What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  The barista calls out, “Chris!” and the man in the concert T-shirt retrieves a cardboard tray with three cups of the largest size coffee they offer. As he passes Josie on his way to the creamer station, he says in a low voice, “You’re terrific,” and though she says, “Thank you,” relieved, her voice full of genuine pleasure, she’s not sure he hears her as he walks away. Some people treat these encounters as though they’re spies at a meet, barely looking at her, whispering a compliment as though it were a secret. These are the fans who feel grateful for what she’s already given them and want only to give something back, and she feels her own responsive gratitude to them for demanding nothing. The teenage barista calls out, “Josie!” and hands over her drink with a disinterest approaching disdain. Josie smiles at her anyway, carrying the warm glow of her secret, believing again for a moment that she is terrific, which is, after all, what we all want to believe. Terrific is the opposite of how she’s felt since she lost Charlie.

  Three.

  It’s not enough, of course, to perform a convincing emotional response to a situation: A good actor must adapt that response to the overall tone of the piece. On a comedy, even heartbreak is occasion for a joke; on a procedural, even murder cleans up tidily, and if you’re playing a relative of the victim, you probably shouldn’t cry. Some stories have no room for raw desperation. Charlie has played being trapped in the trunk of a car three times—twice on comedies, once on a procedural—and on none of those occasions was he asked to scream or sob or have a full-blown panic attack. On one comedy, the scene was a reference to the famous one in Out of Sight, his character trying to play the charming take-it-all-in-stride rogue to an eye-rolling girl. On the other, he performed a series of contortions in concert with another actor, struggling to retrieve a phone from that actor’s back pocket with his teeth. On the procedural, he shook his head wildly as the bad guy duct-taped his mouth, and then after the trunk closed and the car started, he looked around in grim and purposeful resolution, and began kicking out the taillight.

  Alone in this trunk, this real live trunk, in this real live moment, there is no romantic banter, no comic acrobatics, no heroic display of any kind. It does not occur to him to try to kick out the taillight. It does not occur to him to do anything. He’s completely overtaken by panic. He’s hyperventilating and sweating, and while he’s aware of the movement of the car, it’s a dim awareness, afflicted as he is by the tightening vise around his chest against which his heart desperately flings itself. Being forced into a trunk by gun-wielding strangers was terrifying enough to cause these effects, but his claustrophobia intensifies them, his mind telling him over and over that he will die instantly if he spends one more second in this tiny enclosed space. He’s been claustrophobic since childhood for no reason he can recall, though his second-oldest sister guiltily thinks it might be because of the time she shut him in the closet for nearly an hour when he was two. Whatever the cause, he’ll bound up ten flights of stairs to avoid an elevator. He worried, when he had to play those trunk scenes, that he’d ruin a day’s shooting with a panic attack, but his claustrophobia never kicked in. Perhaps because he wasn’t being himself.

  Right now, he has no one else to be. He’s all he’s got. Charlie Outlaw, thirty-four years old and six-feet-two-inches tall, quite tall for any man but especially an actor, too tall to be fetal-positioned in the oven-hot trunk of a midsize sedan, making himself even hotter with his frantic breathing until at last he loses consciousness. Let’s leave him there a moment, poor Charlie, because nothing more will happen to him until the car stops.

  Charlie has always wanted to be an actor. Three months ago, when his parents moved from their big suburban house to an apartment in downtown Cincinnati, his mother sent him a box labeled CHARLIE’S CHILDHOOD in her almost illegible handwriting. In it he found a book report on the autobiography of Marlon Brando, written when he was nine, that offered a random assortment of facts about Brando before segueing into a disquisition on his own ambitions. When I grow up, I want to be an actor. I will be a Method actor in the style of Marlon Brando, who learned from Stella Adler how to make his emotions seem real.

