Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (5 page)

“Maybe next
time,” Betsy said when they returned to the dressing room and began changing
back into their street clothes.
  
Betsy
had her porn career.
 
She was
disappointed, but not nearly as disappointed as Roz.
 
“There’s always a next time.”

“Yeah,
maybe,” Roz said, although a part of her somehow knew that this was it for
her.
 
She was nearing her last audition.

 
But by the time they had taken off their
leotards and Roz had put back on her skirt, her tucked in sleeveless blouse,
and her heels, Greg, the stagehand, was entering the room.

“Ladies
room, Greg!” one of the other dressing ladies yelled at him.
 
He ignored her.

“Roz?
 
Bess?
 
Come with me,” he said.

The rest of
the
Next
girls looked at Roz and
Betsy enviously, but Roz and Betsy looked at each other with a sudden flash of
hope in their eyes.
 
Maybe Barry changed
his mind.

“We need to
change back into our tards?”
 
Betsy
asked.

“No,” Greg
said confidently.
 
“Come with me.”

Roz smiled,
grabbed her satchel and flung it across her shoulder, and then happily, along
with Betsy, followed Greg.
 
He led them
through a corridor that led them, not to center stage where they had expected
to go, but further backstage and then up the stairs to one of the private
rooms.
 

At the door
of the room, Greg turned and looked at them.
 
“It’s not Broadway,” he said, “but at least it’s a gig.
 
Right?
 
Break a leg!”

He left them
puzzled.

Betsy looked
at Roz.
 
“What in the world?” she asked.

But Roz knew
the answer was on the other side of that door.
 
She wasn’t answering any questions that a turn of the knob could easily
explain.
 
She therefore turned the knob,
looked at her friend as if to silently wish her good luck too, and they
nervously, excitedly, entered the private space.

When Roz
opened the door, and saw that it was none other than that dreamboat from the
audition, she became even more hopeful.
 
Was he new to Broadway?
 
Or was he
Hollywood?
 
Did he see something in them
that he could use in his own production?
 
It happened before.
 
Not to
Roz.
 
Nothing remarkable like that had
ever happened to Roz.
 
But she’d heard
about it.

And with
that hope in mind, she and Betsy gladly stayed.

Mick sat in
one of four chairs that lined the wall of the big, but otherwise empty room,
and he sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded on his lap.
 
He certainly looked the role of a Hollywood
producer, Roz thought, in his tailored suit and air of arrogance.
 
But somehow, once she entered the room, it
didn’t feel that way.

They put
their gear down against the side walk and stood in front of Mick, ready to
audition whatever he wished them to audition.
 
But his only request was that they dance.
 
Roz and Betsy both thought it was an odd
request, given that he had just seen them dancing, but they’d had far odder
auditions in their years on the circuit.
 
But as they began their freestyle dance routine, the same one they had
performed for Barry, Mick looked at Roz.
 
“Her,” he said. “Not you.”

Roz’s heart
sank.
 
Another rejection on top of a
rejection?
 
How much was she supposed to
bear!
 
Even Betsy, who hadn’t been in the
business nearly as long as she had, was besting her.
 
But then again, Betsy was white and blonde
and this was how Broadway worked.
 
It was
nothing new to Roz.
 
She just would have
appreciated not being asked to come up at all, only to be forced into yet
another humiliating disappointment ten minutes after the previous one.

She decided
not to participate in her own humiliation and decided to leave.
 
She glanced at Mick, to make sure there
hadn’t been some mistake and he wanted her too, but he wasn’t thinking about
her.
 
He was watching Betsy dance.
 
She therefore headed for the exit.
 
She could have fell down a hole she was so
embarrassed.

But then he
spoke.

“Come here,”
he said.

Roz almost
started to turn around and confidently sprout that Robert DeNiro line:
Are you talking to me
?
 
But after a dance routine that netted her yet
another turndown, and then this added rejection, she didn’t have the
energy.
  
She just turned.

