Someday, Someday, Maybe A Novel - By Lauren Graham
1
“Begin whenever you’re ready,” comes the voice from the back of the house.
Oh, I’m ready.
After all, I’ve prepared for this day for years: The Day of the Most Important Audition of a Lifetime Day. Now that it’s finally here, I’m going to make a good impression, I’m sure of it. I might even book the job. The thought makes me smile, and I take a deep breath, head high, body alert, but relaxed. I’m ready, alright. I’m ready to speak my first line.
“Eeessssaaheeehaaa.” The sound that comes out of me is thin and high, a shrill wheezing whine, like a slowly draining balloon or a drowning cat with asthma.
Shake it off. Don’t get rattled. Try again.
I clear my throat.
“Haaaaaawwrrrblerp.” Now my tone is low and gravelly, the coarse horn of a barge coming into shore, with a weird burping sound at the end. “Hawrblerp?” That can’t be my line. I don’t think it’s even a word. Oh, God, I hope they don’t think I actually burped. It was really more of a gargle, I tell myself—although I don’t know which is worse. I can just picture the scene, post-audition: That actress? We brought her in and she positively belched all over the dialogue. Is she any good? Well, I suppose you could use her, if the part calls for lots of gargling. Sounds of cruel laughter, phones slamming into receivers, 8 × 10 glossies being folded into paper airplanes and aimed into wastepaper baskets. Career over, the end.
“Franny?” I can’t see who’s speaking because the spotlight is so bright, but they’re getting impatient, I can tell. My heart is pounding and my palms are starting to sweat. I’ve got to find my voice, or they’ll ask me to leave. Or worse—they’ll drag me off stage with one of those giant hooks you see in old movies. In Elizabethan times the audience would throw rotten eggs at the actors if they didn’t like a performance. They don’t still do that, do they? This is Broadway, or at least, I think it is. They wouldn’t just throw—
The tomato bounces off my leg and onto the bare wood floor of the stage.
Splat.
“Franny? Franny?”
I open my eyes halfway. I can see from the window above my bed that it’s another gray and drizzly January day. I can see that because I took the curtains down right after Christmas in order to achieve one of my New Year’s resolutions, of becoming an earlier riser. Successful actresses are disciplined people who wake up early to focus on their craft, I told myself—even ones who still make their living as waitresses—like me. I started leaving the alarm clock on the landing between Jane’s room and mine so I’d have to actually get out of bed in order to turn it off, instead of hitting snooze over and over like I normally do. I also resolved to quit smoking again, to stop losing purses, wallets, and umbrellas, and to not eat any more cheese puffs, not even on special occasions. But I already had two cigarettes yesterday, and although the sun is obscured by the cloudy sky, I’m fairly certain it is far from my new self-appointed rising time of eight A.M. My three-day abstinence from cheese puffs and the umbrella still downstairs by the front door are my only accomplishments of the year so far.
“Franny?”
Only half-awake, I roll over and squint down at the pitted wood floor by my bed, where I notice one black leather Reebok high-top lying on its side. That’s strange. It’s mine—one of my waitressing shoes—but I thought I’d left them outside the—thwack!—a second Reebok whizzes by, hitting the dust ruffle and disappearing underneath.
“Franny? Sorry, you didn’t respond to me knocking.” Dan’s voice is muffled and anxious from behind my bedroom door. “I didn’t hit you with the shoe, did I?”
Ahhh, it was my shoe that hit me on the leg, not a tomato. What a relief.
“I dreamed it was a tomato!” I yell at the half-open door.
“You want me to come back later?” Dan calls back anxiously.
“Come in!” I should probably get out of bed and put Dan out of his misery, but it’s so cold. I just want one more minute in bed.
“What? Sorry, Franny, I can’t quite hear you. You asked me to make sure you were up, remember?”
I suppose I did, but I’m still too groggy to focus on the details. Normally I would’ve asked our other roommate, my best friend, Jane, but she’s been working nights as a P.A. on that new Russell Blakely movie. Since Dan moved into the bedroom downstairs a few months ago, I haven’t noticed much about him except how unnecessarily tall he is, how many hours he spends writing at the computer, and the intense fear he seems to have about coming upon either of us when we’re not decent.
