Chapter Fourteen
Rose continued to become. With Landon’s love as an anchor, she tried on new versions of herself year after year, in plays both conventional and avant-garde.
It was an enormous comfort that each semester she would become someone new: Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, a young actress chasing meaning through art; Anna in Marber’s Closer, a woman caught between truth and desire; Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck in earth, forced to maintain a veneer of optimism despite entrapment.
And no matter the role—even when she was the Porter in Macbeth with only one short scene—Landon and his family were always there, in the second row.
It took her until junior year to admit to herself that there was no role she could cinch, no text she could send or voicemail she could leave to convince her mother to come.
The spring of her senior year, Rose took her final bow as Lear’s Cordelia, a role that felt as inevitable as it did extraordinary.
Each night, when the mad king held her in his arms and raged, Rose struggled to wear the indifferent mask of death.
Cordelia’s father remembered her. But it was too late.
Rose had been young, or naive, enough to think that there would be an end date to the pain of her father’s passing, that if she could not rely on it to subside in months, then surely years would do the trick.
But it seemed the door would always be cracked open.
And while it wasn’t why she’d been initially drawn to acting, she found it was easier to let some of the grief belong to the characters.
It wasn’t Rose emotionally breaking down; it was Nina, her chest swelling with tears barely concealed in the play’s final act.
It wasn’t Rose quietly holding in her heartbreak; it was Cordelia, her eyes cast toward the floor as Lear ragefully disowned her.
She was grateful to each character she inhabited for holding some of what she could not.
On her own, she imagined the grief would have swallowed her whole.
Landon was the first to mirror back to Rose that she used theater as a way to cope, that she had permission to fall apart only when the script allowed it.
After opening night of Lear, he’d pulled her close and whispered, “You know, nobody expects you to be okay all the time. You can talk to me. Let me hold some of it, too.” She’d shrugged him off and made him temporarily forget there was anything more to say with the intensity of her mouth on his.
But that night, under the covers, Rose confessed what it was she’d been doing onstage and all the ways she’d felt it saved her.
So it came as no surprise to Landon that come graduation, Rose set her sights on making the transformation permanent.
“New York,” she said to him as the sun rose above the Adirondacks on their very last morning in the bucolic bubble they’d been lucky enough to call home. “I want to try.”
“You should,” Landon breathed into her ear. “You can do anything.” His words held the weight of an incantation, as though by saying it he’d made it so.
That afternoon, through all the pomp and circumstance, Rose dreamed of the city.
It would be so different from their sleepy Vermont town—so vibrant, colorful, and full of life.
Any sadness she felt about the end of an era was mitigated by her excitement for the beginning of the next.
And Landon had made sure she wouldn’t need to say more goodbyes than she had to.
He’d been offered a job at a consulting firm in Manhattan months earlier.
Rose would have been lying to both him and herself if she didn’t concede that his plans had swayed hers, at least a little.
But she also thought that there might be a little fate involved.
Some people are just meant to be together, she thought. Maybe we’re some of those people.
“I’ll visit all the time,” Poppy said when she told her, her cap lost to the wind after she’d thrown it with a bit too much exuberance. “And I actually mean it, unlike most people. Friendship with me is a life sentence.”
By July, Rose had scored one of three bedrooms in a basement apartment in Brooklyn.
Her room was little more than a shoebox, and so expensive she knew the old adage sink or swim had come into vogue to describe exactly this situation.
The walls were bare, with not a single photo or reminder of her past life.
A bright blue mini fridge—the only thing that gave the room any character—served as a nightstand, her bed a queen mattress on the ground topped with two overly full pillows.
Even with Landon’s help, Rose had only halfway moved in, but truth be told she had no immediate plans to continue.
Because Rose had made a bargain with herself: She would make the space feel like home once she’d proven she belonged.
With her first paying gig, she would buy clothes to reflect her new persona: up-and-coming artist dealing with a dash of struggle, but clearly on the rise.
Then, a bureau to house them. And on, and on, slow enough she would be able to feel the rug being pulled out from under her before she toppled.
