Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a short story - from the collection ‘Lives of the Artists.’
Best wishes,
Sam
AN ACTOR PREPARES
There was the period of time when he lived for riding the subway – actively looked forward to it. He had his slushy walk under the highway overpass and then down the long line and through the turnstiles, all the intricate fight-or-flight instincts, the battles for seats and closing doors and elbow room, just to make it to another borough, and then, when he’d taken the position allotted to him, hand on ceiling, or back against the inside doors, or just standing in the middle of the car, skateboarding and swaying with the movement of the train, he was free to observe. Almost everybody was on their phones, of course, as far as he could tell they were pretty much all playing Candy Crush and grimacing along with their successes and failures. There were the handful of people with their books and their dutiful, rolled-up New Yorkers, and they seemed like relics from a lost civilization, their faces were somehow both gentler and more worried than everyone else’s. And he liked to choose just one person and to move as they moved, he had made a point in the beginning of not choosing too carefully and that stayed with him, he did tend to gravitate towards the people listening to music, he liked what that did to the corners of their mouths, the way they all seemed to purse their lips as they listened, and it was a funny sensation for him, pursing his own lips, swaying to unheard music somewhere at the other end of the subway car. It was New York, everybody was in their own space, everybody was infinitely tolerant of eccentricity, nobody ever noticed or called him out for his mimicry act, which vaguely disappointed him.
And that was pretty much it – the highlight of his day. ‘You know you’re a real New Yorker if you go to the subway for peace and quiet,’ somebody had said to him once, and he kept that as one of his personal mottoes, the sort of quiet battle cry that everybody needed to keep going in the city. The office was a laptop, sometimes a desultory meeting – it was astonishing how rarely he spoke to anyone else – almost nobody reacted to anything over the course of the day, it was a kind of practiced poker face, the idea was to frown at the screen just the same if you were looking at a spreadsheet or reading Buzzfeed. And, little by little, in ways that wouldn’t have been discernible to anyone, any more than they were to the models themselves in the trains, he introduced these new characters into office life. He pursed his lips, he bobbed along to his music, he hunched over, he became a Brighton Beach refugee thinking about the boardwalk in Odessa. He limped to the toilet, he had emphyzemic coughing fits if he was alone in the kitchen, a few times a day he received terrible news by e-mail and stared at it unblinking, glassy-eyed, willed himself to fight back tears and return to his work. Sometimes, again en route to the toilet, he had the squinting, brazen look of a panhandler sizing everybody up.
It was childish, it was harmless, he already had a reputation as an office eccentric, for no other reason really than that he wore his hair long and had brightly-colored shirts. If his closest seatmates happened to see him limping or lapsing into a Southern accent on a call to customer service or somebody who wouldn’t mind, they didn’t bother to ask him what it was about, they just smiled knowingly towards him as if they were practitioners of the same mysterious hobby.
Julie appreciated it when he came limping through the door in the evening or if he made a point of murmuring ‘thank you kindly’ if she passed him something at dinner. It wasn’t flagrant, it wasn’t like he was Brandoizing their lives, his conversation was normal otherwise, it was just a kind of background noise, the morning’s panhandler, the morning’s tourist continuing all the way until he fell asleep.
There were four people in their apartment, although at an honest count it was more like six, plus the revolving door at the times when Milla and her boyfriend were on a break. Everybody was an actor or was, at heart, an actor. What they made money from was something completely different, something arts adjacent – coffee, grant writer, assistant to a director. When people were over, an out-of-town friend, or one of Milla’s, waiting in undershirt by the coffee machine, asked what they did, a strange stutter-step came into their voices, a kind of hieroglyphic that, to the discerning, meant that a grant writer at a mildly-known foundation wasn’t really a grant writer, that the foundation meant nothing, that the question itself was mauvais ton, and the reality it implied provisional, transient, a kind of preamble and parenthesis in the eventual narrative: worked as a barista, line chef, barback before….finally quit their day job when….worked all kinds of odd jobs until….did you know that so-and-so once worked as….?
