The Disappearing Act(12)

“Well. I wonder how that went then?” I whisper to my new friend.

She blurts out a laugh again, the ebullient sound so incongruous in the space that even the surly receptionist looks in our direction.

As if on cue the other audition room door opens and a Rose Atwood exits. Her audition clearly has gone better than the last Marcus’s. She throws us a supportive smile as she gathers her things, and after a moment a casting director’s head pokes out of the audition room she just left, scanning the remaining Roses.

The casting director frowns. “Is there a Samantha?”

The Rose nearest the receptionist desk rises hastily, smoothing her tailored trousers and grabbing her script. “Uh-huh. That’s me,” she says brightly before they both disappear into the audition room.

The waiting room noticeably relaxes as the door closes behind them. I check my watch; my time is meant to be twelve fifteen but it’s already twelve twenty. I have another audition across town after this one. I do the math. There are still two more girls waiting ahead of me. Let’s say they each take twenty minutes. I should be done in about an hour. I resign myself to the wait and dig out my mobile phone, keying in my passcode. But I promise myself no social media. Just email and texts. The girl beside me shifts and when I look up, she too is on her phone hastily tapping out a message.

Another Marcus is called into the other room and I find my mind wandering back to George. I need a distraction and for some reason the story that Miguel, the apartment building’s porter, told me yesterday comes to mind. That story about the sign keeps coming back to me in bursts and I can’t help but wonder how much of what he said was fact or if it’s all just generic Hollywood mythmaking.

I tap the words British actress and Hollywood sign into Google and read.

Turns out it’s true—the actress jumped after Katharine Hepburn got her part. This actress could have been Katharine Hepburn, could have had her career, if things had gone differently. The British actress had given up everything to travel to Hollywood, alone; no friends, no partner, she’d bet it all, and she’d almost won. I shiver at the gruesome details of her death, unsure why I am so fascinated. Thinking she’d been laid off, she left her belongings neatly stacked beneath the sign, climbed the service ladder on the letter H, and leapt out into the night sky.

Her carefully folded suicide note read:

I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.



I shake off the memory of George’s four-word message and read on defiantly.

Apparently, a few days after she jumped, a female hiker chanced upon her things beneath the sign and then found her unidentifiable body in the ravine below and called the police. There’s no record of that hiker’s name. She was gone before the police arrived. I find myself wondering why anyone would just leave a crime scene after such a traumatic discovery. And more to the point, how on earth could the police have been sure that the British actress had jumped in the first place? A few words in a note? What if she was pushed? The note wasn’t even signed; it was initialed.

The sound of a throat being cleared on the other side of the waiting room interrupts my thoughts. “Sorry, am I next or…?” a Rose inquires, her voice reedy. “?’Cause my time was like eleven forty-five and that was forty-five minutes ago.”

The receptionist huffs out a sigh, unreasonably irritated by the question. “They’ll call you in the order you arrived. So yeah,” she smirks derisively. “I guess you’ll be next.”

Bloody hell. I’m not sure I can take sixty minutes of passive aggression. I make a decision and rise from my seat as inconspicuously as possible.

“I think I’m last so I’ll just wait outside for a bit, if that’s okay?”

“Sure, go for it.” The receptionist shrugs.

Outside I take a seat on a bench in the sun and let its warmth wash over me. I open my iPhone inbox and scroll down to this afternoon’s audition at Warner Bros. It’s a film about the first female students at Harvard Medical School in 1945. I skim the scenes again. They are fantastic.

I’m halfway through running my lines when a voice snaps me back to reality.

“Good call, it’s better out here. Mind if I join you?”

When I look up, the friendly Rose is standing in front of me gesturing to the bench beside me.

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” I shuffle up as she sits down beside me.

“Well, that was tense.” She smiles, nodding back toward the casting office, her New York accent thick with vocal fry. She pulls out a packet of cigarettes and extends it in my direction.

“I don’t smoke,” I say in a tone that bizarrely suggests I’m not cool enough to do so, but then, I suppose, my new friend is disconcertingly cool. I take in her incongruous Rose Atwood outfit. She is not a natural Rose, though I have no doubt she could play her, but there’s a curl to her smile that suggests she couldn’t be further from the character in reality. And there’s something incredibly familiar about her. I must have seen her in something though I can’t quite put my finger on what it might have been.

She flicks her lighter open in one smooth roll of the wrist and lights her cigarette. Then flicks it closed and takes a drag, a thin gold bracelet jiggling against her watch. “You’re British, right?”