washed up

Jenifer Kelley Emmy Nominated, People's Choice Award Winner, Star of screen & stage! 1x1 RP

[ghostsandgoblins]

[outofwcrk]

swashbuckling1x1‌:

The vast and endless kitchen was all kinds of quiet in the aftermath of the Big Speech. It was kind of what happened when the heroine didn’t fall into the hero’s arms, or the camera didn’t cut away. Alan picked a butter knife out of the wooden rack, turning it over between his fingers, just to have an excuse to look away from the tiny, hopeful smile Jen was giving him. He could feel the point of the fish hook searching for purchase in his skin, a soft place to pierce.

She never did anything outright. It was always all apologies and helplessness, those thin white arms waving in the air like she needed someone to pull her out from the quicksand. He knew that if he got any closer, she’d wrap those arms around the back of his neck and draw him down with her.

Jen was addicted to drowning. She was just terrified of being alone.

“I was at a studio party. It’s the usual. You know how it goes.” The lid of the jam jar twisted off with a pop and skittered a few inches down the counter. He didn’t brush away her question, or say no, nothing important. He wanted her to know he’d been on the clock, working, and he’d come anyway. He wanted to drive it in that this wasn’t some quiet, sleepy hollow: the talent got up at four in the morning, the management never slept. The new Netflix show was nothing unless they had her next thing lined up. “Judd and Paul’re doing another movie soon, we could break you into comedy.” The bread knife flashed as it went into the jam. It left uneven smears on the sliced bread, a layer that Alan concentrated on smoothing out. “We’d have to balance it with Cold Blooded, of course, but the last thing we want is you to get pigeon-holed into drama…

“Oh shiiit. You were saying something about Laura. Not being able to relate.” He smacked a palm to his temple in a seamless doy gesture, as if it had skipped his mind what she’d been saying. “Sorry. Sorry, my bad.” It spun the conversation around from Jen being on the back foot. No more room for Jen to be the distraught, self-involved one. Because, really, if she turned those oh-mama-I-did-a-bad-thing Bambi eyes on him for a second longer, he was not going to be responsible for his actions. In the morning, some daytripper would find him collapsed on the highway: Hollywood agent to the stars tries to walk all the way home, dies tragically and greatly mourned.

“Where’s the script?” he asked. “C’mon. You’re right. Let’s do it. Let’s run lines.”

Watching Alan make that sandwich is making her sick to her empty stomach. It’s gnawing itself, angrily. Maybe that’s why she’s so anxious. That’s a thing, isn’t it? Hunger causing anxiety. There is the squelch of jelly and Jenny has to look away entirely. She’s also avoiding Alan’s eye because she’s afraid he’ll know what it is that she’s thinking.

Once, when the move from Carmel to Los Angeles was still fresh and stinging like salt in the wound of her daughter’s teenage angst, Honey had padded downstairs to find Alan. She’d met him a handful of times and when she was itty-bitty she’d called him Uncle Alan (but even then, somehow, it had seemed ironic coming from out of disdaining little child mouth). 

That morning she had watched the two of them talk, for an hour or however long it had taken Alan to convince her that she was All Right and that she hadn’t made a mistake signing onto that historical HBO mini-series that Tom Hooper had directed a couple of years back (it had not been a mistake, per se, but it had since been relegated to the void where forgotten mediocre television resides). After careful and silent observation, Honey had lifted her head and said: “You know that he’s, like, totally full of shit. Right Ma?” 

Honey’s quiet, discerning, and smarter than Jenny by half (she’d be the first to happily admit it) and so the observation had made her pause. The recollection makes her pause, too, in spite of the fact that it isn’t a revelation. Honey doesn’t understand (how could she) that Laura has been, essentially, paying people to like her since she was 25 years old. 

Alan isn’t a friend in the way that normal people have friends but she is the closest approximation thereof that Jennifer Kelley from 9 to 5er’s (enjoying a fun comeback thanks to all the 90′s nostalgia) can experience. Alan’s “Coul’da-Had-A-V8″ forehead bonk makes Jen wonder if her own theatrics are so transparent. “Is that the last thing we want? I mean I wouldn’t mind it.” The nail goes back into her mouth. 

