The Rendezvous Ch. 03

Right, Keri thought, but I still went through a lot of angst over it. Just like now. "But people say things. Aren't you..."

"There's the things they say and the things they don't say," Evan sighed. Her expression turned wistful as she started counting on her fingers. "The young girl's a slut, but the man isn't. Young actresses need to do these scenes for their careers, but actors don't. Never mind all the movies out there where actors do similar stuff."

Keri nodded. Thinking hard, she could remember seeing a few. She'd had thoughts like this herself many times. She never could put them into words, though.

"The woman has pain but the man doesn't," Evan continued, her hands aflutter. "Or vice versa. The sex is there, but is it really necessary to the story? How much of it is really necessary? Could they have shown less? Could they have shown more? Did I make the decision to do the role or was I forced into it? For the record, I don't think I was with these roles, but it doesn't really matter. People are going to think what they think. You know what I think, though? I think I'm mature enough to make my own decisions. My parents do too- they supported me when I took the roles." Her expression changed again as she turned back to Keri. "And you know what else? I'm not doing these role for career or for publicity. The main reason is practice."

Keri gasped, wondering how many people would think of such a thing. "You're a virgin," she said, staring at Evan. "You don't really know what it's like being with guys."

"Yeah," Evan said. "Most people can only think, read, imagine, and improvise. As an actress, I have some other things I can use to my advantage."

"I see," Keri mused, looking back at her. "Wow."

Evan paused for an instant, then smiled again, looking directly at Keri. "I'm not a complete virgin though."

Keri felt her mouth fall open. Her eyes locked on Evan's, which flashed with another strange look. What the heck? Keri thought. Not a complete virgin? "What do you mean, Evan?"

"I haven't gone all the way with a guy yet," Evan explained, her eyes shining as she stared back at Keri. "I've just come close a thousand times, thought about it." She smiled. "But, girls, now that's different."

Keri felt her eyes widening. Evan was totally blowing away her assumptions. "What?"

Evan paused, then began speaking rapidly. "I get deep into my characters. That's what you're supposed to do in acting, right? Let yourself go. You become the character, and the character you. People forget, though, that life is different from acting. In acting, there's always a script, always things you have to remember. Life, though, has no script. You never know what will happen next. You can imagine, but you never really know. Acting also has props, things to help you imagine what it might be like to do something like cut yourself, or take drugs. Even if you're opposed to such things in real life, or you've never wanted to do them, using the props, reading the scripts, taking direction- they all make it easier to change yourself into someone who could do such things."

"Go on," Keri said. She found the discussion fascinating.

"Emotions, though," Evan continued, still talking fast, "they're different. You can't fake them, not if you want to do them right. You have to be able to shut yourself off, embrace the role, feel what the character would feel. Then you have to stop acting, change back into yourself. Some actresses forget that, let themselves get too changed, too into character. Sometimes that's good, but most of the time it's not. You agree?"

"Yeah," Keri nodded. Thoughts were flashing into her mind, many Hollywood stories suddenly making more sense to her now. But Evan didn't give her time to contemplate them. Instead she kept talking.

"The people you play on screen are so different from the person you are," the young girl said. "You play your roles for brief hours and yourself for the rest of your life. Your true self is fully you, but each of your characters is only one side, one set of emotions. Playing such characters can teach you a lot about limits, a lot about yourself and others. But there are some things you can't learn from scripts."

"Right," Keri agreed. Like sex, she thought, remembering her own experiences. Unless, maybe in porno movies, and even then...

"You can be hesitant at first," Evan went on, her hands waving. "Then you get more confident as the scripts get more complicated. You challenge yourself. That's the way it happened with me. I threw myself into acting, did all I could. I started with small parts- extras, cameos. Then, before I knew it, I was up for Claudia."

Right, Keri remembered, realizing a comment Alicia had made earlier to her made sense now. "Interview with the Vampire?"

"Yeah," Evan said. "Good book, good role. I could do the part, but Kirsten Dunst got it." She frowned, then shrugged. "She did good, though, so I'm not that mad. She used her experience and was a great inspiration. The script, though, that was the real star. It usually is." She paused, sighing. "People forget that, you know. The writer of the movie is the one who has to have the vision. Put it down, create it. All we do is act it out."

