Breaking a Leg Preview

BREAKING A LEG

Renald Iacovelli

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters herein to actual persons, either living or dead, is wholly coincidental. Copyright © 2006 by Renald Iacovelli All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Stone Tower Press.

Stone Tower Press New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-4116-8004-3 Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI Reality Check ............................................................ 1 Avant Garde ............................................................ 15 Cattle Call ............................................................... 30 Vita Brevis ............................................................... 37 One Last Try............................................................ 49 Behind the Scenes ................................................... 56 Million to One .......................................................... 63 Sowing the Seed ...................................................... 84 Sacrifice ................................................................... 95 Sacrifice (Continued) ............................................. 119 A Kind of Success .................................................. 141 Payoff ..................................................................... 152 Dreamsville ........................................................... 160 The Big Cue ........................................................... 175 Proof in the Pudding.............................................. 185 A Star is Born ........................................................ 193 Elective Affinities .................................................. 202 Twinkle, Twinkle ................................................... 230 Coffee ..................................................................... 240 Stardom ................................................................. 252 Serendipity, Almost ............................................... 269 Sneak Preview ....................................................... 300 Trading Up ............................................................ 306 Combat .................................................................. 323 P.O.V...................................................................... 334 Fade Out ................................................................ 355

I Reality Check

lla Dale was a naturally attractive woman; which means that, potentially, she was a beautiful one. Her fine eyes were large and clear; her mouth small; the line of her jaw strong with a hint of masculine stateliness. Her hair was a shade lighter than brown, and in the sunlight it glinted with copper highlights. She was neither fat nor skinny. Her body was a good, solid, well-shaped one, with staunchly attractive hips and thighs; and she walked with a sway that was seductive precisely because it was unconscious and unaffected. Yes, she was very pretty, with a natural beauty. The pity of it was that she seemed to do everything in her power to abase the graces nature had bestowed on her. She seldom wore makeup, and so as a matter of course her fair countenance always looked a little washed out. Her eyes, which were a soft hazel, might have been magnificent with the addition of a little mascara, and her lips never got beyond their fine slender shape for want of a tint. Her hair was cut into no flattering style but hung limply down to her shoulders. As for her good solid body, which men liked so much, it was a rare day when any of it showed, for though she did, now and then, wear short skirts (and when she wore them men could not stop looking at her fine legs), she preferred to wear denim overalls, as though she were a carpenter. Rather than a handbag, she carried about a worn canvas shoulder bag, and her shoes were almost always chunky-heeled and heavy-looking. In short, there were so many ways that Ella could have improved her appearance, and with such a minimum investment of time or money, that her indifference to this matter seemed explicable only by her inability to perceive it. This was the more ironic because she

E

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considered herself to be an artist―and yet nothing is more foreign to the aesthetic temperament than to prefer the plain to the pretty, the indifferently bland to the attractively polished. She was not from New York City―the prettiest women never are any more―but from a small town in Vermont. Her father was a lawyer there, with a practice which, in the rural setting in which he lived, was comfortable and impressive. Hers had been the childhood of an upper middle-class family. As a very young girl she had always had plenty of toys, plenty of new clothes, and the excitement of yearly family vacations; and when she got a little older, her parents had indulged her with a new car as soon as she was old enough to drive. In school she had been a good student with above-average grades, and had been active in student affairs. She had sat on any number of “student committees,” and when she had not been planning a dance, a pep rally for the football team, or helping to design a yearbook, she was receiving the attentions of the most popular boys. She had also been a member of the “Drama Club.” It was here that she had gotten her first taste of acting. The plays and vignettes put on by the Drama Club happened to coincide with her maturing sense of social order and of the adulation and material benefits that were bestowed on famous movie stars. She came to see that the most famous of them were really no prettier than she was; that acting itself was comfortably within her capacity; and that therefore she had as much of a right, or at any rate as much of a chance, of becoming as rich and famous as any of those actresses who were the darlings of the mass media. This was the basis of her ever-increasing passion for that art, though she did not know it herself; certainly, she always spoke of acting in purely ethereal and idealistic terms. Her parents had indulged her all her life, but they were less than enthusiastic in their support of her desire to become an actress. Her father especially tried to convince her of the fatuousness of basing a life, a livelihood, on the unlikely chance of success in such a field. “For every one who makes it,” he would tell her, “there are ten

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thousand who don’t. No, no, dear, you don’t want to do that. That wouldn’t be a smart thing to do.” He tried to persuade her to set her sights on more realistic goals, suggesting that she become a lawyer, like himself, or a doctor, or a teacher, or even, barring any conventional profession (for he was even willing to indulge any shortcoming of indolence in her), of waiting till she should meet the right young man—the “right” young man being, of course, either himself comfortably ensconced in a lucrative profession or coming from a family of means. But all these mature, considered, and commonsensical counsels fell on deaf ears. And it would have been odd had it been otherwise. For Ella was only twenty years old, and spirited young people at that age often have definite ideas about an ideal Purpose to life, and the conviction that their Purpose in particular is especially laudable and imperative. Besides, immaturity is necessarily optimistic about grand schemes, for it has yet to experience the abundant disappointment the world invariably has in store for it not only in great things but in small. Ella went to four years of college the way young people in some countries might fulfill the duty of military service: not wholly willingly, yet obediently and maintaining her morale with the constant thought that it would soon be over. Partly out of deference to her parents, but mostly because no “practical” academic courses interested her, and one was therefore as good as another, she majored in “finance and marketing.” She paid enough attention to her professors and assignments to get moderately good grades. But her heart was not in it. The only things she was really interested in were her drama classes and the annual play put on by the college theater. When she was not studying or acting, she was watching movies or reading plays. No sooner had she fulfilled her parents’ demand to get her education, and had gotten the degree that meant nothing to her (and not much more to prospective employers), than she asserted her majority and announced that she was going to pursue acting in New York City. “You know we don’t approve of that, Ella,” her father said.

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“I know. But it’s something I want to do. At least I want to try.” “And what are you going to live on?” “I’ll get a job. I’ll find something. That’s what I went to college for, isn’t it?” “Yes, it is; but if you get a job you’ll be expected to commit yourself to it. When are you going to act—on weekends?” “I’ll find something,” Ella said, vaguely but with determination; knowing already that she would never take a job that did not give her time to pursue her dream. Her father knew his daughter well enough to perceive that any argument he used to dissuade her from her ambition would only strengthen it, and yet he felt he would have been remiss if he did not inject some gloomily practical elements into her calculations. “You know,” he said, “your mother and I aren’t wealthy people. If you really want to go to New York, Ella, we might be able to help you a little, to help you move there and get set up; but after that, you’d be on your own. It’s not like around here, you know, where it doesn’t cost so much to live. New York’s expensive. We could help you a little—but we’re not made of money. We just don’t have it.” But the young woman had never expected her parents to underwrite her ambition, and having, like all young people, long anticipated living on her own, the last thing she expected or even wanted was to maintain those financial ties that so much more than any others characterize one’s minority and dependence. She told her father that the last thing in the world she expected from him was his “help”; and that she hardly needed it anyway. She would get along on her own, thank you. She would work, like everyone else. She would make her way, just as the rest of the world did. Why should she be any different? Even if she didn’t get an important or especially well-paying job in the business sector, she could always fall back on some clerical position: she was intelligent, literate, she could type—she could be a secretary or some sort of administrative assistant. Yes, she would always find a way to make

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a living. And so she went to New York City and added by one to the tens of thousands of actresses there. Though her parents had not supported her decision to pursue acting, they helped Ella find her first apartment. They applied to a real estate agent who found her a place on the Lower East Side, in a section that was not especially good but which (they were assured) was “up and coming,” and would in only a few years be as fashionable an address as those a dozen blocks northward. Ella’s father paid for the first six months rent, as a “gift” to his daughter. The rent was so high and the area so shabby that he was secretly certain Ella would eventually be become discouraged, come to her senses and come home, and plot out some better, more likely course of life. But in this he had forgotten the naïve pliancy of youth. In her first years in the city she worked as a secretary. Her ability to type had stood her in good stead. She worked for various businesses through temporary agencies. Her “assignments” might last for weeks or months; in one case it lasted for two years. None of these jobs ever made use of her business education, but she didn’t care because the work was not difficult, paid fairly well, and enabled her to maintain herself. Most important of all, they were not full-time positions and she was thus able to schedule auditions and be in any play she might happen to get a part in. In those first years the city was a dazzling excitement to Ella. Not least of this was owing to the many artists she came into contact with. While growing up in Vermont she had been led to believe—who knew where she had gotten such a foolish idea?—that artists were uncommon creatures, indeed a rare variation of the human species. But New York had taught her that, on the contrary, they were as common as grains of sand on a beach. They filled the city by the thousands, by the tens of thousands; in some neighborhoods even apparently outnumbering those with no such pretensions. How delightful it was to be in the midst of so many people with the larger vision required for valuing and entering the arts! She felt as though she had finally found her spiritual home. Perhaps

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people here in general weren’t so friendly as they were back home, but even this aloofness, she convinced herself, was part of the cool urban savvy by which New Yorkers protected themselves from the incessant stimulations of the city, which would otherwise overwhelm them, and which was at any rate so much more sophisticated than the open-hearted rusticity she had grown up with. She was in New York no more than five months when she got into a play put on by a small theater on 11th Avenue, on the far West side of Manhattan. It was a small role but it was a start, it introduced her to people, to the life she had yearned for; and it seemed a very exciting life indeed. In those days she had not only not minded but had actually reveled in the fact that many of the productions she acted in had inexpensive or extemporaneous trappings: that the props might be a few old metal chairs, or a crudely-painted, or rather bedaubed, background, or even some broken furniture that had been rescued from the sidewalk, where it had been left for pickup by the sanitation department. This slapdash way of doing things was for her part of the excitement of an unstructured, freespirited artistic life. But after only two years this novelty had worn thin, and she came to regard each instance of imperfect stagecraft as embarrassingly amateurish. It was about this time also that the first inkling of something “wrong” about her career began to insinuate itself into her consciousness. Month after month, year after year, play after play, it began to crystallize into something more definite and dispiriting: namely, the understanding that for all her effort and sacrifice she was no closer to reaching her goal of becoming a renowned actress than on the day she had come to the city. That dream of discovery was for her, as it is for every anonymous artist, the Holy Grail of life, the Objective toward which all efforts, dreams, and goals tend. There was always the hope that as she played some small part in an obscure theater, someone in a back row would be watching, would see her talent, and would turn out to be more than just an anonymous patron, but rather some director for a large, prestigious theater, or perhaps even a Holly-

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wood agent, and that he would come backstage, inquire after her, compliment her on her acting, and offer her some wonderful opportunity―her “big break.” But after so many years of anonymity this hope had begun to waver and collapse. She could no longer deny the evidence of her own experience, not to mention that of other actors who had been acting longer than herself in independent and small productions. And yet it was only now, when she was thirty-two years old, that other, more portentous signs of failure began to loom in her mind. She could not ignore the fact that over the preceding ten years a whole new generation of beautiful young actresses had appeared in movies, on television, or on the popular stage, even while she, and every other actor she knew, was still scrambling to get into anonymous productions staged in remote buildings and playing not to some public at large but (almost invariably) to small audiences of friends or fellow artists. This fact was especially brought home to her whenever she watched television. Every year, there they were, the new beautiful young faces starring in some new situation comedy or dramatic series. Where had they come from? How had they gotten their roles? Surely they could not have had more experience than she had, and from what she could see they certainly were not better actors than she was. Of course, over the years she had heard about how this or that now famous actor had played at this or that small theater which she herself had visited, and which had been as unassuming as the places she herself performed in. But in all those years she had never known another actor for whom that dream of recognition had come true. Moreover, she was aware that for her the chance for recognition was passing quickly. She was still young and pretty, but she would not be young and pretty for many more years, and she knew that youth and beauty were among the most important assets of an aspiring actress. This accurate sense of having no more time to waste was never more frustrating than when she went to an audition and knew (for by now she had developed a sixth sense about such things) that it would be another small-time, anonymous produc-

