Spur of the Moment (17 page)

30

Going and Going and Never Getting Anywhere

T
he next day at work, Ana was clearly in a funk. Scott kept trying to cheer her up, cracking jokes and telling stories, but Ana was in her own world, and more often than not, she didn't hear him or only smiled wanly in response.

“You're awfully quiet,” Scott said.

It took Ana a moment to realize he'd said something.

“What?”

“I said you're awfully quiet. Are you okay?”

“I'm not feeling very well. I think I may be coming down with something.”

All day, Ana felt like a vise was squeezing her heart, tighter and tighter. She went through the motions of working, but couldn't concentrate on anything.

Ana sucked in her stomach. Maybe if she hadn't put on so much weight, she would be the one flying out to audition. She remembered reading an interview with Jennifer Aniston in which the 5'5” tall Jennifer said that she used to weigh 140 pounds and was told by her agent that she'd never get any parts unless she lost thirty pounds. So she did. And then she got the part of Rachel Green.

Which just proved what a brutal business acting was. Women were not only expected to be thin, but underweight. Ana would do whatever it took to make it.

That night, Ana changed into her sweats and lay on the bed to wait for the phone to ring. She was dreading the phone call from Marin. Whether Marin got the part or had bombed big time, Ana just didn't think she could handle talking to her.

“Have you eaten?” Scott asked.

“Aah!” Ana jumped, yelping with surprise.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.” Scott came into her room and sat down next to her.

“No, it's okay, I'm off in my own little world.”

“So have you eaten?”

“I'm not hungry.” That wasn't remotely true. She was starving.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded. Scott crawled on to the bed and sat next to her. “ 'Cuz you don't look okay.”

“I'm . . . I guess I'm in a state of shock. I mean it's happening. Our dreams... Marin is in L.A. auditioning for a part in a show . . .”

“It's exciting.”

“Yeah.”

“But you wish it were you.”

“Yeah.”

Scott took her hand. They stayed there for several minutes, not saying a word. Then the phone rang. Ana's heart raced. Scott picked up the phone that was next to him on her bedside table and handed it to her.

It was Kieran. Ana was completely taken aback. She'd been expecting to hear from Marin.

“Hi,” she said weakly.

“Hi. I had a great time the other night.”

But Ana had been in the Twilight Zone, unable to do or say a thing. How could he have had fun? “Uh-huh,” she said. It was the most noncommittal thing she could think of to say.

“I was wondering if you might want to go out sometime. Tomorrow night maybe.”

Fuck. She couldn't believe she had to deal with this right now. “You know, Kieran, I don't know you very well and you seem like a nice guy, but I'm not sure I'm really looking to date anybody, even casually, at least not right now. A lot of stuff has been going on. A lot of things have changed since Saturday. Well, might have changed, I . . . look, you know what, this was just not a good time for you to call me. I have your number and maybe when my head has cleared and the world is back to normal . . . I might be ready to go on a date, just you and me.”

“Sure,” he said. He sounded disappointed. “You know, I probably just caught you at a bad time. Maybe I'll call you in a couple weeks when things have settled down for you. It must have been crazy, getting ready for the show.”

“Yeah, yeah, exactly. I need some downtime. So . . . so I guess we'll play things by ear.”

“Talk to you later.”

Ana hung up the phone.

“That didn't go too badly for a break up, did it?” Scott said.

“We were never going out. I agreed to go on a date with him under the influence of far too many beers to make a sound judgment.”

“Is that true, about you not wanting to date anybody?”

“It wasn't true for the last several months, but somehow, today it's true. Or maybe I just know Kieran wasn't what I was looking for. I want a guy like you or Jason or Ramiro, well, except straight of course. But I mean, a guy who makes me belly laugh all the time. I just want a guy who gets my jokes and who I can talk to without even having to think about it and who makes me laugh so hard I cry. Is that too much to ask?”

“I don't think so,” Scott said quietly. “Why don't we get something to eat?”

Ana nodded gloomily, and followed him downstairs to the kitchen.

The phone rang again. Ana picked up the extension in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“I got it.”

“What?”

“I got the part!”

“Oh my God!” Ana and Marin shrieked. “Ohmygodohmy-godohmygod !”

