“I’m going to have to stop you there,” Landon said. “Awful thing heard and acknowledged.”
“But—”
“That’s not how you’re going to break into this industry, Rose,” Landon said. “That’s not you.”
How could he know what was and was not her with such certainty? “I don’t know who I am right now.”
“Come to my place, and I’ll show you.”
It was still so simple with him—no problem she encountered that he couldn’t solve or commiserate with. So easy it made her heart ache. “Okay.”
Weeks turned to months and Rose was still adrift. When she couldn’t sleep at night, she told herself it was because she wasdoing the hard work of unearthing who she was in relation to the city, but the truth was she was waiting for New York to tell her. And she didn’t like the message she was getting.
Her savings dwindled faster than she could have ever imagined. After her twelfth dead-end audition, Rose knew she would need some sort of day job to keep the literal and metaphorical lights on. She methodically walked into restaurants on her block, one by one, until the fifth—an Italian place that catered to tourists and did not make their own pasta sauce—offered her a position as a hostess. Rose was grateful, then, that she and her mother so rarely spoke. All those expensive years of college, and for what? To paste on a smile and bring tourists to their seats in a city full of people doing groundbreaking things with their lives.
With a paycheck coming in, Rose’s ramp to success elongated ever so slightly. She went to more open calls, and more, combing through postings until the shows were so manyoffsBroadway, she wasn’t really sure what she was doing in New York.
“That’s all we need.”
“Thanks, that’ll be all.”
“Next.”
“Next.”
“Next.”
When the endless barrage of rejections threatened to drown her, she picked up more shifts. She was good at it. Rose had spent years pretending there wasn’t a storm brewing inside her, a serene duck paddling furiously underwater. And she had meticulous attention to detail. They gave her more shifts. More, and more, until all of a sudden she was no longer an up-and-coming actress who worked at a restaurant, but a hostess who occasionally made it to an improv class. Smile, seat, repeat.
Landon never once pushed her. He didn’t ask why she’d given up: Was it temporary, or was she just in hibernation, steeling herself for the spring? He was just there. After a callback for an original work by some NYU grads didn’t pan out, Landon studied her crestfallen face and took her out dancing. The morning after she got the call she wouldn’t be playing a victim onLaw and Order SVU, she woke up to a steaming-hot latte from her favorite shop and an everything bagel from the deli they’d decided was the best in New York. He brought buddies to the restaurant and shot her sly looks from their table, his eyes glistening with the promise of what he’d like to do to her after her shift. There was no low she could sink to he would not pull her out of.
Until one day in July, exactly a year after she’d hauled her stuff down to the basement apartment in Brooklyn, when she was sure he couldn’t. Rose lay supine on her floor mattress, buried under her ratty comforter with both pillows, now wholly deflated, on top of her head. Music blared through her earbuds to drown out anyone or anything that could distract her from the enormous task of feeling every last ounce of her failure. Because she had failed spectacularly. There were no new clothes, no bureau to hold them, no posters and photographs in sleek black frames on the walls. One year later and all she had to show for herself was a Walgreens run-in with Kit Harington and hair that perpetually smelled like garlic bread. Landon had told her, over and over, she needed to give herself more time. But Rose wouldn’t give herself more than a year—she couldn’t. How quickly one year bleeds into two, then three, until all of a sudden you’re trapped living half a life. Rose didn’t know a lot of things, but she knew that she needed to try to move on. And to do that, she would need to mourn.
Rose had turned up the music so loud in her headphonesthat she only heard the faintest rap of knuckles on the door. She debated sending him away, but decided it would be best to simply pretend she hadn’t heard. Landon pushed the door open. “Hey,” he said, loudly.
Rose said nothing.
“Hey!” Landon said, testing just how loud he could be without rousing her. Minutes later, his large hands rocked her.
She stiffened. “Go away.”
“I’m coming in.” When Rose didn’t respond, he slipped under the covers. It was dark and warm, and she could just make out the whites of Landon’s eyes in a sea of black.
Rose pulled out her earbuds and held them in clenched fists. “I’m wallowing.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that.”
“I need to be alone.”
Landon smoothed back what felt like a hundred hairs that had succumbed to static and shot up every which way. “It is my professional opinion that you’ve been alone long enough.”
Rose clicked her teeth. “You can’t cheer me up right now.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Don’t lie.”
The whites of his teeth flashed in the dark. “Okay, maybe a little.”
