12
TATUM
JULY 2004
My “big” break comes fifteen months of slinging cosmos and sex on the beaches and chardonnays for tourists at P. F. Chang’s. I don’t mind the work so much. It keeps me busy, though the children are often ill-behaved and whiny, and the tourists are loud and don’t tip well. But Mariana, who logs most shifts with me, has become a good friend, and with Ben still working unending hours, this time prepping for One Day in Dallas, a Kennedy biopic set to shoot next spring, the stint gives me structure, fills my days with something other than scanning the trades for shitty auditions, staring at my cell phone in case my (relatively dodgy) agent calls, running on the beach to lose a few pounds which will take me from girl-next-door to girl-someone-wants-to-fuck. (In Hollywood terms.) I’m contemplating adopting a dog for the companionship, but Ben isn’t home often enough for me to get an affirmative. “I might just do it without you,” I said to him one night while he was nose-deep in a revision. “You’ll just come home to a strange animal in the kitchen!”
“I prefer strange animals in the bedroom,” he said, and I laughed, so he pushed his luck and teased: “See, I’m listening to you, even when you think I’m not.”
So a dog is a possibility, a positive on the potential horizon.
Still, in the months that have passed between landing in LA and now, my ambition has gone from hopeful to desperate; my attitude has devolved from optimistic to jaded. There’s a reason you see aspiring starlets hopping off the bus in movies full of sunshine that turn pale and gray as the scenes roll past. How many doors can one knock on before the rejection starts to sting? Ben tells me to keep my chin up, but Ben is working on his third feature, which I am happy for (of course). It fills our bank account, offers us stability. His success makes him happier than ever, as if each chit, each accolade, brings him closer to God. A self-anointed Hollywood God, but God all the same. He tells me sometimes that he’s chasing the ghost of his dad, and I tell him that he now has to satisfy only himself, and he nods and sometimes seems to believe this and sometimes he doesn’t. I don’t try to talk him out of it too much, though; I understand the weight of parental baggage. It’s not as if I’m not heaving my own shit around too. It’s not as if I’m not wandering about, trying to find my own way too.
What I’m trying to find is what I embraced at Tisch, and what I discovered as a senior in high school after my rocky earlier years, and after my dad was absent and my mom was present but also on one of her holistic jags where she was more focused on the soothing nature of lavender or why we should ban dairy from our home than noticing that her teenage daughter was flailing about with a broken heart (and a lost virginity), and with no one around to guide her. At the time, I was taking drama because it fulfilled my arts requirement, and we were staging a modern rendition of Romeo and Juliet. Our teacher allowed us to adapt it for the modern era—think more Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes than Shakespeare—and when he cast me as the lead, I had to read the call sheet three times because I was sure he’d gotten it wrong. He hadn’t, and to my surprise, I held the audience rapt, silent, almost reverent. The school newspaper had given the production a mixed review but handed me a rave. My mom, an amateur poet who never had loftier aspirations, attended the performance and wept afterward.
“If you can dream it, you can be it, baby,” she said on the drive home.
“So why didn’t you ever try to get published?”
“The art is sometimes enough,” she said, squinting against the headlights of an oncoming car. “The art sometimes just has to be enough.”
But the art wasn’t just enough for me. I knew that immediately when they dropped the curtain on Romeo and Juliet; I knew it all through college, through the slog of hailed shows with great performances (Hamlet, The Heidi Chronicles), and less successful shows with still great performances (The Importance of Being Earnest and a particularly jarring Lost in Yonkers, where I was the only one who could pull off the accent). Daisy wasn’t wrong back at my wedding: I probably had been the best one in our class at Tisch, but out here in LA, Tisch didn’t mean much. Out here, big boobs and a small waist and, sometimes, a suggestive nod to a producer who may or may not want to undress you in his office after a meeting meant much more.
Daisy moves out the weekend of July 4th and crashes in our spare bedroom in our small bungalow. Though it’s theoretically Ben’s office, he’s gone so often that it’s mostly empty space where I sometimes unroll my yoga mat or find an exercise show on TV and run through a series of squats and lunges that make me hate myself, or when I’m feeling more generous, hate this town for making me care about the circumference of my thighs. Daisy is tiny and oozes all-American, so it’s no shock that she has a slew of auditions at the ready. Also Daisy is connected in ways that I’m not, in ways that Ben is. I try not to begrudge them this: Hollywood never promised to be a level playing field, but when her brother’s friend casts at ABC, and when her dad’s college roommate runs Paramount, it’s hard not to feel the nick against my skin. I want to call my mother, want to complain about the inequity of it, not because it means I won’t work hard—harder—but because sometimes the complaining is the solution in and of itself. But my mother is no longer here to listen.
