What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  And he hesitated. She was, she is, but in the beat after the question, he stopped to wonder what Josie would say if someone asked her that about him. Would she say yes? Lately she’d been a little distant. Would it make her uncomfortable if he said yes? Would he seem annoyingly sappy? They’d had a very uncomfortable conversation after his suggestion that they buy a house together, a conversation he’d done his best to forget. In the reporter’s expression he saw that his hesitation had gone on long enough to seem like a negative answer, and so he said, “Yes!” hastily, loudly. Then, uncomfortable with his vehemence, he added, in a worried way, “So far.”

  Everything in this description is accurate—the way he said so far suggested insecurity, not womanizing arrogance—but he should have used a different phrase, like I hope or something, anything else. Because in print it didn’t look the way he’d meant it. Asked if Josie Lamar is the love of his life, he said, “So far.”

  Two words. Five letters. Josie shouted them back at him more than once. Her fury left him stricken and fumbling. His apologies couldn’t unsay it. None of his explanations explained. In all that terrible scene, these were the two worst things: The despair in her voice when she said he’d made her look pathetic. And the flat finality with which she asked him to leave.

  The Brazilian woman nudges him again. “You don’t want to tell me what you said. This means it is very bad.”

  “Yes. It is very bad.”

  “You said she is ugly? You said . . . you hate her mother?”

  “No.” Charlie laughs. “Nothing like that.”

  The woman waves a hand. “I won’t make you tell me. You said sorry to her?”

  “Many times. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “But it is good for you. For you.” She touches his chest with her index finger. “To say what you feel.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he says. “That’s what got me into trouble.”

  “Really? I say what I want to say.” She laughs. “Maybe this is bad.”

  Charlie gives her a rueful smile. “It’s bad when I do it, I guess.”

  “Say something you want to say. What do you want to say right now?”

  “To who?”

  “To anyone. To your girlfriend. To me.”

  Josie. You said I cared too much what other people thought, and then you broke up with me because of what other people think. Josie, you said to leave you alone, so I did. I came all the way here, I let my phone die and stashed it in a drawer; I hiked miles into the jungle. Was all this a terrible mistake? Is there something I could have said or done if I’d stayed, if I’d tried again? Can I fix it, even now? Do you still want me, Josie? Should I run back up the trail and come home to you?

  “You are thinking something,” the woman says.

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t say it.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Ah!” She laughs, leaning back on her hands. “We are always ourselves.”

  He appraises her. She cocks her head, gives him a challenging smile. It’s easy to guess what she wants from him. The test is whether he’ll offer it. He feels a rush of anger at Josie for lecturing him about success in ways that suggested he was wrong to enjoy it, for falling silent when he recounted praise from a famous fan, for disappearing from a party so that he hunted for her for half an hour, calling her phone, until one of his costars told him she’d left. For refusing to buy a house with him once he started making money, citing her attachment to her own house, the skittishness left over from her long-ago divorce. That was the first time he’d felt doubt—and only because it seemed like she did.

  During the last year, the world has become a hall of mirrors, everywhere he looks a different version of himself until even he doesn’t know which one is real. But Josie does. Josie knows him. How can she believe the person he is in that article over the one he is with her?

  “I have an idea,” the woman says. “You can go with us instead of alone.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Charlie says. “But . . .” The word hangs in the air. Any second now she’ll ask, “But what?” What should he say? He can hike to the beach with this woman, maybe spend the night with her there, insist to himself that it really is over with Josie. He can put her off with a joke or maybe sincerity, proceed up the trail alone, continue his penance in solitude. He can grab his backpack without another word and run back the other way, plug in his phone, call Josie, propose. There are other choices, too, so many possibilities, and he doesn’t know which is right, and he doesn’t know where any of them will lead, and so he wishes he didn’t have them. The woman shifts her body toward him, about to speak again, but a sudden commotion intrudes. For an instant—before he separates the noise into the rumble of wheels on dirt, voices raised in confusion and alarm, before he turns to see the car and the van—he’s grateful for the interruption.

