Roz smiled. “You make it sound like Timbuktu.” Then she exhaled. “But you’re right. I’m losing clients hand-over-fist. I may have to make a move if I plan on staying in the game.”
“You haven’t decided yet?”
Roz shook her head. “Not yet.”
Evan looked back at the potentials on the stage. “Between you and me, I’d get out of the game. Lord knows I want to. But it’s in me too deep.”
“Yeah,” Roz said. “Me too.”
“The thing is,” Evan said, still staring at the dancers, “talent is gone. It’s all about the faces now.” He looked at Roz again, at her unblemished, smooth brown skin, her high cheekbones, her big, bright eyes. “You’ve got the face and the talent. That’s what these youngsters lack. You’ve got it. You’ve got the total package.”
Roz didn’t look at him because all of his faint praise meant one thing and one thing only: the news he was about to drop on her wasn’t going to be good. She knew him too well. “I have all of this talent,” she said to him, “but?”
Evan hesitated. He knew it was wrong, but he didn’t produce the shit. He just handled the casting, and when it came to the lead roles they rarely wanted his input even then. “The producers want to go in a different direction,” he said.
That feeling in the pit of Roz’s stomach returned. She’d been getting a lot of rejections lately. She should be used to it. But it was something you never get used to.
“You know how fickle producers can be,” Evan kept talking. “If their life is going well, they love you, if it’s going not so well, they hate you. The least little thing and they worry about their bottom lines. But you had the best audition hands down, Roz.” He looked at her. “Honest you did. You can play that part in your sleep.”
Roz had heard that before too. You were the best. Can sleepwalk through that role. Nobody’s better. Five times in a row she’d heard that before. “If I had the best audition,” she said to Evan, “then why am I not getting the part?”
“I told you why. It’s those fucking producers. They want to go in a different direction.”
“A younger direction?” Roz asked bluntly, and then looked at him.
Evan couldn’t deny it. He respected her too much. “Yes. A younger direction. And I know it makes no sense. You look younger than many of these young girls out here anyways! But you’ve been around for twenty years. That’s the part that scares them.”
Roz shook her head. “Experience scares them?”
“That’s how they are,” Evan said. “It’s wrong, but it’s true. They’re all about the faces now. And the newer and fresher and, yes, younger, the better. But don’t take it personally, Roz.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roz said with a frown. “How else am I supposed to take it? I can’t change my age. I can’t erase my experience.”
“I’m just trying to soften the blow. Doesn’t work, does it?”
Roz shook her head. “Not even a little bit.”
Evan tried to smile. Then he remembered the other part. “But they did offer you another role,” he said.
Roz looked at him. The fact that she was even entertaining the thought showed just how desperate she was to remain viable in an industry that chewed older actresses up and spat them out. Even once-successful actresses like her. But a supporting role wasn’t the worse thing in the world. It wasn’t the lead. But it was something. “What role?” she asked him.
“It won’t be even the second or third lead I’m afraid,” Evan responded. “Far from it.”
Roz’s hopes were dashed again. Not even the third female lead? “Which role?” she asked.
“It’s just a handful of lines, and three or four scenes.”
“Which role?” Roz asked again.
Evan exhaled yet again. “The maid,” he said.
Roz gave him a look that could melt steel. “What?”
“The role is the maid. That’s what the producers are offering you. That’s what I’m offering you.”
Roz couldn’t believe it. She worked her ass off to get somewhere, struggling for over a decade before she met Mick, and she was still treated in the industry like some newbie who had to take whatever she could get?
“My advice,” Evan said, “is for you to take it. Take it, Roz. At least it’s something. It’s all we got to offer. Take it.”
Roz wanted to slap the shit out of Evan. The nerve he had!
“I’ll try to get the writer to spruce it up a bit,” Evan continued. “Maybe make her a maid with an attitude. How about that? Like Florence from The Jeffersons, or Mammy in Gone With the Wind. What about that, Roz? I know you’re used to playing the sophisticated lady. But think how you can stretch yourself if you play a role with attitude?”
“Oh, I got attitude,” Roz said, standing up. “Kiss my ass. And make sure you tell those producers I said it too. How’s that for attitude?” And she walked out of that stately theater she’d played, successfully, so many times before.
A maid, she thought as she walked up the lane of Shubert Alley. All those years of struggle. All that hard work to make a name for herself. And that was what they reduce her to? A gotdamn maid? And not just any maid. Oh no! A maid with an attitude. Florence from The Jeffersons, he said, or Mammy from Gone With the Wind. Mammy! A character who didn’t even have a real name! Her heart wanted to pound out of her chest she was so angry. A part of her wanted to call Mick and tell him to get his ass to New York and put all of those bastards in their places. How dare they treat her that way!
But as she walked out of that theater into the stiff summer night air, and as Deuce McCurry opened the backdoor of the limo and she got inside, she knew she wasn’t about to go running to Mick. He bailed her career out once before, when she, as a black actress on Broadway, couldn’t pay anybody to give her a decent role. And she was still living that decision down, as if that one break Mick gave her by bankrolling a play she starred in, defined her career. It didn’t. He got her in the door, alright, a door that should not have been that hard for her to get through to begin with. But it was her tenacity, talent, and work ethic that kept her in that door.
But as Deuce drove her back to Philly with yet another failed audition under her belt, she realized a startling truth: if she didn’t get a part soon, it was going to be the third Broadway season in a row where she wasn’t able to secure an acting gig. The third season. And her talent agency wasn’t faring much better, as she was losing clients to more lucrative agencies on a daily basis.
And to make matters worse, Mick wasn’t around like he used to be. Used to be a time she could go to him, and talk out her fears to him. He never let her get too weak on him: he did not like weakness at all! But he would listen to her, and would hold her, and that would be enough. But lately he was up to his old tricks again. Always out of the country. Always had some fire somewhere he had to put out. Always leaving her in bed alone.
And she was about to turn forty.
For Roz, who’d never been that old before in her life, it was the wrong damn time all around.