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tion over which she and the rest of the cast would worry and exhaust themselves for a two-week run that a month after its closing would be entirely forgotten about. She could not waste her time with that any more. The small voice within her, which had always confidently heartened her with promises of recognition, now whispered of things far less glamorous: of continued struggle to make a living, of never having quite enough, of having grossly miscalculated about the nature of show business; of having, most of all, thrown away the best and most vigorous years of her life―years which, had she pursued other, more practical goals, might at least have resulted in her financial security. For the matter of money had over the years come to consume her soul. Her father had been right about New York: it was tremendously, criminally expensive. After paying for rent, utilities, groceries, and the essentials of life, she found herself at the end of the month with a very few dollars left over. Here she was, in a city offering almost everything in the world, and yet she was unable to partake of any but a fraction of it, and that the cheapest fraction, for want of any substantial expendable income. This was just another reason for her to have come to dislike New York, and indeed she sometimes found herself longing for what several years earlier she would never have thought she would want again: a home in the country—a real home, like the one she had grown up in, surrounded with lawns and trees, and flowers in the summer. The irony of her life now was that such a dream was even more beyond her means than that of her life in the city, for if she was struggling to pay for an apartment, the expense of buying a house and an automobile (outside of a city, of course, one couldn’t get around without that), would still be more onerous. In an effort to help defray the largest of her expenses, she had had roommates. Most of them had been actresses and she had had a bad experience only with one of them, a girl from Kentucky who had, after the first two months, always found an excuse not to pay her share of the rent. After an awkward and ultimately ugly confrontation (they

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had come down to shouting at each other, to hating each other), Ella had sworn to herself that she would never have another roommate again; but her rent went up every year—her income did not keep pace with it—and she felt all but forced to find someone else. That was when she had met Grayson. They had met during an audition and had taken an instantaneous liking to each other. After some conversation, during the course of which they lamented their excessive living expenses, they proposed the possibility of moving in with each other into a “nicer” apartment than either of them then had. Grayson said she knew about a “great deal”—a two-bedroom apartment on 119th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which was just out of the reach of her single income. Ella agreed to look at it, and though it was hardly new or in an especially good neighborhood it had at least the attraction of two bedrooms. And so they started their lives together. Grayson Ritzlerhof was just two years older than Ella. She was thirty-four. Like Ella, she did not come from New York. She had been born and bred in Indiana. Nor did she have so fortunate a background. Her parents had been lower middle-class people—the working poor. Fortunately for her father, he had lived in rural America. He did not have much money; but then no one else did either; and so his slender financial circumstances did not detract from his legitimacy as a mate to the woman whom he courted. She was a local beauty, and she encouraged his advances purely on the basis of his merits as a tall, strapping, handsome man. And so they had, these two attractive people, married. A year later Grayson was born. She was a beautiful child, for beautiful children come from beautiful parents as surely as ugly children come from ugly parents. About her it could be said that whatever fate had denied her in the way of material benefits it had more than made up for with physical beauty. The features of her face were as fine as it was possible for human features to be. The cheekbones were high, the lips slender and wide, the nose straight and narrow, the eyes blue, long-lashed, and overarched with gracefully curved brows. No hair was more

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golden and no complexion could be fairer; her cheeks, especially in the winter, having about them a faint, pink blush conveying an impression of freshness and health. From her earliest years in school she had always been popular among her agemates, for children possess as well as adults the instinctual perception of human beauty, and are as attracted by it as they are repulsed by its opposite. Thus, she had never wanted for friends or envious attention, and this kind of general yearning for her—this eagerness to know and be with her—fortified her pride and sense of self-worth. It was this popularity that in part had prompted her to consider becoming an actress. As a child of eight or nine she would watch television and movies and be aware that the pretty girls were always admired, just as she was; and to her childish mind it seemed a natural progression in life for anyone who was like her to become a movie star. “I want to be an actress!” she had told her mother and father when she was ten years old. They had humored her girlish dreams. “Why not, darling?” they had told her. “Why not?” But even when she had become older—when she was a teenager and could more seriously consider her future—they did not discourage her dream. On the contrary, her parents had always been proud of her beauty, and they knew that this could not but be a great advantage to her in show business. Moreover, they knew too well the rigors of poverty and were inclined to encourage their child in the pursuit of a career that might result in great wealth. “Who knows?” her father once told his wife, when they were discussing what had turned out to be their daughter’s inveterate intention. “She might get lucky. That’s all it is, you know—luck. It could happen for her. If that’s what she wants to do, she should try it. Besides, you have to take a chance in life, especially when you’re young. When are you going to take it? When you’re old? It’s too late, then.” And so they encouraged and nurtured her enthusiasm, always speaking to her about it as though it were as much a possibility as any other livelihood. They went to her high-school plays and, sincerely, praised her performances. When she entered community college and

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majored in “Dramatic Arts,” they shared their enthusiasm over her progress in her courses; and when she graduated with a high-sounding but entirely useless Associates Degree in “Theater History,” they congratulated and fawned over her as though she had just completed her medical internship. Soon afterwards, Grayson moved to Indianapolis, some sixty miles from her hometown, to become involved in the theater there. But she was only there a year when she realized that New York was the place to be. She came to the city with a thousand dollars and a credit card, and found through a local newspaper a roommate with whom she shared her first apartment in Queens. It was a small, one-bedroom apartment in an unclean building a hundred years old. Only her general awe with the city itself enabled her to overlook this substandard housing. She often told herself that it didn’t matter how bad things were “now” anyway. Any inconveniences were just temporary—just stepping stones to be used on her way to success. Over the years she had had any number of jobs: assisting a photographer, selling cosmetics behind a counter in Macy’s, even bartending; but for the last few years she had been waiting tables at a small, fashionable, rather expensive restaurant in Soho. Even here her stunning good looks helped her. The men tipped her very well indeed. Both Ella and Grayson had the same misgivings about their acting careers, but it was Grayson whose misgivings were most insidiously and frustratingly doubtful. For all her disappointments and lack of success, Ella could still be hopeful about her future because she believed in her talent, whereas Grayson had come to believe that “talent,” at least when it came to acting, was not the first ingredient in success. In one sense it was odd that this should be so, for she had acted in many more plays than Ella had been in; she had even done a few bit parts in a soap opera—once playing the role of a reporter, and in another instance the part of a nurse. But both “roles” had amounted to no more than a few seconds of camera time, and though she had been thrilled to get the parts, in soberer retrospect she realized that such “opportunities” could give no substan-

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tial impetus to an acting career. And if nothing had come from those parts, which had at least given her national exposure, how much less likely was anything to come of acting in another obscure Manhattan-bound play? Years of adversity and disappointment had made her hardheadedly practical. “I’m never going to get anywhere with things like that,” she would tell Ella, referring to some offer she had to perform in some obscure, off-off Broadway play, the like of which she had been in fifty times before. “It’s just a waste of my time.” “But if you don’t try, nothing can ever happen,” Ella would say in return. But Grayson would shake her head. She knew that she knew better. She was often depressed―never more so than when she came home from work, exhausted and hopeless to think it would always be this way. How many more years could she wait on tables, after all? Every day, every hour of the day, she heard her biological clock ticking—the seconds of her youth and beauty, which she knew constituted so much of her acting capital, petering away. How much longer could she wait? Given the extraordinary odds against anyone making a living in the arts, the wonder is not so much that artists should so often suffer from depression as that they should ever be free of it. For it is a terribly hard thing to love and live passionately for one thing, only to have that thing ever receding from one’s reach. Grayson increasingly turned to alcohol for relief. A few drinks in the evening went a long way to ease a sense of failure. After the third glass of wine, or the second scotch on the rocks, her lack of success as an actress seemed essentially unimportant and she could begin to count—and to count with genuine appreciation—her blessings: she was young, healthy, attractive, working, etc. etc. etc.; and certainly by the fourth glass of wine, or the third scotch, she could become downright “philosophical” and believe that worldly ambition was the foolishest of all things and that it didn’t matter to her whether or not she waited on tables for the rest of her life. She would think of the plays that she had been in,

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the people she had known—all those silly or scheming or stupid people; and she would laugh to herself, thinking how ridiculous they all were, herself included for having been among them. At such times she would map out a whole new plan for her life. She would go back to school, take courses in business, and get a good-paying job in something like banking or accounting. In her personal life, she would go out more, and not to the local watering holes, where, increasingly, the crowd was getting a bit too young for her, but to better, classier places, where she was likelier to meet a man who was well-established or had a good future in front of him. Yes, everything would change, she would think, as she drank, and the room around her began to blur a little. But the next morning, with sobriety and a hangover, she had to face again unabated reality and her spirits sank. She saw clearly again how fatuous her resolutions of the night before had been. Change the course of her life now? Go to school for some business training—become an accountant, a banker, a “marketing representative”? It was too ridiculous for words. She didn’t care a fig about any of those things, and just the thought of them filled her with vague revulsion, as though she should expend the increasingly precious time left her to fulfill her one ambition in order to achieve things in which she not only had no interest but even regarded as contemptible. Like so many artists, Grayson could not get over the conviction that she was meant for better things than anything offered by the workaday world. The workaday world was a great bore. Anybody with a head on her shoulders or a heart in her chest merely tolerated it for the sake of money, and even then tried to have as little to do with it as possible in order to pursue something meaningful. What, was she now to become like the prim and proper “career women” she saw so much of in New York and whom she despised for their corporate un-stylishness and their air of self-importance because they could spend twelve hour days cooped up in an office shuffling papers sent to them by people as tedious as themselves?

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Both Ella and Grayson were examples of what happens to young people who commit themselves to an artistic life before they understand its incompatibility with the real world. They are certain that the world of art is a meritocracy—that the best will rise above their less-talented fellows and that talent, dedication, and steadfastness will in the end be recompensed with at least enough recognition to live an artistic life. And, of course, in rare instances this does happen. But in the overwhelming majority of cases it does not happen, and can not—can not because the value of recognition lies precisely in its rarity, and a commodity so valuable is bound to be closely guarded. It is shared only out of self-interest or when a freak of popularity overwhelms the forces of jealousy and envy. Most of those who have made it to the inner sanctum of fame, especially in the world of acting, have done so because their paths to it were smoothed by nepotism, or because they happened to appear before the gates just at the moment when the guards standing before it, ordinarily so vigilant and determined to exclude, were slipped by unawares. ―All of this was something that both Ella and Grayson, after years of fruitless effort and innumerable disappointments, had begun to see for themselves. Each knew from experience that she was unlikely to fulfill her dreams. Both had reached a point in life where, if they continued to think of themselves as actresses, it was merely out of a kind of inertia―because they could not and did not want to think of themselves in any other way. But each of them, in the deepest depth of her heart, was aware that it was almost too late for her, and that if “something” did not happen soon she was destined to be a failure.

