Believe Me Read online

  ME

  Before you fly back to your wife and kids in Seattle.

  Rick frowns.

  RICK

  What makes you think I’m married?

  ME

  (reassuringly)

  The ones I go for usually are. The ones who know how to have fun.

  Certain though he is now, he doesn’t rush it. We sip our drinks and he tells me about some of his clients, back in Seattle—the famous teenage idol he names who likes underaged girls, and the macho heavy-metal star who’s gay but doesn’t dare admit it. He tells me, with a hint of emphasis, how much money there is to be made doing what he does, drawing up contracts for those who are temperamentally unlikely to abide by them, requiring the services of people like him at both ends, the making of the contract and its eventual dissolution. And finally, when I look suitably impressed at all that, he suggests that, since my friend clearly isn’t going to show, we move on to someplace else, a restaurant or club, whichever I’d prefer—

  RICK

  (softly)

  Or we could just get ourselves some room service. I’m staying right upstairs.

  ME

  Room service can be expensive.

  RICK

  Whatever you want. You choose. A bottle of Cristal, some caviar…

  ME

  I meant, room service can be expensive…when I’m the one providing it.

  There. It’s out in the open now. But don’t react to what you’ve just said, don’t smile or look away. No big deal. You do this all the time.

  Just ignore the hammering in your chest, the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.

  Rick nods, satisfied.

  RICK

  I’m not the only one here on business, right?

  ME

  You got me, Rick.

  RICK

  If you don’t mind me saying, Claire, you don’t seem the type.

  Time to confess.

  ME

  That’s because…I’m not.

  RICK

  So what type are you?

  ME

  The type who comes here to take acting classes and gets behind on her tuition fees. Every couple of months I go out, have some fun…and the problem goes away.

  On the other side of the lobby, a family is checking in. A little girl, about six years old, all dressed up in a coat, knit hat, and scarf for her trip to the city, wants to see what’s going on behind the desk. Her father lifts her up, placing her feet on her elephant-trunk suitcase, and she sprawls across the counter, excited, as the manager issues the key cards, handing one to her with a smile. Her dad keeps one hand protectively on the small of her back, making sure she doesn’t slip off. I feel a familiar tug of envy and pain.

  I push it from my mind and get back into the conversation with Rick, who’s leaning forward, his voice lowered, eyes bright—

  RICK

  And how much fun are you looking to have tonight, Claire?

  ME

  I guess that’s open to negotiation.

  He smiles. He’s a lawyer. Negotiations are part of the game.

  RICK

  Shall we say three hundred?

  ME

  Is that what they charge in Seattle?

  RICK

  For that you get quite a lot in Seattle, believe me.

  ME

  What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a woman, Rick?

  RICK

  Five hundred. But that was—

  ME

  (interrupting)

  Double it.

  RICK

  (stunned)

  Are you serious?

  ME

  No, I’m not. I’m an ordinary girl out to have fun—and that’s why I’m worth a thousand dollars. But if you’ve changed your mind…

  I reach for the bag, deliberately casual, hoping he won’t see how much my hand is shaking.

  RICK

  No, wait. A thousand’s…fine.

  ME

  What’s your room number?

  RICK

  Eight fourteen.

  ME

  I’ll knock on the door in five minutes. Don’t make eye contact with the concierge.

  He stands up.

  RICK

  (admiringly)

  That trick with the table was pretty neat. Picking me up right under the noses of the bar staff.

  ME

  You get to learn these things. When you’re having fun.

  When he reaches the elevator, Rick looks back. I give him a nod and a tiny, secret smile.

  Which dies as soon as the doors close, obscuring his view of me. I pick up my bag and walk to the street exit.

  Fade out.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, it’s finally stopped snowing, the fire hydrants along the sidewalk all wearing white toupees of snow. A short way down the street a black town car is waiting, its lights off, its engine running. I pull open the rear door and get in.

  She’s about forty-five, Rick’s wife, with the kind of jaded but expensive looks that suggest she was probably part of the music scene herself once, before she started hosting Rick’s business dinners and bearing his children. She’s sitting next to Henry on the backseat, shivering despite the warm air gushing from the heaters.

  “Everything okay?” Henry asks quietly.

  “Fine,” I say, pulling the little video camera out of my bag. I’ve dropped the Virginia accent now. In my ordinary, British voice, I tell the wife, “Look, I’m going to say what I always say in these situations, which is that you really don’t have to watch this. You could just go home and try to work things out.”