  Before someone shouts, a strangled, fearful sound.

  Before the doors of both car and van open and eight people thrust themselves out.

  Before he sees that they have guns.

  Before they point those guns at him and the other people in the clearing.

  Before they force him into the trunk of the car.

  Later the memory of that grateful instant will make him feel bitterness, regret, longing—longing most of all—for Josie, for the time when he still got to choose.

  Two.

  Josie Lamar used to be a hero, and now she isn’t. Or—because she remains a hero to the many fans of the cult show on which she starred—it’s more precise to say that she no longer feels like one. What she feels like is a half-awake, intermittently employed actress in line at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf wearing yoga pants and a hoodie, her long red hair pulled up in a messy ponytail. How often do you have to act to still call yourself an actress? More and more she’s been thinking about quitting so that not working will be her choice, so that she will no longer have to ask herself such questions.

  Once upon a time, Josie was Bronwyn Kyle, beloved of fangirls and fanboys, a fighter, a Chosen One. She punched and she kicked; she suffered and she triumphed. Bronwyn Kyle didn’t have it easy—to be a leader takes a toll, and so does the inevitability of the new fight that follows each victory—but still, still. Bronwyn knew her worth. She knew her power. And so, because Josie was she and she was Josie, Josie knew her worth and power, too. Josie knew how it felt to stare down an evildoer—to tell him with her expression I will destroy you—and have him turn and run. Josie knew how it felt to matter. Josie tries not to miss being Bronwyn Kyle, but she does miss it, and if she knew what had happened to Charlie, she’d miss it even more. Bronwyn Kyle could rescue Charlie from the people who’ve taken him. What can Josie do?

  The man in line in front of Josie wears a concert T-shirt and jeans, like a crew member or an off-duty actor, but he’s got the serious, clean-shaven face and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair of a businessman, so maybe he’s visiting from out of town. Maybe he’s on vacation. Maybe he slept with someone at a nearby apartment and now he’s stopping here before he goes home. Maybe he goes out really early for his coffee and then goes home and puts on his suit. That last scenario seems the least plausible. He glanced at her a moment ago, and she saw in his face the subtle performance of suppressed recognition. If he did recognize her, in a moment he’ll glance at her again. People have a hard time repressing that urge. Josie understands that. Sometimes she, too, has to force herself to look away from a famous person—the director of her favorite movie from childhood, the roguish movie star whose poster used to hang on her wall.

  It’s 5:45 a.m. Josie has a 6:30 call time at a studio in the Valley. It’s on a lot so small she’ll have to park a mile away and catch the production shuttle. She should make it in plenty of time, as it’s early enough that the 405 shouldn’t be a problem. She’s not a morning person, and two decades of early call times have failed to
make her one, so what’s on her mind right now is how tired she is, and how slowly this line is moving, and how she hopes this guy doesn’t talk to her because she’s not sure she’s awake enough to summon the necessary politeness. Especially if he doesn’t know where he recognizes her from and wants help figuring it out. She’s not worried about the fact that she’s pregnant because she has no idea that she is. She’s only five weeks along. She’s forty-one years old. Though theoretically she wanted to have children, in the last few years the panicky indecision induced by her uncertain career and her waning fertility has given way to acceptance, so while children are still biologically possible, they no longer seem so to her. It hasn’t yet dawned on her that she missed a period. She’s never been regular, even less so since she hit forty.