Mick was
still looking at Betsy.
 
Then he looked
at her.
 
“Sit down,” he said, and
motioned toward the chair beside him.
 
“Please.”

Roz didn’t
see the point of a sit down, especially since he had already announced which one
of them he preferred to hire, but she walked over to him and sat down
anyway.
 
Not directly beside him, but one
chair over.

He turned
his big body sideways toward her, his eyes staring into hers, and he extended
his hand.
 
“I’m Mick Sinatra,” he said.

Roz smiled
and shook his hand.
 
He saw that she had
dimples when she smiled.
 
Deep dimples on
either side of her face.
 
Very sexy, he
thought.

But Roz
wasn’t trying to be sexy at all.
 
Although she did feel some kind of strange when she looked into his
eyes.
 
What she saw while she was on
stage was true: one of his eyes was indeed a lazy eye.
 
But what she didn’t see on stage was how damn
sexy it was on him.
 
His natural
eyelashes were the full, curvy kind women paid good money to plaster on, and
they elevated his lazy eye, and his regular eye as well, into that
I’m too sexy
look.
 
And the intensity of his eyes.
 
They were almost too intense.
 
She almost looked away, but felt drawn not
to.

She, instead,
continued to shake his hand, a hand that swallowed hers.
 
“I’m Rosalind,” she said.
 
“Rosalind Graham.
 
But my friends call me Roz.”

Those eyes
again.
 
Up close, Mick saw a freshness in
her eyes he’d never seen before.
 
It
wasn’t a freshness born out of a lack of experience.
 
She was no wallflower.
 
She was, he would bet, well experienced.
 
But her experience wasn’t tainted like his.
 
Her experience didn’t seem loaded with plots
and schemes and hidden agendas like the women he bothered with.
 
He saw an unburdened soul in her eyes, a
woman free to be whatever the hell she wanted to be.
 
Unlike him, she still stood a chance.
 
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Rosalind,” he
said.

Roz didn’t
realize her hand was still grasping his until he withdrew it.
 
She usually had to force her hand from the
man’s hand, but this man had to force his hand from hers.
 
She wanted to die.
 
Nothing was going right for her today.
 
“It’s a pleasure to meet you too,” she
said.
 
“But call me Roz.
 
My friends call me Roz.”

But Mick was
blunt.
 
“I’m not your friend yet,” he
said.
 
“You’re Rosalind to me.”

Roz looked
at him.
 
She didn’t know if she should
have been offended or amused.
 
But since
he behaved as if he didn’t care either way, she didn’t react.
 
And all conversation ceased.
 
Mick continued to watch Betsy dance, Betsy
continued to dance, and Roz continued to watch Mick.

In his
tailored suit and expensive shoes, he had the look and style of a worldly man,
a man of great sophistication.
 
But that
was only the outer shell.
 
She saw more
than that in him.
 
Not necessarily good,
wholesome more, but more.
 
And although
he projected the image of a man in complete control of himself and everything
around him, there was something about him that defied that control to Roz.
 
Like fire in a bottle, not waiting to ignite,
but to explode, he had that kind of tension about him.
 
And it was that sense, that fire in him, that
kept her from being her usual nosy self.
 
She wanted to ask him a ton of questions.
 
She wanted to know what was he auditioning
Betsy for, and why did he ask her to wait too.
 
But her instincts were telling her to stay quiet.
 
Let him lead this dance.
 
Besides, he might actually audition her
next.
 
She had to wait and see.

And she held
on, waiting patiently, until he spoke again.
 
“You’re a dancer,” he said, without taking his eyes off Betsy.

“I consider
myself an actress more than a dancer, but yeah.
 
I do whatever is required.”

“An
entertainer.”

Roz
smiled.
 
It was a big title considering
her career.
 
But half of the battle in
show business was confidence.
 
You had to
keep smiling.
 
“Right,” she said with a
great smile.

But then the
dagger.
 
“You’re not very good at it,”
Mick said, and he said it as if it were a fact, not a question.

