For two nights, Scarlett had watched the famous Billy Whitehouse lead the cast through their paces. Sometimes he just ran them ragged, forcing them to run the room while they said their lines, sometimes he put them facedown on the floor, or had them stand on chairs. Random as it all seemed, it was amazing what could come out when Billy was ordering everyone around. Lines that had sounded like gibberish to her before (either because she didn’t understand Shakespeare or the actors were saying them wrong) suddenly had meaning. Little gestures could produce laughter or tears. Hamlet became more menacing, the king more duplicitous, Ophelia more tragic. Billy tempered some of what Spencer and Eric had been doing, giving them a winsome edge.
By Saturday, they had come to the last of the sessions. Billy had the cast gather together in a huddle in the middle of the room. It was kind of an intense moment, and sort of not for observers, so Scarlett let herself out quietly to wait in the hall. She walked around, trying to get cell phone reception. When she looped back, she found Billy and Mrs. Amberson standing by the stairs, at the dark end of the hallway. They couldn’t see her.
“You’ll never guess who’s coming in later,” Billy was saying.
“Someone famous? Someone amusing?”
“Donna Spendler,” he said.
The name crystallized Mrs. Amberson. The smile fell from her face like it had come unglued.
“I thought you might react that way,” he said.
Something in the air changed. Maybe it was the air conditioning cranking to life, or the opening of the door in the background as the cast left, but something wasn’t right.
“Why is she coming?” Mrs. Amberson asked quietly.
“To get herself ready for a final audition on Sunday.”
“Final audition for what?”
“A new musical. She’s up for the lead,” Billy said. “I’m just getting her ready. I wouldn’t normally, but the producer is a friend. It’s purely professional. I plan on not helping her very much.”
“You should do what you have to,” Mrs. Amberson said.
“I’ll do the minimum. Was I right to tell you?”
She did not reply.
The full cast was coming out now, and everyone stopped to thank or hug Billy. Scarlett stayed in her spot, trying to figure out what she had just seen. It was a moment before Mrs. Amberson noticed her standing there.
“Is everything okay?” Scarlett asked.
Mrs. Amberson fumbled around inside of her bag for her cigarette case.
“Change of plan,” she said. “I was supposed to see some potential rehearsal sites tonight. I’ll call and reschedule. Just tell the others—Trevor and Eric. They’re still inside. They were going to come with me.”
With that, she left. Scarlett went inside to tell Eric and Trevor the news. They were lingering with Billy a few more moments as he locked up the room. When Scarlett told them the message, Trevor left, but Eric walked with her.
“Nothing to do now,” he said. “I canceled my plans for tonight because of this. Are you doing anything?”
Was this really happening? Was Eric actually asking her out? And could she really not go because she was taking Marlene to yet another of her many social commitments, because Lola was in Boston lying her face off about being at a skin care seminar?
Yes, Scarlett
, she said to herself.
That really is what’s happening.
Which meant that there was only one option.
“Do you want to…come?” she asked. “It’s free food. And you can be the first of your friends to have a Hard Rock T-shirt! They’re really rare.”
To her enduring amazement, he said yes.
There are a few places you don’t go to if you live in New York. Everyone who visits you will expect that you have gone to them—that you in fact go to them
all the time
, spend every possible free second at them. They include: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, F.A.O. Schwartz, the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, Times Square (unless you have to change subways there, but then you never go above ground), and any theme restaurant. It was a source of constant bafflement to Scarlett as to why the Powerkids always seemed to end up at these places. It wasn’t like cancer turned you into a tourist.
Eric, as an outsider, hadn’t gotten any of these memos. He was delighted to be at the Hard Rock. His enthusiasm made
Scarlett view it in a more charitable light, as they negotiated their way through the huge gift shop with its 20,000 varieties of T-shirts.
“Do you come here a lot?” he asked.
If any of her friends had asked her that, she could have smacked them with impunity…but there would be no smacking of Eric.
“With Marlene, sometimes,” she admitted.
“God, I wish my life in high school was as exciting as yours. I wish I grew up in New York.”
Scarlett looked over a vista of Hard Rock shot glasses, unsure how to respond. He was so impressed with her now. What if he found out the truth…that
everyone
else in New York was leading a much more exciting life than she was? He would learn soon enough. Until then, she was ready to embrace the Hard Rock in all its kitschy glory.
The Powerkids were seated together at a massive, long table. The parents and escorts were relegated to whatever seats were left in the general area. Scarlett and Eric were given a small table by the kitchen door. Scarlett got hit in the head with a tray twice, but Marlene couldn’t see her, so it was a pretty good trade-off. It was just the two of them, tucked in a corner.
