In any case, there’s nothing Saskia can do about it at the moment, so she may as well drink her coffee and think about something else, like that woman by the window with the long face and sadly too much makeup and penciled circumflex eyebrows and low-set mouth crowded with corn-kernel teeth who’s squeezing her steaming teabag—the steam billows and writhes evilly against the light from the street—over her cup with her spidery fingers dancing and this wonderfully vivid fastidious expression produced by drawn-back lips and tidy doubled chin. The five-inch golden hoop earrings and gold-threaded purple shawl are a bit much, who’s the costume designer?
She finishes her coffee, buys bread and a banana, walks home. She has nothing on her schedule until a recording session Tuesday, so if she can just keep not thinking about Mette, she can get in some hours revising her play.
For a while after she moved to the city in 2002, it looked like she might have a semi-viable stage career. First off—what made everything else possible—she lucked out and found a woman who could stay with Mette when necessary in the evenings. Elaine was a retired accountant, never married, who took a shine to Mette because she reminded her of her much younger sister, who when little had been “strange in exactly the same way and no one understood her except me.” Saskia weed-whacked her sense of affront, watered her gratitude. She took a waitressing job and fit in another acting workshop during Mette’s school hours. She gained experience, made connections, got an agent, went to a zillion auditions of which a zillion minus five were fiascos, the remainder being minorish roles in off-off-Broadway productions that limped along for a few weeks, steadily deflating. Finally she landed a part she liked to think of as minor-major, though everyone else probably saw it as major-minor, in a play that got generally good reviews and had an extended run of six months. The Times idiot liked the production but declined to devote a word to her, whereas the Daily News genius, in the midst of pooh-poohing everything else, said that she “tapped unexpected depths in an underwritten role.” Meanwhile—fortunately—it turned out she enjoyed waitressing: enjoyed the insane bustle, her volatile fellow waitresses, the backbiting, the shouted resignations in the midst of slammed lunch hours, the busy holiday weekend revenge no-shows, the heat-crazed irascible cooks, the fluttery zoetropic interaction with almost-real-seeming customers, among whom she especially loved the assholes, who in their baroque assholery were fecund sources of acting ideas. At the same time she was doing occasional small roles in TV shows filming in the NYC area: a single mother and waitress (nailed it!) who’d witnessed a crime, a school guidance counselor, a nurse, another nurse, another nurse (what the fuck? male directors’ little buxom nurse fantasies?), one of six bank hostages, a few other spear carriers that have blurred together, with lines like, “He went that way!” and “Are you sure you’re all right?” and “It was too dark to see his face.”
After four or five years of this she got a film role she fantasized might be her big break. She preferred the stage—the protean communication with the audience, the emotional through line, the danger—but of course was aware that if she ever wanted to give up her first love (waitressing!), then film was more likely to be her white-clad Richard Gere. The writer and director was the same guy who directed the play in which Saskia tapped unexpected depths in an underwritten role. (May she pause for a moment to note that fifty fucking years downwind from the founding of NOW, only 8 percent of film and television directors are women? Back to our regularly scheduled program—) She and this guy—Dexter, DGA, WGA, XY—had gotten along well during the stage production, including a couple of times when he seemed genuinely to consider a suggestion of hers before rejecting it, so when he asked her to audition for his pet project she fell on that grenade like a ton of bricks. Of course it was a low-budget indie, a post-apocalypse chamber piece wherein 95 percent of the screen time was handled by two actors, a man and a woman (Saskia!), in a jury-rigged shelter-cum-science-lab plus a withy-and-polyethylene greenhouse in a clearing in the woods. The script was spare and enigmatic, going for Mythic or maybe Folkloric, Adam and Evey, Death and Rebirthy. On the page it didn’t look like much, but the words were speakable, occasionally even beautiful, and Saskia and the other actor (Fawad) built up a rapport. They shot for three weeks in the Finger Lakes National Forest—Mette, now twelve, showing a feline indifference to whether it was Saskia or Elaine who occasionally tapped fruitlessly on her bedroom door back in New York City—and Saskia had good feelings about what they had accomplished. But in film, actors don’t know squat until they see the finished product. When she did, she was excited. Dexter had caught something fresh and nuanced in the way Saskia and Fawad played off each other. Plus, the editing and the cinematography were good, the score was moody and perfect. She started fantasizing about festivals, acceptance speeches, what she’d wear on the red carpet, etc.
The critics hated it. The first one, a prominent male reviewer, approached it as though it were trying to be realistic sci-fi and pompously mansplained the scientific “errors,” which, since these would have been obvious to an innumerate ten-year-old, might in a better world have clued in Mr. Swinging-Dick to the fact that the film wasn’t trying to be realistic sci-fi. Then three or four reviews followed in which the words “boring” and “static” and “pretentious” kept recurring. After that, some herd-instinct tipping point was passed and everyone piled on with cathartic glee: self-indulgent, politically correct, mind-numbing, dead-horse-flogging, slow-motion-train-wrecking, jaws-on-the-flooring, can’t-look-awaying. This was in 2007, so social media was building
