Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

by Christopher Beha

  “We don’t want our own show.”

  “Everybody wants their own show.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Great, so I’ve got a client who doesn’t want to be on television? What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I want to be on television, just not like that. I don’t want to talk about Susan’s pregnancy on This Morning Live. She’s embarrassed enough about this whole thing as it is.”

  “All right,” Alex said, the energy gone from his voice. “I’ll see what I can do in a more traditional line. I’m telling you now it’s going to be a harder sell.”

  “I thought hard sells were your job,” Eddie answered.

  Once off the phone, he sat on the couch with his cup of coffee and turned the TV on. He wanted to see if there was anything about him on Entertainment Daily. Despite what Alex had said, he still thought he could get real work out of all this. After a commercial, ED Morning News came on, hosted by a woman named Coco Kalman.

  “Just a day after leaving his triplet-expecting wife, Drake Tape star Eddie Hartley was seen out on the town, and even canoodling with an apparently underage girl.” The screen cut to Eddie leaning toward Melissa’s face, his eyes half closed in drunkenness. “This photo was Teesed out last night by a user named SweetMelissa1987,” Kalman continued. “Along with the message ‘Spent the night with Mr. Drake.’ No word yet on SweetMelissa’s real identity or where Hartley’s night with the young hottie went from there. Entertainment Daily will be all over this story as it develops.”

  Eddie turned off the TV and called Blakeman at work.

  “How do I get on Teeser?” he asked.

  Blakeman laughed.

  “Where have you been hiding? All the best stars know how to work social media.”

  “St. Albert’s always wanted us to be careful about this stuff, with all the students on it and everything.”

  “That worked out pretty well for you.”

  “I know. So explain what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  Blakeman told Eddie where to find his laptop and walked him through opening an account.

  “You might as well just use your own name, since no one will believe it’s really you.”

  Eddie typed in the user name “EddieHartley” and was told it already existed. He tried “HandsomeEddie” with the same result. Then he tried “HandsomeHartley,” and that worked.

  “She said I was a threadhead? Mr. Drake. What does that mean?”

  “Go in that search box there and put in an asterisk and then type ‘MrDrake.’ One word, no period.”

  The page’s layout confused Eddie. There looked to be about a dozen hits, which didn’t seem so bad, except that when he scrolled down more appeared. He reached the end, and it did it again. He kept going until he was in the hundreds. Who were these people? What could they possibly have to say about him? “Honey, gonna do you like *MrDrake,” one read. Another said, “Shaping up to be a two rub out mornin *DrakeTape *MrDrake.” Every few seconds another appeared. He searched for the user name SweetMelissa l987, and he found Melissa’s feed. At the top was the post from the night before: “OMG Spent the night with *MrDrake. Photographic evidence.” A link in the message brought up the photo he’d just seen on TV.

  “She’s got 5,352 names in her tease circle,” Eddie told Blakeman. “Is that a lot?”

  “It’s more than I’ve got.”

  Eddie continued scrolling down the page, which showed replies to Melissa’s message. “Thatzz shit hot grrrrrl” was the first, from a user named NoNocaine. The one next said, “Dudes a creep but I’d get on it.” Beneath that was a message that read “Lulz that guy was my drama teacher!” Eddie clicked on the user name, but nothing in the profile immediately established whether it was really a boy from one of his classes.

  “By the way,” Blakeman said, “I’m having some people over tonight.”

  “Again?”

  “More or less always, as you might recall. You might want to clean up a little bit. And try not to get quite so banged up this time. You know I don’t stand on formalities, but I mean more for your own benefit. From an image-management standpoint and all.”

  “Is Melissa going to be back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d met her before last night.”

  “Maybe I should just go somewhere else.”

  “If you’re going to wind up in the paper either way, you might have to learn not to worry about it. You can’t control what they write, so just relax. And like I said, make yourself presentable.”

  But Eddie wasn’t listening. While scrolling through another *MrDrake thread, he’d found a link to a poll on CelebretainmentSpot:

  Should Susan Take Eddie Back?

  *Yes, it’s for the kids!

  *Maybe, but make him sweat first!

  *No! She doesn’t need the jerk!

  Click to see results.

  “I’ll call you later,” he told Blakeman.

  Yes, maybe, no. Eddie hesitated, as though weighing the pros and cons. Did people honestly believe they were in a position to form an opinion about the relationship of two people they’d never met, never even heard of a week before? Of course they didn’t. It was just for fun. Eddie wasn’t sure whether this made it better or worse. He guessed there would be a lot of maybes. That seemed fair enough. He clicked “yes” and was brought to the page that showed results. Eight percent of respondents agreed with him. Another 15 percent thought she should make him sweat. The other 77 percent said he should be gone for good.

  He returned to the home page and clicked “yes” again. This vote wasn’t enough to change the results, which either meant that the whole system was fake or that the participation rates were higher than he’d thought. He didn’t know how many times he’d need to vote to change the answer, but he couldn’t bear Susan coming to this page and seeing that number. After three more clicks, “yes” ticked up to 10 percent. He kept clicking and refreshing until it got to 15. If Susan could see that at least some people in this world thought he deserved her mercy, it might make some difference for him. Once he’d accomplished that, he called her. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t pick up the phone.