  In a remarkable coincidence neither she nor Charlie is yet in a position to appreciate, Josie is playing a kidnap victim this week. Later, when she looks back from the end of this story, connections like this—each link on the chain back to Charlie—will seem to Josie both inevitable and amazing. This is how we come to believe in fate. For now, all she knows is that she’s guest starring on a cable procedural, a show that cuts back and forth between victims and the FBI agents out to rescue them. It’s called, appropriately, Kidnapped. Josie is not the first recognizable actor to play one of the victims, though some viewers will be sad to see her in the part, shaking their heads at what becomes of us all, and others will feel the weird nasty triumph we can feel at the sight of a once-successful, now-diminished stranger, and others will get a thrill out of seeing her and imagine she took the part for fun, not out of need, and still others won’t think about her at all, except as her character, whose name they probably won’t recall. They won’t recognize her, won’t realize she was ever even close to famous. The character’s name is Karen. Karen Woodward. Josie auditioned for the part and was glad to get it. She needs the money, sure, that’s never not the case, but also her friend Cecelia is a regular on the show, and also, most of all, she just wants to work. She always wants to work. You can’t be an actor unless someone will let you act. That’s why she so often dreams of writing or painting—anything, really, that would give her a creative outlet over which she had some control.

  The man glances at her again. He says nothing but turns away with a secretive smile, so she knows he recognizes her. He must have been a fan of Alter Ego. No one who knows her from her other work ever looks quite so delighted. Now he’s got his phone out. She can’t see the screen, but she imagines he’s texting someone, and she’s right. He’s texting his wife and teenage daughter, both of whom will be thrilled to hear that he saw Josie Lamar and will want to know every detail of the sighting when he gets back to their hotel room. He’ll report that she’s taller than he might’ve guessed, and really, really skinny, and that she ordered an Americano with an extra shot and room for cream. He’ll say she looks great, and they’ll look up her age on IMDb, and his wife will admire her for resisting plastic surgery and his daughter will wonder why she never married again or had children, and they’ll remind each other of the famous men she’s dated. In response to their jealousy over the encounter, the man will tease them that this is what they get for lazing around in bed while he goes to fetch their coffee. It’ll be a moment they reference for years to come—the time Dad saw Josie Lamar and they missed it, and it was so unfair because, though Dad loved her show, they were the ones who were the real fans, Mom watching it when it aired and then years later rewatching it with her daughter, Josie’s character a role model for them both, a girl so smart and brave that sometimes Mom teared up at the sheer joy of Bronwyn Kyle’s existence, at her ability to show this character to her daughter and say, look, there’s something out there for you besides hookers and girlfriends, I promise. I promise there is.

  For Josie, it’s not that kind of moment. She won’t remember it later, faded into the mass of such encounters. She remembers only the dramatic ones: the linebacker of a man who couldn’t stop saying her name as if it were a proclamation while he stood between her and the exit from Bed Bath & Beyond; the woman in a crisp suit who burst into hysterical tears when she saw Josie at the next table in a restaurant eating scrambled eggs; her cousin’s girlfriend, who slid in beside her in the pew during her grandmother’s funeral, so close their thighs touched, and asked in a very audible whisper for her autograph. The girlfriend held out a hymnal with the funeral program atop it, proffered a pen. When Josie made no move to take it, the woman pointed to a blank space on the program underneath a Bible verse, as if the problem were that Josie didn’t know where to sign.

  Now, in the coffee shop, Josie’s braced and alert, trying to prep for a scene in which she can’t predict the lines. Both cash registers open at the same time, and Josie and the man step to them side by side and place their orders. She’s aware of him while pretending not to be, just as he is of her, though she’s better at the pretending, having had years of practice. It was hard for her, during the time when she was truly famous, not being able to observe people without being observed herself. To be a good actor one has to notice—the particular way the man hiding his anger turns away from his wife, the self-conscious carriage of the teenage girl, newly curvy, who wants to be looked at but can hardly stand it when she is. It’s the problem of an anthropologist in the field—you can’t observe natural human behavior when your very presence alters it.

