Someday, Someday, Maybe (16 page)

And suddenly I’m facing four people who are looking back at me, and I still have no idea what I’m going to do. A man with glasses sits in the closest chair.

“Hello there, Ms., uh—Banks, there we are. As you’ve probably figured out, we’re looking for your funniest laugh. You can begin whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay, great!” I say, too forcefully. “So should I do it into the camera, or …” I’m looking around vacantly, not sure where to focus, somehow not finding where the lens is.

“Ah, there’s no camera here today, since there’s no scene, exactly. Tell you what. Why don’t you just do it for Arthur here,” he says, pointing to a painfully thin man with red hair and freckles to his left, who looks not exactly happy to have been chosen as my target.

“Okay, great. Can I just, sorry … I have a question?”

I think I catch an eye-roll from the other man in the back.

“Sure.”

“What is she—what am I—laughing at?”

There’s a moment of silence in the room, as if no one’s sure how to answer my question. Or maybe they’re shocked at the stupidity of it.

“Well, it’s just mainly a gag, you know?” says the man in glasses.

“A gag,” I repeat.

“Yes. A running gag. Like how she laughs on
The Nanny
?”

“But we don’t want it to sound anything like her laugh,” the man in the back of the room says emphatically.

“Yes, of course, it’s a laugh that’s all her own—just a girl who laughs funny. For no particular reason,” the man with glasses says.

“Okay, thanks. And, sorry, but, what do I do?”

“Do?”

“For a living. What’s my job?”

I can definitely see the man in the back roll his eyes this time, so broadly that the woman next to him swats him lightly with the script she’s holding.

“Well. We don’t know yet. Probably she’s Kevin’s secretary. You know our show? How Kevin keeps getting bad secretaries? Sort of like on
Murphy Brown
?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe she works for Kevin. But mainly, she laughs this hilarious laugh that will make our audience plotz.”

“Two scenes. No lines,” says the guy in the back. “Don’t over-think it.”

“Shush,” says the script-holding woman.

“Okay. Thanks. I think I’m ready.”

I look at Arthur, who shifts uncomfortably in his seat. I think of Kevin on the show, and in my mind, red-haired Arthur sort of becomes Kevin. The actor who plays Kevin is probably in his late forties by now, and still very handsome, but for some reason I think about the heartthrob he was when the show started ten years ago, and I was still in high school. He’d enter almost every scene with the line “Hello, ladies!” which became a popular phrase people used to copy. What if I’d been his secretary, just for one day, back then, when I was in high school and the show was number one. If I’d gotten that chance, especially then, I’d hang on his every word and try to do my very best, so he’d like me. But maybe I’d be so smitten and nervous in his presence that all I could do was laugh adoringly at everything he did.

My laugh is soft and light when it first comes out, and I’m me, but also the nervous teenage me I was remembering. Arthur’s face blushes a deep red, and I can see he’s not used to being the center of attention, and he’s liking it a little bit, and that makes me love him even more, and I pretend he’s just said the funniest thing I ever heard, not just to me but to a roomful of people, and I’m proud to be with him, proud to be the girl on his arm, and I’m so exhilarated by it all that the laugh gets even bigger, and turns into more of a gasp, and I’m almost panting now, in a weirdly inappropriate, almost sexual way that I can’t believe is coming out of my mouth, because it’s a sound I’d never be bold enough to make even in my own bedroom, but for some reason here I’ll do anything to let Arthur/Kevin/actor-who-plays-Kevin know how amazing and special and sexy and magnificent I think he is/they are, and my appreciation reaches its peak, and I’m almost totally out of breath, so I let it soften back down to the small giggle, and finally, exhausted but happy, I let out a little sigh that’s interrupted by an almost involuntary hiccup, like I gulped down too much champagne all at once.

It’s a blur from that point on, a series of snapshots that flash before me: the woman in the back mouthing “See?” to the disgruntled man, who nods and shrugs at her in a way that says “Who knew?” and the man in glasses asking me to wait in the waiting room, but then almost immediately coming back out to say I got the part, and the dreamlike experience of going back to Absolute and signing papers in Joe Melville’s office that say I’m a client of theirs now, and people smiling and shaking my hand, and then walking back out on the street at the most beautiful time, just as the sun is fading, knowing I don’t have to go to work as a waitress tonight, that I booked my second paying job in two weeks, and I can walk at a leisurely pace down Fifth Avenue and imagine that someday, maybe, I’ll go into one of these stores instead of just walking past them looking hungrily into their windows, that someday, maybe, I’ll be carrying a real purse and wearing heels like a grown-up lady instead of walking down Fifth Avenue in Doc Marten combat boots with an apron and a corkscrew and a crumb scraper in my canvas book bag.

Someday, someday, maybe.

12
 

“But I thought you liked the other guy better, the older guy with the asthma,” Jane says to me over steaming plates of food at the upstairs Chinese place on Seventh Avenue. She’s taking me out to celebrate my shoot last night on
Kevin and Kathy
, and we’ve recklessly decided to order all our favorites. Dan wanted to come to dinner, too, but Everett’s parents had gotten them all tickets to see
Cavalleria Rusticana
and
Pagliacci
at the Metropolitan Opera.

“The opera,” I said. “How glamorous!”

“I’ve seen
Cav/Pag
before,” he said, glumly. “I’d rather come celebrate with you.”