II Avant Garde

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he Documentation Department of Studder Skamm Barret—one of the biggest investment banks in the world—was populated by employees who, if one had asked them what they “did,” would have mentioned almost anything other than the thing they made their living at. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them were artists of some kind or another. Most of them were actors, but there were also playwrights, painters, and musicians, not to mention those who proclaimed themselves practitioners of still arcaner arts such as calligraphy or mosaic—for which one could hardly imagine much of a market even in so diverse a place as New York City. The point was that these people would have insisted on an infinitely wide gap between what they did here in the office and what their “real” lives were like. Though from morning to night, five days a week, they typed letters, or tracked job orders, or timestamped interoffice mail, or did some equally dunderheaded and un-artistic thing, they would have dismissed it all with a wave of the hand and insisted that it all had nothing to do with who and what they really were. It was at any rate ironic that so dense a population of artists should have been found in this place, just as they are found in dozens of places like it: that they should find the means to survive in the very bowels of the corporate culture they despised and never lost an opportunity to assail. Ella had been working here as a word-processor for five years. She was still a temporary employee. The employment agency through which she had found the job had told her it was a “long-term” position, though she had never, back then, suspected just how long term it would turn out to be. One would have thought that by now she would have been asked to become a real, permanent employee;

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and in fact over the years she had been asked several times to “join the team” and so partake of company benefits, such as health insurance, paid vacations, and a retirement plan. But always she had refused. The graciousness with which she did so concealed the fact that the very offer had made her uncomfortable, but the only reason she stated was that she needed a “flexible” schedule so that she could pursue her acting career—to take off from work, on a day’s notice, in order to go on an audition; and this was something only her temporary status would enable her to do. She worked only four days a week, Monday through Thursday. As it was a busy documentation center, she was, by the end of the day, mentally exhausted from forcing her attention on a computer screen, and by the end of the fourth day she was physically exhausted as well; but at least she could then look forward to three days of glorious freedom—three days in which her thoughts could be her own, her spirit could revive, and she could go on auditions or rehearse more fully for any play she might happen to be in. She became especially friendly with one of her coworkers, Carolyn Thompson, another word-processing operator who was also an actress. Ella often sat next to her as they worked. Carolyn had come from Detroit, but had lived in New York for ten years. She was a pretty woman, a bit on the short side, with hair dyed a rather too-bright red, and who looked younger than her thirty-six years. She was currently involved with what she always referred to as an “avant-garde” production company. She had just gotten a part in a play curiously titled Fish Have No Feet, and, as she explained, the proper inquiry to make about it was not “What is it about?” so much as “What does it mean?” “Well, what does it mean, then?” Ella asked. “It means different things to different people,” Carolyn said, speaking as she typed the handwritten text on a stand beside her computer. “That’s what’s so great about it.” And she went on to speak of rather nebulous things: “man’s quest for peace in the universe,” “random character clashes in today’s urban environment,” “self-possession in the midst of technological chaos”—all very intelligent-

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sounding but unfortunately leaving something to be desired in the way of real meaning. Nor was this the first time she had felt it necessary to explain a play with so abstruse a title as Fish Have No Feet. Her hearers would take these explanations at face value, nodding often as though they understood perfectly well what she was talking about; and they were the likelier to have this respectful and impressed reaction if they were themselves artists, for then they feared that an inability to fathom such highsounding phrases might bespeak a want of artistic understanding in themselves. In order to advertise her part in Fish Have No Feet, Carolyn spent some time at work printing up cards by which to advertise the play among her fellow employees. The card displayed the name of the play in large white letters, with, below this, the sketched outline of a goggle-eyed trout. The names of the principal players, her own included, were listed at the bottom right-hand corner, while at the bottom left was the name and address of the theater. She produced about a hundred of these cards and handed them out to her coworkers. She also left a small stack in the pantry, so that people who were getting themselves a cup of coffee might pick them up. “I hope you’ll be able to make it to the play,” she told Ella. “Of course I’ll be there!” Ella said. She sounded enthusiastic, but she was not. Over the years she had gone to see, gone to “support,” a hundred such performances of friends and acquaintances, and the charm of these productions had long ago worn off for her. With rare exceptions, they never seemed to be very good, and even when they were, they did not seem so good as to justify the inconvenience of attending them; taking place, as invariably they did, in out-of-the-way and sometimes dangerous neighborhoods. But when one is an actor, one of the liabilities of having actor friends is what might be called the “Principle of Reciprocal Attendance”: they have come to see you, and so you are obliged to go and see them. Unless one is a total dolt, one comes in time to regard this principle as a ridiculous pretense for eliciting uncritical applause, since it

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goes without saying that one’s “friends” are not going to tell you after the show that the play was a bore and your performance a blot and blunder. And so Ella never received an invitation from one of her actor friends without the sense that it was an imposition. She could not help saying, “Oh, I’d love to see it!”—but would at the same time begin conjuring up plausible excuses she might give for not having shown up. And yet, as every actor knew, showing support was very important. Small theaters didn’t have budgets for glitzy newspaper ads or radio spots by which they might advertise and draw a crowd, and their actors did not have the attraction of celebrity. No, a theater company had to rely on word-of-mouth and on direct, personal invitations. The members of the cast had to ask everyone they knew to attend. Only in this way could be avoided the dreadful situation of playing to an empty house. Thus, in the weeks before her play was to open, Carolyn incessantly promoted her play. She assured everyone she knew that they would have a great time, that the theater was a cinch to get to, that there could be no real excuse not to attend, unless it were the reprehensible one of cheapness or laziness;—for she was not above a gentle intimidation. A few said outright that they would not miss her play for all the world; and they meant it. An equally small minority informed her that they had no interest in such things; and they also meant it. But most people, after listening with apparent interest to her puffing, said that it sounded very interesting and they would “try” to make it; and they did not mean it. Ella usually fell into this latter category. But how could she not go to Carolyn’s play? She worked with the woman almost every day; they sat sideby-side; they talked constantly; they were friends. She was obliged to go. The theater where Fish Have No Feet was playing was located on West 39th Street, all the way over on Twelfth Avenue, in a rather deserted area of Manhattan. An area largely of warehouses and garages, it was, even during the day, relatively quiet; but now it was a ghost town. The streets here were dark and the alleys reeked of cheap wine

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and urine. When Ella got out of the cab at the address of the theater, she felt some alarm as she looked about her. It was not a street where anyone, much less a woman, could feel safe even at so relatively early an hour as 8 PM. A couple of homeless people were sitting on the sidewalk, their backs leaning against a wall. One of them sat next to a shopping cart full of plastic bags filled with old clothes, old bottles, old food, and whatever other items he had, in his demented state of mind, regarded as valuable enough to lug about with him through the streets of New York. The other was smoking a cigarette (one wondered where he got the money for them), lifting it to his lips with filthy fingers, and inhaled the smoke only to blow it out with heaving, liquid coughs. They both watched Ella as she got out of the cab, paid the driver, and tried to ignore them. Almost at once they accosted her, putting out their hands and asking her if she had any “extra change.” Ella didn’t look at them; she acted as though she hadn’t heard them; and quickly scanned the nearby buildings for the number corresponding to that of the theater’s address. When she found it, she hurried inside. The building had probably housed a factory or goods exchange when it had been built a century before. The lobby was large, sparse, and empty except for a folding table that served as a “front desk” and some old wooden chairs set against the heavily scuffed and soiled walls. A young man was sitting here. He was about twenty-five years old. Tall, lanky, nice-looking, he had a slight beard, long hair, and wore jeans and a t-shirt stenciled with a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The bicycle on which he had come to the theater leaned against the wall behind him. “Here to see the show?” he asked, when Ella walked up to him. She nodded, yes, and he blurted out, “Great. It’s ten dollars.” On the desk before him was a small metal box, its lid open and containing various crumbled $5 and $10 bills. He collected the $10 admission charge from Ella and bade her enter the theater through the door behind him. The theater itself was a large room, the walls of which were painted black, and the ceiling of which, also black,

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was a network of wires and spotlights. At the back of the room, bleachers rose some six tiers high and provided seating for almost two hundred persons. At the front of the room a low stage had been built. It was nothing more than a large, raised rectangle of plywood, twenty feet in length and eighteen feet in depth. At the moment it upheld a few props: a couple of female mannequins, outlandishly covered with what appeared to be aluminum foil; a full-length mirror; a couple of floor-standing lamps;—an odd assemblage of things. Also, a ramp lead up to the stage from the aisle that ran alongside the bleachers. There were already about forty persons present. The audience was composed completely of young people—no one over thirty-five years of age. Ella glanced over them in order to see if she knew any of them, for it sometimes happened that she ran into people whom she had acted with; but these were all strangers to her. In the next half hour another ten persons showed up, so that, in all, the audience reached a population of fifty. The show was already a half hour behind schedule. Then the lights dimmed, a spotlight shone on the stage, and the director came out to greet the audience, who applauded his appearance. He was about twenty-eight years old, slender, casually but neatly dressed in black slacks and a light blue shirt with an open collar and sleeves folded midway onto his forearm. His hair was straight, dark, and parted on one side, and he wore a goatee perfectly trimmed. He stood before the audience with a confident, eager smile and an air of authority. “Thanks, thanks for coming!” he said. “This is our fourth night of Fish Have No Feet, and before we start I just want to thank you for making this play possible. It took a lot of effort and teamwork to get this production going. We were fortunate enough to get a really interesting review in the West Side Spectator, which you might have read. Before we start, there are a few people I’d like to introduce. I’d like to start with the playwright, Josh Krassman.” He put out a hand to the playwright, a young but heavyset man sitting in the front row. He stood up, turned to face the audience, and gave a nod at their ap-

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plause before sitting down. “This is Josh’s fourteenth play in two years. He’s probably one of the most prolific playwrights currently working in the city. I’d also like to introduce the costume designer, Nancy Packwood. Nancy,” he said, putting out a hand toward her and waving her to stand up, “c’mon, show yourself!” She did. Somewhere in her thirties, wearing glasses with outlandishly thick frames and a quirky purple and gold jacket of her own making, she dared to turn to the audience a single second before quickly resuming her seat. “She’s so shy!” the director said. A few in the audience laughed. “And finally there’s our sound person, Janet Dunkle”—and he pointed upward, toward the back of bleachers, where, in a booth there, a woman could be seen wearing headphones. She was dimly illuminated by the greenish light arising from the electronic console before her. She smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of the light applause for her sake. The director continued: “So, once again, thank you for coming by. We all hope you enjoy the show.” He walked off the stage, to another round of applause. The spotlight went out; all the lights did. For about twenty seconds the entire theater was cast into darkness. A moment of uncomfortable anticipation filled the atmosphere. Then a soft blue light suffused the stage, and the play began. Precisely what it was about would have been hard, if not impossible, to say. Certain people came out (among them, Carolyn) dressed in ragged clothes and spoke lines that had no context. Carolyn herself recited a monologue about crowded highways, air pollution, and the difficulties of commuting to work; then she stamped her feet, ran to each of the four corners of the stage and looked out with hand-visored eyes to the darkness around, before spinning around, falling to the floor with a shriek, then getting up and running off stage. Various cast members succeeded her. Some of them spoke things, some of them sang things, but they all, during or after speaking or singing, moved erratically: spinning, hopping, or (as in one instance) cart wheeling this way or that. Usually as they said their piece the other members of the cast on the stage

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held a frozen pose with an odd face, standing next to and becoming, as it were, one of the mannequins. Between these monologues or outbursts (for some of them really were no more than shouted expletives), a soundtrack was played: trumpeted fanfares blared; sweeps of tiered violins trilled; a bass drum thumped with a dolorous constancy. Then a succession of actors came out dancing a kind of ballet, and just as they reached to an intimate, quiet, and romantic culmination (one of the men gently, gently taking a wispy girl into his arms for a kiss), a scream erupted from one side of the stage and an intense spotlight blazed out onto aisle beside the bleachers. The eyes of the audience, which had grown accustomed to the dim lighting, closed against the brilliance. An old woman strapped into a motorized wheelchair came rolling down the aisle. She rolled up the ramp leading onto the stage, in the middle of which she spun her chair around a few times before stopping. She sat there with a bowed head, her gray grizzled hair looking in the spotlight like a cloudy haze around her pate. Then, slowly, she looked up. Heavily applied makeup and strategically drawn lines exaggerated her age so that she looked positively ancient, and her lips had been made up in such a way as to look like a ghastly frown. For a whole minute she merely looked out into the darkness of the audience with unblinking eyes and air of unutterable woe. Dancers appeared behind her and started dancing, or rather hopping about, in silence as though they had found themselves stepping on hot coals in a soundless vacuum. Then the old woman budged. She placed her hands on the arms of her wheelchair and rose with great effort. When she was finally standing, she took a deep breath, raised her head in an attitude of supplication, and shouted in a disturbingly pathetic old-lady voice: “What does it all mean? What does it all mean? Can someone out there tell me—what does it all mean?” She fell back into her wheelchair, as though the effort she had used in making this inquiry had divested her of her last ounce of strength, and began moving off the stage as music came up and grew in intensity and the spotlight following her dimmed.

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For the next hour scenes like this one succeeded one another. At times one of the actors did something, or said something, that evoked a bout of laughter from some of the audience, who apparently had such developed powers of understanding that they could extract meaning from the ostensibly unintelligible. Even during what seemed to be the most cacophonous, most disjointed parts of the play, the audience sat mesmerized as though every incoherent shout, unprovoked slap, and sudden jig or hop had a distinct meaning or message. Ella was a little uncomfortable to think that she was not sophisticated enough to understand what seemed to be transparent to everyone else, and so when the others laughed, she did also, and when the others sat up to watch with especial attention a particular actor, she did the same; and when the play ended—when the lights of the room came up, and all the actors appeared together for a common bow—she also clapped enthusiastically. And yet despite clapping as though she appreciated the play, she was really something more than disappointed: she was a little angry and felt as though she had been conned out of ten dollars and her time. After the house lights had gone up, and the audience filed out of the bleachers in order to congregate in the aisles and talk, those involved with the play also came out from backstage in order to mingle with the audience. Many of the actors knew many of those who had been watching them, for they had responded to invitations to see the play. When Carolyn saw Ella, she rushed over to her. “I’m so happy you’re here!” she said, giving her a hug. As though by reflex, Ella complimented Carolyn on the play. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Just great!” “Oh, thanks! You have no idea how nervous I was! I’ve been doing this play for almost a week now and I still get so nervous!” “You were fine,” Ella assured her. “Actually, I did flub a few lines,” Carolyn confided, with a rather roguish laugh. “I’m sure Jerry caught them!” “Jerry?”

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“The director. He’s such a pain in the ass! He insists on everyone speaking their lines exactly the way they’re written. He’s friends with Joshua, that’s why—you know, the playwright. And he!—he acts like every word he writes is gold.” Despite Carolyn’s apparent contempt for Jerry, the moment she saw him she called out to him in a cheerful, friendly voice, and waived him over to herself and Ella. He approached with a wide smile, having over the last few minutes reaped any number of compliments on the play, and therefore having his high opinion of himself confirmed. Carolyn introduced him to Ella. That Jerry, at his young age, was already the director of a theater would at one time have seemed very impressive to Ella. And it still would have impressed her, had the theater of which he was the director been anything substantial. But his theater was just another one of those out-of-the-way places—another converted warehouse or hastily-appointed floor of a commercial building—which none but a few actors knew about, and which was likely to disappear the moment the landlord decided to raise the rent a few dollars more per month. His air of satisfaction therefore aroused in her an amused contempt, but she gave no indication of this; she generously deferred to his unfounded sense of himself; and heeded him as attentively as she might have done someone of indisputable accomplishment. After Carolyn had introduced him to Ella, and he shook her hand, he asked if she had liked the play. “It was very interesting,” Ella said, in quick, appreciative tone of voice. “Well, if you think this one was good, wait till you see the next one.” Carolyn turned suddenly to Jerry and asked him, excitedly, “You’ve decided to do Joné’s play?” He nodded, with a knowing smile. “I think it would be good for the company,” he said. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Carolyn said. “Have you told her?” “Yep, I called her this morning. She was happy about it.”

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“Oh, it’s going to be great!” Carolyn exclaimed. “What is it about?” Ella asked. “It’s called Rolling Pin,” Jerry said. “It’s very avantgarde. And yet it’s conventional, too—wouldn’t you say?” he asked, turning to Carolyn. “There’s definitely a story line,” she said, nodding. “It’s quite unusual, actually,” Jerry continued, turning back to Ella. “It’s about this woman who has this handicap—kind of. But it’s not a physical handicap. It’s really a mental thing. You see, she won’t walk.” “She can’t walk?” Ella asked. She wasn’t sure why a play about a cripple could in itself be exciting. “Oh, no,” Jerry said, shaking his head, “she can walk. But she won’t. She refuses.” Ella shook her head. “I don’t get it.” “She’s got this idea in her head that whenever she walks someone she loves dies, or people get hurt, or earthquakes happen, or … oh, I don’t know: just terrible things. It’s like a phobia or something. So she refuses to walk.” “And so she has to roll everywhere,” Carolyn interjected. “Everywhere,” Jerry reiterated, with a decisive nod. “No matter where she goes, she has to roll there. If she goes outside, she has to roll out of her apartment. If she goes into the subway, she rolls down the steps. If she goes shopping, she rolls into the store. Everywhere. And so she gets this nickname in her neighborhood: everybody calls her ‘Rolling Pin.’” Ella laughed; she had never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. But as she did so, both Jerry and Carolyn regarded her with the strained smiles of vague disapproval—the kind of expressions one might expect to receive from having inadvertently offended one’s interlocutors by having attempted to arouse mirth at the expense of their deeply held beliefs. Ella was too couth not to notice this at once and to amend her demeanor: she stopped laughing and said rather apologetically, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know—it’s a serious thing, then?” “Well of course it is,” Jerry said, now quite serious himself.

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In an instant, Ella had sobered up completely. “It sounds interesting,” she said, hoping that by the gravity of her voice she would make up whatever esteem she had lost by her former light-heartedness. She also hoped that Jerry, in keeping with the interested tone of their conversation, would not regard her comment as a nice usage of language meant to avoid telling the lie of a clear compliment. For it seemed to Ella that such a play, such a premise, really was ridiculous and couldn’t square with any reasonable notion of drama. “We’re going to start auditions in a couple of weeks,” he said. “I need a rest after Seals—it took a lot out of me.” Even as he said these words he displayed his fatigue with a certain slump in his shoulders and an exhausted expression, as though he had been doing hard labor for sixteen hours a day. “Ella, why don’t you try for it?” Carolyn suggested. “Try for what?” “For Rolling Pin.” “You’re an actor?” Jerry asked, pleased as punch that she might be. And when Ella confirmed his hopes with a modest nod, he continued, “Would you be interested?” “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to know more about it.” “Are you in anything now?” Jerry asked. Ella shook her head, no; and hoped he wouldn’t inquire into her last performance, since she had not acted in almost a year and feared he would interpret so long a hiatus from theater as a mark of her insincerity in pursuing her art. “Then you ought to try out for it. Come to the audition. Seriously!” Ella shrugged a little and merely as a politeness responded, “Maybe I will.” One of the cast members called out for Jerry, who looked away for a moment, then turned to Ella and Carolyn and excused himself. He sailed off, shaking hands and exchanging cocktail kisses along the way. Carolyn mentioned that the cast intended to get something to eat at a late-night diner and that Ella was more

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than welcome to come along. But Ella declined, saying that she was tired and had to get home. Besides, she had to work tomorrow. When she returned to her apartment she could hear the sound of the television in the living room. It surprised her that this should be so, since it was now past one in the morning, and her roommate Grayson, at least during weeknights, rarely stayed up so late. Sure enough, there she was, sitting in the corner of the couch, clutching a pillow the way a little girl might clutch a doll, and staring, a little bleary-eyed, at the screen. “You’re still up?” Ella asked, as she entered the foyer and turned to lock the door. Grayson didn’t answer. In her pajamas, her golden hair swept back from her face and bound at the back of her head, she merely looked over to Ella and gave a halfhearted, tired smile. Ella walked over to Grayson and plopped down beside her on the couch, kicking off her shoes as she did so. She caught a whiff of alcohol from her roommate, and at once her inclination was to inquire reprehendingly into it. For in the last year or so Grayson had been drinking a lot. Usually she waited till weekends, when she would buy a bottle of vodka or scotch, and then, right after dinner, “settle down,” as she liked to refer to it, with a “few cocktails”—the few always winding up to be, after several hours, a quarter of a bottle, and sometimes more. At first she had drunk openly, indifferent of Ella’s presence; then, noticing undoubtedly her roommate’s unspoken concern, she had become more conscious and furtive about it, and, as though to elude criticism, would drink in the nonjudgmental privacy of her room. More than once Ella had mentioned to her that she was forming a bad and potentially dangerous habit, but Grayson had brushed off the comment with a smiling, casual, “Oh, believe me, it’s just a few drinks! It doesn’t mean anything! I have more than this when I go out, for God’s sake!” Now, surveying the coffee table and seeing neither a bottle of booze nor an empty glass as the remnants of a binge, Ella told herself

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that it was best not even to mention the drinking; not this time, anyway. Grayson had been watching one of those entertainment news programs in which Hollywood movie stars are interviewed and clips of their latest movies are shown. At this moment the “correspondent” of the program was sitting in the luxurious home of Angelina Rourke, the supermodel-turned-actress, who had just married the wellestablished actor, Greg Andrews, though he was almost thirty-years her senior. Angelina looked absolutely beautiful as she answered the questions put to her. Laughing lightly now and then, she played with her hair (incidentally showing off her huge diamond engagement ring) and spoke of what hard work it had been to make her most recent movie, Champion Run. In it, she played a Chicago detective who almost single-handedly takes on the Russian mafia. A film clip of the movie came on. It showed her carrying a high-powered pistol in each hand and breaking into a secret meeting of drug lords. She wreaked havoc as she eluded the gunfire of a dozen automatic weapons suddenly fired in her direction: jumping behind posts that exploded with bullets, then quickly peeking out from behind them in order to take perfectly-aimed shots that knocked off her opponents one by one as though they were sitting ducks in a shooting gallery. In the space of fifteen seconds she did a platoon’s worth of destruction, shooting, taking cover, shooting again, never taking a bullet, but only pumping her own into others; and throughout this most desperate and energetic episode maintaining all the glamour of a world-class supermodel. “I insisted on doing my own stunts,” Angelina explained; and went into a minidissertation on why it was important for an “actor such as myself” to maintain a film’s credibility by doing her own action scenes whenever possible, “even though sometimes you’re really risking your life.” “How was the play?” Grayson asked, staring at the television. “Don’t ask.” “That bad?”

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Ella blew out some air. “Let me tell you something, it was so bad it was …” She didn’t finish the sentence. She was too tired even to search an appropriate adjective or simile. “Anyone call?” Grayson shook her head, negatively. And in that moment Ella perceived the depressed spirits of her roommate. “Are you sure you’re all right, Gray?” Ella asked. “Oh, sure,” Grayson said, smiling a little and glancing up with eyes that seemed to affirm her statement. “Why?” “I don’t know. It’s kind of late for you to be up, isn’t it?” “Yeah, well … I’m going to sleep soon. I just wasn’t too tired tonight, that’s all.” “Well, I’m going to sleep. I’m exhausted.” Ella got up from the couch, bending down to pick up her shoes and carry them with her. Grayson clutched the pillow to her chest a little more tightly and stared at Angelina Rourke, who was talking about the Cannes Film Festival and how excited she was to be going there this year.

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or an actor, the call for an audition can come at any moment. It came for Grayson at ten o’clock the next morning, as she dawdled over a coffee pot, waiting for it to finish brewing and now and then holding a hand against her head, a little sore from a mild hangover. When the phone rang, she answered it, and a voice on the other end of the line introduced herself as a casting representative for the soap opera, The Tide of Years. She had gotten Grayson’s name and number, she said, from a friend of hers, also a casting agent, who worked with the soap opera on which Grayson had made a few appearances. She continued: “We’re creating a new character for Tide, and we’ve been casting about for someone to take the roll. The character is in your age range. Her name is Kitty; she supposed to be a sort vampy character—you know, taking all the men away from their wives and girlfriends! It’s really a great role! Anyway, Grayson, I’d really love to have you audition for it if you’re available.” There was, of course, no question about whether or not Grayson wanted to audition. The prospect of getting a steady, well-paying job as an actress, in a medium that would give her national exposure, would be nothing less than a dream come true. Suddenly she was animated in a way that she had not been for years. Indeed, the moment before receiving this phone call she had been standing with an air of indifference, even of despondency, but now a burst of vitality surged through her. She stood straighter; her hangdog expression firmed into something resembling good cheer; her movements became decisive, energetic. She stepped over to the refrigerator in order to write down instructions on a pen-and-notepad gimcrack that was

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magnetically attached there. The audition was being held for that late afternoon, at five o’clock. It was in fact the last day of auditions for the part. Grayson was to bring a monologue to perform. The first thing she did was to call in to the restaurant where she worked. She spoke to her manager and notified him that she was sorry, but that she couldn’t make it in today—an audition had come up. He was only a little annoyed at the short notice: he had always understood that she was an actress and was not in the least committed to her job at the restaurant. He wished her good luck and said he would see her tomorrow. The transformation that took place in her person between morning and the moment she left her apartment later that afternoon was not less remarkable than that by which a plodding, drab caterpillar changes into a delicate, brilliantly-colored butterfly. For Grayson, whatever her other shortcomings, did not have that considerable one of not knowing how to look her best. When she thought of how Ella went about in such dowdy outfits and with no or ill-applied makeup, she would shake her head and could not help feeling a little contemptuous of her roommate. But she, Grayson, always chose clothes that accentuated her tall, slender, well-proportioned body. She knew just how to brush back her golden hair, so that wisps of it played about the edges of her face. She applied makeup lightly and well: adding just enough carmine to her lips to accentuate their perfect bow-like curve, or just enough blue to her eyelids to highlight the sparkling azure of her eyes. Even at her “worst” she was pretty; but when she took pains to dress well and make herself up, she was beautiful indeed, and she knew it. The audition was to be held at a studio on West 57th Street and to get there she had to take the subway. She always hated having to take it, and she hated taking it now even more because its dinginess and filthiness and noisome smells seemed to infect her careful dress and makeup. She also hated the fact that as she stood waiting for the train or riding it, people—both men and women— stared at her. Of course, they stared at her because she

