“Don’t worry, anyone can learn this stuff. And anyway, you won’t need to worry about it forever.” He smiled and she smiled back, understanding this as an expression of faith in her eventual earnings, in her raw talent. Deploying his large, polite vocabulary, he drafted her resignation from the reenactment show.
One Saturday morning, he arrived at her mother’s house to pack her things into his trunk. Susan was wearing a cardigan he had bought her, clean and white, and walked out of the house decisively. She had hoped for more fanfare, but Sadie did not come down. And her mother, moving things aimlessly around in the small front yard, simply held up her soiled hands in lieu of a hug. “I guess that’s it then,” she said. When Susan closed the car door behind her, she put a hand over her face and exhaled endlessly.
She did not cry until they arrived at his apartment and she saw that he had shifted the bed, emptied out a set of drawers for her clothing. In the corner of the living room was a shiny black television. He smiled his handsome, lopsided smile and she was overwhelmed.
“Why are you being so nice?” she sobbed.
“One day, I’m going to need you to be nice to me,” he said. “When you’re a star of the stage and you can have anyone in the world.”
At night, after he’d indulged her in an hour of MTV, her hand rested limp against the warmth of his back and she felt—for the first time that she could remember—carefree.
But the problem was: in Boston there were no auditions. Or at least not enough to keep her busy. In six months, she landed only asingle moisturizer commercial. She wasn’t right for anything. Student gigs wouldn’t have her, and the few professional troupes passed her over. Al started leaving clippings on the kitchen table: a role at Plymouth Plantation, a voiceover for an audio textbook, a radio spot for a local mortgage supplier. She could not bring herself to apply.
“How about teaching?” he suggested one day. “You’re so good with kids.”
The proposal crushed her more than she could possibly say. It was not unreasonable. She had contributed nothing to the rent. And she could see it came from his own earnest love of classrooms. He adored his students: their intelligent questions, the reflection of his efforts in their thoughts. But his casualness made her question whether he had truly believed in her success in the first place. She felt herself changing into an uncertain creature—estranged, for the first time, from her dreams.
Each day, relief arrived in familiar cymbals, those chords, the regular voices of Cedardale, USA, a disaster-prone town in middle America.
This isLife and Times.
Susan fell headfirst into the stories, a tangle of mysteries and romances, cryptic calls to a local radio station, a small-town matriarch interfering with her son’s chosen match. All sense of her failure vanished. After every show, she called Sadie to debrief. It was a way to talk without talking about themselves. She became dependent upon it. When a dentist appointment caused her to miss a critical episode, she spent the evening despondent, mushing her lobster bisque at the Seaport restaurant where Al brought her for dinner.
“Explain it to me,” Al said. “It’s just so melodramatic.”
“You’re dismissing it because of the packaging.”
“And the stories.”
“Okay, but—every day you just never know what you’re going to see. People are always ascending and descending. No one’s position in life is fixed.”
“So it’s about social mobility?”
“No, it’s—the potential.”
“The potential to… discover a long-lost twin?”
He laughed unconvinced, and frustration welled inside her.I’m being inarticulate, she thought. But fundamentally, he did not understand the need to escape reality.
It was Sadie who saw the casting call at the back of a fan magazine. “If you don’t go for it, I’ll kill you,” she said.
So, Susan sent her headshot to Los Angeles. She told herself it was an exercise, that they would never look at her, that her experience in film was limited to the moisturizer commercial. Assuming it impossible made it easier to avoid the disturbing incompatibility of her desires.
When the call came asking her to audition, it felt like a fantasy. Like that ancient dream of being chosen—at last—was coming to life. In her hand, the receiver trembled with delicious beginnings. The tentative, sensual unknown.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay out on your own?”
“Don’t look so worried.”
“I’m just saying, the homicide rate is a serious concern.”
He was pacing and she could tell something else was bothering him. For Al, the unknown was full of demons.
“Why don’t you come,” she suggested. “Be my bodyguard.”
“That’s a good idea.” He said it so gently that she felt within her a dangerous reprieve: the hope she really could have everything she wanted.
“She’s a good girl gone bad.” Susan is tipsy, radiating wonder and a terrible ecstasy on the lawn in front of the seaside hotel. “Knows the streets a little too well. Troubled. Vengeful. Wheedling secrets out of smitten johns. I just honestly can’t believe it, Al, I can’t believe they want me.”
