Chapter 2: Upstairs

He had learned the smile before he learned anything else about the business. Small parts, cold readings, a hundred hallways where an assistant wrote his name on a list and forgot it before he sat down — after four years the smile came up on its own and stayed up until he got home. In this city it came off for maybe three people.

Tonight he wanted a few hours as one of them.

The bass came up through the floor before it reached his ears. Screens behind the bar slid orange and red around the room in slow turns, so that every face changed shape every few seconds and none of them was worth remembering. The place was run by people from the industry — that was the whole reason to come. The lighting was deliberate, the door was watched, and attention had found him once since he walked in: a woman at the far end of the bar who looked twice, decided against it, and went back to her friends. In this room, that was the going rate.

Mina found him before his drink did.

“There you are.” She took the stool beside him like she’d run the last block to get it. “Okay. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Glassmoor.” She said it the way you hand over a present you picked out yourself. “I saw the thread this morning. The character they haven’t announced yet? He’s mine. I’ve read those books four times. If it’s you, I’m falling off this stool right now.”

“It’s not.”

She waited.

“They went with somebody else.” He turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar. “The show decided there was a better option.”

Mina’s face made the whole trip — ceiling, floor, back up again. “Better than what? Better than you? June, the author follows you.”

“The author doesn’t cast it.”

There was more to it. A company had put money into the production, and the part had been sold before anyone watched his tape, and Bernie had spent an hour that morning handing him all of it. Saying it here wouldn’t change any of it. It would only give Mina something to be sorry at him about for the rest of the night, and then he’d have to manage that, too.

So he stayed with the short version and drank, and let her be angry on his behalf — the one thing he had to hand her tonight.

Wes had been quiet on his other side, elbow on the bar, watching the room instead of the conversation.

“Something will come along,” he said, still watching it. “Probably while you’re looking the other way.”

“You say that like you’re reading it off a card.”

“With that face, it’s a matter of scheduling.”

June laughed, and it came out real, and the night lifted off him a little. Mina made a face at both of them, ordered something pink, and started telling them about a classmate who had submitted the same monologue as four other people in her section, and for a while it was exactly the night he had wanted.

Then a girl came up on June’s left with her phone already awake and a profile open on the screen.

“Hi. Sorry.” She held the phone toward him. “Could I get your number?”

“Ah — I don’t really hand that out.”

“Can I ask why?” She wasn’t embarrassed, which was its own kind of answer. “Do you have a girlfriend, or am I just not your type?”

Her eyes went to Mina, then to Wes, quick, checking a box.

June put his hand flat on Wes’s shoulder. “It’s more that he doesn’t like me giving it to people.”

Wes turned to the shelf of bottles along the back wall and stayed there.

The girl looked at Wes with new eyes, and then she did something June hadn’t expected. She took it seriously.

“Oh.” She turned to face Wes. “I really didn’t read that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” June lifted his hand off Wes’s shoulder slowly enough that it became part of the apology. “And for what it’s worth, it’s not every night a girl like you asks for my number.”

She went red and laughed and backed into the crowd, and she looked over her shoulder twice on the way, and both times he was still smiling.

“Unbelievable,” Wes said, to the bottles.

“I was being polite.”

“You told her we’re together.”

“I didn’t tell her anything. She filled it in.”

Wes let that sit for a second. “You’re not worried she works out who you are and puts it online?”

“With what? I said four words to her.” June turned back to the bar. “And nobody posts a story that has nothing under it, because the first thing anyone asks is what else there is. The answer would be: a girl asked a guy for his number in a club and he said no. That’s the whole post.”

Wes opened his mouth, thought about it, and closed it.

“Also,” June said, “you should be flattered.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mina said, from June’s other side. “You’re decent-looking. Nobody’s buying the two of you, though.”

“In your expert opinion.”

“In anybody’s.”

Wes set his glass down. “Quick question. In your world, how many men are there who aren’t a downgrade from Rhys Calloway?”

Mina opened her mouth, closed it, and looked down at her glass. It had been a week of bad threads and worse theories, and the question came out before she had decided to say it. She had picked Kestrel for one reason, and it was the same reason she owned two tickets to a show he would never play and a shelf of interviews she had watched more than once: she had spent her junior year of high school working toward one school in one city, because it was the one he had gone to, in a different program entirely. Wes called it a hobby that had gotten out of hand. She called it following in his footsteps.

