by Leah Stewart
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m talking about girls who used to have posters of him in their bedrooms. They totally want to see him. He’s Malachi! I mean, you know. You’re Bronwyn.” She sighs with rapturous melancholy. “God, I wanted to be you.”
“I wanted to be me, too,” Josie says, and Kirsten laughs again.
“I bet he’s a really good kisser,” she says. “He is, right?”
Josie shrugs. “It’s been a long time.” Only when she sees Kirsten’s slightly wounded expression does Josie realize that her resolute good humor was flagging, that her tone was peevish. You’re Bronwyn. “But, yeah,” she says, lowering her voice, “he’s a really good kisser.”
“I knew it! You were acting but you weren’t totally acting.”
“No, not totally.”
“How can you manage a real relationship,” Kirsten abruptly asks, “after living a fantasy like that?”
The acuity of the question startles Josie, who dismissed this woman as a surface dweller about thirty seconds into their conversation. She pegged her as one of those actresses who never questions the existential weirdness of what they do and how they live, who announces that she’s cold or hungry with a childlike belief in the importance of her needs, who takes on faith her right to specially prepared food and very expensive handbags, who tweets things like OMG you guys are the best, I love you! to her four million followers because it’s good for her career, yes, but also because she does love them. Someone who is hyperaware of her appearance and her public image but who is otherwise without self-consciousness. Someone who has as much in common with Josie, despite their shared profession, as a pretty purring cat. Because she’s caught off guard, Josie answers the question honestly. “It was hard, actually. I think in my twenties I made some mistakes because of that.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, divorcing my husband, probably. I mean, I definitely divorced him. It was probably a mistake. Hard to say.”
“Was he in the business?”
“No, he worked for Verizon. Very stable guy. Very sweet.”
“But kind of boring?”
Josie winces. “I don’t know if boring’s the word.”
“How’d you end up with him?”
“We met really young, when I was still on the show. At a concert, actually, which I thought was good, like a normal way to meet someone. Everyone else I knew was dating other actors. And he didn’t even know who I was.”
“But then he turned out to be boring.”
“Well . . .”
“How long before you got divorced? I know, I’m interviewing you. I could just look all this up.”
“No, it’s okay. I was thirty-two.”
“That’s my age! And since then?”
“Since then?”
“Weren’t you with Charlie Outlaw?”
Josie tenses again. “I was,” she says. Then, with an effort, she returns to a playful tone: “You’re thirty-two? So you were, what, ten when you had that crush on Malachi?”
“Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .” Kirsten smiles mischievously. “Thirty-two.”
“Oh, I get it. So when you say your friends want to see him . . .”
“It might have been my idea. Now you think I’m a stalker.”
“No judgments here. Have you met him?”
“Just in passing.”
“Should we go see him play?”
“Definitely,” Kirsten says.
On their way to the court, they pass the suburban neighborhood set, and Josie remembers how the first time she saw an exterior set like this she couldn’t stop marveling that the plants in the landscaped gardens were real. Why would they use fake plants? someone said to her. We’re outside. But that wasn’t the point; the point was the disorienting effect of reality inside the make-believe, the way it made the whole world seem hallucinatory. Oh God, she really doesn’t want to see Max. She’s fighting the urge to let her pace flag. Kirsten is talking but Josie doesn’t quite know about what. She knows the rhythms of conversation and can make the right sounds in the right places, and though Kirsten ought to notice that she isn’t really listening, maybe she’s gotten what she wanted from Josie, the promise of an introduction to Max, and so doesn’t mind. Josie wishes that the fact that she expected to feel an intense confusion about seeing Max and that she observes herself feeling it did anything at all to diminish the feeling’s power.
