Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,52
He couldn’t meet her eyes because he was with his father, and when he turned and left the set, she glanced timidly at his retreating back, his shoulders slumping as if in resignation or defeat. There seemed no way that anything could happen between them. But she didn’t think she wanted anything to happen, either. Most plainly, she wasn’t free, and he was also seeing someone else—a woman whom Elise could even imagine herself liking if they were to meet. Will had no business cheating, nor did she. And his father, as calculating as it might be to think such a thing, would undoubtedly be able to do more for her, was, in fact, already doing so much for her.
5.
Even in early adolescence she had not believed that she could settle for the kind of life that it seemed most adults she knew had settled for. While her friends were already discussing how many children they would have, what kind of houses and cars they wanted, and where they would work and live and take their vacations, she was thinking that she might do something else, that maybe she could be famous and not have to live in a brick ranch house with three small bedrooms and plumbing problems because tree roots had grown into the pipes. She did not want to marry her high-school sweetheart, who was likely to become fat and lazy by the time he reached thirty. She had read too many Cosmopolitan articles and Dear Abby columns about infidelity and marital discord before her seventeenth birthday that it was probable that marriage’s supposed enchantments had been spoiled for her for life.
As for her nebulous desire to be famous, her mother had enrolled her and her sister in tap dance and ballet classes starting when they were four, and although Elise had done well in both, she had not been the best student in the class. Her sister Belle had been a little better than Elise was, but what interested Belle most about the classes were the costumes—the special shoes and leotards and especially the tutus they got to wear for the ballet recitals. Belle was her mother’s daughter: infatuated with pink and ruffles, and learning to sew, and matching her hair ribbons to her shoes and girl-sized purses. Elise was her father’s daughter: athletic, impatient with clothes that needed to be ironed and hung in the closet, bookish and boyish-looking until she reached puberty and suddenly she had breasts, as well as shapely arms and legs that extended far beyond hemlines. By fifteen, she was two inches shy of six feet and growing into the face she would have when a film director visiting Austin for the South by Southwest Music Festival in the spring of Elise’s junior year at UT spotted her in a club and gave her his card and asked her to call him because she might be the girl he was looking for to play the daughter of a character Diane Keaton had all but committed to playing in this director’s next picture. Elise had the look—she was that memorable.
A week later, she did call him and he remembered her, but instead of flying her to Hollywood, he asked her to send headshots, ones she had a friend take because she couldn’t afford to hire a professional photographer, and when she sent them off to the director, he didn’t acknowledge their receipt for two months, and by that time, she was dating the French professor, but the director didn’t forget her, and it was he who called in early October and asked if she might be interested in auditioning for a comic role in a film about two brothers who were driving the corpse of their eccentric uncle cross-country in order to complete a secret burial ritual, one his will had specified. She thought it sounded like a very stupid movie but she agreed to audition, and then it turned out to be a Vince Vaughn picture and she knew that she would take the role if they thought she was good enough. She had been in the drama club in high school and had acted in three plays in college, but had only had small roles because the acting students always won the leads. It was clear to her that the director wanted her mostly because he liked the way she looked, but there were plenty of others who had started out this way too.