“Have you heard anything?” she said. “About him and Sloane Adler.”

“They did a song together this spring,” June said. “I heard people at work talking about it. They get along. Past that I don’t know anything, and neither does anybody who tells you they do.”

“She’s pretty,” Mina said. “She’s pretty and she’s good and she’s been in a room with him for a month.”

“That’s how records get made.”

“You’re not helping.” She put her forehead down on the bar for a second and came back up. “If he ever goes public with somebody I’m going to need a week off. I’m serious. A week.”

“You’ll survive it.”

“June.” She grabbed his wrist with both hands. “Date him. I’ve thought about this. If he ever ends up with anyone, you’re the only person I could accept.”

“I don’t think either of us would survive it,” June said, cheek propped on his hand, smiling at her, and Mina laughed and let go of his wrist and ordered something else, and the three of them stayed at the bar while the screens above them went orange, red, orange.

The upstairs room had been taken for the night: two couches, a low table, a rail, a wall of glass. Whoever had lit it had gone the other way from the rest of the building — pink and red, low enough to make everyone in the room look good. From the rail, the floor below was laid out and legible, every stool and every face. From the floor, the upstairs was a line of light above the bar and nothing else.

Rhys had come in from the studio without going home first. No jacket, sleeves shoved to the elbow, hair going flat where the headphones had been sitting all day, his head back against the couch.

“I’m never doing that again,” Sloane said.

“You said that at four,” said the man on the other couch. “And again at six.”

“At six I meant it.”

“You wanted the credit,” Rhys said.

“I wanted the credit. I didn’t want the experience.” She tipped her glass at him. “Do you know what it’s like in there with you? You don’t say anything. You just look at them through the glass, and everyone in the room starts fixing what they were doing.”

“That sounds useful.”

“It’s not normal.”

“Good.”

Somebody came back from the rail long enough to report that the floor below was filling up, and then, since he was standing there anyway, with the other piece of news: the owner of the label had come down to the studio himself on Tuesday, sat in the back of the room for an hour, and told Rhys to make the record he wanted and stop asking what things cost.

“I didn’t ask what things cost,” Rhys said.

“That’s why he said it.”

The man on the couch held up two fingers. “He also said the videos. Whatever he wants for the videos. That was in there. I heard him say it twice.”

Sloane turned on the couch to face Rhys. “Speaking of videos. The first single — you shoot next month, right? Have you got somebody?”

“For what.”

“The part. The one with the script.”

“I have a script.”

“I read that script,” the man said. “It’s good. It’s just not going to be an easy shoot. The whole thing is one person looking across a room. That’s the video. If nobody believes the look, there’s nothing under it.”

“So,” Sloane said. “Who are you looking for?”

Rhys reached over his head for the glass on the table, drank what was in it, and set it back down.

“A face.”

“Anybody’s face.”

He didn’t answer that. Down below, the DJ brought the tempo up a step and the floor answered it.

“I saw somebody,” Sloane said, after a minute. “On television. One of the book adaptations — the one my sister made everyone watch over the holidays, with the swords. He played one of the villains. Second or third down the list. He was —“ She stopped to get the word right. “He was really good-looking.”

Rhys turned his head on the couch.

“A guy,” he said.

“He’s an actor.”

“A guy works.”

Sloane sat up straighter. “He’s at your label, I think. Not the big part of it. The other one.” She was already reaching for her phone and already losing the thread. “It’s right here. I can see the poster. I can see his face and I cannot get the name.”

“Take your time.”

“I’ll ask my sister. She watched the whole thing twice, she’ll know it in four seconds.” Sloane put the phone face-down on the table. “Remind me tomorrow and I’ll have it for you by noon.”

“Sure,” Rhys said.

He didn’t sit up to write it down, and he didn’t ask her again. Somebody opened the door to the stairs on their way out, and the record from the floor came up in one piece — bass, then the crowd, then bass — and the door shut on it again.

Rhys took a cigarette out of the pack on the table, put it in his mouth, and the lighter caught on the second try.