“Can I ask you something that’s potentially kind of rude?” he asked, after they had ordered.
This sounded very promising.
“How is it that you live in a hotel in New York, but you aren’t rich? From what Spencer’s told me, it’s kind of hard for you guys right now.”
Okay. Not what she was expecting. Still, a fair question.
“You could say that,” she said.
“I don’t want to pry, but I’m just curious about your life.”
“My dad’s family started the hotel. I don’t think my dad wanted to run it. But then they had us, and my grandparents wanted to retire, so that’s what happened. I think things were okay—not great, but okay—until…”
She looked down at the ketchup, unsure whether or not to continue.
“Until?” Eric prompted.
Scarlett nodded in the direction of the table of Powerkids.
“Until that,” she said.
This was the truth never spoken among the Martins. No one talked about the fact that the financial troubles were directly related to Marlene’s long illness, the piles of bills that medical insurance didn’t cover, the single injections that cost thousands a dose, the hospital costs that ran into the hundreds of thousands. Obviously, there was no price too high for her cure—but it had taken its toll. If Marlene had been well, life would have been very, very different.
“Oh…right,” he said, understanding.
“She doesn’t know,” Scarlett said. “We’re never supposed to say it. I mean, she’s alive.”
“That must have been so scary,” he said. “I can’t imagine my brother getting that sick.”
“It kind of wasn’t,” she said. “Actually, that summer was kind of fun. I knew
something
was going on, but they didn’t tell me the whole story until she had to be moved into the hospital.”
“Kind of a tip-off that there was a problem.”
“Yeah. Kind of. I always felt bad, though.”
“About what?” he asked.
There was real concern in his voice. Eric was having a
conversation
with her—a real one. She never talked about the Marlene stuff except with Spencer, and occasionally with her friends, but never in much detail. There was one fact she often left out of those talks.
“For not feeling worse,” she said.
“You feel bad for not feeling bad?”
“My parents told Spencer first,” she explained, “since he’s the oldest. He just went into his room for a while. I think he really
got
it, how bad it was. Then they told Lola, and she got really upset. My parents couldn’t calm her down. That was bad.”
The food arrived, but he waved his hand to show he was still listening.
“Everyone was terrified of telling me,” she said, “but I’d figured it out by then, and I guess I was…okay with it or something. I just thought that if you got sick, you went to the hospital and someone made you better. Which is kind of what happened. I’m the mean one, I guess.”
“You’re not mean,” he said. “You’re just kind of…fearless.”
Was he
high
? Fearless? There were a lot of words that Scarlett could have used to describe herself…well, actually, there weren’t, but…if she had had a few, fearless would definitely not have been one of them.
“You just seem like you’ll tackle any problem put in front of you,” he said, thickly spreading ketchup on his burger.
“They don’t go away if you don’t,” she said. “And my ideas are usually bad.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t think you get my point,” he said. “See, I lived in fear of coming here. I come from this little town where everybody knows
each other. I was a big star there. I was, like,
the actor.
Here, there are real famous people. Every other person you meet is an actor. You go to auditions, and there are a hundred people in line ahead of you. Everyone’s talented, everyone’s good-looking, everyone has a good agent. Everyone has a story. Like you.”
Before, liking Eric was like a mirror—it was just a shiny thing, and it only went one way. But he was looking back at her now, and with interest. This was it. This was what people were talking about when they described falling in love. She was almost watching it happen to herself, like she was on the outside of her body.
So it was a bad time for her phone to ring. Mrs. Amberson’s name popped up on the screen.
“She never leaves you alone, does she?” Eric said, pointing at the screen with a fry.
Scarlett slipped away from the table to answer, just on the outside chance that Mrs. Amberson could somehow sense the fact that Eric was nearby.
“I need you, O’Hara,” she said, urgency rippling through her voice. “Whatever you’re doing, I need you to drop it at once.”
“Are you okay?” Scarlett asked. “Do you need a doctor or something?”
“I need you! Be here within the hour!”
Scarlett returned to the table, completely frazzled.
“Something’s wrong with her,” she said. “She was telling me she needs me, now. I’ve never heard her like this. But I can’t…”
“Don’t worry,” Eric said, all too quickly. “It sounds important. I’ll bring your sister home.”
