John Shirley - Wetbones by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

looking as if she wanted to bolt, then sagged with a kind of polite despair when Amy spotted her and made a bee-line for the table. "Glorie-uh!" Amy chirruped, going on with machine gun rapidity, "I knew you'd be in one of these grotty places, where everything costs at least two dollars too much. Gloria, I have great news."
    "This," Gloria said wearily to Prentice, "is my roommate Amy Eisenberg. Amy, this is Tom Prentice."
    "God it took you long enough to introduce me, ooh he's a big one isn't he, I didn't think you liked big ones, big men I mean, I mean big physique"
    Gloria stammered, "Amy - did you, uh, need something?"
    Amy kept her eyes on Prentice as she talked, looking him up and down. He smiled as neutrally as he could. Her wet umbrella was leaning against his chair, dripping on his pants leg. "Your address book, sweetie. I need Polly Gebhart's phone number, I lost it -"
    Gloria snatched up her purse, yanked it open, muttering, "Why don't you get an address book and organize yourself, Amy?"
    Amy took the address book. "I going to, I have to now, that's my news, - there's a producer who's hot for me, for me as an actor I mean -" She made a conscious policy of pretending to stumble over sexual innuendoes, Prentice later learned. "- and he's having me do a call-back, it's for an off-Broadway show, a really happening show that half of Hollywood is trying to get the rights to -" She turned abruptly to Prentice, as if thunderstruck. Looking at Prentice but speaking to Gloria. "Hey is this that screenwriter you told me about that you were -?"
    "I'm only barely a screenwriter," Prentice said modestly. A kind of pseudo modesty that was really a way of confirming his status. "Just one credit." He'd just had his first script produced, Fourth Base . First script? First one he sold. Fifth one he wrote.
    "Amy, if you've got what you need," Gloria said, brightly "we -"
    "Don't you listen to her," Amy said to Prentice, "it's her quaint way of asking me to join you. But only for a minute." She pulled a chair from the next table, and sat herself on it with the air of a guest on a talk show who's just been asked to sit and tell the host what her newest project is. "This is my first real break, this part in Sweet Fire, but I did that thing at Summer Stock with Julie Christie, you remember that, Gloria?" Gloria, who had sullenly lit a cigarette - she was one of those people who saved smoking for expressing anger - nodded briskly and blew smoke at the window. A waitress caught Gloria's eye and shook her head, and Gloria stabbed the cigarette out in her coffee cup. Amy hadn't
    waited for Gloria's answer. She went breathlessly on, "- And I think the Connecticut gig got me this job because Ervin - Ervin's my agent, Tom - Ervin got this producer a videotape of me working with Julie Christie, who played my mother . . . Maybe I'll just have a capuccino." She grabbed the waitress's apron as the woman sped by, smiled sweetly into the glare this got her, and said, "Could I have a capuccino with lots of chocolate sprinkles? I'd be infinitely grateful. Thanks."
    Gloria groaned and didn't bother to muffle it. Prentice shrugged and winked conspiratorially at her, as if to say, We'll wait her out and then we'll get back to our lunch.
    But Amy stayed for an hour, giving a sort of informal resume of her bit parts and commercial walkons and her part-time gig as a back-up singer in a rock band (surprising Prentice by mentioning that she played the accordion with them, too). She was too amusing to be tedious, but then Prentice's viewpoint on that might have been muddled by the sheer erotic magnetism Amy gave off. She could be quite funny, too, and despite everything, he was glad she'd showed up.
    Finally Gloria had to go to a meeting with the director of an art department. Prentice paid the check and they put on their coats; Prentice opening his mouth to offer Gloria a drop-off from his taxi, when Amy said, as if just thinking of it, "Tom, I have to walk