8
You have two messages.
BEEEP
Frances, it is I, your father. The one from Connecticut. I say this in the event that your mail, which you’ve undoubtedly been sending me, has been rerouted to another father in another state. I’ve sent your check. Don’t worry about the money. You don’t have to pay me back. Just call me before we start Ring Lardner on Tuesday, okay?
BEEEP
Franny, uh, hi. (rustling, crumpled paper sound) It’s James. Franklin? (sound that could be cigarette exhale, or just loud breathing) Um, yeah. I was just thinking we could—uh, we should all have a drink sometime. So, uh, yeah.
BEEEP
Things are really looking up. I actually got that Niagara laundry detergent commercial, and I’ve scheduled the two meetings with those agents, and James Franklin called, even though his message was sort of vague. But there it was anyway, his raspy, sexy voice on my machine, a voice I can’t quite bring myself to erase. I played it over and over, until finally deciding I needed Jane’s help to decipher it.
“He’s asking me out, right?” I say, after replaying the tape for her a third time.
Jane shakes her head. “He said ‘we all.’ ‘We all’ is not asking you out.”
“But why leave a message just to ‘we all’ me? I think he’s asking me out, in his own way.”
“ ‘We all’ means: I asked for your number because I think you’re cute, but I’m seeing someone so I’m trying to pretend to myself that I just asked for your number to be friends with you, and I’m asking if you want to have a drink sometime with me and my girlfriend, which will never happen, but it helps me feel like less of a shithead for asking for your number in the first place. You’ve been ‘we-alled,’ my friend. Now can we erase the tape? Remember what happened last time.”
The Brill Agency had a hard time reaching me about the Niagara job, because neither Jane nor I noticed our answering-machine tape was full. So I decided to get a service, where they give you your very own phone number and an actual person who answers, as if you have a real office and he’s your assistant. At first, it was thrilling to call in to see if I had any messages. But after a few days and no messages, I thought I detected a note of pity in the voice of the answering-service guy, so I had Dan call, just so I’d have a message to check.
“But what do I say?” he asked, looking baffled at the prospect.
“Anything,” I told him. “Just give me a callback for something. Something believable, but a little impressive.”
“I’d feel better if I more clearly understood the parameters of this assignment,” Dan said, furrowing his brow.
“Dan, I’m late for work. Just pick a play and make up a theater. No one’s grading you, okay? I just need the guy to think I have something going on.” Even though he seemed flustered, I trusted Dan to treat the whole thing like the perfect student he is, so I was feeling pretty confident when I called in the next morning.
“Frances Banks’s line,” the voice said.
“Hello, this is she,” I said primly. “Any messages?”
“Yes, Ms. Banks. You have received a callback for a play.”
“Oh, great,” I said with the kind of breezy confidence that told him I get callbacks a lot. “Can you give me the details?”
“It’s for the role of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
I’m about twenty years too young for that part, but at least Dan gave me the lead in something. “Oh, wonderful. Good old Martha,” I said fondly. Maybe he’d think I’d played the part dozens of times. That would teach the anonymous voice to respect me.
“At the Old Horse Theater in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. Did I detect a hint of sarcasm in his voice?
“Okay, thanks.” There was a silence on the other end. “Any other details?”
“Well, it’s none of my business, but I’d never heard of it, so I looked it up, and that theater doesn’t seem to exist.”
He looked it up? How? In what? Does he just spend the day traveling around to towns in New Jersey trying to uncover fraudulent theatrical claims? “It’s a small theater,” I said, somewhat indignantly. “Small, but very well respected.”
“Well, if you say so. We have the booklet of all the LORT theaters, A through D, and I didn’t see it anywhere.”
Ugh. There’s a booklet of all the regional theaters? There are categories, from A to D? I didn’t know any of that.
“Yes, well, it’s new. They’ve added, recently, an ‘E’ category. E, for ah, experimental,” I added lamely, and abruptly hung up.
The next day, I canceled the service, and Jane and I have pledged to be better message-erasers.
Only I won’t erase James’s message. Not just yet.
