Lucid (5 page)

When I finish, there is a beat. June glances over to read Tucker. He is still staring at me, his face indecipherable. June tells me it was lovely and thanks me for coming down and says she’ll call. My heart sinks.

Tucker turns to her and asks if he can speak to me alone. I’ve been on hundreds of auditions, callbacks, readings. This has never happened before. June squeezes my shoulder warmly as she leaves the room.

“I’m not going to cast you,” he says in the kindest way he can by choosing a matter-of-fact voice to treat me as a professional rather than a brokenhearted girl, which is what I am. “How old are you?”

I lie by ten days.

“If you want a career in this profession, and if you’ll work hard enough, you’re going to make it. I’m not saying you have a chance; I’m saying you will make it. And my guess is sooner rather than later.
There’s an elegance and a refinement to you that is at odds with the core of this character. The day will come when you have the technique to overcome something like that.”

I want to jump up and down and squeal, in an elegant and refined way, of course.

“We’ll work together someday, Maggie. And it will be my pleasure.”

I walk around town in the rain for about two hours imagining the, oh, thirty or forty films that Tucker and I will make together during our mentor-protégé collaboration. My favorites are a startlingly reimagined version of
Lear
, with me as Cordelia (somehow I envisioned Tucker actually playing Lear and carrying me out of frame in the finale), and an original conception of my own in which my character is alcoholic, blind, with either one or no legs (depending on how my technique has developed), and oh yeah, also in love with a ballerina. But it’s tragically unrequited.

Eventually, I fall by
Elle
to borrow some clothes from the magical room of never-ending high-fashion wardrobe items. Some of the upside of having your mother indentured to a fashion magazine includes free cosmetics and facial products of all kinds, introduction to some well-known cover models (who are frequently as misunderstood by history as, say, Genghis Khan), entrée to endless parties, a few of which are actually cool, seats at fashion week, and a free pass to borrow goodies you could never afford. I’m in need of a few goodies to outfit me for a photo exhibit tonight.

Jerome, whose taste is somewhere between stellar and impeccable, helps me choose an Hervé Léger bandage dress and some killer McQueen heels, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I suddenly forget the audition.

As I’m dressing, Nicole asks as casually as she can manage (which is not very) if I’m disappointed not to get the role. Uh, no, I think, not disappointed at all. Didn’t even want it. Just spent all those hours preparing for the hell of it.

I tell her that my technique isn’t there yet but that some mildly encouraging things were said, and I’m fine. If I tell her I am actually swooning with ecstasy, I’ll never get out of here. Gallery openings never have an adequate amount of hors d’oeuvres, but they are always the highest quality of deliciousness. I feel like I haven’t eaten in days because of my nerves, and my stomach is like that Venus flytrap from
Little Shop of Horrors
. Feed me, Seymour.

I walk into Flowers Gallery, and my name is on the list. In my
Elle
-borrowed outfit, I feel good. Most of the glitterati haven’t arrived, which works into my evil plan of collecting all the crab toast I can nab. The opening is in honor of Mona Kuhn’s new collection, shot in the South of France. The guy who owns the off-off-Broadway theater where I did the
Glass Menagerie
when I was fourteen is tight with the guy who represents Mona, who is my most favorite photographer, so I begged him to invite me. Of course, I can only imagine how insanely jealous Sloane will be tomorrow morning. Hey, it’s a $60 train ride; she can get her butt down here.

Actually, that could never happen. I’ve tried to look up Sloane in information in Mystic, Connecticut. She doesn’t exist. My dad took us up there for a month one summer, and I used to bike by what I thought was her house. A nice family lived there. Not hers. I’m absolutely positive that Sloane has done the same for me.

Five crab toasts and two braised lamb shanks later, I’m stuffed, which is not a good look in a bandage dress. I’m drinking red wine
from a glass that seems never to empty because the waiters are so good at their job of filling it up. I turn down several cocktails from assorted males who like to look at the part of your bandage dress where there’s no dress. Do these guys think we don’t see where they’re looking? This always amazes me. Nicole says, sure they know, but they don’t care. Nah. Guys think they’re bulletproof. And, irony of ironies, just as I’m hating on the men in the place, in walks…well…

He is tall, which I’m ashamed to admit is sort of a requirement (sorry, short guys). He has incredible hair, which is kind of golden and amber and stays gorgeously long and in place with no product. Magic hair guy. His eyes are nearly black, but I’m so in the spell of charisma that I don’t realize this means the hair might be dyed. So what? I stand my ground. Stare straight at him. And just wait to see what happens.

