When the Nines Roll Over (20 page)

I stood at the head of the table in my waitress uniform, cracking my gum and wondering if I could run to the bathroom. I decided it would be a bad idea and tried to ignore the growing pressure in my bladder.

Bucky Lefschaum winked and gave me the thumbs-up. The casting director began feeding me lines. By now I knew the scenes so well I could act them in my sleep, and sometimes did. I did not hold back. The first good sign was my first punch line. Everyone in the room started cracking up. It wasn't even a great line.

The second good sign was the executives' notepads. The network people had their yellow legal pads in front of them, their pens in hand ready to scribble comments. About ten seconds after I started, all their pens were lying on the table, the yellow pages unmarked.

I finished and everyone clapped.

“Well?” asked Bucky Lefschaum. “Did I tell you?”

“That was wonderful, June.”

“She'll play off Delilah Cotton perfectly.”

“Okay?” asked Bucky. “We have our Linda?”

My eyes were open but I was floating in the ether. All the fear and disappointment and resentment, the years of No, all the alumni magazines featuring all the supreme achievers from my class, all of it flown away from me, leaving me so light that I could not feel my body, could not feel the floor beneath my feet.

“I have a problem.”

And just like that I was back in my body, the space walk of a second before a half-remembered psychedelic trip. It was Elliot Cohen with the problem. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his palm over his stubbled jaw.

“She looks just like Cassie Whitelaw.”

“Who?” asked Bucky.

“Jeez,” said a lady executive. “She does. I didn't even notice that.”

“I'm not getting it,” said Bucky. “Who gives a crap about Cassie Whatever?”

“I do,” said Cohen. “I'm paid to give a crap. She looks just like Cassie Whitelaw from
St. James Infirmary.
”

“So what?”

“It's too confusing for our viewership. People think they're watching a different show.”

“What? Your what? Your
viewership
? What is that, Yiddish? Your fucking
viewership
?!”

Bucky Lefschaum, God bless his heart, hollered and cursed for all he was worth. I walked out of the room and kept walking until I found the women's room.

“It's terrible business,” said my agent. “I told them I'm not going to send them actors anymore if this is how they're treated. But, you know, it's a network. They know we can't hold out on them. Anyway, keep your head up, champ. Your ship will come in.”

Sam gave me an hour-long massage, kneading the tired muscles in my calves, rubbing the sore spot between my shoulders, kissing the back of my neck.

“Do you know how beautiful you are?” he asked when he was finished, his knees on either side of my belly. “Do you have any idea?”

“Sam?”

“Uh huh?”

“What if someday you wrote the perfect poem—”

“What's the perfect poem?”

“No, just say you wrote the perfect poem. Or, let's say it's a great poem. You know it's a great poem. You're absolutely sure.”

“That's the thing, though, with poetry. You're never sure.”

“But say this time you are. Okay? Hypothetically, you've written a poem, it's really good, people will be reading it in a thousand years. And you send it off and you wait and you wait and finally one day you open the mailbox and you've got a hundred letters, and each one's a form letter, and each one's saying no.”

“Right.”

“Well? What would you do?”

“I'd write another poem. Maybe I'd write a poem about getting a hundred rejection letters in one day.”

“You're stronger than me, I guess.”

“No, I'm not. Here,” he said, leaning across the bed and picking up a typed note from the nightstand. “I got one today. You want to hear it?”

I did not want to hear it but Sam had already begun.

He laughed. “When I die I'm going to find the pearly gates all locked up with a sign saying, We regret that circumstances do not allow individual comment.' ”

I reached up and pulled his curly head closer so I could kiss the newborn bald spot.

“You could always come down and keep me company,” I told him.

My agent called a week later. “I just got off the phone with Lefschaum,” he told me. “
St. James Infirmary
was canceled.”

“Yeah?”

“That means Cassie Whitelaw's off the air. That means they want you.”

“Yeah?”

So I finally got my sitcom, playing Linda McCoy at a greasy spoon called Joe's Eats. My boss's name is Mr. Lee, played by a man who really is named Mr. Lee, a famous comedian from China. I hadn't known there were famous comedians from China. When I said that to Sam he laughed at me. “Jesus Christ, June, there's a billion people in China. You don't think any of them are funny?”

I was so used to rejection that when the break finally came—the break I'd been dreaming about for years, asleep and awake—it seemed unreal. In April I was taking orders for turkey melts and fries, by September I was a regular on network television, slinging hash browns and one-liners in 6.5 million homes nationwide.

The night I signed my contracts Sam took me to Dan Tana's to celebrate. He wore a jacket and tie for the first time since I'd met him, and he combed his hair into a careful side-part. Usually when we went out Sam would drop me off at the door and then drive around for ten minutes looking for a space; on this night he turned his car over to the valet and escorted me to the maître d's station.

