by Leah Stewart
But Charlie did prove something when he refused to keep walking, and her displays of dominance don’t disprove it. Charlie understands now that he still has power. To use it, he just has to be willing to risk his life.
He is so hungry. What would he eat right now, given any option in the world? The breakfast sandwich from the place in West Hollywood. A sundae from Graeter’s in Cincinnati, hot fudge on black raspberry chip, whipped cream. His father’s Cincinnati chili, steeped for hours with cinnamon and chocolate shavings in the crockpot, which he hasn’t had in years because he no longer eats beef. No—dolsot bibimbap. Dolsot bibimbap from the Korean place where he used to go with Josie. They went there so often that they were recognized as regulars instead of people from TV. After they broke up—after she broke up with him—he went four times in a week hoping to run into her, but she never came, and he hasn’t been since because it hurts, and even to crave the bibimbap hurts, but bibimbap is what he would like to eat right now. They both prefer it with tofu instead of meat. The dish comes steaming in a black stone bowl, too hot to touch, an egg sizzling atop the rice and vegetables. The waitress stirs in the bright red pepper paste—they both like it spicy—and then Charlie picks up a slender slice of mushroom with his chopsticks and eats it, his face pleasantly warm and dewy from the steam. Josie says, “Don’t burn yourself again,” because Charlie has trouble waiting for the rice to cool, and the roof of his mouth has suffered many times for his impatience. “It smells so good,” he says, and she laughs though nothing is funny. She laughs with pleasure: They are together; they are about to eat this food. She says, “Eat the last dumpling.” There were seven yaki mandu and they each ate three and politely left the last one sitting there. He picks it up with his chopsticks and bites it in half, and then offers the other half to her, and she eats the dumpling and then dips her finger into what’s left of the sauce and licks it. “So rude,” he says. “So unladylike.” She grins at him and repeats the action. He stirs his bibimbap, risks a bite. The rice that was at the bottom of the bowl comes to the top golden and crispy.
“You just burned yourself, didn’t you?” Josie says, and Charlie says, “Worth it.”
“You have no regrets?”
“I’d do it again.”
“And you will.”
“I love you,” he says. “Do you hear me? Can you hear me? I love you.”
A shadow falls over him. Charlie looks up to see that Adan is suddenly standing beside him, and at the same time, he registers that he’s been dimly aware of a buzzing sound, at first mingling with the sound of the waves and then growing ever more distinct. “Ben!” Adan says, but he doesn’t stay to explain whether that was fear or excitement making him exclaim. Adan runs over the sand to the edge of the world, lifting his hand to his eyes as a small boat comes into view. He turns and shouts something at Denise and Thomas, waving them forward. Charlie waits until they’ve passed him to get slowly to his feet. As he stands, he realizes one of his legs and a spot on his lower back have fallen asleep, so he shakes the leg, rubs the spot on his back. He starts to drop his towel, but if he does, one of them might take it, so he drapes it over his shoulders and ties it loosely at the front. He can’t risk another loss.
Adan, Thomas, and Denise currently have no interest in Charlie’s towel. They’re paying no attention to Charlie at all, engaged as they are in helping Mystery—because it’s Mystery in the boat, arriving just as they said she would. They wade out to pull her in, and once her boat is onshore, they begin to unload the supplies. An impulse to go help them surfaces. He notes and then discards this impulse, which, of course, under different circumstances he’d follow. One of the many oddities of this experience is how the ordinary impulses arise in these extraordinary circumstances, and now he remembers the moment on the platform, after his fall, when Adan hugged him, and what Charlie felt was rescued. Here are feelings that go with being rescued: gratitude, relief, comfort, indebtedness, admiration. How deeply, bewilderingly at odds those feelings were with the fact that he is Adan’s captive, that if he weren’t Adan’s captive he would never have fallen at all. Everything depends on the circumstances, on the other actors in the scene. He looks behind him at the jungle, the possibility of escape. He has no food. He has no water. He has no idea of the way. He doesn’t think he could run that far before somebody shot him. His leg progresses painfully from numbness to feeling. His first impulse was to hang on to his towel. His second was to go help his captors unload the boat. He reacts to the stimulus of the moment just as he’s been trained. Does he even have an essential self?
Denise looks around at him, as if she’s just recollected her duty. Her gaze feels like the swinging of a gun in his direction, though her gun is on the ground. Perhaps he flinches, perhaps he looks sufficiently cowed standing there in his ridiculous towel—at any rate, she doesn’t feel it’s necessary to keep watching him. She says something to Mystery, who produces a white bag, stained with grease, from the boat. From this bag, Denise extracts something and takes a ferocious bite of it, chewing and swallowing before she passes the bag to Thomas. Mystery has brought them the fried pies, usually stuffed with ground beef, that can be found at roadside stands all over the island. Charlie hasn’t had one because he doesn’t eat beef. Ha ha ha! He doesn’t eat beef!