Julie tolerated it the least of any of them. She looked people in the eyes and said, “I’m an actor” and dared them to ask if they had seen her in anything. She was a kind of folk hero for this, or had been at the point when they were lavish with praise for one another, when they were very much on the same team conquering the city together, before they had fractionalized into the usual roommate disputes, before they became an extension of their agreed-upon roles, the one who shook down the others for rent, the one who left too many dishes in the sink, the one who always forgot to send a message announcing an out-of-town friend.
That was pretty much the new dynamic. Ryan felt like he was in the reality cam on some survivor show, if he came across Vivian late at night scanning the refrigerator for something, she would have her lips pursed, she would hesitate a moment and then, checking that the coast was clear, she would tell him about how she had started to suspect Milla of kleptomania – too many things were disappearing from the fridge and around the apartment – and then sharing a slushy walk with Milla to where she got on a Citi Bike and he got on the train she would say, “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, it will just get back to Julie,” and he would have to do some elaborate pantomime of pinky swears and scouts’ honors before she trusted him enough to tell him that Julie had been unbelievably brusque and pushy in her attempts to extort rent, and then when there was laughter and the door slamming and the pause before the bed began to shake from Milla’s wall Julie would – without comment now – just put in earbuds and listen to something soothing, something that reminded her of comfort and of home, always the same decisive head shake, the same lip curl that Ryan made sure never to imitate in her presence.
And he was neutral, he was ‘Switzerland,’ as Vivian called him in her overdramatic way, he got along even with the undershirted men by the coffee machine. This was, honestly, a bit thankless, what it mostly meant was a jenga of confidences that he had to keep from everybody else, the number of conversations that began “please don’t tell….” and he wasn’t sure of exactly what the rules were for Julie, if there was some clause of full disclosure and transparency that you were supposed to have with your partner if you lived together or if that was only if you were engaged or married or if that didn’t exist at all, and he had joked once to Vivian, who didn’t get what he meant, that he was jealous of therapists and tax lawyers and the tidy bulwarks they kept, that he felt he should take a dollar from anyone who told him anything just to keep his mouth shut.
Vivian was the first one to give up. She and her boyfriend did it like they were holding a press conference, like they were LeBron James or something, they posted a video on facebook announcing that they had always thought they might live by the Gulf of Mexico when they got older, and there was a family place there, and they might as well do it now, and they looked at each other very lovingly, very wistfully, like they were imagining cheap rent, imagining a place where everybody smiled at you in the grocery store, imagined too the long evenings on the porch, the long nights, the whisky on the sideboard, the cards on the table, the pause in the conversation, the knowledge that New York was out there, that New York was trucking along, and they had been there and hadn’t measured up. Well, that was Ryan’s imagination – probably that wasn’t really what they were thinking about, probably nobody played cards anymore, even on the Gulf of Mexico – but he had a tendency to read things into a look, to create a whole story, and he wasn’t as nice as people thought, because he was blond and sunny and liked to hike everybody assumed he was a nice guy, which he wasn’t really. In any case, that wasn’t Julie’s reaction. She watched the video on facebook and her head twitched from side to side and her lips were curling in the way that was verboten to imitate. “That is the worst,” she said. “That is the fucking worst. Sitting right there. Tells it to the whole world. Doesn’t have the balls to say it to our face.” Ryan usually defended people – it was a reflex for him. This time, he let it go, didn’t even mind that Vivian was probably right there, monitoring the reaction to her facebook post, that Julie’s voice was carrying.