  He’d forgotten all about this, and he’s not sure now if it was lack of confidence or masculine embarrassment that made him wait so long to audition for a school play, which he did finally as a sophomore in high school, and only then because his girlfriend persuaded him to try out with her. The play was Grease, and he got the part of Kenickie. His girlfriend was cast as an extra and quit the play in anger—she was the star of the school’s drama program, but Grease is a musical and she couldn’t sing. Charlie didn’t ever say that to her, of course. He listened to her rant about the drama teacher’s betrayal with patience and understanding. Partly because of that, she stayed his girlfriend a while longer, swallowing her own hurt feelings to come see him every night he was in the play. Also, she couldn’t resist his performance. Even then he’d been that good. Sitting in the audience, she could feel the way he magnetized the air. When his castmates spoke, she heard them say their lines. When Charlie spoke, she believed him. The other girls at school looked at him now with drugged and helpless yearning, but he was only hers. Every night in the auditorium she felt the power of having what everyone else wanted.

  Why on earth, at nine, had he been allowed to read the autobiography of Marlon Brando? His father was the exhibitions director at the Contemporary Arts Center, site of the famous Robert Mapplethorpe controversy, and his mother was a First Amendment lawyer. They forbade him violent television, but beyond that, they resisted censorship. If they saw him with a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever from his oldest sister’s bookshelf, they’d say, “That’s not appropriate for you, honey,” but they wouldn’t actually take it from him. They’d trust him to put it back, as if he could be counted on to understand the need to protect his own childish innocence. He usually did put it back, whatever the book was, because he liked being trustworthy. He was number three of four children, the others all girls, and every one of them a handful except for him. He wasn’t just the only boy; he was the only good one. Until the play, he’d shown no evidence of special skill—his sister Caroline was a math whiz, Beth a talented artist, Alexa a three-sport athlete—but he was the good boy, and oh how his parents loved him for it. Though his sisters taunted him for those good-boy ways, they loved them, and him, too.

  Everybody loves Charlie Outlaw. Or at least they used to. He’s counted on that, always, without quite understanding how much. He’s had an unconscious belief that he arrived first, whole and complete in himself, and the love pursued him. Only since the article has it seemed to him that everybody’s love is the foundation on which the rest of him is built. He has big eyes and mobile, expressive features, an easy smile, good manners. Because he is a tall and broad-shouldered man, his inherent sweetness seems a charming discovery rather than a weakness. You’re so nice! people say to him, as though his niceness were a miracle, and when your niceness wins you so much approbation, why wouldn’t you continue to display it? In the last year, as his share of the world’s attention expanded exponentially, he has been so, so nice. And he’s gotten so much love—so much! The naked adoration in their faces. The outsize gratitude for any minor kindness, so that to have been nothing but polite makes him feel like a god. He’s been mainlining love, a dose so strong that the high teeters on the edge of pain. It’s terrifying to be worshipped, more terrifying still to imagine being worshipped no longer. For months now, even before the troublemaking article, he’s been waking at four in the morning in the desperate sweaty grip of his own inadequacy.

  The headline on the article was “Charlie Outlaw Takes the Stage,” which didn’t quite make sense, as he’s in a TV show, not a play, but the copy editor couldn’t resist doing something punny with his name. Few can. Outlaw Wears a White Hat, Outlaw Rides Again, etc. A quick internet search and almost every article about him confirms that the name is real, not invented, but people on the street still ask him,
sometimes in a tone of sweet wonderment, sometimes in a way that tells him they already know and just want to confide they’re in on the joke. Then he says yes, and they say really?, with varying inflections. And he says yes. They look skeptical or amused or oddly impressed. The skepticism perplexes Charlie. Why would a man who wanted to be taken seriously name himself Outlaw, given the choice of any name in the world? When an actor changes his name, he’s not looking to sound like a self-deluded character on a sketch-comedy show. He’s looking to distinguish himself from some other guy in the Screen Actors Guild. He’s looking to sound like a star.

  Who is he now, if people no longer love him? If Josie doesn’t?

  The car is slowing now in the face of some substantial bumps in the road. The jostling rouses Charlie, who would just as soon have not been roused, as at this moment there’s no benefit to consciousness. When he slipped into his mind, he found Josie there. Outside it, she’s gone. Nothing good about being him. He opens his eyes, then closes them. If only this feeling of unreality signified that none of it was real. They bound his hands in front of him with rope. He tries to loosen it and succeeds only in further chafing his skin. He tries to think, but in his brain there is only a humming silence harmonizing with the vibrations of the car. One clear thought finally surfaces, and it is this: I must be in shock. He is correct in this self-diagnosis, for all the good it does him. His pulse is rapid, his pupils dilated, his skin clammy. He feels like he might throw up. As the car continues to slow and then finally stops, he concentrates on vanquishing his nausea. All will be well as long as he does not vomit. For comfort, distraction, resolution, he pictures Josie’s face.

  Charlie and Josie first met as Benedick and Beatrice at the home of an actor who liked to gather groups for readings of Shakespeare plays. Charlie tagged along with a friend who’d been invited because he knew that Josie would be there. When he was a kid, he watched her show with his sisters, and he had a crush on her character, which, of course, he understood at the time as having a crush on Josie. By the time they met, he was sophisticated enough to know that he shouldn’t conflate her and her character, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious to see how much she’d resemble Bronwyn, that he wasn’t watching for signs of that. His friend had told him that she was surprisingly good at Shakespeare, given her lack of formal training or experience on the stage. “You don’t even know if she knows what she’s saying, but she makes you feel it,” he said.

  Then Charlie walked into a room and saw her, and despite himself, he was disappointed. She seemed too diffident, too quiet. As soon as they started to read the play, though, he knew that his friend had been wrong. She knew exactly what she was saying. He had a sense that her intelligence was always being underestimated, that she underestimated it herself. But what power she had in her! When she wasn’t acting, she dimmed it. Or the world did.

  Their relationship progressed very quickly in that way that makes you feel like your love is inevitable, irresistible, while everyone around you suggests that you might be moving too fast. For two years they never fought, which was in retrospect a mistake, because when they finally arrived at conflict, they had no practice in recovering from it. Even so, for two years they were a fantasy, a miracle. They drove everybody else crazy.

  Please, Josie, he thinks, in the trunk. Please, Josie. Please. What is he asking her for? To come for him and transport him back to that time.

  On the other side of the world, in Charlie’s home state of Ohio, a teenage girl in the grip of boredom and longing enters Charlie Outlaw into Google. He comes up smiling, smoldering, angry, sad, determined. So many faces, image after image, as she clicks through looking for the version that most swells her heart. And there it is, the one that will shortly grace the home screen of her laptop, a shot a magazine chose from dozens, his gaze frank, his smile inviting. She sighs. “I still love you, Charlie,” she says.

  The trunk opens. The air and light rush in. Charlie Outlaw opens his eyes.

  Four.

  Every episode of Kidnapped is a variation within a strict form, like a sonnet. In the teaser, we see the victim proceeding through her day in the unknowing bliss of normalcy. Then comes the sudden intrusion of horror—the grab, the van, the gun. Cut to the title sequence. After the commercial, the agents get the case. The last scene is always the agents together over a cheerful meal or drink, advancing to an infinitesimal degree their repressed romance. Once the victim’s rescued, she vanishes from the story. Like most procedurals, the show makes Josie dwell on everything it leaves out: the terror of the victim, the strain on the agents, everyone’s accumulating post-traumatic stress. What happens to someone who’s been on the receiving end of that much malice, that much indifferent cruelty? What happens to the agents exposed again and again to the worst that people can do? Rescue cannot possibly be the end. But five minutes later it’s scenes from next week.

  The first scene that Josie has to shoot today is her most taxing one, emotionally speaking. Tomorrow there’s an exterior shoot involving running and falling and being dragged. For today’s scene, she’ll come to in a small dark room, chained to a chair, and she’ll struggle and scream until her kidnapper comes in, and then she’ll demand to know who he is and what he wants until he answers with some creepy quotations from the Bible. Then she’ll struggle some more as he clamps a chloroformed cloth across her mouth. Or rather, as Josie would say, these are the things that a lawyer named Karen Woodward will do. Some actors use “I” in reference to their characters, some “he” or “she.” Josie is in the latter group, very deliberately so. The “I” is inescapable in any performance whether you say it or not. An actor’s body is her art: Josie herself will be chained to a chair, Josie herself will be screaming. Josie will do her best to believe when she is chained and screaming that what is happening is happening to her, and then later she will do her best to believe that it happened to someone else. Everything that has ever happened to one of her characters has happened to her. But imagine the trauma, the grief, the confused romantic yearnings, if she allowed that to be true.

