Someday, Someday, Maybe (11 page)

BEEEP

Frances, it is I, your father. The one from Connecticut. I say this in the event that your mail, which you’ve undoubtedly been sending me, has been rerouted to another father in another state. I’ve sent your check. Don’t worry about the money. You don’t have to pay me back. Just call me before we start Ring Lardner on Tuesday, okay?

BEEEP

Franny, uh, hi
. (rustling, crumpled paper sound)
It’s James. Franklin?
(sound that could be cigarette exhale, or just loud breathing)
Um, yeah. I was just thinking we could—uh, we should all have a drink sometime. So, uh, yeah
.

BEEEP

Things are really looking up. I actually got that Niagara laundry detergent commercial, and I’ve scheduled the two meetings with those agents, and James Franklin called, even though his message was sort of vague. But there it was anyway, his raspy, sexy voice on my machine, a voice I can’t quite bring myself to erase. I played it over and over, until finally deciding I needed Jane’s help to decipher it.

“He’s asking me out, right?” I say, after replaying the tape for her a third time.

Jane shakes her head. “He said ‘we all.’ ‘We all’ is not asking you out.”

“But why leave a message just to ‘we all’ me? I think he’s asking me out, in his own way.”

“ ‘We all’ means: I asked for your number because I think you’re cute, but I’m seeing someone so I’m trying to pretend to myself that I just asked for your number to be friends with you, and I’m asking if you want to have a drink sometime with me
and my girlfriend
, which will never happen, but it helps me feel like less of a shithead for asking for your number in the first place. You’ve been ‘we-alled,’ my friend. Now can we erase the tape? Remember what happened last time.”

The Brill Agency had a hard time reaching me about the Niagara job, because neither Jane nor I noticed our answering-machine tape was full. So I decided to get a service, where they give you your very own phone number and an actual person who answers, as if you have a real office and he’s your assistant. At first, it was thrilling to call in to see if I had any messages. But after a few days and no messages, I thought I detected a note of pity in the voice of the answering-service guy, so I had Dan call, just so I’d have a message to check.

“But what do I say?” he asked, looking baffled at the prospect.

“Anything,” I told him. “Just give me a callback for something. Something believable, but a little impressive.”

“I’d feel better if I more clearly understood the parameters of this assignment,” Dan said, furrowing his brow.

“Dan, I’m late for work. Just pick a play and make up a theater. No one’s grading you, okay? I just need the guy to think I have something going on.” Even though he seemed flustered, I trusted Dan to treat the whole thing like the perfect student he is, so I was feeling pretty confident when I called in the next morning.

“Frances Banks’s line,” the voice said.

“Hello, this is she,” I said primly. “Any messages?”

“Yes, Ms. Banks. You have received a callback for a play.”

“Oh, great,” I said with the kind of breezy confidence that told him I get callbacks a lot. “Can you give me the details?”

“It’s for the role of Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
.”

I’m about twenty years too young for that part, but at least Dan gave me the lead in something. “Oh, wonderful. Good old Martha,” I said fondly. Maybe he’d think I’d played the part dozens of times. That would teach the anonymous voice to respect me.

“At the Old Horse Theater in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. Did I detect a hint of sarcasm in his voice?

“Okay, thanks.” There was a silence on the other end. “Any other details?”

“Well, it’s none of my business, but I’d never heard of it, so I looked it up, and that theater doesn’t seem to exist.”

He looked it up? How? In what? Does he just spend the day traveling around to towns in New Jersey trying to uncover fraudulent theatrical claims? “It’s a small theater,” I said, somewhat indignantly. “Small, but very well respected.”

“Well, if you say so. We have the booklet of all the LORT theaters, A through D, and I didn’t see it anywhere.”

Ugh
. There’s a
booklet
of all the regional theaters? There are
categories
, from A to D? I didn’t know any of that.

“Yes, well, it’s new. They’ve added, recently, an ‘E’ category. E, for ah, experimental,” I added lamely, and abruptly hung up.

The next day, I canceled the service, and Jane and I have pledged to be better message-erasers.

