Postcards From Last Summer (33 page)

The cab dropped me in the driveway of Elle's house and I meandered around to the rose arbor, having spotted some activity by the pool. The Long Island Railroad had been right on schedule, and yet it had felt like one of the longest trips of my life as I'd kept replaying this morning's appointment with Jorge throughout the entire ride.

Summer hours—I could have actually stayed in the Hamptons last night—but I'd dutifully scuttled into the office since today had been the only time the publisher could fit me into his busy schedule. And all for what? Rejection.

“Lindsay! Yeah!” Elle sprang up with a clear plastic tube of water, checking the chemical balance in the hot tub. “You're here! Let the Labor Day weekend festivities officially begin!”

Darcy smiled up at me from the shallow section of the pool, where she was swirling Maisy around in a floating chair. “You look like you had a rough day.”

“Well, I have good news and bad news. Which one do you want first?”

“Bring on the bad.” Darcy motioned her closer. “Let's get it over with.”

“Jorge rejected my romance proposal. He was very kind about it, but apparently it's a lifeless piece of crap. He said I got all the mechanics right, the format down, but the writing lacked freshness and spontaneity.”
At least I didn't break any of Allessandra's rules,
I'd wanted to tell Jorge as my soul sank in disappointment. I'd worked most of the summer on that proposal and staked my hopes on getting it published. Motivated by visions of success—Lindsay McCorkle, published author—and dollar signs dancing before my eyes, I'd turned down party invites and dinner dates to stay at my computer, pushing into my story.

Ironically, I'd even lost my boyfriend over this romance novel, although I acknowledged that Zack's own compulsions also contributed to our drifting apart. The man was like a shark, compelled to keep moving, running, pumping, climbing. When I needed my lunch hour at work to write and had to cancel my gym date with Zack, he'd gotten a little too personal. “Don't think those abs are going to stay tight sitting at a desk,” he told me. “And that ass—cute though it is—it's very likely to turn to flab in a matter of weeks.”

Painful words, especially for a former fatty like myself, but I'd taken the high road, deciding that obsessive exercise compulsion was Zack's problem, something I had tried to help him with. One weekend in August, when I'd stayed in the city to spend some time with him, I'd waylaid him to Central Park, suggesting a quiet walk up past Strawberry Fields to the boat pond. Even though we could have clocked it in a few miles, Zack seemed undone by the word “quiet.” “Don't you ever want some quiet space in your day?” I'd asked him. “Just a moment or two to experience some peace in your life?” He'd shaken my arm off. “What are you, the Dalai Lama? If I need quiet I'll shove some earplugs in. I like noise, stimulation, action.” “What about introspection?” I'd asked. “I don't go for that touchy-feely crap. Now, if we run this path, we can probably make it to the reservoir and back in thirty minutes. Ready?”

Zack ended up running alone that day, and we hadn't bothered to call each other since. I had been relieved to break free of him so easily and had turned all my attention and energy toward my romance novel, the story of a very proper editor (who did not eat tuna sandwiches at her desk) who, against her will, falls for a sanitation worker, a hard-core Yankees fan New Yorker who is also a secret millionaire because his grandfather invented a sorting device for recycling.

“That must be a bummer,” Darcy said as I sat down on a lounge chair by the pool and kicked off my sandals. “And you put so much time into it.”

“You know,” Elle hurried over, shaking the tube of pool water, “you could send it around to other publishers. Maybe Uncle Jorge is wrong.”

I recalled Jorge's comment that had cut me the most: “I sensed that your heart just wasn't in it,” he'd said, sliding the clipped pages across his desk. “It's sort of a paint-by-numbers as opposed to a work of art.”

His words had stung, probably because I acknowledged their truth. Although I'd vested quite a bit in the success of my work, I hadn't squeezed any of myself into the story. How could I, when the characters had to be so perfect, so neatly drawn so that they could fit into their formulaic capsules like those tiny dolls you bought from twenty-five-cent gumball machines at the supermarket?

“Actually, I think Jorge is right.” I let out a breath. “It just about kills me to admit it, but I don't care about those creaky characters, that prissy editor and the millionaire trash slinger. I could care less about the story; I just wanted to have something I wrote published. You know, the way you want someone to peek into your life and discover you have this amazing hidden talent?”

Darcy hung low in the water, smiling as Maisy blew bubbles. “That's the fantasy. The reality is that you have to scrape every ounce of yourself together and put it out there and hope for the best. At least, that's the way acting is.”

“But wait—what's the good news?” Elle asked.

