Only Acting - The Unfinished Novel

I need to know if I have some genuine characters here. My greatest struggle in writing fiction stories, is that I have no feedback from other people to tell me if my characters, my plot, my expressions are GOOD.... genuine. If anybody has a chance, am I headed in the right direction with this? I am tortured as to whether this is worth my time.



Today was not to be like all days. Normally Greta would not be walking down by the river with her Poppa ‘just for fun’. Greta stopped walking and stared out over the Paris Seine River as though she were looking for something to jump out of the twilight distance. She stood unusually tall for her age next to Gerard Depardieu, her Poppa. There was a gap of awkwardness between them.
A thin man and a woman with a pretty smile sat on a bridge not far away. The man said a lot of things to make the woman smile.
Greta tore her eyes from them and reached down and picked up a small pebble. She made a face. “It is ugly, see it, Poppa?”
Gerard glanced at the rock with little interest. She was not like typical children. Most often she was cynical. When picking out pebbles on a river bend, she picked out ugly ones. Why she picked out ugly things when she could single out the beautiful, perplexed both Gerard and the people who met his outspoken little girl. Maybe it was because she herself had beautiful raven black hair and she knew it. Was that enough beauty, perhaps? Or could it be that she knew her own face was not beautiful, so she looked for other ugly things to keep her from looking in the mirror at her plain, unattractive face. Regardless, Gerard was the only one who knew how very much Greta resembled her missing mother. The child was not beautiful now, but she would be one day.
“It is a very ugly rock, isn’t it.” She did not ask this as a question. She stated this and then threw the rock into the river with all of her might. She was apparently unsatisfied with her throw.
“It did not skip!” she accused with dismay. Bending, she scooped up a handful of sand and pebbles. “Make one skip, won‘t you?” she demanded of Gerard with the authority of a 12 year old.
The man with her may have looked old, but he was only 43 (which he reminded himself of daily). His mustache and goatee hid grieved frown lines from most people, but Greta had a way of getting beneath the mustache and turning those frowns into smiles. Maybe it was the way she would glare until she got her way, or the saucy pout of her lip when she was only momentarily without something she wanted.
Finally, his lips curled into a gruff laugh and he assured, “All right, my little Grete. I will see.”
The man rubbed a leathery-hand across his scruffy chin and took a sandy stone from the child’s palm. He held it carefully, and then with a gentle flick of his 43-year-old wrist, the stone went sailing across the water and -
“Four skips!” She crowed gleefully. Then she looked up at her Poppa and begged, “Teach me!”
Normally, this was how it would go. “Eh…no. See, you must be older.” So, there was to be an honest benefit to age.
They would go on to banter a bit, in which Greta‘s banter was mainly alarmed. “As old as you?”
“That’s not very old, really.”
“I have to wait that long?!”
“No, no. Just… a little longer. Then your wrist will be grown long enough to… eh, you’ll see when the time comes.”
“When will the time come, Poppa?”
“Just a little longer, Grete.” After all, Gerard Depardieu still needed something to impress his daughter with when all else failed.
But today was to be different.
“You hold the rock like this,” he said, pretending that the placing of the rock within the hand was magical and had to be done perfectly. “Now, when you release the rock, you must flick your wrist, just so… See how it is done?”
Greta tried it. The rock fell into the river with a dull plop. “Nope. The ugly rock failed.”
The man laughed, “Heh, no, Grete. It was not the ugly rock, but YOU that failed. Come. Try again.”
It took her three more tries of doing it exactly as he had showed her, and then, “I - it skipped! Did you see that? Only twice, but - oo, let me do it again.”
This is what Gerard had been waiting for. This was the moment he always waited for when he was trying to teach something. The actors he had been working with for the past 5 stage-houses had been pathetic. He had once been the star in Cyrano de Bergerac and his supporting actress had knocked his nose off in a flair of un-predestinated drama. Hadn’t he repeatedly told her that she must exhibit full control while acting, or her acting would overcome her in a most ridiculous fashion? But perhaps, as the young supporting actress had claimed, Gerard was too harsh. He was hard to listen to, because once he had his mind set, he could not hear anything else. Maybe he should not have knelt so close to a maddening diva, they had mocked. Well, let them find another star, then.
Most people when they first met Gerard wouldn’t think of him as young and full of potential, but many of them would remark on one thing.
