Selling Out by Dan Wakefield Page B

hotel. Whatever suits you best.”
    â€œOh, I think I’d prefer to be right here now,” Perry said.
    Prefer, hell; you couldn’t have kept him away from the place with armed guards.
    This was where it was happening, the center of the action.
    He selected an office on the second floor, right above Ned’s; it was only a dingy cubicle, really, with some Salvation Army—vintage furniture, and a small window looking out on another identical building, but it seemed to Perry quite splendid. It was near a watercooler in the hall, and he could quickly run down to Ned’s office and show him the latest pages that had just come out of his typewriter. Likewise, with an interoffice buzz on his phone, Ned could summon Perry down for important consultations, as he did later that very first afternoon.
    â€œIf you have a moment, Perry, there’s someone here I’m anxious for you to meet.”
    He was a round, cherubic-looking young fellow. Perry realized at once he must be Ned’s choice to play the part of Jack. He was even dressed for the part, sloppy collegiate, with baggy old jeans and a faded sweatshirt, tousled blond hair that he had to brush up from his eyes. He wasn’t precisely the person Perry had imagined for the role, but the important thing was he didn’t look like some slick Hollywood star. If anything, he looked a bit young for the part.
    â€œPerry Moss, I’d like you to meet Kenton Spires, our director.”
    The pleasant, pudgy fellow blushed and shook hands, and Perry tried to hide his shock and disappointment.
    How could he be a director? He was only a kid.
    â€œYour script is the first really brilliant piece I’ve been shown for television,” Spires said quietly.
    Well, at least he was a smart kid.
    Kenton had won an Obie and directed several prize-winning dramas for PBS, yet he’d been languishing out here for almost a year without getting a break because he didn’t have what Ned called “schlock time,” or commercial TV experience. But Ned made it a condition of his own involvement in “First Year” that Kenton direct the pilot, so Archer had gone out on a limb and raised hell to get the network’s reluctant approval for him. Perry was soon delighted.
    As the three new colleagues continued their discussion of the project over sandwiches and beer, the young director seemed not only as civilized as Ned, but also a fellow artist, a kindred spirit; hell, a buddy. It was as if time in L.A. moved faster in professional friendships, too, like an old-fashioned film run fast forward, so that what in the ordinary pace of life and relationships would require whole years was accelerated and experienced in a matter of hours.
    By the time Ned and Kenton dropped Perry off at the Marmont late that evening it seemed as if the three of them had been best friends in high school and had just got together again to produce this show.
    There was a couch in the room where Perry sat in on his first casting session, an old lump of Salvation Army furniture covered with faded brown slipcovers of some tired, nubby material. He figured this must be the infamous casting couch of Hollywood legend, but the actresses reading for the part of Laurie didn’t even sit on it. Ned and Kenton sat there, while the young women stationed themselves in chairs by the window.
    The faculty wives back at Haviland would have no doubt been relieved—or perhaps secretly disappointed—to find the symbolic casting couch was nonerotic and businesslike, as were the sessions themselves. After three or four readings, and the quick exchange of glances and comments afterward between Ned and Kenton, it was obvious that any other consideration than the actress’s talent and suitability as Laurie was not only irrelevant, but annoying. Had some aspiring bombshell swiveled in and performed the most erotic disrobing since Salome, the reaction would have been that it was not the