Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  “Ow,” he said.

  “That’s one.”

  “Ow.”

  “That’s two.”

  She told him to lie down on the futon. She pulled a dirty blanket from off his bed and covered him with it. In his kitchenette, she poured him a glass of water, and placed it on the floor within his reach. She took the chair again.

  “It was bad?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad,” she said. “Was it real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Eric.”

  “I thought it’d be flattering.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  There was a poster for E.T. on the wall, the boy on his bicycle against the moon, E.T. hooded up like Eric on the futon. He was from Chicago, or from one of the John Hughes–style towns outside the city. His father worked in the top floor of a very tall building.

  She drank from her own glass of water.

  “I don’t think I can come back next semester,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Holds.”

  Eric asked her how much and she told him.

  “You’re a dirt-poor country girl.”

  “Yut,” Molly said.

  “That’s hysterical.”

  He sprang up all at once and ran to the bathroom. Molly listened to him vomit.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “No,” he shouted. “I’m not. This is my whole life right here.”

  Eric stood in the doorway, and wiped his mouth with a washcloth. If he tried to clean himself up and make a move on her, she was going to kick him in the movie star. She looked at him and felt sad. He believed her kindness meant she had forgiven him. He didn’t understand women at all.

  “You can’t go,” he said. “Look at me. What would I do without you?”

  “The same thing,” she said, and smiled.

  “Seriously,” he said.

  “Seriously what?”

  “You can’t go. We have movies to make. People will forget about this one. People forget everything. That’s all they do,” he said. “I’ve got a screenplay idea where you’re homeless. We could do method research. I know a Harvard guy who works at a shelter. We could sleep there. We could really get it.”

  “Tempting,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” Eric said. “When do those loan checks come in? It’s a lump sum, right?”

  He went to his desk and pulled open a few drawers.

  “I don’t want your money,” she said.

  “Just hold on.”

  His back to her, Molly watched him find his checkbook. It was a joint account that his father dumped money into every few weeks.

  “It’s more than the holds,” she said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “One second.”

  Molly heard him tear the check out. He walked over and handed it to her. It was for two thousand dollars.

  “Keep half,” he said. “You can pay me back the rest when your loans come in.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” Eric said. “I’m saying, ‘I’m sorry about the movie.’ ”

  He was paying her off, was what he was doing, and she absolutely, positively could believe it. Eric was pathetic. She pitied and hated him. Her plan, the one she’d made on the walk over, had been to go back home to Vermont and work. If her parents tried to force her after the new year to go back to school, she would fake a breakdown or a depression or something. The symptoms would be easy to fake. She would work and save up and move to California in May, when Rosanna was home. After that, she didn’t know, but she had planned it out that far at least, and now it was going to happen much, much sooner. She wouldn’t have to work at all.

  DUES 1997

  2

  “YOU’RE AN ABSOLUTE MESS.”

  Sally was sitting in the front row of the theater, looking up at Molly on stage.

  “You’re completely devastated. You want to die.”

  “I want to die?” Molly asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to kill myself?”

  “No,” Sally said. She had on black leather pants and a purple smock. She’d given up recently and had cut her hair short. “Wanting to die is different. We’re in LA, for god sake. It’s pilot season. Everyone in this room wants to kill themselves. Wanting to die is different than suicide. One’s an action. The other isn’t. Let’s do repetition. Let’s explore this.”

  Molly set her script down on the stage floor. She looked out into the small black box theater at the dark faces of her classmates. There were fifteen of them tonight. Abigail was still crying from two scenes ago. Roderigo was pounding his fist into his knee. Once again, he hadn’t been able to be cruel. He simply couldn’t call Justin a fag. It was right there in the character—it was all but in the character’s mouth—but it was too loaded for him. It was too much. Justin sat beside Roderigo, and Molly watched him put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. She turned away.

  “Upset,” Dominic said to her. Molly squared up, and looked at him—this beautiful, reprehensible man—and wondered where he got his frosted tips done. They were so light, nearly natural.

  “Upset,” Molly said.

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” Sally interjected from her seat. “What’s ‘upset’? What is that? ‘Upset’ isn’t anything. Remember, keep it simple. What’s right here, Dominic?” Sally tapped her diaphragm. “Right here, right here. What do you see when you look at her?”

  Dominic and Molly stared into each other’s eyes. It was like playing catch, except you didn’t have a glove or a ball, and you weren’t outside at all, but on the second floor of a strip mall off Ventura Boulevard down in the Valley.

  “Sad,” he said.

  “Sad,” Molly said.

  “Hurt,” Dominic said. “I want to help you.”

  “You want to help me.”

  “I want to hold you.”

  “Hold me,” Molly said, feeling something, some small shaft open. She tried not to notice it.

  “I need to hold you,” Dominic said. “You’re beautiful.”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay,” Sally said, rising off her seat into a weird crouch. Over drinks once, she’d told Molly the only problem with Meisner was that for the first two or three months of class the only thing male students could observe honestly was their need to fuck everything. “It’s their only accessible instinct,” Sally had said. “It’s pitiful.”

  “We know you find her beautiful, Dominic,” Sally said. “We all do. But you’ve got to use that more honestly. Think about it: you’re leaving her. She’s just lost a child, and now you’re going to leave her. Believe it! It’s happening to you!”

  Molly couldn’t look at him. She stared at the space above his right shoulder. Why would she look at him? Why would she do anything? He was leaving her. She wanted to die.

  “It’s not Molly’s fault,” Dominic said, breaking character. “But I’m not here.”

  “Where are you?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dominic said. “Somewhere else. You know, I’ve had this thing lately. There’s been a lot of…” he trailed off.

  Molly was one of the class’s beautiful people. She belonged to that company—her and Dominic and Justin and sometimes Lena—but she didn’t like to take advantage of it. She didn’t like to do this thing—this thing that Dominic was doing right now—where the beautiful person in question clogged up the whole room with their most recent drama. Sally’s wasn’t that kind of class, anyway. You couldn’t get into it because you’d seen a flyer down at the Coffee Bean. You had to know people. You had to be vetted and recommended. You had to be serious. Molly had been telling Justin for weeks that Dominic should be sent back down to intermediate. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t an actor.

  But the thing was, Sally loved him. She thought he was sex on a stick, which was true. If Molly hadn’t been sort of kind of engage
d, she might have even…

  “Let’s try something,” Sally said. “Bring that chair over. Put it in the middle of the stage. We’re going to get you over the hump here, Dominic. Over the hump through humping. Do the lines, but as a sex scene. Okay? You need to feel how screwed up this whole scenario is. Take off your shirt, Dominic. Molly?”

  “I’ll leave mine on.”

  “Stay open to this, Molly,” Sally said, before turning to the class. “Everybody! Stay open! This is the kind of thing you’re going to run into in casting offices. You’ll prepare for the audition one way, and then—woof!—it’s something else. Be fearless!”

  Sally instructed Molly to sit in the chair so that she was facing the audience. She told Dominic to stand up behind Molly. Each of them had their pages in their hands.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Sally said.

  It was like dancing with someone who wasn’t a very good dancer, but who could maybe become a good dancer if you led them properly, except you weren’t dancing with them at all. Instead, you were in a softly lit room, pretending to have sex with them in front of fourteen people.

  Dominic began to rock the chair back and forth so that the rear two legs came off the ground a few inches, then dropped, then rose, then dropped again. Molly caught his rhythm.

  “I love you,” Dominic read aloud.

  “I know,” Molly read.

  “There’s something wrong with me. I can’t help how I feel.”

  “You disgust me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What should I say?” she asked.

  Molly pulled her shirt off over her head. She felt her breasts shake in her bra. She tried not to care, but she cared, so she used it. She followed the feeling down. She didn’t force anything. She let it come. Dominic had to put more and more weight into his motion to get the chair off the ground. She could hear him breathing harder.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “It’s something I have to do.”

  “After this, I never want to see you again,” she said.

  “But what about—”

  “Never,” she said.

  The scene was supposed to end there, but Molly swung her arm around awkwardly and grabbed the fabric of his pants. She pulled him into her, and caught his rhythm once again, and then took it over. She wanted to make Dominic cum against the chair if she could. She wanted him to feel as ashamed as his leaving her was making her feel. She started to moan. She pushed harder against him. Instead of the rear two, the front legs began to rise off the ground. Molly worked toward her climax, and when she was done—when the last fake twitch had escaped her—she let her hand drop from his pants, and then sat there with her arms between her legs, catching her breath.

  Sally turned to the class.

  “If this were an audition, Molly just got the part.”

  * * *

  After class, she stuck around to use the telephone. She needed to double check her call-back times for the next day. The office was behind the stage, in a room that had once been a darkroom. No one had ever bothered to take out the revolving door. When she was finished listening to her messages, Molly turned the window fan on above the desk Sally shared with three other acting teachers, lit a cigarette, and tried to figure out how she was going to get from Studio City to Burbank in five minutes the following day. Without traffic, it would take at least fifteen minutes, and then she would have to find parking, walk to the office, compose herself, make ten seconds of memorable chit-chat with the casting agent and the assistant producer, hear their notes on whatever changes they’d made, incorporate those, and do it. It was all completely impossible, but what other choice did she have?

  Sally spun her way through the office door.

  “Oh, Roderigo!” she said. “You’re killing me!”

  “I know. Breaks my heart,” Molly said. “He’s the sweetest, most wonderful man in the world.”

  “Too sweet,” Sally said, taking a cigarette from out of Molly’s pack. “Too wonderful. There’s an angry monster in there, I know. He has to let him out. He’s all blocked up. He’s all constipated. I don’t know what the problem is.”

  “We talked about it,” Molly said. “Anger feels stereotypical to him. He feels like ‘the angry cholo’ when he gets angry.”

