Pat smiled sympathetically. “I get tapes like this every week. Young women and young men come into my office and read for me, and they want you to like them so badly that you can feel them ache, but they aren’t any better than this and they never will be any better than this.”

“Then you suspect she has not pursued acting as a vocation?”

She made an I-hope-not shrug.

The shot changed abruptly into a tight close-up. Closer, Karen’s eyes showed an absence of line or character. She was talking about herself and trying to look serious. “… think my strengths lie in comedy, but I can also do drama. I think I’d make a really good ingenue.”

Peter’s voice cut in sharply. “You sound like an idiot in a malt shop, ‘really good ingenue.’ If you’re an ingenue, just say it. Say ‘I’m a perfect ingenue.” ’

Karen looked unhappy and said, “Oh, Peter, do I havta?” When she addressed Peter, she looked off camera. When she was acting, she looked directly out of the screen.

Peter’s voice said, “Why am I wasting my fucking time?”

Karen looked unhappy some more, then made a little smile and stared back into the lens and made herself serious and said it. Then she giggled.

It went on like that, cutting from bit to bit. Most of the bits were just fragments, five seconds of this, eight seconds of that, and many of them were repetitious. Peter would ask her a question or tell her to do something and she would answer or do it. There was something hopeful and naïve to her manner, maybe because she was nineteen. She tried hard even when she looked unhappy.

My stomach grumbled and I kept looking at the lox and bagels. I had to keep reminding myself that lunch at Lucy’s was only moments away.

At one point, Peter walked into the picture and handed her a couple of script pages. He was wearing an orange Marine Corps T-shirt with a couple of stains on the back. They wouldn’t take me because of this hip thing. He was young and skinny and built exactly as he was now, all wide butt and coat-hanger shoulders and intense eyes. His hair stuck out in a tremendous natural that, within the small confines of the TV monitor, seemed to be a full three feet across. Karen cleared her throat and read the speech from Rocky that Talia Shire says to Sylvester Stallone to give him the courage to go on. She didn’t read it well. She giggled when she finished and asked Peter if that was okay. He said no.

The tape lasted twenty-two minutes. Karen Shipley never once mentioned her family or her friends or her hometown. She giggled sixty-three times. I counted. Giggling is not one of my favorite things.