Entr'acte (5 page)

“I don’t know,” Debbie said doubtfully. “But chances are you won’t be up for the same parts as her.”

Joyce washed and dried her face, then took her own, hypoallergenic makeup out of her purse. She applied a shade barely darker than her own skin, and a pale rose blush to her cheeks. Then she outlined her eyelids with pencil and used just a hint of mascara on her lashes.

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She reached behind her and undid the elastic keeping her hair in a braid. Her thick, honey-colored hair tumbled over Joyce’s shoulders, and she shook her head to spread it out.

“Oh, the fresh-scrubbed look. Wonderful. You’ll work a lot,”

the photographer said in a monotone when he emerged. He sounded like he was reciting a speech, and the women just looked at each other.

Joyce perched on a stool in front of a blue screen that unrolled from the wall. The screen had been fully extended so that it even went under the stool, making Joyce look as if she was floating.

The photographer put his light meter up against Joyce’s sweater, creased his brow and started moving the lights and the umbrellas that reflect them. He wired all of the lights into the flash trigger of his camera and began snapping pictures.

For some, Joyce looked back over her shoulder, a carefree smile on her face. In others, she stood with her hands on her hips as if she was playfully scolding someone; her gold and white sweater, rust-colored skirt and Topsiders with socks making her look like a preppie.

Then she sat at the man’s computer terminal, typing her resume into the system and listing all the roles she played in high school and the classes from “Muriel Pettit, noted Broadway dancer.”

“That’s my grandmother,” she shyly told Debbie.

When she started to pay by check, the photographer threw a fit and claimed she would have to wait three days until it cleared to get her photos.

Leaving Debbie behind Joyce dashed across the street, got the cash out of an automated teller machine and ran back to pay the bill.

Although they had been with him for more than three hours, the photographer had no other customers. His phone hadn’t even 40

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rung. “I’ll be by to pick these up bright and early tomorrow,”

Joyce said to him pointedly.

When they got home they took Amelia for a walk and made supper, with the trade papers spread out on the kitchen counter.

“Ingénues, that’s us,” Debbie grimaced. When Joyce wrinkled her nose in distaste, she added, “in some of these ads guys our age are referred to as juveniles. I think they’ve got it worse.”

A network soap opera was casting an “under-five,” meaning the part called for five or fewer lines. The character would be a day player, appearing only in that one episode, the ad said.

“That’s a bad sign because all the soaps have casting departments that keep files on people they’ve seen,” Debbie said.

“If they’re looking for more it could be either that they want to build up their files, or the look they’re trying to cast is so exotic they’re having trouble finding it.”

“We’re not exactly exotic-looking,” Joyce said. But she circled the ad and wrote the particulars in her daybook anyway. Most of the ads said SAG, AFTRA or Equity cards required, meaning the auditions were open only to members of those unions. It would be a long time before Joyce would qualify for membership, she knew.

One of the quickest ways to get eligibility was to be cast in a union production, earning points toward membership. But since that meant being chosen out of open, cattle-call auditions, the chances were not great.

“What’s an industrial?” Joyce asked.

“That’s usually a variety show put together to highlight a company’s products or reputation,” Deb said, again assuming her voice of experience. “They’re usually done at trade shows or conventions, and they’re not bad if you don’t mind being a dancing fabric-softener bottle or something.”

“Have you tried out for these?” Joyce asked.

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“Yea. They ask you to sing. You bring your sheet music and give it to the piano player,” Debbie said. “They like to hear the standards, Porter, Gershwin, that kind of stuff. They might ask you to dance. If they do they’ll give you the steps, light, jazzy stuff.

There’s no acting.”

Joyce wrote in the industrial audition, making a note next to it,

“I Get a Kick Out of You.” It was a favorite song of her grandmother’s, and maybe it would bring her luck.

She chose two more ads to answer, one for a local commercial and the other for what appeared to be an agent. It was hard to tell since the ad only said “looking for new faces. Placements in radio, TV and film.” Joyce might have thought it was an employment agency except it mentioned bringing a photo as well as a resume.