Without even realizing she’s doing it Jennifer gets up and goes into the sitting room to get her script. She’ll do anything and everything that anyone tells her to do. It’s a part of the reason she’s a good (enough) actress. 

“Maude Apatow went to school with Honey, actually. I don’t know if you remember.” Why would he? Who knows. “Maybe if you can set up a lunch -- -- that would be a nice in. Maude slept over once.” She’s examining the script, examining with a brow furrowed as deeply as atrophied muscles will allow. 

“I don’t really know how much of it I have memorized. Have you read it all the way through? The whole pilot? There’s just so much here. It’s really -- rich material. It’s just hard to find -- you know, my way in it all.” She’s talking like she’s on Inside The Actor’s studio, playing to the unseen camera off right. “Do you know who else is reading for Laura? And -- what do you think they’re doing with that Sarah Jane Lin-whatever character? Like, is it gay? Or do they want me to play it that way? Like subtextually?”

[outofwcrk]

swashbuckling1x1‌:

If he had to hear that apology one more time, Alan was going to stab himself in the leg with a fork. Maybe then for five blissful seconds, it wouldn’t be all about Jen. The cult of Jen. The last recorded sacrifice of Jen—until the next one came along, of course. He stuck his head into the fridge, wincing at the lack of options. If her wattle collapsed on her and she went out on the red carpet looking like Naomi, their publicity earnings would shrivel up like post-menopausal libido.

Behind him, she was still going into hand-wringing anxieties about the new pilot. Alan was having too hard a time finding a second slice of bread to go with the first—

Should I read for Theresa instead?

—He turned around so fast that he crashed back into the fridge door. “Jesus, no!” he nearly yelled, taken aback too much to regulate his indoor voice. After all the gymnastics he’d done to ensure Jen would get Laura… The ghost nearly left his body.

“Absolutely not,” he repeated, calmer and firmer this time. “Theresa dies in the first act. Theresa doesn’t get to come back in Season 2. Theresa has one plot line, tops, and a girlfriend.” He plucked a sorry looking pot of jam from the fridge and rounded on Jen. “Laura, on the other hand, is cutthroat. She’s pathological; she’s unlikeable. Laura’s a villain. And villains—“ He punctuated it by twisting the cap off the jar—“are memorable. Gillian gets one shot at Best Supporting Actress. But you, sweetheart, you’ll have chance after chance. You’re gonna make Laura into the Cersei Lannister of this goddamn generation.”

Don’t give up on me now, he was thinking through every second of the guns-blazing speech. Not after nearly twenty years. Not when it was past one in the morning and he was so far from home. Jennifer Kelley was baggage like the beat-up suitcase he’d put in the back of his second-hand trunk and driven out from Wisconsin. He still hadn’t thrown that thing out. He kept his passport in an inside pocket to make sure he never would.

It’s not that Jennifer likes to be “handled.” It’s just that she doesn’t know how else to get the attention she so desperately and constantly needs. Really, she’d like to be self sufficient. There has, as long as she can remember, been an alternate version of herself whose life plays parallel to reality in her head. 

The Other Jen is grounded and successful and she doesn’t need to call her agent in the middle of the night, and she’s sure as hell not a 50 year old woman who still bites her nails like a teen. 

Even in spite of such a rousing speech -- a speech worthy of a smile, at least, if not a hearty cheer -- Jennifer’s brows do their best Botoxed impression of anxiety.  “I don’t know...” Under the low light in the kitchen Alan looks old and she wonders, fleetingly, not even long enough to really register it as a thing she’s thinking, how much of it is her fault. Is she the reason he got kind of fat? 

“No, I mean -- I do know,” she takes her thumb out of her mouth and nods. “You’re right. I know you’re right. You always are.” And she says that purely to fluff his ego but Jennifer isn’t even self aware enough to register her manipulations as such. She thinks she’s being nice. 

“I just feel so lost. They sent me this scene with her kid and it’s like -- she’s just so awful to him. Like I feel like it would have been better if she’d have just eaten him on his way out of the womb like Tasmanian Devils do, y’know? I just -- I can’t relate.” She puts a hand up, as if protesting her own flood of trite cliches. “I can figure it out. I think running it against someone will help.” 