Max left Alter Ego in its penultimate season, and though he came back for the series finale, though the breakup scene wasn’t even the last thing they shot for his final full episode, she thinks of that scene as the last time she worked with him. It remains one of her most wrenching experiences as an actor. It remains one of the most wrenching experiences of her life, more vivid in her mind’s eye than all but a few things that have happened to her when she was only Josie. There’s the memory of filming the scene and then the memory of watching it later: One comes with a sorrowful ache, the other with pride because she was good in that scene, she was really damn good. As they ran lines in the makeup trailer the morning of the shoot, the reality of Max’s impending departure from her life slowly crept up on her, and the thought of it began to seem as unbearable to her as it did to her character. By the time they were filming, the necessary tears were easy to access. The difficulty was in saving them for the end of the scene. The camera, despite being right in her face, wasn’t there. The crew wasn’t there. He was there. She looked at him—his slightly crooked nose, the muscle in his jaw that flexed at least once every sad scene, his trying-not-to-cry expression, so familiar to her now, his body, too, as familiar as if she really were his lover. She knew where he was ticklish! She could recognize him by his smell. She cried so hard at the thought of losing him that when they were done shooting and he hugged her, she couldn’t let go. She buried her face in his chest, and he clung to her right back. The crew members went about their business, politely looking away from the intimacy of their grief.
And it wasn’t because she was actually in love with him. Beyond that emotional residue, there never was anything between them off camera, no “what if” conversation, not even a drunken kiss. What can be hard to explain, even to yourself, is how the actual doesn’t matter. The subconscious leads its own rebellious life.
As soon as the basketball game comes into view, Josie identifies Max just from the way he moves before she’s close enough to make out any other details. He looks to her as limber and quick and high jumping as he did twenty years ago. He isn’t, of course, but that’s how she first sees him. What she doesn’t know is that he spotted her, too, and started playing harder, much harder. His team was down by four, but he drives for a layup, steals a long inbound pass, and hits a three-pointer for the win. He hopes she saw that; actually, he knows she did. He could feel her eyes following the arc of the ball along with his.
This has been a shitty year for Max, kicking off with the end of his marriage—and, yes, he cheated on his wife, but she was no saint either—and ever since, he’s been stuck in a malaise, a bored depression, a depressed boredom. He went skydiving a couple weeks ago just to wake himself up, and it worked, but only while he was falling. Seeing Josie is a welcome jolt—that bright flame of hair. His heart is a hard, rapid beating in his chest. It’s a good feeling.
He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t break away from the ritual of good gaming and shoulder slapping. He grabs his towel and his water bottle, takes a swig, scrubs at his hair. He walks over to Josie wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, enjoying the pretense of being casual. A couple feet away he stops and says, “Hey, Red.” He doesn’t ask what she’s doing there, just takes her in. She looks good. She’s obviously gotten older—lines around her mouth, angular where she used to be soft—but she still looks great, sexy as ever. He was so jazzed when he read the script where he first got to take off her clothes. There was a fight s
cene, the two of them back-to-back against a bunch of monsters, that turned into post-victory sex. She was awesome shooting those fights, never wanted the stunt double, did as much as they’d let her, and pushed for more. To watch her move like that and then obey a desire to grab her and kiss her had taken no acting ability at all. She has two very sensitive spots in the hollows of her collarbone. If he brushed her there with his lips or even his breath, she’d sigh, her body yielding into his in a way that was so incredibly sexy, or she’d giggle and ruin the take. He rolled the dice on that one a bunch of times.
“Hey,” Josie says, with girlish softness, a breathy come-on of a greeting, which is an accident, and which she feels Kirsten noticing. “Max,” she offers as crisp follow-up, “do you know Kirsten Campos?”
One of the other men on the court, a character actor with comically large eyes and a long skinny neck, watches Max with a combination of admiration and resentment. Max is, in his opinion, a little bit of a dick, but one of those guys who manages to be a dick and make you like him anyway. You feel even more annoyed because you like him anyway.
Ah, Max Hammons. Who are you really? Your fans would love to know. Or at least they think they would. What they really want is confirmation that you’re who they think you are, you’re who they want you to be. If people love your character and you yourself are less strong, less noble, less clever, less funny, less passionate, less brave—if you yourself are an actor with an ex-wife and a mortgage, not a badass spy—they’d just as soon you keep that to yourself. Max would never make a mistake like Charlie’s interview. Max never fails to behave in public with the impervious dapper charm of a leading man. His appeal is on a different order than Charlie’s. He doesn’t melt your heart; he makes you eager for his approval. Picture him in black and white, leaning in to light a woman’s cigarette and then sitting back in his chair to regard her with an air of private amusement. He’s fine with letting you believe he’s a man of action and mystery, master of the art of seduction and other heroic acts. He doesn’t care if you know the real Max Hammons. Maybe the man with the mean right hook and the knowing smile—maybe that is the real him.
Standing at the edge of the court with the two actresses, his sweat-drenched T-shirt clinging gloriously to his torso, Max directs his attention to Kirsten. So much so that the big-eyed character actor, observing from a distance while he disconsolately bounces the basketball, imagines it’s Kirsten that Max wants to fuck. But Max, with subtle cues (a quick glance, an ostensibly accidental arm bump), conveys to Josie that his interest is in her. He’s charming Kirsten, sure, with his twinkly laconicism and admiring appraisal. But he and Josie have a secret. Such is the magic of Max that this is somehow better than if he were paying her overt attention. When abruptly he shifts eye contact to Josie, she feels it like a kiss. “You’ll be here all week?”
She nods.
“I’ll come see you,” he says.
Two.
Tuesday he doesn’t come.
Three.
Wednesday he doesn’t come.
Four.
It’s Thursday morning, time for camera blocking, and Josie feels ridiculous. What energy she’s expended waiting for Max to show! On set today, she’s walked through an unreal living room, an unreal bedroom, and an unreal restaurant wondering if she might resume an unreal relationship. All of it—rooms and relationship—carefully constructed for maximum verisimilitude. Now she sits with Kirsten at a real table in the fake restaurant awaiting an adjustment to the lights. Kirsten is on her phone, tweeting—“Sorry,” she says to Josie, rolling her eyes. “They make me do this.”
No one makes Josie tweet, for which she supposes she should be grateful.
“You know what I did last night?” Kirsten says, still looking at her phone. The phone chimes, Kirsten reads something and laughs, then her thumbs begin to fly again. Maybe she was talking to the phone. Though the leads normally leave the camera blocking to their stand-ins, Kirsten’s here to keep Josie company, as she’s told her more than once. This is nice, Josie supposes, as otherwise she’d feel like a big loser alone among the stand-ins, but also it makes her further indebted to Kirsten, and she wonders how she’s going to have to pay.
Josie catches herself staring at Kirsten’s screen and turns to watch two stand-ins talking at another table. What is it like for your primary value to be your resemblance to someone else? She’s been around them often enough but still finds stand-ins and stunt doubles disconcertingly uncanny. Always especially unnerving was the sight of her stuntwoman dressed in an outfit identical to hers, wearing a wig that looked just like her hair.
Josie doesn’t remember this, but when she was a child, her mother used to tape her daytime soap while she was at work and then curl up in bed with Josie and watch episode after episode on the weekend. When Josie was six, the show replaced an actor but kept the character, calling a new face by the old name, and when Josie saw everyone pretending like nothing had changed, she peppered her mother with angry, insistent questions, and no matter how she answered them, the whole thing seemed world-shakingly upsetting, perhaps the more so because her mother acted as if it were normal. Her mother had to stop watching the show in Josie’s presence, saving her carefully labeled videotapes for nights after her daughter was in bed, because Josie started having nightmares in which a different woman claimed to be her mother and no one would believe that she wasn’t. On Alter Ego, Josie did as many of her own stunts and fight scenes as she was allowed. People took this as a sign of her toughness, her teeth-gritted commitment to the role, and sure, those things were in the mix. But mostly she just didn’t like being replaced.
Kirsten puts her phone down and looks expectantly at Josie. “It’s really dorky,” she says.
