“It’s so hard when the role is an ingénue,” Maggie said. “You know?”
Eleanor didn’t.
“Every girl thinks she’s an ingénue. Anyone under thirty or a hundred fifty pounds comes out for these auditions.” She rolled her eyes. “Some people don’t understand type.”
Eleanor had not weighed herself in years and took in that number with some trepidation. “Type?”
Maggie looked at her like she was an idiot. “You know. Ingénue. Soubrette. Siren. Matron. Et cetera.”
Eleanor knew those words but hadn’t realized they were so ironclad. The roles themselves might have been confined that way: the beautiful young lover, the flirt, the very sexy woman, the comedic older-woman character. But were actresses, too?
“Do you mean people can only play certain roles?”
“Well, I mean, people can play whatever roles the director casts them in,” Maggie said. “But for the most part, directors look at a girl and know who she should play. For example, I always play ingénues.”
Eleanor felt a rush so powerful that she clenched her fists. She smiled. “So do I.”
She faced the wall so she could ready herself for the coming moment. This close to the stage, she could hear another actress’s audition. The girl was terrible. She pushed her voice past its comfortable point, so she yelled rather than sang.
Maybe I have a chance, Eleanor thought. Her fear melted away in favor of bullheaded pragmatism. She turned to the young man with the clipboard. “Water?”
He pointed around the corner at a cooler with paper cones. Eleanor warmed the water in her mouth before swallowing so as not to contract the muscles in her throat. Next she gargled, then massaged her throat, face, shoulders. Enunciating silently to warm up her facial muscles, she clenched her fists hard, then let go and touched her toes, breathing as deep as she could. It was amazing how preparation could quiet her mind.
The music was in her body; she could no more forget the lyrics than forget her own name. The places where she’d stop to breathe or crescendo were ingrained. Eleanor was talented, but moreover, she was prepared.
Maggie went in when the other girl finished, but Eleanor knew better than to listen. If Maggie was good, all this mental centering could be disrupted. She continued to stretch and think through the song in her head.
In less than two minutes, Maggie emerged from backstage.
“That’s it?” Eleanor asked.
Maggie did not seem upset. “I sang, they asked me about my dancing, then I left.”
“Who was in there?”
“Harry Flynn and Len Price,” Maggie said. “A producer.”
“Don Mannheim wasn’t there?”
“Guess not. It doesn’t matter. Harry Flynn is the one to impress, if you ask me. He is the director, after all. They say he’s the meanest man in the business.”
Even Eleanor had heard that. His bitter tongue was so infamous it was mentioned in reviews. She tried not to think about Don’s absence—she’d burned to see him, but if she won the part, she’d see him all the time.
Maggie flipped her hair. “Break a leg.”
Eleanor took deep breaths before Lisa emerged next, looking upset. Eleanor didn’t even have time to pretend to be polite before the clipboard man returned.
“Eleanor?” he asked.
Eleanor felt something in her throat. She needed more water, but there wasn’t time.
“Go in, give your music to the accompanist, and stand center.”
She barreled through the doors and almost missed that she was backstage at a Broadway theater, then stopped. Set pieces were tucked off to the side, and on an ordinary day she would have killed to explore all of them. The smell of sawdust calmed her. It reminded her of Pat’s store and his cardboard inventory boxes. She took in her surroundings for another moment, and then walked out of the wings, onto the stage.
“Eleanor?”
The lights were too bright to see. Harry Flynn was in the middle somewhere. Her eyes adjusted enough to spot him in the audience. She recognized his thin face from photographs. He was a long-boned man with a background in ballet. A large gray-haired man sat beside him.
“Where are you from, Eleanor?”
Was he supposed to ask these questions?
“Wisconsin.” Her voice was too soft. She repeated herself and waited for him to ask something else. He didn’t.
Her feet were sweating; they slid in her pumps, and she knew her walk was funny. The pianist was downstage on the lip, behind an upright.
She crossed to him and plopped her music down.
“I’ll be starting with ‘The Man I Love.’” Leaning over the piano, she conducted a tempo, humming along.
The man paged through her music, passing the Gershwin piece and stopping at the Blitzstein. Was he listening?
She tried not to sound nervous. “That’s my second choice.”
He looked up and speared her with a stare. “I know.”
Eleanor’s body recognized him before her mind. She felt a drop in her stomach, coolness in her hands and feet. The man at the piano was Don Mannheim.
Behind the piano, he was both smaller and larger than she’d expected. Smaller because the idea of him had swelled enormous in her mind. Larger because Eleanor always imagined intellectual men to be slight and thin wristed; Don had broad shoulders and a burly chest. His jeans and a sweater were so regular they looked wrong on him. Coffee stained his cuff. His hair, almost as dark as it was in the black-and-white photographs, was mussed instead of slicked back, and shadowed his chin and cheeks. There was tightness in his body when he sat, and even though she knew he was a talented piano player, he lacked the ease of a pianist. He looked tense and volatile, his leg jiggling. His demeanor was of anxious impatience, as if he were being scratched by the air around him. This was so noticeable, and so opposite what she had imagined, that Eleanor had to recast him in her mind. Don Mannheim, the genius, was a nervous man.
He nodded, acknowledging her recognition without any performed kindness, then looked at the music. At once, his awkwardness made sense. He wasn’t timid or jittery; when Don looked at the music, his eyes took on the tight focus of a man with augmented concentration. He flipped through her pages and then looked at her, as if imagining her performing each song. He was so intense that she understood now why his musicals were so good. Don Mannheim was at home in his area of genius.
“I love Blitzstein.” Black hair crept up the backs of his hands and grew on his knuckles. His nails were cropped short, and he had a bruise under one of them, like he’d slammed a finger in a door. She was glad to know these intimate details and ran her eyes over his body, collecting more to replay in her mind later. His legs were thin. Beneath the neck of his sweater, she saw a furry chest. She watched his irises move back and forth, reading the music like it was a sentence in a book.