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was stately and beautiful and thus stood out from among the dumpy-looking multitudes, which had come to characterize the population of New York City, as a light stands out amid the darkness. She was sensible enough to know that she ought to be pleased by this kind of attention; that she would have had a lot more to worry about if she were ignored; still, even praise, even adoration, if it is incessant, can be annoying because it requires a constant effort to ignore or to accept. Grayson kept her eyes averted from everyone. When she arrived at the broadcast studio where the auditions were being held, she was directed to a hallway in which some two-dozen other young actresses were waiting. A woman associated with the soap opera collected her headshot and resume and told her she would be called; in the meantime, she would please wait here, in the hallway, with everyone else. The presence of these other hopeful contenders irritated Grayson. She was irritated partly because she was at the end of the line, but even more so because this line was like so many others she had been in. She didn’t know any of the women here today: and yet she knew them all. For they were always the same type. Like her, they were young, attractive to varying degrees, and had to their credit either an education in theater or “media,” and resumes detailing their various roles in small productions. Some of them had doubtless done bit parts in soap operas or even in low-budget movies. Some wore jogging clothes or leotards, as though they had just come from the gym or from a dance class, and a few held bottles of designer water, which they took occasional sips from. Some squatted on the floor, others leaned against the wall, as they held their monologues in their hands and went over them a last time, or as they mouthed the words they had memorized and repeated a hundred times before. Still others, less insecure in their memory, chatted among themselves, asking one another if they knew this or that person, or had seen this or that production. Their casualness veneered the dire hope that had made them drop whatever else they had planned for that day in order to rush here—the hope

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that this time they might get part that would further their careers. Grayson shunned any conversation with her fellow actresses by taking out her monologue and studying it. She hardly needed to do so, since she knew every word of it, every comma and semi-colon of it, by heart. It was the same monologue she always performed when a casting director did not specify anything in particular. It was one of her favorite pieces, coming from a little-known French play of the 1950s. It dealt with the a group of Parisians during the Second World War, and in particular with a woman who had learned of the death of a young man who had loved her, whom she had always disregarded, and whose courage and worth she realized only now when it was too late. It was a very moving monologue. It said, to Grayson’s mind, some very beautiful things, which she brought out the more pointedly by her intense presentation. It was just the sort of monologue that evinced what she regarded as her forte, namely the ability to evoke intense emotion from an audience. Of course, even if she auditioned brilliantly it would mean nothing if the director, or whoever was judging her, was as insensible as a stone—if he were a jerk who didn’t have two eyes and two ears in his head. More often than not that seemed to be the case. Over the last few years she had auditioned for dozens of roles, only to be passed over for actresses whose appeal she could not fathom. Certainly they had been no better than she was; in most cases, they had been worse. And yet she seemed always to be vindicated in the end, for those productions did poorly and were gone almost as quickly as they had come; as though the degree to which she had been regarded as unfit for them was a barometer of the producers’ ill conception in everything else. Nevertheless, these rejections had always taken a toll on her self-confidence, for facts are hard things to overlook or downplay, and the fact that she hadn’t gotten a particular part had a way of discrediting the internal voice that would hasten to reassure her of her talent.

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Every now and then the woman who had collected the headshots and resumes, and who stood at the closed door leading to the television studio, would call out the name of the next actress, who would quickly gather up her belongings and proceed inside; and a few moments later her muffled voice could be heard from within as she auditioned. Grayson was one of five remaining actresses when her name was called out. The studio was one of the sets from which The Tide of Years was broadcast. Designed in the manner of some tasteful living room, the area was fronted by a dozen cameras and consoles, and overhead the ceiling was a network of wires, microphones, and lights. Sitting beside one of the television cameras were three persons, two men and a woman. They were all young, in their early 30s. The woman was apparently the one who was responsible for these auditions. She was looking down on the clipboard on her lap when Grayson entered the studio, but then looked up with a polite smile. Within those first seconds she and the two men beside her eyed Grayson with the expert scrutiny of cattlemen who, at an auction, are able in an instant to descry the flaws or excellences of the latest cow led to the exhibition pen. “Grayson Ritzler—hof? Is that how you pronounce it?” the woman asked “Ritzlerhof, yes,” Grayson said. “And you’re doing”—glancing at her clipboard—“a monologue from Borders of Night? I’ve never heard of that one.” “It’s a French play,” Grayson said. “The playwright was kind of obscure.” “Oh, okay,” the woman said, pleasantly. “Well, if you’ll just stand over there in the set, just start when you’re ready.” After readying herself for a few seconds, Grayson began the monologue in a rather low, almost analytical tone of voice, standing in one place and looking down at an area just before her. But with each sentence her voice became more animated, her features more intense. What had started out as a blank stare evolved into intense glares

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and tearful eyes as she reminisced about lost love. She moved across the set as she spoke, twisting her hands, shaking her head, raising her voice as she recriminated herself for untaken opportunities. At one point, when she reached one of the fake walls, she lowered her head against it in an attitude of utter despair, and spoke in a hushed, pathetic voice about how differently and better her life might have turned out if only she had not been so blind to the great good she had refused to let into her life. She couldn’t have been more expressive or consumed with her character had the play actually been in performance. Five minutes later, when she had uttered her last words, she held her pose for a few seconds—a few seconds during which, instinctively, she let the atmosphere she had created resound—and then, assuming a more natural demeanor, looked over to her judges, in an attitude of expectation which let them know she had finished. They gave no indication of either approval or disapproval. Their expressions were merely pleasant, polite. She had acted her heart out to an audience looking on with chilly criticalness, as though they were not quite human. A couple of them jotted something down on the notebook or clipboard on their laps. One of the men leaned over to the woman and whispered a few words into her ear, and she, not looking up, nodded inscrutably. Finally she raised her eyes to Grayson and said, “Well, thank you very much Grayson. That was very nice. Thank you for coming by. We’ll be making our decision in the next few days.” The tone of voice in which she said these words— polite, distant, final—gave no indication of her sentiments. Her tight-lipped expression might have been that of a woman withholding her enthusiasm for having discovered finally the perfect “fit” for the part; or it might have been the barely-maintained impatience of someone perturbed with having had to sit through another audition too wretched for words. In any event Grayson would find out in the next few days. She knew from experience that if she did not get a call back by then, it was unlikely that she would be consi-

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dered for the part. As always, she tried not to get her hopes up. There had been a time, in the earliest years of her career in New York, when she had literally jumped for the phone the moment it rang, certain that it was someone from an audition she had gone on, calling to make her an offer. Now, she let the answering machine pick up the calls. For it if was really a call back, she would get the message anyway; and if it wasn’t, it saved her the effort of masking the disappointment in her voice. A week passed. No call came.

IV Vita Brevis

veryone in the apartment building knew the Morgan twins. They were two little old ladies, twins, who were never seen apart. As though they were children still being dressed by a mommy and daddy who proudly highlighted their cute sameness, they wore the same clothes, the same jewelry, and did their hair in the same way. It was really charming to see them on any given morning or afternoon, pushing their little identical carts to the market or sitting in a local bagel shop, treating themselves to an inexpensive lunch. One couldn’t help smiling at the sight; or, even, feeling a twinge of envy. For twins present the enviable spectacle of souls who, from the moment of existence, are handed a perfect companionship, the likes of which the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to find, usually in vain. It happened one day that one of the old twins was no longer seen with the other, and a few days later the news spread through the building that she had died. The details of her death also became known. Catherine, the eldest by ten minutes, had awoken in bed with the unpleasant sensation of a cold foot against her own (for the sisters even slept together). She did not think much of it at first, in that nebulous state of semi-sleep. But the coldness persisted, and grew more pronounced. Then she became aware of something else: of the stillness, the silence, of the bed;—of even the want of the sound of her sister’s breathing. Though she remained unawake, there was a part of her mind that had already given the dreadful explanation for these novel sensations; and if she continued to try to sleep, to force herself not open her eyes to full consciousness, perhaps it was because she did not want to know clearly what she already was in some degree aware

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of. But wakefulness eventually forced itself upon her. She turned on the lamp on the end table, and walked around to the other side of the bed. She stood looking down at the small old body—that mirrored image of herself—beneath the sheets. She could see her sister was dead: the open mouth, the too-stiff features: yes, it was death—inanimate and somehow inhuman. Surprisingly enough she did not cry out, or panic; rather, a slow steady suffusion of sadness overcame her spirit, making her movements slow and her thoughts sluggish. Calmly and determinedly she called for an ambulance, and said in a steady voice to the operator who picked up on the other end of the line, “I need to report a death. It’s my sister. She died.” And from that moment something in her died also. Everyone in the building, when they learned about what had happened, felt the loss keenly. Yes, it was downright amazing how much pity this death evoked. And this was unusual. Over the years any number of elderly people had passed away, and their deaths had been remarked with only a few brief words of pity or a regretful shake of the head—gestures made in passing, and more out of deference to decency than out of any real sense of loss. But this was quite different. It was as though everyone had put themselves in the place of the surviving sister. Even those of little imagination had a sense of how devastating it must be to lose, as it were, one’s second self. They knew it was worse than losing even a husband or a wife, and perhaps on par only with the death of a young child. In the past, few people from the building had ever gone to the funerals of those who had also lived there, but in this case even a few of the most stolid, dissociated tenants showed up at St. Anthony’s Funeral Parlor on 86th Street in order to show their respect. Their attention was torn between the little corpse who lay in the coffin, wearing a dark blue dress, her hands folded serenely across her chest, clutching a crucifix, and looking for all the world like a little wax doll; and the surviving twin who sat in the front row, ashen, silent, still;—and, most strikingly or disturbingly of all, wearing the same dark blue dress as the corpse.

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Ella ordinarily didn’t speak to people in her building outside of a polite hello when she met them in the elevator, but it happened that she met up with Mrs. Morgan, who was just coming home after having done some shopping at the store down the street. The old lady was pushing her shopping cart, taking small, feeble steps, and when she reached the building she struggled with the door, which was heavy for her frail arms. Ella hurried to open the door for her, saying, “Let me get that for you!” “Oh, thank you so much!” the twin said. They rode up the elevator together, Ella going so far as to ask the old lady which floor she lived on and pushing the button for her. When the elevator stopped, the old woman proceeded to leave, but she had difficulty in pushing out her cart, whose wheels were impeded somewhat by a slight unevenness―of no more than a quarter of an inch―between the elevator floor and the hallway. “Here, let me help you with that,” Ella said, taking the cart and pushing it out into the hall. “Oh, thank you, dear. That’s so nice of you!” “Which way?” Ella asked. “Oh, you’re so sweet! This way, dear.” When she reached her apartment door, Mrs. Morgan fumbled a little for her keys. Her eyesight was not so good as it used to be, and her hands trembled as she tried to undo the snap on the pocketbook. Age spots covered the translucent wrinkled skin of her hands. “I’ll take it inside for you,” Ella volunteered. It really was an “old lady’s” apartment. The furniture was in a style that had been popular forty years before, and was of that dark wooden variety, upholstered with floral-patterned cloths, which always gives a room a heavy, oppressive air. Lace antimacassars covered the backs and arms of the couch and two armchairs. A kidney-shaped coffee table occupied the middle of the living room on the patterned carpet dulled from years of vacuuming. A small color television, some ten years old, stood on a stand in the corner, upholding a vase sprouting fake flowers. Against one wall was a bookcase, but it contained no books, only knick-knacks: cheap porcelain figurines of

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little girls or little animals, and small framed pictures, most of them black-and-white, of long-dead family members dressed in styles from the ’Forties and ’Fifties. The few paintings on the walls were of that nauseous fleamarket variety depicting rustic scenes with the requisite cabin, winding stream, and, in the background, the range of gray-blue mountains (always looking more like grayblue blotches than mountains). Nothing here was new and nothing here was distinguished. At best it was dingily innocuous; at worst, it was a testament to how long frugality could extend the usefulness of items which owed their manufacture and purchase to bad taste. “The kitchen is in here,” Mrs. Morgan said, guiding her helper and guest. Ella took the grocery bags out of the cart and placed them on the counter next to the sink, and the old lady, standing beside her, began sorting out the items she had bought: a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, cans of soup, sugar, pasta, bananas, chicken legs, dish detergent, sponges, a roll of paper towels. She seemed to be looking for something in particular, however, for she placed her hand at the bottom of each empty bag and felt about there. Then she found what she was looking for: the cash register receipt. She brought it close to her weak eyes and squinted at it, examining it carefully. Suddenly she exclaimed, “I knew it! I knew it!” Her demeanor, which had been that of a tired, sagging, demure old lady, took on a hard, angry edge. “What is it?” Ella asked. “They charged me ten more cents than they should have for the milk! I knew she made a mistake! I told her she made a mistake! I knew—I knew!” This outburst seemed so extreme in regard to the pettiness of its cause that Ella was at first at a loss for words. Then, in an attempt to soothe the old lady’s anger by making her aware of the unreasonableness of her reaction, she said uncertainly, “Well … it’s only ten cents.” “Ah, ‘only ten cents’! But ten cents here, and then a quarter there, and a dollar there—it adds up, dear!”

