I'm Glad About You(8)

It was a horrible thought, but not an inaccurate one. During one of those interminable phone calls from her mom shortly after she had moved to New York, Alison had allowed herself a moment to wander down the hallway, only to catch her two roommates rolling their eyes at each other in comic dismay. Alison might not have put it together even at that point, but when she hung up the phone, Roger the gay chorus boy who had the biggest bedroom actually laughed out loud. “Who was that, your mother?” he said. “She sounds like a nightmare.”

“Oh! No, she’s all right,” Alison said, startled at his assessment. Ginger, also a chorus animal albeit of the busty slutty type, snickered and tossed her gorgeous red-blonde mane about like a pony. Nothing more was said, but Alison tried to keep phone calls from Cincinnati out of the living room after that. She didn’t care if they made fun of her mom behind her back, but she didn’t want to have to watch it.

They were never there anyway. “We’re musical theater gypsies; we’re never home,” Ginger reassured her. “You’ll get tons of privacy.” This turned out to be essentially true. The place was small and the public spaces of the building were dirty and ill-maintained but her share of rent and expenses usually didn’t top $950, so the room actually was a good deal. Plus, even though it was way over on the west side, it was still in Manhattan. So many of her equally desperate peers had to schlep in from Brooklyn and Queens, which clearly made a schedule of running from one dispiriting audition to another even more exhausting and hopeless. Consequently, until the road tour of A Chorus Line burned itself out and their real roommate wanted his shitty little room back, she was one of the lucky ones.

And she did, as it turned out, really have the whole apartment to herself, as Ginger had promised. There was no telling when she or Roger might show up for a few days, gossiping incessantly about what new musical got creamed in San Francisco, and who was having a boob job, and what talent-free television hack had most recently snuck into town and stolen what part from what long-suffering New York actress. They arrived without notice and then disappeared as quickly, leaving leftover macrobiotic takeout, dirty dishes, and quite a bit of smelly laundry in their wake. The first few times it happened Alison was bemused at their careless assumption that she would clean up their abandoned messes, but then she realized they didn’t actually make those assumptions because they didn’t bother to think about things that deeply. They came and they went. If they arrived home to find mold growing in the sink they would be pissed off, but they never put two and two together in terms of the causal effect of their own inability to clean up after themselves. But the fact was, neither one of them ever missed a rent check. So after they breezed through, Alison cleaned up the kitchen, lugged their sweat-stained leotards and yoga pants down to the laundry room, and, like them, didn’t think much more about it.

Truth be told, even though they had virtually nothing in common, Alison came to enjoy the chaotic interludes when her wayward roommates managed to show up. Ginger was correct when she told her that she would have a “ton of privacy”; she had not told her how lonely she would be. Especially now that she didn’t have any place she really needed to be, first thing in the morning. Once she had dumped her horrible job answering phones for a bunch of crooks masquerading as real estate agents, she took Lisa’s advice and signed with Ponce Gourmet, a specialty gourmet food shop that also booked semi-swank catering gigs in the financial district. Lisa had explained how advantageous such jobs could be for a New York actor, since they booked you only for late afternoon or evening events, leaving the better part of the day available for auditions. Plus you didn’t even have to agree to the shifts they offered you—the arrangement was more or less built on your availability.

The downside being, of course, that when they didn’t call, Alison had nothing to do all day. More drastically, she also had no income. She had been too shy to mention this concern to Lisa, or the weirdly cheerful booking agent at Ponce Gourmet, because she had already figured out that people in New York actually didn’t want to know how poor you were. Being poor was dreary and problematic in this expensive city; you simply had to have money. Everyone was so stressed out by the noise and the crowds and the cars and the enormous buildings and the anonymity of it all that whenever you landed in a restaurant or a store you had to buy something, just to calm your nerves. And there were so many wonderful overpriced dresses and shoes and cocktails and meals to buy. The times she had gone shopping or had a drink with Lisa and her New York posse she was truly alarmed at how casually everyone flashed their credit cards about; most of these women were actresses like herself but they behaved as if they all had trust funds that would never run dry. Occasionally she’d hear one of them worry about cash flow but no one seemed to be constantly reworking the numbers in their heads the way Alison was, wondering if she was going to be able to have enough to pay for her cell phone, apartment, and grocery bills at the end of the month. She couldn’t even let herself wander down to a bar for a drink when she had no catering gig, no roommates, and nothing to do on a Thursday night. Her pragmatic brain and what it knew about the basics of economics—do not run up those credit cards—wouldn’t let her.

There was of course that scene to prepare. That might take four minutes. She had exaggerated—or, in other words, blatantly lied—to her mother when she called it a “big scene.” It was a little scene, a scene so small any bonehead you picked out of a crowd on the street could feasibly do it. It didn’t even take up a whole page: