Believe Me

by JP Delaney

  Theaterland…If people were allowed to pick their own country, that would be mine.

  Then I turn off Broadway, down a barely lit cross street. To where a weathered, peeling sign says THE COMPASS THEATER. People—students on dates mostly, taking advantage of the daily half-price unsolds—shuffle into the foyer. I go on a few yards farther and slip through the stage door.

  Assistant stage managers, the runners and gofers of the backstage operation, are rushing around urgently with props and clipboards. I find the greenroom. It’s been divided with a stage flat to create two makeshift dressing rooms, girls one side, boys the other. In the first one, Jess is putting on her makeup in a mirror she’s sharing with three other girls, all of whom are trying to do the same thing.

  “Hey,” I say brightly.

  “Hey, Claire.” Her eyes flick to me, then back to her task. “How was it?”

  I pull out Henry’s envelope. “It was four hundred dollars. Now I just owe you another three.”

  Jess’s dad, who’s super-rich, has bought her an apartment in Manhattan. I’m supposed to pay rent monthly, but sometimes I get a little behind.

  “Great,” she says distractedly. “Actually, give it to me later, could you? We’re going out after and I’ll only lose it.”

  I must look hopeful, because she adds, “Why not watch the show and come along? You can tell me if I’ve nailed that feminine distress Jack’s been going on about.”

  “Sure, why not?” I say casually.

  Because even the company of actors in a bar is better than nothing.

  “Three minutes,” a stage manager calls, slapping the flat with his hand.

  “Wish me luck,” Jess says, smoothing down her dress as she gets up, eyes still on the mirror. “Break a leg and all that shit.”

  “Good luck. Not that you need it. And take the forest scene slower. Whatever your dumb-ass director says.”

  Within seconds the greenroom has emptied. I make my way to the side of the stage. As the house lights go down I creep forward and peek at the audience through a gap in the scenery, breathing in the potent, addictive smell of theater: fresh scenery paint, old stage dust, moth-eaten cloth, and charisma. That moment of power as the darkness settles, and with it, all the noise and bustle of the everyday.

  For a beat, we all hang there, waiting. Then the stage lights come up, rich with color, and I take a step back. Snow tumbles through the air, glittering and soft—fake snow, but the audience gasps anyway.

  The director’s big idea is that this Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in winter. A gimmick, I’d thought when Jess told me, but now, seeing those fat snowflakes drifting through the air, settling like sequins in the actors’ hair as they tumble noisily onto the stage, I can see how he’s captured in one image the play’s magical, otherworldly quality.

  THESEUS

  Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

  Draws on apace…

  I feel a sudden stab of longing. This is the forbidden kingdom, the dream from which my lack of a green card and my problems in the UK have banished me. The hunger is something physical, a craving so deep it knots my stomach and thickens my throat. Tears sting my eyes.

  But even as the stage swings glassily to and fro I find myself thinking: Next time you need to feel something in class, use this. It’s gold dust.

  4

  Four hours later we’re all in the Harley Bar. Somehow, we always end up in the Harley Bar, a basement sweatbox with vintage motorbikes hanging from the ceiling, where the waitresses wear a house uniform of black bras under fraying sleeveless denim jackets. Springsteen blasts from the jukebox, so we have to yell—twenty trained voices coming down from a post-performance high, plus girlfriends, boyfriends, and hangers-on like me.

  Jess and a group of us are swapping stories. Stories about acting, of course. It’s all we ever talk about.

  JESS

  What about Christian Bale in The Machinist? He lost, like, a third of his body weight for that role.

  ACTRESS 2

  Or Chloë Sevigny doing a blow job for real in The Brown Bunny.

  ACTOR

  Define real in that context. No, I’m just saying.

  ACTRESS 3

  Adrien Brody in The Pianist. First he lost thirty pounds and learned to play the piano. Then, to know what it felt like for his character to lose everything, he got rid of his car, his apartment, and his phone. Now that, my friend, is commitment.

  ACTRESS 2

  Hey, I could do that! Oh, wait. Except I currently play a singing dancing chorus mouse in a Broadway musical.

  She does a little drunken mouse dance.

  ACTRESS 2

  Mousy mouse, mousy mouse, welcome to my mousy house—

  Across the room, the barman glances at me. A glance that lingers just a little longer than it needs to.

  The last time I saw that look was when Rick the scumbag lawyer offered to let me sit at his table.

  But this guy is my own age, tattooed, cool, and skinny. Despite the icy cold that blows in every time the street door opens, he’s wearing just a T-shirt, and the dishcloth he’s got tucked into the back of his jeans whisks around his butt every time he turns back to the row of bottles behind the bar.

  All of a sudden, I’m there. At the bar.

  GOOD-LOOKING BARMAN

  Hey!

