Lost Along the Way(7)

Instead, she got a little apartment down in the grimy East Village. From the beginning, though, life in Manhattan was never as grand or as shiny as Jane had imagined it to be. She’d always had such big plans, for a big life that she knew she was meant to live, but it was harder to reach than she’d originally allowed herself to believe. She was one of a million girls trying to be an actress in New York City, and so she took the odd jobs that she needed to take while she passed around head shots to anyone who would take one and performed in small plays in tiny basements in the outer boroughs that she thought were beneath her. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever be able to make enough money to live in one of the awesome apartments she saw on TV, which were somehow always occupied by characters who didn’t really have proper jobs themselves. No matter how much she tried to save, she couldn’t afford anything other than the tiny apartment downtown that she shared with three other girls she barely knew, despite the fact that there were only two bedrooms. Not the cool Tribeca lofts with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the Hudson River. Not the luxurious Upper West Side condos with exposed brick walls and working fireplaces. Not the immaculately decorated East Side co-ops with thirty-foot-high ceilings and Waterford vases overflowing with calla lilies sitting on heavy mahogany tables in the foyer. There were no tasseled window treatments, no Sub-Zero refrigerators, no doormen, and no shiny parquet floors so polished they actually looked wet. None of that. Instead, she had furniture from tag sales that she tried to pass off as retro or quirky or effortlessly eclectic, but she never managed to get it right. She spent most of her twenties feeling that way about her entire life. It was exhausting.

She’d continued to try to act, but as she approached thirty, she’d accepted that she was never going to be good enough to make a living at it. As much as she hated to admit it, she wasn’t talented enough. Slowly, her dreams of telling James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio about how she’d struggled downtown with all the other artists until someone plucked her from obscurity and made her a millionaire began to fade away. Jane felt that life owed her more than what she was born with, but she didn’t really want to work the way girls had to work to break into the business. She didn’t like being a waitress and she still refused to take naked pictures, and after a certain point what else was she supposed to do? At what point would it have been okay to give up?

Then she met Doug.

She hadn’t been looking to meet anyone that afternoon, which was funny because most of the time, all she was doing was looking to meet a guy who could rescue her. She was sitting in a dive bar down by the South Street Seaport, lamenting the loss of another low-paying, bullshit job (walking dogs for a spoiled bitch of a woman who didn’t work but for some reason found it impossible to make time to take care of her own pets), when Doug entered. He took the stool next to her and removed a file from the leather briefcase he’d set at his feet. He glanced over at the glass of liquor in front of her and whistled.

December 2004

“What is that? Scotch?” he asked, revealing a thick British accent.

“Bourbon, actually.”

“Wow. You must have had one hell of a morning to be hitting the hard stuff this early.” He should’ve been turned off by the concept of a girl slugging hard alcohol in the middle of the day, but it seemed as if it actually intrigued him. That should’ve been her first clue that something was seriously wrong with him.

The truth was, she didn’t even like the taste of bourbon, but she didn’t have the money to buy multiple drinks, and beer wasn’t strong enough. She thought one glass of the hard stuff would provide the most bang for her buck.

“Or maybe I’m just a raging alcoholic,” she joked, though even then she had her concerns that if she didn’t start making some changes, and soon, she might actually become just that.

“Are you?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted.

“So what are you then?”

“An actress,” she said. “Which means I’ll probably wind up being a raging alcoholic. Just not today.”

“Ah, the life of an aspiring actress in this city can’t be easy. I don’t blame you for drinking during the day,” he said. He seemed sympathetic, which Jane liked. Usually people just rolled their eyes at her when she told them what she wanted to do with her life, but not him. Of course, there was the chance that he was humoring her, but she didn’t think so. You don’t have to be an aspiring actress in New York City for long before you start developing a keen sense for when people are lying through their teeth.

“That’s very kind of you. I try not to make it a habit, but the truth is, it’s been a really shitty day,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. Lately she found herself having a few cocktails during the day on a regular basis. It was hard to find reasons not to when she had nothing else to do with her time, and since drinking wasn’t keeping her from anything important, she didn’t think it was that big of a deal. It didn’t help that the odds of breaking into show business at twenty-nine weren’t good, and the thought of being thirty, single, and a failure was more than she could handle. When she’d moved to Manhattan she had had such big plans, and none of them involved her walking dogs or going to sleep alone at nearly thirty years old. And yet somehow that was exactly what was happening. She took another sip of her drink and felt her insides warm. Maybe it was the booze, or maybe it was the man. It was hard to say.