It starts with a slow smile. I don’t smile back, but I don’t blink. Here he comes. And to my surprise, the first thing he says is…

“Aren’t you Maggie Jameson?”

I’m stuck for a comeback. Here’s what I come up with…

“As a matter of fact, I actually am.”

This has to be the dumbest single way any human ever acknowledged their own identity.

“I’ve been looking for you. Actually, that’s a slight exaggeration. I’ve been looking for a woman to play a role that you could crush. I have a short list. Nine names. I’ll be honest enough to say you were seventh. But looking at you tonight, I hope I can persuade you to hear me out.”

This is the life of a wannabe ingénue. Should I be more upset that the guy (“Thomas Randazzo, born Tomaso, of course,” he tells
me) is not hitting on me, or more thrilled that he wants to cast me, or more skeptical that he’s pretending to want to cast me in order to hit on me? I decide that with that hair, he doesn’t need any excuses to hit on anybody. And since I’m way too young (a lot more than one year and ten days) to live out this fantasy, I’m gonna hope he’s casting me.

“I work for Rosalie Woods. We’re casting a primetime series for ABC.”

Rosalie is the primo casting director on planet Earth and surrounding galaxies. ABC is an Earth-bound television network. I am literally pinching my arm to see if this is somehow a dream within a dream.

“It’s based on the Innuendo books. I’m sure you’re familiar with them.”

For those who have recently revived from a prolonged coma, the Innuendo books (presently five of them) have made vampires obsolete in terms of youthful romance. I devoured the whole series in one weekend. They are well written, deep, and really hot. The bidding war for the film rights was extensively over-reported.

“And you simply have to find the perfect Lara.”

“I sure do. It’s not you. You were born to play Robin.”

Robin is maybe the fourth lead, the edgy, unconventional, free-spirited, well, babe. Lisbeth Salander but elegant and refined.

Thomas hands me his card. Now some guys could go to the length of printing a card like that just to get lucky. Once again, not with that hair.

“We haven’t gone out to anyone yet. We’re waiting for Macauley Evans to wrap his feature in South Africa. He’s going to be directing the pilot, and obviously he’ll be key in the casting.”

I recover my senses.

“Thomas, I’m almost speechless. The chance to read for Robin would be an opportunity that I could scarcely imagine.”

“Don’t be so modest, especially in that dress.”

Red flag. Maybe it isn’t about the role and is more about the bandage. Or he could just be pointing out that I’m not exactly telegraphing shrinking violet tonight. He isn’t ogling my goodies. In fact, I’m probably the one ogling. As if he can hear my internal debate, he brings it back to work…

“I saw you in
The Mamet
on HBO.”

One scene. Fifteen lines. If you sneezed hard, you’d have missed me.

“You blew Andy Garcia off the screen. And I thought, this is what Emmy Rossum was supposed to be in
Phantom
. Then I remembered I’d seen you do Holly Golightly in summer stock in the Berkshires and you were incandescent. Audrey Hepburn at sixteen.”

Fifteen. Barely.

“I just have this instinct, I mean, you know, that’s how we work in my business. You feel that spark, and you just know. I’m sure I’m sounding like, I don’t know, a casting agent. Sorry about that.”

A smile as nice as his hair. He stares at me, comfortably, pleasantly.

“There are a few things you’d be right for. At some point, we should get together and talk about that.”

At some point. What point is that?

“But by all means, let’s play out the Robin thing first. Funny bumping into you tonight; I wasn’t going to come. In fact, I have to give Mona a hug and run off to this thing at the Standard.”

I like the Standard. I’d like to go to the Standard. Invite me to
the Standard. He holds out his hand. His hand! Gentlemanly and businesslike.

“Real pleasure to meet you, Maggie. We’ll be in touch.”

