I'm Glad About You(12)

“Great,” Alison nodded, turning her attention to Michael in the corner. He was sitting next to a camera on a tripod, and he looked bored out of his mind.

“Can you slate yourself?” he asked rhetorically. She nodded. “Good. Whenever you’re ready.” There was no friendly eye contact or extraneous banter. He tapped a button on the camera and flicked his gaze at her, impatient before she had given any cause for it.

“Alison Moore,” Alison stated clearly for the camera. Bored Michael looked down at the half page of type in front of him.

“She saw something? That’s what she says,” he read, and then he glanced up at her, expectant. After all the waiting and hours of obsessive preparation Alison was not, in fact, ready. The stupid jerk had read the two lines together, as if it were one person’s line instead of two lines, from two different characters. It threw her for a moment, and she paused, trying to figure out why her cue wasn’t the same line she had had memorized. Then when she realized what he had done she had to take a moment to reconfigure how she was going to respond and just say the first line. It was just some people, people were running, she thought, but that wasn’t it, she knew the rhythms better than the words themselves by this point and those were off; she had momentarily forgotten the lines. And now the whole thing was going too fast. It was only two lines. How could she make two lines work? How on earth can you be an actress, she thought, when you only have two lines? No wonder her mother thought she was a moron. She was living like a hermit, or a rodent, in a hellish little apartment and spending her whole life worrying about two mediocre lines for an audition for a bad scene in a mediocre cop show. At least in Seattle she was actually acting. Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and even some Molière, plus all those bad readings by hapless playwrights, which were actually about something even if they were unintelligible. She hadn’t been making enough money to feed herself in Seattle, but she was getting out there and putting some art into the world, even if it was bad art. Now she was doing—what was this, anyway? She felt a tremor run through her body. She had given up everything for this, and this was truly idiotic, New York City was filthy and the people rude and spiritless and this whole enterprise was just f*cking stupid from start to finish.

“It was just people running,” she said. Her own terror and disappointment at the mess she had made out of her young life mysteriously entered the room and hung there. Her weariness was tangible. “There were so many people.”

“You see a gun?” Michael asked, completely uninterested.

“No. Just everybody running, and yelling.” She felt the tears rise to her face. Why was she crying, why now, why did this have to happen right now? She wanted to scratch her own eyes out but instead she just blurted out the rest of the line. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she informed the camera, defiant now. She really did; she just wanted to get out of there.

There was a moment of silence. “Thank you,” said Leslie the suspicious casting director, dismissing her. Two f*cking lines and she hadn’t even watched, Alison felt sure.

“That was really great,” piped up the writer. “Seriously, that was fantastic.” He turned to the director. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he informed him, firm. “It’s only two lines but there has to be stakes.”

“No, I get that,” said the director.

“You can’t just throw some Goth girl in this, just so you have something to point the camera at,” the writer continued, as if he were in the middle of a private discussion with the whole room. “She’s the first indication we get, the way she is acting is the first time McMurtry gets the scent of what might be going on here.”

“If it’s that big, then everybody gets the scent,” the director said, annoyed to be having this conversation at all, much less in public.

“What would be wrong with that?” asked the writer. “It’s a triple homicide, hello, it’s going to make the Daily News. There’s a whole crowd watching, we’re supposed to have something like twenty extras that day.” This was important to that guy. Those two lines were everything.

“I just don’t see the point of giving the whole show away in the teaser,” the director announced. He turned back to Alison, pointed. “Thank you, that really was terrific.”

“I’m not saying—that’s not what I’m saying,” said the writer, frustrated.

“Thanks,” said the casting director, as she stood. Alison was clearly being dismissed. She turned, relieved, ready to bolt out of there.

“No, that’s—could you wait?” said the writer. Alison looked back, confused. She looked around at the others. Was he talking to her? “Yes, you, I mean you, you should wait. Just wait outside the door for a moment, please,” he ordered her. He stood himself, heading toward the closed door with a purposeful authority. “That was terrific, really just wonderful, Alison. I want you to wait right here.” He waved his hand vaguely as he opened the door. The gesture would have been dismissive if what he was saying wasn’t so pointedly not. As she stepped outside he continued to talk. “The last three episodes came in short, and we’re getting hammered by the studio, they want us to come up with scripts that are closer to sixty pages and I think that to do that we have to bite the bullet and . . .” The door slammed shut behind him. Alison stared at it, wondering how they were going to bite the bullet. Hello Kitty girl looked up at her.