Sometimes I call Piper. But she’s an obstetrics nurse (like my mom) who works nights and sleeps days, and I hate waking her with my burdens. Sometimes I’ll complain to Leo, who himself calls more often, needier now that his own dad is gone, though I never had the impression that he dumped his inner life on his dad in the first place. But grief and death can do that to you—slice open a place that is vulnerable and wanting—so he leans on me like a big sister, and in return I lean on him because he makes it easy to. He listens to my grievances about my humiliating auditions or the way I collided with a waiter carrying a full plate of hot fried rice, and how even half a day later, I found charred peas in my hair and plenty down my bra too, and also how I’m just a girl from Canton who can’t call in favors. (There’s Ben, yes, who floated my name to casting with One Day in Dallas, but I wasn’t the right “type,” as is too often the case out here.) Leo may be a rich kid with a trader job he hates, but he listens, and because he wants so desperately to shed the burdens of his own background (the job he loathes, the expectations of a dead father he can now never outrun), he understands.
Now, Daisy has rented a convertible until she leases a car of her own, but insists that I drive.
“I’m hopeless with maps,” she says. “Besides, it will be more fun if you come.”
So three days after she lands in LA, I chauffeur her from audition to audition. Daisy is naturally skinny with just the right amount of curves, and she is very blond, like she was bred on the farmlands of Kansas, a look that happens to be in high demand right now at castings. (Well, really, it’s always in high demand.) She goes out for guest spots on two teen shows, a small read for Quentin Tarantino’s newest, and more commercials than I’ve auditioned for all year. If it were anyone else, I’d hate her. Actually, it occurs to me, as I sit in the car at an expired meter so I can argue with the meter maid if she circles around, that I do hate her a little bit, but she’s Daisy, and one day, if asked, she’ll drive me around to my own set of auditions. I try to meditate as I wait: I’d attended a freebie class on the beach last week run by a celeb guru. I was kind of hoping to meet someone famous who might decide to be my best friend and help me forge connections of my own, but also I thought maybe I’d learn something too. To help me quiet my mind, to still my unfulfilled ambition. In the car, I breathe in and count to seven, then breathe out and count to seven over and over and over again, but then Daisy raps on my window, and my eyes fly open, and I’m as I was before: listless, annoyed. Jealous, if I’m really being honest with myself.
“You OK?” she asks, sliding on her seat belt, undoing her rubber band so her hair spills effortlessly over her shoulders like in a shampoo commercial.
“Yeah.” I put on my blinker to head up Sepulveda to take the back roads toward the Valley, hoping to beat traffic. “All good. All fine. Just tired.”
“Hey, I’m not getting any of these, you know that, right?”
“Of course you are,” I say. “And I want you to.”
“Well, I’m not. I mean, I’ve sucked it big all day.”
“You don’t have to say that. You don’t have to make me feel better.” I fiddle with the dial on the radio.
“I thought that you were fine.”
I sigh. “It’s not you. It’s me.”
“You were the best one of us at school, Tate.”
“That doesn’t matter out here.”
She quiets, losing herself to the view out the window.
“Were you meditating just now?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me,” I say.
She chokes on her laugh. “What the fuck? You’ve been out here for, like, a year, and you’re meditating? Whatever happened to the fuck-all bartender from NYU I knew and loved?”
“That fuck-all bartender was just an act, you know that. When have I ever been fuck-all anything in my life?” I come to a stop at a light. “Also, I took a class with Lily Marple’s guru. And you know that she’s nearly the highest-paid actress right now? I mean, it must be working.”
“Eh, I know someone who knows Lily Marple’s agent. Said she’d give a blow job to anyone who asks.”
“Shut up.”
She shrugs. “It’s true.”
“Jesus, I’m so fucked.”
“No, dear, not that, just a blow job or two.” She starts to giggle, which spirals into an uncontrollable fit of howling, crying laughter, and soon I’m laughing so hard I can barely keep the car in my lane.
“Hello, Hollywood! Daisy is here and she is prepared to give blow jobs!” I scream out the open air of the convertible until I realize that we’re actually in front of the audition building, and I jolt into a parking spot. “I take that back!” I shout. “Daisy is here, and she is the most professional, qualified actress I know!”
Daisy reins in her laugh until it sputters to a slow chuckle, takes three deep breaths, and then flips open her compact mirror. Her eyeliner has smeared, her cheeks are blotchy from the hysterics.
“God, I look like hell. Also, I’m wiped; I don’t think I can deal.”
“Come on, Daisy, get out. Don’t be late.”
“Can’t. Don’t make me.”