I had to join my first union, the Screen Actors Guild, which cost over a thousand dollars. I didn’t have to join on my last commercial because they let you work once non-union, but on the second job you’re required to join. Due to the fact that I have eighty dollars in my bank account, I called my dad to ask him to send me the money Western Union, which he said he would, although it took me awhile to explain why my getting a job was costing him a thousand dollars.
“Why can’t you pay the union after you get paid for the job?”
“I can’t do the job unless I’m in the union.”
“But they let you audition for the job even though you aren’t in the union?”
“Yes.”
“And they know you’re going to get paid because it’s a union job they let you audition for. And now they know you have to join the union because they know you got a job.”
“Yes.”
“They know you’re going to get paid, because they know you’re going to get paid by them, but they won’t wait for you to get paid by them before you have to pay them?”
“Dad. Yes.”
“And I thought Marx was confusing.”
Then I had to take a shift off from work. Herb said it was my second warning, and I’d better be careful not to miss another shift for at least a month, or he would think I didn’t take my work seriously.
That afternoon, the call sheet that tells me what time and where I’m supposed to go comes through the fax machine, and my heart leaps to see my name is very first on the list under “cast.” Under “character” it says “Wife.” On the other commercial, I was listed as “Sweater Girl #3.” I can only dream of the day I play someone with an actual name.
My alarm goes off at four thirty A.M., and for a minute I think I’m being robbed.
“Hello?” I say into the darkness. Then I remember.
I’m ready in record time, and I hurry to catch the train. The other riders are similarly bleary-eyed and the car is quieter than normal. At 72nd and Broadway, I get off the subway and walk a block toward the park before I realize I’m heading in the wrong direction. I walk quickly back west, not waiting for lights to change, weaving through the cars. The traffic isn’t too bad yet, and the sun is still low in the sky. I pass a few trucks parked on 72nd, flanked by orange cones and signs stapled to the electrical poles that say “No Parking Allowed—Permit to Film.”
This must be the shoot, my shoot. A stocky girl is standing on the corner by the trucks, wearing a giant fur hat with earflaps and speaking into a walkie-talkie.
“Hi, excuse me,” I say. “Uh, what is this, uh, for?”
“Mayonnaise commercial,” she says gruffly.
I’m in the wrong place. How can I be in the wrong place? How can there be two commercials shooting in the exact same location?
“It’s a commercial,” I say, just to be sure, “for mayonnaise?”
“Yes,” she says, as if I’m thick. “Excuse me.” And she turns her back to me.
I circle the block, jogging a little, looking left and right, starting to sweat. There’s nothing else that looks like it could be my location. No one will be at the agency yet to help me. I don’t have a watch on, but I’m sure I’m late now.
Finally, I circle back to the mayonnaise commercial, where massive trucks are being emptied by burly guys carrying loops of electrical cord on their shoulders and sandbags with a sort of nylon handle in their hands.
The earflap-hat girl is still on the corner, now smoking a cigarette and talking to a guy who’s wearing a heavy-looking leather belt with a walkie-talkie hanging from its holster. She sees me coming and her eyes narrow.
“Uh-oh,” she says out of the corner of her mouth.
I almost keep walking. I don’t want to talk to her again. She obviously thinks I’m some sort of mayonnaise fanatic. But I need help.
“Hi, sorry, me again. I know you told me this is a mayonnaise commercial, but I’m an actress, and I’m supposed to be shooting a commercial for Niagara detergent? And it’s supposed to be near here somewhere, and I didn’t know if maybe you guys all know each other or something—”
Her face totally changes and she drops her cigarette. “They’re looking for you,” says the guy with the walkie-talkie belt.
“Oh shit,” says the girl. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—hi. I’m Mavis. I’m the second-second. Let me show you where your trailer is. Can I take your bag for you?”
Mavis walks heavily in front of me, babbling all the way.