Keri nodded at each point. True, she thought. So true. And there are so many good visions... Shaking her head, she turned to the mini-fridge next to the couch and took out a bottle of water. "Here," she handed it to Evan. "You might need this." Evan nodded in thanks, took the bottle, opened it, and drank deeply, smiling. Keri smiled too, deciding to draw her back to the main subject. She took out a bottle of water for herself, opened it, and drank. "You were talking about getting with girls," she prompted Evan.

"Yeah," Evan said, taking another drink. She thought for a moment, then smiled, words coming back to her. "So many of us just play our roles. We step into the vision, but we don't embrace it. We try to ignore its effect on us, or deny it. Meanwhile we each live out thousands of different visions, again and again. As Erika might put it, each of them becomes a spirit in our mind."

Keri blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Sorry," said Evan. "Erika and I had an intriguing discussion while you were talking to Alicia. Erika was telling me she hopes you can introduce her to Mel Gibson. I'd forgotten you and Mel did a movie together."

"We did," Keri replied, remembering. "Erika and I were talking about this earlier. She told me she wants to be in Mel's Passion of the Christ."

Evan nodded. "She told me that too. She wants to play Legion."

Keri stared at Evan. "The Gadarene demon?"

"Yeah," Evan said. "I asked Erika why that role, and she started telling me about her religion. They believe in something called Body-Thetans, spirits in a person's mind that one must either reconcile with or cast out. Erika's theory is that the real Legion was someone who was having particular trouble with their Body-Thetans, and Jesus was there to help him."

"I suppose I can see why Erika would be interested in doing such a thing," Keri mused, thinking back to their earlier conversation on religious tolerance. She shook her head. "I'm not sure if Mel would want to put anything like that in the Passion though. It's going to be controversial enough as it is."

Evan's eyes widened. "You've seen the script?"

Keri grimaced. "Just rough drafts. Mel was starting to work on it when we did our film and once we got to be friends, he showed me his ideas. It was a little..." She paused, then shook her head again. "I don't like everything about the film, but I do plan on seeing it. It should be interesting."

"I think so too," Evan smiled. "The discussion really got interesting as we went on. Erika was going on and on to me about how every person is sometimes named Legion. We all have voices in our heads, and for some they speak louder than for others. Actors especially, and writers, directors, artists, scientists, scholars- every kind of visionary there is."

Keri rolled her eyes. "That sounds like something a Scientologist would say."

Evan bobbed her head in agreement. "Right. And Erika's not your typical Scientologist, of course, but..." She paused. "We have to work with her, I guess."

"Right," Keri agreed, glad her frown was mirroring Evan's. "I think we might be able to," she said after pausing to take another sip of water. "I was apprehensive about her at first, but now I think we can get along. The differences don't matter." Keri felt a momentary disturbance at her words, then smiled, realizing their truth.

"Yeah," Evan nodded. "And some of the things Erika says make you think. This discussion especially. It brought to mind some things I've wondered about before." The young girl's voice got lower and her hands stopped moving. "How do you live your life living out other people's visions?" she asked Keri. "How do they change your own, especially when people write things for your characters for which you yourself aren't sure you're ready yet?"

Keri pondered the questions for a moment. "Are you saying your roles have had you dealing with issues you never really thought about before?"

Evan smiled. "Exactly. If I wanted to do the roles, I had to think fast. At first, I was just playing them, trusting the directors and my fellow actors, the crew, my parents, myself. Then as I got older, I started thinking deeper. It was hard not to. Did I really want to do these things, keep doing them? It often got to the point where I wondered if I was really living my life."

"If someone wasn't writing it for you," Keri surmised.

"Yeah," Evan said. "That's why I started taking charge of my life. I asked my parents to take me out of school so people would know less of the truth about me. They could talk all they wanted, I thought. Sooner or later they'd lose interest. Meanwhile I could move on, live my real life. And the events of that life became very important to me. That's why I'm waiting to get with a guy. I have to find the right one. I don't want to get hurt. So many times I've seen or read about it happening. You know what I mean, right?"