Now: contradictory impulses, offshoots of the primal one for survival. To stay here away from Denise. To go over there and ask for food. Mystery saves him from decision, coming toward him with a pie in one hand and a plastic grocery bag in the other, and he is so grateful. Gratitude again!
She comes just close enough to extend the pie to him, then takes two steps back. She watches while he eats it, her air suggesting cautious satisfaction, like someone making progress in taming a feral child. He tells himself to eat slowly, to savor, but he can’t. The pie is gone in an instant. It is delicious, though he doesn’t really taste it. He licks his fingers and looks at her, hoping for another. She comes closer and holds out the bag. He restrains himself from snatching it and then tries to restrain his disappointment when he sees there’s no food inside. The bag is full of magazines. “Thank you,” he says.
She nods. “Something to read.”
“Thank you,” he says again.
“You are still hungry?”
“Yes.”
She glances behind her—the others are completely absorbed by food consumption—and then pulls from her pocket another of those little wrapped chocolate cakes. She puts her finger to her lips. “Shhhh.”
He thanks her, yet again, and eats the cake fast. She takes the empty wrapper from him and stuffs it in her pocket. “You read,” she says.
He could eat more—he could eat so much more—but at least the intensity of his hunger has diminished. He tries to think like this: She brought me the food, she brought me the magazines, she has an interest in me and/or an innate kindness and maybe that can be exploited. Instead of like this: If I’m good, she’ll take care of me! The latter response, a natural human reaction, is also how one trains a dog. It makes things easier that both lines of thought lead to the same action. He sits down and opens one of the magazines. Mystery watches for a moment—To confirm his obedience? To take pleasure in his pleasure?—and then rejoins the others. Satiated for the first time in days, they lounge on the beach like vacationers.
Charlie starts with the cover of the magazine, which promises a profile of a movie actor he’s met once or twice. This actor is a handsome guy who first became famous for a gorgeous shirtlessness in mass entertainments but lately has been tackling more complicated roles. Charlie loved the actor’s performance in the movie this profile is designed to promote—the magazine is three months old—so it takes restraint not to flip directly to the story. It’s satisfying to exercise that restraint, as he could not do with the food. He starts at the beginning of the issue. He reads the table of contents. He reads the copy in the ads.
By the time he reaches the pro
file, two-thirds of the way into the magazine, he has a pleasant conviction of having earned it. But when the reporter describes the actor as “defensive” at a personal question, his pleasure turns quickly to annoyance. His annoyance increases when the reporter elicits from the actor the details of his preparation for the role, then comments that it’s tempting to roll your eyes at his pretension. The article on the whole has a tone of fond condescension that infuriates Charlie. In fact, he feels a rage substantially out of proportion to the cause. The reporter wouldn’t call an Oscar-winning critical darling pretentious even if he’d described his process in the exact same words. What does this writer know about acting? Has he ever done it? Has he ever stood alone on a stage? Or tried to believe he’s alone and heartbroken with a camera two inches from his face? They permit you to think yourself an artist only once they’ve decided to anoint you one. Otherwise you need to cut the crap and do what you’re told.
He drops the magazine, picks up another, flips it open with unnecessary force, and there is Josie. He recognizes her immediately, but it takes him a beat or two to realize that. First he feels a quick painful shock and only after does he understand why. The photo is of Josie kissing Max Hammons. Their lips are touching. Her eyes are closed. His hand is on her arm. Beneath it is a column of speculation suggesting that Josie and Max are now a couple, revisiting rumors that they were a couple in the past, that perhaps they’ve secretly been a couple all along.
Charlie glances up at the kidnappers to make sure they’re not watching him. They’re not. He checked because he’s crying, and he doesn’t want them to see him cry. He lies back on the sand and puts the magazine over his face. Rivulets run down his temples to dampen his hair. He tries to sniff inaudibly. In his weakened state, he believes every word he just read. Yes, it’s a trashy magazine. He appeared in a gossip item in this magazine himself, at a restaurant with a costar he was never even remotely dating. But sometimes that shit is true. The article makes him believe, as he hasn’t believed before, that the world will go on without him. In the story of Josie’s life, he doesn’t get a single mention. He doesn’t matter. He isn’t a person. In fact, he’s a commodity, and in making him one aren’t the kidnappers just completing the process he himself started? He doesn’t matter, not even to Josie. He is an erasure mark. He will die out here—this thought hits him with the force of revelation. He’s feared it many times, but now he believes it. He will die out here. He cries with a helplessness that feels like dissolving.
Suddenly he feels the magazine rising from his face, and he lifts his head, startled, to see Mystery regarding him. “You are all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“I see you shaking.”
“I’m fine.”
She looks at the magazine. “This upset you?”
“No,” he says.
“I can see you crying.”
“I have a lot of reasons to be upset.”
“You were not crying before the magazine. I thought you wanted the magazine.”
“I did. I do.”
“Then why do you cry?”
Why does he answer her? We all have moments when we can’t resist the urge to say what’s true. Charlie has those moments more than most. He points at Josie, frozen there like that. With Max Hammons! Who sprang out of Charlie’s nightmares to take his place. He says, “I love her, and that’s not me.”