“What is?”
“I watched an episode of Alter Ego last night.” Kirsten wears a look of mischievous entreaty, like a child who’s done something naughty but is pretty sure she can sell it as cute.
“You did? Which one?”
“Episode seventeen.”
“Which one is that?”
“The one where you and Max have your first big love scene. Oh my God, when he kisses you!” Kirsten closes her eyes and shakes her head, smiling an inward rapturous smile. “That’s what I thought love would be like.”
“Yeah,” Josie says. “Me, too.” She notices that PA, Mason, standing off to the side. It’s his quality of sudden alertness that drew her eye. Ah, yes, he wants to hear what she’ll say about Max. Everybody thinks they have the right. Because she did kiss him and she did touch him, but it wasn’t real so any discussion of his lips and tongue and abdominal muscles is just a little light titillation, no harm, no foul. If Max were her actual ex-boyfriend, people wouldn’t feel like his make-out strategies were in the public domain.
Unbelievable as it seems, she was a virgin when she shot that scene. If you asked her about her first time, that, not the real thing, is what her memory would summon. The real thing was nothing special. See why she doesn’t want to talk about this? Does anyone want to hear how vulnerable and confused she felt? No, they just want her to say that it was sexy, that it was fun. People think they’re asking for the truth, but what they want to hear is a different kind of fiction.
“Max was always very courteous about love scenes,” Josie says. “Always checking with me, making sure I was okay.”
“That’s nice. Wish they were all like that.”
Josie nods, and they sit a moment in silence. She wonders what Kirsten is recalling. Josie thinks of the time an actor slipped his hand beneath her top and pinched her nipple hard during a scene that was supposed to involve only kissing. But she doesn’t ask. “I make jokes,” Josie says.
“What?”
“Between takes, in love scenes. I make jokes.”
Kirsten nods. “I do that sometimes. If it’s awkward.”
“Except with Max. I never did that with him. We were very ear
nest, the two of us.” She glances at Mason, wondering if he’s satisfied by this eavesdropping. What would he rather hear? How sometimes Max would brush his lips over the hollow above her collarbone and she’d shiver with the pleasure of it? Telling herself it was Bronwyn’s pleasure, not her own.
“Those scenes were intense,” Kirsten says. “Maybe you needed to stay in the moment.”
“Right,” Josie says. And suddenly she wants to say more: Isn’t it still your tongue in his mouth, Kirsten? Isn’t it still your breast in his hand? When we say it’s purely professional, aren’t we lying? When I kissed Charlie, the very first time I kissed Charlie, I was Beatrice and he was Benedick. Wasn’t it still our first kiss?
Don’t say that, Josie. Not to Kirsten. Not in hearing distance of Mason the PA, who might tweet it or snap a surreptitious photo and post it with a caption on Instagram. Josie Lamar’s still in love with Charlie Outlaw. Josie Lamar says love scenes with Max Hammons were real. Has Josie Lamar gained weight? Oh, the possibilities for humiliation are multitudinous. That’s why you don’t say what you think, and when you think of something else, you don’t say that either.
“Where is he, anyway?” Kirsten says.
“Who?”
“Max!” Kirsten’s expression adds Duh.
Josie shrugs, as if to let the gesture govern the emotion, which, as she knows, it sometimes can. “I don’t know.”
“He said he’d come by, didn’t he? I’m sure he said that.”
“Yeah, he did, but you know. Maybe shooting’s run long.”
Kirsten toys with her phone. “I hear that show is a pretty tight ship,” she says musingly. “They’re usually out on time. In the beginning, I think it was a disaster—constantly going long. But now Max insists they stay on schedule. That’s what I hear. Maybe it’s even in his contract. So I think he could . . .” With a glance back at Josie, Kirsten checks herself, signaling Josie that her face must reveal hurt or disappointment, which she does her best to erase. Kirsten says, “Well, I bet he’ll come to the taping.”