I shake his hand. He lingers for just a second longer than he should. Then he gives a little wave. And he’s off.

Either this guy has so much game he just Jedi-mind-tricked me into thinking he wasn’t hitting on me and making me wish he would, or I have a little crush on a man who could be the key to some big opportunities.

The bandage business has no pockets. So I’ll have to hold on to his card for the rest of the night. Like I’ll ever call him.

A
sparrow is trapped in homeroom. I walk in right before the bell and kids are freaking out because the poor little thing is slamming itself against the glass of a partially open window desperately trying to escape. No one knows what to do. Some swat books at it, many yell and disorient it further.

“Stop,” a calm voice says from behind me.

I can only see his profile, backlit from the open door. And then he walks into the room. It is a face of such strikingly unique beauty that it actually stops my breath. A beauty so compelling that I admire it for its own sake without even fantasizing being close to it in a personal way. I gasp softly, but no one notices. That’s how completely he’s captured everyone’s attention.

He steps to the window with a commanding presence, and the rest of the class falls back. At this point the sparrow is fluttering its wings hysterically against the glass. The boy reaches out with his
bare hands and gently cups them around the terrified creature. It seems somehow to calm at his touch. He simply reaches through the open part of the window and releases the sparrow, who flies madly off without so much as a thank you. The boy stands for a moment, his back still to me, oblivious of the rest of the class, simply watching the bird fly away.

He goes to a seat in the back of the room. At this point every eye is on him, the new kid in homeroom who just performed the Miracle of the Sparrow. He picks up a well-thumbed paperback of Kafka’s
The Trial
, a particular favorite of mine. But his choice of leisure reading isn’t what has me hypnotized. It is something more mysterious, and even perhaps darker, than the book itself.

This guy is reading his book as if he is alone in the world. He seems to have no awareness, let alone interest, in any of us. There is nothing in the absolute stillness of his beautiful face to suggest arrogance or conceit, and this gives him an aura of limitless inner power. But the most striking part is that there is a darkness to it. A danger. Although I’m not sure what could be at risk.

Unlike Maggie, I have no acting experience except for one summer at Stage Door Manor in the Catskills. I went there because I knew that the study of acting would help me in writing characters. I have written short stories since the age of six (okay, those were really short). And when I was eight, I finally had the courage to write one about my greatest fear. It was not a nightmare; it was a waking fear that would often keep me from sleep. There was a sorcerer floating beyond my second-story window. He was invisible, and yet I knew exactly what he looked like. Because he wanted me to.

He looked like this boy now sitting in my homeroom, reading
Kafka. Or at least that’s what I realize in this moment, as goose bumps cover my flesh. I knew that if I ever let my guard down, the sorcerer would be able to come through my window, into my bed, and take control of me. I had rituals at night to keep him at bay. I wrote stories about these rituals, which always worked. There are eleven of them. I often wondered if I would ever have the courage to write the story of them not working.

I don’t know him, and yet somehow I do. Enough to not like him. I know I will never like him. It isn’t personal. It isn’t a judgment. It is a fact as true and unchangeable as gravity.

Mr. Sanchez introduces the gorgeous new boy as James Waters. Then he begins reading every banal announcement ever invented by homeroom teachers. There are fire drills in our future, bake sales (the horror!), the posting of rules for our dumb mathalon (a marathon of mathematics), tutoring sign-up for tutors and tutorees, we will no longer be served polenta in the cafeteria because it was too hard to scrape off the walls after last Thursday’s “incident.” And through all of this, every cell of my being is focused on the beautiful boy six rows behind me. It feels as if his pale gray eyes are boring into the back of my neck despite my absolute certainty that he hasn’t noticed I’m alive. And then, dear Mr. Sanchez wipes James Waters from my mind.

“I know that all of you are, I suppose the phrase is, ‘looking forward to’ the opportunity to honor the memory of William Rainey on the athletic field next Friday afternoon. I never had the pleasure of personally knowing Bill, but I have heard from so many students and faculty members of his gentle intelligence, his kindness, his sweetness of spirit, and of course, his athletic prowess.
Now I suppose all of you know that your classmate in this very homeroom, Sloane Jameson, will be one of the principal speakers at this event…”