When the Nines Roll Over

by David Benioff

  GARDEN OF NO

  He was a poet. Burn scars covered his forearms. Whenever the hot grease leapt from the grill to bite him, he’d step back, wipe his arm across his dirty white apron, and stare at the sizzling burgers like a man betrayed. The first time I saw this happen I ran to the ice machine for an ice cube, came back and pressed it against the angry red splotch on his skin. He watched me, smiling. He had the darkest eyes of any white man I’ve ever known, and the biggest hands.

  That was my first day waiting tables at Wiley’s. After the lunch rush was over he took his break and came out to the counter for a cup of coffee. I filled his cup and he smiled at me. Sam wasn’t an especially handsome man, but when he smiled you wanted to stay with him, to lean back and bathe for a while. After a long day on your feet, Sam was like a tub of warm water.

  “So I hear you’re an actress.”

  Yes, I was a waitress, and yes, I wanted to be an actress. I would meet people at parties and tell them I was a waitress, 147 and they would always ask, “But you want to be an actress?” As if they were so original, these publicists and software designers and production supervisors.

  There was no point burdening Sam with these gripes, so I said, “I’m trying.”

  “You look a little like Cassie Whitelaw. People ever tell you that?”

  I groaned. “All the time. I wish I had her plastic surgeon.”

  Cassie Whitelaw, star of the hospital drama St. James Infirmary , was my personal nemesis, the beautiful version of me. When I first saw her, in a television ad for dandruff shampoo, it was funny. We were watching the Oscars and all my friends cackled and threw popcorn at me. Now, with her magazine covers and visits with Jay Leno and movie star boyfriend, she’s not funny anymore. I saw her one time on the Third Street Promenade and followed her past the movie theaters and sports bars and sidewalk saxophonists, watching her skinny ankles and lizard-skin pumps, watching the promenaders recognize her and nudge each other, watching her bask in the watching.

  Sam said, “Nah, you’re prettier than her.”

  The first morning at Sam’s I woke to clacking, loud and unsteady, like shots fired from a capgun. I staggered to the bathroom, opened the door, and flinched as the sunlight attacked me. Below the bright window sat Sam, on the closed toilet seat, an old manual typewriter on his lap. The typewriter looked like a toy in his giant hands. He wore plaid boxers and an L.A. Raiders T-shirt and a ridiculous pair of horn-rim glasses.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

  “What are you doing?” I was shielding my eyes with my hand, trying not to imagine what I looked like right then, what kind of monster risen from the deep I most resembled.

  “If I don’t get my writing done in the morning, I don’t get it done. It’s a poem.”

  “A poem? You write poems?”

  “Yes,” he said, and there was both pride and resignation in the way he said it. “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh” is what I said. Mostly I wanted to escape the sunlight. There was something wonderful and admirable about a man who wrote poetry in the morning, but something embarrassing as well, and I wanted to go back to bed, to my own bed.

  My mother did not approve of the Sam situation.

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a poet.”

  Silence on the line. “But what does he really do?”

  “I’m telling you, he’s a poet.”

  “All right. And what does he do for money?”

  I sighed. “He’s a short-order cook.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And how old is he?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Oh, thirty-five. Well, that’s nice. So this is what he wants to be, a short-order cook? He’s happy with that?”

  “I don’t know about happy. It’s a job. It pays the rent.”

  “June—”

  “He can bring home the bacon,” I said, and then I laughed and laughed. It was an old joke of Sam’s. I laughed and laughed, not because it was so funny, but because the longer I laughed, the longer I could put off listening to my mother.

  “Wonderful,” she said, when I finally stopped. “That’s wonderful.”

  In the middle of May everything changed. My agent called after months of silence and I asked him if he had the wrong phone number. He laughed and said, “Nah, champ, I’ve been waiting for the perfect part. No use dragging you to a lot of calls if the part’s not you. This one’s got your name all over it.”

  I pictured June scrawled one hundred times on a blackboard. June will never get this part. June will never get this part. After seven years of close calls and bad luck, I had learned to treat hope as a dangerous emotion, the mother of all suffering. But I called Showfax and had them fax the sides to a mailbox store on my block. Two of my friends came over and read with me until my timing was perfect. My agent was right: The part had been written for me. Linda McCoy, the third biggest role in Joe’s Eats, was a wisecrack ing waitress at a greasy spoon. Somebody in power was having a little joke, and I was happy to play along.

  On a Tuesday morning I read for the casting director’s assistant. She was about my age and prettier, and she fed me lines in a robotic monotone that seemed calculated to throw me off my stride. But I was strong. I was Linda McCoy. By the end of the scene the casting director’s assistant was giggling despite herself.

  They gave me a callback and a week later I read for the casting director, and a week after that for the producers. Bucky Lefschaum, the man who created Mr. Midnight and The Campus Green, a man I’d seen cavorting with the stars at the Golden Globe Awards, stood up in the middle of my read. His curly hair was fading from his forehead but he was fit and tanned. He looked like the tennis pro that all the country club wives were fucking.