  She doesn’t know the actor playing the kidnapper, which is probably for the best. They’ve exchanged a few pleasantries. Right now she’s watching him chat up one of the makeup artists. She and her friend Cecelia Wright—who plays the female half of the FBI pair—are standing near, but not in, a line of people at an ice cream truck hired by the director as a thank-you to the cast and crew. Later today she and Cecelia are scheduled for their one scene together—Cecelia rescues Josie, Agent Corbett rescues Karen Woodward—but production is running three hours behind, so when a PA knocked on the door to tell them about the ice cream, they were hanging out in Cecelia’s trailer playing each other in a word game on their phones. Josie took this job in part to hang out with Cecelia. They haven’t gotten together much lately, with the long hours Cecelia works: here until eleven last night, back at six this morning. It’s hard being number one on the call sheet. Josie remembers how hard and would nevertheless like those days to return.

  “There’s a lot of food on this set,” she says to Cecelia.

  “Really?” Cecelia’s reading something on her phone, only half listening.

  “That taco truck yesterday, ice cream today, plus craft services.”

  “I don’t pay attention,” Cecelia says. “I mostly don’t eat it.” She puts her phone in the pocket of her FBI agent blazer and frowns. “How do we feel about the Alter Ego reunion?”

  “Is something up?” Josie looks at the outline of the phone in Cecelia’s pocket.

  “No, that was a text from my mother. Her cat’s sick. I just wondered how we feel about it. Are we glad? Are we nostalgic? Are we wishing it wasn’t happening?”

  “We have mixed feelings.”

  “Right?”

  “Right.” Josie looks at the menu posted beside the window on the white ice cream truck. No one has asked if she and Cecelia are in line; everyone assumes the actress
es won’t be eating the ice cream. Normally this would be a reasonable assumption, but right now Josie would very much like some ice cream. It would be fair to say she has an intense and urgent desire for it. “I’m debating whether to hire a publicist,” she says. “I mean, I know we’re all doing interviews at the convention, but for individual stuff.”

  “Why bother? The studio will send them.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll be all about the show,” Josie says. “I mean someone for me. I could really use some good individual press.”

  “Oh,” Cecelia says. “Right.”

  Josie registers that she’s just made Cecelia uncomfortable. Contained within that exchange was the difference in their relative positions: Cecelia has for some time now had studio publicists serving her cause and so doesn’t need to shell out thousands of dollars to get her picture in a magazine. So Josie doesn’t go on with what she’s thinking, which is that a well-placed interview might lead to a long-term job. She says, “I know they’re covering hair and makeup.”

  “They want to sell those anniversary DVDs.”

  “Not stylists, though.”

  “Oh really?” Cecelia frowns. “I’m glad you’re paying attention. I didn’t realize that was on us.”

  At other times Josie would freely say to Cecelia that she’s reluctant to spend the $1,000 that one day of a stylist’s services would cost, not to mention the $5,000 or more she’d spend on a month with a publicist. But relationships between actors shift, in ways subtle and not, depending on whether they’re working. The one without the job must be careful not to express jealousy, which means, as good actors have high sensitivity to the subtexts of interaction, that she should perhaps not bring up that she’s feeling a little strapped in case she inadvertently expresses jealousy or at least alerts the other one to the possibility that she feels it. The one with the job might feel uncomfortable about her good fortune, conversationally constrained by the need to neither rub it in nor complain. Or she might perceive resentment from the other one and feel resentful in return at her friend’s inability to take pleasure in her success or at her friend’s blind notion that now all her problems are gone. There are some who like their friends better when they’re not doing well, enjoying the position of superiority, of sympathy expressed from a loftier perch. These people disappear when you get a job even if your job is not as good as theirs. Cecelia isn’t like that; no one Josie has stayed friends with is. Still, it’s better not to talk about money with Cecelia right now. Josie wishes she hadn’t brought up the publicist at all. “I might succumb to the ice cream,” she says.