by Keri Knutson
CHAPTER ONE
I doubt I could remember the name of the first movie I ever saw, even with a loaded gun to my head. It was probably some classic from the golden age of Hollywood, perhaps one of the half dozen my mother had been in : the great Charlotte Corday, who had faded from the big screen and been reborn as the perfect '50s TV mother, forever smiling benignly.
Well, at least her dream had started. I was giving up the idea of ever seeing the name Madeline Pryce on the marquee, and this morning's audition was the most recent in a series of brief encounters that felt as awkward as blind dates and ended just as badly. For the past five years I'd subsisted on a diet of rejections, regional commercials, and one recurring daytime soap role that hadn't lasted half as long as the casting director had promised. The cachet of stardom attached to my family had not blossomed around me after my parents plunged off the seaside road and sometimes, mostly at night and mostly after a really lousy day, I wondered what cosmic fluke had kept me out of the car that night.
The emergence of a dark figure between two parked cars wiped out my thoughts of the audition and I slammed my foot onto the brake pedal, my '56 Chevy sliding to a stop with a sound like a woman screaming. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see the van behind me swerve sideways just in time to avoid my rear bumper. The Litigation Louie picked himself up from the street and skulked off in search of a mark with slower reflexes. If I wasn't careful, the cosmic scales were going to balance after all.
I started back down West Hollywood, past weed-filled, cyclone-fenced empty lots interspersed with cheap souvenir shops and trendy pseudo-celebrity hangouts. In places, Old Hollywood--the one tourists look for and rarely find--sparkles like a well-cut gem amid a tangle of costume jewelry. The Orpheus is one of those almost forgotten jewels, a 1930s theater hanging onto the dividing line where Hollywood is wedged against the galleries, shops and bistros of more affluent West Hollywood. The theater was my day job, but something more than that. I had an abiding affection for the old art deco monster. I saw it as part time machine and part secret fort, where I could slip sideways to a place where there were always happy endings.
Today the theater had no hold on me. I pulled onto the rotting pad of parking lot across the street, grateful to find a spot close enough to the lone streetlamp to assure at least a passing chance of making it back to my car alive.
Reproduction posters of tonight's triple bill studded the theater's front window, night moths trapped under glass. Universal Monsters who once inspired terror in the movie-going public of the '30s and '40s now filled me with a different type of fear. I knew tonight's crowd was bound to be packed with mercenary youth and nomadic millennials, reckless kids whose spiral-bound theme book doodles ran more toward daggers through skulls than arrows through hearts.
The alley housing the theater's side entrance held the familiar smell of wet cardboard, a scent trapped by the high brick walls that formed a cut-out where the dented dumpster sat. I saw Irene leaning over the railing of the stoop, ensconced in layer upon layer of multicolored gauze, her white hair hidden beneath a bright scarf.
"Maddie!" she yelled.
"Aren't you hot in that get-up?” I said.
She jingled as she executed a slow pirouette. "Why, yes, thank you, I am." I waited through her giggles.
“Don't you get it? I'm Maria Ouspenskaya."
Again I waited. Maria who? Then I remembered. The old gypsy woman who sent Larry Talbot off to become the Wolfman.
"Irene, you never cease to amaze me. You don't think you're getting me into a costume, I hope."
"Oh, where's your sense of adventure? You'd make a great Bride of Frankenstein." Irene laughed again and descended the short stairway to offer a motherly hug. "I'm just kidding, sweetie. But you're too young to be such a fuddy-duddy."
Not that young, I thought. I gave her a quick hug back, taking in the scent of buttered popcorn mingled with gardenia perfume. Irene Shoffit had managed the Orpheus for nearly thirty years and had saved me from unemployment not that long ago. She'd become the closest thing I had to a confidant.
I opened by mouth to tell her about the morning's failed audition when she took a step back and I realized she hadn't been looking for me.
"You didn't happen to see Jason, did you?" she said.
I hated the hopeful look that flashed in her eyes. "He's not here again? When was the last time he showed up for work, anyway?"
Irene's son had stood outside my circle in high school. He was one of those loners who made other kids nervous in a way that was never easy to explain, and the years between then and now had given me no further insight into him and no reason to care. Tonight he was just pissing me off. Four more hours added onto five I was already dreading.
"Maddie, I hate to ask you to stay late again, but I don't think he's going to show up and I'll need you here for the third feature. Jason will either straighten up or be out of a job. I'm tired of making excuses for him and tired of being embarrassed in front of my friends."
The last thing I wanted to do was make Irene feel worse. "Don't worry about me,” I said, flashing a smile that I hoped look genuine. "I'll take care of it tonight. Jason can make it up to me later."
That seemed to pacify Irene for the moment and we went inside. She turned toward the lobby and I headed for the makeshift cafe/changing room that occupied a back corner of the building and always smelled like the inside of a latex Halloween mask.
The opaque glass of the single, narrow clerestory window threw the last rays of sunlight across the floor in an amber harlequin pattern. Dust swirled by my shoes as I made my way to locker number twelve to peel off my street clothes and trade them for the black fez and bolero jacket that made me look like an organ grinder's monkey. The uniform felt shiny against my skin, the tile floor cool against my stocking feet.
Weak light bounced off the edges of the corner mirror where I stopped to straighten my jacket, creating phantom companions in the chairs behind me, indistinct reflections of faceless people. I stared into my own face for a moment: dark eyes, full lips, cheekbones the less fortunate would pay good money for. I'd grown accustomed to the fact that my beauty did not startle me. I was a pretty girl in a sea of pretty girls, and my looks had yet to open doors for me. My dark hair blended with the uniform, leaving my face floating like a disembodied spirit in the warped changing-room glass.