The Novelist & The Actor

The woman and the man were eating chicken piccata. The man moaned after his first bite. 

“What are these, tart little peas?” he said, referring to the capers. “God damn.”

The woman had cooked the dinner, and rather quickly too. Despite her haste, she had cooked it perfectly. 

Like many men and women, these two were married. But unlike many married couples, the man and woman did not see each other very often. The man was an actor. The woman was a novelist. Because of this, they were often kept apart. 

While apart the man and the woman were often interviewed. The woman would say, “My husband, the actor.” The man would say, “My wife, the novelist.” As if their interviewers did not know the two were spouses. But the man and the woman were both quite famous and their interviewers knew all about them. Still, their fans enjoyed the news drawn from these interviews, even if they rarely went anywhere new. 

Before yesterday the man and the woman had not seen each other in over a month. The man had been on set, in Paris, where he was interviewed six times. The woman had been touring the West Coast, where she was interviewed two or three times at each stop of her fifteen-stop reading tour. But, finally, they were back together, in New York, where they would each remain for six weeks. Besides a few separately scheduled interviews, they'd be spending quite a bit of time together.

***

When the man and the woman finished the piccata, they had a brief conversation about their schedules. They had several appearances to make. A gala. They agreed they ought to make an outing to the botanical garden. And what about a weekend in Rhinebeck? When they finished discussing their schedules, the man rose from his chair, gathered up the dishes from the table, and brought them into the kitchen. He rinsed the dishes in the sink then put them into the dishwasher. He closed the door of the dishwasher and stared at the machine’s control panel. A very puzzling control panel. They’d moved into the apartment earlier that year. The man had only used the dishwasher three or four times. Who designed this thing? the man wondered. 

***

This six-week reunion was more nerve-wracking for the man than for the woman. The man was an eccentric. Or so he’d read in the various introductions to the many interviews he’d given (as well as in the reviews of his many movies, reviews he often found too harsh). He’d always felt rather normal, rather sane, not eccentric. Yes, he was definitely sane. He was just a rather free person. Most other people were not free. They were too afraid to be free, too conservative. That's just how it goes in a society. If the man was eccentric, he felt it was because he was simply a bit freer than the average bloke. But if you read the introductions to the interviews more closely than the man did, you would know the main reason the man was categorized an eccentric was not for his liberal spirit but because he was a practitioner of The Method, which was a wee bit wacky. Always pretending to be different people. The woman had testified to the eccentricity of her husband's practice quite frequently in her interviews, and in her books. But she too would have said, in fact often did say, that her husband was no eccentric, just a normal, sane, fun-loving actor dedicated to his craft.

***

Several months ago, while the man was still in Paris, his agent had landed him a role in a big budget American football movie. And yesterday, the day after the man had returned to New York, he had begun his descent into his new character. He was playing a hard-hitting free safety, a hard-hitting free safety who happened to be half-black. The latter fact is what was wracking the man’s nerves. Perhaps his stress with the dishwasher had sent his mind veering towards notions of embarrassment, but now here he was thinking, My god, what have I done? Because the man was not actually half-black. He was not black at all. Zero percent, so far as he knew. So far as he knew, he was Spanish, Greek, and a little Hungarian. Nevertheless, standing there, staring at the countdown timer projecting from the base of the flummoxing dishwasher onto his bare, tanned foot, the man found himself trying to think, and thereby thinking for the first time in his life, I am a black man, as if it were a matter of will. The thought was a bit frightening, as most new and taboo thoughts tend to be. But he'd become the actor he was today by always surmounting such fears, fears of being seen as a charlatan, a phony, an imbecile. Yes, he had a strong will. Strong enough even for this. 

The woman hadn’t seemed to notice the man’s change in character yet. Unless she was just pretending. Was he doing something wrong? Or was she pretending that everything was normal so as to study the man like a specimen? The woman was a novelist after all. The woman was always secreting away her true self to brazenly spy on the man right to his face. The man loved this about the woman, being studied by her. And yet, I am not a specimen, he thought, and the thought felt true. He was suddenly angry at his wife. 

That judgmental lying little— he thought. Though this was not so much what he thought but what he wanted himself to think, for he was a football player and football players are known for their tempers. My art demands this, the man thought from inside of his new character.

The man gave the surprisingly quiet dishwasher a gentle, frustrated kick because it seemed to not be working. It started to groan. It was working!

Because the big budget American football movie was being directed by a black director and the black director had chosen the man to play this particular role, the man’s agent assured the man that all would be well as far as society was concerned. 