“I’m so sorry, I usually work on features with like, you know, famous actors, not that you’re not … shit, anyway, and that’s what they always tell us to say when people ask what you’re shooting, you say ‘mayonnaise commercial,’ because no one wants to know who’s starring in a mayonnaise commercial, so it keeps people moving and not hanging around asking questions and trying to catch a glimpse of Russell Blakely, or whoever, but I should have—the character is just listed as ‘Wife’ on the call sheet, and no offense but you don’t look old enough to—I mean I’m sure you’ll play a great wife, but …”
As she prattles on, I realize I’m experiencing a feeling I’ve never had before, something I can’t quite put my finger on. I was completely intimidated by Mavis and her hat and her walkie-talkie, but now everything has changed and she’s apologizing to me, trying to make me feel good. She’s treating me as if I’m important, as if she works for me. I’ve never even had an employee, and I don’t want Mavis to feel the way I felt ten minutes ago.
“Well, here’s your trailer. Hair and Makeup are in the next one, see that big trailer with the pop-out? Someone from Wardrobe will be here in a second with your changes, and I will tell them I made you late, it’s a hundred percent my fault and I will tell the director—”
“Mavis,” I say, stopping in front of the door to the trailer.
“Yeah?” she says, her eyes squinting into the sun, almost hidden by the furry front of her hat.
“This is my first real shoot. I don’t know anything. For instance, I have no idea what a second-second is.”
Mavis smiles and seems to relax. “Second assistant to the second assistant director. I basically tell you where to go when, and am in charge of the general awesomeness of your day. Want some coffee?”
“Um, sure. Where is it?”
“I can get it for you.”
“No, no, that’s okay, I’ll get it.” I don’t want to get on Mavis’s bad side again.
“Okaaaay. It’s just that they need you in Hair and Makeup right away, and it’s sort of complicated to explain where crafty is. I can get it for you. Unless you need … do you like it a particular way or something, in a way that you think is too complicated for me to make?”
I’m trying to be polite, because of course I wouldn’t dream of asking someone I’ve never met to fetch me coffee, but somehow it seems as though Mavis thinks I’m being rude by not allowing her to get it for me. I don’t know where I’m going wrong. This world seems to have different rules from the other world I’ve been living in all of my life. I wonder if I’ll ever learn them.
“No. Nothing special. I guess, okay, um, just milk and sugar, if it’s no trouble.”
“No trouble,” Mavis says, in the way people say “no worries” when they have lots, or “no biggie” when something is a colossal headache.
From the minute I walk into the wardrobe fitting, in a trailer near mine, I’m confused. There are two giant rolling racks, one full of tan trousers, one stuffed with thirty or forty identical blue shirts.
“Oh, are there … are there more people coming?” I ask a harried-looking woman nearby. She looks at me as though I’ve said something strange.
“What? Oh, the racks? Noooooo. These are all for you.”
“But, aren’t these all the same pants?” I say, laughing a little.
“Well, no, there’s actually quite a variety,” she says gravely, indicating that, to her, pants and their similarity to one another are not a laughing matter. “I’m Alicia, by the way, the costume designer.”
I wonder how Alicia feels to have the title “costume designer” when it refers, in this case, to the choosing of one blue shirt and a pair of khaki pants.
“Sorry if it looks like a lot, but they aren’t sure if they want a twill or a gabardine, and don’t get me started on their limited comprehension of the stirrup pant. God forbid they allow for a little fashion. Anyway, we’ll have to try them all on. The client is very specific about what they want. I fought for jeans as an option, but the client didn’t want to make too urban a statement.”
I don’t know who “the client” is, but already I’m worried about their opinion of me and their strong conviction regarding khakis versus jeans. So I obligingly try on endless pairs of pants, which all look the same to me, and pretend to agree with Alicia, who finds them all very different.
Finally, Alicia finds a pair she likes, except they’re a little snug in the waist.
“These are perfect. Let’s Polaroid these, too. We might have to cut them in the back, though,” she says. “You guys really shouldn’t fudge your sizes, you know?” She attempts a smile, but I can tell she’s irritated.
“I didn’t fudge my sizes,” I say, as nicely as I can. “At least, I don’t think I did.”
“Well, what jean size did you give them?”
“Um. Eight maybe?”
“In inches, I mean.”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t know they made pants in sizes like that.”
“Well, that’s how they size jeans now. It’s probably where we got the signals crossed. Don’t worry. You’re sitting most of the time, thank God, so we can improvise. Like I said, we can cut them if we have to.”
