Spur of the Moment (29 page)

49

More Surprises

A
na was at the office, working late as usual. She called home to check the messages before she left for the theater. “You. Have. One. New. Message. Message. Sent. At. 1:42
P.M
., ‘Hi, my name is Alicia Hestler from the Luna Agency and I'm looking for Ramiro Martinez.' ” Alicia Hestler, Alicia Hestler, why did that name sound so familiar? “I've tried getting a hold of you through email, but I haven't had any luck so I thought I'd give you a call. Ramiro, I loved
Staring at the Sun
and I very much want to represent you. I have some editors in mind who I really think will love it. Give me a call at. . . .”

Ana sprung out of her chair and screamed. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God!” Ramiro didn't have a cell phone and he was probably on his way to the theater now. Maybe she could call Marin and have her tell . . . No, it would be better to tell him in person.

Ana grabbed her purse, turned her computer off without shutting down properly, dashed to the hall where she waited impatiently for the elevator to arrive, then sprinted out to her car. She drove to the theater with reckless abandon, nearly hyperventilating with excitement.

Ramiro wasn't at the theater yet when she got there. She was about to explode with excitement. Damn him for being late!

She quickly changed and when she exited the dressing room, she saw him talking to Nick.

“Ramiro, I need to talk to you. It's very important.” She pulled him away from Nick when Ramiro was in the middle of a sentence. She didn't care. At this moment, she was not a woman to be trifled with. “You have to hear something.” She dialed their home voicemail on her cell phone and gave him the phone.

“I don't understand,” he said, after he'd clicked the phone off.

“A couple of months ago, I sent out queries to agents to see if they wanted to read
Staring into the Sun.
Three did. So I mailed it out. Alicia was the first person who got back to me. You. Us. She read it and wants to represent you.” He didn't say anything as he tried to absorb this. “Don't you get it? Somebody in the industry thinks your book is good enough to sell. She's going to spend time trying to sell your book because she thinks she can make money off your talent. She thinks you can really write.”

“Huh.”

“Can I tell everybody else?”

“But what if she can't sell it . . .”

“That's not even the important thing. The important thing is that you're a real writer with an agent. An agent for god's sake!”

“I guess . . . Just these guys. Nobody else.”

“Everyone! May I have your attention please! Our good friend Ramiro Martinez has written a beautiful novel, and today a literary agent called and said she'd like to represent him.”

“A novel?”

“You wrote a novel?”

“I read it a couple months ago and it blew my mind,” Ana continued. “Ramiro didn't think it was good enough, of course, so I took it upon myself to market it, and an agent wants to represent him. A literary agent. A real one. In New York!”

There were the inevitable shouts and hugs and handshakes. They didn't spend a single moment of the forty-five minutes before the show they were supposed to spend warming up, warming up. There were many questions—like how many millions would he make—but few answers. Ana had only read about getting an agent; she didn't know anything else about the publishing business.

Chelsey: “How long will it take before the agent sells it?”

Ana: “I don't know.”

Jason: “When will it be in bookstores?”

Ana: “I don't know.”

Scott: “Will you go on a book tour?”

Ramiro: “I don't know.”

When the theater opened, Jason left to join Nick in the audience, and the other five ran backstage.

As they waited for the theater to fill in, all of Ana's excitement for Ramiro disappeared. Out of nowhere she started to feel a cold dull ache in her chest. She knew this feeling of anxiety well, she just didn't know why it was hitting her now.

Ana didn't understand how her feelings could surge and plunge in seconds flat. Was everyone as moody and emotional as she was, or had all her training as an actor to be in constant touch with her emotions made her insanely unbalanced?

Shake it off, shake it off,
she told herself.
Why am I feeling like this? Maybe because Ramiro is on his way to being published? Marin is on a TV series? And where am I? Left behind.

Ana felt suddenly adrift. Since she and Scott had gotten together, she hadn't focused much on how she was going to accomplish her dreams. For her New Year's resolutions, she'd vowed to lose weight, work out more, and get more sleep. She hadn't put a single thing on there about her career. Maybe she'd been so career-driven before she and Scott got together because she'd had nothing else to spend her free time doing. Or maybe since the show, she knew she could work her ass off and still get nowhere.

It wasn't too late to amend her resolutions. She would write more comedy, practice stand-up, maybe even take some voice and acting lessons....

It was her cue to run on stage and be introduced along with the other performers. For the next several scenes, she was able to stop thinking about her career and her future, but the uneasy feeling didn't subside.

Toward the end of the show, Ana was beginning to feel physically and mentally tired from all that was expected on stage. Then when Scott, the emcee for the night, called out that he needed two actors, it was her and Marin's turn to get onstage. Scott turned to the audience. “What is the relationship between these two women?”

“Sisters!” was the first thing he heard.

“Ana and Marin, you're sisters. Actors begin!” He ran offstage.

“You're just jealous,” was the first thing Marin said. It took Ana aback. If that was the first thing Marin had thought, Ana must not be doing a good job masking her real-life jealousy. Ana felt suddenly vulnerable.

“I am not. It's just not fair. You never work for anything and everything gets handed to you on a silver platter.”

“Oh, boo-hoo, so life's not fair, big deal, news at eleven. Anyway, it
is
fair.”

“No it's not. John was going to ask me to the prom, and then you stole him away from me.”

“Whatever. John asked me because I'm gorgeous and you're a fat ass.”

Ana inhaled sharply. She felt like Marin had reached out and slapped her. Ana hated her body enough on her own, she didn't need Marin to give her a hard time about it, too, even if this was a made up scene. Ana hated the fact that her weight gain was something so public; she wished she could hide it and deal with it on her own. She certainly didn't want it discussed on stage. “You're a boyfriend-stealing thief and you know it. Everything always goes your way.”