“Are you an actor? I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before?” And, no, he hadn’t been on WANTED posters before, so it wasn’t as though innocent citizens were experiencing pamphlet de-ja-vu. He simply had that aura.
Unfortunately, along with this aura came a certain amount of deception. Greta would often comment on this.“Is that suit expensive? How did you have money to buy it? Why do you only wear it whenever we go to visit stage-houses? Why do you never smoke those big cigars unless you’re with your ugly friends?” Greta was a very perceptive little girl, much to Gerard’s chagrin. Often Greta’s inquisitive, out-spoken words would anger Gerard, and he would scold her to shut her mouth. Greta would glower at him and then scream that she hated him and that he never listened. When he looked like he was about to strike her, she would suddenly melt into a smile.
“I’m only acting, Poppa.” Gerard would let it go at that. Greta seemed to sense instinctively that, although Gerard’s fame was growing, his money seemed to be spent faster than it was made. And Gerard, as angry as he could get with his daughters’ frankness, loved her with an exasperated, unending love.
Now they walked along the beach and Gerard was about to tell Greta some news that would be very ugly.
“Grete?”
“Wait, Poppa. I’m looking at the sky. Why, when we’re in the city, are there so few stars, but when we went to visit Grandma Sharon’s house that one time in the country, there were TONS of stars?”
Gerard hesitated, and then glanced up. “I don’t guess there’s less stars up there now than there were at…your Grandma Sharon’s.”
“Then, why?”
“Do you always need to know why?”
“Yes,” she said stubbornly.
“Fine. Here in Paris there are so many street lights, that they blot out the lights in the sky.”“Street lights can do that?”
“Kind of. Grete, I need to talk with you.”Greta skipped around him with a devilish smile. “What, Poppa?”
“Can you sit down, while we talk?”
“Is it serious?”
“You could say that.”
Greta sat.
“Nobody knows about you.”
Greta rolled her eyes. “We’ve been through this before. Nobody knows I’m your daughter, because you had an affair with my mother 12 years ago and then she ran off and left you with me and now you’re stuck with an illegitimate child. I know. And I’m not to say anything to your acting friends about me being your daughter, because then they might ask where my mother is, and that would just open a can of worms.”
“Right. Great memory. But there’s something more.”
She looked up at him curiously, and he sank heavily into the sand beside her.
She could smell the sweat of the river and the man beside her. “I have cancer,” he blurted out.
That meant nothing to her. “And?”
“And I am not expected to live much longer.”
“So what does that mean?” Gerard sighed. Trust his Grete to want to know exactly what everything means… even the meaning of death.
“That means that I’m sending you to live with your Grandma Sharon.”“Until when?”
“Until… I get better.”
“But you just said you’re not getting better. You said you’re going to die. The doctors said that, didn’t they? What doctors did you go to? -Because you know, Dr. Stanton doesn’t like me very much, so he may have said that just because-”
“Greta, stop. I’m not planning on dieing. I mean, look at me. I’m only 43! I have my whole life ahead of me! I could even go to America!”
“Then come with me! Grandma Sharon lives in America!” Gerard felt a certain sense of relief that at least the child was going to grieve him some. So all was not hard within the heart of Greta Depardieu.
“I simply can’t, Grete.” Gerard shrugged.
Greta’s eyes glowered and then she suddenly spit out, “No. I’m not going. I hate Grandma Sharon. She smells like soap.”
“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to smell like.”
“She smells like OLD people soap!” Greta clarified passionately. “And she’s mean.”
“True, she is mean,” Gerard reflected. “But think of it this way. You’re-” Greta cut him off by throwing sand in his face and yelling, “I don’t want to think of it!” right before she ran down the beach and up the grass to his motorcycle.
Gerard sighed. “You’re going to America,” he finished, and then stood, dusted off his pants and headed up the hill after Greta. His steps seemed a little lighter, as though he were greatly relieved.
------- -------- -------
“I told you, I refuse to go!” Greta insisted angrily, and was visited upon by the stony face of the woman before her.
“Gerard!” The plump woman with all the makeup on her face twisted around and went stomping down the stairs as she bellowed for assistance. Greta watched her go, and then listened through the floor-boards as the woman reached Gerard and spoke quite animatedly to him in the little kitchen beneath Greta’s room.
“That girl you’ve been so nice to - is intolerable! I don’t know how you’ve put up with her all this time!”
“She has great-”
“Yes, I know you said she has great acting talent, but I’ve yet to see it! The only acting she can do starts between her eyebrows and her lips when she’s furrowing them like a she-devil!”