“Dan! Come in!”
“You’re decent?”
In fact, I went to sleep in an outfit that far exceeds decent, even by Dan’s prudish standards: heavy sweatpants and a down vest I grabbed last night after the radiator in my room sputtered and spat hot water on the floor, then completely died with a pathetic hiss. But that’s what you get in Park Slope, Brooklyn for $500 a month each.
Jane and I had shared the top two floors of this crumbling brownstone with Bridget, our friend from college, until the day Bridget climbed on top of her desk at the investment banking firm where she worked and announced that she no longer cared about becoming a millionaire by the time she turned thirty. “Everyone here is dead inside!” she screamed. Then she fainted and they called an ambulance, and her mother flew in from Missoula to take her home.
“New York City,” Bridget’s mother clucked as she packed up the last of her daughter’s things. “It’s no place for young girls.”
Jane’s brother was friends with Dan at Princeton, and assured us that Dan was harmless: quiet and responsible and engaged to be married to his college girlfriend, Everett. “He was pre-med, but now he’s trying to be some sort of screenwriter,” Jane’s brother told us. And then, the ultimate roommate recommendation: “He comes from money.”
Neither Jane nor I had ever had a male roommate. “I think it would be very modern of us,” I told her.
“Modern?” she said, rolling her eyes. “Come one, it’s 1995. It’s retro of us. We’d be Three’s Company all over again.”
“But with two Janets,” I pointed out. Jane and I are different in many ways, but we worked hard in school together, we’re both brunettes, and we’ve both read The House of Mirth more than once, just for fun.
“How true,” she sighed.
“Franny?” Dan calls out, his voice still muffled. “You didn’t go back to sleep did you? You told me you’d try if I let you. I promised I’d make sure—”
I take a deep breath and I bellow, in my most diaphragmatically supported Shakespearean tone: “Daaaaaaan. Come iiiiiinnnnnnn.”
Miraculously, the left side of Dan’s face appears through the crack in the door, but it’s not until he’s confirmed my fully covered status and stepped all the way into the room, leaning his oversized frame awkwardly against the corner bookshelf, that I suddenly remember:
My hair.
I have no romantic feelings toward Dan, but I do have very strong feelings about my unruly, impossibly curly hair, which I piled into a green velvet scrunchie on top of my head last night while it was still wet from the shower, a technique that experience tells me has probably transformed it from regular hair into more of a scary, frizzy hair-tower while I slept. In an attempt to assess just how bad it is, I pretend to yawn while simultaneously stretching one hand over my head, in the hopes of appearing nonchalant while also adjusting the matted pile of damage. For some reason this combination of moves causes me to choke on absolutely nothing.
“Is it … (cough, cough) … is it really late?” I sputter.
“Well, I went to the deli, so I don’t know exactly how long your alarm’s been going off,” Dan says. “But Frank’s been up for at least two hours already.”
Shit. I am late. Frank is the neighbor whose apartment we can see into from the windows in the back of our brownstone. Frank leads a mysterious, solitary life, but one you can set a clock by. He rises at eight, sits in front of a computer from nine to one, goes out and gets a sandwich, is back at the computer from two until six thirty, is gone from six thirty to eight, and then watches TV from eight until eleven P.M., after which he goes promptly to sleep. The schedule never changes. No one ever comes over. We worry about Frank in the way New Yorkers worry about strangers whose apartments they can see into. Which is to say, we made up a name for him and have theories about his life, and we’d call 911 if we saw something frightening happen while spying on him, but if I ran into him on the subway, I’d look the other way.
“It’s kind of cold in here, you know,” Dan announces, scrutinizing the room from beneath his long brown bangs. Dan always needs a haircut.
“Dan,” I say, sitting up, pulling the covers to my ears, “I have to tell you—this flair for the obvious? Combined with your shoe-throwing accuracy? You should submit yourself to the front desk at The Plaza Hotel or something, and start a personal wake-up service. New Yorkers need you. I’m not kidding.”