  “He has to get over that. Where in this town is there a script for a wonderful, intelligent Mexican American man who works two jobs, goes to night school, and acting class once a week?” Sally asked. “This is Hollywood. This isn’t reality. He could do a one-man show if he wants reality—get it out of his system. In the meantime, what he should do is get a neck tattoo, shave his head, and start wearing those big khaki pants they all wear. He’d get a part like that.”

  “That’s terrible,” Molly said.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” Molly said. “That’s one hundred percent screwed up. That’s not him.”

  “But who is?” Sally asked. “I mean really. What a presumptuous idea. He’s an actor. He should act. Be the cliché. This is America. Clichés pay the bills. You think I like being the ‘acting teacher?’ ‘Acting teacher’ is how I make money. If it was up to ‘Sally,’ she wouldn’t do a damn thing. We’d be living out on the street. Actors are weirdos who pretend to be normal—but we’re accepted, thank God! We’re accepted! People need us, and they know it. It’s not like we’re painters or something—or poets, for fucksake! We aren’t embarrassing people to death. They know what to make of us, at least. That’s a stroke of luck, believe me. If this country had its way, they’d round up all the artists and burn us alive.”

  Sally always spoke about herself as if she were a hundred different people. Molly only ever felt like who she was, and she found this depressing. She was twenty-four and often told herself that if she didn’t make it by the time she was twenty-six, she would go ahead and kill herself. Most days she didn’t mean it—not really—but the fantasy made her feel better. Then there were the other days.

  “How about you?” Sally asked. “How was the deodorant audition?”

  “Great,” Molly said. “I’ve got a call-back tomorrow.”

  “That’s so good.”

  “Yeah,” she said, forcing the enthusiasm. “I’ve got a pilot call-back too.”

  “What?” Sally said. “That’s huge!”

  “Totally. It’s totally huge,” Molly said, although it didn’t feel that way. To get a part, you needed to have been seen before, and Molly had yet to be seen. Casting agents remembered you from in-person interactions, but producers often didn’t. Producers needed context, prior validation in the form of screen time. The role didn’t have to be a lead, or a supporting even. You could have walked into the frame and handed someone a piece of paper. What was important was that another producer had approved of you, had said, “This one’s good. We can use her.” Everything in Molly’s life was connected to the same question: If she couldn’t get a part in order to be seen and get another part, how was she supposed to get a part? She couldn’t complain to Sally, though. Sally was the only reason she had a manager at all. The woman was connected. She’d made some calls and still it took two years.

  “That’s tomorrow too,” Molly said. “The pilot audition.”

  The show was about a guy who solves crimes of a historical nature by remembering his past lives. Molly was up for the role of GIRLFRIEND. The character didn’t yet have a name. It was a small role, sure, the producer had said, but there was always room to grow. What could Molly bring to it? How could she aid them in seeing GIRLFRIEND more clearly? Could she make GIRLFRIEND feel big? Could she make a seemingly insignificant, nearly worthless character come alive?

  “Are you prepared?” Sally asked her. “Have you done the research?”

  “Tons,” Molly said.

  * * *

  Because it was a Wednesday night, which meant her manager wouldn’t be there and they could eat for free, she met Jared at the restaurant where she worked. Parking was parking. She found a s
pot near the edge of a sloping driveway, checked her bumper two or three times to make sure she wasn’t over, and then walked the two blocks to the restaurant. Through the front window, she saw Jared at the bar, nursing a Manhattan. He was seven years older than her. One of the fundamentally boring things she loved about him was that he didn’t drink too much. Her first two LA boyfriends had been drunks—the usual, self-pitying sad sacks—and Molly wondered if she didn’t have a bar sign on her forehead, some mark that attracted them. Since college, she had adopted a personal discipline that made her feel dull sometimes. She waited tables. She went to acting class. She worked out. She auditioned. She guessed the drunks had relieved her of that routine, but they were exhausting after awhile. She liked Jared’s attentiveness, his trust in her, and his sense of humor, although Molly often regretted having fallen in love with another actor. She also wasn’t crazy about the fact that he might be it. She had a secret vision of herself as coupled with a man who would elicit far more of the world’s jealousy than this one did.

  She gave him a big hug and a kiss.

  “How was class?” Jared asked.

  “Fine,” Molly said. “Weird. The usual.”

  He kept his hair short because he was starting to lose it. He had a nose that was round at the tip. Watching television on their couch, Molly liked to put quarters on his chin and leave them there.

  “How was your day?”

  “Terrible,” he said.

  One of their problems was that he didn’t complain enough. Because he didn’t, it made Molly the complainer in the relationship. She had, in fact, asked him to share more, but upon hearing the whiny tone in his voice she regretted having mentioned it at all.

  “The audition?”

  “The audition,” Jared said.

  There was hardly anyone else at the bar. A few local regulars. Molly ordered a glass of Pinot from the new bartender, who was a dead ringer for Lorenzo Lamas. She was suddenly not hungry.