  “It’s Eddie,” he said to her voice mail. “I don’t know if you’ve seen this thing about the girl, but it’s not what it seems. I went to Blakeman’s last night, because I didn’t know where else to go. And there was a party going on. There’s always parties going on here. It’s not like I went out somewhere looking for fun. Patrick Hendricks’s girlfriend was here, and some people took some pictures. It’s like I was a celebrity or something. It was weird. Anyway, I definitely didn’t ‘canoodle’ anyone or anything like that. So, just call me when you can.”

  Now that this photo was floating around, he didn’t imagine she would be taking him back too soon. If he wanted things to quiet down, the first thing he needed to do was make sure he wasn’t still at Blakeman’s when people started arriving that night.

  NO ONE WAS WAITING outside when he left late that afternoon. But the tabloids didn’t need to send photographers after him when so many readers were prepared to do the job themselves.

  Eddie walked a few blocks to the Cue Hotel on Thompson Street. It was a celebrity favorite, and he thought it could be trusted for discretion. At the front desk they told him that a luxury suite was the only thing available on short notice. Eddie was shocked at the price they quoted, but he could afford it, for now. The fact that his windfall wasn’t nearly enough to raise triplets made it seem strangely dispensable. And Susan wouldn’t want this money to support their children. He was like a man in a screwball comedy, obliged to spend all he had and come out of it with nothing. Only then could he return to his family, cleansed. With this in mind he felt a kind of satisfaction when he handed over the cash for three nights in a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  The flat-screen TV on the bedroom wall was as wide as the king-sized bed facing it. A laptop computer sat on an ornate writing desk in one corner. In
another was a wooden bureau, but Eddie had nothing to put in it. Beyond the bedroom a separate sitting room was filled with a leather couch and a starkly modern coffee table piled with the kind of expensive photography books that Susan actually liked to look through, here meant to sit untouched to suggest sophistication.

  Eddie had once thought that such rooms would be a regular feature of his life. Perhaps he’d wanted that as much as he’d ever wanted to act. In those early days the flush future had seemed as real to him as the actual life he was living. The worst part about giving up, when it had come time to give up, was knowing that all those years had been wasted. That time would never be turned into the story of early struggles leading to success. He should have quit years before, when it would still have been easy to go back to school, before his parents bought the house in Florida, before he’d acquired credit card debt it would take him decades to pay off.

  But maybe it would amount to something after all. Those years had left him in debt, but they had also left him with that video, which had erased the debt and then some. Those years had paid for the procedures that conceived his children. Eventually all this business would pass, and he would return home. Susan would take him back, because she would do whatever was best for these kids. Even if they never got back what they’d had before, they would have something new.

  But was this what he wanted? He would not have chosen for things to have gone this way, but was it really so terrible? Here he was in a luxury suite in the Cue, and people were talking about him on TV. If he could make everything go back to how it had been, he wasn’t sure that he would. He sat on the bed and turned the TV to Entertainment Daily. He was almost surprised that they weren’t talking about the tape.

  “Justine Bliss was picked up on the streets of Silver Lake just hours ago,” Marian Blair intoned. “Police say she was incoherent and had been wandering the Los Angeles neighborhood for hours. Friends tell us they are praying for her recovery. But they say she won’t get better until she fixes her toxic relationship with her father.” She turned to look into another camera. “That leads us to today’s Entertainment Daily U Decide poll question: Is Tom Bliss part of the problem or part of the solution? Text one for ‘yes’ and two for ‘no’ to EDUDECIDE. Standard messaging rates apply.

  “Now for some happier news. Fans who have been calling for more of Susan Hartley are about to get their wish. Tomorrow morning she’ll be appearing on This Morning Live, where the pregnant gallerist will open up to Sandra West about her future as a single mom and rumors that she’s about to sign a reality deal.”

  Eddie turned off the TV. His immediate reaction was a sense of betrayal, though he couldn’t say in exactly what way he’d been betrayed. He had spent a lot of time in the past few days thinking about what he could make of his new fame, but he hadn’t imagined Susan having similar thoughts. And he’d been waiting to hear from her before doing anything. He’d turned down his own chance to get them on This Morning Live. He wondered what Alex would think when he found out that Susan had gone ahead on her own. Why had she agreed to do it? She didn’t want that kind of attention. She’d said as much when she threw him out of the apartment. But he knew she was scared about paying for these kids. He couldn’t blame her for taking a shot that might make her some money. Instead, he blamed himself for passing up the chance. If he’d known she was willing to do the show, he would have asked her himself. They might have been on it together.

  Before going to bed, he dialed down to the front desk and asked for a wake-up call to get him up before the show began.