Once we were seated at our booth Sam ordered a bottle of good champagne, a bottle he couldn't afford, and right then I knew what was going to happen. I saw how nervous he was, playing with his fork, scratching his neck behind the tight collar, gulping down his ice water, and I knew.

After the waiter poured the champagne Sam lifted his glass and said, “To Linda McCoy. May she live a long, happy life.”

“To Linda McCoy.”

We drank, and when I lowered my glass Sam was still staring at me. I wanted to stop him, I wanted to hold his curly head to my chest and whisper how awful I was, how foul-tempered and jealous, how vain and insecure, a woman who could not be reasonably expected to make anyone happy.

Instead I said nothing, only watched him root around in his jacket pocket. It was like seeing a suicide leap from a tall building—there was so much time to watch him fall, to wonder why he jumped.

Please, Sam, I wanted to say, please don't, please look somewhere else. Because the word was coming and the word was so loud the whole restaurant must already hear it, the word was so loud it drowned out the jazz pouring from the speakers, drowned out all the drunken laughter, all the cell phone conversations, and the diners were elbowing each other and turning this way, Oh, look, look, that poor schmuck, he hasn't got a chance, doesn't he hear it?

The word was No and I was the word made flesh. I was rejection in a Mexican peasant shirt, rubbing the rim of the champagne flute to hear the glass hum. Sam pulled the ring from his pocket and started to slide forward off his ban quette. I put my hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

“Sam,” I said, and anything more seemed redundant, so I kissed his shaven jaw, stood up, and walked quickly to the door. I thought someone would grab me and force me back to the table, some officer of the law. This could not go unpunished. This was unkindness so deep I wanted to slither free of my skin, drop the husk of me on the floor of the restaurant, and run, my wet skinless feet leaving bloody prints on the sidewalk.

Nobody stopped me and nobody pulled out the flaying knives and I walked for two miles down Santa Monica Boulevard, wishing it would rain so I could at least be the drama queen, sobbing as the mascara ran down my cheeks. The truth was, though, that the farther I walked the better I felt. By the time I got to Fairfax I was singing to myself, old radio tunes and songs I made up on the spot.

Outside of Canter's Deli an old hunched-over bum held out a Styrofoam cup and jingled his change. “Help me get some dinner, miss?”

“No,” I said, forcefully.

I pushed opened the door and walked inside, past the buttery pastries stacked neatly behind glass, and the bum called after me, “Maybe on the way out?”

At my table I ordered matzoh ball soup and cheese blintzes and when the food came I devoured it, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, spearing pickles from their briny bowl. Around me the young Hollywood hopefuls jabbered away. That was the season for leopard skin and all the girls wore it: leopard-skin coats, leopard-skin pants, leopard-skin thigh-high boots, even one young flirt in a leopard-skin pillbox hat.

The ceiling at Canter's is meant to look like stained glass. It's a strange effect. What's a Jewish delicatessen doing with a fake stained-glass ceiling? But I liked it, I liked the painted branches, the painted blue sky, the soft light that spills down.

The kids around me were loud and obnoxious, howling for the waitress, stomping their boot heels, yelling out insults, jumping from table to table, exchanging phone numbers, bragging about their plans for the weekend. I liked them. They all wanted something and most of them wouldn't get it. I didn't know a single kid in the restaurant but I knew what they were: actors and musicians and writers and comedians and directors. Most of them weren't claiming those professions on their tax returns and most of them never would, but that's what they were. For a few minutes that night I liked all of them. I wanted to protect them. They seemed so young and brave, recklessly assured, so cocky and virile and American. They were all going to be stars and they were practicing their roles, confident that people were watching them, that people cared. They were optimists, and if they weren't optimists they were pretending, and they believed that somewhere a man in a suit was waiting to see their faces or hear their songs or read their scripts, and the man in the suit would nod and say, Yes. Except there aren't enough Yeses to go around.

In the middle of my reverie the girl in the leopard-skin pillbox hat slid into my booth opposite me. She leaned over the bowl of pickles and whispered, “We just want you to know that we think you're the greatest.”

I stared at her. Her skin was very pale, almost translucent. I could see the fine network of blue veins traced across her temples. She wore a necklace of paste emeralds.

“Tell me if I'm bugging you,” she said quickly. “I'm not a psycho, honest. But we were all watching you and I just had to come over. Is it okay?”

“Sure. Do you want a pickle?”

“I just had four. Why are you eating alone?”

“Well,” I said, “my boyfriend just proposed and I ran away. And I was hungry so I came in here.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, as if she'd expected that answer, as if most people at Canter's had just fled marriage proposals. “I think it's a shame, it's
criminal
, that they canceled
St. James Infirmary
. That was the best show ever.”

“Oh.
Oh
. Well, thanks. We had fun with it.”

“And I just wanted to tell you, and this is from all of us”—she pointed to her table on the other side of the room and her friends waved at me—“we all think you're really great and you shouldn't be sad because you're going to be fine. We're all big fans. Would it be okay, I know this is really cheesy, I'm sorry, but—”