Ellen Hart Presents Malice Domestic 15: Mystery Most Theatrical. Karen Cantwell
goal as an actress? Where do you see yourself?”
I’m growing more comfortable with Cyril. Maybe I don’t want to stab his heart to shreds. His demeanor is still condescending, but he’s asking me meaningful questions. “Movies or television, but I want to do comedy. Humor is my passion.”
“You don’t give off a funny vibe,” he says.
“My clown suit is at the cleaners.”
He doesn’t laugh. I don’t think he understands humor. Clearly, I’m funny as hell.
He spins his chair around to stare out the window behind him. The arrogance galls me. Forget the knife. I imagine myself vaulting over the desk and shoving him through the window in one swift move. I look down to see his rude-man body sprawled on the sidewalk, broken to pieces from the twelve-story fall. Comediennes from around the world, wrongly accused of funny vibe deficiency, applaud my bravura.
As I stare at the back of his chair, I wonder if I should talk to sell myself better, or keep quiet. I decide selling myself is the better option. That’s what this crazy town is about after all—artistic prostitution. I’m about to mention my improv troupe and invite him to our next performance. We’ve been well-reviewed, I’ll tell him. Only he spins back around before the words are out.
“Listen…” he begins.
Crap on a cracker. Here it comes.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you.”
The pocket of hope is gone. A lump forms in my throat—that happens when I fight back tears.
He keeps it coming. “You’re not attractive enough for film or television. That’s just how it is. Maybe, and I’m just saying maybe, the best you’re ever going to get are commercials playing some kid’s mom.”
Whoa. He really didn’t sugar-coat it. At least the other agents were a little gentler. One told me, “You just don’t have the look.” Another said, “Honey, you look like every other young woman who walks in my door and I need a look that stands out. Nothing personal.” Not Cyril. He hits me hard. Translation: You’re ugly, but not so ugly that you can’t play haggard old women beaten down by ground-in stains on their son’s white baseball uniforms.
I want to respond. Surely, I should argue the point, but I can’t. The lump is a rock now. A boulder preventing me from defending myself. The words are stuck in my head: I’m only twenty-one and my mother tells me how beautiful I am every day, and oh by the way, stop trying to look like James Spader, you tiny, pesky mosquito man!
I came into this meeting feeling very Norma Desmond, and yes, I know Norma kills her man with a gun, but frankly, guns scare me, so hence, the knife. But, as I ponder that knife and my future and the story that will be told about me, another hero comes to mind. Dirty Harry. Norma is desperate. I don’t want to be desperate. Harry is smooth.
I want to be smooth.
Cyril stirs uncomfortably in his chair since I haven’t said a word. “So, I’m sorry, but—”
“Go ahead,” I say, cutting him off.
“What?”
“Go ahead. Do it.” I unzip my purse and wrap my fingers around the knife.
FADE OUT
FADE IN FLASHFORWARD, EXTERIOR, PRISON YARD - DAY
I wipe sweat from my brow. This heat is killing me. I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand. Gravel dust makes me cough. Someone, somewhere shouts again, “I said, where’s Mary-Alice?”
Of course, it’s not just someone, it’s Cyril. He likes to visit the shoots on occasion, and when he does, I always set up a good practical joke to get him good. Today I had a stagehand put a rubber finger in his coffee. Poor Cyril. He has no sense of humor even after all of these years.
Bette, the assistant director, tells me to get back to makeup and get my face fixed. We’ll do a few more takes on the prison yard set and call it a day. Of the fifty-two commercials that I’ve made as Gotcha Gabby, for Grime Away laundry detergent, the conditions on this fake prison set have been the worst. I won’t complain though. As a recent article in the Los Angeles Times reported, I’m worth a cool five million dollars while I continue to “keep people laughing all the way to store shelves.”
I get to makeup and a young intern there is excited to clean my chair before I sit. Her hunger for this town is fresh, I can tell. We chat. She’s surprised I’ve been acting in commercials since 1987 and honestly stunned when I say I’ll be fifty-five in two days.
“How did you make your way into this business?” she asks me.
“I brought a knife to an interview with my now agent, Cyril Broadstone.”
“A knife?” Her eyes are wide. “You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding.”
DISSOLVE TO FLASHBACK CONTINUED, INTERIOR, CYRIL’S OFFICE
“Go ahead. Do it.” I unzip my purse and wrap my fingers around the knife. “Sign me. I dare you. I’ll do commercials. I’ll be the best, smartest, hardest working, most lucrative commercial actress you need me to be.”
“You dare me?”
I sense his interest under a veil of disquiet. I press on. “I dare you.”
He narrows his gaze, picks up the pen again, clicks it open, clicks it shut. Our eyes are locked. My hand clutches the knife still.
“I sell knives,” I say finally. I’m lying. I don’t sell knives. But I’m gonna sell this one.
He’s hooked. “You mean like door to door?”
“Yeah. A struggling actress has to make money somehow, right? I keep one in my purse—for when I ride the bus at night. Protection.” I place the serrated steak knife on the coffin-desk. “If I sell you this knife right now, you represent me.”
SLOW FADE OUT
FADE IN, GOTCHA GABBY COMMERCIALS MONTAGE, MARY-ALICE VOICEOVER
Gotcha Gabby was born on the spot that night to help me sell Cyril Broadstone a Gitchi-Gazu kitchen knife. Soon, we all went on to sell millions of boxes and bottles of Grime Away laundry detergent. People recognize me on the street, take smiley selfies with me. They laugh at my thirty-second antics. I’m that crazy old friend that’s been welcome in their home for years. I’m funny. I’m happy. I’m safe.
Yet the fact is, I walked into that first meeting with Cyril ready and willing to kill him.
Mark Twain once said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he doesn’t show to anybody.”
What I say is, that everyone has a face, and everyone has a line.
Mark and I, we’re speaking the same truth.
Listen… I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you.
FADE TO BLACK
THE GHOST OF HAMNET, by R. M. Chastleton
Asked to write about a deadly fall at the theater, Ham Laurence finds himself revisiting a place he had shunned and questioning the cause of another death.
“They want me to write about a mystery involving the theater?” Ham Laurence leaned back into the red leather corner banquette seat that reminded him of his worn-out Doc Martens. “Hasn’t that trope been done to death, so to speak?”
Ham took a long sip from his gin and tonic, the first in his evening routine in the dark NoHo bar: consume at least one too many while sneering at obviously underaged NYU students trying to hoodwink the bartender (rarely successful) and tourists trying to order food as though this was a British pub (never successful), as he made a valiant attempt at a freelance writing career (sometimes successful). Annabella Finnegan, his part-time girlfriend