***
The role he got was very off-type for him. It happened in exactly the way that these things are always supposed to happen. The casting director who had hip-pocketed him sent him the side, he went into a windowless studio room, it was part of one of these studio complexes, he could hear people rehearsing in the other room, it sounded like for some kind of high school musical, the carpeting was really awful, very ’80s, it seemed like they hadn’t renovated on purpose, they wanted to make it as miserable as possible, like it was some kind of spiritual exercise, they were making the point that the path forward can come from anywhere, that the most unexpected places could be the portal to exactly what he was dreaming about. He was reading for this tough Irish immigrant kid, and what he was doing was broad, he knew that, it wasn’t the sort of feeling that everybody always talked about in the acting classes, the audition seminars, the feeling of having killed it, of just knowing, but something had changed, the molecules of the air around him were somehow different, enough so that when he got the e-mail inviting him to a callback he almost didn’t react to it, he was walking through the rain and the highway overpass, he had a couple of errands to run for Julie, he actually forgot to mention it to her when he first got home, his first thought was annoyance that it conflicted with drinks with a friend, which he would have to move around.
The callback was a different story, that was in a real rehearsal room in a theater with actors who had real Irish accents. There were people with glasses who had scripts in front of them and coughed enigmatically at different moments in his performance. And that was excruciating, he took the subway home, he picked up groceries, at every moment he was aware of his phone not ringing in his pocket, the promotions and spam in his inbox seemed like a personal affront, Julie called to remind him to get a certain type of salt from the grocery store because he always got the wrong one and he had never felt worse than when he reached for the phone triumphantly buzzing and it turned out to be her, explaining something about iodine. But it came later that night, just an e-mail, wedged between department store sales and credit ratings, the thought occurred to him that it was very low-key, that people might miss something like that, but of course nobody ever did, a very flat business-like e-mail letting him know the date of the first table read, some note about equity and inclusion, and of course they knew that everybody would be scanning their e-mail for something like that, everybody would react promptly, it wasn’t like they needed to call, wasn’t like they were worried he would miss it. Julie was in the middle of cooking and he came up and kissed her on the side of the neck, heard a different voice coming out of him, she was in the middle of one of these fast-moving phases of cooking, moving up and down the counter like it was some kind of drill, but she screamed and threw her arms around his neck and the cupboard was scrounged for champagne that they were pretty sure Vivian had left. And, at dinner, with Milla trudging out of her room, he was quizzed about each one of the glasses-wearing people behind scripts, each one of the authentic-accented ringers from Ireland, and he surprised himself by having opinions about the personality of each one of them, did impressions of some of them, they had been an unexpected, unlikely event in his life, now they were his family, whatever obscure dramas they all had with each other were about to become his dramas. When he was already drunk and sleepy, and lay on his back on the bed and watched the ceiling spin over him, he somehow worked up the energy to do the dishes and vaulted himself into the kitchen and found Milla there scanning the refrigerator for something, it was Vivian’s gesture, Vivian appraising the kitchen for petty theft, it was like now that she was gone everybody else had to pick up all of her pieces, Julie taking her alcohol, Milla adopting her gestures. “Congratulations,” Milla said again, her smile was tight and actorish, she always had lots of eyeliner and makeup, even at home at night, it had the effect of pulling her face together into sharp, tight lines, Julie was taking a shower, he could hear the water running from their room. “It’s a funny feeling,” he was saying, “just the feeling of knowing you’re in the right room.” He was rinsing and drying, a certain ballet that took him between the sink and cupboards, she was moving around him, she was trying to organize a midnight snack, yogurt and maybe some champagne to go with it. “It was a click,” he was saying, “like I didn’t know why I was there, I didn’t know why anybody had considered me for that part, but that was the place, such a funny feeling, I knew it right away.”
She passed next to him to get some silverware and he turned and kissed her, his hands were still soapy from the dishes, he couldn’t run them over her in the way he wanted to. It didn’t follow from what they were talking about, it didn’t follow from their previous relationship, the introduction to Julie’s friend from one of her acting classes, the years of roommate squabbles, the boyfriends and semi-boyfriends. She didn’t seem surprised or pleased. She kissed him back, she let herself be bent backwards, leaning on his forearm. At some point, she smiled tightly at him, she retreated back to her room.
