small and inadequate, but they’re what she has to work with. BUDDY leans into them.

  CARLYLE

  (very softly)

  Abracadabra!

  “Bull’s-eye,” the casting director said softly.

  Quinn wiped his eyes and then his nose on his sleeve.

  “Now we’ll do it again,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Now we’ll do it again. And after that, we’ll do it again.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “You’re going to have to. If you’re going to carry a feature film on your back, honey, you’re going to have to be rock solid even on the tenth take.”

  Quinn took in a deep breath, and then he did the scene again, and after that, again.

  And so she began to teach him. Not like Dee and all those teachers Mimi kept making them work with. She taught him like a director would. They worked on holding back; on building; on breaking and cresting and digging for gold in an empty mine and bringing up just a little bit more. Once or twice she screamed, “God, no. No, no, no. You had it right and now you’re fucking it up.”

  And of course he had had it right and then fucked it up, he just didn’t know how. So she taught him that, too.

  Two hours later, abruptly, she said, “Enough.”

  “What?”

  “That’s all—that’s enough. We’re done.”

  “I don’t want to be done.”

  “A mature actor knows when to say done, but you’re not a mature actor, so I’m saying it for you. We’re done.”

  “For how long?”

  “For now.”

  “Can I come back? When can I come back?”

  She regarded him through the same cool eyes that had freaked him out every time he’d seen her, except now he understood that through them, she saw him. How many people actually see you? Not many, at least not in Quinn’s experience.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We’ve done only four pages!”

  “That’s all you need. That’s the scene you’ll audition with.”

  “But there’s so much more.” He could hear his voice rising, but he couldn’t stop it. “What if they change the scene? What if they choose some random scene and say do that? I won’t know how.”

  “Oh, you’ll know how.”

  “I won’t! I thought I knew this scene when I got here, and look how much of it was crap!”

  She took a cigarette out of a pack in her desk drawer, lit it, and narrowed her eyes at him through the smoke. “All right. Be here next Tuesday at six.”

  His heart began to race. Mimi had said if he missed Dee’s class one more time, she’d drop him as a client. “I have a class.”

  “Skip it.”

  “If I do, Mimi says she’ll drop me.”

  She smiled out of her old eyes and said softly, “Fuck Mimi Roberts.”

  THAT NIGHT, AS HE LAY ON HIS AIR MATTRESS IN THE corner of Baby-Sue’s apartment, trying not to hear Baby-Sue and Jasper screwing in the other room, he thought of the ground rules Evelyn Flynn had laid out for him: he would dump Mimi as a manager and Evelyn would act as Quinn’s manager instead, at least for now. In return, she owned him: he would work whenever, however, and at whatever she told him to.

  “I gather you can be difficult,” she said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, not with me. I don’t have time, and neither do you—they’ll be starting to audition for Buddy in the next few weeks, and you’re not ready. You act up just once and you’re done.”

  He nodded.

  “Whatever personal life you do or do not have gets checked at the door. Period. You are not my son. I am not your mother. I don’t love you, so I won’t be cutting you slack. That needs to be crystal clear.”

  “I get it.”

  She also told him flatly that she would not call in favors for him. Whatever he booked, he did on his own, though with the help of her coaching. She’d told him she knew Gus Van Sant, and that she thought he’d give Quinn a fair shake, if Quinn made it that far in auditions; but even so, he was a long shot at best, and he’d have to put everything he had on the table if he was even going to stand a chance.

  Quinn was okay with that. He wanted this part more than anything he’d ever wanted before. The role was dark, which suited him; it was a lead, which meant he’d never have to bottom-feed again on guest-star roles that came months apart; and he’d get to work with Gus Van Sant. Gus Van Sant!

  So he called the studio the next morning, before there was any chance Mimi would be at work, and left a message on her phone, saying that he knew she’d drop him because he wouldn’t be at class, so he was going to find a new manager. She’d be relieved about that. He was relieved about that. He would have been relieved even if he didn’t have Evelyn Flynn. Mimi was for babies, for little kids, and Quinn was no longer a little kid. Mimi forgot about that all the time, which pissed him off. A lot of things she’d done pissed him off, now that he thought about it—now that he could afford to think about it. She always told him what to wear to auditions and showcases, which was so much crap—he knew how to dress himself. She made him call her after every audition to report in, even if it was for piddly stuff like commercials, which he didn’t give a shit about because he had plenty of money from his monthly allowance, and if it strapped Nelson, so much the better. The asshole had kept his distance the whole week Quinn was home for Christmas, and when he was forced to be in the same room with Quinn he said stuff like, “This isn’t Hollywood. We work for a living up here.” Nelson could just go fuck himself. His mom could, too. The only person in his family who really gave a shit was Rory. The kid was cute and nice and he loved Quinn completely and without reservation. His Christmas present to Quinn had been a framed picture of himself with their dog, Schuyler, and near the bottom he’d written the date and then his own first and last name and the name of the dog, as though Quinn might not remember who they were. His mom and Nelson had given him a new sleeping bag and a camping cot so he didn’t have to sleep on the floor anymore. Big fucking deal.