I can’t believe she’s going to cut a brand-new pair of khakis just so I can sit down in them for a few hours. And I feel guilty that I’m not the right jeans size.
“What’s a good size to be? In inches, I mean.”
Alicia looks thoughtful, then seems to decide I’m worthy of being educated. She takes a deep breath.
“Well, I usually do features.” She pauses, somewhat dramatically.
“Uh-huh,” I say, confused as to whether that’s my answer.
“So like, on this last feature I did, I worked with Cordelia Biscayne?” She raises her eyebrows.
“Oh, wow.” I’m trying to look as impressed as I can tell Alicia wants me to be.
“Yes, I know. I was one of the assistants to the designer, but still. Cordelia’s a doll, by the way. And anyway, her jean size is twenty-six, twenty-seven. Yours is probably, twenty-nine or thirty? So,” Alicia says, sympathetically. “Not that you should feel bad—I mean, you look fine, and not everyone can be Cordelia Biscayne, right? But, something to aspire to.”
Of all the lists I’ve made of goals, and all the visions I’ve had, it never before occurred to me that I could be this specific, that I could aspire to a goal actually measurable in inches. I wonder if this is how successful people do it. I wonder if the difference between success and failure could more accurately be described in the waist sizes for jeans. “Well, I’m doing all right, I guess,” I imagine myself saying, “but I’m about three inches from where I really want to be.” I think of how much effort it has taken me to even be a 29. I can’t imagine what else I could do to be a 26. But it makes sense, too, that the Cordelia Biscaynes of the world are literally measurably different from the rest of us.
Three inches might as well be three hundred to me today.
“Hi, I’m Carol, I’ll be doing your makeup. Any allergies or preferences I should know about?”
I’m looking into a giant mirror on a wall of mirrors, each framed by dozens of fluorescent lightbulbs. In the blinding light, my face looks nothing like the face I have in Brooklyn. I wonder if this is my real face, or if the face I have in Brooklyn is the real one, and what my Queens face might look like.
“Um, no, not that I can think of,” I tell her. I wonder if I will, over time, develop preferences, and what they might be in regard to my face being made up. I hope I do this long enough to have time to acquire some, so I don’t feel so unprepared for these types of questions.
She snaps a switch by her station and what seem like a hundred more round bulbs spring to life.
“Wow, do I really have all those freckles?” I just can’t get over how different my face looks in this mirror.
“Mmm, let me see.” Carol puts on the glasses that hang on a chain around her neck and brings her face just inches from mine. I hold very still, as if I’m being examined in a doctor’s office. “Well. You have some freckles, it’s true. I don’t think they’re distracting, though. I don’t see them as a problem, but I can even out your skin tone if that’s what concerns you.” Carol sighs. I don’t think she likes me.
“Okay, great. Whatever you think. Thanks.”
“Want a magazine?” she asks.
“Um, yes, sure. Thanks. Again.”
I’m not sure whether Carol is generally grumpy or if I made her that way. I thumb through the copy of The National Enquirer. MICHAEL GOES AFTER ELVIS’ $200 MILLION! CORDELIA BISCAYNE SHOPPING SPREE! CANDICE BERGEN DEATHBED DRAMA! I wish I’d brought something else to read. This magazine makes my stomach hurt.
So many people on a set to get to know, I think, while skimming PRINCESS DI’S LOVE LETTERS! So many names. How can I remember all the names of all the people I’m meeting in just one day? But isn’t it rude to not at least try? Mavis, Alicia, Carol, I say to myself. Mavis, Alicia, Carol.
“Do you like to do this yourself?” I look up from my magazine to find Carol waving a strange metal object in front of my face. I have no idea what it is or what it might be used for.
“I’m sorry—what is that?”
Carol peers over her glasses at me in surprise. “You’ve never seen one of these before?”
“No.”
“But of course you have. It’s an eyelash curler! I’m sure your mother has one.”
My mother could have had one, it’s true, but I didn’t have my mother during the time I might have been interested in what it was, something I don’t feel like explaining to Carol.
“Oh yeah, probably,” is all I say.
Carol brings the menacing instrument to my face, clamping my lashes between the narrow opening and then squeezing hard. I feel as if my whole eyelid is being stretched up and over the top of my head, and my eyes start to water.
