Starry-Eyed (26 page)

Megan realized what she must have known for months or years since the first time she'd seen what was inside Lena's hat box. That what everyone was always looking for was an
it
.

“So let me ask you, um,” Steve/Mark looked down at the papers on the table. “Megan, let me ask you, how did you get into this business?”

She had a simple answer to this question and it had the advantage of being true, but mentioning her mother and Erika in front of a director was not something she had ever willingly done. She thought of telling him why she liked her acting class and going to the theater (her father had taken her to see O'Neill's
Ah, Wilderness
the previous weekend). She thought of saying,
I love to watch acting. I love how a character made of words is turned into a living, breathing person with gesture, posture, and clothes. I love being part of the magic, even if it's only by watching
.

But Megan realized that her love of plays and of the intense, focused energy in her class was not something to be used as a lie. It was its own truth, and so she told them about Erika Bauer, her mother, and the ad campaign.

“That was you? I saw that ad fifty times,” Steve/Mark said. “I must have only been looking at Lena. I couldn't believe how great she still looked.”

“Yes,” Megan said. “My mother is very beautiful.”

“As are you,” Steve/Mark said somewhat perfunctorily. “And you're smart. You're right, you're not it, but that's just because I'm looking for a type.”

“Okay,” Megan said, relieved to hear him confirm what she thought. “Thank you.”

She was not a type. Whatever else was wrong with her, it was not that.

“Don't run out of here yet,” Steve/Mark said, writing on the back of one the script sheets. “A friend of mine is in town. He's at the Chelsea, seeing girls. I've read his script. He's looking for a face. A real face, but a beautiful one.”

“Jesus, Mark, you can't just send her all over town,” the other man said. “If it's not an open audition, she breaks a ton of union rules going without an appointment.”

“As soon as she leaves here, I'm going to put a call in to her manager and to Tomas.”

Mark handed Megan the paper he'd written on.

“Tomas Grudnik is the real deal,” he said, pronouncing it as
Tomash Groodnick
. “He only comes to the States for funding and casting.”

“Thank you,” Megan said, fairly certain that going to a hotel between 7th and 8th Avenues to meet a man that her manager hadn't talked to was a bad idea.

One she couldn't wait to do, and she left the room without responding to Mark's
Good luck
.

. . . . .

Tomas Grudnik answered the door himself, even though there were two other people in the room, women he introduced as his assistants. They were packing up a video camera and a folding table. Tomas was tired-looking with lines etched into his face and wearing glasses. He was delicate looking, but still weirdly handsome.

She handed him her headshot, smiled at the assistants as they said good-bye, and sat on the edge of the couch in the hotel suite's front room. This was it. She was alone with a strange man in a hotel room. Jesse would not be coming to pick her up, and if he knew where she was right now, he would have a fit.

Tomas asked her if she wanted anything to drink and she shook her
head no, asking, “Is there a script? Do you want me to wait outside and knock when I've read it?”

“No, no,” he said. “It's not how I work. This time, we just talk.”

Megan relaxed a bit as she organized her little joke about pigs who were communists (her English class was now halfway through
Animal Farm)
.

“I make notes,” he said, picking up a pad and pulling a pen from his shirt pocket. “About our talk. Is okay?”

For the first time, she noticed that he had an accent and she smiled, thinking of Erika Bauer and her whole crew of assistants. On the day of the shoot, everyone's English had sounded like music.

“I have seen your picture in magazine,” Tomas told her. “With your mother.”

“Yes,” Megan said and then, to spare him having to say it, “my mother is very beautiful.”

“She is,” he said. “She was. When I am young, she is very famous. Is brave choice to pose with you.”

“I wanted to do it,” Megan said, trying to figure out what he meant by brave. “Lots of people thought she looked even better than her younger self.”

“Yes, she did. She does,” Tomas said, “but the photo with you tell us why she is beautiful.”

Megan was silent. She hardly thought it worth pointing out that no one needed a photo to see that Lena was beautiful. When people spoke of Lena's beauty, it was as if they were speaking about beauty itself. Not about Lena.

“When your mother look at the camera, she invite us to look at her, but when you look, all you do is look at it.”

“You're supposed to look at the camera,” Megan said, trying to recall everything that Erika had said to her that day. “Or through it or something.”

“Lena, how do you say . . . she responds to camera,” Tomas said. “You study it.”

“Am I too tall?” Megan asked him.

She did not want to sit here and talk about Lena and her own shortcomings, especially if it was going to turn out that she was not what he was looking for.

He shook his head, smiled. “No, not at all. I'm going to have drink; it's been long day.”

Tomas walked over to the suite's small kitchen and opened an already open bottle of wine, pouring it into the sort of glass that hotels leave in bathrooms, next to the sink. Megan went from being relaxed to incredibly nervous. Which made no sense, as there was no reason that Tomas having a glass of wine should make her brain scatter into pieces.

“So they tell you too tall,” Tomas said, sitting down on the other end of the couch across from her with his wine and a small dish of nuts he had taken out of a cupboard. “What else do they say?”

“It depends.” She told him about the man who said she would grow up to be a woman who didn't know what a novel was.

“Probably not chance for that,” Tomas told her, “but I tell you the problem you have.”

“I know what it is,” Megan said, not wanting to hear it from him, “I'm too tall for how young I look.”

“Is true, but not problem,” he said. “I would use as part of package. No. Problem is you are not open.”

“You mean private?” Megan thought of her locked away file, the key hidden in a sock.