I keep picturing how miserable Dan looked as we said good night, and the big warm hug he gave me before I left, which seemed somehow different than the one he gave Jane, and I think about how happy he is whenever we come here and the way we always tease him for stabbing at his dumplings the way he does, his giant hands useless with the chopsticks.

“We’ll bring you leftovers,” I reassured him, but he still seemed miserable.

“Franny? Hello? Where’d you go?” Jane says, stabbing a chopstick in my direction.

“Sorry. Yes. You’re right. I did like Barney Sparks better.”

“Then why did you sign with the Joe Melville shiny-face guy?”

“Because. Absolute Artists represent famous people, and they only take the best people from class. That guy James Franklin is there, and Joe represents Penelope Schlotzsky, too. I’m lucky they wanted me at all. And anyway, I booked the job they sent me on, so it wasn’t really a discussion. It was already their commission.”

I’m saying all the right things, but for some reason Jane doesn’t seem convinced. “Hmmph,” is all she says.

“It seemed like it was meant to be,” I say sagely, waving my arms in what I hope is a mystical fashion.

“But you said that Melville guy made you nervous, and kind of gave you the creeps. Is your agent supposed to give you the creeps?”

“It doesn’t matter. This is a professional relationship. It’s not show
friends
, it’s show
business
.”

“I think that’s only what people in show business who have no friends say.”

“He got me an actual job. On my first real audition.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that. So. Tell me.”

I take a gulp of wine from my glass and try to remember exactly how it felt last night to be standing on a stage, with bright lights and four giant cameras on wheels gliding smoothly by. “It’s like a dream. I was nervous, but some of it actually felt familiar. There was an audience. Sitting in a theater. In a way, it wasn’t that different from doing my high school plays. There aren’t as many people in the audience as you’d think from all the laughing you hear on television. The sets are much smaller than they look. And darker. The weirdest things made the biggest impression.”

“Like?”

“Well. They tailored everything. They knew how many inches my skirt should be from my knee. They measured it. Everything was tailored just for me, and they did it overnight. They tailored my T-shirt. My
T-shirt
. Now all my non-tailored clothes look sloppy to me, or too loose or something.” I tug at the front of my sweater and make it flap back and forth. “I mean, look, I’m positively swimming in this.”

“Looks fine to me,” says Jane, now having moved on to her dish of lemon chicken.

“Also, do you own an eyelash curler?”

“Yes. I never use it, though.”

“Well, I didn’t even know what it was. It’s a barbaric tool. Using it feels like when I’d turn my eyelids inside out on the playground in elementary school to try and impress the boys. But to have someone do it
for
you?” I say with a frown, and Jane shakes her head in sympathy. “They fixed my hair and my makeup after every take—I’d hardly moved at all but they’d fix it again anyway. They kept powdering me even if I didn’t feel sweaty—I had to scrape the foundation off when I got home. The director would set the blocking, but then Kevin, or Robert, the actor who plays Kevin, kept forgetting it, so I’d have to change mine, too, and then remember to do it the same way every time, so all the takes would match, only then he’d forget again and I’d get thrown. I was so busy trying to remember if I picked up the phone with my right hand or my left hand that I could barely focus on anything else.”

“But did it go well? Do you feel good about it?”

“I’m not sure. I think so. The audience laughed, and lots of people said I did well, but I have no idea who any of them were or if they were the ones I needed to impress. But the laughing thing was getting such a positive reaction from the audience, the writer decided to give me a line.”

Jane’s eyes go wide. “No way!”

“I know. I got really excited, too, which is so dumb when you think about it. I’ve done whole plays in summer stock and all those scenes in class, and here I was so excited about one line.” I pause and take a gulp of wine. “I got to say, ‘You’re so cute.’ So I’d do the laughing thing and sort of look at Kevin dumbly and sigh, and say ‘You’re so cute.’ ”

“Hilarious!”

“People kept telling me it was unusual for them to give a guest star more to do, sort of on the fly like that. Jimmy said Kevin doesn’t like last-minute changes, so if they think of something to try, they usually give it to Kathy.”

“What’s she like?”

“She said I was funny, and she thought it was refreshing that I wasn’t a waif like most actresses my age.”

“Sounds like someone got a little threatened.”

“That occurred to me, too,” I say, lowering my chopsticks and my voice. “But that’s crazy, don’t you think? What would she care about me for? I’m just there for one night. She’s the star of the show. Anyway, I guess I don’t know how I did. The director did everything so quickly. I was confused because I kept waiting for him to tell me things about my character’s motivation and subtext, like Stavros does in class, but he didn’t mention any of that. There was only one time when he really gave me any direction.”

“What’d he say?”

Cindy, our regular waitress, passes by and Jane gestures for another round of drinks.

“He said,” and I pause dramatically, “ ‘Don’t do the laugh before you hand Kevin the cup of coffee. Hand him the coffee,
then
do the laugh.’ ”

Jane and I are silent for a moment, pondering this wisdom.

“Huh.”

“And you know what? It worked. I got a better laugh.”

“Wow,” she says, shaking her head.

“I know. And I have no idea why.”

“So, when will it be on TV?”

“I don’t know. They don’t have a time slot yet. They have to wait for, like,
Murder She Wrote
to get canceled or something.”

“Well,
that’ll
never happen.”

“I know,” I say, and sigh.

Jane uses her chopsticks to take another scoop off the top of the still steaming pile of chicken fried rice. “It’s all so mysterious, isn’t it?” she says, and I bob my head furiously.