by Leah Stewart
She used to believe she could be a hero, and that is why they let her be one, but now a long time has passed in which they’ve told her she can’t be much of anything, and she can’t find her way back to her original belief. How we love the idea of the person who can’t be broken, but that is a national fantasy. Find the right circumstances and there is no one impervious to diminishment. Just ask Charlie. And even if Josie could become impervious, how could she then be a good actor? Read all the acting books. Impervious is the opposite of what they tell you to be. Lee Strasberg: “For a human being, too much sensitivity is very difficult to live with. For an actor, there is no such thing as too much sensitivity.” And, yes, Josie, like all actors, is a human being, but Lee Strasberg knew that as a fact of secondary importance. Sensitive: highly attuned to nuance. Sensitive: easily wounded. What a shame that what is fine is also fragile. Yes, Josie, it hurts to be too sensitive, but for you there is no such thing. Impervious, you still wouldn’t get what you wanted, unless what you wanted was to stop wanting at all.
In the audition room, over and over, an actor is made or broken. That’s bad enough. Imagine if they already know who you are and don’t want you. Imagine if you can’t even get in the room. Before she got the part on Kidnapped, and then the part on You & Me, both of which came to her because of Alter Ego, Josie had not had an audition in eight months. Over the phone, her mother has been suggesting alternate careers. Josie has seventy-five credits listed on IMDb, and her mother thinks she should go into real estate. “I just don’t want you to run out of money,” her mother said, and Josie reassured her that she won’t and said what she always says when she wants her mother to drop this subject, which is to talk vaguely about syndication and streaming and DVDs, but the truth is, if it goes on like this, she might run out of money. She’s been considering getting an appearance agent—she knows her former castmates Daniel and August both have one, maybe the same one—and joining the fan convention circuit. Tampa. Albuquerque. Cincinnati. She looked at the website for the Phoenix convention, and when she saw that the actors scheduled to appear are not only known for previous roles but currently working, she wondered if she’d even make the list. But there are plenty of smaller ones that would definitely want her, or so says Daniel. “Only do the ones where they give you a guarantee,” he told her last night in the hotel bar. “Because, yeah, people pay forty or fifty dollars a pop for the autograph or the photo, but I’ve never earned more than the guarantee.”
“You like doing them?”
He shrugged. He’d read some doubt in her voice because he was stiffer now, his voice wary. “It’s fun.”
“It must be nice to see how many people still care about the show,” she said, trying to make up for whatever judgment she’d accidentally implied.
“It’s awesome,” he said, relaxing again. “They bring you presents—pictures they’ve drawn of you, or somebody brought me a Dinky Toys tank because she’d read I collect them. And I didn’t have that one, so I was psyched. Every interaction is positive. They love you.”
Josie asked about Dinky Toys, which she’d never heard of, and which proved to be small die-cast vehicles made in England in the middle of the twentieth century, and then she pursued the question of how Daniel acquired this interest and learned that his grandfather was British and that Daniel’s mother used to take him back to Wales to visit him. In Wales, he’d play with his grandfather’s toys, saved from childhood, and when his grandfather died, he left the little trucks and double-decker buses to Daniel, and Daniel grew misty telling her all this, which was fascinating and nothing she’d ever known about him in all these many years. She felt a tender sadness at the idea of his being so touched by a gift from a stranger even though she knows she’d be equally touched by it, and maybe that’s one reason why she’s afraid to take this step into the convention world, open herself to so much unequivocal love, and make a lot of money for receiving it. Such a step feels irrevocable.
There’s also this story, which she didn’t tell Daniel, hasn’t told anyone except Charlie. A few years ago, just before she met Charlie, she accepted an offer, through her manager, to go to an Alter Ego fan convention in London. They paid her $16,000 in cash. The actual convention part was fine, but one of her duties was to attend a cocktail party, where she posed for picture after picture, and then, as people got drunker, groping crept into those encounters, hands crept up her side toward her breasts, and though she shifted and avoided as best she could, she was still clinging resolutely to her role, which was to be available and polite, and so she didn’t shout or push anyone or storm out. By the time she got back to her hotel room, she felt dirty. She felt like she’d left a little piece of herself at that party, and she wouldn’t ever get it back.
Three.
This convention, of course, is on a different order, an operation of enormous scope and size. There are 100,000 ticket holders, and bodyguards and studio publicity and hair and makeup, and big stars throwing parties that smaller stars hope to attend. Josie’s itinerary includes a long list of parties she could have gone to last night, had she so desired, and also “optional lounges,” sponsored by corporations or magazines, where she could go to “relax and escape the rush” for the price of being photographed while she did so.
The first item on today’s agenda, after 6:15 hair and makeup and 8:15 breakfast and briefing, is the roundtable discussion for the Syfy special. She needs to be on for this, so she’s glad that she managed to sleep last night. In fact, she slept so deeply she missed the alarm and woke to hair and makeup knocking on her door, and while they adjusted her appearance, she drifted between realities, playing out reunion scenes with Charlie. All through breakfast, trying to ignore this alternate life, she concentrates intensely on what the others are saying, so intensely that she sometimes doesn’t realize it’s her turn to speak. This doesn’t bode well for the roundtable.
