Someday, someday, maybe.
12
“But I thought you liked the other guy better, the older guy with the asthma,” Jane says to me over steaming plates of food at the upstairs Chinese place on Seventh Avenue. She’s taking me out to celebrate my shoot last night on Kevin and Kathy, and we’ve recklessly decided to order all our favorites. Dan wanted to come to dinner, too, but Everett’s parents had gotten them all tickets to see Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci at the Metropolitan Opera.
“The opera,” I said. “How glamorous!”
“I’ve seen Cav/Pag before,” he said, glumly. “I’d rather come celebrate with you.”
I keep picturing how miserable Dan looked as we said good night, and the big warm hug he gave me before I left, which seemed somehow different than the one he gave Jane, and I think about how happy he is whenever we come here and the way we always tease him for stabbing at his dumplings the way he does, his giant hands useless with the chopsticks.
“We’ll bring you leftovers,” I reassured him, but he still seemed miserable.
“Franny? Hello? Where’d you go?” Jane says, stabbing a chopstick in my direction.
“Sorry. Yes. You’re right. I did like Barney Sparks better.”
“Then why did you sign with the Joe Melville shiny-face guy?”
“Because. Absolute Artists represent famous people, and they only take the best people from class. That guy James Franklin is there, and Joe represents Penelope Schlotzsky, too. I’m lucky they wanted me at all. And anyway, I booked the job they sent me on, so it wasn’t really a discussion. It was already their commission.”
I’m saying all the right things, but for some reason Jane doesn’t seem convinced. “Hmmph,” is all she says.
“It seemed like it was meant to be,” I say sagely, waving my arms in what I hope is a mystical fashion.
“But you said that Melville guy made you nervous, and kind of gave you the creeps. Is your agent supposed to give you the creeps?”
“It doesn’t matter. This is a professional relationship. It’s not show friends, it’s show business.”
“I think that’s only what people in show business who have no friends say.”
“He got me an actual job. On my first real audition.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that. So. Tell me.”
I take a gulp of wine from my glass and try to remember exactly how it felt last night to be standing on a stage, with bright lights and four giant cameras on wheels gliding smoothly by. “It’s like a dream. I was nervous, but some of it actually felt familiar. There was an audience. Sitting in a theater. In a way, it wasn’t that different from doing my high school plays. There aren’t as many people in the audience as you’d think from all the laughing you hear on television. The sets are much smaller than they look. And darker. The weirdest things made the biggest impression.”
“Like?”
“Well. They tailored everything. They knew how many inches my skirt should be from my knee. They measured it. Everything was tailored just for me, and they did it overnight. They tailored my T-shirt. My T-shirt. Now all my non-tailored clothes look sloppy to me, or too loose or something.” I tug at the front of my sweater and make it flap back and forth. “I mean, look, I’m positively swimming in this.”
“Looks fine to me,” says Jane, now having moved on to her dish of lemon chicken.
“Also, do you own an eyelash curler?”
“Yes. I never use it, though.”
“Well, I didn’t even know what it was. It’s a barbaric tool. Using it feels like when I’d turn my eyelids inside out on the playground in elementary school to try and impress the boys. But to have someone do it for you?” I say with a frown, and Jane shakes her head in sympathy. “They fixed my hair and my makeup after every take—I’d hardly moved at all but they’d fix it again anyway. They kept powdering me even if I didn’t feel sweaty—I had to scrape the foundation off when I got home. The director would set the blocking, but then Kevin, or Robert, the actor who plays Kevin, kept forgetting it, so I’d have to change mine, too, and then remember to do it the same way every time, so all the takes would match, only then he’d forget again and I’d get thrown. I was so busy trying to remember if I picked up the phone with my right hand or my left hand that I could barely focus on anything else.”
“But did it go well? Do you feel good about it?”
“I’m not sure. I think so. The audience laughed, and lots of people said I did well, but I have no idea who any of them were or if they were the ones I needed to impress. But the laughing thing was getting such a positive reaction from the audience, the writer decided to give me a line.”
Jane’s eyes go wide. “No way!”
“I know. I got really excited, too, which is so dumb when you think about it. I’ve done whole plays in summer stock and all those scenes in class, and here I was so excited about one line.” I pause and take a gulp of wine. “I got to say, ‘You’re so cute.’ So I’d do the laughing thing and sort of look at Kevin dumbly and sigh, and say ‘You’re so cute.’ ”
“Hilarious!”
“People kept telling me it was unusual for them to give a guest star more to do, sort of on the fly like that. Jimmy said Kevin doesn’t like last-minute changes, so if they think of something to try, they usually give it to Kathy.”
“What’s she like?”
“She said I was funny, and she thought it was refreshing that I wasn’t a waif like most actresses my age.”
“Sounds like someone got a little threatened.”
“That occurred to me, too,” I say, lowering my chopsticks and my voice. “But that’s crazy, don’t you think? What would she care about me for? I’m just there for one night. She’s the star of the show. Anyway, I guess I don’t know how I did. The director did everything so quickly. I was confused because I kept waiting for him to tell me things about my character’s motivation and subtext, like Stavros does in class, but he didn’t mention any of that. There was only one time when he really gave me any direction.”