***
In one sense nothing was different. He kept his day job, rehearsals were still a few weeks away. Julie tutored most evenings, he and Milla screwed in Vivian’s old room. For some reason, that made the most sense to them, a sublettor had shown up, dropped off some enigmatic boxes, disappeared again, and that felt right, the mattress without any bedding, the boxes marked ‘glassware’ and ‘trinkets’ and ‘mantelpiece.’ It was an absurd risk, Julie’s clients canceled all the time, he made sure to keep his phone on and charged and next to the bed, he monitored it closely for notifications of her movements. He had heard her so many times, Milla, had been able to link up sound and motion, had been able, he felt, to envision just about everything, but now, out of some residual loyalty to Julie, she was completely quiet, he watched the way beads of sweat formed on her brow, the tight way she pursed her lips as she concentrated. Afterwards, she stroked his body with one finger along the flank, that was what he liked the best, the feeling of her evaluation, her summing-up. Then they were really cutting it close and he went back to his and Julie’s room to take a shower, learn his lines. She usually stayed there a bit longer, wrapped herself tight in a sheet that they’d finally brought over for exactly that purpose.
When rehearsals started, he put in notice at his office – it wasn’t a big deal, they were used to actors, they’d gotten over annoyance about this kind of thing a long time ago. They’d all spent so long taking acting classes, talking about agents and managers, talking about the ‘break,’ the whole mysticism of how to align yourself exactly right so that the stars shined on you – Vivian in particular had been a shaman of this kind of thing, forever lighting candles and watching lunar cycles – that he’d almost forgotten what it was actually like, just the process of being given blocking and talking earnestly to a stranger, with whom he now had this deep relationship, and making sure that his voice hit the back wall of the theater. There were two Irish actresses who were the stars of the cast. They had known each other since conservatory, had dated all the same men, squabbled constantly. They had this shared look whenever a stage manager announced a union-mandated break or if someone showed up with granola or parfait. At the end of rehearsal, they waited for everybody to leave, everybody with their time cards and their equity rules, and then they had their own rehearsal, no directing, no blocking, just drilling the scene over and over again until they cracked the core of it. One of them would prop the door open so they could blow their cigarette smoke out into the street.
Ryan stayed late to work on the scenes with them. Not everybody was up for their protocol – some of the other actors had kids, some of them took equity rules seriously. It would be Ryan and one or two other of the minor characters, depending on which scene they wanted to work, and then he would be dismissed and the two of them would work their one-on-one scenes. He’d get his bag and walk towards the subway, they would be lighting up a fag behind him, taking a moment to bitch about the production, or maybe someone Ryan had never heard of, before they got back to work. When he got home Julie would usually still be doing some of her work, proof-reading, grading. She’d have earbuds in, point towards the wall, Milla had started up again with one of the more objectionable of her boyfriends, and Ryan lay on the bed in his clothes, his hands clasped under his neck, he watched Julie bent over, the oddly chopsticked way she pecked at her keyboard, he listened to Milla operatic, always operatic, ceilings had become somehow important to him recently, he stared up and always had the illusion that the room was spinning above him, when Julie got annoyed about his bag or his jeans being on the bed he had just enough energy to slide them off, dive under the covers.
When he took the train there was no more imitation of kids playing Candy Crush, no more swaying with the panhandlers. Now he was always and only Ricky, the kid from the tenements. He liked to wear a shirt with the sleeves cut off, he was always rolling cigarette papers for himself. When he finished rolling, he’d absentmindedly wet the tip, place it behind his ear. His gait was different, more seafaring, he made sure to stand right in the middle of the doors when he was leaving or boarding a train, he never stepped aside for anyone. It was New York, nobody minded particularly, nobody noticed what he was doing, his shambling movements, the way he’d grease and pomade his hair when he wasn’t rolling his cigs.