  “Stop,” he said. He took off his sunglasses and hooked the stem in the collar of his polo shirt. “Just stop right there. Why go on? You are Linda McCoy. You’re my girl.”

  He shook my hand and left, just like that. I turned to the casting director.

  “I got the part?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “You still have to read for the network.”

  “Mazel tov,” said my agent when I told him the news. “If Lefschaum liked you, you’re golden. Just look as good as possible for the network. That’s all they care about. What do they know about acting?”

  I read for the network in a conference room at their studio in Century City. Framed posters of sitcom stars hung from the walls, flashing bleached teeth and airbrushed cleavage. The producers, including Bucky Lefschaum, sat on one side of the table. The network executives sat on the other side. It was casual Friday and it was beach weather, the stupid Los Angeles sun beaming its indiscriminate love on everyone, and the executives wore short sleeves. They were much younger than I had imagined. I only recognized one name, Elliot Cohen, the senior vice president of something. He slouched in the corner wearing faded corduroys and a linen shirt, with a surfer’s lean body and freefalling hair. I recognized his name because he was a well-known Hollywood swordsman, notorious for sleeping with two of the three female Friends, though at that moment I couldn’t remember which two. He was a man of stature in the community. He looked like he would smell good.

  I stood at the head of the table in my waitress uniform, cracking my gum and wondering if I could run to the bathroom. I decided it would be a bad idea and tried to ignore the growing pressure in my bladder.

  Bucky Lefschaum winked and gave me the thumbs-up. The casting director began feeding me lines. By now I knew the scenes so well I could act them in my sleep, and sometimes did. I did not hold back. The first good sign was my first punch line. Everyone in the room started cracking up. It wasn’t even a great line.

  The second good sign was the executives’ notepads. The network people had their yellow legal pads in front of them, their pens in hand ready to scribble comments. About ten seconds after I started, all their pens were lying on the table, the yellow pages unmarked.

  I finished and ev
eryone clapped.

  “Well?” asked Bucky Lefschaum. “Did I tell you?”

  “That was wonderful, June.”

  “She’ll play off Delilah Cotton perfectly.”

  “Okay?” asked Bucky. “We have our Linda?”

  My eyes were open but I was floating in the ether. All the fear and disappointment and resentment, the years of No, all the alumni magazines featuring all the supreme achievers from my class, all of it flown away from me, leaving me so light that I could not feel my body, could not feel the floor beneath my feet.

  “I have a problem.”

  And just like that I was back in my body, the space walk of a second before a half-remembered psychedelic trip. It was Elliot Cohen with the problem. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his palm over his stubbled jaw.

  “She looks just like Cassie Whitelaw.”

  “Who?” asked Bucky.

  “Jeez,” said a lady executive. “She does. I didn’t even notice that.”

  “I’m not getting it,” said Bucky. “Who gives a crap about Cassie Whatever?”

  “I do,” said Cohen. “I’m paid to give a crap. She looks just like Cassie Whitelaw from St. James Infirmary.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s too confusing for our viewership. People think they’re watching a different show.”

  “What? Your what? Your viewership? What is that, Yiddish? Your fucking viewership?!”

  Bucky Lefschaum, God bless his heart, hollered and cursed for all he was worth. I walked out of the room and kept walking until I found the women’s room.

  “It’s terrible business,” said my agent. “I told them I’m not going to send them actors anymore if this is how they’re treated. But, you know, it’s a network. They know we can’t hold out on them. Anyway, keep your head up, champ. Your ship will come in.”

  Sam gave me an hour-long massage, kneading the tired muscles in my calves, rubbing the sore spot between my shoulders, kissing the back of my neck.

  “Do you know how beautiful you are?” he asked when he was finished, his knees on either side of my belly. “Do you have any idea?”

  “Sam?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “What if someday you wrote the perfect poem—”

  “What’s the perfect poem?”

  “No, just say you wrote the perfect poem. Or, let’s say it’s a great poem. You know it’s a great poem. You’re absolutely sure.”

  “That’s the thing, though, with poetry. You’re never sure.”

  “But say this time you are. Okay? Hypothetically, you’ve written a poem, it’s really good, people will be reading it in a thousand years. And you send it off and you wait and you wait and finally one day you open the mailbox and you’ve got a hundred letters, and each one’s a form letter, and each one’s saying no.”

  “Right.”

  “Well? What would you do?”

  “I’d write another poem. Maybe I’d write a poem about getting a hundred rejection letters in one day.”

  “You’re stronger than me, I guess.”

  “No, I’m not. Here,” he said, leaning across the bed and picking up a typed note from the nightstand. “I got one today. You want to hear it?”

  I did not want to hear it but Sam had already begun.

  “Thank you for sending us your manuscript. The return of your work does not necessarily imply criticism of its merit, but may simply mean that it does not meet our present editorial needs. We regret that circumstances do not allow individual comment. The Editors.”

  He laughed. “When I die I’m going to find the pearly gates all locked up with a sign saying, We regret that circumstances do not allow individual comment.’ ”

  I reached up and pulled his curly head closer so I could kiss the newborn bald spot.

  “You could always come down and keep me company,” I told him.