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Ella only nodded, as though she agreed, or as though so logical a tenet of economy could not be argued against. But her smile was slight and forced, and she silently lambasted the old woman for a ridiculous attention to pennies. Really, to get upset for the sake of a dime! It was too ridiculous for words; it was despicable. And yet how many times had Ella seen some elderly man or woman react just so absurdly in some store, making fools of themselves, making a scene, arguing with the cashier for the sake of ten or twenty cents! “Big Deal!” Ella wanted to tell the old woman in the most belittling and disdainful voice she could have assumed. But she was too polite to do such a thing, and besides, she felt sorry for the old lady. “I’m going to give her a piece of my mind next time I go in there!” Mrs. Morgan continued. “They did this to me a couple of weeks ago, too. It’s not right!” “I’m sure it’s just a mistake.” “Well, I can’t afford mistakes like this,” Mrs. Morgan said. She put the receipt down on the counter with a sour expression, seemed to consider it a few more seconds, and then, as though bethinking herself that it was impolite to let loose her annoyance before a stranger, she assumed a sweeter expression, looked up at Ella, and asked in a better-spirited tone of voice: “How about staying for a cup of tea?” “Oh, it's okay. I’m sure you’re busy.” “No, no, not at all,” the old lady rejoined. “Stay—stay! Sit down! Just for a few minutes. Please.” The vehemence with which this invitation was offered hinted at a desperation for company that played on Ella’s pity. The old lady was lonesome, and Ella hadn’t the heart to leave so quickly. It was very likely Mrs. Morgan had not spoken much to anyone since her sister’s death. And in fact these days the only human voices she heard came from her television set. The Morgan twins had lived here so long that theirs was one of the few apartments that had never been “renovated,” that is to say, cut up into smaller units. Consequently every room in the place was large. Even the kitchen was large enough to contain a table and four

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chairs, with space to move about. And yet, while everything was orderly, it was not entirely clean. On the table, for instance, was a bowl of artificial fruit whose wax bananas and oranges were covered with a film of dust. A clear vinyl cover meant to the protect the linen over the table itself showed here and there smudges and small crumbs where the cleaning sponge had missed its mark. Saying, “I bought some good cake the other day. We’ll have it with our tea!” Mrs. Morgan set out before her guest a plate, a fork, and a cup. The plate had a raised floral pattern along the edge, and within the interstices formed by the vines and roses were dark areas not sufficiently scrubbed. The same was true of the fork: between the prongs it was dark with a slight accumulation of crud. The fact was that though for most of her life she had kept an immaculate home, Mrs. Morgan had reached that advanced age when one is no longer willing or able to expend the effort needed to search into every crack and crevice for dirt and grime, or no longer has the keenness of perception to find them out. Besides, the fatigue and increased indolence of old age has a way of blinding us to the dirt and messiness which in our younger, more energetic years would have been intolerable. Already Ella half regretted having accepted the invitation to stay. A kind of sad revulsion took possession of her as, point by point, she noted not only the indifferent housekeeping but also of the signs of decrepitude in her hostess: the way her legs were bandied; the way she shuffled rather than walked with definite steps; the slight hump rising at the shoulders; the flabby skin depending beneath her jaw; the wrinkles that corrugated her exposed flesh, even all the way to her fingertips. Even the smell of her person was strange and musty and old. “And what does she have to look forward to?” Ella asked herself, maintaining, all the while, a pleasant smile. From the refrigerator the old lady brought out a little box of cake. It was one of those cheap pound cakes with an off-brand name, made mostly of white flour and sugar, and which was always on sale for 99¢ at the local store. She set this on the table, along with two cups, tea bags, a bowl

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of sugar and a carton of milk. When she finally sat down opposite Ella, she let herself down carefully on the chair, murmuring a slight “Ohhh” when she had done so, as though even seating herself had cost her considerable effort. A few minutes later the water had boiled. Ella got up, saying, “You sit down, I’ll get that,” and served her hostess and herself. They talked about events in the building, the people they knew, or rather had seen, and shared a little gossip in that way. But then the conversation became more personal and the old woman freely and without any sense of impropriety interrogated Ella. Her old eyes acquired a gleam when, after asking Ella if she was married, and receiving a “no” for an answer, she mentioned that there seemed to be “so many nice young men” who lived in the building, intimating that Ella was in a prime position to find a boyfriend. Ella smiled at this, of course. Undoubtedly there were a few young men who lived in the building; and perhaps some of them were “nice”; but only someone whose sensibilities regarding the opposite sex had been cooled through age could think that youth and pleasantness were the only criteria for choosing a mate, especially when you yourself were young and attractive. There also had to be “chemistry”: that indefinable, ineffable something by which one person was radically drawn to another. If such a thing no longer entered into Mrs. Morgan’s calculations when considering which young people were appropriate for each other, it was because she had outlived that point in life when she was able to relate to the way young people felt and thought. In all other matters the wisdom of age may be a guide to the young: but in the matter of love it is almost always out of step, and for this reason: that the creation of the next generation no longer has anything to do with them. “Dear, have some cake,” Mrs. Morgan offered. She sliced it for her guest and placed it on her plate. Ella ate it—but only with her hand; breaking off a tiny piece and bringing it to her mouth. She did not want to use the unclean fork.

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“It’s a beautiful day outside, isn’t it?” Mrs. Morgan asked. “Yes. Very nice.” “I only go outside when it’s nice out,” she said. “Yesterday it was a little chilly.” Yesterday, so far as Ella recalled, wasn’t chilly at all, but she nodded, as though in agreement. “Which apartment do you live in, dear?” “I’m in 6F.” “Is that at the front of the building?” “It’s in the back.” “Oh, that’s nice. I wish I had an apartment at the back. It must be much quieter there. You don’t hear any traffic sounds. But then I don’t think you get as much sunlight, do you?” “In the winter we get a lot.” “We? Who is ‘we’?” “Oh, I have a roommate,” Ella said, with a slight laugh. “Ahhhh” the old lady said, and nodded, slowly, knowingly, and looked at her guest in such a way as to intimate that she had discovered a romantic union after all. “She’s just a friend of mine,” Ella said. “I met her at an audition a few years ago.” “An audition? Are you a singer or something? An actress … ?” “Yes, an actor,” Ella said, with some modesty. For a while they discussed Ella’s acting. Whenever Ella mentioned a production she had been in, the old lady would look as though she were impressed. She mentioned a few movie stars that she liked: all of them from the ’Forties and ’Fifties. “How about you?” Ella asked. “Were you ever married?” “I was married for thirty years. He was a wonderful man. He died twenty years ago. Cancer.” “I’m sorry.” Mr. Morgan smiled, politely accepting the condolence. “We had a nice life while we were together,” she said. “Do you have children?”

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Mrs. Morgan shook her head, and said simply: “No, we never had them.” It always rather interested Ella to know why married people didn’t have children; but out of politeness she never asked, rightly supposing that they were just as conscious as she was of the unusual barrenness, and were bound to offer the information themselves if they wanted to do so. “And how about you?” Mrs. Morgan asked. “Me?” “Do you have children?” “Me?” Ella pulled back a little, as though it were a ridiculous question. But a second later it occurred to her that there was nothing at all ridiculous about it. She was at an age by which it was entirely possible for her to have had several children—a notion that made her strangely uncomfortable and eager to get off the subject. “No,” she said. “But maybe one day. I think I’d like that.” Mrs. Morgan needed no prompting, however, to get off the subject and to talk about the one thing that she thought about nearly all the time—herself. Nearly all her life was behind her now, and, too old and tired to venture further than the local grocery store, her greatest excitements existed only in memory. She had always had her sister as a sounding board for these reminiscences; and had in turn played that part. But since her sister had died, there had been no one to talk to, and the need to speak, to converse, to direct words toward another human being who would listen and understand and react, overcame her. She did to Ella what too many of the old do to young people: she began to talk about herself ad infinitum. She spoke about her parents, her brother, her two sisters, her husband, all of them in the past, all of them dead. She related a little breathlessly how beautiful she used to be as a “girl,” by which she meant a young woman, and of the silly, serious, or grand things she had done: the dances she had attended, the dreams she had had, the trips she had taken, the people she had known. “When I was twenty-seven I got a job with the telephone company,” she said. “I worked there for thirty years. I was a switchboard operator for … oh … so long!

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Do you know what that is? They don’t have those any more. It was a big board, with all these plugs and sockets, and we’d sit at it wearing a headset and switch calls. We’d get there at six o’clock in the morning, but I always got there a little early, at five-thirty. I’d make coffee for all the girls, you know. Oh, we had such a good time. Of course, we had to work hard…” On and on she went, remembering so much, often looking away into the air as though she could see it all over again, and certain that her guest was as interested as herself in all the minutiae of operating old-fashioned telephone equipment. Ella listened, smiling politely, but grew more depressed with each minute. What a sad waste of life Mrs. Morgan’s seemed to be!—the sadder, the more depressing, because, evidently, the poor old lady thought she hadn’t had such a bad life at all! Ella knew it was wrong—knew, even, that it bespoke a certain hardness of heart in her character—but she couldn’t help regarding Mrs. Morgan with some contempt: for what else but contemptible could one call spending thirty years of one’s life sitting in front of a switchboard and being proud of it? Perhaps if in addition to making her living in this way she had also been a mother and had raised a family, Ella would have felt differently, for she loved children and she could see the challenges and accomplishment in raising them. But Mrs. Morgan had done no such thing. She had been, as she now unabashedly proclaimed (and at the phrase Ella actually stared at her hostess) a “career girl.” Career girl! What did that mean in her case but that she had grown old in a brainless job, then retired to live with her twin sister, watching television and collecting Social Security checks enabling her merely to survive? It was all so hopeless and despairing—so pointless and pitiable and pathetic. “If that ever happens to me,” Ella thought, staring down at the table, “I swear, I’ll kill myself.” “My boss was so wonderful,” Mrs. Morgan was saying. “What a wonderful man. Mr. Jackson, that was his name. He was very big in the company. An Executive Vice President! He was in charge of our whole division. You should have seen how well he dressed. Oh, you just should have

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seen the suits he would wear! Tsuh, tsuh, tsuh—just perfect! Tailored, from Italy. His ties, all silk. His shoes, always so shiny, patent leather, the best! Everything fit him to a tee!” On and on she went about this person, about his suits, his trips abroad, his promotions, about how, once, even, he had “met John Kennedy in Washington.” But all Ella could think was: Where is the old goat now? In his grave, very probably: moldering away there, in dark silence; his skull tilted to one side and the rest of his bones covered with whatever was left of that fine Italian tailoring! This image, of what this man must look like now, compared with the glowing portrait drawn of him by Mrs. Morgan, so struck Ella with its ironic incongruity that she, who had been hearing but not listening, could not help saying aloud, “Terrible.” “What?” the old lady said. “Oh … nothing. What were you saying?” The old lady seemed a little taken aback, as though insulted that she had been talking to no purpose. But any offense she had taken lasted only a few seconds before she took up from where she had left off and continued on—and on, and on; in the same chatty, reminiscing vein, if not about her boss, then about someone else, equally absurd and inconsequential, or about other events, as personal as they were trivial, as interesting to her as they were essentially tedious to anyone else. And Ella felt what all intelligent people feel when politeness forces them to endure the torturous conversation of a doddering or uneducated (and the two go hand-inhand) senior citizen: pitiful contempt. One pities the declining physical powers, the illnesses, and the lonesomeness of age; but very often the contempt is greater, and comes from a just impatience for a foolishness that has persisted even into the most advanced stage of life. For surely by then a person has had more than enough time to acquire the things that alone command reverence: namely, intellectual graces, or at least a sober understanding of what constitutes genuine accomplishment. But for someone at eighty years of age to be impressed with the same tinsel and fluff that aroused her excitement at eighteen or