“What’d he say?”
Cindy, our regular waitress, passes by and Jane gestures for another round of drinks.
“He said,” and I pause dramatically, “ ‘Don’t do the laugh before you hand Kevin the cup of coffee. Hand him the coffee, then do the laugh.’ ”
Jane and I are silent for a moment, pondering this wisdom.
“Huh.”
“And you know what? It worked. I got a better laugh.”
“Wow,” she says, shaking her head.
“I know. And I have no idea why.”
“So, when will it be on TV?”
“I don’t know. They don’t have a time slot yet. They have to wait for, like, Murder She Wrote to get canceled or something.”
“Well, that’ll never happen.”
“I know,” I say, and sigh.
Jane uses her chopsticks to take another scoop off the top of the still steaming pile of chicken fried rice. “It’s all so mysterious, isn’t it?” she says, and I bob my head furiously.
“Yes! I mean, wait—what do you mean?”
“Well, I keep expecting to understand show business better, but it’s still so confusing to me. Like, Russell Blakely is this huge star, right? And at first I thought everything he did was so interesting and special, and I laughed so hard at everything he said because he honestly seemed like the funniest person I’d ever met, and everything about him was better somehow, like he was more than regular, like he was a person, but from another planet or something. But the longer I work for him, the more I see he’s just this guy, this very unusually gorgeous, extremely muscle-y guy, who’s sort of funny, and sort of smart, but who’s a regular person who married the girl he dated in high school and doesn’t seem to know how he got here. He seems totally baffled by his success, and he’s always asking my opinion about things, like his wardrobe or whatever, and I’m wondering if he’s forgotten I’m just the P.A. on my very first movie ever.
He hasn’t been in a grocery store in three years, he told me. Someone goes for him. Someone does everything for him. And he seems miserable. He reads everything they write about him in the magazines and he gets so upset. When work is over and his wife is back in L.A. he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, and he goes out with guys from the crew who aren’t even really his friends and they get drunk and it ends up on Page Six. I keep thinking someone should be helping him in a different way, or there should be some sort of manual for him. Because he just doesn’t seem to be enjoying any of it.” Jane shakes her head sadly.
“I would enjoy it,” I say. “I think.”
“Yeah, I think I would, too,” says Jane. “But who knows?”
“Who knows,” I agree, draining the last sip from my glass. “Oh! One more thing, from last night?”
“Yeah?”
“Apparently, we’re not supposed to wash our jeans anymore. The wardrobe lady told me. We’re only supposed to dry-clean them.”
“What? That’s insane.”
“Yep. We’re supposed to buy jeans really tight, as tight as we can squeeze into, so all the fat gets compressed into as little space as possible. Then we want the fat compression level to stay that way for as long as it can, right? Well, washing jeans makes them softer and baggier, and lessens the fat-compression quotient. Therefore, dry-cleaning is the only answer. Isn’t that terrible news?”
Jane shrugs. “It sounds expensive, but I don’t think it’s necessarily ruining my outlook on civilization.”
“But c’mon. Don’t you agree, dry-cleaning is so unfair?”
“Why?”
“It’s like, the clothes charge you for wearing them.”
Jane stares at me blankly. “How are the clothes charging you?”
“Clothes that have to be dry-cleaned are already the most expensive clothes. Then it’s like they’re charging you another three dollars every time you wear them.”
“Regular clothes charge money to clean them, if we’re looking at it that way. Regular laundry costs money, too.”
“But not as much. And you can do regular laundry yourself. Dry-cleaning is like this secret society you’re not allowed into. No matter what, you’re at their mercy. You can have a Ph.D. in anything, but you still can’t dry-clean your own clothes. They’ll never tell you how. No one’s ever even seen what the machine looks like. Think about it. There’s a reason they keep the actual dry-cleaning apparatus hidden behind all those racks of hanging clothes. They don’t want you to crack their code. They won’t let anybody in. Not anybody. Even rich people. You know any rich people with dry-cleaning machines in their house? Exactly. Even they still have to pick it up and drop it off like everyone else.”
“I’m pretty sure they have people who do that for them. Also, in New York they deliver.”
“But still. The dry cleaners own you. You’re at their mercy. Clothes that have to be dry-cleaned look down on you.”
“Is it the clothes who are to blame, or the dry-cleaning professionals themselves?”
“Chicken or the egg, my friend.”
“This new dry-cleaning conspiracy theory reminds me of your fear of ironing.”
“This is nothing like my fear of ironing, although ironing is another secret society that doesn’t want you to know what’s up. Do you know anyone who can tell you why the ironing board is shaped that way? How does it help me that it’s the size of a surfboard? Why is an ironing board so hard to fold? Does it want me to leave it standing up in my room for days? How am I supposed to do sleeves on that thing? Never mind collars.”
“You know what you should do with that shirt you’re struggling to iron?”
“I know, I know. Send it to the dry cleaners. But I’m afraid to go to our cleaners now that Mr. Wu has seen my commercial. He keeps asking if he can put my head shot up on the wall. You know how that back wall is covered with head shots?”