Only I won’t erase James’s message. Not just yet.

I
had to join my first union, the Screen Actors Guild, which cost over a thousand dollars. I didn’t have to join on my last commercial because they let you work once non-union, but on the second job you’re required to join. Due to the fact that I have eighty dollars in my bank account, I called my dad to ask him to send me the money Western Union, which he said he would, although it took me awhile to explain why my getting a job was costing him a thousand dollars.

“Why can’t you pay the union after you get paid for the job?”

“I can’t do the job unless I’m in the union.”

“But they let you audition for the job even though you aren’t in the union?”

“Yes.”

“And they know you’re going to get paid because it’s a union job they let you audition for. And now they know you have to join the union because they know you got a job.”

“Yes.”

“They know you’re going to get paid, because they know you’re going to get paid by them, but they won’t wait for you to get paid by them before you have to pay them?”

“Dad. Yes.”

“And I thought Marx was confusing.”

Then I had to take a shift off from work. Herb said it was my second warning, and I’d better be careful not to miss another shift for at least a month, or he would think I didn’t take my work seriously.

That afternoon, the call sheet that tells me what time and where I’m supposed to go comes through the fax machine, and my heart leaps to see my name is very first on the list under “cast.” Under “character” it says “Wife.” On the other commercial, I was listed as “Sweater Girl #3.” I can only dream of the day I play someone with an actual name.

M
y alarm goes off at four thirty
A.M.
, and for a minute I think I’m being robbed.

“Hello?” I say into the darkness. Then I remember.

I’m ready in record time, and I hurry to catch the train. The other riders are similarly bleary-eyed and the car is quieter than normal. At 72nd and Broadway, I get off the subway and walk a block toward the park before I realize I’m heading in the wrong direction. I walk quickly back west, not waiting for lights to change, weaving through the cars. The traffic isn’t too bad yet, and the sun is still low in the sky. I pass a few trucks parked on 72nd, flanked by orange cones and signs stapled to the electrical poles that say “No Parking Allowed—Permit to Film.”

This must be the shoot,
my
shoot. A stocky girl is standing on the corner by the trucks, wearing a giant fur hat with earflaps and speaking into a walkie-talkie.

“Hi, excuse me,” I say. “Uh, what is this, uh, for?”

“Mayonnaise commercial,” she says gruffly.

I’m in the wrong place. How can I be in the wrong place? How can there be two commercials shooting in the exact same location?

“It’s a commercial,” I say, just to be sure, “for mayonnaise?”

“Yes,” she says, as if I’m thick. “Excuse me.” And she turns her back to me.

I circle the block, jogging a little, looking left and right, starting to sweat. There’s nothing else that looks like it could be my location. No one will be at the agency yet to help me. I don’t have a watch on, but I’m sure I’m late now.

Finally, I circle back to the mayonnaise commercial, where massive trucks are being emptied by burly guys carrying loops of electrical cord on their shoulders and sandbags with a sort of nylon handle in their hands.

The earflap-hat girl is still on the corner, now smoking a cigarette and talking to a guy who’s wearing a heavy-looking leather belt with a walkie-talkie hanging from its holster. She sees me coming and her eyes narrow.

“Uh-oh,” she says out of the corner of her mouth.

I almost keep walking. I don’t want to talk to her again. She obviously thinks I’m some sort of mayonnaise fanatic. But I need help.

“Hi, sorry, me again. I know you told me this is a mayonnaise commercial, but I’m an actress, and I’m supposed to be shooting a commercial for Niagara detergent? And it’s supposed to be near here somewhere, and I didn’t know if maybe you guys all know each other or something—”

Her face totally changes and she drops her cigarette. “They’re looking for you,” says the guy with the walkie-talkie belt.

“Oh shit,” says the girl. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—hi. I’m Mavis. I’m the second-second. Let me show you where your trailer is. Can I take your bag for you?”

Mavis walks heavily in front of me, babbling all the way.