  He’s Australian. I love Australians.

  ME

  Hi!

  And for some reason I say it in my Virginian accent, the one I used earlier with Rick.

  GOOD-LOOKING BARMAN

  What can I get you?

  ME

  (shouting over the noise)

  I’d love a martini.

  GOOD-LOOKING BARMAN

  Coming right up.

  He fills a shot glass to the brim with Jack Daniel’s and slams it down on the counter.

  ME

  I asked for a martini.

  GOOD-LOOKING BARMAN

  That’s the way we make martinis in this bar.

  He grins at me, daring me to complain. Nice smile.

  So I pick up the glass and drain it.

  ME

  In that case, give me a piña colada.

  GOOD-LOOKING BARMAN

  One piña colada…

  He splashes a measure of Jack Daniel’s into a glass, adds another measure of Jack Daniel’s, and finishes it off with a third measure of Jack Daniel’s.

  I tip the whole lot down my throat in one long chug. People crowded around the bar break into spontaneous whooping and applause.

  Applause. Now, there’s a sound I haven’t heard in a while.

  At least, not directed at me.

  ME

  You’d better line me up a Long Island iced tea while you’re at it.

  …which really ought to be a fade-out in this movie that’s always running in my head.

  But it isn’t. It’s a jump cut, or a montage sequence, or one of those other technical things, because then everything gets messy and jumbled until suddenly I’m in someone else’s apartment on top of someone else’s body, moaning.

  ME

  Yes, yes, omigod yes—

  RANDOM MAN

  Yes—

  Ah, yes. Cast change. The good-looking barman, whose name was Brian, didn’t get off till three. So I hooked up with a friend of one of Jess’s friends instead. By that point I was too drunk and too high on the applause to settle for my own bed.

  Though if I’m honest, it wasn’t only the alcohol. Or the appreciative audience.

  The feel of a warm body, and someone to hold…That’s something I crave, after one of Henry’s jobs.

  Because if a woman can’t trust the man who said he’d love her for
ever, who in this world can you trust?

  And knowing it was me—my skills, my lines, my performance—that helped break up a family always makes me feel weird.

  I’m not proud of that stuff I do for Henry.

  But sometimes I am proud of how well I do it.

  5

  Next morning I take the subway back to Jess’s, still wearing her jacket and not much else, ignoring the knowing looks from commuters. One of the exercises Paul makes us do involves going out onto the streets of New York in character and talking to complete strangers. Once you’ve done that a few times, you develop a pretty thick skin.

  Ditto sitting in hotel bars and having married men hit on you.

  That was one of the things that persuaded me to take up Marcie’s suggestion, actually—thinking it might be good for my acting, as well as my finances. So Marcie hooked me up with Henry. Henry likes to describe himself as a paralegal, but effectively he’s the law firm’s in-house investigator. He arranged to meet me in a bar, which seemed an odd venue for a job interview until he explained what they wanted me to do.

  “Think you can handle it?” he’d asked.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t like I had any other options. “Sure.”

  “Good. Go outside, come back in, and try to pick me up. Think of it as an audition.”

  So I went out and came back in again. And because it felt strange to be chatting up this gray-haired older man, it was easier to slip into a character. Just a voice and an attitude—a femme fatale from an old film noir; Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, maybe—but it gave me somewhere to hide.

  I took a seat at the bar and ordered a drink. I didn’t even look at the man two seats down.

  Never hit on them directly, he’d told me earlier. Make it clear you’re available, but they have to proposition you, not the other way around. The innocent should have nothing to fear.

  Yeah, right. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that men’s brains don’t work that way.

  INT. A DIMLY LIT NEW YORK BAR—DAY

  Reflected in the mirror behind the bar, we see CLAIRE WRIGHT, twenty-five, as she plays with her drink, a little bored.

  HENRY, a lean ex-cop in his early fifties, moves to the next stool.

  HENRY

  Are you on your own?

  CLAIRE

  (a smoky, languid drawl)

  Well, I was.

  He glances at her hand.

  HENRY

  I see you’re wearing a wedding ring.

  CLAIRE

  Is that good or bad?

  HENRY

  It depends.

  CLAIRE

  On what?

  HENRY

  On how easily it comes off.

  Her eyes widen at his audacity. Then:

  CLAIRE

  Now that you mention it, it has been getting a little loose lately. What about you?

  HENRY

  Am I loose?

  CLAIRE

  Are you married?

  HENRY

  Not tonight.

  CLAIRE

  Then I guess it’s my lucky night.

  She gives him a look—frank, confident, direct. This is a woman who knows what she wants. And what she wants right now is some fun.

  HENRY

  (breaking character)

  Jesus H. Christ.

  ME

  Did I do that okay? I could try something different—

  He loosens his collar.

