What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  “How is Jamal?” Josie asks.

  “He’s good. I told you he won that second-book contest, right?” To Max, she adds, “That’s how you get published when you’re a poet. You win a contest.”

  Max says, “That’s also how you get a part.”

  “True.” Cecelia smiles at her screen. “Very true. Must be why we understand each other.” She starts typing again, still wearing her inward smile.

  Here it comes again, Josie. That longing you cannot conquer and cannot bear. Right now, at this very minute, Charlie is being herded into the rain forest by people with guns. If you knew that, what would you do? What lengths would you go to to get what you want?

  “I miss the fight scenes,” Josie says. “I miss kicking ass.”

  “I miss watching you kick ass,” Max says. “You were so good at it.”

  “You were, too.”

  “We were good at it together.”

  Max leans into the table, eyes on Josie as though Cecelia weren’t there, and whispers, “I don’t know what countenance means either.”

  “I think it means you agreed to something,” Josie says. “Or it means your face. Your ‘fair countenance,’” she quotes from somewhere, and Max gives her that slow, knowing grin.

  “My handsome face,” he says.

  “All right, you two,” Cecelia says, and for a startled moment Josie thinks she’s scolding them for flirting, but, no, she got a text from the director and she’s leaving to go meet him at another bar. Josie’s nervous about being left alone with Max, but she also wants to be left alone with Max. So it’s with a complicated mixture of emotion that, as they’re saying good-bye to Cecelia, she spots the Alter Ego showrunner and two of their other castmates headed their way. They squeeze into the booth, so that Josie is pressed closer to Max, and as she talks to Bill, the showrunner, who sits on her other side, and Max talks to the other actors, she is hyperaware of Max’s thigh lightly touching hers, his arm brushing against her arm. At one point, when their arms are touching, she notices Bill noticing, his expression speculative. Though he makes no comment, he looks at her with that assessing air, which provokes her to say, in a voice pitched below the noise of the bar, “Nothing’s going on.”

  Eyebrows up, he murmurs back, “The whole freaking world saw that picture.”

  “That was just a friendly good-bye.”

  He cocks his head, adding skepticism to skepticism.

  “I swear. It’s only become a thing because some asshole took that picture. I promise, Bill. You know there’s never been anything. We just have chemistry.”

  “All right, I believe you. Because I know when you’re lying.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m an actor.”

  “So you’re lying?”

  “No, I’m not lying. I’m just saying you wouldn’t know if I was. But I’m not.”

  He concedes with a shrug. “Your life is weird.”

  “You just now noticed?”

  “You know a question’s inevitable, right?”

  “During the panel?”

  “Yeah. Someone will most definitely ask.”

  “Okay. I’ll come up with a good answer.”

  Bill jerks his beer at Max. “Better get him on board with it, too.” He sees Josie hesitate and says, “I have to tell you, if you don’t want to talk about it there’s something to talk about.”

  “Fine, fine,” Josie says. “I’m tired of observant people.”

  “You’re one of us. Don’t hate on your own tribe.” He smiles. “If you do get together, I want all the credit.”

  “If we do get together, I will write you an ode.”

  He laughs. “An ode?”

  “An ode. An ardent ode.”

  “Ardent,” Bill repeats. “That’s a good word.”

  “You can have it,” Josie says. “I give it to you.”

  Bill puts his hand affectionately on her shoulder. “I miss you,” he says. “My star.”

  By the time she is alone with Max, when everyone else has wisely stumbled off to bed, he is very drunk. She knows this because of the smile he turns her way as soon as Bill is gone—it’s supposed to be sexy and inviting but slides tipsily toward goofy. “Hi,” he says. She herself is not drunk at all. She nursed that vodka tonic a long time before switching to water because she doesn’t sleep well when she drinks and hair and makeup will be at her door at 6:15. And also because there was a part of her that wanted to erase all doubts with alcohol and tumble into bed with Max, but another part of her, the part that’s in charge, thought it might be smarter to hang on to her doubts for now.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “So,” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “Everybody thinks we’ve got something going.”

  She nods. “Bill asked me.”

  “I thought that was what was happening. You weren’t that subtle with the whispering. Daniel and August asked me, too. Everybody wants to know. Enquiring minds.”

  “Bill thinks they’ll ask us tomorrow on the panel.”

  “Who, the moderator?”

  “No, the audience. Do you think the moderator would? We could ask her not to.”

  “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “You’re right. That makes too much of it. We need a plan, though.”

  “Sure, okay. A plan.” He smiles again. “You know the audience will love it.”

  “I know, but what are we going to say?”

  He shrugs. “What do you think they want to hear?”

  “That we’re really Bronwyn and Malachi and we’re secretly married and I have superpowers. And we have tiny superpowered babies.”

  “Flying babies.”

  “Flying? What show were you on? I couldn’t fly; you couldn’t fly. Ass-kicking babies.”

  “Ninja babies.”

  “So the plan is we’ll tell them we have magical ninja babies.”

  He laughs. “You have a better one?”

  She considers. “Okay, someone will definitely ask us if we’re dating, or something like that. How about I say, ‘Sadly, no.’”

  “You’ll probably get an aww. And then I’ll say, ‘I know, it’s a shame.’”

  “That’ll work. We can keep it going in that vein.”

  “Someone might ask if the kiss was real.”

  “We can say, ‘Well, you know, we touched lips. If that’s what you mean by real.’”

  “That’s good.”

  “Well, I’m good.”

  “You are good. You’re really kind of amazing.”

  Josie scoffs.

  “I’m serious. You’re just . . . amazing. You’re brave. You’re strong. You’re inspiring.”

  “Brave and inspiring. That’s what that girl said. It makes me feel like I have a serious illness.”

  “What girl?”

  “The waitress on You & Me. I can’t think of her name.”

  “The one who needed all the takes?”

  “That one.”

  “Don’t try to distract me.”

  “Would I do that?”

  “You’ve never been able to take a compliment.”

  “Really? Never?” Though she knows this is true. Charlie used to tell her to close her eyes when he wanted to be earnest, to say that she was smart and funny and the best actress he knew.

  “You probably don’t remember—once I wanted to tell you how much I liked the way you’d said a line, and you all but punched me in the face every time I tried.”

  “Were we doing a fight scene?”

  He thinks. “Were we?”

  “Because that would explain it.”

  He performs exaggerated frustration, clenching his fists. “Let me give you a compliment!”

  She clenches her own fists, pounds them on the ta
ble. “No!”

  “Why not?!”

  Why not? Why not? A good actor strives to make the self a malleable instrument. The danger, when you succeed in making the self a malleable instrument, is that you’re not the only one who can play it. You want to trust flattery, you see, but you can’t. The fact that you want to trust it so badly is the reason that you can’t. If you believe what people tell you about yourself, you’re instantly gullible, instantly vulnerable. You become whatever they say you are. There’s nothing, good or bad, you won’t believe.

  “I surrender,” Josie says. “You can give me a compliment.”

  “You can’t look away or make a joke.”

  “Oh God. Okay. I’ll have to close my eyes.” And she is sorry she said that because that routine was only for Charlie, and now she’s used it in this scene and made it a little less real, a little less hers. She closes her eyes anyway, to disappear. Max touches her gently, runs his fingers down her jawline, like he used to do on the show, like she’s done herself before in a performance but doesn’t think people do very often in real life, or at least not the people who’ve been in love with her. We accept that as love, on TV and in the movies, as we accept the flavor of certain candies as watermelon or grape. That’s not what Charlie used to do. What Charlie would do was put his mouth very close to her ear so that his breath tickled her skin, and she’d smile like a person on the verge of laughing, and then he’d say, “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh,” with laughter in his voice, and she’d struggle not to, and then he might kiss her and say, “Keep your eyes closed,” and then he’d say whatever it was he wanted to say and have her listen, have her believe he meant.

  But Max runs his fingers down her jaw. “You’re amazing, you really are. I’ve always been a little in love with you, Bronwyn.”

  It takes her a second to hear it. Then she opens her eyes, sees the forthright desire on his face. No sheepishness, no wincing, no joke. He doesn’t realize.

  He called her by her character’s name.

  She musters a teasing, skeptical smile.

  He called her by her character’s name!

  “I’m serious,” he says. “I’ve always been a little in love with you. Don’t look at me like that! Do I need to make you close your eyes again?”

  “You’ve always been a little in love with her.”

  He frowns. “With who?”

  “With Bronwyn.”

  “With you, Josie. Don’t you think I know the difference?”

  No, you clearly don’t, Max, not at this moment, and it is striking Josie now that maybe you never have. It’s true that Josie was flirting with you because she wanted—in some dark corner of her psyche that it distresses her to acknowledge—to be with someone who didn’t know the difference, to feel again, if briefly, that there was no difference. But there is a difference, there is. She could pretend otherwise, but do you want to be with her if she’s acting? If you do, she doesn’t want to be with you.

  She was never acting with Charlie. Not even when she was Beatrice and he was Benedick.

  She lifts her hand. She runs her fingers down his jawline, doing it slowly, on her face an expression of tender regret. Good actors make acting look easy, so people pay them the compliment of thinking that it is. “It’s late. I’m going to bed.”

  “Can I come?”

  She laughs, though she, Josie Lamar, would rather cry. He is not Charlie, and she wants Charlie. She was deluding herself to think she could recast the role. “I have to sleep. Early morning.”

  “Tomorrow then,” he says.

  She wants Charlie, and what good does it do to be so sure of that now? She’s afraid even to text him again. She has to perform herself tomorrow—she has to be the Josie Lamar who is funny and friendly and confident—and if she endures another cycle of hope and disappointment, she will fall apart. “Tomorrow,” she agrees.

  Two.

  It would be an injustice to Josie to assume she is always as uncertain as she has been of late. It’s an injustice Josie herself has been guilty of committing, constructing her self-image out of her weaker moments. We all shape-shift, of course. But not all of us know we’re doing it. Not all of us do it on purpose. Not all of us embrace our ability to transform as our essential quality. When you know you can be different people, sometimes it’s hard to figure out which one you are.

  To understand Josie—to understand an actor—first understand what it’s like to audition. Know that to seek love and approval is to court their opposites. Auditions hold out the promise of joyous achievement for which you must risk the far more likely possibility of rejection, disappointment, humiliation, despair. Still, far worse than auditioning is not getting an audition at all. You want those auditions so badly. When you get one, your agent tells you that you have an appointment, maybe several days in advance, maybe the night before. You get a script and are told to prepare certain scenes. You and your competition all arrive around the same time in an office in an office building. There’s a sign-in sheet on a clipboard by the front door. Past that you see a desk and a guy texting behind it, indifferent to you or doing a good job of pretending to be. Don’t ask him for his stapler because you forgot to staple your headshot to your résumé. He’ll be annoyed and won’t hide it. This is why he keeps a dish of highlighters, pencils, and staplers beside the sign-up sheet for the newer actors who failed to highlight their lines before they came in, who failed to do their stapling. If you use these supplies, that will mark you as unprofessional or a novice, and either you’ll be flustered already by your own obvious inadequacy or you’re so annoyingly oblivious that you’re probably not any good. Maybe you’ll get the part anyway, for being handsome or beautiful. If you are neither handsome nor beautiful nor good, then what are you doing there? You sign in. You’ll be read in the order you appear on the list. The sides—the pages you’re to read—are there, too, and if you know what you’re doing, you check the sides to see if the scenes have changed since you were given the script.