“Look, it's not my fault if Mrs. Parsons made me the lead in the play and not you. It's not my fault I'm bursting with natural talent.”

“You were not the most talented. You were the only one who auditioned who looked the part.”

“I can't help it if I'm naturally more talented, beautiful, and charming than you.”

And it was true: Marin was just naturally more talented, beautiful, and charming than Ana was, and always would be. There were some things that could be improved and worked on, but there was innate talent and then there was the endless legion of talentless wannabes, and some people could never crawl out of that category. Which group did Ana belong to? Who was she if she didn't have any talent? She wasn't a teacher trying to save the world or a talented painter or a gifted writer. She wasn't thin and beautiful. She wasn't a wife or mother. She wasn't good at her job, as The Weasel liked to remind her a thousand times a day. She was just a stressed out, neurotic wreck who always said the wrong thing at the wrong time, who hung around talented creative people so she could pretend she was one of them herself.

Ana had all these grandiose dreams of fame and success. Of entertaining masses of people. Of being beautiful and wealthy and loved by all. But that's all they'd ever be. Dreams. Fantasies of a different life to make the life she actually led bearable.

That's what it all came down to. The world was divided into those who dream and those who do, who take their dreams and make them real.

I can't help it if I'm naturally more talented, beautiful, and charming than you.
For six years, Ana had lived in the shadows of a woman who was simply more talented, more beautiful, more charming than she. A woman who both men and women noticed right away, gaped at, stunned by her beauty. Ana was lost in the shadows of Marin's charm and good looks, upstaged by Marin's superior comedy and acting skills. And the world was full of Marins. Who was Ana kidding, pretending she could be somebody?

“That's what you really think of me, isn't it,” Ana said quietly.

“Absolutely!”

Ana burst into tears.

Ramiro jumped on stage, holding a clipboard. “All right, your auditions for
People Who Are Richer and Prettier Than You
was excellent, but the director wants to see more action. A fight maybe. Okay, let's take it from scene two.”

Ana quickly wiped away her tears. “You are such a hussy.”

“What did you call me?”

“Face it, you're a hussy slut!”

“You bitch!” Marin pounced on Ana. They fell to the ground and starting rolling around with each other. Now that it had been declared just an audition, both Ana and Marin were able to do a better job of pushing aside their real lives and pretending they were auditioning for a part. The audience roared at the physical comedy.

“You're so fat,” Marin said, “they've created a T-shirt just for you that says, ‘Body by Pizza Hut.' ”

“Uh!” Ana yelled. She untangled herself from Marin's grasp and ran off stage. Moments later, she came back with something behind her back, a contrite expression on her face. She said in a soft voice, “All this fighting is stupid. We're sisters. We should love each other.”

Marin looked angrily away. Then she seemed to consider what Ana's “character” had said, and Marin's body language softened, until she shrugged, conceding defeat. “Yeah, I guess you're right.”

“Come here, give me a hug.”

When Marin got a little closer, Ana pulled the gallon of water they kept offstage to drink between scenes from behind her back and poured it over Marin's head. Marin jumped back and gasped.

Ramiro yelled cut. “Good work ladies. You're both hired!”

With that, Ana and Marin ran off stage.

“What the fuck was that?” Marin hissed. “You know I've got a date with Jay tonight. Fuck. My hair is ruined!”

“I'm sorry, it's just what came into my head. The audience seemed to like it . . .”

“Fuck the audience. What is going on with you?”

“Nothing. I'm sorry. It was just a scene.”

“Bullshit. You meant everything you said out there.”

“Yeah, well so did you. It's totally uncool of you to bring up my weight in front of everybody. I'm
trying
to lose weight. You don't understand what it's like. You can eat whatever you want. You have no idea how hard it is for me to maintain even this Body by Pizza Hut kind of body.”

“You know I didn't mean that.”

“If you didn't mean it, why did you say it?”

“I don't know, because I'm an actress,
pretending.
Gosh, is somebody maybe a little bit sensitive about her weight?”

“Try very sensitive. I know I've gained weight. You shouldn't judge me on something you don't know anything about. Your body is just like everything else in your life, perfect, without you ever having to do any work for it,” Ana hissed.

“You think I didn't work for that TV series? I've been acting and performing for the last ten years. I've worked my butt off to become a good actress.”

“It's not just the series, Marin. It's everything. You don't have to worry about car payments or paying back forty thousand dollars in student loans. You don't have to work a mind-numbing day job because you don't have to worry about money. You get to go spend your summers in Europe because Daddy will pay for you to go. And you're gorgeous, but did you have to do anything to get those looks? Everything has just been handed to you on a silver platter. You have a perfect life.”

“Oh, I have a perfect life, huh? Which is why my parents have
never
seen us perform and have come to visit me out here only once in the six years I've lived here. Of course Dad will pay for me to go to Europe; he'll do anything to keep me out of his hair. The Explorer, that was his way of pretending to be a good Dad instead of coming out here to visit me. Ana, you don't know how good you've got it. You're talented—a lot more talented than you know, obviously. You've got a mother who thinks you're the sun and the moon and the sky; she literally bursts with pride every time she talks about you. You're beautiful, you've got a boyfriend who loves you more than anything, you're twenty-four and you're already a manager. You've got more talent in a single fingernail than most people do in their entire bodies. I can't help it that the casting director was looking for a slim blond. It was a great experience. I'm very, very lucky, I know. This business is brutal. Directors and agents are always deciding that your looks are out of style or they think your ear isn't the right shape for the part. Whatever. You've got to build up a thicker skin if you're going to make it in this business.”