“You love this lady?”
“Yes.”
Mystery holds the picture close to her eyes. He waits for her to laugh or frown with skepticism or at least ask another question. But she does a surprising thing. She reaches out to wipe his wet cheek with her finger, persisting through his automatic flinch. She looks from the picture to his face two or three times. Then she returns his magazine.
Four.
Three actresses sit on a long bench against the wall in a small antechamber; on either side of them are the doors to the bathrooms. All three parked outside the gates of a studio lot, then showed a photo ID to a security guard, who gave them badges that allowed them to proceed inside. They walked to a three-story building, entered a huge lobby, crossed it to the check-in desk. The guard at the desk has a quirk: He plays the saxophone while he sits there, a jazz sound track, sometimes sprightly, sometimes mournful, that to an anxious actor running lines in his head can be pleasant uplift or jangling interruption or ironic commentary. Whatever the feelings of these three women, they each smiled at the guard as they signed in at his desk. Then they went down the hall to the antechamber and took seats, one by one, on the bench.
Eventually the woman from the business affairs office came out with three clipboards containing their three contracts, and they signed. The contract woman has hair that makes one think of a cocker spaniel, but her demeanor is decidedly unfriendly, even mean. As she waited for all three of them to sign away seven years of their lives for a part only one of them will get, she embodied all the disappointment and cruelty of their business, or at the very least the fact that none of the contracts is an offer, that the women have to say yes first, like agreeing to a marriage in advance of the proposal just in case someone decides to propose. They all signed and smiled and thanked her as if they were already on camera.
Now they wait to be summoned, one at a time, by a casting assistant. That person will escort them into the office belonging to the studio’s head of casting. In there are three couches positioned in a U-shape around a coffee table, a TV on the wall completing the square. The actor testing stands in front of the TV. The couches are crowded with nine people in suits. Six more people in suits sit in chairs squeezed behind the couches and wherever else they fit.
The actresses have twelve pages of material to perform once they enter the room, material revised since the original audition, for which all three of them had considerably more time to prepare. Each of them wishes the sides hadn’t been revised or at least that they’d been given more time with the revisions. They don’t care if the revisions have made the script better—they care about getting the part.
Two of the women know each other. In their twenties, they took improv classes together at the Upright Citizens Brigade. They are thirty-two and thirty-three, respectively, and they have each starred on a sitcom. One was part of an ensemble on a moderately successful show that ran five seasons. The other was a breakout character on a critically beloved, low-rated show that ran for three. One came very close to getting SNL. The other has had a couple of small but memorable film roles. Each sees the other as her primary competition, as it seems odd that the third woman is here to test at all, not being a comic actor. Maybe she knows the casting director.
The third woman—Josie—does not need access to their thoughts to know what’s in them. She, too, wonders what she’s doing there. Her agent came down on her quote for this, and yet she’d still guess it’s higher than either of theirs. She’s ten years older and more expensive and not known for comedy. Why would they hire her? They didn’t even really want her to come in. Josie feels trapped in the sort of story she’s always hated, the kind where characters exist only to demonstrate the inexorable workings of fate. She does not want to audition today. Auditioning today seems entirely futile. And yet she is helpless not to do it.
Last night, instead of prepping for this test, Josie went for a drink with Cecelia and did not have a drink. She marks that as the first choice she’s made in fear of hurting the baby. Now she wonders if the anxiety she’s feeling right now is hurting the baby. She sees the approaching edge of what will take some time to hit her fully, the fact that from now on there will be a baby to consider. Even if she got this job, how could she do it with the baby coming? If she doesn’t get this job or another one, any other one, how will she support the baby? When she has someone else to feed, what will her mother say then?
This audition is for a comedy.
“Good luck,” Josie says to the first actress, who is standing now to follow th
e casting assistant down the hall. As she departs, Josie and the second actress exchange quick polite smiles of rueful commiseration, then go back to studying the sides. The last line puzzles Josie. The character says it to a man she’s dating. “You know what? I’ve got some pineapple soda.” Because the scene takes place in the bedroom, Josie assumes that pineapple soda is a reference to some kind of sex act, but googling did not teach her what. All she got were recipes for pineapple mint soda or strawberry pineapple soda or links to buy pineapple soda. It’s news to her that pineapple soda exists. She can’t bring herself to ask the other actress if she knows what the line means.
She should have asked Cecelia if she knew. But last night at the bar, it seemed in bad taste to talk about anything except what had happened to Cecelia: Her movie part went to someone else. “Jamal’s getting tired of listening to me whine,” Cecelia said. “He’s like, uh-huh, but you’ve got a job, and I’ve got to get the kids to do their homework. And I know, I know, but no one stops him from writing whatever poem he wants to write. No one’s like, hey, I know you wanted to try a villanelle about birds, but you’ve got to stick to free verse about politics. This part was so good. This part was so good.”