  An anthropologist who wanted to examine how people react to celebrity would find Josie a good interview subject. She’s sympathetic to the starstruck—the ones who are nice, at any rate—and she’s honored and often moved to hear that she impacted someone’s life, and yet it’s by necessity a distancing sympathy, tinged with caution, the way you might feel about a little-noticed acquaintance who abruptly presented you with a love poem. What people want is eye contact, recognition, to register in the consciousness of the person so deeply embedded in theirs. They are eager to touch you, and often they do, your sleeve, your hair, your hand. They ask to take your picture, or they don’t ask and take it anyway. They say: “Oh my God, I just really want to hug you,” lost in a desire so compelling they’re helpless not to express it, as if they’re children, or drunk, or on the rapturous verge of speaking in tongues. They’ve approached transcendence. They’re near the source. Their hearts thunder. Their legs shake. They feel the heat coming off your body. You’re real! You’re real! They were right to believe in everything you’ve ever made them feel.

  It was so much worse twenty years ago when she was on TV every week, in people’s living rooms, and they lacked any sense of separation between their lives and hers. Then when people approached her, they’d attract other people until a crowd had gathered around her, and in those crowds, Josie felt vulnerable, overly exposed, unsafe. Now she doesn’t mind, in no small part because these days one fan doesn’t usually lead to more. Most of the time she even likes the interaction, exhausting as it is trying not to end up the butt of a joke on someone’s blog, the villain of someone’s Twitter feed—trying to be what people want. But today she fears a fan encounter, because people have been theorizing in the virtual world about her reaction to Charlie’s interview, and therefore someone might have the temerity to ask her about it in the physical one. After a night lost to Twitter and the comments sections of celebrity gossip sites, she forbade herself to look again. He just said the truth was one opinion. She’s washed up. Another: What I don’t get is how she ever got hot in the first place. Another: She was great on Alter Ego, but as she ages, she comes off shrill and unlikable. Another: She’s too old for him. He’s so cute and she’s a hag.

  How is she supposed to forgive him? Charlie did not, of course, say that she was washed up. Charlie didn’t say anything like that. But what he said could be interpreted that way. It was fine for him to tell the reporter that he was afraid of coming to rely on fame, that he was afraid of the world becoming his mirror, of growing so used to attention that when it vanished he’d be bereft. But he should
n’t have said that this was what had happened to Josie. He shouldn’t have talked about her struggle, which was not his to expose; he shouldn’t have said he thought it was hard for her now to watch fame happening to him; and above all, he shouldn’t have said so far.

  At the thought of that phrase, she feels again the rush of shame and grief that has not, in the last three weeks, lost any part of its power. Her years as an actress have taught her to be vulnerable at work, guarded otherwise, but for Charlie she lowered the wall, so when he hurt her she had no defenses. If she hadn’t trusted him so thoroughly, it’d be easier to forgive him now. That article was a repudiation of everything she’d believed their relationship to be. Was he the love of her life? Yes, yes, he absolutely was. Her certainty is unbearable in the face of his qualified answer. She misses him with a horrible intensity. She can’t allow herself to call.

  Please talk to me, his last text said. Every day for the last two weeks she’s picked up the phone to respond, then stopped herself. And in all that time, fourteen days, he hasn’t tried again. So it really is over. It’s over. How can it be over? But it is.

  She knows that as he grew more famous she occasionally subjected him to abrupt withdrawals, to glimpses of an anger she refused to acknowledge. Yes, she admits it. And she knows how sorry, how wounded, he is. She would have known that even without his saying so because she knows him so well. She’s sure he feels as if the whole world has taken up arms against him, with her at the head of the charge. But how could he say such things? How could he fail to predict the consequences? She knows what it is to ride high on adoration, and yet she can’t forgive him for succumbing to it so completely he believed it was his to keep. He made a public example of her and at the same time proved that he himself had learned nothing.

  She resolves—again, again—not to think about Charlie, which takes an effort so monumental it feels physical and is, she knows, a resolution made particularly ridiculous by the fact that this morning she put on the necklace he gave her. She’s wearing it right now tucked under her shirt. Her longings are contradictory and manifold.