Ripley shook his head. “You’ll ruin yourself,” he said.
It had been a long time since we’d seen each other and I’d called him up, looking for advice. We were sitting out by the pool behind his house, our teak lounge chairs shaded by a giant red umbrella. It was a Tuesday or a Saturday, March or October. That was the problem with L.A., I could never remember. “You’re telling me no one here takes acting classes?”
“You’re fresh, unspoiled,” he said. “That’s your thing. People take acting classes to learn how to do what you’re already doing.”
“So by studying acting I’ll spoil my unspoiledness?”
“Exactly.” He was drinking Perrier with crushed ice and lime. A Hispanic woman came out of the house to put a bowl of kumquats on the table between us, then went back without a word.
“I just want . . .” I began. But I had no idea what I wanted. All I knew for certain was that the day was hot and the pool looked like heaven.
“What?” Ripley asked. “To be a movie star?”
I smiled. “Swimming pools, movie stars.”
Ripley felt some responsibility for me, I guess, having brought me there to be in a movie that was sitting in a can. Still, he offered up his next sentence with hesitation. “I know a guy,” he said. “They’re starting to put together a production of Our Town.”
Just that fast I felt the words rise up in me—-clocks ticking and sunflowers and new--ironed dresses. They were always there, like some small animal hibernating in my chest. I said nothing.
“You could try,” he said, making it clear that my impending disappointment would not be on him.
“Where?” I popped a kumquat in my mouth the way bored girls in L.A. will do. The sourness was akin to being electrocuted but I betrayed nothing. Maybe I was a better actress than I thought.
“New York.” Then, a kumquat later, added, “Broadway. They’ve signed Spalding Gray for the Stage Manager.”
“No!” Nell says.
“I didn’t get the part.”
“You tried out for Our Town on Broadway with Spalding Gray!”
“Spalding Gray wasn’t there when I auditioned and I didn’t get the part.”
Emily lifts up a branch and peers beneath it, trying to decide if it needs to be tied. “I’m starting to understand something here,” she says, and all of us think she’s talking about the tree. “Every thing leads to the next thing.”
Maisie stops to look at her sister. “That’s called narrative. I guess they don’t teach you that in hort school.”
“I understand narrative, idiot, but when you see it all broken down this way, step by step, I don’t know, it’s different.” Emily looks at me. “Your grandmother asks you to register people for a play and you wind up starring in the play, which gives you the nerve to try out for the same play in college, which means that Ripley gives you a part in his movie, but the movie doesn’t come out, so you wind up in New York to try out for the play again—-”
“But you don’t get the part,” Maisie says.
“And so you go to Michigan,” Nell says, “which is how you get to us.”
“It’s just that I thought this was going to be a story about Duke,” Emily says, her dark braid down her back, the bill of the Michigan State cap shading her eyes. “And then I thought you were just taking us on some wild--goose chase to amuse yourself.”
It’s still there, though you have to tune your ear in order to hear it: the last hissing ember of Emily’s bygone rage and desire.
“It is a story about Duke,” I say, taking in a deep breath of northern Michigan in the summer, the smell of the trees, of these three girls. Nothing will ever be like it.
“It’s about Duke and it’s not,” Nell says.
“That’s right,” I say, nodding. “Yes and no.”
I went to New York expecting to win. There was no George at the audition. An assigned reader sat to the left of the director’s table and read George’s lines, Mrs. Webb’s lines, the Stage Manager’s lines. When they called me back the second day, a few other actors were loitering nervously, though not Spalding Gray. We read scenes together, testing our chemistry. I had never felt so comfortable, so certain that I was an actress. The next time I saw Ripley I would thank him for talking me out of acting classes. I wore barrettes to keep the hair out of my face so the casting director could see my lovely little ears. I wore my UNH sweatshirt. When I went to leave the second day, the five men in the audition studio all stood to shake my hand. The last one double--checked to make sure he had the name of the hotel where I was staying. I went back to that hotel room to wait by the phone, and two hours later it rang. A man was asking if I could meet him at the Algonquin the following afternoon so that we could discuss the play.
I said sure. I asked when.
“What you need to remember is that everything’s a fix,” he told me at our little table in the corner of the very dark bar. His name was Charlie. Gray suit, a white shirt, no tie. I remembered the suit from the audition. He had a good tailor—-a scant quarter--inch of shirt cuff showed beneath his jacket sleeve. “They say they want someone new but you’re too new. If the movie was out, you’d be a shoo--in. Ripley says you’re terrific in it, by the way. We certainly thought you were terrific in the audition.”
I’d been formulating a brief acceptance speech in my head in which I expressed my excitement and gratitude, but Charlie seemed to be telling me I wasn’t going to need it. Is that what he was telling me? I refused to believe his message was clear. Then the waitress arrived at our table and I stumbled over my choice of beverage: a Coke would make me look young, but a Jack and Coke would make me look even younger, a kir might make me look like an actress but maybe one who was trying too hard not to care. In my sudden panic I defaulted to Perrier with crushed ice and lime, which made me look like a Californian, which was the last thing I wanted to look like. “The movie will be out by the time the play opens,” I said, my voice small.
Charlie shrugged, by which he meant what did I know about release dates? He was right, of course. That’s when it occurred to me that I was supposed to sleep with him. He’d brought me to a dark hotel bar to talk about getting the lead in a Broadway play, which, sorry as he was, he wasn’t going to be able to give me. Or maybe he could. I imagined the key was already in his pocket. I went through my options quickly, a feeling not dissimilar to my drink order: I could be indignant or offended, or I could just follow him to the elevator. Didn’t everybody have to sleep with somebody eventually in this business? Would I sleep with him if it meant I’d get to play Emily on Broadway opposite Spalding Gray?
Yes. Yes I would.
“Listen, you’re great,” he said, resting his hands on the white tablecloth just in front of our flickering candle. They were nice enough hands—-no wedding ring—-at least I would be spared that additional guilt. “But there’s too much money involved. You’ve got to be able to sell tickets.”