The moderator is a magazine writer who was a big early promoter of the show. He greets Josie with admiration and delight, and then after he poses his first question (“What’s it like to be all together again?”), there’s a moment of silence before she realizes the whole table is looking at her. Not at Cecelia, not at Max, but at her. They’re deferring to her, waiting for her to answer. Of course! When it comes to this show, she never stopped being the star.
All right. Okay. She’s team captain. She knows that job. In fact, that job is a welcome relief from her thoughts. That job insists she be here. She speaks first when it’s clear no one’s sure what to say, she brings up funny anecdotes about Max and Cecelia and tosses them the ball, she draws out August, who’s shy and has barely spoken. She talks about Bill’s fantastic scripts, her admiration and gratitude. She sets a good example. Everyone is sweetly grateful. Everyone is charmingly sincere.
As the hour winds down, the moderator asks her, “What was it like when Max left the show?”
“Oh,” Josie says. She glances at Max. “That was awful.”
“We were so broken up,” Max says. “We could barely get through our last scene together.”
“What was your last scene?” the moderator asks.
They say together, “It was a fight.” Josie goes on, “It was that fight that goes wrong, early in the episode, when Bronwyn accidentally punches Malachi.”
“It was supposed to be funny,” Bill interjects. “But they kept playing it like it was the saddest thing in the world.”
“It wasn’t just supposed to be funny,” Josie says. “Bronwyn was so angry at him for leaving. That punch wasn’t completely accidental.”
Bill smiles fondly at her. “That’s why I loved working with you. You really understood that character. You really understood my writing.” He adds, in a self-mocking tone, “You really got me.”
“So the good-bye scene wasn’t the last one you filmed?” the moderator asks.
“No, but it felt like it in the moment,” Max says.
Bill says, “You’d like to be able to shoot things in order so the actors could follow the natural emotional arc. Like, how much easier to let them cry and emote in their actual final scene than try to stop them in one that has a completely different tone. But, alas, there’s scheduling guest stars and locations and money and stuff.”
“Petty concerns,” Cecelia says with a smile.
“So the good-bye scene was also hard to shoot,” the moderator says.
“Yes,” Max and Josie say together. Then Max says, “I really felt like I was saying good-bye to my first love. Remember, Josie was my first on-screen love. Our relationship, on-screen and off, was profoundly important to me.”
The moderator looks at Josie. She shakes her head. “I’m afraid to talk about it. I’m honestly afraid I’ll cry.”
Max rises from his seat and rounds the table to give her a hug. “Aw,” everybody says. Josie swallows hard. She tells herself she is acting so that she can hug him back and not worry about giving him the wrong impression, so that she can keep this team-captain feeling of being in control. But wouldn’t it be nice to let him hold her while she wept, mourning the end of the idea of him. That beautiful idea, which could have saved her from facing the real-life loss of Charlie.
“You guys were great,” the moderator says, when the cameras are off and he’s shaking everybody’s hand. “Please make a movie.”
They laugh and thank him and walk out together with the kind of mutual understanding particular to a group of people who once shared a purposeful intimacy. They have seven more interviews to do before the panel, which starts at three. Max complains of his hangover. Cecelia is giddy about her all-but-certain part and exhausted from being kept awake most of the night by her giddiness. But Josie is warmed up now, and my God, it feels so good to do something right. The interviews are brief segments of banter for the internet, and she knocks them down one after another like a batter whose every swing connects. Publicity and their bodyguards shepherd them from one hotel to another, hair and makeup in frantic action as they go. Max grows increasingly sluggish and Cecelia’s answers begin to tend toward the inchoate but that’s okay, because Josie is on. “Thank God for you,” Cecelia says, after Josie rescues her from an incoherent, rambling answer. “I forgot how good you are at this.”
Josie says, “I did, too.”
At two o’clock, they’re escorted through back hallways into a tiny room in the convention center, where they eat boxed lunches of turkey sandwiches and apples. The moderator, a woman named Patricia, goes over the run of show: introductions, clips of deleted scenes from the new DVD set, Q & A. Even Josie feels her exhaustion now that she’s sitting down, confronting how ravenous she is, so ravenous that she eats the entire subpar sandwich. She sags into her chair, and there is Charlie, back in her head again, without distractions to keep him and his silence at bay. If things were normal, she’d call or text him during a break like this. Go away, she thinks, although, of course, she wants the opposite.
When, one by one, their names get called, and they hear the audience roaring to convince them they are loved—don’t worry, they aren’t tired anymore. Bill comes out last, lifting two bottles of champagne above his head. From beneath the table he produces plastic champagne flutes. Max pops the corks, to whooping and applause, and Cecelia fills the flutes and passes them down the line. “To Alter Ego,” one of the other actors cries, and Max adds, “To twenty years!” and Josie adds, “To Bill!” and then Bill, of course, says, “To the cast!” and then Cecelia and Max simultaneously say, “To Josie!” and the crowd erupts in cheers. They clink glasses with whomever they can reach, wearing wide misty smiles. Then, as the crowd calms down, Josie leans into the mic and says, “Let’s do this,” and the cheering starts again.
