Chapter 8: No Audition

# No Audition

The movie was black and white and about twenty minutes in, and nobody in it had a job worth mentioning, which was the whole reason he’d picked it.

He’d put another one on after the water. The lightest thing left in the queue — a man and a woman meeting over the wrong coat. He’d lost the first ten minutes to the kitchen and picked the thread back up anyway. The rest of it would be the two of them being wrong about each other in a way you could see coming from the far side of the room. He liked the ones where being wrong about somebody cost a weekend.

The room had gone the color of the screen. His phone had been on the arm of the couch since he came back from the kitchen, and he hadn’t looked at it.

When it rang he jumped.

“Are you sitting down,” Bernie said.

“I’m lying down.”

“Sit up.” A chair creaked on the other end. “Okay. I’m going to say the whole thing, and I want you to let me finish, because if you cut in I’ll lose the order of it and we’ll both be on this call all night.”

“Okay.”

“The video. The advance single off Calloway’s record. His manager called us —“ a breath — “which, I know how that sounds, so I’m going to say it a second time. The advance single. The video. It’s you.”

Halliday sat up.

“Say something.”

“Say the part where I go in and read.”

“There’s no reading.” Bernie was talking at the speed of a man driving a little too fast. “They’re not seeing anybody. There’s nobody to see. It’s you. Next week you’re on set. Tomorrow you go to Solstice and you sign.”

On the screen, the woman was closing a door.

“No audition,” Halliday said.

“No audition.”

He waited for the rest of it. For the laugh, for the correction — wrong guy, sorry, wrong Halliday. Nothing came. At the other end, Bernie was breathing the way a man breathes after a flight of stairs, and working hard not to sound like it.

“Say yes,” Bernie said. “I need the yes before I call them back.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“Who decided it,” Halliday said.

A pause with nothing in it. “That’s the thing. I asked. They gave me a date and a room number.”

“Did you—“

“No. And don’t. Listen.” The chair again. “Did you actually talk to him? At the club. You and him.”

“He gave me a hat.”

“That’s not—“

“That’s what happened. He handed me a hat and he left.”

“See, that’s what I keep coming back to,” Bernie said, and then he was off, working it the way he worked out a budget, out loud and badly. “Maybe he got a look at you in there and it stuck. Maybe somebody over there pulled up the video and— I don’t know. I’ve been on the phone since six this morning and I don’t have a better idea, and nobody’s paying me for the one I’ve got.”

“He doesn’t know my name.”

“Then somebody over there likes you and it isn’t him. Take it either way.”

Halliday looked at the screen. The woman crossed the room and did something small and exact with her hands that he’d have to watch a second time.

“One more thing,” Bernie said. “Doyle’s directing.”

Doyle.

“Marty Doyle.”

“The Glassmoor one.”

“Same man.” Bernie said it the way he said anything he’d already decided was good news. “You know what he does. He does series. He doesn’t do videos. And they handed him six minutes of song.” A beat. “That isn’t a favor to you or me. That’s the label telling the room what they think the record is.”

Glassmoor had had Doyle’s name on it for a winter and then hadn’t, and by spring Halliday had stopped checking. He didn’t say any of that.

“Owen’s driving you,” Bernie said. “Seven-forty, downstairs, silver car, he’ll text you tonight. Bring your ID. If they put a contract in front of you, read it before you sign it. I’ll call you after.”

“When do I—“

“Next week. Monday, probably. I’ll have the rest of it before you’re awake.”

“Okay.”

“You sound like a man who’s been sitting in the dark all day.”

“I have been.”

“Sleep anyway. Tomorrow you’re employed.”

The call ended. He didn’t get up.

He tried to find the hinge on it — the read that went well, the person who’d watched it, the room that had liked him enough to say so later, on the phone, in the right week. There was always one place where a thing had turned. He went looking for this one and there was nothing. A date and a room number, and Bernie at the other end of it asking him whether he’d spoken to anybody.

He texted Bernie: what time do I have to be up.

[ seven. owen has the rest. ]

He set an alarm for six-fifty. The calendar had been empty since spring, and now it had one line in it.

A while later the phone lit up again, from a number he hadn’t saved. Four lines: a name, a car, a time, an address, and nothing else.

He left it on the arm of the couch, screen up, with the address showing. Then he found the scene he had lost and started it over.