I laughed as I pushed my sunglasses onto my head. “Apparently, my romance was so godawful that Jorge realized Windswept Island is not well suited to my editorial sensibilities. He's moving me to a new imprint next week—mysteries. Maybe not as lucrative for the company, but I am thrilled to get a shot at editing mysteries and relieved to be away from Tuna Breath Beckett.”

“Ha! You've been liberated!” Elle said.

“I just might enjoy going to work next week.”

“Speak for yourself. I'm starting on the crime show Tuesday—
Truth and Justice.
I feel like I have to take it since Isabel pushed so hard to get me another production job, but I'm not looking forward to it. Cops and crime scenes are a far cry from the gentle creatures of
Woodchuck Village
, and I hear the E.P. is even an odder egg than Isabel.”

“Who, you must admit, was surprisingly judicious in the end,” Darcy said.

Elle wrinkled her nose. “Do you think?”

“Oh, cut her a break!” Darcy splashed water at Elle, who danced out of range. “I was working there this week when Isabel gave a speech to the whole staff,” Darcy told me. “All this rationalization about how things happen when people work together in close quarters, and that she hates to lose Elle. She was totally on Elle's side, but Ricardo gave her an ultimatum, and she couldn't do
Woodchuck Village
without her star beaver. But she promised to give Elle a good recommendation and look—already she's got this.”

“Judd Siegel is his name,” Elle said as she lifted the skimming pole from its hooks. “He's got a reputation for devouring young production associates and spitting them out. I heard he went through three interns in one week.”

“He'll get more than a mouthful with you,” I teased. “Come on, Elle! You've never been afraid of anyone before.”

“I'm not afraid. Just disappointed.”

“I'm sorry about you and Ricardo.” I shielded my eyes to shoot her a sympathetic pout. “Really. I know you had a lot of hope for that relationship.”

“I just can't believe he snapped like that,” Elle said. “He went crazy.”

“Better to know that now than down the road,” Darcy said.

“And maybe this whole experience made you a little more aware of the way you try to control things,” I said gently. “The way you push, hard and fast, in your eagerness to pull everyone together and create a family.”

“I do that?” Elle paused, the skimmer in midair. “Tell me more, Dr. Lindsay.”

“Nothing more to tell, except I'm guessing that the worst part of the breakup with Ricardo is having to leave
Woodchuck Village
. The bright, cozy set, the warm, sweet storylines, the people and the positive attitudes there—all combined, I think it became a second home for you. Your TV family. It's got to be hard to say good-bye.”

“Yeah.” Elle sat on the edge of the pool and plunged the skimmer down to the bottom. “Everything you're saying, a lot of it's valid, and it makes me so mad at Ricardo, that he would pull a power play to take away one of the things I love, that show.”

“He's probably hurting, too,” I said, “but that probably doesn't help you much, does it?”

Elle stood up, extracting the skimmer from the water, hand over hand. “I'd like to see him get his fat beaver tail caught in a paper shredder.” She looked up, her green eyes full of anger. “Does that make me a bad person?”

Darcy and I laughed. “I don't think so,” I said as Darcy coasted Maisy toward the steps and out of the pool.

“It's not going to be the same there without you,” Darcy said. “I know I'm going to feel a little funny going in to do the Delilah voice-overs, standing right next to Ricardo, that traitor.”

“He'll be a gentleman to you, I'm sure,” Elle said. “But give me a week or two to get my bearings and I'll see what parts are being cast on the crime show. Milo wants to jump ship, too, and he already has a buddy working in the shop on
Truth and Justice.
Just wait and see, in a couple of months we'll all be working together again.”

Bundling Maisy into a fluffy towel, Darcy held her close and rubbed noses. “That's your aunt Elle—the lucky charm.”

W
hen Tara arrived a few minutes later with a surprising tale of the demonstration she'd encountered, Darcy sat back with her towel-bundled baby in her arms and tried to soak it all in—the sweating people, their watchful eyes locked on Tara in her mother's BMW, and John Sharkey at the heart of it all, stoking them up, lauding their cause.

When Tara's story was done, she and Lindsay went inside to change into swimsuits while Elle went to mix up a batch of lemonade twisters.

Hugging her daughter, who now wailed as if she had just seen the ending of
Beaches
for the first time, Darcy recalled sitting by the pool around this time last year, moping about losing this house, worried about Kevin's addictions, stunned from missing her last semester of school and being kicked out of the local country club.

And she'd thought she'd had big problems.

As Maisy latched onto a nipple and settled down, Darcy sighed and settled into the chair. She'd leaped a few obstacles this year, with the help of her friends.