  And she says, as they always say, “I want to know.”

  I hand her the camera. “The bottom line is, he uses prostitutes regularly. Not just when he’s away, either. He talked about paying up to five hundred dollars back in Seattle. And he just offered me a thousand.”

  The wife’s eyes fill with tears. “Oh God. Oh God.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say awkwardly. “He’s waiting for me in room eight fourteen if you want to go and talk to him.”

  Her eyes might be full of tears, but they also blaze with anger. Remember that. “Oh, sure, I’ll talk to a lawyer. But it’ll be a divorce lawyer. Not him.”

  She turns to Henry. “I’d like to go now.”

  “Of course,” he says smoothly. As we get out of the car—Henry to get behind the wheel, me to go on my way—he discreetly passes me an envelope.

  Four hundred dollars. Not bad for an evening’s work.

  And after all, Rick was a scumbag. He made my flesh crawl. He was arrogant and aggressive as well as a cheat. He deserves everything his wife’s about to throw at him.

  So why, as the town car pulls away through the dirty gray snow, am I left feeling so sick and disgusted by what I just did?

  2

  So now you’re wondering who I actually am and what I’m doing here in New York. My backstory, in other words.

  Name: Claire Wright

  Age: 25 (can play 20–30)

  Height: 5’7”

  Nationality: British

  Eye color: Brown

  Hair color: Flexible

  Those are the facts. But you aren’t really interested in those. You want to know what I want. Because that’s rule one, day one, the very first thing you learn: It’s what you desire that defines you as a character.

  I was telling Rick the truth—that part of it, anyway. I want to be other people. I’ve never wanted anything else.

  In any list of the top ten acting schools in the wor
ld, around half will be in New York City. The Juilliard, the Tisch, the Neighborhood Playhouse, to name just some. All teach variations on the same approach, rooted in the work of a great Russian actor called Constantin Stanislavski. It’s about immersing yourself in the emotional truth of a part until it’s a part of you.

  At the New York acting schools, they don’t teach you to act. They teach you to become.

  If you’re lucky enough to get through the initial round and be invited to New York to audition; if you’re lucky enough to be offered a place; if acting has been your whole life ever since you were eleven years old, a little girl escaping the drabness of successive foster homes by pretending to be someone and somewhere else…then not only are you one in a thousand, you would also be crazy not to accept.

  I applied to the Actors Studio course on an impulse—Marilyn Monroe studied there, and she grew up in foster care too—auditioned on a weird conviction that it was meant to happen, and accepted in a heartbeat.

  They even gave me a scholarship. It paid some of the tuition fees. It didn’t pay living costs in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

  According to the terms of my student visa, I could work…so long as my job was on campus. Campus was Pace University, a cramped modern block adjacent to City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Not many opportunities for part-time employment there.

  I managed to get a waitressing gig at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, sprinting there three evenings a week after class. But the owner had an endless supply of young women to choose from, and it didn’t make sense to let any of them stay too long. That way, if the IRS or Immigration came checking, he could always claim their forms were in the mail. After two months he told me, not unkindly, it was time to move on.

  One of my teachers, Paul, suggested I talk to an agent he knew. I found the address—a narrow doorway in a prewar block zigzagged with fire escapes, right at the end of 43rd Street—and walked up three flights of stairs to the tiniest office I’d ever been in. Every surface was piled high with headshots, scripts, and contracts. In the first room, two assistants sat either side of a cramped single desk. I heard my name being called from the second. Sitting behind another desk was a small woman rattling with oversized plastic jewelry. In her hand she had my CV, which she was reading aloud while simultaneously waving me to a seat on the other side of the desk.

  INT. NEW YORK AGENT’S OFFICE—DAY

  MARCIE MATTHEWS, a tough New York agent, is reading my CV.

  MARCIE

  Stage school. London School of Dramatic Art—for one year. A TV walk-on. A couple of European art-house movies that never got released.

  She tosses the CV aside, unimpressed, and stares at me critically.

  MARCIE

  But you’re pretty enough. Not beautiful, but you could play beautiful. And Paul Lewis tells me you have talent.

  ME

  (pleased but trying to be modest)

  He’s such a great teacher—

  MARCIE

  (interrupting)

  I still can’t represent you.