“Of course. I think it’s cute. Why not just give him one? He’s proud of his customers in the neighborhood.”
“But haven’t you ever noticed, out of all those head shots, there’s no one famous, no one even vaguely recognizable?”
“That’s not true—there’s—”
“Besides him, I mean. Besides that one very famous person, who I doubt has ever actually been to Mr. Wu’s.”
“You think Mr. Wu forged a famous customer? You think Mr. Wu autographed a picture of someone famous himself? Where would he have gotten the picture?”
“You see them on the street sometimes. I don’t know, I’m just saying it’s occurred to me. Because other than him, that one very famous person, do you recognize anyone else on that wall?”
“Well, there’s that cast photo from Cats with all the people in their cat costumes … I don’t recognize them individually, but as a group they seem authentic.”
“But besides the somewhat believable cats.”
“Wait—yes—there’s that actress—my mother loved her—she was on that detective show in the sixties, what was it called …?”
“The Uniforms?”
“Yes! That! Paula somebody.”
“Paulette Anderson.”
“Yes! So that’s one more actually famous person.”
“Jane. Paulette Anderson has been dead for at least ten years. This is what I’m saying. I’m afraid being on that wall is some sort of bad luck. Like, if I give Mr. Wu my head shot, I’m doomed to obscurity.”
“Better obscurity than death. Better obscurity than Cats, for that matter. And what if that picture he has isn’t a fake?”
“Well then, I guess I’ll either end up dead, unknown, a cat, or Bill Cosby.”
13
You have no messages.
BEEEP.
I’ve had no auditions in the last two weeks and I’m starting to get nervous.
Joe called the Monday after the Kevin and Kathy shoot to congratulate me again, and say that he wanted me to come into the agency at some point and meet the other agents, because “they were all very excited” about me. But the first two weeks after Kevin and Kathy were so full of auditions and meetings with casting people, there wasn’t time to schedule an appointment. And in the last three weeks, no one called to set one up.
I tried my best to be prepared for every audition, but I’d never had such full days before. It was all a blur of papers coming off the roll from the fax machine and time spent rushing from one building in Manhattan to another. But then we ran out of fax paper and I kept forgetting to get a new roll, so I had to cold read a few times, and I’ll admit, there were a few days when I showed up at an audition not really prepared. And then there was the big audition I had prepared for, a small part in a Broadway play directed by Mike Stanley, but I was so nervous to meet him that I left out an entire page of the scene and he didn’t ask me to read it again, and when he asked me if I studied with anyone in town I went blank and couldn’t think of Stavros’s name, and I went home and cried.
“The feedback was that you seemed a little green,” Richard explained, delicately.
Those first few weeks, Joe would come to the phone when I called, but now Richard, Joe’s assistant, is the only person I get. I thought that was fine at first since he was the one who actually saw me at the Showcase, but now I worry that I’ve been demoted. It was Richard who sent me to the photographer that “Joe loves” to get new head shots, even though I’d had new ones done just a few months ago that cost over a hundred dollars. Richard said that Joe thought mine were too smiley and commercial, and I needed some that looked like I could be a dramatic actress, not just a comedienne. I thought my new one looked more angry and stiff than dramatic, but he assured me the photo would transform after it was retouched, a painstaking process using a tiny paintbrush to take out imperfections on the blown-up negative before the photos can be copied. The retouching took two weeks, and the eight-by-ten glossy copies cost three hundred dollars. Now I have no freckles, and the half-moon area under my eyes looks oddly whiter than the rest of
my face, but I still look angry.
I thought it made sense that I’d had no auditions while the agency was waiting for the new pictures. But there were no auditions the week after I dropped them off, either.
I’m worried that those first three weeks were my chance to prove that getting the Kevin and Kathy job wasn’t some sort of fluke, but I blew it and they’ve forgotten about me now. I read an article in Backstage that said it’s important to remind your agent that you are available and interested in working, so I finally braced myself and called Absolute at the beginning of the third silent week. The problem was that because I didn’t really have a reason to call, I sort of choked on the phone. I asked to speak to Joe, and Richard said he was sorry, Joe was in a meeting, but could he help me with anything?
“Um, uh, no that’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, well, actually, as long as we’re talking, I was just wondering if there’s anything I can be doing, or if there’s something I’m not doing, or, um, are my head shots working okay?”
“Your head shots?”
“Yeah, the new ones. I was just checking. I mean, Joe picked that serious one where my hand is on my chin, right?”
“I think so, I have it here somewhere … yes, your hand is on your chin, and your head is sort of tilted to the side?”
“Yeah. Is that … I wonder if it’s sort of cheesy? And maybe that’s why, uh, no one is calling?”
I didn’t intend to complain or bring this up. I must sound rude, like I’m telling them how to do their job. I’m just looking for someone to give me some sort of explanation for why nothing is happening.
“But Franny, Joe loves this shot. I mean, I do, too, but Joe really loves it, which is why he picked it. He’s really a master at choosing the picture that best represents you. So, no problem there. Sooo, there’s really nothing else for you to do right now but wait. Sorry.” There’s a pause where I feel as though Richard wants to say something else, but then doesn’t.