Jason and Ramiro came running when they heard the commotion.

“Did somebody die?” Scott asked.

“I take it Marin got the part,” Jason said calmly.

“She got the part! Shegotthepartshegotthepartshegotthe-part!!! So tell me everything,” Ana said to Marin.

“Today I read with the other actors. There are three guys—Alex, Conrad, and Bennett—and two girls, Devin and Jessica.”

“Do you like them?”

“Yeah, I guess. Devin is this cute black girl, and Jessica has this glorious—totally fake, but glorious nonetheless—red hair halfway down her back. They are both actually pretty funny. Devin is thirty! And she plays a twenty-one-year-old. Isn't that funny? Conrad is your typical WASPy guy who is arrogant and looks like some Aryan-Nation Ken doll. Alex is very hot, I hope there's a romance written in our future. And Bennett seems, I don't know, really quiet for an actor. Kind of reserved. Maybe he's just one of those types you need to ply with alcohol or have to get to know them for a while before they'll open up.”

“So, where are you staying? How much money will you make? When do you start shooting?”

“I'll be out here till just after Christmas. If the series turns out to be successful, I'll have to get an apartment out here.”

“No! You can't move!”

“We'll see what happens. For now we're all just staying in a hotel. They'll run the pilot at the end of January.”

“Oh my god, are you so unbelievably excited? You don't sound like you're jumping up and down.”

“This whole thing is just so surreal. I mean it's happening so fast. It hasn't had time to sink in yet. But get this. They're paying me $60,000.”

Ana hadn't been expecting that. She'd been expecting slave wages. “Wow, that's a lot more money than I would have thought.”

“They have to pay me a certain amount because to be able to perform, I need to belong to AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors. It's a union. I had to be offered the contract from a TV show to be able to join, but then to actually act, I have to sign up.”

Sixty thousand dollars. It was significantly more money than Ana made in an entire year, and Marin was raking it in for just eight weeks of work. “Wow,” she mumbled in a hoarse whisper.

“Listen, you guys were the first people I called. I have to call Chelsey and Mom and Dad and everybody from high school and college and anybody else I can brag to.”

“Congrats, Marin. I'm really happy for you.”

“Love ya.”

“Love you.” Ana hung up the phone.

“So? Tell us everything!” Scott said.

Ana repeated what Marin had said, then, while the three of them were talking, she sneaked upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and burst into tears.

She fell on her bed and pressed a pillow to her face to mask the sound of her sobs.

 

 

A
na awoke the next morning in a dark fog of depression. It took everything she had to get out of bed and into the shower.

She stood in the shower and let the hot water beat down on her for several minutes. She had no idea how long she'd been just standing there, until there was a knock on the door and Scott's voice calling out, asking if she was okay.

“What? Oh, I'm fine.”

“It's almost eight. You're going to be late to work.”

“I'll hurry.” Eight o'clock? What time had she woken up? How could it possibly be so late?

She quickly washed her body and shampooed her hair, skipping the conditioner today. She got dressed in a daze and when she went downstairs, Scott pointed out that she was wearing one black shoe and one brown one. They were completely different styles.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just . . . I didn't get a lot of sleep last night.”

“I made you some coffee.”

“Thanks.”

This was all backwards. Ana was the mom of the house. She was the one who made the coffee in the morning and asked everyone if they'd slept well and worried and fretted if they hadn't. She was the one who looked out for everybody, not the one who needed looking after. But she was too tired to think about it right now.

At work, Ana was completely unable to focus. Every email she was sent seemed to be written in ancient hieroglyphics; some weird language that she had to battle to translate. Everything took so much effort. It exhausted her.

She stared at her computer screen until it faded into a blue haze. She was a failure. She was kidding herself thinking she had any talent. This was a brutally tough business, and the talentless could not survive. Unless, of course, their father was Aaron Spelling. All these years, she'd just been embarrassing herself, getting on that stage and pretending she could act. She needed to accept that she would not be an Academy Award-winning actress whose face graced the pages of
People
and
Vanity Fair.
She was a marketing manager, and she had to accept that all she'd ever be in her life was a woman who marketed software.

