Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

by Christopher Beha

  “Everyone seems to have come out all right except me.”

  “Don’t sound so bitter,” Susan told him. “You deserve to suffer a little. And she helped you out, too. She’s the reason I picked up the phone when you called. She’s the reason I’m starting to think about taking you back. She told me to give you another chance. I think she’s felt pretty guilty all this time about the way things ended between you. Now you guys are even.”

  “However it happened, I’m glad you’re thinking about it. I love you.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” Susan said.

  EDDIE WANTED TO TELL CelebNation or Entertainment Daily or even the people on Teeser that he’d been forgiven. They’d both forgiven him. The story was over, and everyone could leave them alone. But it didn’t work that way. The story would only be over when people got tired of it. Martha wasn’t going to let him off the hook, wasn’t going to go to the press and tell them that she’d deserved it, that he wasn’t such a bad guy. She had said these things to Susan, which was more than she’d had to do, but she wasn’t going to tell the rest of the world. Even if she did, it wouldn’t end the story. Martha lived to have the story told about her. It was her job. Soon it would be Susan’s job, too.

  He called Talent Management, and he was put straight through to Alex.

  “Did you see Martha going to my apartment?”

  “Isn’t it great?” Alex said. “There’s going to be a big dramatic reconciliation scene to begin the show.”

  “Susan’s going to take me back?”

  “Not you and Susan. Martha and Susan.”

  “You’re going to reconcile them? This is the first time they’ve even met.”

  “Poor choice of words. The point is they hugged and they cried, all that. The business with the tape is behind them.”

  “You sent Martha there?”

  “Not me, Moody. Everything they say about the man is true. He’s some kind of genius.”

  “How did he get Martha to agree to it?”

  “It wasn’t all that hard, to be honest. She’s got a big celebrity wedding to plan, and this will help make her more relatable. Martha can come off as a little cold, you know, especially after the way things ended with Rex. But Susan’s got relatable to burn.”

  “Listen, Alex, you are still representing me, too, right?”

  “Sure thing, Eddie.”

  “So do something to get me back into this story.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  How could he have thought for a moment that the visit had been spontaneous? He’d made the mistake of imagining that Martha was still a human being, not a carefully marketed product. But Susan wasn’t a product, and he was surprised that she’d kept the truth from him. Perhaps she already took it for granted that everything that happened to her was planned for the show. This almost certainly meant that her encouraging phone call was also staged. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that Moody wanted him to be encouraged. And Susan might still have meant what she’d said, even if she was saying it for other reasons. Each event could mean two things at once—one for the cynical producer who orchestrated it, and something else for the people who experienced it.

  HE WAS STILL CONTEMPLATING these possibilities a few hours later when he heard the knock. A glass of melted ice sat on his chest, and it spilled as he sat up from bed and pulled his Cue bathrobe shut.

  “Room service,” a voice on the other side of the door announced.

  Eddie had no memory of ordering room service, but he knew his memory was not entirely to be relied upon at that point.

  “What is it?”

  “All of our extended-stay guests get a free meal for each month of their stay.”

  Had it been a month? He wasn’t sure. It had been close, certainly.

  “Just a second,” he called out.

  He stood up, put on his slippers, and pulled his robe shut. When he opened the door a great burst of light filled his eyes. The man in the doorway lowered his camera and they stood face-to-face.

  “Motherfucker,” Eddie said as he lunged. But the cameraman was already running down the hall. In his robe and slippers and drunkenness Eddie couldn’t keep up with him. He tripped and his robe came open as he hit the hallway floor. The camera clicked another half dozen times before the man disappeared down a stairwell. Eddie picked himself up and returned to his room, but the door had locked behind him.

  He’d lost his belt somewhere, perhaps back in the room, so he held his robe shut with one hand as he waited for the elevator. In the lobby the woman at the front desk smiled.

  “Hi, Aimee,” Eddie said, reading her name tag. “I’ve locked myself out of room 341.”

  “It happens all the time,” Aimee answered, seeming unfazed by his appearance. “I just need to see some photo ID.”

  Eddie waited for a second.

