CHAPTER 72: Penny Nails The Room
The callback was going to come. She knew before she was back in the elevator.
That was new. Penny had had good auditions before — she knew the difference between doing her best and bombing, she had the range for that — but this was something else. This was the specific, surreal knowledge that she had been in a room full of strangers and she had controlled it. For eleven minutes, the room had been hers, and she had known it in real time.
She pressed L and watched the floors descend and thought: huh.
The casting office was on the eighteenth floor of a building on 48th Street. Midtown Manhattan, mid-morning, November chill coming through the lobby glass in gusts every time the main door opened. She'd been here forty minutes early and had sat in a room with six other women who all looked approximately like her — blonde, mid-twenties, that open-but-composed thing New York auditions seemed to select for — and she'd run her sides twice in her head, eaten a granola bar, and not let herself catastrophize.
When they called her name, she'd gone in.
Eleven minutes. She'd looked at the casting director directly when the material asked her to and just slightly past him when it didn't, and she'd remembered what Stuart had told her about the third take being the one where you stop acting and start deciding, and she had decided. She'd made the room wait for a half-beat on the turn, and the room had waited, and when she looked up the casting director's pen wasn't moving anymore.
"Thank you, Penny," the assistant had said, after.
Penny had said, "Thank you so much," and walked out, and now the elevator was at L and she was in the lobby.
A woman was sitting in one of the low chairs near the revolving door, reading a playbill. She sat the way people sat when they spent a lot of time in lobbies — comfortable, unhurried, occupying the space without performing anything.
"Fifth floor?" she said, without looking up.
Penny slowed. "Sorry?"
"Casting office, fifth floor is TV, eighteenth is film." She turned a page. "Which one were you?"
"Eighteenth."
"Hmm." She closed the playbill. "How'd it go?"
"Good. Really good, actually." Penny said it before she'd decided to say it.
The woman looked at her. She was maybe forty, with the kind of face that held everything back until it didn't. "Don't caveat that," she said. "If it was good, it was good."
They ended up at the coffee place on the corner, because the woman — Dana, who had a recurring arc on a procedural and was very matter-of-fact about it — said the Midtown coffee was better than anything she'd had back west and Penny hadn't disagreed because she'd only been here since yesterday.
Dana drank her coffee black and explained the bicoastal math the way you explain it to someone who's going to need it: flight cost, the scheduling friction, what "hiatus" actually meant, what an agent in New York wanted versus what an agent in LA wanted, the bone-tired of landing on a Tuesday after wrapping Friday. Not cruel, not cautionary. Just actual.
"Do you have an agent?" Dana asked.
"Not in New York."
Dana made a face that wasn't quite a face. "You will," she said.
Penny's phone buzzed. Stuart, lit up on the screen.
She picked up.
"Tell me," he said, before she could even get out hello.
"I think I got it."
"Yes." He said it the way someone says it when they'd been waiting. "Penny. God. Tell me everything."
She told him: the room, the pen stopping, the assistant's thank you, Dana at the coffee place. He asked real questions — which sides did they use, the one from the pilot script or the second set — and she realized he'd actually memorized her audition materials, had absorbed the specifics over dinner last week without making a production of it, and the realization caught her mid-sentence.
"Are you still there?" he said.
"Yeah. Yeah, sorry." She looked out the window at 48th Street. "I just — you remembered the sides."
"I like specifics," he said. "What happened after the turn? You said the room waited."
She told him. He laughed — not the polite laugh, the real one, the one that meant he was picturing it and delighted — and it traveled 2,800 miles fine and she heard every bit of it.
He did not say: can't wait for you to come home. He did not say: that's great, when do you think you'll be back? He said, "You should get some sleep. Are you eating actual food? Get actual food." He said, "Call me when you know," meaning the callback, and she said "I will." And that was it. Easy as anything.
She sat with the phone in her hand after he hung up.
Out on 48th, a delivery truck was edging around a cab, and a man in a gray coat was eating something wrapped in foil and walking, and New York was being entirely indifferent to her, exactly the way she'd always imagined it would be. Big and loud and not waiting for anyone.
The agent's card was on the table, next to her coffee.
It had appeared during the third sentence Dana said about New York representation — the casting director had apparently flagged her, called a number, produced a name. "He's not flashy but he's serious," Dana had said, setting it in the saucer. "Tell him I sent you."
Penny had said, "Oh, thank you, that's so — I don't know if I'd actually —"
"Take the card," Dana said.
She'd taken the card.
She turned it face-up. JEROME KATZ — THEATRICAL REPRESENTATION — then a number with a 212 area code.
She turned it over. Blank back. The kind of card that wasn't trying.
She'd promised herself she wouldn't keep it. She didn't need to keep it. The audition was for one project, a potential callback chain, not a life relocation; she had Stuart, she had the shop's calendar on her fridge, she had Sunday phone plans and the good coffee place on Lake Avenue she and Stuart had started going to on slow Saturdays.
She picked up the card.
She put it in the front pocket of her bag, where she kept the things she needed to reach quickly.
Outside, New York kept going, the way it would keep going.