by Leah Stewart
“Maybe,” Josie says.
But she has a sinking certainty that he won’t, that she needs to let go of the possibility that something will happen with Max. It’s either that or feel like a fool. The trouble is that, letting go, she loses the bulwark between her and her grief over Charlie. For hours after she gets home, she tries and fails to occupy herself—with a book, with television, with housecleaning, with a call to her mother, who doesn’t pick up. Then she stops resisting and calls Charlie. She’s tired of silence, hers and his. She’s tired of her own lack of agency. Be at the center of the wheel, not clinging to the rim—she read that somewhere, and it seems a good philosophy, because on the rim you’re up and down, round and round, and someone else is doing the spinning. But what is at the center of her wheel? The work, always the work. Acting, she is at the center. What if she doesn’t have the work? Because sometimes they give it to her and sometimes they don’t and that she can’t control. She doesn’t know what she can control. Right now it feels like nothing. She waits for an audition. She waits for a job. She waits for Max to show. What does she have that’s hers?
The call goes straight to voice mail, and she hears Charlie speak. At the sound of his voice, she feels the pressure of tears. She swallows. She’s always liked his voice. It’s a flexible voice, sometimes higher and gentler, sometimes deep, a bass rumble in your breastbone. He can sing, too. Not many people know that. But he has a lovely singing voice. “Hi, Charlie,” she says into the silence. “It’s me. I just wanted . . .” She’s a good actress and she’s managed to sound casual, natural, but abruptly her uncertainty catches up and she hesitates and ruins the whole performance. What is it she wants? She wants to be reminded what love is like.
Don’t say that, Josie.
“I just wanted to see how you are,” she says. “I hope you’re okay.”
He isn’t okay, of course. Josie pictures him in a bar; or visiting Spain, where he’s always wanted to go; or playing video games with his two best friends. But where he actually is, it has not yet occurred to Josie to imagine.
“Anyway, you can call me if you want.” She swallows again. “I miss you.” Then she hangs up, tosses the phone aside. She didn’t mean to say I miss you. Or did she? What is the opposite of despite yourself? For yourself? With yourself? If she misses him, why shouldn’t she tell him so? If she loves him, why shouldn’t she take him back? If the answer is pride or self-respect, she’s not feeling much in the way of either. She’ll see how she feels when he calls back.
The rest of the evening, she carries the phone around the house, waiting. She checks Charlie’s Twitter feed, his Instagram, but he’s gone dark since demands for his head began to multiply in comments sections. She’s surprised he’s lasted this long. Charlie can’t stand for people to be mad at him. She expected some sort of public mea culpa by now, something both earnest and humorously self-deprecating. That he’s stayed quiet suggests an impressive amount of self-control. But it makes her uneasy, too. If he isn’t doing what he would normally do, then two explanations are obvious: Either something from the outside has compelled his behavior, which surely would be nothing more sinister than a publicist’s advice; or he’s changed. She wanted him to change, but Charlie as he was is the Charlie who loved her. Her sleep is restless, and every time she wakes, she checks to see if she missed a call, an e-mail, a text. The Charlie she knows would not let I miss you pass in silence. The Charlie she knows would have responded by now. Has he changed so quickly? She is bereft, crying in her bed alone at 3:40 in the morning. Where has that Charlie gone?
Five.
Only once she’s given up on Max does Max appear. He’s learned from his characters the power of the last-minute rescue, or perhaps he always knew it. Josie doesn’t even notice that he’s there, standing in the video village, joking with a writer he knows. She’s too preoccupied with what’s happening on the stage. Tonight, Friday, is the taping in front of an audience, and after some initial nerves—Josie’s not used to live performance, not having done a play since high school—she’s having a great time. It’s really fun being funny. What a thrill: the immediate response of laughter. What an affirming sound.
The sitcom is about a young couple and their friends. After a good long run of will-they-won’t-they, the couple got married in last year’s finale, so this season the writers are stepping up the workplace plot lines. All this Josie knows from binge watching on Hulu after she got the job. In her episode, she plays a colleague of the husband’s, a mysterious woman, who, the husband becomes convinced, is leading a double life: She’s a spy or maybe, he’d like to believe, even a superhero, which is, of course, why they cast Josie. He makes a bet with a friend about what she’s up to and starts following her, and his wife, finding his explanations implausible, starts following him. They arrive at a scene in which the wife has followed her husband as he followed Josie to a restaurant. After some shenanigans, when the husband is distracted, the wife sits down at Josie’s table just as she’s about to order. They stare at each other, and then the wife blurts, “Are you sleeping with my husband?”
Josie says, “That depends. Who’s your husband?”
