I'm Glad About You(9)

EXT. STOOP—CRIME SCENE—DAY

Small groups of bystanders, milling about. McMurtry wanders through, looking for his witness. Spots the Uniform holding her to one side. He gestures them over.


McMURTRY





She saw something?





UNIFORM





That’s what she says.





WITNESS





It was just people running.





There were so many people.





McMURTRY





You see a gun?





WITNESS





(scared)





No. Just everybody running, and yelling.





Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.





McMURTRY





Sure.





She ducks away. A street tough in a sweatshirt waits for her, puts his arm around her, and walks her off. McMurtry looks to Ramirez, who has approached.


McMURTRY





She saw something but she’s not talking.





RAMIREZ





No one is.





Alison was auditioning for the part of the witness, a character so unimportant it didn’t even have a name. And yet it was a big deal that they had agreed to see her for it. She didn’t yet have an agent and no one—not even the girl who sits at the desk outside—would talk to you unless they could see on the list in front of them that you had been submitted by Abrams, or Innovative, or Paradigm, or Writers & Artists. The fact that she was being seen for this lousy two-line part was all due, again, to Lisa, who had called her agent and asked him to get Alison an audition, as a personal favor.

“It was just people running. There were so many people,” Alison murmured to herself, to see if there was a rhythm to the language that she might exploit. There was something there, she thought, something deceptively simple but humming with fear. “It was just people running, there were so many people,” she said, louder. The grammatical inaccuracy of “it was,” the image of the spilling, panicked crowd, then the repetition of that simple word “people.” When she tried it a third time, “It was just people—running. There were so many people,” she felt the whisper of this girl’s fear start to curl around her brain. Her eyes drifted down to her next line. “No. Just everybody running and yelling.” A breath, a shift. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Was he really her boyfriend? He was the source of her fear, that’s for sure. But that “no” was important; it was the place where she shut down. It stopped her, turned her in a different direction. She was scared of one thing on the first line, and something else on the second. The fear on that second line was a different kind of fear, something more personal and threatening. “NO,” she repeated, abrupt, a bit too forceful. Then, with an edge of defiance, “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Alison thought this chick was stupid talking to the cops like that. She toned it down to something more approximating a whine. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting.” Made her sound like a moron. Alison hated playing scenes like that. Plus it honestly didn’t feel right. This girl was scared, first of what she saw, then of something worse. She didn’t have the self-control to try to manipulate the cops. “Can I go? My boyfriend’s waiting,” she insisted, out loud. Forceful was better. She really shouldn’t talk to the cops like that, but the fear was fueling it.

Was she making this all up? The scene really seemed like nothing when you just looked at it as a whole. But then when she considered her little piece of it, those few words and what she felt when she said them, it seemed clear there was more there. All those coaches and teachers and directors and acting classes told her the same thing over and over: Let the words do the work. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Law & Order, the words are going to teach you everything you need to know about what to do. That wasn’t always true—back in Seattle she had slogged her way through dozens of bad new plays by half-baked young writers who thought they were deconstructing reality when really all they were doing was writing incomprehensible bullshit. In those cases you couldn’t let the words do the work because they were never doing anything but floating around the page. But this really did seem like it presented her with something to play. Not much, but something.

She thought she might actually have a shot at landing this one. There were only two lines, and she had heard through Lisa that usually in these situations they let the casting agent just hire a friend, that’s how insignificant these throwaway parts were, just a step up from extra work. If they were going to go through casting on a two-line part, they certainly weren’t going to waste a ton of time on it. They couldn’t possibly see more than three or four girls for something this minor. She might actually get it.

Alison took great comfort in this rigorously argued line of thinking while she channel flipped between news stations (the apartment came with basic cable, and nothing more), then went to bed. She woke early, went for a 7 a.m. run up the West Side Highway and back down Riverside, went home, took a cold shower, ran over the lines again, blew her hair dry, chose a sexy little camisole top to wear over jeans and heels—completely inappropriate for a street kid who maybe witnessed a murder, but she knew not to be stupid and to just wear the sexy outfit—went over her lines again, put her makeup on, and went over the lines again. By that time she was practically chanting them: “It was just people running, there was so many people. It was just people running, there was so many people.” It seemed an appropriate mantra for the three blocks she had to walk to the subway, where everybody was, in fact, running, and there were so many people.