Someday, Someday, Maybe (28 page)

“You’d love it.”

“I bet.”

“We should go.”

I blink at him. “We should …?”

“What? Uh,
you
should go, I mean. You should go someday,” Dan says, his face reddening. “To see the phone booths,” he adds, somewhat lamely. “Sorry. Force of habit. I’ve only recently stopped being a ‘we.’ Everett broke up with me.”

“Oh, Dan, I’m so sorry,” I begin, but our drinks arrive, and Dan waves me away with his hand.

“There’s time enough to tell you all about it. Let’s enjoy these first.” He picks up his glass and gestures for me to do the same. He seems at a loss for the appropriate toast, then his face lights up. “To the theater!”

“To the theater!” I agree, clinking his glass lightly with mine. I want to ask Dan questions about Everett and what’s happened, but the sidecar he ordered for me is sweet and strong, and my questions are swept away by its golden thick flavor. It slides down easily, and after a while we order another round, although this time Dan gets a scotch on the rocks.

“Try this,” he says, sliding the glass over when his scotch arrives. “It’s meant to be sipped slowly.” I tilt the glass back gingerly and try to take just the tiniest sip, but even that burns the back of my throat, and I can’t help coughing.

“How can you drink that?” I say, sticking out my tongue and pounding my chest dramatically.

“My father started us young,” Dan says, somewhat ominously. Then he lets out a long breath and frowns, shaking the ice in his glass.

“So,” he says, after a moment. “My script got rejected by that festival.”

“You’re kidding—how can that be?” I say, truly shocked. All those nights he spent poring over his pages at the dining room table, all that effort. To me, it seems impossible that Dan could fail at anything.

“Everett said that me not getting into the festival had nothing to do with her decision, but I think it was her last hope.”

“Hope of what?” I say gingerly.

“You know, that I’d be
legitimized
somehow. Otherwise, to her, what I’m doing has all been some sort of folly. A waste of time.” Dan drains the rest of his scotch in one gulp and puts his glass down with a thud. “The most frightening thing?”

“Yes?”

“This all happened yesterday, and I came home and decided I’d start over, keep working on the script, submit it somewhere else. I’ll just work harder, I thought. But nothing came. I couldn’t write. That’s never happened to me before. I’ve never not been able to write.”

I remember the night I sat with Everett, when she compared Dan’s work to some juvenile rite of passage, “like backpacking through Europe,” and that it was she who mentioned seeing
The Phantom of the Opera
, and being dazzled by the effects that Dan and I were just mocking. But I don’t think Dan needs to hear my thoughts on why he and Everett weren’t right for each other at the moment, or my theory about how people can be divided into groups based on whether their reaction to the chandelier in
The Phantom of the Opera
is sincere or ironic. With a start, I realize my hand is on his arm, and I’ve been absentmindedly stroking his tan corduroy jacket this whole time, in an attempt to soothe myself, I think, as much as him. I pull it away quickly and sit up straighter on my bar stool.

But then we order a third round, and Dan a fourth, and the crowd in the dining room thins and the lights seem to dim, the bottles behind the bar transforming into a colorful blur like an abstract water-color. As he pays the bill I try to remember when the last time was that I had three drinks in a row without any food to go with them except for a few free crackers that we spread with soft cheese from the little pots they offered at the bar. When I try to stand up, I almost lose my balance and I have to grip the back of my bar stool to steady myself. Then it comes to me: I’m pretty sure the last time I had three large drinks in quick succession on an almost-empty stomach was never.

“Izzat Lisbeth Taylor?” I hear myself slur, as I weave unsteadily toward one of the framed caricatures on the wall, bringing my face almost close enough to kiss the glass. I squint my eyes and blink a few times, but I still can’t seem to make sense of the blurry signature beneath the drawing.

“Nah. Nutter,” Dan says, coming up behind me to take a look. “Ishhhhtockard Shhanning, I think.”

“Whahh?”

“Not her, I mean. Ishhhtock—’scuse me.” Dan clears his throat, takes a deep breath and steadies himself by leaning one hand on the wall. “It. Is. Sssstockard Channing, I think.”

“Ohhhhhh yeah! It
is
her! I
love
her, don’t you?” I say, turning to face Dan and clapping my hands. “She looks
so good
, don’t you think? She’s
so
talented! I saw her in—”

Dan leans his other arm against the wall, so now I’m enclosed on either side in a sort of Dan-tent, and then he leans his whole body against me and kisses me, deeply and softly, in a way that makes the whole world go silent. There’s no sound, no past or present, nothing at all except me and Dan kissing while Stockard Channing gazes down at us, her pastel-pencil red lips smiling in approval.

In the distance, the silence is broken by the faint sound of silverware clinking, and even that is soothing, a sound like little bells swaying in a soft breeze.

I’ve never kissed anyone in a public place. Not like this. Clark wasn’t one for reckless displays of affection. He’d hold my hand, but that’s about it. I’ve never cheated on anyone, either, although I try to tell myself that just one drunken kiss isn’t so bad. Even so, I know I’ll feel embarrassed and guilty in the morning. I can tell even now, through my drunken haze. But for tonight, I feel too good to feel bad. For tonight, it all seems oddly inevitable. If only I hadn’t run into Genevieve, if only Dan hadn’t been lying on the sofa, if only James had called, if only the lights at the bar weren’t so pleasantly dim, if only I didn’t stop to examine a portrait of Stockard Channing. It almost seems as if it couldn’t be helped, as if this was supposed to happen.

“It’s okay,” Jane will tell me in the morning. “You needed to feel good. You’re just friends who got confused. Just steer clear of each other for a while.”