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twenty-eight—to hear an old woman brag of knowing a “well-dressed” man of her youth, or an old man boast of the “success” of his pet store or pharmacy chain—good heavens!—it’s as though we had been transported into a surrealistic world where the longest-lived people still had the minds of children. This is also why it is a hundred times more honorable in age to lament not having achieved great things than to boast of having succeeded in ordinary ones, for such an attitude at least evinces a respectable objectivity. An hour after she had entered the apartment, Ella took her leave. When she stepped out into the hall she felt as though she had been liberated from a prison. Now during the course of Ella's life in New York there had been certain events that had reinforced her dedication to acting just when her ambition had flagged in the face of adversity and disappointment. For instance, she had once been in a play in which everything from the smallest prop on stage to every stitch of costume the actors wore had been meticulously constructed; or the time when she had played Antigone and had seen and heard the audience of almost two hundred people rise to their feet, their hands outstretched as they clapped and called out accolades to her in particular; or the several times when casting agents had seen her and gone out of their way to take her name and number;—such things, experienced always just in time, had given her hope, had refreshed her will to succeed. And now her visit with Mrs. Morgan had been another such incident. Ella told herself that she would never—never—wind up like that old lady, so alone, so feeble, and, worst of all, so god-forsakenly empty-headed. She swore it to herself! Even if she never succeeded as an actress, even if she struggled another ten or fifteen years and nothing came of it, even if she were finally old and sick and poor—even then she would never be so foolish as to think that any part of her anonymous, conventional life had been something to grow nostalgic over. She would never mention a word of it to anyone. Never, never!

V One Last Try

ne day at work Carolyn, who had appeared in the curious production of Fish Have No Feet, informed Ella that Jerry Douglas, the director, had again expressed his interest in having her audition for the part in his new play, Rolling Pin. Since the night of the play, when Ella had herself spoken to the director, she had not given him or his offer of an audition a second thought. She had regarded their conversation as just the friendly chat of colleagues, to be engaged in one day and dismissed from memory or serious consideration the next. “I hope you don’t mind that I gave him your number here,” Carolyn said. “He really does want you to audition. You should, too. It’s a great play. You’d love it.” Ella just nodded and expressed herself as amenable to the idea, but having remembered what it was about, she had no interest in it. Jerry called her at work, as she sat at her computer, typing a document. He spoke with enthusiasm about the project; he mentioned the seasoned actors whom he had already recruited for several principle parts; he raved about the great sets. Ella could almost not help being swayed by his excitement, and as she continued to listen to him detail the quality and uniqueness of the production her curiosity was piqued. She was also a little flattered at his perseverance in trying to convince her to be a part of it. “I’ll have Carolyn give you a copy of the scene we’re doing for the audition,” Jerry told her. “It’s not more than ten minutes long.” A few days later Carolyn handed her the script. Ella read it during her lunch break, and as she did so she shook her head and often looked up with an expression of uncer-

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tainty—the way a person does when she senses something is amiss. For the more she read, the odder the script seemed. Always she turned her eyes back to the dialogue, however, curious to find out what came next; and always would look up again, as though dumbfounded. When she had read the last of the six pages, she turned the photocopied sheets over in her hand a few times, gave a little laugh to herself, and thought, “What the hell is this?” Fortunately Carolyn was there to explain once again the premise of the play. And again Ella felt the need to contain a skeptical smile before Carolyn’s serious-minded explanation of how Rolling Pin was an allegory for the age-old ill of the persecution of those who were different from the majority. “You ought to audition for the part yourself,” Ella said; adding, with secret sarcasm: “You seem to understand it so well.” “Actually, I already did audition for it,” Carolyn replied easily. “Jerry’s had a few auditions so far. He just wants to see a few more people, that’s all. I’m telling you, Ella, you ought to try for it. This is really different.” It was that last phrase of Carolyn’s—that this play was “really different”—that stuck with Ella all through that evening and the next day. To do something groundbreaking, something extraordinary, something truly “different”—wasn’t that the very challenge for an actor, the thing that an artist such as herself was supposed to wish to do? There had been a time when the more “different” something was, the more eager she had been to be a part of it, if only because, after all, novelty is its own attraction. She wondered if she had not lost some passion for her art since those days, and grew a little alarmed to think that her lack of enthusiasm to audition for this strange new play was an indication of the loss of her artistic temperament. Surely she hadn’t lost the old fire! Surely she had not become so conventional as to be blind to originality, to innovation? After dinner that evening she read the script over again. This time the ridiculousness of the concept behind it seemed to dissipate somewhat. This time she was even able to glimpse the seriousness of the

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thing. And though, the next morning, for a few hours anyway, she reverted back to her scoffing opinion of the play, as the day wore on the fear of losing her “edge,” of becoming too conventional and inartistic, once more asserted itself, and she began to feel that Rolling Pin was an interesting concept. Besides, one couldn’t judge a whole play on only six pages of script and a synopsis of the plot. So many things depended on how the thing was produced— how the stage was set, how good the other actors were; and Jerry had assured her of the quality of these. And who knew but that the play would be a smash hit and jumpstart her career? One would never have thought, to see how many other actresses showed up for the last audition for Rolling Pin, that it was an off-off-off Broadway play. Two dozen hopefuls had answered the call, which Jerry had placed on some Internet web site specifically dealing with events in New York City. Even though the ad had specifically called for actresses between the ages of twenty and thirty years old, not a few of those gathered here were already well into their forties, and looking every minute of it, though these claimed that they really were only thirtyfive, or, all right, since you insist on being a stickler about it, just turned thirty-seven. The scene for the audition was one in which the parents of the non-walking daughter decide to rouse her out of her condition by some good old-fashioned tough love. The father especially is determined to cut his daughter no slack. He considers her refusal to walk to be “just so much nonsense.” From the first he has spoken to her harshly, even abusively, in a well-intended effort to help her shake off her bizarre mania. Her mother on the other hand cannot help being tender-hearted in her methods, preferring reason to commandment, entreaty to insult. But the father is a powerful figure; the great Force of the home; overbearing, straight-seeing; for whom there are never two ways but only one way, the Right Way—his way. For the last ten minutes he and his wife have grown increasingly frustrated as their gentle persuasions have failed to convince their daughter that her fears are imaginary, are an

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embarrassment to them as her parents, and that she must stop being so foolish and stand up and walk like everyone else. But when she continues to remain prostrate, to ignore every plea to rise, the father loses his patience. Paternal kindness transforms into frustrated imperiousness. He towers over her, glowers down at her, stretches out a hand, a finger, as though he would strike her, and shouts his words. “You will get up off that floor now!” he thunders, standing before the poor, pitiable creature at his feet. Rolling Pin breaks down into tears. She clutches her father’s pants and pleads, “I can’t. Don’t you understand, I can’t! I can’t!” “Stop this foolishness and get up!” He reaches down and pulls up his daughter in one impulsive motion, lifting, or rather heaving her up as though she were so light and inert a thing as a rag doll; then setting her before him, as though to balance her for once and all in an upright position. “Now, that’s enough of this nonsense! What do you think you’re doing? Are you out of your mind? What are you trying to do to us? Enough is enough!” His hands let go of her shoulders. But no sooner has he let go of her than she drops to the ground and rolls frantically away from him. Rolling Pin’s mother, who regards her daughter’s affection as embarrassingly strange as does her husband, but who cannot bear to see her child suffering, interposes. She steps before her husband even as he makes again toward his daughter. “There’s no reason to yell at her,” she says; and stares at him, hard. “But what is her problem, for God’s sake! There’s nothing wrong with her! This is crazy!” “You don’t have to yell, it won’t get us anywhere,” the wise woman says. The mother steps over to her daughter, who is convulsed in tears, and bends down to her. “You can’t keep doing this,” she says, softly, kindly. “We don’t know how or why you got this crazy idea in your head, but now it’s time to stop, dear. Do you understand?

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It’s time to stop now. You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep doing this. Now get up. Let me help you up.” “You don’t understand, neither of you,” Rolling Pin replies through her sobs. “I’ve told you a hundred times, and you just don’t listen to me.” “Nothing bad is going to happen if you walk, dear,” the mother says, bewildered. “Get up, damn it!” the father says, from several feet away. “Get up!” “I won’t do it!” Rolling Pin says, in a desperate whisper. “I can’t be responsible!” ―And off she goes; or rather, off she rolls, around and around, across the stage, as her poor, bewildered parents follow her with angry-tentative steps, themselves caught between despair and frustration. “Now listen up people!” Jerry said to the actresses still waiting to audition. He put his hands on his hips and spoke with a high-pitched voice singularly child-like in its whine. “This is a key scene—key, do you hear me? You really want to make the audience feel Rolling Pin’s pain— understand? This woman is in pain! She’s a tortured soul! She’s an outcast of society. Already people have begun to shun her. They don’t want to have anything to do with her. They think she’s too weird. Just because she’s different! As you’re doing this scene, that’s what I expect you all to keep in mind—the woman is in agony! She doesn’t like rolling around on the floor like that! She really doesn’t! And it’s not just mental agony;—no! It’s physical too. Rolling around like that, she’s getting all bruised up. All bruised up! By the end of the play her elbows and knees are gonna be all scraped up, all black and blue. We’ll have the makeup for that. Pins, nails, bits of glass, little stones, beer bottle caps—whatever’s on the floor, she’s getting hurt by it, she’s picking them up as she rolls along. She’s suffering because she’s different—see? Now that’s the message. It’s sad; sad! So I expect all of you to think in those terms. All right, let’s keep going now”—and he called the next actress. Ella was the next actress to be called to do the scene. As she had watched the previous actresses do it, she had

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done all she could to contain her laughter, for it seemed to her that she had never seen anything so bizarre. But by the time the fourth actress was giving her rendition of Rolling Pin, her viewpoint had once again changed, and she convinced herself that it was no laughing matter; no, not at all; but that the character was serious, tragic, and ought to be portrayed as such. Thus even before she got on stage she had come into her character, had understood her character: she knew how she would play the part, and say the words, and express the misery. When Ella had finished her audition and got up from the floor, Jerry applauded her interpretation. That in itself was no indication of what he really thought, since he had deigned to applaud every actress—a small, quick patting of the hands as he said, “Very nice, very nice. I appreciate your coming by.” And when the last actress had finished her audition, he thanked all of them for their efforts and dismissed them with a standard, “We’ll let you know.” Of course usually that phrase, “We’ll let you know,” at least in the acting world, means “You’ll never hear from us again”; but it happened that Jerry did let Ella know the very next day. When she got home from work there was a message on her answering machine: in an enthusiastic tone of voice, Jerry said that he had “loved” her “interpretation,” that he “could see already” how well she was going to “work out,” and ended by saying that he hoped she would take the part. His enthusiasm, his support, for her audition, flattered her and made her feel good. She called him back and accepted. He told her that a two-week rehearsal period would start next week. “Congratulations,” Grayson said, when she learned her friend had gotten the part. She sounded happy enough for Ella, but there was a part of her that was at least a little jealous. For almost six months now, despite going on numerous auditions, she had been unable to get into anything, and now there really were times when she was beginning to wonder whether she had any talent at all. On the other hand, and as she knew very well, she probably would not have bothered to audition for Rolling Pin.