Dan knits his brow for a moment, as if concerned he might actually be called upon to present his qualifications for the job, but then a little light comes into his eyes. “Aha,” he says, pointing his forefinger and thumb at me, play-pistol style. “You’re joking.”
“Um, yes,” I say, pulling an arm out of my blanket cocoon to play-pistol him back. “I’m joking.”
“Did you know, Franny,” Dan begins, in a bland professorial tone, and I steel myself in anticipation of the inevitable boring lecture to come, “the statue in front of The Plaza is of Pomona, the Roman goddess of the orchards? ‘Abundance,’ I believe it’s called.” Pleased with his unsolicited art history lesson, Dan squints a little and rocks back on his heels.
I stifle a yawn. “You don’t say, Dan. ‘Abundance’? That’s the name of the bronze topless lady sculpture on top of the fountain?”
“Yes. ‘Abundance.’ I’m sure of it now. Everett did a comprehensive study on the historically relevant figurative nude sculptures of Manhattan while we were at Princeton. Actually,” he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “the paper was considered rather provocative.” He pumps his eyebrows up and down in a way that makes me fear his next words might be “hubba-hubba.”
Dan and Everett, engaged to be married. Dan and Everett, and their mutual interest in the historically relevant figurative nudes of Manhattan. Apparently, that’s the kind of shared passion that tells two people they should spend the rest of their lives together, but you wouldn’t know it to see them in person. To me, they seem more like lab colleagues who respect each other’s research than two people in love.
“That is fascinating, Dan. I’ll make a note of it in my diary. Say, if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind checking the clock on the landing and telling me the actual time?”
“Certainly,” he says, with a formal little half-bow, as if he’s some sort of manservant from ye olden times. He ducks out of the room for a moment, then sticks his head back in. “It is ten thirty-three, exactly.”
Something about the time causes my heart to jump, and I have to swallow a sense of foreboding, a feeling that I’m late for something. But my shift at the comedy club where I waitress doesn’t start until three thirty. I had intended to get up earlier, but there’s nothing I’m actually late for, nothing I’m missing. Nothing I can think of, anyway.
“You know, Franny—just a thought,” Dan says solemnly. “In the future, if you put the alarm clock right by your bed, you might be able to hear it better.”
“Thanks, Dan,” I say, stifling a giggle. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll give that a try.”
He starts to leave, but then turns back, again hesitating in the doorway.
“Yes, Dan?”
“It’s six months from today, right?” he says, then smiles. “I’d like to be the first to wish you luck. I have no doubt you’ll be a great success.” And then he does his little half-bow again, and plods away in his size-fourteen Adidas flip-flops.
I flop back on my pillow, and for a blissful moment, my head is full of nothing at all.
But then it comes rushing back to me.
What day it is.
The reason I asked Dan to make sure I was up.
Why I’m having audition anxiety dreams.
A wave of dread crashes over me as I remember: when I looked at the year-at-a-glance calendar in my brown leather Filofax last night, I realized that, as of today, there are exactly six months left on the deal I made with myself when I first came to New York—that I’d see what I could accomplish in three years, but if I wasn’t well on my way to having a real career as an actor by then, I absolutely, positively wouldn’t keep at it after that. Just last night I’d promised myself that I’d get up early, memorize a sonnet, take in a matinee of an edgy foreign film. I’d do something, anything, to better myself, to try as hard as I could to not fail.
I throw off my covers, now welcoming the shock of the cold. I have to wake up, have to get up, get dressed, for … well, I don’t know for what exactly yet. I could go running … running—yes!—I have time before work, and I’m already in sweatpants, so I don’t even have to change. I trade the fuzzy pull-on slipper-socks I slept in for a pair of athletic socks I find in the back of my top drawer, and I tug on the one Reebok that’s lying on the floor. I’m going to run every day from now on, I think to myself as I wriggle on my stomach, one arm swallowed beneath the bed, fishing blindly for the second shoe. I realize there’s no direct line between running this morning and reaching any of my goals in the next six months—I don’t think I’ve ever heard Meryl Streep attribute her success as an actor to her stellar cardiovascular health—but since no one’s likely to give me an acting job today, and there probably won’t be one tomorrow either, I have to do something besides sit around and wait.
