In the fiction realm, we authors sometimes have to throw out a few expository paragraphs because, as the novel or story has developed, the character has grown in a different way. This is hard to do. Herewith, one of my favorite bits of Woman With Eyes Closed, that didn’t make the cut.
“As she always did on Sunday nights, Perrin watered the pots after dinner if they needed it, while Jack finished up in the studio. She walked down to the water, wading up to her knees to cool herself. The surf had kicked up now, big swells rolling in. She thought of Gia, busy and happy with her lights and cameras, and wondered if she herself given up on a career too easily. For instance when she didn’t get into the Neighborhood Playhouse, though she had been a top theatre student in high school. She never knew why she didn’t get in, they gave no explanation. After that there was a TV ad (shampoo), and some print modeling for a catalogue. There were parts in an off Broadway play. Small. Two. There were more auditions. Theatre stages with blasting klieg lights, basements of department stores with grey peeling paint, Upper West side producer’s apartments with overstuffed eighties furniture and stained pink deep pile carpet, and sometimes wandering hands. At the auditions she saw the same women over and over again— women like her, but older. It was hard not to notice how worn down they were, like caged birds, their feathers falling out. They had once been pretty like she was, and had had a few early successes. In NYC that joy that she once had had, of letting a role onstage overtake her, met with obstacles she could not overcome.
After an audition she’d see someone five or ten years older than her, leaving the supermarket with a bag that sagged with a cans of soup. She began to wonder about faith, and why hers had begun to feel so flimsy, like nothing so much as the milkweed floss she used to find in the marsh as a kid. Faith was absolutely necessary to continuing. Having faith was part of the folklore of the city. You were supposed to endure, and the hardship would sharpen your talent. That is, if you had the fortitude. At the auditions, the women began to recognize her, and she them. The smile, the nod. The shabby coat, the frazzled dye job with graying roots. The paperback copy of Portrait of a Lady, or The Bell Jar held against the faded linen shift. Hello they said—with a tossed scrap of sympathy. Hello, we’ll be seeing you…we’ll see you... They assembled indistinctly, like water through cracks in a subway tunnel—the prettiest ones, the gifted ones—from obscure corners of California and Oregon and depressed little upstate towns… Hello…Hello, we’ll see you, they said, smiling at her.”