The girl playing the waitress has one line. It’s her job to hand the wife a menu and say, “I’ll just give you a minute.” This is her first TV job. She has one line. She wants to put into it everything she is, everything she’s learned to this point, every sacrifice it took to get her here. Josie feels a pang of sympathy when the girl oversells the line and then a pang tinged with irritation the second and third times she does it. The fourth time it’s all irritation. This many takes, Kirsten whispers, is very bad on a sitcom. “Losing the audience,” she says, with a knowing head tilt in their direction. Josie can hear the laughter diminishing, hardening, every time they redo the scene. On the fourth take, the writers were called to the stage to laugh. Now the stand-up whose job it is to warm the audience up before the taping and keep them warm between takes does his mightiest to redirect their restlessness. He starts a contest, singing the opening bars of a TV theme song and asking people to name the show. WKRP in Cincinnati, Josie thinks. Charlie’s from Cincinnati. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie—shut up! Someone shouts out the answer, and the younger audience members continue looking mystified. The writers confer near their cluster of director’s chairs. The cause of the trouble stands a few feet from Josie, wearing that stricken I-fucked-up look, that shrinking posture, that dread and self-loathing and ruination and doom. Josie wishes she could pull the girl aside and tell her to calm the fuck down. But kindly. She wouldn’t actually say fuck.
Though she can sympathize with the other actress, Josie’s never been in her precise position, having gotten her first part when she was fifteen. She’s been working steadily for twenty-six years. She’s never had any other kind of job. The actress—her name is Emily Evans—is twenty-eight. At this very moment, if she wasn’t pretending to be a waitress she’d be waiting tables for real, and lately there are a lot of days when she finds it tough to believe in herself. She knows she’s got to calm down, to be easy in the moment, to say the line how her character would, which is brisk yet amusingly knowing. But is that how her character would say it? Who is this nameless waitress? Maybe she’s a normal person stumbling through an awkward moment. Maybe she’s a bit of an earnest dim bulb. Maybe she’s compulsively sincere. Her agent told her that if they liked her they might cast her again because they have scenes in the restaurant all the time, and now she’s fucked it up; she had one line and she fucked it up. She looks at Josie Lamar and is alarmed to find the other woman watching her, but then Josie gives her a tiny little smile, not a pitying smile but an encouraging one. These things happen, she imagines Josie saying. She imagines this very thing has happened to Josie and that Josie survived it. The important thing is to survive. She smiles back, trying to be brave.
On the next take, to everyone’s relief, she nails the line. “Because of you,” she says to Josie after the
taping, nearly in tears. “Thank you so much.”
“That was all you,” Josie says. “It just took you a little while to get there.”
“No, it was you. You smiled at me, and I thought about how brave you are and how inspiring you are and I thought, I can do this.”
Josie’s usually uneasy when people assign her traits that properly belong to one of her characters—that properly belong to Bronwyn Kyle. But right now she’s feeling too good for that concern. She just says thank you and for good measure hugs the girl. She’s riding the buzz of a successful performance. Kirsten said they should have her back, and then the showrunner echoed the sentiment. For once, she’s willing to let someone call her brave and inspiring without feeling compelled to demur.
When she finally does see Max standing at the craft services table pulling a stick of gum from a preopened pack, his presence seems inevitable. Of course he came. Of course. And as soon as he spots her and starts up that slow-building smile, the one that says he can read her mind, she forgives him for not showing up sooner. It seems silly, even, that she thought there was anything to forgive. He puts his arms around her. “Still got that killer timing, Red,” he says.
It’s nine thirty, and though she ate dinner at four, she’s hungry again. Max remembers that she enjoys a nighttime breakfast. During Alter Ego, with all its night shoots, they ate a lot of two a.m. pancakes. He doesn’t take her to Holtman’s, the place they used to go back then, but to a newer one not far from the lot that he swears is better. They sit facing each other in a booth. Josie orders chocolate chip pancakes and a side of bacon. She’s gained four pounds since that Oreo shake, but right now she doesn’t care. The four pounds don’t even cross her mind. She feels giddy, drunk, though she hasn’t had a drop of alcohol. She dips her bacon in maple syrup, licks her sticky fingers, offers Max a bite of pancake from her fork, which he accepts, grinning as he chews.
“Not bad, right?” Max says.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I might still have to give the edge to Holtman’s.”
“You still go there?”
She shakes her head. “Not in years. But in my memory those pancakes are perfect.”
“Not down with the night breakfast anymore? Or you just have a new place.”
“No more late shoots. And you need a companion for night breakfast. Nobody should night breakfast alone.”
“The Night Breakfast. Is that a children’s book?”
“It should be.”
“In the Night Kitchen. That’s what I’m thinking of. ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.’” Josie looks at him, puzzled. Max can quote this book because he has young children to whom he’s read it, but that isn’t the conversation he wants to have, so he doesn’t explain. Instead, he says, “I thought we should talk about what we’re going to talk about on the reunion panel.” He’s good at avoidance. He’s good at cutting the wheel hard.
“You want to rehearse?”
“I just want to be sure I don’t tell any stories you don’t want me to.”
She smiles. “Or maybe the reverse.”
“Are you implying I ever embarrassed myself?”
“Like when you tripped over a cable and went through a wall?”
“Oh God.” He laughs. “Yeah, don’t tell that one.”
“What about when you thought you had to walk in slow motion for the slow-motion scene?”
“Ah, I see, we’re not holding back, are we? Well, I can tell some stories, too.”
“Better than mine? I don’t think so.”
“What about our first kiss?”
“No, sorry. You’re still the most embarrassing.”
