I'm Glad About You (5 page)

There was of course that scene to prepare. That might take four minutes. She had exaggerated—or, in other words, blatantly lied—to her mother when she called it a “big scene.” It was a little scene, a scene so small any bonehead you picked out of a crowd on the street could feasibly do it. It didn’t even take up a whole page:

EXT. STOOP—CRIME SCENE—DAY

Small groups of bystanders, milling about. McMurtry wanders through, looking for his witness. Spots the Uniform holding her to one side. He gestures them over.

McMURTRY

She saw something?

UNIFORM

That’s what she says.

WITNESS

It was just people running.

There were so many people.

McMURTRY

You see a gun?

WITNESS

(scared)

No. Just everybody running, and yelling.

Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.

McMURTRY

Sure.

She ducks away. A street tough in a sweatshirt waits for her, puts his arm around her, and walks her off. McMurtry looks to Ramirez, who has approached.

McMURTRY

She saw something but she’s not talking.

RAMIREZ

No one is.

Alison was auditioning for the part of the witness, a character so unimportant it didn’t even have a name. And yet it was a big deal that they had agreed to see her for it. She didn’t yet have an agent and no one—not even the girl who sits at the desk outside—would talk to you unless they could see on the list in front of them that you had been submitted by Abrams, or Innovative, or Paradigm, or Writers & Artists. The fact that she was being seen for this lousy two-line part was all due, again, to Lisa, who had called her agent and asked him to get Alison an audition, as a personal favor.

“It was just people running. There were so many people,” Alison murmured to herself, to see if there was a rhythm to the language that she might exploit. There was something there, she thought, something deceptively simple but humming with fear. “It was just people running, there were so many people,” she said, louder. The grammatical inaccuracy of “it was,” the image of the spilling, panicked crowd, then the repetition of that simple word “people.” When she tried it a third time, “It was just people—running. There were so many
people
,” she felt the whisper of this girl’s fear start to curl around her brain. Her eyes drifted down to her next line. “No. Just everybody running and yelling.” A breath, a shift. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Was he really her boyfriend? He was the source of her fear, that’s for sure. But that “no” was important; it was the place where she shut down. It stopped her, turned her in a different direction. She was scared of one thing on the first line, and something else on the second. The fear on that second line was a different kind of fear, something more personal and threatening. “NO,” she repeated, abrupt, a bit too forceful. Then, with an edge of defiance, “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Alison thought this chick was stupid talking to the cops like that. She toned it down to something more approximating a whine. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Made her sound like a moron. Alison hated playing scenes like that. Plus it honestly didn’t feel right. This girl was scared, first of what she saw, then of something worse. She didn’t have the self-control to try to manipulate the cops. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she insisted, out loud. Forceful was better. She really shouldn’t talk to the cops like that, but the fear was fueling it.

Was she making this all up? The scene really seemed like nothing when you just looked at it as a whole. But then when she considered her little piece of it, those few words and what she felt when she said them, it seemed clear there was more there. All those coaches and teachers and directors and acting classes told her the same thing over and over:
Let the words do the work.
Whether it’s Shakespeare or
Law & Order
, the words are going to teach you everything you need to know about what to do. That wasn’t always true—back in Seattle she had slogged her way through dozens of bad new plays by half-baked young writers who thought they were deconstructing reality when really all they were doing was writing incomprehensible bullshit. In those cases you couldn’t let the words do the work because they were never doing anything but floating around the page. But this really did seem like it presented her with something to play. Not much, but something.

She thought she might actually have a shot at landing this one. There were only two lines, and she had heard through Lisa that usually in these situations they let the casting agent just hire a friend, that’s how insignificant these throwaway parts were, just a step up from extra work. If they were going to go through casting on a two-line part, they certainly weren’t going to waste a ton of time on it. They couldn’t possibly see more than three or four girls for something this minor. She might actually get it.

Alison took great comfort in this rigorously argued line of thinking while she channel flipped between news stations (the apartment came with basic cable, and nothing more), then went to bed. She woke early, went for a 7 a.m. run up the West Side Highway and back down Riverside, went home, took a cold shower, ran over the lines again, blew her hair dry, chose a sexy little camisole top to wear over jeans and heels—completely inappropriate for a street kid who maybe witnessed a murder, but she knew not to be stupid and to just wear the sexy outfit—went over her lines again, put her makeup on, and went over the lines again. By that time she was practically chanting them: “It was just people running, there was so many people. It was just people running, there was so many people.” It seemed an appropriate mantra for the three blocks she had to walk to the subway, where everybody was, in fact, running, and there were so many people.

