9. Castles and Kingdoms
CASTLES AND KINGDOMS
ESTRELLA
Iwas still thinking about the kiss when I walked into the wrong audition room.
Not badly wrong — the right floor, the right corridor, just one door too early — but wrong enough that I had to be redirected by a production assistant who was very kind about it and very young, the way everyone in this city seemed to be young, as if Los Angeles ran on a different calendar than the rest of the world.
“Flores?” she said, checking her clipboard.
“Yes. Estrella Flores.”
“Room Four. Down the hall, last door on the left.” She smiled. “Good luck.”
I thanked her and walked the rest of the corridor telling myself to focus.
This was not a significant audition by any measure I had previously used to measure auditions.
A supporting role in a television series — not a major network, not a film, not anything that would have crossed my desk two years ago in Mexico City.
But that was two years ago, and I was here now, and the only direction available was forward.
The self-talk was something I had developed recently. Before Leo, I had managed on pride alone. Pride was efficient but brittle. The self-talk was slower but it held better under pressure.
I was thinking about this — about Leo, again, inevitably, as I had been thinking about Leo at irregular intervals since Sunday when he had kissed my hand in front of the library and then, much more importantly, since I had kissed him properly on my own doorstep and watched his face do something extraordinary — when I pushed open the door to Room Four.
Three people sat behind a folding table: a director whose name I had researched and then temporarily lost to the general fog of the morning, a casting woman named Deborah with whom I had spoken briefly on the telephone, and a man whose lanyard identified him as a producer, and who was currently eating a granola bar with focused efficiency.
“Ms. Flores,” Deborah said warmly. “Thank you for coming in. We’re excited to meet you.”
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said, and the words came out in my own voice, unguarded, the accent sitting exactly where it always sat when I was not concentrating on moving it.
I had been concentrating very hard on moving it for weeks. Mrs. Feldman’s exercises, Miguel’s suggestions, my own increasingly exhausting self-corrections. Th not d. Flatten the r. Soften the music of it. Make yourself easier.
Today I was thinking about a kiss on a doorstep, and I forgot to concentrate.
“We’ve pulled up your reel,” the director said. He had the particular energy of someone who had been in rooms like this one for many years and retained, despite everything, a genuine curiosity. “The scene from Corazón de Ceniza — the confrontation with the husband. That’s extraordinary work.”
“Thank you,” I said. Still my own voice. I was so distracted by the kiss that I had not yet noticed I was not performing any of the corrections.
“We’d like to read the scene on page twelve,” Deborah said, sliding a page across the table.
“It’s a confrontation scene as well — our protagonist, Rosario, has just discovered that her sister has been lying to her.
She’s furious, but she’s also frightened, because the sister is the only family she has left. ”
I looked at the page. Read it once. Felt the shape of it.
This I knew how to do. This I had always known how to do. The fury that sits on top of the fear, the love underneath both of them. Two marriages had given me, among other things, an advanced degree in this particular emotional architecture.
I set the page down and began.
I was three lines in when I felt the room change. The quality of silence shifted — from the professional assessment of people doing their jobs to something more alert, more present. The producer set down his granola bar.
I didn’t stop. Rosario was not thinking about accent corrections, and so for the length of the scene, neither was I.
Rosario was thinking about her sister, about the lie, about how the people we love most are also the ones best positioned to destroy us — and about how we choose them anyway, because the alternative is worse.
When I finished, there was a pause.
Then the director said, “Can you do it again? Exactly the same.”
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.”
A pause, and then: “Estrella.” Just my name, in his voice, said in a way that meant everything about it. “Tell me.”
So I told him — the wrong room, the forgotten corrections, Rosario and her sister, the director asking me please not to change a single thing about the way I spoke.
I heard myself laughing as I told it, which surprised me, because when it was happening it had felt enormous and serious and almost unbearably significant.
In the retelling it was also funny. The thing she had been filing down for months had been the thing all along.
“Of course it was,” Leo said. “I told you. Hollywood is wrong about many things.”
“You did tell me that.”
“In the library. On the first day.”
“I remember.” I did remember. I had been sitting at a table with an English conversation club pamphlet and two children who were about to embarrass me, and a stranger had said Hollywood is not known for its appreciation of authenticity, and I had thought, somewhat grudgingly, that he was probably right.
“You were very confident for someone I had only known for four minutes.”
“I’m a footballer,” he said. “We’re trained to assess situations quickly and commit.”
“And what was your assessment, after four minutes?”
A beat. “That you were the most interesting person in the room,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”
I pressed my free hand briefly against my sternum, where the ache of it lived. Outside, the palm tree continued to do nothing, unhurried and complete.
“The children want to know if you’re coming to dinner on Thursday,” I said, which was true, and also a retreat to safer ground, and he probably knew it.
“Are the children the ones asking?” he said, which confirmed that he knew it.
“The children,” I said firmly, “are asking.”
“Then tell them yes,” he said. “Absolutely yes.”
I called my mother that evening, after the children were in bed and the apartment was quiet and I was sitting at the kitchen table with the offer document in front of me and a glass of wine that I had been intending to drink for forty minutes.
“They want me,” I told her, “to sound like myself.”
Mamá was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said, in the tone she used when something had confirmed a long-held position, “I could have told them that twenty years ago.”
“You did tell me that twenty years ago.”
“I told you every year,” she said. “I told you before Pasión y Venganza, and after, and between the two husbands, and when you packed up my grandchildren and moved to another country. I have been very consistent on this subject.”
“You have,” I agreed.
“Your voice is your voice, Estrella. It came from your grandmother, and her grandmother before her. It is not a flaw to be corrected. It is — what did this director call it?”
“A revelation.”
She made a sound of profound maternal satisfaction. “A revelation,” she repeated. “Exactly. I will tell your father.”
After we hung up, I sat for a while in the quiet kitchen.
On the refrigerator, held by a magnet Pedro had chosen — a small football, of course — was a drawing Luz had made last week.
Four figures: me, the children, and one tall one in glasses.
Luz had labelled them all carefully. Under the tall one, she had written nuestro Leo, in the careful capital letters of someone who has recently been taught to write and is taking the responsibility seriously.
Our Leo.
I looked at the drawing for a while. Then I looked at the offer document. Then back at the drawing.
I had come to Los Angeles to rebuild something.
I had thought the thing I was rebuilding was a career — which it was, which it still was, which the offer document confirmed in pleasingly specific financial terms. But sitting in this kitchen, in this small apartment that had started to feel like mine in a way that the houses of my two marriages never quite had, I thought that maybe the thing I was building was larger than that.
A life. An actual one. Not arranged around what looked right or what sold or what kept the photographers satisfied.
Something true and somewhat inconvenient and full of children who required specific cars and stuffed lions with professional appointments, and a man who arrived at beaches with contingency towels and kissed my hand at library courtyard dances and somehow, somehow made me feel like the most interesting person in the room.
It was terrifying. I had learned, the hard way, that the things most worth having were the things that could actually be lost.
I picked up the wine. Took the first sip. Opened the offer document to page three, where the details were, and began to read.
Outside, Los Angeles was doing what it always did — bright and enormous and indifferent, full of people building their castles in the sand, hoping the tide would hold.
For the first time in a long time, I thought mine might.