Adversity is the first path to truth.
She recalled the quote, Lord Byron, from some reading she'd been assigned at Bennington. So much had changed for Darcy and her friends over this last year, and she had no doubt their lives would be transformed again and again, just as the beach eroded and reformed with the shifting tides.

What would they all be up to next year? No predicting that, but Darcy was grateful to have these good friends. During this time when her life revolved around Maisy's hunger cries and diaper changes, she felt fortunate to have friends who brought flashes of their lives to her, even if just to complain and commiserate.

“Okay, Maisy, now we're going to go for a walk outside.” Darcy tucked the baby into the perambulator—“the Rolls Royce of carriages,” Mrs. Mick insisted—putting her on her tummy since she seemed ready for a nap. “First we're going under the rose arbor. Can you smell the roses?” Darcy's voice was not the high-pitched tone of “baby talk,” but gentle and soothing. Or so she hoped. Ever since Mary Grace had convinced her to talk to the baby she found herself blabbering on about absolutely nothing—the color of the sky, the taste of fresh raspberries, refreshing relief of plunging into the pool on a hot summer day.

“The ones in the arbor look like they're just about to bloom,” Darcy said, smoothing the back of Maisy's downy blond head. “Any day now, pumpkin. Just be patient. And when they open up, you'll see all these tiny explosions of color. Oh, look! That one there is beginning to bloom.”

Darcy felt a stirring in the carriage. As if on cue, Maisy lifted her upper body with her arms and flung herself over, her eyes brightly glimmering at Darcy.

“You rolled over!” Darcy gasped. “Your first time!” She jostled the baby's tummy and tugged on the ruffles over her padded bottom as Maisy responded to her delight with a wet, gummy, baby smile.

Darcy was all smiles herself, face-to-face with the most wondrous creation on the planet.

Summer 2003

I
t was not a good day for an audition.

New York City was embroiled in a fit of early summer humidity, making its citizens that much more prickly. Drivers were quick to hit horns, pedestrians ducked through building lobbies to absorb a few seconds of relief, and the stench of a million bad days snaked up from the street in rotten heat waves.

Darcy felt something pooling in the hollows under her eyes and suspected it was her makeup. Her hair had frizzed and lost its curl the minute she left the closeted coolness of the Little Red Schoolhouse Day Care Center, where she'd left a slightly disgruntled Maisy making a collage of buttons for Grandma Mick's refrigerator. Four-year-old Maisy had resigned herself to serving time at the Red Schoolhouse, though this time of year she preferred to be barefoot and sand-caked, having her run of Elle's house in the Hamptons. The kid had a point, but Darcy tried to explain that sometimes choices were out of your hands . . . like the decision to hold an audition for this low-budget film on the hottest June day New York had encountered in decades.

The address posted in
Backstage
magazine was fronted by a dingy entrance on Forty-seventh with stick-on numbers that seemed to be slipping down the facade. Inside, down a narrow hallway she found the usual scramble of disorganized boredom of an open call: actors waiting their turn, tense and frustrated, a table of sign-in sheets and forms, someone arguing with one of the casting people, and the ubiquitous assistant with her clipboard.

As Darcy filled out the form for the role of “midtwenties, white female,” she wondered if the film's director, Noah Storm, would be sitting on the panel inside. Two years earlier, his dark comedy about a large family of children who prop their dead grandmother in the attic and proceed to raise themselves had caused a buzz at Sundance. Despite mixed reviews when the film opened,
Bad Children
had become a cult favorite on video, and Noah Storm, a scrawny Jewish kid from the Bronx, was now a “name.”

“It's still a low-budget film,” Darcy had pointed out when Elle raved about the up-and-coming Noah Storm. “I doubt it pays much,” she'd said, tossing the
Backstage
into the paper recycling bin of their Hell's Kitchen apartment. After Elle's breakup with the Beaver, she'd realized she needed a place to hang her hat in Manhattan, and Darcy had already been searching out reasonable apartments near the theater district, since she'd been getting a few minor roles in Broadway shows. When Darcy found a rambling three-bedroom over a delicatessen that was a great deal, she and Elle decided to take it.

“Stop making excuses and just go to the audition,” Elle had insisted, plucking the ad from the bin and handing it back to Darcy. “It's great exposure, and unless you're Nathan Lane, film work is the way to go. You perform once on camera and people all over the world can see you. That's gotta beat dragging your butt to the theater every night at five.”

