Page 18 of The Lion in the Library

I did it again, exactly the same.

Another pause.

Deborah and the director exchanged a look that I had learned, over twenty years of auditions, to interpret. It was not the look of people being polite. It was the look of people making a decision they had already made.

“Ms. Flores,” the director said, “I want to ask you something, and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way.”

“Of course.”

“Have you been working with a dialect coach?”

I met his gaze. “Yes. For several months.”

He nodded slowly. “Have you considered,” he said, with the careful phrasing of someone who had said difficult things to many talented people, “not doing that? For this role, specifically?”

I stared at him.

“Rosario is from Guadalajara,” he continued. “She moved to Los Angeles fifteen years ago. She has built a life here. She is —” he paused, searching, “— not fully of either place. That’s the whole character. The way she exists between two worlds.” He looked at me steadily. “What you just gave me is exactly that. I don’t want you to smooth it. I want exactly what you have.”

The silence that followed was the kind that rearranges things.

“I understand,” I said, in my own voice, which had been exactly right all along.

Miguel called before I had reached the car park.

“Deborah called me,” he said. “Estrella, they want you. They want you. They are sending the offer tonight.”

I sat down on a low wall outside the building. The Los Angeles afternoon was bright and warm and entirely indifferent to the fact that something had just shifted in my chest.

“She said the director called it ‘a revelation,’” Miguel continued. “A revelation! Do you know how often I hear that word in this business? Almost never. Almost never, Estrella.”

“He told me to stop using the dialect coach,” I said.

A brief silence. “Yes,” Miguel said. “Well. Yes, that is — that is consistent with the approach we’ve been discussing.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Miguel.”

“Estrella.”

“We have not been discussing that approach.”

“We have been discussing,” he said, with tremendous dignity, “the importance of your authentic voice as your primary instrument. Which is what I have always believed.”

“You hired me the dialect coach.”

“I hired you a coach to help you understand your instrument better,” he said, without missing a beat, “so that you could make informed choices about when and how to deploy it. Which is exactly what you did today. I’m very proud of the work you’ve done.”

I looked at the sky. A palm tree was doing absolutely nothing against it, perfectly still in the warm air. “You’re unbelievable,” I told him.

“I’m your agent,” he said. “It’s the same thing. I’ll send you the offer as soon as I have it.”

He hung up. I sat with the receiver in my hand for a moment before setting it back in the cradle.

Then I found another coin and called Leo.

It rang twice. “Hola.” His voice did something to my nervous system that I had decided to stop finding embarrassing and simply accept as a fact of my current life.

“I got it,” I said. “The role. They offered it.”