Keri shook her head, still confused. "But girls, that's different for you?"

"In some ways, it's the same," Evan shrugged. "In others, though, yeah, it's different. Society teaches us we're not supposed to like members of our own gender that way, meanwhile some of us do. History so often denies it, shoves it under the rug. But still people talk, and some of them have ideas. Some people have actresses act out those ideas. But how do we know when we're doing it right?"

She paused and took a drink. "We have to do it right, you know. Otherwise the people who really have gone through what we're acting out will resent us. When I did my show, I was thinking about that a lot. I was twelve, and Jessie was going through so much I'd never gone through. Divorce, an extended family, anorexia..."

Keri broke in. "And I'm guessing kissing other girls."

Evan nodded. "I wanted to get things right, it was important to me. The show's writers kept doing things radically, taking them to a realistic extreme. It was unusual for a TV show to do that, still is. It scared me and excited me all at once, then again and again." She smiled. "Eventually I got used to it. When they had me kissing a girl, though, I got really scared. I had thought about that, but never done it. Never even really considered it. And then suddenly here I am kissing Mischa Barton, one of my good friends, right in front of the world."

"Yeah." Keri felt herself shaking at Evan's words. It had been hard enough for her and Ilana to embrace and kiss in private, she thought, same for her and Tony and all the others. If someone else were writing their lives, though, making them act out their feelings in public, she could easily see how it could have been worse. So many times it had been, in scripts and in life.

"And she's a friend," Evan went on, "but we're not that close. Not really. There's so much we're still learning, so much we're keeping to ourselves. We were both interested in the scene, but we weren't ready for its effect on us. We were scared when we read the script, scared yet curious. Then when we did the first rehearsal, we liked it so much, and..."

"You got together," Keri completed, guessing where she was heading.

"Yeah," Evan said. She smiled for an instant, then took a drink and started talking again. "We talked about it afterwards and we decided we had to. Mischa was more ready to deal with things than I was. She came from a family a lot like mine, and she'd been in a couple movies that dealt with sex and its effect on society before being on the show. You may have seen them. Lawn Dogs? Lost & Delirious?"

Keri paused, thinking for a moment. Foreign films, she thought. British and Canadian. I've seen them. It's just been a long time. "Didn't the first one deal with a relationship where everyone thought there was sex. but there really wasn't, and then it happened?" she asked. "And the second one there was sex, but people thought there shouldn't be, so the couple broke up?"

"Basically," Evan replied. "Lost & Delirious was about lesbians, so it was particularly relevant to our situation. Mischa also did another film called Skipped Parts. It was about teenagers having sex for the first time and all its effects on them. Jennifer Jason Leigh was with her in that one."

Keri nodded, recognizing the name. "Good actress."

"Yeah," Evan agreed, sipping at her water. "Anyway, when Mischa did that movie, she wanted to get things right too. She was tired of just doing parts that were written for her. She wanted to actually have the real experiences, not just act them out. So she went out and had sex with a guy, then came back and did the movie. She was still doing the script, but she was into it now. The emotions were more settled."

Keri nodded again. She could see how such a thing might happen. Back on Malibu Shores with Tony, something similar had happened to her.

"So anyway," Evan summed up, "we wanted to get things right, so we actually did the relationship our characters were having between ourselves. We were upset about it at first, afraid, but then we decided to make the best of things. We thought maybe there'd be some value in the experience. There had to be, right? Real people go through it."

"Yeah," Keri agreed, thinking about how many film audiences and critics forgot such a thing. Or worse, tried to deny it when they saw the evidence. Pass it off as a phase, or just a movie, not something that could be real.

"We had to get things right for those people," Evan said, "and for us too." She smiled. "So we decided what the hey, let's do it, see what it's like. And we did it. I wasn't Mischa's first, but she was mine, and it was great. I liked it, kept wanting to do it again. Can you see what I'm saying here?"