When she looks at him it is with an overeager nervousness. “Thank you for coming,” Love me, love me, love me. Something in her chants it all day long. Alan doesn’t even think she’s a good person. She does charity work and she’s a good mom but all Alan has ever seen is -- the bad parts of her. “What were you doing when I called? I hope I didn’t -- tear you away from anything important.” She offers him a sweet smile that worked better to charm when she was 30 years younger but it’s still got a little glow to it. Even tipsy, even in the middle of the night. 

[outofwcrk]

swashbuckling1x1‌:

So his wallet was lighter and he’d passed up a convoy of Jeeps headed for the desert of plenty, but at least there were no spiders. Everything’s coming up roses, Alan thought to himself.

“I’m up now!” he called uselessly after Jen as she stormed off into the interior of the house. The odds were high that she was going to fetch her script, not pick up the phone for the Uber she’d promised. “I’m here now,” he said, a little softer, closing the door behind him.

It clicked about as noiselessly as the spiderweb made when the fly walked into the parlour.

The house felt as cavernous and miserable as the inside of Jen’s heart, but Alan dutifully flipped on the light switches and nudged tossed-around cushions out of the way. Jen’s martyred huff hadn’t taken her too far, so he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her along in the direction of the kitchen.

“Fetch your script in a minute,” he told her, stepping smoothly into the role of friend, philosopher, agent and guide. “I’ll fix us a midnight snack, and then we can run lines on the patio.” He drew back just to beam at her, not letting his grip on her slacken for a second. “C’mon. You’re the golden girl. We’ll knock this out of the park.”

Bad jokes and disinterested affect aside, the most infuriating thing about Alan was that he did not love her as Jennifer so desperately wanted him to. He should to love her after all these years, shouldn’t he? They’ve spent so many nights like this together and he always comes. He’s one of the few people she can always count on to come but she knows, deep down, that he does not come because he loves her and she does not know how to make him do that. 

She doesn’t want him to love him in the romantic way. Of course not. There’s been a long string of women -- friends who were just a little too close, who Jen loved a little too much -- with whom Jen has been in often unrequited love with but she’s never loved a man. 

Alan may not love her but she’ll settle for a soft touch. Predictably, she melts into him. She’s always yielded easily to his guidance. He must know how badly she craves it, otherwise he wouldn’t give it. “I’m sorry,” He probably saw the apology coming too. She is always so, so sorry! Really, and truly. It’s never an act. 

“I didn’t mean to --” She sighs. Their faces are very close until she untangles herself from his embrace. Albeit, reluctantly. “I’m not the golden girl, anymore, Alan.” She settles on one of her barstools. She won’t stop him from making a snack because she doesn’t want to say out loud that she can’t eat it. There’s something too humiliating in admitting it. “I know that. This is a long shot.” She self soothes like a child, touching her face and mouth, making herself small. 

“Everything’s got to be perfect. You know, they have Gillian Anderson coming in to read for Laura, too? She just did that show on West End. And that Netflix thing. And she’s so like -- I mean, in person she looks sort of shellacked, now if you ask me. I think she went a little bit overboard,” She raises her hands as is the habit when she’s saying something particularly awful about another woman. Surrendering to an unseen feminist firing squad lined up along the fourth wall. “But, on camera she looks great. She’s got that delicate thing. I just don’t know. Maybe I’m miscast. Do you think I ought to ask to read for Theresa instead?” 

[outofwcrk]

swashbuckling1x1‌:

“Mmpf—“ Smothered in Jennifer Kelley’s arms, Alan patted her on the back in a there, there sort of way. Half his mind was on the studio party he’d abandoned, the other half was dreaming of the bed he longed to faceplant into. Her apologies washed over him like a soft murmuring tide, and he rode it out until she invited him inside.

That was the point when he abruptly disengaged, cocked his head and just stared quizzically at her. It was the middle of the night for fuck’s sake. His Jen-antennae began to quiver with suspicion. Propping one palm against the door frame (as if that would hold out if she decided to press-gang him indoors), he asked:

“Why?” It came out a tad more warily than he liked. “If it’s the spiders again, you’re supposed to call the reservations desk at the Four Seasons.” Sage advice that he remembered dispensing when he rushed out of the neighbour kid’s bat mitzvah. “And you know I don’t do indoor plumbing.”