She looked
at him.
 
“Excuse me?”

Mick didn’t
know why he was bothering with this.
 
If
he wanted sex, there were easier ways to get it than this.
 
But it wasn’t sex.
 
He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it
wasn’t just sex.
 
He continued to watch
Betsy dance.
 
“You’ve been attempting to
break into the business for a long time, no?”

Roz wanted
to show how insulted she felt.
 
Who the
hell did he think he was?
 
But she was
not the kind of person who could argue against the truth.
 
“It’s been a minute,” she said.

“Minimal
success?” He asked this and looked at her again.
 
He saw such pain in her eyes that it
afflicted him.
 
She had a story to tell,
and it wasn’t the happiest tale.
 
“Or am
I being too harsh?”

“No,” Roz
said, although the thought of her lack of success did pain her.
 
“You’re not being harsh at all.
 
Yes, I’ve had success.
 
And yes, it’s been minimal.”

Mick
appreciated her honesty as he stared into her face.
 
It was a face made remarkable, he thought,
not so much in its look, but in its structured, apple shape.
 
The features on her face, from her big, dark
brown eyes, her straight, aristocratic nose, to her full, sexy lips, were all
perfectly proportioned and complimented each other to rousing success.

If he were
to be truthful about it, he was stunned by her beauty.
 
So stunned that he did what he usually did
not do to show his interest: he assessed her.
 
He looked down, at her big breasts, at her flat stomach, at her gorgeous
legs coming down out of a short skirt.
 
When he looked back up into her wonderfully expressive eyes, his lust for
her was on full display.
 
Roz didn’t
think it was possible, but even his lazy eye was more hooded than it had
already been.
 
She looked away.
 
Because she was suddenly feeling the heat
too.

Mick didn’t
look away.
 
He continued to stare at
her.
 
“How long have you been at it?” he
asked her.

Roz
continued to look at Betsy.
 
She was no
more interested in Betsy’s moves than Mick was.
 
But just looking away from
him
proved a better distraction.
 
“Ten
years,” she said.

“That long?”

Roz
nodded.
 
“That long.”

“Tell me
about it.”

Now they
were getting somewhere.
 
Roz looked at
him.
 
“Is this a part of the audition, or
just small talk?”

Mick didn’t
deal in small talk, and he sure as hell wasn’t auditioning her. “Neither,” he
said.

Roz waited
for him to say more, but he didn’t.
 
But
that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested altogether.
 
She was.
 
“I graduated from Yale University’s School of Drama,” she said, “and
then made my way to the Big Apple certain I was going to conquer Broadway
before I was twenty-five.
 
I had a plan,
you hear me?
 
I was actually going to
conquer Broadway.”
 
Then she paused.
 
“I never dreamed it would conquer me,” she
said.

Mick felt a
jolt when she phrased it that way.
 
“Is
it as bad as that?” he asked her.

It was as
bad as that, but Roz wasn’t going to go there.

“Barry
suggested that you had some degree of success.”

Roz
nodded.
 
“I did.
 
Early on.
 
I received steady roles and earned a decent living doing what I loved to
do.
 
It was exclusively off-Broadway
success, but it paid the bills and allowed me to build a little nest egg for
that inevitable lean time that every actor eventually faces.
 
But it was all good times then.
 
I was a kid chasing her dreams and man was I
having a blast.
 
I had eight straight
years of at least some kind of acting job, even some off-off Broadway
gigs.
 
And I was teaching acting on the
side.
 
It wasn’t a dream come true life,
but it was a life.”

“What
happened?”

Roz
hesitated.
 
“By the time I turned thirty,
the gigs just dried up.
 
Casting
directors that used to know my number and would give me the heads up on roles
they thought I was tailor made to play, suddenly stopped calling.
 
I went from the
it
girl, at least in the off-Broadway sense, to a has-been almost
overnight.
 
I got old.”

Mick
frowned.
 
“Old?
 
You can’t be a day over thirty.”