“I’m so sorry, I usually work on features with like, you know, famous actors, not that you’re not … shit, anyway, and that’s what they always tell us to say when people ask what you’re shooting, you say ‘mayonnaise commercial,’ because no one wants to know who’s starring in a mayonnaise commercial, so it keeps people moving and not hanging around asking questions and trying to catch a glimpse of Russell Blakely, or whoever, but I should have—the character is just listed as ‘Wife’ on the call sheet, and no offense but you don’t look old enough to—I mean I’m sure you’ll play a great wife, but …”

As she prattles on, I realize I’m experiencing a feeling I’ve never had before, something I can’t quite put my finger on. I was completely intimidated by Mavis and her hat and her walkie-talkie, but now everything has changed and she’s apologizing to me, trying to make me feel good. She’s treating me as if I’m important, as if she works for me. I’ve never even had an employee, and I don’t want Mavis to feel the way I felt ten minutes ago.

“Well, here’s your trailer. Hair and Makeup are in the next one, see that big trailer with the pop-out? Someone from Wardrobe will be here in a second with your changes, and I will tell them I made you late, it’s a hundred percent my fault and I will tell the director—”

“Mavis,” I say, stopping in front of the door to the trailer.

“Yeah?” she says, her eyes squinting into the sun, almost hidden by the furry front of her hat.

“This is my first real shoot. I don’t know anything. For instance, I have no idea what a second-second is.”

Mavis smiles and seems to relax. “Second assistant to the second assistant director. I basically tell you where to go when, and am in charge of the general awesomeness of your day. Want some coffee?”

“Um, sure. Where is it?”

“I can get it for you.”

“No, no, that’s okay, I’ll get it.” I don’t want to get on Mavis’s bad side again.

“Okaaaay. It’s just that they need you in Hair and Makeup right away, and it’s sort of complicated to explain where crafty is. I can get it for you. Unless you need … do you like it a particular way or something, in a way that you think is too complicated for me to make?”

I’m trying to be polite, because of course I wouldn’t dream of asking someone I’ve never met to fetch me coffee, but somehow it seems as though Mavis thinks I’m being rude by not allowing her to get it for me. I don’t know where I’m going wrong. This world seems to have different rules from the other world I’ve been living in all of my life. I wonder if I’ll ever learn them.

“No. Nothing special. I guess, okay, um, just milk and sugar, if it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble,” Mavis says, in the way people say “no worries” when they have lots, or “no biggie” when something is a colossal headache.

F
rom the minute I walk into the wardrobe fitting, in a trailer near mine, I’m confused. There are two giant rolling racks, one full of tan trousers, one stuffed with thirty or forty identical blue shirts.

“Oh, are there … are there more people coming?” I ask a harried-looking woman nearby. She looks at me as though I’ve said something strange.

“What? Oh, the racks? Noooooo. These are all for you.”

“But, aren’t these all the same pants?” I say, laughing a little.

“Well, no, there’s actually quite a variety,” she says gravely, indicating that, to her, pants and their similarity to one another are not a laughing matter. “I’m Alicia, by the way, the costume designer.”

I wonder how Alicia feels to have the title “costume designer” when it refers, in this case, to the choosing of one blue shirt and a pair of khaki pants.

“Sorry if it looks like a lot, but they aren’t sure if they want a twill or a gabardine, and don’t get me started on their limited comprehension of the stirrup pant. God forbid they allow for a
little fashion
. Anyway, we’ll have to try them all on. The client is very specific about what they want. I fought for jeans as an option, but the client didn’t want to make too urban a statement.”

I don’t know who “the client” is, but already I’m worried about their opinion of me and their strong conviction regarding khakis versus jeans. So I obligingly try on endless pairs of pants, which all look the same to me, and pretend to agree with Alicia, who finds them all very different.

Finally, Alicia finds a pair she likes, except they’re a little snug in the waist.

“These are perfect. Let’s Polaroid these, too. We might have to cut them in the back, though,” she says. “You guys really shouldn’t fudge your sizes, you know?” She attempts a smile, but I can tell she’s irritated.

“I didn’t fudge my sizes,” I say, as nicely as I can. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

“Well, what jean size did you give them?”

“Um. Eight maybe?”