Lots of people were happy with a life mired in the morass of middle management. Why wasn't that good enough for Ana?

So few people succeeded as actors. What were the chances that all six of them would make it? Marin was the beauty, the natural talent. Of course she'd be the one to make it. Ana should stop embarrassing herself by pretending she had a chance.

 

 

F
or the next several days, depression tightened its grip on Ana.

She cried in the car at stoplights, she cried herself to sleep, she cried at the office in the bathroom stall. She cried because she was jealous and because she hated herself for being such a horrible person. She'd always said that you could tell who your friends were not just by whether they were there for you if things were tough, but if they could be genuinely happy for you when you succeeded. And now here she was: She
was
happy her friend was succeeding, but she was also painfully envious.

Ana believed that there were five areas in life that people had to work on to be happy: Love, Friendship, Work, Health, and Finance. She hated her job and she didn't have any money or a boyfriend. Except for friendship, she was bombing big time in everything. And she was depressed because, on top of everything else, she deeply, deeply missed her friend.

She tried to keep her workouts up, but she didn't have the concentration to lift weights. The only thing she could manage was to mindlessly jog on the elliptical rider. Going for miles and miles and never getting anywhere, that was all she could do.

31

The Plight of the Modern Male

O
ne of the nice things about having three gorgeous women as best friends, Scott thought, was that he had all the commitment of a serious relationship with the added bonus of relentless sexual frustration.

After shows at Spur, flocks of men would gather around the women. These were the kind of men that could handle bitter rejection, glowering looks, and pointed comments without notice. They simply went on to the next kill and took what they could get.

Scott was not one of these kind of men.

Women would coo and purr at Jason and even—and this broke Scott's heart—Ramiro, but something about Scott's goofiness and his total inability to put the moves on a woman kept him forever classified as “Buddy.” His three brothers and sisters were all married, some were even having kids, and he feared he would forever be the only single person in his family. He'd eternally be the weird artistic outsider who didn't grow up and get married as he had been fervently trained to do. To his nephews and nieces he was incredibly popular. As an uncle he reigned supreme. As a lover, he expected Elmer Fudd fared better.

Scott was more the kind of guy that, at dance clubs, would first try to get noticed as the funny guy by dancing goofily and going all out while doing so. At his height, it was hard not to notice. But once he found a woman he thought looked intriguing, he suddenly tried his best to become invisible, dancing sort of behind her to her side, hoping that she would turn, become instantly smitten, and thus begin a sincere and fulfilling long-term relationship.

He feared, though, that the smoky, drunken atmosphere of a bar was perhaps not the ideal setting to form a meaningful, long-lasting commitment. But what other choice did he have?

Scott put the finishing touches on a painting he was working on. Art was the one area of his life where he'd always felt confident. He was in grade school when he realized he was talented. His class was asked to draw pictures for Valentine's Day cards. He'd drawn, naturally, several hearts, and when his teacher came behind him to inspect his progress, her mouth fell agape.

“Your hearts are perfectly equal on either side!”

“You are an artist,” she declared. She patted him on the shoulder, shook her head in disbelief, then moved on.

Scott inspected the work of his classmates nearby, and his teacher was right, everybody drew asymmetrical hearts. They would be curvy on one side and then too angular on the other. Or one side would be bigger than the other. Maybe he did have an artist's eye; the ability to translate what he saw in his mind through his fingers onto the page.

Scott became an ardent sketcher-in-the-notebooks kind of guy. He adored comics—they were proof he could draw and then sell what he created. He could actually make a living at this! He managed to do well in his classes despite his endless doodling. So well that his math teacher encouraged him to apply to colleges. His parents had wanted all their kids to go to college. Some of his siblings had gone to community colleges for a while before dropping out, but none earned their degree. Scott would be the first to graduate from a university.

As he researched schools, he came across the major “graphic design.” He'd never heard of it before. Certainly in his small town, nobody worked as a graphic designer. When he learned what graphic designers were paid, he abandoned his plans to become a comic strip creator (his passion for the medium was waning as he grew older anyway) and decided to be a graphic designer. He liked his job (except, of course, for The Big Weasel), his friends, his life. He just wished he had someone to share it all with.