Julie and Milla came together to opening night. It was a funny feeling, it was like he was watching them more than they were watching him. Julie was bent forward, he thought he saw the light of her phone screen once or twice in the dark theater, Milla was ramrod straight, it looked like she wasn’t breathing. Back in school, he used to be superstitious about this kind of thing, never looked at an audience even when he had a direct address monologue, but in this play he had plenty of time just hanging out on stage, reading the newspaper, pomading his hair, and it wasn’t just that, he felt that he could kind of explore the audience even when he was delivering his lines, the place they were stored in him was some kind of airtight chamber, people who didn’t know much about acting always talked about presence, but it wasn’t that, more like the opposite, it felt like the real him was hovering above, detached, a bit bored, and Ryan the actor and Ricky the character were moved around like marionettes. At the curtain call, one of the lead actresses squeezed his hand and ran her fingertips along his back. Everybody was watching everybody – she’d been on stage for virtually the entire show, had god knows how many lines, and they were like doing scales to her, all she was thinking about, he knew her well enough by now to know this, was the supporting actors, who had brought it tonight, who would need some extra work. At celebratory drinks, Milla was ramrod straight again, he noticed the way she cupped her mug of beer on the instep of her hands like it was a saucer, everybody was strangely quiet, Julie had some issues with how the play had been written, she handled most of the conversation.
He and Julie broke up not too long after that. It was the usual thing, she happened to see some flirty texts from Katie, the Irish co-star, and then she dug around on his phone and found the whole thread with Milla. She insisted that nobody be there when she packed up, he came back to the apartment and found it like a construction site, power strips uprooted and tossed in the middle of the room, clothes strewn around the floor. Milla let herself in a few minutes after he did, they looked together at the wreckage of the kitchen and living room, stared at each other like they were in a spaghetti western. He moved towards her and she took him by the hand, led him to her room. Vivian’s replacement sublettor had finally moved in, but there was no need for that kind of sham secrecy, that night he moved his toothbrush and towel over to her room, exactly like he was visiting a different apartment, within a week they’d posted an ad for a sublettor for Julie’s old room.
There was no more need for pomading his hair or rolling cigarettes on the train – Ricky was inside of him, immaculate, unshakeable. The casting director was starting to send him out for other auditions for when his show was supposed to end, and he took each of them into his body, a couple of days roaming around the city as a sharp stockbroker, a couple of days as a minor league baseball player. When he didn’t get the roles, he didn’t take it to heart – he figured he probably was just the wrong look or something – went back to the Candy Crush kids, the geezers reading The New Yorker. At the wrap party for the show, Katie pulled him aside, started to really close-talk him, tell him how he’d shown up right from day one, how she never had any doubt about his discipline, his dedication, how, on stage, she’d felt completely safe with him, held by him. She was extremely drunk, her breath smelled of some kind of fruity schnapps, maybe apricot, she was smoking freely indoors. When it came time to get cabs, he texted some half-hearted excuse to Milla. “I can’t believe – all this time – and you haven’t seen my place,” Katie said.
In the morning he was in a kind of dreamy, fugue state on the train. Most people there were sleeping, or else they were track workers or some kind of short-order cook on one of these endless commutes. That’s what most of life was, he reflected, that’s what most people were stuck with, jobs that you woke up for before the sunrise, commutes that were the same thing every day. It wasn’t the way he’d normally think, but Ricky was a bit of an anarchist philosopher – he probably had some shards of Ricky still stuck with him. Milla was very bleary-eyed when he came in. She got up, she sat on the edge of the bed, she wrapped her arms around him like he was a teddy bear, she leaned her head against his torso. He was sure the recriminations were coming – the lie he’d texted her was really threadbare – but he didn’t care and, for the moment, apparently, neither did Milla. She had already confessed that she just couldn’t make her share of the rent, had asked him, crying, if he could cover her this month; as for the next month, who knew, maybe it was time to go back home, rethink things a bit. They were all giving up, Vivian was posting cheery Instagram stories about the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, Julie was who knows where, Milla, spiky, sexy Milla was too tired even to get jealous, he was the only one who’d crossed over, the only one who’d managed to turn himself into someone new.