The questions recycle much of what they’ve already talked about today—what was it like to work with each other, what were their favorite episodes—but with considerably greater specificity, as the more intense the fans, the more they want to know why you made that particular face when you said that particular line. Josie is ready and waiting for the kiss question. She’s surprised it takes as long as it does. She’s pleased as well as surprised, as it suggests the show really is the thing they care about.
Then a little girl, about eight or nine, wearing a shirt that bears an image of Josie’s much younger face, comes to the mic. The crowd murmurs its approval of her precocious fandom. “Hi, sweetie,” Josie says. “Do you have a question?”
“Yes,” she says.
“What is it?”
“Are you and Max dating?”
The crowd laughs, and so does Josie. “That’s not what I was expecting,” she says. “Did your mother tell you to ask that?”
The child shakes her head. “You kissed,” she says.
“You saw that picture?”
“No,” the child says. “My dad told me. He wanted me to ask.”
The audience erupts in cheers and laughter.
“Where’s your dad?” Josie asks.
The girl points out a man, also wearing an Alter Ego shirt, grinning and blushing hard. He waves.
“Sent your kid to do your dirty work, huh?” Josie says.
He shrugs elaborately, palms up to the ceiling.
“You must really want to know.”
“Yeah,” he shouts. “We all want to know.”
The audience shouts and claps its agreement.
“Sorry,” Josie says. She shakes her head. “Nothing to know.”
“Just a friendly good-bye,” Max says. “Between friends.” The audience groans, and he says, “I know. It’s disappointing.”
Cecelia says, “They’re friends who used to make out a lot. It gets to be a habit.”
Josie nods in a way that allows as how she’s right.
The girl says, “Okay,” and winds her way back toward her dad. The woman who was waiting behind her abandons whatever she’d meant to ask in favor of a follow-up. “So you and Max have never been a couple?”
“We are not now and never have been a couple. I swear.” Josie looks at Max, and says, in mock dismay, “No one ever believes us.”
“It’s all the making out,” Cecelia says. “It’s confusing.”
“Make out now!” someone shouts.
“Are you crazy?” Josie frowns with mock reproof in the shouter’s direction. “What kind of convention do you think this is?”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Max says, to whoops of agreement.
“Next question,” Bill says, waving away this conversation.
The woman at the mic moves as if to relinquish her spot but then darts back with animal abruptness, startling the man who was stepping up to the mic. She blurts, “Are you pregnant?” Then she jolts off to the side.
“What? No.” Josie looks down. “But I am getting rid of this dress.”
The audience laughs.
“Okay,” Max says. “That was weird.”
“Yeah, but why did she ask me that?”
“You don’t look pregnant,” Cecelia says.
“Thank you, Cecelia.”
Cecelia nods. “I got your back.”
“None of us thinks you look pregnant,” Bill says. He turns to the audience. “Does anyone think she looks pregnant?”
“No!” they roar back.
“Okay, but I’d still like to know why she asked me that.” She leans back, then into the mic again, deepening her voice. “Not to be too neurotic.” The audience laughs. “But seriously. Where’d she go?”
“Here!” someone shouts, and Josie spots the woman and waves her back.
“Come explain yourself,” Max says.
The man waiting his turn at the mic steps ostentatiously back as the woman returns. She says, with sheepish pleasure, “I just always wanted you and Max to have a baby.”
Josie lets her mouth fall open. �
�You’re kidding.”
“I always thought it would be a really cute baby.”
“So just a breeding program,” Cecelia says. “Not a comment on your outfit.”
“Okay. I’ll accept that.”
“Let’s get this back on track,” Bill says. “I think what the audience really wants to know is, Max, are you pregnant?”
Max takes a comic pause. “How’d you know?”
Bill shrugs. “You have a glow.”
Cecelia points at the man who’s been waiting. “You have an important question. I can tell all this banter’s driving you nuts.”
“No, it’s funny,” he says, without conviction, and the audience roars again.
“We’re not funny,” Max says sorrowfully.
“What’s your question?” Cecelia asks.
“It’s actually for you,” the man says.
“Wonderful.”
“I want to know, when Vivi was evil . . .” The man goes on talking, and Cecilia gives a good answer, the audience sighing its appreciation in response. Josie listens but doesn’t. She makes what she hopes are properly attentive faces. She’s done so well today—she’s pretended there is no weirdness with Max, she’s hardly thought about Charlie at all—but now she’s rattled. Why is she so rattled? She takes a good long swig of her champagne, hears someone shout, “Go Josie!” and lifts her empty glass in salute. A voice in her head speaks with startling conviction. You shouldn’t have done that, it says. Because you’re pregnant.