  HENRY

  I almost feel sorry for the bastards.

  Three days later, I sat in a quiet bar off Central Park and allowed a businessman to tell me he no longer found his wife attractive. Afterward, I handed his wife the tape, and Henry handed me four hundred dollars.

  It wasn’t a regular job—some months there’d be three or four assignments, sometimes none at all. Most of Henry’s work was actually what he called spousal surveillance: following people around, trying to catch them in the act. “Most of our clients are women,” he told me once. “Usually, they’re correct in their suspicions. Maybe they’ve clocked their husband wearing a fancy shirt to the office, then texting later to say he’s been held up. Sometimes it’s just a new aftershave. Or they’ve already seen incriminating texts on his phone, and just want to know what the woman looks like. Men, now, they’re more likely to be wrong.”

  Back when he was a cop, Henry worked undercover, and he clearly misses the buzz of those days. During the long hours in town cars and hotel lobbies, waiting for our targets to show, he passes the time telling me stories from past operations.

  “You have to see the gray. Criminals instinctively know when you despise or fear them. So you gotta make yourself believe whatever they believe in. And that’s the dangerous part. Not the guns or the beatings. Some guys, the gray takes hold of them, and they can’t make it let go.”

  I tell him he’s a method actor without knowing it, and swap him acting stories in return. Such as our very first class, where Paul had us do a scene from Ibsen. I’d thought my fellow students were pretty good. Then Paul made us do it again while trying to balance broom handles on our hands. Under the pressure of doing two things at once, we all fell apart.

  “What you did that first time wasn’t acting,” Paul told us. “It was pretending. You were copying what you’ve seen other actors do—but it wasn’t real to you. That’s why you couldn’t do it when you had to put your conscious minds to something else. I’m going to tell you just one thing today, but it’s the most important thing I’ll ever say to you: Don’t think. Acting isn’t faking or impersonating. The clue is in the word. Acting is doing.”

  Henry thinks this is all bullshit. But I myself have seen actors in a greenroom sneezing and snuffling with flu, only to have it dry up the instant they step on stage. I’ve seen shy introverts become kings and queens, the ugly become beautiful and the beautiful repulsive. Something happens, something no one can explain. Just for a few moments, you become someone else.

  And that’s the best feeling there is in the world.

  * * *

  —

  Manhattan’s looking like a movie set this morning. Steam vents have made melt holes in the snow, smoking lazily in the sunshine. Last night made a sizable dent in Henry’s envelope, but I stop at a deli anyway to get bagels for Jess and me. When I come out, a bunch of kids are fooling around, throwing snowballs, so I scoop up a handful and join in. I can’t help thinking, Wow. Here I am in New York, the New York, taking part in a scene straight out of a movie, and studying at one of the best drama schools in the world to boot. The script has a happy ending after all.

  Is it just me who does this—who feels they’re constantly watching themselves in the movie of their own life? When I ask my friends, most claim they don’t. But they must be lying. Why else would you become an actor, if not to edit reality?

  Even if I’ve just remembered that the scene playing in my head, the one with the New York snowball fight, is from that terrible movie Elf.

  As I let myself in I catch voices from Jess’s room. She’s on a Skype call with Aran, her boyfriend, who’s doing a commercial in Europe. I have a quick shower, check the jacket’s not looking too bad, then knock on her door.

  “Breakfast, rent, and Miss Donna Karan,” I tell her brightly. “Any reviews?”

  Every morning the first thing Jess does is check the Internet to see if anyone’s blogged about her. She shakes her head. “Nothing. But my agent emailed—I have a go-see with a producer who saw the show last night.”

  “That’s great,” I say, trying not to sound too envious.

  “And how was your night?” Her voice is carefully neutral. “I looked for you about two, but you’d left.”

  “Oh, it was good.”


  She sighs. “Bullshit, Claire. It was empty meaningless sex with a total stranger.”

  “That too,” I say lightly.

  “I worry about you sometimes.”

  “Why? I always carry a condom.”

  “I meant safe life. Not safe sex. As you very well know.”

  I shrug. I’m not about to get into a conversation with Jess about my love life, or lack of it. When all’s said and done, she’s got a family, and people with families don’t understand.

  I hang up the jacket and raid Jess’s panty drawer for clean underwear. At the bottom, my fingers encounter something small and hard and heavy.

  I pull it out. It’s a gun. An actual gun.

  “Well, Jesus, Jess,” I say, stunned. “What the fuck is this?”

  She laughs. “My dad made me get it. You know, just in case. The big bad city and all that.”

  “And you worry about me?” I say incredulously. I point the gun at my reflection in her mirror. “You gotta ask yourself, punk, does that color suit ya?”

  “Careful. I think it’s loaded.”