And I’m not going to break my deadline the way I’ve seen some people do. You start out with a three-year goal, which then becomes a five-year goal, and before you know it you’re still calling yourself an actor, but most days you’re being assigned a locker outside the cafeteria of the General Electric building so you can change into a borrowed pink polyester lunch-lady uniform and serve lukewarm lasagna to a bunch of businessmen who call you “Excuse me.”
I’ve made some progress, but not enough to tell me for sure that I’m doing the right thing with my life. It took most of the first year just to get the coveted waitressing job at the comedy club, The Very Funny, where I finally started making enough in tips to pay my own rent without any help from my father. Last year, after sending head shots month after month to everyone in the Ross Reports, I got signed by the Brill Agency. But they only handle commercials, and it’s erratic—sometimes I have no auditions for weeks at a time. This year, I got accepted into John Stavros’s acting class, which is considered one of the best in the city. But when I moved to New York, I envisioned myself starting out in experimental theaters, maybe even working Off Broadway, not rubbing my temples pretending I need pain relief from the tension headache caused by my stressful office job. And one accomplishment a year wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
Still wedged halfway beneath the bed, it takes all my strength to push a barely used Rollerblade out of the way. At this point, I’m just sweeping my arm back and forth, making the same movement under my bed as I would if making a snow angel, only the accumulated junk is a lot harder to move. I give up for a moment, resting my cheek against the cool wooden floor with a sigh.
“Do you have any idea how few actors make it?” people always say. “You need a backup plan.” I don’t like to think about it—the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is an actor—but I do have one, just in case: to become a teacher like my dad, and to marry my college boyfriend, Clark. It’s not a terrible scenario on either count—my dad makes teaching high school English look at least vaguely appealing, and if I can’t achieve my dream here, well, I guess I can picture myself having a happy normal life with Clark, living in the suburbs, where he’s a lawyer and I do, well, something all day.
I played the lead in lots of plays in high school and college, but I can’t exactly walk around New York saying: “I know there’s nothing on my résumé, but you should’ve seen me in Hello, Dolly!” I suppose I could ask one of the few working actors in class, like James Franklin, if he has any advice for me—he’s shooting a movie with Arturo DeNucci, and has another part lined up in a Hugh McOliver film, but then I’d have to summon the courage to speak to him. Just picturing it makes me sweat: “Excuse me, James? I’m new in class, and (gasps for air), and … whew, is it hot in here? I’m just wondering … (hysterical giggle/gulp) … um … how can anyone so talented, also be so gorgeous? Ahahahahaha excuse me (Laughs maniacally, runs away in shame).”
I just need a break—and for that I need a real talent agent. Not one who just sends me out on commercials, but a legit agent who can send me out on auditions for something substantial. I need a speaking part at least, or a steady job at best, something to justify these years of effort that might then somehow, eventually, lead to An Evening with Frances Banks at the 92nd Street Y. Most people probably picture receiving an award at the Tonys, or giving their Oscar acceptance speech, but the 92nd Street Y is the place my father loves best, the place he always took me growing up, so it’s easier for me to imagine succeeding there, even though I’ve only ever sat in the audience.
Six months from today, I think again, and my stomach does a little flip.
Trying to imagine all the steps that come between lying on the chilly floor of my bedroom in Brooklyn and my eventual appearance at the 92nd Street Y, I’m sort of stumped. I don’t know what happens in between today and the night of my career retrospective. But on the bright side, I can picture those two things at least, can imagine the events like bookends, even if the actual books on the shelves between them aren’t yet written.
Finally, my fingertips graze the puffy ridge on the top of my sneaker, and I wedge my shoulder even more tightly under the bed, straining and stretching to grab hold of it. The shoe emerges along with a box of old cassette tapes from high school, my Paddington Bear with a missing yellow Wellington, and a straw hat with artificial flowers sewn onto the brim, which Jane begged me to throw out last summer.
I push these shabby tokens of the past back under the bed, put on my shoe, and get ready to run.