“You bit me!”
“Nope. What else you got? Come on. Impress me.”
He points at her. “That was good.”
“What was good?”
“That was from the show, right?”
“No,” she says. “Was it?”
“It was definitely from the show. Come on. Impress me. I thought you were doing it on purpose.”
“Oh my God,” she says. “I don’t even know. That is really sad. Are you sure?”
“I don’t know what episode, but you definitely said it,” he says. “Even I know that, and I’m no expert on the show. You know how fans are like, ‘In episode seventeen, what did Malachi mean when he said blah blah blah?—I never have a clue. I don’t even know which one was episode seventeen. Just tell me who the monster was.”
“Is that what you say to them?”
“I say, ‘Which one was episode seventeen?’”
“I know which one that was.”
“You do?”
She nods slowly, points her syrupy fork at him. “But you don’t deserve to know.”
“Why not?”
“Because not knowing is like forgetting our anniversary.”
“What . . . ohhh. That one!” He grins with delight. “Wow, how could I forget?”
“I’d like to think you just forgot the number of the episode.”
Max looks over her shoulder, squints as if gazing into the past. “I do seem to recall at least one or two of the major plot points.”
This is real, isn’t it? Both of them remembering. Their feigned desire that wasn’t feigned. Because her character felt it, she did, too, and Max the same. Looking at him, she knows it without a doubt. She isn’t thinking about what a good actor he is, she’s thinking about what a good actor she is, so good she might fool herself. Is she feeling what she feels now or what she felt then, what she made herself feel in order to play those scenes? Does it matter? In all her life, has she ever been happier than when she was Bronwyn in his arms? She loved him so much, missed him so badly. What is the difference between dreaming and being awake? She is overwhelmed, at this moment, by the adrenaline rush of his presence, the push-pull of shyness and urgency. He’s divorced; Charlie’s gone. Why can’t it be real?
“You know what story I really don’t want you to tell?” she says.
“What?”
“I bet you know. Or maybe you don’t remember. It might be best if you don’t remember.”
“Oh, wait.” He sits back in the booth looking enormously pleased with himself. “Of course I remember. How could I forget one of the greatest moments of my life?”
It was during a love scene; she made a low sound of pleasure, and the director told her to keep it PG. She got teased about it after, though not by Max. Across from him, she feels herself blushing, like she must have done at the time. What are you going to do, Josie, now that you’ve strode confidently up to this precipice? Are you going to jump? “Listen—” she says. And that’s when the girl walks up. It doesn’t matter what the girl looks like. She could be anyone.
“I’m sorry,” she says, though she’s not sorry, not sorry at all. She’s giddy. The adrenaline it took to get herself to their table jitters through her system, making her shift from foot to foot, her hands vibrating, her eyes practically pinwheels. How did Josie not notice her noticing them? She’s usually so attuned to that kind of thing. Yet here she sat, focused only on Max, like someone who didn’t need to pay attention. But back to the girl: “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re Max Hammons.”
He smiles his dazzling smile. “That’s right,” he says. “That’s who I am.”
“Holy shit,” the girl whispers. Josie bets she doesn’t even know she said it. “I love you.”
Max touches her very lightly on her trembling arm. “Thank you,” he says, his hand still there. “But listen.” He lowers his voice. “I need to pay attention to her right now.” He indicates Josie with his eyebrows, as though he and the girl were in subtle conspiracy, Josie oblivious. “I wouldn’t want her mad at me.” The dazzling smile again.
“Oh, of course,” the girl stammers. She glances at Josie, her face registering recognition. “Oh,
it’s you,” she says. “I didn’t realize . . . You’re dating Charlie Outlaw.”
Josie gives her a quick, firm smile. “Hi.”
The girl nods vigorously, backing away, her cheeks bright. “Thank you,” she says. And then she retreats to wherever she came from. Max doesn’t watch her go, his eyes on Josie as if no interruption had occurred. From somewhere behind Josie comes a burst of excited laughter.
Josie sighs. Dammit. “I’m not—” she says at the same time Max says, “Are you—” They both stop. “No,” Josie says.
“You’re not?”
“No, I’m not dating him. I was. I’m not now. You don’t know about the interview?”
“What interview?”
“Never mind. The point is we broke up.”
“I’m sorry,” Max says. “If I should be.”
Josie’s eyes find his. She shakes her head. “You know why you shouldn’t be?” she says, with sudden ferocity. “Because he couldn’t do that.” She jerks her head in the direction the girl went.
“Ah,” Max says, drawing out the vowel as if he understands exactly what she means.
“He could never just be like, ‘Now’s not good.’ He couldn’t ever send them away.”
He thought they deserved his time more than I did, Josie thinks, and the anger and grief she feels as she thinks this tells her not to say it aloud. Angry and sad are not what she wants to be. But Charlie didn’t even call her back! If Josie knew how much Charlie loves her—if she believed—she’d know with equal certainty that something’s gone wrong. But she doesn’t believe, so all she has is an itchy little bad feeling, small enough to ignore. She wants to rewind to right before the girl walked up and reintroduced the idea of Charlie. And then erase her and rerecord.