“Being half-black is hot. It’s in,” the man’s agent said. “People are going to see you and think: hot.” And if the man’s not being black was viewed as problematic by a few viewers, that was okay too because “being problematic [was] hot too, for the time being.” 

The man stepped away from the dishwasher satisfied with his work there. He returned to the dining table where he found the woman taking a selfie. She took several of herself, then several more with the man in the background, mean-mugging. She began the process of posting the best of these photos online.

Later tonight I should comment on her selfies, the man thought, that’ll seem cute. Hundreds of people would agree with him, maybe thousands. Those same people would wonder too what character the man was in the midst of becoming, what role the look on his face in her selfies implied. 

For people knew this is what he did. And people knew too that the woman was writing another novel about it, about marrying an actor who was performing his characters at all times, even at home, on the toilet, in the shower, in their bed. The publicity people were promoting the woman’s in-progress novel as hard as an in-progress novel can be promoted. There was division in-house about whether she should write it edgy or quirky, for both edgy and quirky were de rigueur. The woman's plan was to simply tell the truth—so, both.

***

What version of her husband was the woman dealing with now? It was a question the woman often asked herself. The question comforted the woman. It implied, in a way that only ever made sense to the woman, that unlike most other husbands, the man was not a fount of deception. The man was a person fully determined to be himself. Which himself the man became was irrelevant, because below each himself was the man, her husband, trying desperately to become. That was who he really was. It was people who strove thusly, to become themselves, that the woman liked to imagine the minds of most, who she chased around the pages of her novels.

The man removed his phone from his pocket and clicked on the screen. There were many notifications. He was suddenly flooded with hairpulling anxiety. What on Earth was he doing with his life? He put the phone back into his pocket. He didn’t want to wade into all that. Instead, rather spontaneously, the man asked the woman whether she thought the Black community would be upset when they found out he was playing a half-black character. 

“Maybe you can say you have Moorish roots,” the woman said.

“Seriously,” the man said.

The woman said she thought the Black community wouldn’t get too upset. “It’s not like you’re playing Martin Luther King,” she said.

The man found himself growing irritated. 

“I think they’ll hate it,” the man said.

The woman laughed. “It or you?” the woman asked.

“You know, my grandfather—” the man said, but the man’s grandfather was not black, or he could not make himself believe it, and so he heard right away that his voice lacked the necessary conviction for this non sequitur.

The woman stopped laughing. 

They were staring at each other. The woman had a wry smile that made the man even angrier. This time he realized why. He smiled back, lacing his smile with a hint of something mean.

Then he said, “I hate my fucking agent. I’m just playing some stereotype, aren’t I?”

 “You chose to do this,” the woman said. 

“Fuck,” the man said, laughing at himself, his mask briefly slipping. She was right.

We are so free it’s almost contemptible, the woman thought to herself. Free as man and woman or free as actor and novelist, the woman was not sure. When she wrote of them this time, it was vital that she capture this uncertainty—was freedom part of their characters or part of their art? This is what would make the new book special, better than her last. Could people be disgusted and enthralled simultaneously? Of course. Little captured the public’s attention more.

“At least your character winds up rich and successful,” she said. 

The man shook his head.

“Maybe you can switch roles, play the white roommate,” she suggested.

***

The man’s character in the big budget American football movie plays for an inner-city high school in the 1980s. Because of some initiative the team goes around the suburbs stomping on teams full of rich white kids. That is basically the plot of the first half of the movie. The man’s character’s hate for his rich white opponents fuels his high school football success, earning him a D1 scholarship, where he is assigned a white roommate. They do not like each other, but then they become best friends, win a national championship, and get drafted to the NFL. The character’s high school hate is framed by the movie as an important competitive advantage that he bravely relinquishes. So, this hate was going to be something the man needed to convey. Standing there, reflecting on his need to conjure an impression of authentic hate of rich white people, his existence felt suddenly embarrassing. And with this embarrassment, with this shamefulness swelling in the man’s mind, it was quite easy to imagine himself portraying someone who hates more generally—white people, black people, women, all of society. For they would all judge him soon. So, fuck them.

Anyways, the woman, the novelist, was very excited, of course, to spend these six weeks with the man, the actor, as a half-black football star. Firstly, because as previously mentioned, the woman was writing yet another novel about being married to the man. It was her third such novel. They say, “Write what you know,” after all. They say, “Most writers write the same stories again and again and again.” This was the first time, however, that the woman’s novel would be about a novelist married to a Method actor. The first novel had been about a novelist married to a racecar driver. The second, a painter married to an oil prospector. Two roles her husband had once played. 