“Roxanne… don’t you think you’re getting a LITTLE over-heated?”
“A little! I’m trying to help the little vixen pack! Why don’t you try doing that without getting all steamed up? It’s a wonder your ornery old mother will even take the girl!”
Greta practiced to keep her face solemn without betraying any emotion.
“Goodness knows why my mother agreed, but she has and that’s all there is to it. I may not have much time at all here, Roxie. I need your help.”
The ample-bosomed woman immediately melted and became all sympathy. “Oh, I know Gere, and it breaks my heart to think of it.”“Cut the act, Roxanne,” Gerard said very simply. Greta could see the woman’s shock through the floor-boards.
“That’s what they call a verbal slap,” she remembered one of her Poppa’s friends’ telling her once.
“That’s why the old man never married,” others would remark reverently.
The woman called Roxanne left the room slowly and ascended the stairs heavily. When she reached the top of the stairs, she looked as if she had been slapped once more.
“Grete - you spoiled…” Her voice trailed off in fury, and then she hissed, “Pick up all of these clothes and put them back into the suitcase or so help me, I will make sure you’re like the rest of us decent people and never get to see the sorry face of Lady Liberty!”
It was somewhere between the moment that the blood-red lips of Roxanne spit those words into Greta’s face, and the moment that Roxanne pinched her arm until she began picking up clothes, that Greta suddenly felt a desire to go to America. If this witch thought the face of the Lady Liberty was ugly, well, Greta had determined she was going to like Lady Liberty… ugly face or not.
------- -------- -------
“Stop! Let go of me!”
Greta was watching a little boy whose hand was being forced to hold the hand of a nun.
“Just go with her,” his mother was saying tearfully.
“I don’t blame him,” Greta said, turning to her seat-mate. The train was just about to take off. She could feel it by the way the floor trembled in excitement.
“Don’t blame who?” the stern-face woman opposite her asked without interest.
“That little boy.”
“I take it you mean the screaming one being grasped by the hand.”
“Sure. That one,” Greta pointed.
“And why don’t you blame the boy?”
“He’s scared and the nun is ugly.”
“That’s no reason to show such violent outbursts in a public arena,” the woman sniffed primly.
“Is there ever a good reason to show violent outbursts?” Greta asked innocently.
“The cheek!”, Greta expected her to say, but the woman merely sniffed. Even better, Greta decided. The woman was going to take the position of a staunch chaperone, enduring as a persecuted public servant.
“All Aboard!” The conductor’s voice sounded hoarse from yelling too much.
The land began to slowly chug-chug by.
“Wave to your guardian, Greta,” the woman issued.
Greta turned to the window and stared at her father. There he was. Didn’t look a bit sick, if anybody asked Greta. She put a hand to the window and the man waved at her, the charmed face of an actor wrinkled in goodbyes.
“Forever goodbyes,” Greta whispered to herself. That’s what her Poppa had called it last night when he had tucked her into bed. A forever goodbye. It had been forever since her Poppa had tucked her into bed.
“Well, show some emotion,” the woman prodded. “You’re going to America!”
Greta practiced keeping her face solemn, and showing no emotion. When she was sure the woman wasn’t looking, though, she winced. There was her emotion.
The woman huffed, and the city began to drift behind the train in equally powerful huff-huffs. The busy sound of traffic, and the rev of her Poppa’s motorcycle engine became like fog in Greta’s mind.
“How did you know my…Poppa?” Greta was about to catch herself from saying Poppa, but then ended up saying it anyway. Who was to care on a train in the middle of nowhere?
The woman, apparently cared. She looked quite indignant, in fact. “Your Poppa?” She scoffed, “The very idea! Gerard Depardieu is a prominent actor, known all over the cinema of Paris. He has made it very clear that he has been a generous guardian to you, but you care little for him at all. You made that very clear in your pathetic goodbye to him. Poppa, indeed! Hardly!”
“I was only acting,” Greta remarked sullenly.
“Well, apparently he didn’t care for your acting, or he wouldn’t be sending you to be the help for his nearly deceased mother.”
Greta glared at her. “He apparently told you nothing.”
The woman’s back straightened, and she gathered her tall bag (Greta noted it was ugly) closer to herself. “And you are how old? 10?” That was meant to be demeaning, Greta gathered.
“12,” Greta said evenly. “What has that to do with anything?”