After a supper of spaghetti and sauce from a jar, Joyce got out the daily newspaper and searched through the help wanted ads.

“I’ve got to have something to fill my afternoons, right?” she smiled. “My chances ought to be somewhat better here, I have had two years of college. I can do a lot of things.”

But drama majors are not qualified to be secretaries, teachers or management trainees, the three biggest job categories. Joyce couldn’t apply for any nursing jobs, and nurses’ aides were paid less than some waitresses.

She was thoroughly discouraged and about to fling the paper on the floor when her eye caught a column of ads under

“Editorial.” Several publishing houses wanted proofreaders and copyeditors; no experience but a good command of English was required.

“Some of these jobs are part-time,” Joyce read out loud. “I could earn half of $28K, which I’m assuming is $14,000, a year while I try for acting jobs.”

“Not so fast,” Deb chimed in. “Those are all 9-to-5 jobs. Even if you only worked half the shift, they’d expect you there when 42

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you were supposed to be. And those are prime hours for auditions.

“What are you going to do if you get a callback, but it’s in the afternoon, when you’re supposed to be checking some budding Hemingway’s spelling? Tell them to forget it?”

“The idea is to remain flexible, I get it,” Joyce said. “I’ll be a waitress somewhere, I know I’m good at that.”

Debbie grandly slid a dime under her dish and winked at her roommate.

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A short while later a tall, thin man in a light overcoat blew into the apartment, as if he lived there and had forgotten his keys.

Debbie didn’t seem alarmed, so Joyce sat back and waited for the introductions to come. First the fellow squeezed Deb’s butt while he turned her so he could stare at Joyce.

Then he whipped off his coat and flopped into a chair with a heavy sigh and an affected manner.

“This is Ron,” Debbie said.

“I’m the best, but I’m taken,” Ron said, feeling up Debbie’s rear again.

“Ron is a jerk,” Debbie said, pulling away but smiling at them both.

Ron was an actor too, at least back in his hometown. Joyce discerned by his accent that was somewhere in the South. He hadn’t had much more success than Debbie, but Ron had cast himself in the role of aspiring actor, and he delighted in playing himself, Joyce discovered.

He insisted on reading a scene with her, and Joyce cringed inside. This kind of self-absorbed person would need to be the center of attention, she thought. Not the kind of partner you want for a cold reading.

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He rejected most of her suggestions for material. “Streetcar’?

That’s practically a cliché. Nothing left in it because everybody reads it,” Ron proclaimed.

They settled on Christopher Hampton’s play “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” because there were two copies in the apartment.

Ron was the manipulative Valmont and Joyce took the role of the Marquise. Amelia made several unscripted appearances as the pet of the salon, and Debbie was their appreciative audience, perched on the couch with a bag of Doritos.

Joyce had only seen the movie version, but felt that the key to her role was subtlety and an almost eerie inner calm. Ron was all over the place, full of broad flourishes and hammy asides. He badly wanted to do the duel scene, but the women wouldn’t go along with him.

Debbie sat transfixed while the two read all of their characters’

speeches. When Joyce had said her last line, “In the end, all there is is the game,” Debbie didn’t applaud or call out.

“Ohhhh…You radiate evil,” she said after a moment, in the context of the play a glowing review. Ron started to preen until he saw that Debbie was talking to Joyce.

He sulked for a little while, but Deb massaged his shoulders and fussed over him. Ron brightened when Joyce asked him for tips on how to audition; he missed her wink to Debbie.

“When you’re reading, ignore the stage directions,” he said.

“They are what the playwright saw in his mind, but you are free—

encouraged—to find the character in your mind,” he said.

“The obvious ones, like “she walked out,’ of course you follow. But stuff like “she whispered” or “she was upset’, those are up to you.”

Joyce nodded, interested in spite of herself.

“In Michael Shurtleff’s book he says to ignore transitions, and I think he’s right,” Ron continued.

