Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 18

All of this is why, freshly graduated from college a year later, applying to The New Yorker was not even a consideration. What should I do? I asked myself, during my long walk following the disastrous job fair. I wanted to be a writer. Of that I was certain. But in the meantime, I needed a job.

I did briefly consider becoming a movie star to support myself. I had met enough of them to know it couldn’t be that hard. And I still had the five hundred headshots I’d had printed in my sophomore year of college just before I dropped out of acting school. But ultimately, I decided against it. First, I liked my privacy too much to put it on sale the way an actor must. Projecting myself into a future filled with screaming fans and cold French fries (at restaurants, they’d drop by, insisting I pose for a “quick” photo); car chases with paparazzi; secret affairs with my driver/bodyguard/ping-pong partner/masseur/amanuensis; I saw great sadness behind my sunglass-covered eyes, a great weariness of spirit that even my heavily insured smile could not mask. I saw bottle upon bottle of prescription painkillers mixed up in my purse. I saw endless afternoons of shoplifting and Pilates; it wasn’t a life I wanted.

Plus, there were no roles I really wanted to play. What I had disliked most about acting, during my brief time studying it—aside from the other actors, the directors, the set designers, the composers, the playwrights, the stage-hands, the ushers, the box office salesmen, the audiences, the critics, and the drafty theaters themselves—was always having to play someone else. I didn’t want to be a chameleon, but a great personality photographed in black and white, my face framed by long thin fingers wilting gracefully around a cigarette, my hair hidden beneath a marvelous silk turban, my cruel lips—what are cruel lips? I’m always reading novels about characters who have them—on the verge of some pronouncement as quotable as inscrutable: “Where people go wrong is when they sell their soul to the devil; leasing is the thing. This way you’ll have a steady stream of income pouring in annually and can regularly renegotiate a competitive price based on market fluctuations.” To transform, yes. But into myself! Whoever that was.

And then, after being turned away from an open call for extra work in a Russell Crowe film, I realized I was just too sensitive a creature to handle so much rejection—one. As a result, the other 499 headshots remain untouched in a tightly packed box on a high shelf all the way in the back of my closet. On the same shelf, incidentally, as my stock of unsold T-shirts.