She had grown enough not to immediately assume the worst, but that small, scared girl for whom life had broken its promise still haunted her.
Her first Sunday morning in the city there was an open call for an off-off-Broadway all-female production of The Seagull.
It was perfect, Rose thought. She only needed to brush up on Nina’s lines, and she would have her monologue for the audition sorted.
She pulled on a high-necked black tank top and a black shift skirt, practicing lines in the mirror as she brushed her teeth.
“Why do you say that you have kissed the ground I walked on?” she recited.
“You should kill me rather. I am so tired. If I could only rest—rest.”
The young woman behind the white folding table didn’t even glance up. “Name?” she asked.
“Rose Martin.”
The woman made a small show of flipping through every page on her clipboard. “I’m not seeing it.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “I thought this was an open casting call?”
The woman sighed. “You still need an appointment.”
“I’m sorry.”
She grabbed a pen and scribbled something on the bottom of the last page on her clipboard.
“If they have time after the filled slots, they’ll see you.
” The woman took in Rose’s obvious dejection and softened a touch, lowering her voice.
“Nine times out of ten you would have been right,” she said, “about the open call. And you’re not the first who didn’t realize.
These guys are a little self-important—it’s the whole off-off-Broadway thing. ”
“Oh, okay,” Rose said. “Thanks.”
“Grab a seat wherever you can. There’s a great coffee shop a block away.” It’s New York, Rose thought. Of course there is.
“I’ll just wait.”
“Suit yourself.”
Rose took a seat on a white folding chair beneath a fluorescent light that made her feel uncomfortably on display.
To her left, a row of women who all bore some small resemblance to her crossed their legs, bounced their feet, and clutched index cards with bold numbers penned in thick black marker.
To her right, the off-white wall was scuffed with smudges where chairs had rested too often.
At the far end of the room, beyond the woman and her clipboard, a folding table was cluttered with half-filled water bottles.
The room smelled like lemon cleaning solution, though not enough to mask the smell of sweat.
“Hey,” a woman said next to her. Of all the women in the long line of chairs, she looked the most like Rose: long brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin, a body neither sculpted nor neglected.
“Hey,” Rose said back.
“Have you ever auditioned for Curtis and Abe before?”
She’d never auditioned for anyone who wasn’t a professor or a well-meaning but power-hungry directing student. “First time.”
“Shoot, I was hoping you had. I’ve heard they’re…” She seemed to reach for the word. “Eclectic?”
“What’s that code for?” Rose may never have professionally auditioned, but she wasn’t stupid.
“Grapevine says at least Abe is handsy.”
“Well, you’ll have to give me the scoop when you’re done. I’m so far back in line they didn’t bother giving me a number.”
“Cool, I’ll let you know,” the woman said, with an air of detachment that implied she probably wouldn’t. Then she turned back to the script in her hands, signaling the end of their brief, transactional interaction.
The minutes passed slowly, the women coming and going at irregular intervals with no pattern Rose could discern.
Why twenty minutes for one and three for another?
Why did that woman look elated and the next like a child who had dropped an ice cream cone in the sand?
In the windowless room, Rose couldn’t watch the sun set over her first day as an up-and-coming artist, but she felt it. Tick, tick, tick.
Finally, mercifully, the room was empty save for Rose and a few fellow stragglers. By that point, she felt such a kinship with them she was about ready to invite everyone back to her basement apartment for drinks. “Rose Martin!” a voice called. Rose shot up out of her chair.
“Here!” she called back. One of the remaining women snickered. Rose mentally struck her from the invite list.
A woman with a sharp pixie cut waved her in. “Honestly, good for you,” she said. “I don’t think I would have waited. This has been a fucking day.”
The audition room was nearly as sterile as the holding pen.
Two casting directors sat behind a folding table in the back of the room.
One flashed Rose an easy smile that did not quite reach his eyes while the other would not meet Rose’s gaze, tracking somewhere around her collarbone or lower.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said the one with the smile.