  Then you find a chair and wait. The room is full of people who look like you. If you’re a middle-aged white woman, like Josie, the room is full of middle-aged white women. The auditioning room is the great equalizer. Some of them used to be famous. They’re doing the thing that people do when they used to be famous, making themselves unnecessarily visible, either by trying too hard to be seen or by trying too hard not to be seen. The ones in the former category might, for instance, find it necessary to have a loud phone conversation with their agents. The ones in the latter category might be tucked into corners, turned away and inward in their chairs, like they’re in danger of being accosted for their autographs. You can tell their money situation by their shoes. They project whatever quality worked for them when they were hot, when they were in hit shows. If it would be very easy for you to be just like them, and if you very much don’t want to be, you spend your time in the waiting room thinking less about the part and more about how to walk the line, so narrow it’s invisible, between caring too much and making an obvious pretense that you don’t care at all.

  Then they call you in to read, and from the moment you enter the room, they are alert to everything about you—your body, your walk, your hair, your face, your nervous laugh, how awkward you are when the assistant clips the mic on, how you got prickly when they cheerfully asked you for gossip about the other actors on your old hit show. Sometimes they know you won’t get the part as soon as you walk in the door and nevertheless must enact the charade. This necessitates an immunity to your hope, to everyone’s hope. Without detachment, their jobs would be unbearable. They say, “Great!” They tell you you made interesting choices. (You know they say those things all day and most of the time they’re lying. But they mean it sometimes! Do they mean it when they say it to you?) When the audition is over, you start to walk out still wearing the mic clipped to your shirt, and the assistant stops you, and you say, “I’m taking it with me,”
and the assistant laughs politely, though he’s had this exact exchange ten thousand times. The door closes behind you, and on the other side, in that soundproof room where you just wept or shouted or seduced, they praise you or they take you apart. Later, your headshot will either be pinned to the board where they display the casts of their shows or filed in a cabinet under your gender, race, and age.

  An actor might believe she can play any part if given the chance, that any and all transformations are possible. A casting director doesn’t believe that. A casting director is looking for the particular set of traits a particular actor can embody, for what each actor brings to a role. Does it even matter how well you perform when you say the lines? It’s easy to think it doesn’t, especially when the report you get later is that you were too old or too tall or didn’t have quite the right look. What is quite the right look? You have no idea. Could you have achieved it if you’d worn different clothes, done something else with your hair? When you’re rejected—and you are almost always rejected—the thing that’s being rejected is not your work but you. Do you see how easy it would be to let that destroy you? When Josie was cast as Bronwyn Kyle, she brought herself to that audition, and she turned out to be exactly what they wanted. After the show ended, she kept doing that, and it worked at first, and then it worked less often, and then it stopped working much at all. Over and over she wasn’t what they wanted. So the question shifted from What can I bring to this? to What do they want? Whatever it was she thought they wanted, she tried to be it. She second-guessed her instincts. She pretzeled herself. She was driven by the whip of desperation, and casting people can read desperation. Desperation is not what they’re looking for.

  Why did she get the part of Bronwyn Kyle? Josie plays three conditions crucial to that character especially well—uncertainty, intensity, determination. She is excellent at the kind of close-up in which the gaze firms, the jaw tightens. The moments when self-doubt and indecision give way to resolve are Josie’s forte. (She is also particularly good at longing and the struggle to repress it. She is good at the tug-of-war between emotion and control.) In high school, along with all the other seniors, Josie took a standardized test designed to measure aptitude for the military. After that, she got calls from a recruiter for the Marines. More than once, when asked by an interviewer how she knew she could play a hero, she said, smiling, “Well, I could have been a Marine.” Later, during increasingly difficult times, that thought could be employed to give her confidence, and then, like so many other things that had once given her confidence, it grew to seem a placebo that she had mistaken for a cure. Dumbo’s feather, which never actually made him fly.