Leading Man

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Book: Read Leading Man for Free Online
Authors: Benjamin Svetkey
Cedar Lane. Her home couldn’t have been more different from mine. While my house had become as gloomy as a James Agee novel, Sammy’s was as wacky as a Kaufman and Hart screwball comedy. During dinner, Samantha and her two sisters juggled three conversations at once, like verbal plate spinners, diving in and out of the kitchen to help Sam’s mom with a stovetop emergency, while Sammy’s dad tossed scraps from his plate to the dog. The chaos didn’t stop there. Samantha’s room upstairs looked like it’d been hit by a tornado, followed by an A-bomb. Half-read paperbacks were splayed around the floor, homework poked out from under the covers of her old-fashioned sleigh bed, girly undergarments were stuffed under the cushion of a chair. On abookshelf, half hidden by an empty box of Mallomars, was that ceramic turtle she had made in fourth grade.
    One day when we were about fifteen, we were lounging on the lumpy mattress in her room reading magazines and listening to the radio when Samantha made an announcement. “I’ve decided that I’m going to become an actress,” she said. This made sense. Samantha was an actress even before she knew she wanted to be an actress. But then she went on. “And I’ve decided that you should become a writer.” I was accustomed to Sam’s pronouncements. Just a year earlier, she had declared that it was time I got promoted from her best friend to her boyfriend. She grabbed my head as if picking up a melon and gave me my first kiss. I knew once Samantha made up her mind about something, it was pointless to argue. But I was curious.
    “Why do you think I should be a writer?” I asked her.
    “Because writers are interesting,” she answered. “And writers and actresses make super-interesting couples. Like Marilyn Monroe and Henry Miller.”
    “Arthur Miller,” I corrected her. “Henry Miller’s the one who had the affair with Anaïs Nin—remember that book of hers I showed you?”
    “Or Lillian Hellman and Raymond Chandler …”
    “It was Dashiell Hammett. And Lillian Hellman was a writer, too, not an actress.”
    “Whoever. The point is, I’m going to be a famous actress, so you have to become a famous writer. That way we can be famous together for the rest of our lives.” She peered up from a magazine and gave me a smile. “You better start writing, buster.”
    Samantha wasn’t kidding. She threw herself into drama classes and auditioned for every high school musical. She began reading Uta Hagen and would torture me with Meisner Technique acting exercises (she once spent an entire day repeating the phrase, “How could you?” inflected in every variation imaginable). As for my part of the deal, I enjoyed the idea of being a writer a whole lot more than the actual paperwork. I liked to imagine myself as a Fleming-esque figure, tapping out twisty spy novels on a manual typewriter as I swigged martinis and chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. But whenever I actually sat down to try to write something for real, I’d end up drawing doodles of Marvin the Martian. I knew early on that my true calling wasn’t as an author. It was as Samantha’s audience.
    When the time came, we went away to different colleges, although we made sure we didn’t stray too far apart. I ended up in New Hampshire, Samantha in Vermont. It was only a couple of hours between campuses. Still, we made the most of the drama of our separation. From the long, mopey letters we mailed each other, you’d think we’d been imprisoned on opposite ends of the universe. After graduation, it was Samantha’s idea that we move together to New York. She had prodded me to major in journalism in college—one way or another, she was going to make a writer out of me—and she pushed me to apply for that job at
KNOW
. Sammy picked our studio in the West Village, chose the fold-out sofa bed we bought from a furniture shop on Eighth Street, and decided what take-out dishes to order from the Chinese restaurant around

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