“Why would he tell a little 12 year old girl the truth, if he thought she was going to throw a bratty tantrum?”
“I threw one with a lie anyway, so that means he wasn’t avoiding himself much. He didn’t tell you he was ill, did he?”
The woman laughed. Greta looked in her mouth when she laughed. The display produced an unavoidable grimace from Greta. “Gerard Depardieu sick? All of Paris would know, little Grete. And you, his child? Another well kept secret.”
Greta disliked her very much right then. So much in fact that she wanted to run away… far away. But how could one run away when one was on a fast-moving train? Where to go?
“Where am I to live?” Greta asked responsibly.
“Well, certainly not with Sharon Depardieu as her granddaughter. But, I have been instructed to deliver you to her as a help for her in her old age.”
Greta and the woman both laughed. They looked at each other, realizing they were laughing for different reasons.
“Me, helping…her.” Greta smirked.
“Depardieu with a grand-daughter,” the woman wrinkled her thin nose in equally unattractive humor.
Several hundred more miles passed before the two spoke again. They shared a sack lunch, in which Greta was not offered a sandwich without the crusts.
“Eat your apple,” were the next words that were to transpire.
There was a pause of a few more miles, and then the woman repeated, “Eat your apple,” to Greta.
Greta looked at the thing dismissingly, and announced, “It’s severely bruised.”
“God made both the bruised and the well,” the woman remarked, as though there was special significance between the apple and Greta’s “Poppa”. Greta made a face and crunched into the apple, making sure that soggy brown pieces flecked onto the woman’s blue-serge suit (which was surprisingly hard to do).
As Greta watched another large city fall into the back-drop of the scenery, she felt the need to talk to this woman for whatever reason, and they lapsed into their third unpleasant conversation. (Fourth if you might count their awkward introduction to each other, during which Greta refused to speak.)
“Why would my Poppa lie to me?”
“You’re really going to need to call him Mr. Depardieu now, Grete. No more of this make-believe, all right then?”
“Fine. If it will make you answer my question faster. Why would,” she mocked, “Mr. Depardieu lie to me?”
“Well, I really don’t know,” the woman said, apparently not wanting to fabricate a theory. Then she seemed to change her mind, and she added rather rebukingly, “Maybe he was just acting.”
There was a numbing pause that the woman seemed to take satisfaction from. Greta sniffed, but it was far from a sniff of emotion.
“You never did say how you knew my… Mr. Depardieu.”
“Well, I acted in one of his plays once.”
Greta wrinkled her nose. “What? You?”
The woman looked down at Greta severely. “I was quite a good actor, I’ll have you know. Gerard was quite fond of me.” Her eyes got far away, apparently seeing something far more interesting.
Greta looked at her in un-amused disgust, “What play did you act with him?”
The woman answered with a raptured expression, “ A one of a kind! Cyrano de Bergerac!”
Greta looked at her suspiciously. “Were you-”
“Supporting actress!” she cried.
For the first time all day, Greta felt a genuine shiver.


Greta couldn’t sleep. She remembered looking at the train the night before, directly before she and - what was that woman’s name again? - boarded. The number of box-cars had seemed to stretch on and on… without end. Now, she bitterly compared the train with her journey. The journey she was embarking on seemed to have the same quality; endless.
“Are we almost there?” she whined - not unlike other little children that she could hear a box over.
“No! Stop asking!” the woman snapped and she shut her deceptively owlish eyes once more. Greta sneered at her sleeping form. When she had first met the woman, she had taken one look at those large owl eyes and the stiff set of her chin and had thought, “A book worm. A teacher. A governess. A nanny.” All of those assumptions had proved to be wrong. And yet, she was still rather predictable, because Greta had expected her to be boring and useless on the trip, and so far the woman had been just that. It annoyed her that the woman was sleeping, though. She looked so peaceful with her scarf relaxed around her, and her stiff chin looking soft and dimpled.
Greta found herself wondering what it would be like if the woman before her died. What if… what if that scarf tightened around her neck? What if she didn’t deliver Greta to her destination after all? What if she mysteriously disappeared? There was the door to the train car, just a few feet away. If someone was shoved out that door, they would be nearly unrecognizable after the wheels of the train had finished with them.
A few minutes later, Greta felt sick to her stomach. She had moved to a different seat The seat before her was empty, as though it would erase the memories of there ever being an old, stern woman. Greta didn’t even remember doing it. They said she killed the poor late actress. Well, Greta knew they had no way to prove it.