And without even having to discuss it, that’s exactly what Dan and I will do.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll draw a line in my mind between myself and Dan, as if we’re two kids traveling in the backseat of a car who need an imaginary wall to give us the illusion of having our own space.

I’ll be more careful from now on, I promise myself.

After all, I know better than anyone what can happen when you accidentally go the wrong way down a one-way street.

21
 

You have one message
.

BEEEP

Franny. It’s Richard calling from Absolute Artists. Call me as soon as you get this. I have an offer for you
.

BEEEP

These are the words I’ve been waiting for months to hear, and there they are, recorded ninety-five minutes ago according to the digital voice on the tape of my answering machine, but for some reason I haven’t called Richard back yet. I catered a lunch shift at a giant investment firm in the financial district earlier today, and it’s been almost fifteen minutes since I got home from the corner deli, where I bought a slightly bruised apple, a blueberry yogurt, and two fruit-punch-flavored wine coolers (they were on sale). I’m winded, as if I’ve come in from a run and not just a trip to the store, but I feel calm and focused, too, as if I’m about to take a final exam for a subject I’ve prepared for thoroughly.

I place the wine coolers, yogurt, and apple in the refrigerator. Then I change my mind and take the apple out and set it on the counter. I look at it for a while, as though it might open up its mouth and say something, then I take a knife out of the drawer and cut a piece that is slightly less than half, avoiding the core and the seeds. I take a bite and decide it tastes better than it looks. I finish the almost-half and run my hands, which have now become slightly sticky, under the tap, rinsing them, shaking off the excess water, then drying them methodically on a dish towel. From the center of the kitchen, I could almost reach out and touch a wall in any direction, but even in this small space I feel lost. I might as well be bobbing in the middle of the ocean. I’m so excited that I’ve gone completely numb. I’m in shock—that must be it.

I got a job, I got a job
. After all this time, I finally got a job!

But which one?

I auditioned for a revival of
Brigadoon
at a regional theater in Poughkeepsie. I auditioned to play the quirky assistant in that new sitcom,
Legs!
, that takes place in a modeling agency and stars a formerly famous model from the ’70s. I auditioned to play someone whose purse has been stolen on that cop show where one of the policemen is alive but his partner is a ghost. I auditioned for two parts on two different soaps, one to play a college student who says, “Does anyone have the homework assignment?” I auditioned to be the co-host of a Saturday morning children’s show. I auditioned to represent a line of blenders on a home shopping channel, and I auditioned to say one line in an Eve Randall film: “Can I take your order?”

Maybe that’s the job I booked: “Can I take your order?” The casting person seemed to like me that day. Or was that the casting person who seemed to not like me? What day was it? What was I wearing? I could look it up in my Filofax, but I’d rather remember it myself. The job I booked has to have stood out in some way, some special way that separates it from the others.

“Can I take your order?” I say out loud in our tiny kitchen, to an imaginary Eve Randall sitting at a booth in the imaginary diner in my head. “The soup of the day is chicken noodle,” I tell Eve with a smile. Only the first line was scripted, but I had thought of more I could say for the audition just in case there was room to improvise, in case I had the chance to show something more than that one line, to prove I had thought about the waitress not just as a generic waitress, but as a person who was in the middle of a specific day, who got up late maybe, because she had a fight with her boyfriend the night before, who read the specials off the board that morning and wrote them down on her order pad, or maybe was the type who knew them by heart.

“It all started with one line in an Eve Randall film,” I will say to the audience assembled for
An Evening with Frances Banks
at the 92nd Street Y. “Can I take your order?” I’ll say, just like I did in the film, my very first, and the audience will laugh in recognition.

Finally I get up the courage to call the agency. “Oh, hi, hello there, it’s uh, Franny Banks, for Richard?” I say to the receptionist.

“Hold on a minute, Franny. Joe will be right with you.”

Joe
will be right with me? Joe Melville is actually going to take my call? Now I’m nervous, since he and I haven’t spoken in so long. It makes sense, I guess, that he would talk to me only when there’s actually a job to discuss. Of course! This must be their system, that Joe calls only when it’s really necessary. I wished I’d figured that out earlier, and not spent so much time worrying about why he never called.

The classical hold music is finally interrupted after what seems like a very long time but was probably under a minute.

“Hello, Franny, congratulations, you’ve booked your first real job.” Joe sounds confident and familiar, as though we talk all the time.

I don’t want to correct him, but he must remember that I booked
Kevin and Kathy
, the very first audition he sent me on.
Don’t be difficult
, I think.
Just be positive
.

“Oh, thanks! Besides
Kevin and Kathy
.” Thankfully, Joe doesn’t say anything, so I blaze forward. “I’m excited. I mean, I think I’ll be excited when I find out which job it is.”

Joe covers the receiver for a minute and I can’t hear what he’s saying.

“Sorry about that,” he says, talking to me again. “I thought you’d been told. You got the female lead opposite Michael Eastman in the feature film
Zombie Pond
.”

The female lead in
Zombie Pond!
Wait.
Zombie Pond, Zombie Pond
. Of course I remember going in for a movie called
Zombie Pond
, but I’m struggling to remember the material exactly, and can’t recall going in for the female lead of anything. Surely I’d remember that.

It’s coming back to me, sort of. There were barely any lines in the scene.
That’s
the female lead? I don’t remember it going that well. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue—she screams more than she speaks. She’s described as quivering and whimpering quite a bit, and she gets tied up by zombies and left in the basement wearing nothing but her underwear.

That’s
the job I got?

“Wait. Sorry. The girlfriend who gets locked in the basement?”