I nonchalantly expressed a desire for food to Kelly, knowing she is a mom and assuming all mothers know where the closest food is.
“You’re hungry?” she asked, mulling the word over. “Huh. I’m not.”
This is the kind of digestive narcissism that makes people hate actresses.
Off camera, I eyed the tray of real hors d’oeuvres meant to be part of the background to the party. Once the coast was clear, I quickly consumed a pecan, trying to keep my jaw still and eat at the same time.
“They spray those with poison, you know,” said Matthew, who had witnessed my entire operation.
“Yeah, right.”
I ate a second nut.
“No, really,” he said, gesturing at the spotlights in the corner. “It’s so they’ll pop on camera.”
I spit a little wet pile of masticated nut mess into my palm.
“I’m kidding,” he said.
He was a very good actor.
* * *
The actress who played the literary agent and I became friends. We had to stand uncomfortably close to each other for much of the day, because that’s how we were blocked. It turned out we lived a street away from each other in real life. While the director spouted off terms I had never heard before, embedded in instructions I was meant to follow right now, she took me under her wing and explained everything to me. She told me when we were rolling, what was practice and what was real. She explained that a “side” was a portion of a script. All the while being directed herself in her first multi-episode role on the show. She would not go back to being some other self tomorrow. This was her real life, her career, her paycheck—and I, the lowly walk-on, was threatening it with dumb questions. Yet she was selfless in her assistance.
To celebrate her inaugural appearance on the show (she appeared in one episode before mine and five after), she had a party at her apartment. Someone handed me a glass of wine and we settled on the couch. As the lights were dimmed, I quickly grilled her about the rest of the party scenes, about what happened to the characters in the days after I left. Late in the game, I had become a Gossip Girl addict.
“Whose apartment is it supposed to be, anyway? Your boss’s?”
“Mine.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes,” she insisted, as if it were really hers, “it’s my apartment.”
“No. That can’t be.”
With a quick snip, my one tether between reality and Gossip Girl was cut. A twenty-seven-year-old literary agent does not live in that apartment. She just doesn’t. Even if she’s descended from titans of publishing. I didn’t need Gossip Girl to be realistic about books or writers or parties. Or pretty much anything. The show features a lot of usurping of fashion shows and sabotaging of record deals, for example, and I assume these are not pitch-perfect representations of their respective industries. But there is one realm in which I know too much about the reality to remain silent about the fantasy and that realm is real estate.
After the screening, I walked home, remembering the very last moments of my scene. You can’t see it on TV, but what happens is this: I deliver the last of my few lines, excuse myself to hunt for cake, and rush to get off camera as quickly as possible. What with the director, the assistant director, the makeup artist, six cameramen, and so forth, there are about forty people in the living room at any given time. I duck under a boom microphone, squeeze between two cameras, and find myself released into a dining room visible in the background when the show airs.
The room is filled with extras, split into gesticulating clumps. A couple of guests in the corner absolutely light up upon seeing me enter the room. I feel the same comfort I might feel upon entering a party alone and spotting friends. They mouth, “Hello.” I wave and whisper, “Hello,” back. The camera is still rolling in the next room, but I am no longer acting. I cross over to them, brushing past other extras, who also aren’t saying much. I want to find out how I know this couple. Once I arrive, I see their lips are moving, but they are not actually speaking. Their champagne is flat. There is blocking tape at their feet. Embarrassed, I stand there, leaning on bookshelves filled with prop books. It’s not me they are happy to see, it’s me.
You Someday Lucky
My new coworker and his wife are obsessed with a personality-diagnosing system called the Enneagram, which originated in fourth-century Alexandria and gained popularity in America during the 1970s. They are both from Boulder, the Bennington of the West, so their affinity for a numerically based wizardry system makes sense. It also makes sense if you’ve never heard of the Enneagram. Studies show that only 15 percent of people already making their own nut milk have heard of it. It’s too complicated to be confined to a place where you might have noticed it, like the back page of a magazine. It makes astrology look as precise as a fortune cookie, numerology as helpful as a mood ring. It makes the Myers-Briggs test look like someone ripped it off a cereal box.
One night after work, I go over to their apartment so they can figure out my personality number. This is a fantastically indulgent exercise, like a four-handed massage or group therapy in which only one person’s problems are addressed. Over the course of several hours, they ask me all sorts of questions, some personal, some philosophical, some mined from their many books on the subject. Scenarios presented involve hypothetical reactions to crowded parties, animal attacks, solitary confinement, and statements that describe