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Though she didn’t say so (for she didn’t want to hurt Ella’s feelings), she thought the play was ridiculous, a waste of time, and Jerry and his troupe—whom she had never heard of before—just another group of artists drifting without hope of genuine success. “When do you start rehearsals?” Grayson asked Ella. “Next week. Monday night.” “Are you going to change your schedule at work?” “I’m just going to work fewer hours. I let my supervisor know already. She’s okay with it. I’ll have to leave at five. Rehearsals are at six-thirty.” “You won’t be getting home till late. You’ll be tired.” “Tired? I’ll be exhausted. I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not even so sure I’m up for it.” “Well, but at least you’re in something,” Grayson said, throwing a sop to her roommate’s pride. “Yes, at least I’m in something. I don’t know, I think there might be something to this play. The more I think about it, the more I think there might be.” “Well, it is different,” Grayson said; again with apparent support. “Maybe you can come by one day after work and check it out.” “Maybe. We’ll see. By the way, I’ve been invited to a party next week. One of the guys at work invited me. I think you’ve met him—Claude?—the short guy with the red hair? He’s in a theater group that’s giving the party.” “Which theater is it?” Grayson told her: Houston Street Circle. Ella had heard of it. She said that she thought she had even “seen something” there once. “It’s going to be Wednesday night. If you’d like to come, you can come with me.” “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I’ll be in rehearsals.” “Well, if you change your mind, you’re welcome.” But Ella knew already she would not change her mind. Over the years she had been to a hundred such parties, and they no longer held any interest for her. She had grown into a sober-minded woman.

VI Behind the Scenes

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rom the first Jerry proved to be one of the most difficult directors Ella had ever worked with—and she had worked with some of the worst. However pleasant he was in social situations, he was a martinet when it came to overseeing his theater productions. It was always said of him by actors who had worked with him that he was great as a friend and horrible as a boss. As though possessed of a split personality, which dichotomy however was under his control, he was able to turn on the “severe Jerry” as soon as he stepped into the theater, then turn it off as soon as he left it, as easily as one flips a light switch. He could yell at an actor during the day, calling him an idiot, a nincompoop, an ass, and then, at night, at some social gathering, could chat with him happily, excusing his outbursts with a “You know I don’t mean it personally!” and praising to the skies his victim of a few hours before. He had his actors rehearse not just scenes, but even separate lines, many times over; and he often stopped them in midsentence with an imperious, impatient, annoyed, “No no no!”—waving his copy of the script and then demonstrating the “right way” the dialogue was to be spoken. During rehearsals, he stood close to the stage, the better to watch every nuance of expression or movement on the part of the actors. If his exalted dramatic sensibilities, his piercing eagle eyes, detected anything “wrong,” he would stop an actor in his tracks with a single, peremptory clap of his hands and call out, “Hold it! Hold it! Wait, wait, wait!” in a frustrated tone of voice, as though he could not believe anyone could be so stupid. And however pleasant he had been to Ella before the rehearsals, he seemed to treat her with especial hauteur. Indeed, as she was the principal character in the play he seemed deter-

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mine to pick out what he regarded as the smallest flaw in her work. Nothing was more infuriating and absurd than to see him jump up from his chair, hop onto the plywood stage, and say in an irritated tone of voice, “Ella, that’s wrong! That’s all wrooooong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! I really—really—need it to be this way. That’s the whole point of that line! Listen—listen to how I would say it!” He did this so often, with such vehemence and flamboyance, that he seemed to be interrupting the actors less in order to offer instruction than to exhibit his own histrionic talents to a captive, albeit increasingly impatient, audience. If the director made the rehearsals unpleasant for the actors, it was the playwright who plunged them into downright misery. For the author of Rolling Pin, either through Jerry’s invitation or her own insistence, was present at most of the rehearsals. Her real name was Joan Schlagblatt, but finding that name rather uninteresting, even somehow commonsounding, she had spruced it up to a more literary or romantic Joné Schlag—always pronouncing the initial J with a soft, almost Gallic zh sound. Hardly anyone knew her real name, since, of course, people in general only know the names they are given; but of the few people in New York who did know her real name, none of them who wished to remain on good terms with her would have contradicted her self-styled identity. Had any one of them called her “Joan,” he would have been corrected, and if he insisted on so calling her she would relegate him to the very long list of her enemies. She was not native to the city. She had come to it three years before from a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. She was twenty-eight years old and physically unremarkable. Her face was not pretty; it was plain, with a nose a little too thick, cheekbones a little too heavy, and a chin somewhat recessed. She was not tall, nor short, nor fat, nor skinny; she was just an average-looking young woman. She knew this herself, and it disturbed her. For to Joné Schlag anything “average” was anathema, since she was sure that as an artist it was her duty to embrace and exhi-

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bit the extraordinary. She expressed this notion most outwardly in the way she dressed and decorated herself. She never bought anything in a regular clothing store; all her clothes were “vintage,” and she had a knack of mixing and matching them to wild inconsistencies: for instance, wearing a long, formal-looking dress with tattered sneakers, or a short, tight-fitting mini-skirt with leggings and army boots. On her wrists or around her neck she often wore thick plastic fashion jewelry. She wore glasses with cat’s-eye frames from the ’Sixties: they had had rhinestones in them at the outer, uplifting edges. A diamond stud punctuated one of her nostrils; another one pierced her right brow; and a line of four small rings ran up the side of her left ear. It was very likely that she had pierced other parts of her body, though no one could be certain. Her hair was never the same color for long; it had in only the last year run the gamut from sunset orange to liquid marine. Now it had pretty much returned to its natural auburn, though the very ends were tinged with yellow. On the whole she always looked strange and when she walked down the street she knew that people looked at her a second time, but she liked, she thrived on this attention. Nothing gave her more pleasure, more confirmed her notion of her own artistic integrity, thank to think she was shocking the pedestrian sensibilities of the multitudes. She lived in the West Village, in a one-room apartment twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide with a nook for a bed, another nook for a bathroom, and a kitchen so small that two people couldn’t stand in it at the same time without rubbing elbows. She referred to this as her “studio,” but when she spoke of it her auditors might not at first realize that she was talking of the place where she lived, for she had a way of making it sound as though it were some detached or additional space rented for the express purpose of producing her masterpieces in. “I had a few friends over at my studio the other day,” she would say; or, “I have to get back to my studio and get some work done”; or, “I’m so happy I was able to find a studio that fits my needs.”

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She did not make a living writing plays; indeed she had never made any money from them. For her livelihood she was a clerk in an optical store on 12th Street, not far from her apartment. It was a little shop selling unique eyeglass frames, most of which were made in Europe. Joné had taken the job because the manager had not had a problem with the way she dressed; in fact, he rather liked it because it was in line with the unconventional, the “trendy,” image he wished to convey. She worked there four days a week, Tuesday through Friday, and of the five hundred people who might come through the door during that period she would despise at least four-hundred-andfifty of them. The middle-aged women from Jersey or Long Island who had convinced themselves they were still young enough to wear the bright tiger-patterned frames from Rome;—the pretty, well-dressed, slender girlfriends of young Wall Street bankers, who clung on their boyfriend’s arms, and pointed and oohd and aahd at the latest styles, like the phony little coquettes they were;—the computer geeks from Baruch, or the Indian interns from Cornell, who were too dopey to know that the stylish frames from France just made their dorky looks the more absurd;—oh, how she despised them all!—all these pedestrian, predictable, inartistic people!—all these hopeless, shallow wannabes! To her mind they just didn’t have a clue about style, about “attitude.” But she—she, the playwright Joné Schlag—she understood. She was well-known in avant-garde circles, and not only in the theater but also in the other arts. For Joné Schlag was “versatile.” Not only did she write plays, but she also painted, wrote songs, and herself did “performance art.” Almost every night of the week found her at some gallery or jazz club or play, for all her friends were artists like herself, and she had made them and their artistic pursuits her entire world. Indeed, she was most likely to be home just when one might have expected her to be out of it: namely, on Friday or Saturday nights. For that was when people from Jersey or the boroughs descended on Manhattan like hordes of locusts. In they would come, with all their disgusting conventionality, dressed up

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in fine clothes, sauntering into glitzy restaurants, crowding into Broadway plays, waiting in lines before velvetroped night clubs, and generally supporting and bolstering everything that, according to Joné Schlag, was despicably mundane and commercial about New York. According to her, such people just ruined the real, the better, the truly artistic ambiance of the place. Joné and Jerry seemed to have an especially good relationship. They were ever conscious of being comrades-inarms against the vulgar forces of conventionalism. If Joné considered herself one of a rare breed of innovative literati, Jerry was a man who was determined to widen the theatrical horizons of the masses. If she thought of herself as the super-sophisticated aesthete, whose ultra-refined sensibilities could not but recoil from anything accepted by the unsophisticated majority, he likewise regarded his theater as the only venue in the city—perhaps in the world—where people could be “challenged” (as he termed it) with a “truly unique artistic experience.” Certainly, they were each other’s best audience and cheering gallery. During rehearsals Joné sat in the first row, watching the actors and smoking the endless cigarettes which she rolled herself. (“Commercial tobacco is just full or artificial junk. You have to have the natural product, then it’s not so bad.”) With a languid movement of her hand, she would bring the cigarette to her mouth, inhale, then raise her head, pucker her lips, and blow up at a steep angle a dense swift stream of smoke, all the while keeping her eyes on the stage. She never lost an opportunity of adding her criticisms to those of Jerry. She always spoke in a tone of voice that was, essentially, condescending, and most of her comments were directed toward Ella. “Look, hon,” she said, during the fifth night of rehearsals, after not Jerry but she had stopped Ella in the middle of a scene; “I’d like to see you thump the floor a little when you roll. I’d like to hear this kind of sound”—and she gave the stage a light pounding with her fists. “Hear that? That hollow sound? Like you’re really hitting into it? Can you do that for me?”

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“How am I supposed to do that,” Ella asked, her voice barely suppressing her annoyance. She had been rolling around on the stage for the last two hours, and her legs and arms were hurting. Moreover, she had come, within the space of a single week, to despise Joné, whom she considered an intermeddler. “It’s very easy,” Joné said, shaking her head as though she didn’t believe anyone could be so stupid as to ask such a question. “You just give the stage a little pat—with your hand—when you’re rolling. Here, I’ll show you.” She put out her cigarette and climbed up to the stage. She lay down and began rolling, slapping the floor with each rotation and in such a way that it did not seem purposeful and also produced the desired thump. Just watching her roll around on the stage—what with her yellowended hair, black sweater, fake jewelry, and army boots— made Ella open her mouth a little. Jerry, who had been watching this, exclaimed: “Joné, you’re brilliant! I should have thought of that!” The playwright/songwriter/painter/performer got up from the stage and brushed a little dust off from her clothes. She turned to Ella with a smile that could have won a Tony for its insincerity. “See what I mean, Ella? It’s not hard, and it adds a great effect.” “I’ll try it,” Ella said. Her tone was short. It was the end of a long day, and she was tired, and once again she was having horrible misgivings about the play. Earlier that day she had discussed her project with a few of her actor friends at work. They had all laughed when she had told them about her role; asking, “Is that a comedy?” It had taken some explaining to convince them, who could hardly be accused of closed-mindedness, that it was, if anything, a tragedy; and nearly all of them professed finally to understand why it might be so. But even as they lost their smiles and nodded with apparent understanding, she could not help feeling that they were merely giving her the benefit of the doubt in order to avoid giving offense. That lingering doubt, that Rolling Pin was too oddlyconceived a play ever to succeed, Ella had never been entirely able to shake off. A dozen years before she might

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have felt differently. Then, the strange and the weird had been a great recommendation to her, and she would have been the first to vaunt of her participation in something so far off the beaten track. Only, she had come to see that the beaten track is beaten precisely because it coincides with what is generally regarded as pleasurable and comprehensible; and that while it is possible for intermittent anomalies of plot, character, or direction in a play to offer the audience perplexity enough to edge uncomfortably their general comprehension, such anomalies, should they become too frequent, alienate the very attention they seek to engage, and inspire contempt or—what is worse— indifference. This is why, out of ten thousand instances of art that try to be “different” or “new,” all but one or two of them are hurried into the eternal night of oblivion. Ella had come to see this as certainly as Jerry, Joné, and most of the other members of the cast had not. She came to regret having accepted the part, especially when, after work, she was tired and wanted so much to go home and relax, and instead had to take a bus or the subway to a place so far out of her way as the theater. Jerry would be waiting there, just itching to give direction, and Joné, sitting in the front row and smoking like a chimney, would be ready to add her own officious comments and “suggestions.” One had to have the patience of a saint to endure all that when one was tired, and Ella was running low on that kind of patience. But she had committed herself, and a sense of honor prevented her from reneging on her commitment. If only for the sake of those actors who thought the play “wasn’t so bad,” she made her best effort. But even as she went to rehearsals, she would berate the weakness—as she now regarded it—by which she had been flattered into auditioning and accepting the role. “I’ll never do that again,” she would tell herself.