When she walked into the holding area for the auditions—a long hallway, Formica floors, plasterboard walls, fluorescent lights, metal folding chairs—her heart sank. So much for her theory that they wouldn’t spend an unnecessary amount of time auditioning twenty-something actresses for a two-line part about people running. The hall was lousy with girls of every stripe and color. Tall, short, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, redheads, blondes, brunettes, a couple with crazy pink and blue streaks in their hair and pierced tongues and noses. As a white girl standing five foot ten, with long shaggy brown hair and a camisole top over jeans and heels, Alison was most definitely among the more conservative choices in this group. She felt her palms start to sweat.
Oh well
, she thought,
just get it out of your head that you could land this. Just do a good audition. Just get them to remember you
. It was pathetic making yourself feel better before you haven’t gotten the job, but at the same time it helped. Her brother Andrew was obsessed with basketball, and there was a period of time when he just kept lecturing everybody on the fact that the journey was the goal, and the goal was the journey. Megan and Jeff finally got sick of hearing about it and yelled at Andrew anytime he brought it up, but that deceptively simple idea had entered Alison’s spirit and at times it peeked its head out, when she really needed it.
The journey is the goal, and the goal is the journey
, she told herself. It did; it made her feel better.

She went up to the exhausted metal desk which had been shoved up against the wall at the end of the hallway and leaned in politely to make sure the girl sitting there saw her. The girl was wearing a pink sweater and had loads of Hello Kitty paraphernalia cluttering the corners of her desk. She was all impatience, and elbows.

“Hi,” Alison started.

“Just a minute,” said the girl, who held up a finger as she made notations down the side of a page filled with names. Alison did as she was told and waited patiently until the girl looked up, sudden. “What’s the name?” the girl asked.

“Alison Moore,” Alison told her politely.

“We have you down for eleven,” the girl reported, reading off the page. She glanced up at the industrial wall clock bolted to the wall right above their heads, which reported that it was only 10:50. The girl at the desk looked at Alison with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh!” said Alison, startled at the accusatory nature of the glance. “Yes, I realize I’m early.”

“We’re backed up as it is,” the girl at the desk reported, as if this fact were also Alison’s fault. She ran her pen down the second page of appointments until she found Alison’s name somewhere near the middle. “There’s no contact information. Who made the appointment?”

“Ryan Jones, from Abrams,” Alison stated with brightness and confidence. She was just repeating what Lisa had told her to say.

“Is he representing you?”

“He’s hip-pocketing me right now,” Alison stated. She barely knew what that meant, but the girl at the desk accepted it and wrote it down. “You have a head shot?” she asked.

Alison dutifully handed over her head shot. It was easily the most beautiful picture that had ever been taken of her. Her long bangs hung perfectly over the startling intelligence of her green eyes, and the way her cheekbones tilted toward the light made her look like she might carry some sort of Cherokee blood in there with all the Irish-English-German–Eastern European mutt that the rest of her was. Her smile was wide and joyful for once, rather than cocky. She looked like a movie star; it was the smartest $1,500 she had ever spent. The girl at the desk didn’t even glance at it. “They’ll call you when they’re ready,” she informed Alison. “But like I said, they’re already way behind.”

Alison nodded politely at this and scooted herself down the hall, to the first open chair that she spotted. She ended up sitting between an ill-tempered Hispanic girl and one of the Goth chicks, the one with blue streaks in her hair. Hispanic girl in a bad mood wouldn’t even look at her. Goth chick grinned, hapless, and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Rae,” she informed Alison. “Are you reading for the witness?”

“Yeah,” said Alison, appreciating the gesture of camaraderie. “There are a lot of people here.”

“For a fucking two-line part! Like, how much are they going to pay if you get it, even, seven hundred bucks? Bite me with your seven hundred bucks.”

“Well, I’m just glad they’ll see me,” Alison admitted. “I’m pretty new here.”

“Oh no, totally, you
got
to do it. Got to be
seen
. Those fucking agents, they’ll drop you like you got the plague or something, if you can’t even get
seen
for this shit. It is such a cataclysmically shitty time. They keep using this shitty economy as an excuse to drop people, my agency, they just let half their client list go. I’m, like, fuck, what the fuck! I don’t know why I’m still on the rosters. Last year I had a good year, I ended up with a four-show arc on
Blood Brothers
, that might be why they haven’t axed me yet. Who knows. I hope this Goth thing works. It’s a totally retarded look I’m well aware but I had to give it a shot. I have
got
to land something.”

It was a lot of people running, there was so many people
, Alison thought. She watched the far end of the hallway, where a tall skinny blonde in six-inch platform heels swung out of the doorway, looking like she was trying to not look unhappy, while behind her some guy in jeans and a crummy blue windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap, leaned over the girl at the desk to see who was his next victim. “Maria Isabella Rodriguez!” called the Hello Kitty assistant. The Hispanic girl to Alison’s left stood slowly, stretched, took a piece of gum out of her mouth, and deliberately stuck it to the bottom of the folding chair she had been sitting on, before strutting down to the waiting auditioners.