Someday, Someday, Maybe (39 page)

“You were eleven, right, when she—?”

I nod, but the combination of the night I’ve had already and Dan now bringing up the story of my namesake makes tears well up in my eyes. I don’t want them to fall, so I become very focused on lining up all the bobby pins on the coffee table just so, like regiments preparing for inspection.

“Well, I think it would speak to you more now. Franny, the character, is trying to be real in a world full of people who constantly
talk
about how real they are, but seem to her to be a bunch of phonies.” Dan’s head is tilted back a little, and I can see his eyes are shining the way they do when he’s talking about a filmmaker he loves. “Sort of like Franny the person, don’t you think?”

I think about how often James Franklin used the word “authentic” to describe everything from Arturo holding up the work on set to the Cuban coffee place I didn’t like very much. My chest feels tight and my breathing is shallow. I know exactly what Dan means. I nod a little but keep my head down, still perfecting my line of bobby-pin troops.

“She wants to be an actress, too—do you remember that?”

I shake my head, miserable. I’m remembering how painful it was when I read the story that first and last time, poring over it for clues, trying to find some message from my mother, something she’d left to me, some piece of her tucked into its pages. But I couldn’t find anything at all.

I steal a quick glance at Dan and he smiles back, but in a distracted way. He seems simultaneously very focused on me and entirely lost in his own world, as if it’s very important that he piece the story together properly.

“She’s in a play, remember? But then she quits. She quits acting altogether, almost because she loves it too much. It’s too important to her and she doesn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons, for anything resembling
ego
. She’s ashamed of herself for even wanting to compete, for ‘not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.’ I always loved that line.”

I nod again, but I’m sniffling now and my eyes are so full I can’t hold back anymore, and a few tears spill over. I think of how many times I’ve wanted to quit because I didn’t think I was worthy, and how guilty I felt that I wasn’t satisfied by the idea of a simple, normal life with Clark, and how many clues there are in this story my mother left to me, and how I’m only just starting to understand what they mean.

“Also, there’s the book she carries.” He nods, looking very serious. “
The Way of the Pilgrim
. Remember that? That’s actually the most beautiful part.”

“Yes, sort of. It’s that—the book is about chanting or something, right? I don’t get it.”

“Well, yes, but the mystic who’s supposed to be the author of the book that Franny is reading isn’t advocating any particular belief. He’s counseling that the repetition of a simple phrase—just the act of repetition itself—will bring enlightenment. That’s the thing that always stuck out to me—the idea that quantity
becomes
quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don’t have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice
as if
you have it. She carries the book to remind her what she’s after.” Dan pauses for a moment, his eyes resting on my brown leather Filofax on the coffee table. “You have a book like that,” he says, nodding toward it.

“
This?”
I say, picking it up, trying to imagine my worn leather Filofax as some kind of mystical book. “No. This is totally different. This just shows I haven’t accomplished anything. This, in fact,
proves
it.”

“Maybe you haven’t accomplished what you want
yet
,” Dan says. “But what that book shows is how you’ve kept filling up the pages. Quantity becomes quality by itself, like the story says. You don’t even have to believe in your success. Just keep at it, like the fictional Franny, keep filling up the pages, and something’s bound to happen.”

I’m slightly cheered by Dan’s theory, and the thought that all my days have not been wasted, but that’s not the reason for the small but unfamiliar glow rising in my chest, a happy fragment of some memory from long ago. I can almost, but not quite, feel the presence of my mother in the room. I try to pin it down, to make it last a little longer, but it’s like waking up from a dream that slips away when daylight comes. Still, I’m glad to have been warmed by it, even a little.

I’m a complete mess now; my nose is running and my head is swimming, and I realize I should probably pull myself together and survey the damage in the bathroom mirror. I attempt to stagger to my feet, but my dress is so tight that the lumpy sofa sucks me back in, and I sort of fall back onto it in defeat. This starts a new wave of tears.

“Do you need a Kleenex, Franny?” Dan asks softly, and I nod and hiccup as he gets up from the table. He’s back a moment later with a wadded-up ball of toilet paper that looks big enough to sop up an entire ocean, and a cold beer from the fridge. He stands above me patiently while I dry my eyes and blow my nose and take a sip of beer.

“Can I show you something?” he says, after my breathing has calmed down a little.

“Okay,” I say, and Dan takes my hand and helps steady me as I get up from the sofa.

He doesn’t drop my hand as he leads me across the living room floor and into our tiny kitchen, and he hesitates only briefly before continuing through the door that leads from the kitchen to his bedroom. I have to suppress a flash of annoyance as it occurs to me that Dan is trying to seduce me again, and at the worst possible time, when nothing at all makes sense and I’m upset and vulnerable. I pull my hand away.

“Look, Dan, this really isn’t the—”

“Franny, it’s all right, I’m not—just look.”

“I can’t—I want to go back to—”

“Just look,” Dan insists gently, pointing toward the window above his bed, which looks directly into our neighbor Frank’s apartment—Frank the mysterious loner, whose regimented days we sometimes use to tell the time. At first, everything looks like it always does. It must be around nine o’clock, and as usual there’s the familiar sight of the back of Frank’s head silhouetted by the glow of the television light.

“I don’t under—oh!” I inhale sharply as I see her, a woman in Frank’s apartment. She walks into the room holding two glasses of wine, which she must have poured in the kitchen we can’t see but know exists. She hands a glass to Frank and sits down next to him on the couch, so now the backs of two heads glow from the light of the television, a sight I haven’t seen once in three years.

Dan and I watch them quietly for a moment, even though they do nothing more exciting than sip from their glasses and watch TV.

“See, Franny?” Dan says with a little catch in his throat. “There’s always hope.”

30
 

Although it’s been almost six months, it feels as though time has stood still in the office of Barney Sparks. He’s wearing the same blue sport coat he had on the first time, and when he pounds his chest to help a cough escape, dust explodes like tiny fireworks in the rays of the late afternoon sun, just as it did on the day we met.

I’ve been seated for about twenty minutes now in the familiar giant chair that makes it impossible to sit up straight, and over a cup of the extremely weak coffee he poured for us both (“I’m not supposed to be having this—Mrs. Sparks would have my hide.”), I’ve managed to explain much of what’s happened since the day I first climbed the creaky stairs to his office. It all tumbled out in a rush: how I booked my first audition and signed with Joe Melville, how I got fired from the club and had to go back to catering, the movie I turned down and being dropped by the agency. I even told him about going to my first premiere and how exciting I thought it would be, but how disappointing it ultimately was—although I didn’t tell him all the reasons why that night was so painful.

“Horrible way to see a movie. All that glad-handing. I avoid them like the PLAGUE,” he agreed, shakily raising his chipped white mug to his lips for another sip.