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The women smiled again—Shurtleff was a famed casting director. Joyce wondered what he would think to know a self-absorbed novice agreed with him.

“In life, we don’t stop to show how we got from emotion A to emotion B, we just do it,” Ron said. “There’s no need to show the audience a transition, and it feels false.”

“Another thing…”

Joyce felt like she should be taking notes. Ron was really on a roll now, back at center stage where he felt most comfortable.

“If you lose your place, don’t stop. Just keep going or fumble around until you get back on track. Asking to start over drives them crazy.

“Only actors stare each other in the eyes when they’re speaking to each other. Lose that; it’s false.”

Joyce nodded again.

“Talking about truth, it’s no good if it’s boring. Sometimes getting at the truth of a scene isn’t enough. And avoid shortcuts.

As Shurtleff says, chewing gum is not creating a character.

“Remember that you’re reading to show them who you are, not how well you can read. React on the line, not in the pauses in between. Know why?”

“Because it isn’t the way people react,” Joyce said. “It sounds fake.”

“Right!” Ron said, delighted with his pupil. A few minutes later, having kissed both women on their foreheads, he was gone.

“Wow!” Joyce said.

“I know exactly how you mean that,” Debbie laughed. “What scares me is: are we all like that?”

Joyce undressed and got into bed, feeling that her first day in the city had been a success and tomorrow would be even better.

She heard the phone ring, and Debbie speaking softly. Then she heard a knock on her door. “Phone for you,” Deb said.

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“It must be my parents. Professor Collins must have told them how to reach me,” Joyce said. “I guess I should have called them sooner. It’s late and they’re probably worried they haven’t heard from me.”

“It’s a guy,” Debbie said.

It wasn’t until Joyce had taken the receiver and heard his voice that she thought of Doug.

“I’m at the bus terminal, Port Authority. It’s on Eighth Avenue,” he said. “Can you come and get me? We have to talk.”

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Doug was waiting in a section of the huge terminal where coin-operated television sets were bolted to hard-plastic armchairs.

As she came up behind him, Joyce saw that he was watching one of those public affairs shows where some talking head tries to explain an obscure government regulation.

Flopped in other chairs and resting against the support columns or along the wall were a number of the city’s homeless.

Their possessions were in tattered shopping bags and most of them wore several shirts, even though it was late spring.

A policeman came along and almost apologetically roused the ones who had fallen asleep with their legs stretched out into the corridor.

But while none of the homeless was paying the slightest attention to Doug, he sat rigid in his seat, scanning them furtively from behind the TV console.

Joyce groaned as she saw the suitcase on the seat next to him: this was not planned as a brief visit.

“Doug,” she said flatly. “Let’s go. I have a long day tomorrow and I have to get some sleep.”

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“Is that any way to say hello after I came all this way?” he asked petulantly. Doug squirted out from behind the TV console, and wrapped his arms around Joyce.

“We can talk about that at home, sometime,” she said, self-conscious from the stares of the few straggling travelers and the nighttime population of the terminal.

Doug introduced himself to Debbie, pumping her arm in an enthusiastic handshake. “Are you a dental student?” she innocently asked him, as they walked to the exit. Doug just looked confused and Joyce pretended to have something caught in her throat to disguise her giggles.

“Your parents told me how to reach you,” he said, while Debbie walked down the block to get the car. The girls had gone out to meet Doug with just jeans and tops pulled over their nightclothes, and Joyce shivered in the cool air.

“What are you doing here, Doug? I thought we understood each other,” Joyce said as they piled into the VW Bug for the ride downtown. “I’m trying to get organized myself, get started in my career; I don’t have time for this.”

Doug sat with his suitcase on his lap and admitted that he hoped to change her mind and “look out for you, at least in the beginning, until you get settled.”

It took a little prying but it soon came out that Joyce’s father had encouraged Doug to pursue his daughter to New York, and coincidentally to see how she was doing and report back.

This enraged Joyce. “What makes you think you can stay with us, anyway? Who the hell do you think you are?”