Oh, no. This could not turn into playtime with Mrs. Amberson and bonding time with Eric and Marlene. But Eric was being his
absurdly courteous self and was already on his feet, offering to get someone to wrap up her food. Before she knew it, he had introduced himself at length to the head Powerkid parent and been taken into the fold. He even walked Scarlett out and hailed the cab for her.
“I’ll take good care of her,” he promised, as he helped her in. And with that, Scarlett was speeding across Forty-fourth Street, away from Eric.
Mrs. Amberson was sitting up in her bed for once—not smoking on the balcony. She was dressed in a long, vaguely oriental set of baby-blue silk pajamas and a never-before-seen pair of glasses were balanced on the edge of her nose. The silver drapes were closed and the wall sconces were lit, giving the room a warm, rosy glow. The expensive Parisian notebooks and papers were all over the bed, and the Montblanc pen (the one without the inkpot) was out of its box.
It appeared that she had actually been
writing
something. Even in Scarlett’s flustered, heightened state, this registered as being unusual.
She was also not, as Scarlett had been led to believe, dying.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Sit down.”
Scarlett sat down on the dressing table stool opposite the moon mirror. Mrs. Amberson took a moment before speaking, opening and closing the red cigarette case several times. She held it up.
“Did I ever tell you about this case?” she asked. “It’s a very special item…from the thirties, made in Berlin. I saw it in the window of
an antique store when I first moved to the city. I promised myself that if I got a big break, I would buy it. I checked on it for months, making sure no one took it. And then one day, I got that big break. I went over to buy it. And it was gone! Gone!”
Scarlett was getting the very annoying feeling that she’d been dragged away from something that might possibly, maybe, have counted as a date with Eric to hear a story about a cigarette case…and this did not make Mrs. Amberson more endearing.
“So how did you get it?” Scarlett asked dutifully.
“Someone bought it for me,” she said. “That very day, to congratulate me. I’d never even told him about it. He just happened to pass the store and saw it. I don’t know how he afforded it, either…”
“Who?”
Best to keep this story motoring along.
“A friend,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Funny thing is…this is the only reason I still smoke. I can’t bear to be without it. It was the first truly beautiful, special thing I’d ever owned.”
She removed a cigarette from it, then tossed her beautiful, special thing across the bed.
“It’s very sturdy,” she said. “The Germans build things to last.”
She went over to the window, but instead of climbing over the desk onto her perch, she sat on the edge of it, lit the cigarette, and held it at arm’s length out the window. She exhaled smoke into the room.
“What I’m about to tell you requires some delicacy, Scarlett,” she said. “I need to know I can trust you. Before I say any more, you have to promise me that what we talk about tonight will never leave this room. Your trust will be rewarded, I promise you.”
She looked at her just-lit cigarette, tossed it away, and shut the window. She slipped back to the bed. This was mysterious behavior, even for her.
“I promise,” Scarlett said.
She snapped the case open once or twice.
“I presume you heard a bit of the conversation I was having with Billy earlier. He mentioned a woman named Donna Spendler.”
Even saying the name seemed to cause her discomfort.
“There are some people who will do
anything
to get ahead,” she said, “no matter what the cost to other people. You find them in every walk of life. Donna Spendler falls into this category. What I’m about to propose may sound a little…unethical. But it’s really just a joke, and it’s nothing…
nothing
…compared to what she deserves.”
“What is it?” Scarlett asked, nervously.
“The fact that we’re doing
Hamlet
made me think of it,” she said, getting up and pacing the floor in front of the moon mirror. “Hamlet knows his uncle is guilty of murdering his father, but he can’t prove it. So when a group of traveling actors appears, he hires them to perform a play that will trigger his uncle, make him realize he’s caught, and force him to confess. Drawing from that idea, I want to stage a little play…”
“A play?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, “Donna goes up for the final audition for a very big Broadway role, which she may get. There is only one possible thing that could tempt her away from that room—and that’s the possibility of a television show. So tomorrow, at the crack of dawn, her agent will get a call telling her there is a casting emergency. An immediate opening for a female lead role in a new show.”
Scarlett remained silent, unsure what to make of what she was hearing.
“I know an out-of-work television writer who sent me some pages of a failed pilot called
The Heart of the Angel
,” she said. “It was originally set in LA, but a few tweaks of the lines will relocate it here, and it will be called
The Heart of the Empire.
Good title, huh? The main character is currently a man, but by tomorrow afternoon, it will be a woman. A woman of about Donna’s age. She becomes a cop after she turns forty to avenge her daughter’s murder. She saves kids. The actress who got the part has been horribly injured in a car accident, and someone else needs to step in, immediately. A big, golden opportunity…one that will take
all
of tomorrow afternoon. If she doesn’t take
that
bait, I’ll eat my yoga mat. Television trumps Broadway every time.”