I put the car in park. “Daisy, seriously, this is for The O.C. That’s, like, real shit, real exposure. You can’t be too tired for that.”
“I am. Jet lag.” She groans, then tilts her head toward me and smiles. “Besides, I’ll never get the part. It’s for a bad girl with, like, tattoos. Not the blond all-American.”
“Well, they wanted to see you.”
“Oh God, you know as well as I do that they have no idea what they want to see. And I’m pretty sure they only agreed to this because my dad made some calls.” She shoves the sides—the audition dialogue—at me. “You go. Tell them you’re me.”
“I can’t tell them I’m you! I don’t even have my headshots on me.”
Daisy pops open the glove compartment and pulls out a stack. “Please, if I know anything about Tatum Connelly, it’s that she’s always prepared. Sign in with my name, then give them your real stuff when you get in the room. They won’t say no.”
“They’ll say no.”
“Then so what? I’m not getting this part anyway.”
I glance at the sides. She’s right: this role was practically written for me. Not me, Tatum, but the version of me I so easily inhabited at the bar, the one who threw shots down her throat, dismissed the tarty undergrads, picked up men for the sport of it. That version of me could play this role as if I were someone else entirely.
“They’re going to say no,” I repeat.
“So make them say yes,” she answers and shifts her seat back to take a nap, as if she’s put the question to bed.
They ask me to read three times through, then whisper among themselves, conferring in a tight little huddle behind a table littered with scattered headshots, discards of actors who are disposable and unwanted, not right for the part. The director, Seth, a guy about thirty, give or take a few years, with a scraggly goatee and a worn Red Sox hat, flips my résumé over and rereads it.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I reply.
“I could be blind here, but I’m pretty sure you are not Daisy Alexander, now, are you?”
I stutter, feel my composure ebbing out of me. I remind myself to play the part, to be anyone they want me to be, to be anyone I need to be. I tilt my chin higher, puff out my chest.
“Listen. I just thought . . .”
He waves a hand, indicating for me to be quiet. I turn to go.
“Wait, it’s OK, it’s OK.” His eyes narrow on my résumé again. “Ah, Romanticah. I knew I knew you from somewhere.” He smiles. “Ben and I grew up together.”
“Ben grew up with everyone, it seems like.”
“I know, right?” He laughs. “You from the city too?”
He means: Are you part of our circle? Shouldn’t we have met? Are you someone from whom I should curry favor?
“Sort of,” I say.
“I’m intrigued,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
“Give me the part, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
His raucous laugh shocks his associates into laughing too. I smile, though I think: You are all such fucking lemmings. I put my hand on my hip, jut it outward, flip my hair in a display of attitude. It’s not so hard, this bravado. It’s what I practiced for at the bar with Daisy, it’s what I trained for practically since Romeo and Juliet. Being someone other than me. I slip into it like a second skin, like if I try a little harder, soon I won’t even notice the difference.
“I like it,” Seth says, nodding.
Me too, I think.
They call the next morning with an offer for a three-episode arc, tell me to have my agent reach out to go over the details. I only have my dubious commercial agent, with his dreary office in Van Nuys and who mostly got castings for non-union local commercials (and possibly soft-core porn), so Daisy calls her own agent, and just like that I have real representation and am a working actress. Daisy had booked two of her commercials and the spot in the Tarantino movie. The O.C. was small potatoes compared to that, but I didn’t have a dad who knew people who knew people; I didn’t have a high school network to call in favors. Not that Daisy wasn’t talented; not that Ben wasn’t either.
Also, not that I wasn’t indebted to Daisy for giving me the audition in the first place.
I was. I am.
I love them both.
But even with them in my army, it had been fifteen months without as much as a nibble, without as much as a solitary yes.
I was the most talented one at Tisch.
Ben ditches the office early, and he, Daisy, Eric (his writing buddy from Williams), and I toast to our successes at Nobu off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu as the sun blazes out into darkness, painting the sky in oranges and pinks and yellows that seem unimaginable if not for viewing them with our naked eyes. Ben snakes his arm around my waist and tugs me in for a kiss, while Daisy and Eric flirt over the bottle of champagne that Ben ordered, and we drink too quickly.
“You didn’t have to do all this for me,” I say, waving my hand, still clutching a mostly empty flute of champagne. “It’s just a guest part on The O.C.”
“It’s the start of something; it’s the beginning of a snowball.” He tilts forward and touches his forehead to mine.
“So we can snowball together,” I say.
“Let’s snowball together,” he repeats.
“OK,” I say.
“I see you,” he whispers in my ear.
I close my eyes and kiss him because we see each other so easily, we can do so even with our eyes pressed shut.