“I like the stage work,” Darcy said. The nervous excitement when the house lights went down and the curtain rose, the ringing energy of a dozen actors quickly taking their places onstage, the satisfaction of laughter or applause when a scene hit its mark. “The only drawback is, it keeps me in the city.” Granted, it also kept Maisy up late so Mommy could tuck her in at night, but it didn't matter since they were both able to sleep in each morning. In a year or two, when Maisy started school, late nights would be a different story.

“Just audition and see what happens,” Elle bellowed in typical overbearing Elle fashion.

Thus Darcy was here in this dank basement, following the casting assistant down the hall, unable to hear well as she told Darcy exactly who would be sitting at the table, but then the assistant was mumbling and facing the wall.

“Excuse me, who did you say?” Darcy asked as she wiped away the beads of sweat and makeup under her eyes. No time for a compact or a bathroom break.

“The casting director Trish Sanchez, who's my boss, the director, and the British actor Bancroft Hughes, who'll be playing the leading role in this film.” The assistant wiped one palm on her shorts.

Darcy didn't know who Bancroft Hughes was, but she didn't want to say that. “And they'll give me instructions inside?”

“Just do your best and follow instructions, okay?” the girl snapped, pulling the collar of her sleeveless blouse away from her neck.

Darcy felt her own white lace camisole top sticking to her midriff, though it was a little cooler here on this underground level. Still, Darcy would rather be out of the city, walking along the beach, and she felt sure everyone stuck in this basement audition was blistering with discomfort.

The previous candidate, a middle-aged man with sweat beading on his dark brown skin, emerged from the room, Darcy's cue to enter.

“Bring me your paperwork and I'll give you sides,” the woman called. Darcy closed the door and crossed to the woman, presumably Trish, who seemed miserable under a huge black smock speckled with red dots. Darcy couldn't be sure if she was painfully large or pregnant or both, but either way she felt for the woman, who was obviously suffering in the heat. She recognized Noah Storm sitting next to Trish from newspaper photos, and the classically handsome man to his left seemed vaguely familiar.

“Would you please read the role of Nia,” Trish instructed, handing her two pages of dialogue.

Darcy frowned down at the papers in her hands. “Any tips? Would you like me to play it warm or sarcastic? For comedy or drama?”

“We want you to read it cold,” Noah Storm said, as if it were a challenge. “And I'm getting sick of fielding all these questions, aren't you?” He swung toward Trish. “Who's prepping these people, anyway?”

“They're being told what we expect,” Trish assured him.

“That's not true.” Darcy shook her head, realizing it was probably a mistake to point out the casting crew's failure, but from the lackluster interest of this panel she was fairly sure she wasn't getting a part anyway. “The instructions aren't too clear out there, but I'll do my best.”

“Go talk to them, would you?” Noah groaned. With a heavy breath, Trish moved to the door, while the British guy, whom Darcy recognized from small parts on TV and film, seemed to be programming things into a PalmPilot.

Although Darcy knew she should use this time to study the part finally in front of her, the words were a jumble when she looked down. Instead, she smiled awkwardly at Noah Storm, a beanpole of a man, wiry and gaunt. He could have been a soccer player except for his exquisite eyeware, thin rectangles with luminescent frames. Something about him shrieked intensity—his high, chiseled cheeks or his stark gray eyes. Or maybe it was his impatience.

“Let's just go on without her, so we don't waste time,” he told Darcy. “We're evaluating your raw qualities, not interpretation.”

“I see.” Darcy took a deep breath, knowing that it was the death knell to read without the casting director present. “Okay, then . . .” She proceeded to read the monologue, a woman explaining her disappointment with men by describing one failed relationship after another. Just as she finished the two pages, Trish returned and settled back into her chair.

“Would you like to hear something else?” she asked, trying to read their reactions. Noah's hands were pressed to his face—good? bad? tired?—and Bancroft Hughes was smiling like a barfly hoping for her phone number.

“Thank you,” Trish said, holding out her hand for Darcy to return the pages as she turned to Noah Storm. “The important question is, where should we order lunch from?”

Darcy bit her lips together to keep from tearing into all three of them as she shot out of the room, heading for the familiar blocks of the theater district.

It was not a good day for an audition.

By the time she got home, she was making a mental list of things to pack for the train ride out to the Hamptons. She was unzipping the large duffel bag as she checked her voice mail—one beep and a woman's voice, polished and smooth.

It was Trish Sanchez. “The film is called
Life After iPod,”
her voice said, oozing restrained annoyance. “And we'd like to messenger a script over right away. You're our Nia.”