callbacks

*This one started with a question: what happens when you ask an actor to stop performing for five minutes? I wanted to write something that felt like opening a door you didn't know was unlocked. Thanks for reading it.*

Okay, so. I'm Geraldine Upton, I'm forty-four years old, and I have been acting since before some of you were born. Divorced two years ago from Scott, who I met doing a regional run of Blithe Spirit when I was thirty-five. We were good together on paper. That should have been a warning.

Anyway. This story is about Colt, and letters, and how I apparently cannot stop performing even when nobody is watching. Except he was watching. That is the entire idea, in a way.

The Reprise Room is this members-only karaoke bar in a converted warehouse over on Fulton. Faded velvet curtains between the booths, stage light that flickers like an old film reel no matter how many bulbs he goes through. Colt owns the place. He used to stage manage, back when, and it shows. The man treats a Tuesday night crowd like a Broadway house with a fire marshal in it.

I had done the last set of the night. Heart of Glass, if you must know, and yes, I nailed it, thank you for asking. I grabbed my coat off the hook by the door and walked home through the drizzle, and when I got in and went to hang it up, my hand found something stiff in the left pocket.

A manila envelope. In my pocket. Which I definitely did not put there.

Inside was a typed letter. Typewriter font, actual typewriter, the kind with the slightly uneven letters. It said:

*Geraldine. You were better at midnight than you were at rehearsal. Consider this an audition notice. I'm writing an immersive piece for the fall and there's a part I can't cast from the usual stack of headshots. Record yourself reading this letter aloud. Send it to the number on the back. By midnight tomorrow. No music, no character voice, no lighting. Just you. If you'd rather not, burn this and I'll never mention it. Colt.*

And the number on the back, because of course there was a number on the back.

I stood in my kitchen holding this thing like it was a live grenade. My first thought was, is this a bit? My second thought was, this is absolutely a bit, and my third thought, somewhere around midnight when I should have been asleep, was, well. I've done worse for less interesting men.

So the next day, Wednesday, I came home from a callback I didn't get (they said I was "too polished," which in actress language means too good, obviously), and I sat on my bed with my phone at seven pm and just... didn't start. For an hour. Stage fright, at forty-four, alone in my own apartment, reading a letter into a phone. The irony was not lost on me, and it also did not help.

At nine I finally hit record. And here's where it got away from me.

I started out doing exactly what he asked, his letter in my lap, my voice doing that thing it does, all rounded and pleasant and completely fake. "Colt. You were better at midnight than you were at rehearsal." I got through two lines like that. Then I stopped, because I could hear it. The gap between the words and me. And I said, out loud, to a phone:

"Oh, come on. He said no character voice, Jerry."

So I started over. And the weird thing is, once I dropped the performance, my own voice came out, this flat slightly tired middle of the night voice, and I kept reading but I also kept... wandering. I talked about how I get stage fright before every single curtain, even now, even for karaoke, even for a phone. How it's worse alone. How there's no audience to catch you when your hands shake in your own kitchen, so you just stand there shaking at the fridge like an idiot.

Then I described the feeling. Which I have never told anyone. That it isn't fear exactly. It's more like standing on the edge of a thing and wanting someone to tell me to jump, and being furious that no one ever does, because I'm too good at looking like I don't need telling.

I sent it at 11:52. Eight minutes to spare. Then I turned my phone face down on the nightstand and refused to look at it for twenty minutes, like a coward.

His second letter came Thursday, under my apartment door, which means the man now knows where I live, which, fine, he owns a bar, people find things out. Typed again, three sentences.

*Good. Tonight, read the transcript back to yourself in the dark. Say out loud what your hands do while you listen. Send that.*

I want you all to appreciate what a strange instruction that is. Read my own confession back to myself in the dark and narrate my hands. Who does that? Who thinks of that? A former stage manager, apparently, because it's a direction, isn't it. It's a goddamn stage direction. Lights down, Jerry. Just your hands and your voice.

So Friday night I turned off the lamp and sat on my bed and played my own voice back to myself, which is its own special horror, and I did what he told me. And I said it out loud, into the phone, in the dark.

I said: my hand is flat on my collarbone, just resting there, feeling my pulse do its stupid anxious thing under the skin. I said my thumb finds the hinge of my jaw, the spot that tightens when I'm about to cry or about to speak, which for me is the same moment. I said my palm slides down my sternum, over the dip below my ribs, that little valley where I always stop, and I stopped there too, fingers at the waistband of my sleep pants, and I said into the dark, "And now my hand is here, and I don't know if I'm allowed."

And then, God help me, I kept going a little. Not far. Just enough that my breath changed on the recording. Then I cut it off and sent it and lay there with my heart going, listening to the radiator click.

Sunday, another envelope under the door. This one was one line. One single typed line, centered on the page like a title card.

*Good. Now the part you didn't say out loud.*

I read it four times. I made coffee. I read it again. And I got a pen, because typing felt too easy, and I wrote in the margin of that letter the thing I would not say into a phone he could keep.

I'm not going to tell you what it says yet. A girl needs something of her own. But I will say it took me three attempts, two crossed out, and my handwriting came out shaky, and I'm forty-four years old and this is the most honest I have felt in a decade, arguing with a piece of paper in my pajamas on a Sunday morning.

I sealed it, addressed it to the Reprise Room, and walked it over in the rain like a woman delivering a confession she can't take back. Which, well.

The next envelope didn't come under the door. It came Monday, mailed, with an actual stamp, which felt almost formal after all the slipping-under-things. Inside was the fourth letter, typed, longer than the others.