  ME

  Why not?

  MARCIE

  No green card, for one thing. Which means no union membership. Which means no work.

  ME

  There must be something I can do.

  MARCIE

  Sure. You can go back to England and apply for a green card.

  ME

  I…can’t do that.

  MARCIE

  Why not?

  ME

  It’s complicated.

  MARCIE

  No, it’s not. It’s depressingly familiar.

  She reaches for a vape and clicks it on.

  MARCIE

  I emailed a couple of colleagues in London about you, Claire. Know what they said?

  ME

  (miserably)

  I can probably guess.

  MARCIE

  The kindest was “a little intense.” Mostly, it was “stay away.” And when I went deeper, the word tumult kept cropping up.

  She raises her eyebrows.

  MARCIE

  Care to explain?

  I take a deep breath.

  ME

  Tumult…That was the title of my first studio movie. My big break. Playing the love interest opposite…Well, I guess you already know his name. He’s famous and good-looking and everyone knows he has one of the happiest marriages in showbiz.

  I look at her defiantly.

  ME

  So when he fell in love with me, I knew it was the real thing.

  MARCIE

  (snorting derisively)

  Sure.

  ME

  That was before I heard the phrase they use on movie shoots. DCOL, darling. Doesn’t Count On Location.

  MARCIE

  And?

  ME

  And after four weeks his famously beautiful wife turned up on set with his three famously beautiful kids in tow. Suddenly the producers found excuses to keep me out of the way. I was stuck in a sound booth, redubbing lines I’d already done perfectly first time around.

  MARCIE

  (nodding)

  Go on.

  ME

  That’s when I started hearing the rumors. That I was a crazy stalker. That I’d threatened his wife. The same PR machine that spun his movies was now spinning me.

  I’m fighting to hold back the tears. I know how naïve I must sound. But the truth is, I wasn’t inexperienced. You don’t come out of foster care some blinkered innocent.

  But you do come out desperate to love and be loved. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever met; the most passionate, the most poetic. He could recite every love speech in Shakespeare like it was written just for him.

  Moral: Never fall for anyone who prefers to speak someone else’s words.

  I don’t tell Marcie about the other stuff, though I suspect she knows already. How, deranged with adolescent despair at the unfairness of it all, I went to his trailer and cut my wrists open on the same daybed where we’d made love between scenes. How I’d wanted to show him that it hadn’t just been acting. That it had been real.

  At least, for me.

  ME

  And that was that. Overnight, the castings dried up. I’d committed the number one sin, you see. I’d been unprofessional. It was a week before my eighteenth birthday.

  Marcie nods thoughtfully.

  MARCIE

  You know, Paul’s right: You’re pretty good. For a moment there, you almost had me feeling sorry for you. Instead of: What a dumb, self-destructive fuck-up.

  She stabs the end of the vape at me.

  MARCIE

  The producers were right. Find yourself another career.

  ME

  I hoped America would be a second chance.

  MARCIE

  That was naïve of you. The days we took the huddled masses yearning to be free are long gone.

  ME

  This is the only career I’ve ever wanted. But I can’t go on studying without some kind of work.

  Marcie scowls and sighs at the same time. Tusks of vape smoke swell from her nostrils. Then, as if against her better instincts—

  MARCIE

  All right. Leave your details in the front office. There’s a couple of crummy music videos coming up. But no promises.

  ME

  Thank you! Thank you so much!

  I jump up and pump her hand overenthusiastically. As she disentangles it, batting away my thanks with the end of the vape, Marcie happens to glance down. Something in the mess of papers on her desk catches her eye.

  She reaches for it, re-reads it, looks up�
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  MARCIE

  How would you feel about working for a firm of divorce attorneys, Claire?

  ME

  As an assistant?

  MARCIE

  Not exactly…Look, I’ll be honest. The job is not great. But they need someone like you and they’re prepared to pay well. Very well. Non-union. And cash.

  3

  As the town car with Rick’s wife pulls away, I turn and head in the other direction. The streets are littered with icy slush and I don’t have an overcoat. Snow works its way inside the toe of my right shoe.

  Times Square is a riot of electricity and color. A single mime artist, braving the cold, entertains a ticket line. Billboards flash snippets of reviews: “MESMERIZING,” “BRILLIANT,” “EXTRAORDINARY.” I pass under a street sign that says THEATERLAND.