  ELEVEN

  HE WATCHED THE FIRST hour of This Morning Live with the volume turned down while he searched online for stories about Susan. CelebretainmentSpot and half a dozen other sites reported that she would be making a “major announcement” on the show. Several commenters guessed that she had lost the babies. Some of them took an inexplicable glee at the possibility, and there was speculation that she’d never been pregnant at all. Others shouted this speculation down. Within fifteen minutes and fifty comments, the conversation had moved beyond Susan to what appeared to be long-standing arguments between pseudonymous opponents. Eddie kept reading after it had all stopped making any sense to him. It was strangely absorbing in spite of its uninviting tone. He became so immersed, in fact, that he almost missed the beginning of Susan’s segment.

  “The celebrity world has a new darling,” Sandra West said, coming back from commercial. “Susan Hartley was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight when an explicit video surfaced showing her husband getting intimate with Dr. Drake star Martha Martin. Then the stylish art world veteran showed her fierce side, sending her husband out the door— and his things out the window—just as news arrived that she was pregnant with triplets. Now, for the first time anywhere, Susan sits down to discuss what comes next. Thanks so much for being here, Susan.”

  The camera turned now to show Susan sitting next to Sandra in the studio.

  “Thanks for having me,” she said.

  Her face was bright and inviting, and she neatly fit the part Sandra had described—a stylish art world veteran.

  “First of all,” Sandra said, “I want to ask what went through your head when you first saw that infamous video.”

  She talked as though Eddie had cheated on his pregnant wife. No one hearing the story for the first time would know that the video was a decade old.

  “To be honest,” Susan said, “I still haven’t looked at it. I’m not sure I could stand to see it. I’m trying to keep positive, not just for me but for the babies. I think they can feel that, if I have a negative experience. It’s like, if I watched it, they’d be watching it, too. And I don’t want them to have to see their father that way.”

  Her hand shook lightly as she reached for her water. Otherwise she seemed entirely calm. Eddie understood how appealing she would be to the morning audience. She appealed to him, too, more than she had in a long time. When she spoke, she kept her face at the right angle to the camera and the host, something that Eddie knew did not come naturally. She had obviously been given some training. Her poise seemed the product of more than a few hours’ work. She might just have been a natural, but Eddie knew that such people were rare.

  “That’s such an inspirational attitude,” Sandra said. “It seems like your husband has only gotten himself into more trouble in the past few days, running around with young girls.”

  “I’m trying to keep positive, but Eddie just isn’t a very mature person. I hope for his own sake he gets there eventually, but he’s not there now. I don’t think he’s ready to be a father. I think that’s a lot of it. That’s why it’s best for both of us if I go through this process by myself.”

  Eddie had never expressed doubts about being a father, just about how they would afford it. Having these kids was the reason he’d done what he did, and Susan knew it. She was telling a story about him, making him fit the idea the audience already had. Whose story was it? Had she been told to follow this line, or was it her own idea? He found it all hard to watch.

  “Speaking of this process,” Sandra said, “I understand you might have a bit of news to share this morning. There have been some rumors about a reality show. What can you tell us?”

  “I just finalized a deal yesterday with Moody Productions. We’ve already got several networks interested, but I can’t say more than that.”

  “That’s very exciting news. Can you tell us what viewers can expect from the show?”

  “It’s just going to be me,” Susan said. “My work at the gallery. My life preparing to be a single mom. There’s been a lot of stuff out there the past few days. Some of it is true, some of it isn’t. I just want to show people what I’m actually like.”

  “Before we finish up,” Sandra said. “Let me say how brave I think you are.”

  “Thank you for that. And thanks so much for having me on the show.”

  “There you have it. If you’re as fascinated by Susan Hartley’s story as I am, I know
you’re going to be eagerly awaiting this show. I hope you’ll come on again when there’s more news about that. We’ll be right back after this break with a report from Afghanistan.”

  Eddie turned off the TV and called Talent Management. When they told him Alex wasn’t in, Eddie called his cell phone.

  “I just watched This Morning Live,” he said.

  “Wasn’t she great? I’m in the greenroom now, she’ll be out in a second.”

  “You’re with her?”

  “Of course I’m with her. I set the interview up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did tell you. I said I’d get you on This Morning Live, I’d get you a reality show with Moody, the whole deal. You said you weren’t interested.”

  “That’s because I thought Susan wasn’t interested.”

  “She’s interested now. It’s going to be a great show. Moody says we may get Bliss’s old spot on 2True. And I got Susan some serious money. In case you weren’t aware, kids aren’t cheap.”

  Of course Eddie understood the appeal of making some money. Susan didn’t know about the remaining cash from Morgan, so their situation seemed even more desperate to her than it was. Still, she’d made the choice so quickly, as if acting on an impulse Eddie had never seen in her before.

  “If she’s on board,” he told Alex, “then I’m on board.”

  “I’d like to get you involved, Eddie. But Moody wants Susan. A single mother with triplets is a great story. You’re sort of a complication at this point.”

  “A complication? No one would even have heard of Susan if I hadn’t sold that tape.”

  “It doesn’t matter how they heard of her. The point is, people like her. They’re interested. Pretty soon the tape is going to be old news, but if she plays it right, Susan’s going to stick.”