“Feel okay?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say through gritted teeth. I want to ask Carol if I can do the second eye myself, but I’m afraid I’m already on her bad side, so I endure the discomfort once again. When she’s done, my lashes look like the ones on a doll I had when I was little whose eyes never closed, even when you laid her down.
Finally, I’m done in Makeup and shuttled two chairs down to Hair. “Hi, I’m Debra, I’ll be doing your hair.” (Mavis, Alicia, Carol, Debra.) Debra is a black woman with dimples who appears to be about fifty, and not grumpy at all. “Look at those curls! You sure you don’t have one of my people mixed up in your family?” She laughs, squeezing my shoulder. “Don’t you worry. I know just what to do with this mess.”
Miraculously, she does know what to do. Instead of trying to flatten my hair, she curls it with a curling iron, which is the last thing I would ever have thought of. It makes all the curls look neat and shiny instead of the irregularly frizzy, uneven way they usually look.
Debra tilts her head and regards me in the mirror. “There we go,” she says, wrapping a curl around her finger, smoothing it down. “They’ll drop a little more, too, by the time we’re on set. Pretty girl.” She pats me on the head and starts unplugging her irons.
I smile at Debra, and the person in the mirror with the Manhattan face and hair smiles back. I look so little like me, the Brooklyn me, that I can actually enjoy looking at myself without most of the usual dissection. Maybe the trick is for me to always be in some sort of disguise, to always be dressed to play someone else. Only then can I really appreciate myself.
“The client,” as it turns out, isn’t one person but a group of seven people, five men and two women, all with suits and shiny hair, whose names I barely catch, so I don’t even try to add them to my list. One by one they shake my hand and introduce themselves, and then I don’t see them for the rest of the shoot. I do periodically get reports as to their levels of enthusiasm delivered from behind the video monitor where they’re watching.
“The client loved that take,” Bobby the director (Mavis, Alicia, Carol, Debra, Bobby) occasionally says, or, “The client is wondering if you could smile more?” I sit in a chair and do the monologue into the camera lens, my too-tight khakis split open in the back, my too-loose shirt gathered with an industrial-looking clamp sticking out from the middle of my back. From the front I look put together, but every other angle would reveal how false the front of me is, how much effort has gone into presenting a one-sided image of perfection.
Bobby is an easygoing guy in his thirties, with very curly brown hair spilling out from underneath his New York Mets baseball cap. He seems to have a lot of confidence and shakes my hand with a strong grip. He’s wearing jeans and a blazer with running shoes. He tells me he usually does features, so this shoot should be a snap.
“I lit this very softly, too, so the freckles will sort of fade. I heard you were concerned.” He looks at me directly and with gravity, the way I imagine a doctor might say, “You have leukemia.”
“Oh, that’s, no, I wasn’t saying …” I want to tell him it’s all a misunderstanding, but I can’t figure out how to explain without sounding like I’m complaining about Carol the makeup artist. I decide it’s too complicated.
“Okay, yeah, thanks.”
I say the exact same lines over and over again until they lose all meaning. Someone with a stopwatch times me, and for about four hours I’m either speeding up or slowing down by increments of one second, two at most. Takes that are twenty-eight seconds strangely feel longer than ones that are twenty-six. Smile more, smile less, tilt my head, talk to the camera like it’s my best friend, raise inflection on the name of the product, but don’t sell it, not too much, not too little, have fun with it, now really have fun with it. Finally, some combination of speed, inflection, enthusiasm, or just exhaustion makes them say, “That’s it! That’s the one!”
I’m confused, because I know they have done lots of different shots: close-ups of my hands and suds and the laundry coming out of the dryer. I know they will use all the different pieces and somehow assemble them into one coherent piece, so I don’t know why it was so important to get that one perfect take, but I’m too shy to ask, as if revealing myself now as the novice I really am might make them doubt their satisfaction with me.
I shake the hands of the client, one by one, and say thank you, goodbye, I had a great time, which is sort of true, and a brunette in a blue suit says, “You were adorable! You remind me a little of myself at your age.” Then, she leans closer and whispers in my ear, “Don’t worry, I hated my freckles, too.”