Keri thought about it for a second, then nodded. She wondered how often Evan told such a story, how much it had been for the young girl's benefit as much as hers. "I think I can understand what you're saying," she said. "I went through something a little different myself. Acting was hard for me in the beginning, still is. There's lots of tension, and I found having sex was the best way to relieve it. First I just masturbated, then I got with Ilana..."

"You mean Ilana Miller?" Evan interrupted. Keri nodded, marveling again at how precocious the young girl was. Evan smiled. "I watched you and her dancing on MMC when I was a kid. She's pretty good, and hot. I thought she had a bright future."

Keri beamed, thinking about the life Ilana had now. Still good, even though it was outside the spotlight. Sometimes Keri wished she could live a similar life. "We all have bright futures," she sighed. Seeing Evan's expression, she resumed talking. "After her, there was Tony, and then others. I liked what I was doing, so I kept doing it. That's how it was for you too, right?"

"Yeah, kind of like that," Evan grinned. "I know all about tension. I agree, sex is good relief. Mischa thought so, and Nikki did, too, when I did it with her."

"Nikki?" Keri asked, then remembered. "Nikki Reed." She pointed at Evan. "Your co-star on Thirteen. You and her... your closeness wasn't just acting."

"Nope," Evan laughed. "I felt a lot of tension doing that film, Keri, more than I ever did on Once & Again. I've never been the slightest bit inclined to really do anything like what Tracy did to herself and her family. Most people aren't, thankfully. But they do exist. If we deny them, forget them..." She paused, then gulped, dropping her arms. "Doing it was something I had to do, but it was hard. I needed a friend to talk with, and maybe because of what I had gone through with Mischa earlier, that wasn't enough." The young girl sighed, then smiled again. "Fortunately Nikki was very understanding."

Keri returned her smile and nodded. This girl was so different from her, but now she was finding out they were so much alike. Wow.

"So," Evan finished, "now you're doing it with Alicia, right?"

Keri stared at her. "How did you..."

"I'm not blind, okay?" Evan cut her off. "I told you, I observe emotions. I wasn't completely sure, I made some guesses. Before, you and Alicia were talking civilly but with hostility under the surface. Friends, but not really friends, you know? And then you left the room, then she did, then you came back alone, then you came back with her. The way you looked and talked together each time, you seemed closer, happier. People don't get that close that quickly unless they've really connected, and there's no better way to connect instantly than having sex. Before now, I wasn't sure I believed the possibility. I didn't think Alicia really was into girls. I thought she said she wasn't."

"She's unsure," Keri said, smiling. "I was her first."

Evan smiled back, taking another sip of water. Keri stared at her, still surprised by her confession. She was even more shocked when Evan lowered the bottle, then shrugged. "Okay, maybe she needs reinforcement then. I know I did. It's hard to get that in this business a lot of the time. We play so many different roles."

"Yeah," Keri agreed, thinking deeper. "And people can hear about us, read about us, meet us a few times, but they can never really know us. Nor can we know them." She thought back on all the projects she'd done, all the stages of her life, how little she'd seen her friends in each stage after that stage was over. "We move on so much too, don't see people anymore."

"Exactly," said Evan. She put down her empty bottle. "It's hard to latch on to one person in this world, especially in lives like ours. Mischa and I were pretty exclusive back on our show, but since it ended we've moved on. She has another show now, and I have my own career. I developed other relationships. I got with Nikki, and other girls, and..." She stopped, then started talking again, her hands waving. "We still get together now and then, but a lot of the time we can't really connect. It's hard. Busy schedules."

"And you have to be careful," said Keri. "There are dangers. If the truth gets out..."

"Exactly," Evan cut in. "You can plan all you want, think carefully about what you're going to say, but in the end you're improvising, acting on instinct. You can't predict everything." She took a breath, then gave Keri a deep smile.

Keri shook her head. She couldn't believe so many deep statements were coming from a girl so young, a girl she hadn't known before today. Yet here they were. "Why are you talking to me like this?" she asked Evan, thinking about the wonder of it.

The young girl shrugged. "I want to get close to you, become friends. It will help our characters bond for the movie, and teach me more about people. You too. We'll both become better actresses. And," she smiled at Keri, "if you want to get together sometime, we can also do that."