Birds of California(8)

“Anyway, it’s been suggested to me that you might want to give her a call and talk to her about it,” Russ says now, nodding a hello at someone over Sam’s shoulder. “She finds out you’re signing on, the whole thing looks a little more legit—”

“Wait.” Sam is confused. He’s been working in LA for long enough that he knows he should have a better understanding of how these things come together, but he feels like the window has closed and now it’s too late to ask—that if he admits he doesn’t always totally understand what the fuck is happening in his career he’ll be exposed as the fraud he worries he is. “Is it not legit?”

“No, of course it’s legit,” Russ says quickly. “You think I’d be bringing it to you if it wasn’t legit? I think she just needs a little coaxing, that’s all. Hartley seemed to think you were guy for the job.”

“Jamie did?” Sam grins at that. He loves Jamie. And if Fiona never particularly struck him as the kind of person who could be coaxed into doing much of anything, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth at least talking to her about it. The whole project kind of sounds like fun.

More to the point: Sam really needs a fucking job.

“Okay,” he says now, smiling his thanks as the waitress drops off their revolting salads. “Sure. I’m game.”

“Of course you are,” Russ says, glancing at his phone one more time before picking up his napkin. “Eat your lunch.”





Chapter Three


Fiona


Fiona has rehearsal that night, so once she’s done at the print shop she cranks the air in her roasting car and heads downtown, crawling through rush hour traffic while Kate Bush wails away on the stereo. She feeds a handful of quarters into the meter before she heads inside, traipsing down the stairs and through the long, pee-smelling hallway until she gets to the theater, where Georgie and Larry are already sitting in the house arguing about a meme Larry saw on Facebook.

“Frances!” Georgie calls, waving one plump, manicured hand in Fiona’s direction. “Settle something for us, would you?”

“What are you going to ask her for?” Larry asks crabbily. He’s wearing a baggy plaid button-down and dad jeans, his salt-and-pepper hair springing up in every direction like baby arugula. “People her age don’t vote.”

“I vote,” Fiona says, which is mostly true. “Warm-ups in five.”

She drops her backpack in the second row and digs out her battered script, propping her feet on the back of the seat in front of her and rereading the scene they’re working tonight while Larry and Georgie gripe at each other and the rest of the cast trickles in. The Angel City Playhouse was a porn theater back in the eighties before it was taken over by a development corporation as part of an urban renewal project that never materialized. Now it’s a black box with a dressing room the size of a walk-in closet and a bathroom they share with the nonprofit that rents the office space upstairs. The theater seats eighty-three people. As far as Fiona understands it, they have never sold out a run.

She fishes a pencil out of her bag, scribbling a couple of last-minute notes to herself in the margins. She never intended to act again, obviously—not that this even really counts, because it doesn’t. But last winter she was dropping off a bunch of her mom’s old stuff at the Goodwill across the street when she saw the handwritten sign on the door of the building:

ANGEL CITY PLAYERS. AUDITIONS TODAY!

Fiona still has no idea why she went inside. It was the same part of her that thought it would be a good idea to let some guy from Justin Bieber’s entourage give her a DIY tattoo in a bathroom at the bar at Sunset Tower, she guesses—the reckless part of her that acts first and considers the implications later. She scrawled a made-up name on the sign-in sheet and rattled off the same monologue she always used to do when she auditioned, Helena’s Love looks not with the eyes speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It used to get a ton of laughs when she was a kid—the randomness of it, probably, like she was a dog who could bark the alphabet.

Diane didn’t even chuckle. “Thanks,” she said when Fiona was finished, yanking one of six pens out of her bright red bun and writing something on a legal pad, barely looking up. “We’ll let you know.” Fiona went home and immediately forgot about it until three days later, when Diane called her cell phone and offered Frances Fairbanks the role of Elaine in Arsenic and Old Lace.

That was eighteen months ago. Since then she’s played Catherine in Proof and Mollie Ralston in The Mousetrap and Juror 3 in an all-gender production of Twelve Angry Men. Every time the lights go down Fiona fully expects this to be the last time, for someone in the very back row to jump up and point at her like she’s a witch from The Crucible, but so far she hasn’t been caught.

Probably because there are only ever a dozen and a half people in the audience.

“You guys ready to start?” she asks now, getting to her feet and tying her hair up. Two months ago Diane and her wife started fostering a set of twin girls who’d just gotten out of the NICU, which is how Fiona wound up moonlighting as director of this season’s show, a modern-day imagining of A Doll’s House—not because she knows anything about directing, but because she was sitting in the front row of the theater eating a smoked salmon bagel when Diane got the call from the social worker. “Can you take over?” Diane asked, shoving her marked-up script into Fiona’s hands before speeding off to Target for car seats and diapers. There’s still a smudge of scallion cream cheese on the front of the folder. Fiona had never directed anything in her life—she literally went home and ordered a book called How to Direct Theater from Book Soup—but to her surprise she’s found she actually likes it a lot: imagining each scene in her head before rehearsal, talking to everyone about their characters and what they want. It makes her feel like she’s in control of something, even if that something is a low-end production of an overdone Ibsen play. It makes her feel very calm.