Half-hearted as the touch is, it’s warm and it’s comforting and it’s the only human contact Jenny’s had all day outside of holding up the line talking to the cashier at Gelson’s while she was buying Smooth Move (she has an audition coming up, after all). The girl had a fat, sort of flabby face but she was warm and smiley and when she handed Jen her change their hands had touched and it had reached Jen even through a manic and hungry haze. 

As always, with Alan, Jennifer is comforted until the moment he opens his mouth. She’s sensitive, easily riled, very defensive. She had an Acting Coach back in the 90′s named Dwayne who had warned her that she runs a little hot. And that sometimes what she thinks is happening isn’t really happening and so she doesn’t react in proportion to the truth of the scenario. He also suggested that she might try listening to the other person when they talked. This was good advice that she has never chosen to apply to either her acting or her life. Her refusal to do so is probably the reason she has never actually managed to maintain a relationship or win an Emmy. 

“It’s not spiders, Alan.” Sharply. She pulls away from him and aims that bony, neuroses at him like a gun; hand on the hip, eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who got me the audition.” There’s a strange assumption made, always with Jen, that the other person ought to be able discern out of the sky the source of her upset. She turns her back on him and walks into the house, it is presumed that he will follow if led (he usually does, anyway). 

She’s never grown up. Forever a teenager, gawky and insecure and woefully melodramatic. “Just forget it. I’ll get you an Uber home. I shouldn’t have called. I just thought that, you know, you might be willing run lines with me. If you were up. I shouldn’t have called.” The only thing more glaringly obvious than Jennifer’s unchecked Martyr Complex, is the fact that she’s at least a little drunk. 

[outofwcrk]

swashbuckling1x1‌:

Alan Holt rested his forehead against the headrest of the car seat, closing his eyes for a moment of brief respite. “Trade you,” he mumbled to the man sitting in front. “I’ll give you fifty bucks right now to switch places with me.”

The Uber driver raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. “Is that included in the fare you owe me, or is that an extra for my trouble?”

“Fuck you, man. Where’s your sense of empathy.”

The driver’s gaze slanted sideways to the house sprawled out on Beachwood Canyon. Prime real estate that this punter was visiting after midnight. Alan shoved a handful of bills at him and stumbled out of the car. He had to resist the urge to kick one of Jennifer’s potted plants as he went past.

He was distinctly aware of the Uber lingering in the street, watchful, as Alan slumped against the front door and leaned on the bell. To think he could have still been at Ibiza. Hell, he had one foot in a car going to Vegas. He could be throwing away his memories of his lost youth and stirring debauchery with a—

The door flew open, revealing America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Kelley’s silhouette.

“Hey kid,” said Alan wearily. “You rang?”

It’s not so much that she wants to see Alan as it is that she needs to see someone. Sometimes the need is so urgent, so pressing, it makes it hard to think about anything but. The house is so empty now without Honey in it; crushingly so.

Were Honey here, she’d not have needed to call Alan and she certainly wouldn’t have spent as long as she did out on the deck, standing in the middle of the deck with her script pacing maniacally and muttering to herself under the dim, dim, light of 8 to 12 stars and the bright, bright glow of all that light pollution.  

“Fix Mama another drink, will you? Fix Mama another drink, will you? Fix Mama another drink, will you?”

Alan Holt has been her “someone” for – well, longer than she’d ever admit to out loud because she only started lying about her age 5 years after she met him. So, he knows, exactly how old she is and exactly how long it’s been. That frightens and comforts her in equal parts. Sometimes, she worries he is the only friend she has.

America’s Sweetheart? In order to be considered America’s Sweetheart America would have to consider you sweet and hold you close to their heart. Maybe, however long ago, she’d been that. She’d even managed to worm her way back into the viewer’s hearts after they’d turned on her, viciously, as a result of the overexposure pushed by the studios. Maybe she could be again. That’s what she was trying to win back. That’s why Alan was here; because if she could reclaim her title, he could buy another boat.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.” She hugs him with a frantic sort of desperation. As if she hasn’t seen anyone in months. As if she’d been worried he was dead. As if he were a long lost brother. Maybe, one of the reasons people tolerate her is because she has an uncanny knack for making others feel so wonderfully important. Like the only person in the world she’d ever want to see. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I bothered you so late. Come in.” She ushers him in, hand on his shoulder. “You’re tired. You hate me. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

[stuckinreversemode]

#me during awards season