Five minutes later they’re done and setting up for my final shot. “Do you always talk when you’re shooting like that?” I ask Crispen.
“Yeah, it helps me get in the moment. Makes it real. As real as it gets with pancake makeup and a fake white daughter, anyway.”
“Are you done?”
“Yep. You have two scenes. I have one. Don’t look so happy. We both get paid the same.”
They’re ready to shoot the bar scene. An older male model with antennae is our waiter. He’s supposed to serve me and my young protege the software, a box on a plate. When we get our huge plate and open the box, we’re to act surprised.
“More surprise, please. Like the box just spoke to you. That’s what happens, right?” Brian Bean asks, turning to the clients.
“The box?” Darryle says. “Yes, in the software, it talks back.”
“Right. So more surprise. Big eyes. Open mouth. Try again in five.”
The waiter comes back and hands us the box. I suspect he stepped in front of me, but I continue, anyway.
“Hey, look at that. A box! That’s not what I ordered,” I say to my new son. He opens his eyes wide, mouth a big O. Nails it.
Brian Bean grins. “Brilliant. That’s the good stuff. A couple more like that and it’s a print. Keep going, guys. Three more.”
Three more, and Brian Bean shows the clients our twelve-second scene. Backward, forward, slow motion, reverse angle. Darryle smiles. Jeanie asks if it’s too late to make me Asian, digitally maybe.
“So now you’re talking to the camera, too,” Crispen says. Stealing my style, eh?”
We’re hanging up our silver jackets, folding our silver pants. “Borrowing it,” I say. “That’s okay, right?”
Crispen thinks for a moment. “Sure. Anything to help out a brother. Did you bring your voucher book?”
“Yeah. But you’ll have to show me how to fill it out. Our DBMI vouchers were tiny. This bastard’s as big as a poster.”
Crispen whips out a pen, starts filling in both of our vouchers. He presses hard—three copies. He writes our names, the client’s name, address, the number of hours, our hourly rates.
“Mine’s $150 an hour,” I tell him. He writes “150” on my form, fills in “220” on his. I almost break my eyebrows. Under “usage fee” he adds $4,000 to the total, the bonus of being used for a national campaign. It looks as if I’ll be able to afford meat for a change.
“Do you want me to take your voucher back with me?” he asks. “I’m going to Feyenoord this afternoon, anyway. Yellow copy’s for the agency.”
Brian Bean signs my voucher. I rip out the white copy, hand it to him. Rip out the yellow copy, hand it to Crispen. The pink copy, the only proof so far that I am, in fact, a real model, flutters alone in the field of blank forms. It can take up to six months to actually get paid. In six months I may no longer be a model. Or real.
The rest of the day, like most, is a blur of go-sees and auditions. Clients thumb through my portfolio, tell me how much potential I have, how much better I’d do in Munich or Miami or Cape Town. Most of them don’t even bother to ask me to walk. When I leave, I have to remind them to take a comp card to remember me by. My new comps—four of my best shots copied onto a small cardboard card—cost $300, most of it borrowed from Crispen. He knows as well as I do that it may take me six months to pay him back.
I’m supposed to see Clive Thompson at 1:30. His studio is somewhere in the grey wasteland of North York, and it takes me an hour to find it, even with a map. The elevator opens into a hall that thumps with dance music. I check my appointment book. Fourth floor, turn left. But I hear something else and turn right.
There are some sounds that will always turn people’s heads, no matter what they’re doing. The sound of falling change. The word nipple. The sound of a young girl crying. She’s in the corner at the other end of the hall, sitting on the floor, her hands clasped around her knees.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing.” Brown hair, decent body. I think she may have served me drinks somewhere before. She doesn’t look up.
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Tough go-see?”
She glances at me. Now that most of her makeup has leaked off, I’m surprised to see she’s only about sixteen.
“He told me I’m not really cut out for it.”
“Modelling?”
She nods.
“Clive Thompson? That’s terrible.” I know he’s right, though. The dance clubs of Toronto are filled with girls like her—young shooter girls who can only make it by on their tips. Because so many guys are always trying to sleep with them, they get the impression they’re hot. By the time they discover they’re not, they’re usually too old or too married to care. This one made the mistake of believing her patrons. The only work she’d be able to get would be in a makeup commercial. They’d hire someone that looks a little like her for the “After.”
“It’s probably just that you’re maybe a little too short.”
“You think?” She lifts her head off her knees.
“Yeah. You know how they like those big, long girls. Why don’t you try acting instead? They don’t care how tall you are.”
“I used to be in the drama club at Sir Leopold Carter, my old school. And my teacher always said I was pretty good. I had a guy come up to me once. From a talent agency, I think.”
My head nods while I escape through the back door of my mind. I wonder if I did the right thing by lying to her. Maybe I should have been honest and told her she’d be better off going back to school. Better to know and accept this now than to have one’s heart broken a thousand times before the age of nineteen. The ancient Greeks actually determined a mathematical equation for beauty. If I knew what it was, I could show this girl her face is a problem that can never be solved. I wonder if the formula still holds. Is math ever wrong?
She thanks me for listening, and I turn left down the corridor, toward Clive Thompson’s studio, knowing that if things go bad, there will be no one out here willing to lie for me.
I’m in the bathroom at a McDonald’s in the Annex, desperately trying to take off my makeup. But not even their industrial soap has any effect. If any man whistles at me, I’ll cut two holes in my jacket and wear it as a mask.
I’m supposed to see an apartment at 2:30 near Avenue Road, but I forget to allow for wind resistance on Bloor Street, and no one’s home by the time I get there. Yesterday I told the agency that I’d be moving out of Breffni, Augustus, and Crispen’s model apartment, and they said a new model from out west would take my room next week. If I don’t find a place soon, I’ll be sleeping next to that guy.
I leave McDonald’s and step around a bare-chested man playing a drum on a plastic barrel. Wearily I pull out my map and weigh my options. Every neighbourhood has a name: the Annex, Swansea, Rosedale, the Beaches, Cabbagetown. I’ve tried the first, following up on ads. The last sounds pleasant enough. Its name reminds me of Sunday-morning British cartoons. I can see Hedgehog and his friend, the talking tugboat, living there. I’ve noticed a lot of FOR RENT signs in other neighbourhoods, so I figure I might as well try my luck.
At Bay and Bloor secretaries and salesclerks are out on their