“Why?” was all that Scarlett could think to say.
“Don’t think that I don’t know this is a lot to ask. I promise you, Donna Spendler deserves this and more. A lot more.”
“She deserves not to get a part?”
“Answer me this, O’Hara. What if someone used Spencer, took away his chance to perform? Actively killed his career?”
“I’d be…really mad?”
“You’d be more than mad,” Mrs. Amberson said. “That’s what I want you to imagine.”
“Who did she do this to?”
“That’s not important.” She sat on the dressing table, and it shifted, just a touch. “What is important is that this is someone who does not care about the careers of other actors. She will do what she has to to get ahead. And as you know, I take an active interest in
promoting
the careers of young actors, like I have with your brother’s
theater company. Their continued success is largely in my hands right now.”
It wasn’t precisely a threat, or a guilt trip, or blackmail. It was a statement of fact wrapped in a thin coating of warning.
“Would this ruin her career?” Scarlett asked. “Like you’re saying she did to someone else?”
“I could only wish! No, O’Hara. It’s just letting the air out of her tires a little. No one will be hurt. No one will even know. It’s just a little prank to get some justice for someone that was hurt a long time ago. Plus, it will be fun. What do you say? Are you in? Don’t you want to do something big this summer? Something you’ll always be able to talk about?”
There were a few perfectly sensible reasons to walk away from this, which Scarlett felt deserved a few moments of consideration. Overriding those was the fact that Mrs. Amberson really was the person keeping Spencer’s career and dream alive at the moment.
“We’ll keep the crew small,” she added, giving Scarlett a sly glance. “Just you, me, your brother, and Eric. I think they’ll be very enthusiastic about this proposition. We’ll make an excellent team.”
Scarlett waited a moment before answering.
“What do you need me to do?”
“I knew you would do it, O’Hara!” she said, elated. “Now, to pull this off…”
She picked up her notebook from the bed and leafed through several pages of notes.
“…we will need the following. One, a studio. That’s done. Billy has graciously loaned me a secondary studio space of his for a few hours, no questions asked. Two, a camera. Easily purchased in the
morning, I should think. Three, a small group of actors skilled in improvisation. That’s Spencer and Eric. And these…”
She took a handful of pages from the bed, printouts of script pages with notes written over them.
“I need you to type these up. This is our script. I’ll need five copies of it ready by noon. Do you think you can manage that? And send Spencer down.”
Her voice had lightened to its normal, happy, command-giving tone. But there was still something there—something deeper. Respect. Affection. Or just some bond people develop when plotting fake auditions together.
“Tomorrow,” she called out as Scarlett departed. “Great things, O’Hara!”
Scarlett was understandably nerve-rattled when she got upstairs. Spencer’s door was open. He had his headphones on and was “cleaning,” which meant he was dumping the contents of boxes onto his bed. The one he was currently working on contained tubes and pots of well-used makeup, fake body hair and skin, and lots of crumpled script pages.
“Trying to find a blood pack,” he explained, when he noticed Scarlett had appeared in his doorway. “Eric and I have been thinking about doing a thing where one of us stabs the other by accident during one of the scenes. We want to run it by Trevor, but it won’t look good unless I bleed. I have about seven of them in here somewhere…Marlene said you brought Eric along to some party she was at tonight.”
He tacked that on to the end very casually while plucking three noses out of the mess and piling them on his pillow. Scarlett spoke
fluent Spencer, though, and knew that this was not just a random remark.
“Just for backup,” she said. “It was free food. At the Hard Rock. I would have taken you, but you had gone to work.”
“The Hard Rock?” he repeated. “Why do they always pick janky places?”
The matter had clearly made his radar, but he said no more about it. He continued picking through the debris until he produced a small plastic bag of dark red liquid.
“Here we go,” he said. “I’m thinking stomach. It’s really easy to puncture the bag there and get the blood all over the place.”
He pulled up his T-shirt and started poking around his abdomen for possible locations for his wound.
“Mrs. Amberson needs you,” she said.
He straightened up, a little too quickly.
“Service?” he asked. “I love to give service.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“What?” he asked, all innocence. He jumped up, fished a deodorant from under a stack of clothes, shoved it under his shirt, and applied it liberally. “I am a Martin. Hotel management is in my blood, and customer satisfaction is my life.”
“Every time you flirt with her,” Scarlett said, “a puppy dies.”