“Tell me, what is you like about being actress? You not like what people say about you, and Mark say you are very stern with him. So, who is making you do these things?”

“No one,” Megan said, thinking of how her auditions produced disappointment in her father's eyes, curiosity in her mother's, and disgust in Liv's. “I thought it would be more interesting.”

Or rather, she'd thought
she
would be more interesting. Or more understandable.

“But is not?” he asked, getting up and bringing the bottle of wine
from the kitchen to the low table by the couch where he and Megan were sitting, and refilling his glass.

“Parts of it are,” she said, and just then, all the pieces of her brain unscattered and fell into place in a new and clear way. “Parts are very interesting, but maybe not important.”

Or important without being interesting, she thought, while realizing that she had been saving up many more notes and images than had made it to the file. And, as if a dam had burst, they all tumbled out into Tomas Grudnik's hotel suite.

“Like, when I come out of an audition and it's already dark, or almost dark, and the whole city is rushing home, and I step into it,” she said. “I'm small and big all at once. And the waiting is so boring, in the rooms before they call your name, but it's always women who take your headshot, and have you noticed that they're almost always blonde and wear too much makeup? The men who are waiting to audition, well, they like to talk and act as if they're not nervous. I've never seen anyone auditioning to play a father or something like that read their script, but the women are so tight and . . . strained. Even the really pretty ones who are thin and pretty enough to be famous for it look nervous.”

Megan stopped for a breath and looked at Tomas looking at her.

“I wonder if that's the problem,” she said. “I never get that nervous until after, when I'm hoping I might get the job, but know I won't.”

“I don't think nerves are problem, not even lack of them,” he said. “When you wait, what else you see?”

What else did she see? Well, there were all of those girls she couldn't help but see.

“All the girls, it's like there are so many of us,” Megan said. “There's this endless supply of girls and obviously we're different, but we're also exactly the same. This collection of arms and legs and . . .” She hesitated, not wanting to talk about girls' bodies or her own body. “Well, faces. It's like the people in charge are looking for something, only they don't know
what, but if you look, each and every girl, even the ones who are totally a type have a way of being . . . amazing.”

Appealing, lovely, funny, knees, wrist, hands—especially hands, Megan loved girls' hands—necks, hair that was short, hair that escaped its pins and barrettes, hair that curled around ears . . .

These words poured through her mind until they stopped with a thud and she suddenly saw what the file was. It wasn't a collection of keepsakes or even notes on what she had seen, but evidence of desire. Not of wanting to look like other girls, but of a wanting nonetheless. She looked up at Tomas, half of her finally aware of what she had always known and half of her hoping she still had a secret.

“Yes, right there is problem,” he said and she thought,
He knows. If he knows, it's true
.

“Lena invites us into her beauty, but you keep us out by looking at beauty,” he said.

Her heart was beating so fast she thought the noise might come out of her ears and fill the room. She had no idea what he was saying.

“I can't use you and this is not business for you,” he said, putting down his empty wine glass. “You are in business of understanding, not of being.”

So he didn't know. Or he hadn't listened or couldn't hear what was running around her brain and body like an escaped, crazed monkey happy to be free while desperately looking for a place to hide. Tomas thought Lena invited people into her beauty while she, Megan, kept people out by looking at beauty?

That wasn't it at all. She looked because she had no idea how to have. How could she be in the business of understanding when she was just now seeing all she did not understand? Although maybe, just maybe, paying attention to what confused her was a way of understanding.

“Who shot campaign?” he asked. “Was Erika Bauer, no?”

“Yes, it was.”

“She made interesting choice.” He yawned, standing up. “You must
forgive me, I have long flight yesterday and is already very late my time.”

Megan stood as well, holding out her hand to shake good-bye. “So I'm not it.”

“You're not,” he told her. “But I thank Mark for, how you say, referencing you?”

“Referring,” she said, wondering if she should thank Mark as well.

Would it have been better not to know this? Would she have to tell anyone now? What did she know about girls who liked girls? She thought suddenly of Stéphanie, who was not Erika's friend or roommate, but both.

Or neither.

Megan let go of Tomas's hand.

“I do love plays,” she said. “Seeing them. Studying them.”

“I am glad to know this,” he said. “Theater is haven for all.”

. . . . .

She made her way down the stairs and onto the street. She turned, heading toward 8th Avenue, where her bus home would be stopping. If her three years as a model and actress had ended in Tomas's hotel room, her life as a fellow traveler through the strange and the beautiful was well on its way. Had Erika guessed that Megan loved girls? Or had she, like Tomas, understood that a mildly beautiful girl (the daughter of a great beauty) could see what others failed to notice?

Megan supposed it didn't matter as long as she used the camera to record not just other girls, but each of the images she stored up and, until now, had kept secret. She might not take another acting class (her father was right, a real photographer learned to develop her own photos), but she knew she would always have a home in one of those uncomfortable seats that offered a glimpse of the silent darkness and its pooling light.

All around her, throughout the city, people moved, intent on catching a bus or the subway, on running one last errand. If Megan paid attention, she would find a way to turn each person into a picture. She stood still
for a minute, trying to absorb that everyone she saw offered up the makings of a photograph. She shook her head and moved forward with the crowd that was blissfully unaware Megan Walker now had her own Siamese twin traveling with her. It would not lead to the sort of fame Lena once had or that was waiting for Liv, but if Megan were lucky, there would be beauty in it.