The woman had been pretending not to notice the man getting into his character. But she had noticed, of course. He was cursing more, for some reason. And his temper was up. His best gesture so far had been that light kick of the dishwasher. A hint at the pent up anger lurking inside this football player. The woman would tell the man as much later that night. Until then, she would not interfere.

That the man was playing a black man was so obviously a terrible idea—for the man, for the woman, for their relationship, their image, their brand, their future—that it actually excited the woman. Social catastrophe is what novels were made for. The most important thing, the woman knew, was that the man look incredibly attractive (in the movie, in the selfie, always), which he did. For if you look hot enough, all will be forgiven. She looked at the selfie with her husband emerging from the kitchen. His shirt buttons undone, his chest wet from rinsing dishes, a dishtowel slung over his shoulder, the stern look on his face as he concentrates on her, on her phone’s camera lens. He looked really hot. The man always looked really hot. The woman tried to think about his attractiveness objectively. His Greek face, his abs, his credentials, his money. This hotness offered her an erotic path for the novel.

To that end, the second reason that the woman was excited about his new character was that the woman, truth be told, had always had a bit of a fetish for Black men. The man had started working on a tan. The man had shaved his head. The man had put on muscular weight. He looked even better than usual. The woman was very eager (as she often was when the man became new men) to sleep with the man, who both was and was not her husband. Had the man’s character ever slept with a white woman? The woman did not know. But the woman had never slept with a black man. And now, for a little while, she could pretend to do just this.

The man hovered behind the woman now, looking down at her. She saw his reflection over their picture on her phone screen.

If the man had to choose a favorite feature of the woman’s physique it was her prominent clavicles. Two smooth hyphens that funneled one’s gaze down the graceful plain of her slim chest. The woman sat still, allowing the man and his character to watch her, to make thoughtful decisions about her. She breathed slowly. She was pretending to look at her phone, her selfie with the man. The woman could not see the man in real life, but she sensed him regarding her. 

The woman liked being watched. When one is watched closely, one has no choice but to act, to play a role. The woman liked roleplay.

The woman continued to look at her phone, but she was not thinking about her phone. The man’s shadow loomed over her own. The man gripped the woman’s shoulders and began to massage them. It was a stranger’s hands that touched her. This is what men like my husband are most afraid of, the woman thought.

“Let’s have sex,” she whispered. 

“What’s that now?” the man said, though he knew exactly what the woman had said.

The man’s desire for the woman rose in response to hers for him. To take and grant pleasure. To subject each other to something carnal that seemed to both avenge a historical wrong and further betrayed that same wrong. The woman wanted to be overwhelmed by this character. The man wanted to give the woman what she wanted and yet he detested her for wanting it. 

Of course, nothing like this unfolding scene could possibly occur in the movie. It was a family movie about sports and determination and breaking down racial barriers. It was mostly about football and the white college roommate and the lifelong bond they form on their way to the NFL and the dissolution of the character’s anger towards the white race through his comradery with the roommate. There were no sex scenes.

And nothing like this unfolding scene would find its way into the woman’s novel, because no one would ever publish such a book, because surely it was racist in some way, in its cynicism, its flippancy, its absurdity, its faux pas masquerading as candor. And the woman loved to publish. Sometimes the woman thought the pleasure she got from publishing and the pleasure from the praise she received for what she published was greater than any other pleasure life had to offer. Although, at this particular moment, if an interviewer asked the woman about life’s greatest pleasure she might answer differently.

Because here they were, in real life, together in the spotlight of this feeling. This. This uncomfortable, uncontrollable thing. 

When the man’s movie did come out and the nation watched it, no matter what he was accused of, the beauty of his physical person would send thousands of men and women scrolling to the man’s Instagram page and one after another submitting their DMs about what ought to be done to the man or to his wife or else what they wanted the man to do to them. Or they would find the woman. They would DM the woman. They would share their thoughts about the man with the woman. They would tell the woman what she should do to herself, of what they wished to do to her, and even what they could do to her husband if she so pleased.

The man and woman knew as much. They knew the character of the messages they’d receive would be ardent and somewhat troubling, that the attention this character would attract would be too much. But that was their job, was it not? To funnel attention to their characters, their vexing characters.

The interviewers would, of course, have many questions. Even a few new ones this time. A few nerve-wracking ones. But the man and the woman would give the right answers. Or they wouldn’t. It didn’t matter now.

“You smell like lemon blossoms,” the man whispered into the woman’s ear. 

His stubble scraped the skin of her warm cheek. She reached back, behind herself, wrapped her arm around his neck, and pulled him closer.