Joe read. Wylie picked him up on the first sentence; the sweating agony started. The supper hour passed and restaurant tables emptied, but at the last table a man whose hair had become wild goaded and harried a boy who tried to do miracles with his voice. The sugar bowl was upset and blocks of sugar, unnoticed, lay strewn across the cloth. Joe, draining a water-glass in a momentary respite, thought of something he had read in high school: “Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.” Sometimes the producer, frenzied, swooped on the accent of a word, sometimes the cadence of a phrase. A shade of difference, a mere shade. Often that was all Vic Wylie asked.
A porter came to the back of the restaurant with mops and pails. The producer, hearing the clatter of chairs being lifted from the floor and stacked on tables, shook his head as though to clear it of a mist, stared at the spilled sugar, and was all at once quiet, inert.
“What time is it, kid?”
“Eleven-thirty.”
“A long day.” Vic Wylie put the script back in the leather case.
Royal Street had the exhausted midnight desertion of an avenue given over during the day to brisk business and the shuffle of crowds. A parked taxi waited hopefully at a corner. Fog was coming in on a damp east wind.
“You’re a worker, kid,” Wylie said. “You’ve got to work in this game. When you put on a show, the listeners hear it only once; it’s got to be good that one time. I don’t spare myself; I don’t spare my casts. I like an actor who’ll go along with me and take it.” He stood on Royal Street and rubbed his chin. “What’s Carver doing for you?”
“He got me station auditions,” Joe said. It came to him with a shock of surprise that he hadn’t thought of Amby all day. Or of the McCoy Building.
“Nobody has to get anybody station auditions. Anything else?”
“He got me a bit part in I Want Work.”