  My agent called a week later. “I just got off the phone with Lefschaum,” he told me. “St. James Infirmary was canceled.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That means Cassie Whitelaw’s off the air. That means they want you.”

  “Yeah?”

  So I finally got my sitcom, playing Linda McCoy at a greasy spoon called Joe’s Eats. My boss’s name is Mr. Lee, played by a man who really is named Mr. Lee, a famous comedian from China. I hadn’t known there were famous comedians from China. When I said that to Sam he laughed at me. “Jesus Christ, June, there’s a billion people in China. You don’t think any of them are funny?”

  I was so used to rejection that when the break finally came—the break I’d been dreaming about for years, asleep and awake—it seemed unreal. In April I was taking orders for turkey melts and fries, by September I was a regular on network television, slinging hash browns and one-liners in 6.5 million homes nationwide.

  The night I signed my contracts Sam took me to Dan Tana’s to celebrate. He wore a jacket and tie for the first time since I’d met him, and he combed his hair into a careful side-part. Usually when we went out Sam would drop me off at the door and then drive around for ten minutes looking for a space; on this night he turned his car over to the valet and escorted me to the maître d’s station.

  Once we were seated at our booth Sam ordered a bottle of good champagne, a bottle he couldn’t afford, and right then I knew what was going to happen. I saw how nervous he was, playing with his fork, scratching his neck behind the tight collar, gulping down his ice water, and I knew.

  After the waiter poured the champagne Sam lifted his glass and said, “To Linda McCoy. May she live a long, happy life.”

  “To Linda McCoy.”

  We drank, and when I lowered my glass Sam was still staring at me. I wanted to stop him, I wanted to hold his curly head to my chest and whisper how awful I was, how foul-tempered and jealous, how vain and insecure, a woman who could not be reasonably expected to make anyone happy.

  Instead I said nothing, only watched him root around in his jacket pocket. It was like seeing a suicide leap from a tall building—there was so much time to watch him fall, to wonder why he jumped.

  Please, Sam, I wanted to say, please don’t, please look somewhere else. Because the word was coming and the word was so loud the whole restaurant must already hear it, the word was so loud it drowned out the jazz pouring from the speakers, drowned out all the drunken laughter, all the cell phone conversations, and the diners were elbowing each other and turning this way, Oh, look, look, that poor schmuck, he hasn’t got a chance, doesn’t he hear it?

  The word was No and I was the word made flesh. I was rejection in a Mexican peasant shirt, rubbing the rim of the champagne flute to hear the glass hum. Sam pulled the ring from his pocket and started to slide forward off his ban quette. I put my hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

  “Sam,” I said, and anything more seemed redundant, so I kissed his shaven jaw, stood up, and walked quickly to the door. I thought someone would grab me and force me back to the table, some officer of the law. This could not go unpunished. This was unkindness so deep I wanted to slither free of my skin, drop the husk of me on the floor of the restaurant, and run, my wet skinless feet leaving bloody prints on the sidewalk.

  Nobody stopped me and nobody pulled out the flaying knives and I walked for two miles down Santa Monica Boulevard, wishing it would rain so I could at least be the drama queen, sobbing as the mascara ran down my cheeks. The truth was, though, that the farther I walked the better I felt. By the time I got to Fairfax I was singing to myself, old radio tunes and songs I made up on the spot.

  Outside of Canter’s Deli an old hunched-over bum held out a Styrofoam cup and jingled his change. “Help me get some dinner, miss?”

  “No,” I said, forcefully.

  I pushed opened the door and walked inside, past the buttery pastries stacked neatly behind glass, and the bum called after me, “Maybe on the way out?”

  At my table I ordered matzoh ball soup and cheese blintzes and when the food came I devoured it, wiping my mouth wit
h the back of my hand, spearing pickles from their briny bowl. Around me the young Hollywood hopefuls jabbered away. That was the season for leopard skin and all the girls wore it: leopard-skin coats, leopard-skin pants, leopard-skin thigh-high boots, even one young flirt in a leopard-skin pillbox hat.

  The ceiling at Canter’s is meant to look like stained glass. It’s a strange effect. What’s a Jewish delicatessen doing with a fake stained-glass ceiling? But I liked it, I liked the painted branches, the painted blue sky, the soft light that spills down.

  The kids around me were loud and obnoxious, howling for the waitress, stomping their boot heels, yelling out insults, jumping from table to table, exchanging phone numbers, bragging about their plans for the weekend. I liked them. They all wanted something and most of them wouldn’t get it. I didn’t know a single kid in the restaurant but I knew what they were: actors and musicians and writers and comedians and directors. Most of them weren’t claiming those professions on their tax returns and most of them never would, but that’s what they were. For a few minutes that night I liked all of them. I wanted to protect them. They seemed so young and brave, recklessly assured, so cocky and virile and American. They were all going to be stars and they were practicing their roles, confident that people were watching them, that people cared. They were optimists, and if they weren’t optimists they were pretending, and they believed that somewhere a man in a suit was waiting to see their faces or hear their songs or read their scripts, and the man in the suit would nod and say, Yes. Except there aren’t enough Yeses to go around.