  “I’m in my bathrobe.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Here’s what we can do. If you tell security where your wallet can be found in your room, they can go get your ID. They’ll bring it down here, and I’ll print out a key card for you.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “We are committed to security here at the hotel. It causes some slight inconvenience at times, but our guests appreciate it.”

  He could tell she had been trained to say just these words in just this way, and there was no sense arguing, but he couldn’t remember where he’d left his wallet.

  “I think it might be on the bedside table,” he told her. “Or else on the floor near the bed.”

  “That should be sufficient.”

  “Do you think I could speak with a manager?” Eddie asked.

  A few moments later a tall, thin man in a double-breasted suit appeared at the desk.

  “How can I help you?” he asked with a vaguely European accent.

  “Did somebody tell the press about my presence in the hotel?”

  “Sir?”

  “I just opened my door to someone claiming to be room service and a fucking photographer started taking pictures of me in my underwear.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. It sounds very unpleasant.”

  “That’s great that you’re sorry, but I’d like to hear what you’re going to do about it.”

  “Have you been drinking, sir?”

  “As a matter of fact I have, but that isn’t relevant right now. This woman has been telling me about all your security, but then I’ve got paparazzi stalking me.”

  “I see,” the manager said. “That’s a real problem, sir.”

  “Do you have any idea how that could have happened?”

  The manager seemed to consider possible answers to the question.

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “Eddie Hartley, from room 341.”

  Now the man looked carefully at Eddie, as though he might recognize his face.

  “I don’t believe that anyone here at the hotel was responsible for alerting the press to your presence. But I promise you I will look into the matter very seriously.”

  They waited together for the security guard to arrive with Eddie’s wallet.

  “It was right where he said,” the guard told them. He withdrew Eddie’s license and passed it to the manager, whose face was brightened by a flicker of bemused recognition. He passed the ID to Aimee, and she smiled. It was clear that neither had known until that moment that Handsome Eddie was staying at their hotel. The manager handed over the wallet while Eddie’s new key card was being printed.

  “I’m terribly sorry for your inconvenience,” the manager said. “I promise to look into the matter. In the meantime, would you like us to move your room?”

  Eddie knew they could find him if they wanted to.

  “I don’t really think it matters,” he said.

  “IS HANDSOME EDDIE HEADED for a breakdown?” CelebNation asked when the photos of Eddie spread out in the hallway hit the Internet. “Attacking photogs, making scenes in hotel lobbies—Hartley is hitting rock bottom
just as Susan moves on with her life.” “This latest outlandish behavior came just hours after a tearful call in which he begged Susan to take him back,” Marian Blair told Entertainment Daily viewers. “Sources say she was even considering it, but now she worries he’ll be a danger to her pregnancy.”

  He’d told Susan where he was staying, and immediately they’d come for him. He remembered what she’d said about making friends with the photographers. You helped them with certain things, and they made deals with you. Martha had given her advice about dealing with things. Was this the advice? Did she want him to look like a fool? There was a cruelty to it that was entirely unlike her, as though she wanted to punish him a bit more before accepting him back.

  Eddie considered moving hotels—and not just for the privacy, which wouldn’t last in any case. He was running through the money that he’d thought could change his life forever. In another month, his St. Albert’s salary would stop coming in, and the payment for the video would disappear even more quickly. He’d liked in theory the idea of leaving himself with nothing, as a kind of penance for what he’d done. But now he was faced with the real problem of what to do then. He might easily run through it all before Susan took him back.

  The person he needed to help him through all this was Susan. After their one conversation, he’d imagined they would talk regularly again. But he called every few days after that, and she never picked up. Their brief conversation—and the visit from the photographer that followed—felt like some special message to him. But he didn’t know what the message meant. So he waited where he was.

  THIRTEEN

  SUSAN’S SHOW PREMIERED ON the Tuesday after Thanksgiving with an hour-long episode, which Eddie watched from his king-sized bed. The episode began with Martha’s arrival at the apartment. The scene seemed designed to signal to viewers who Susan was and why they were supposed to be interested in her without the work of lengthy exposition. Something had happened that brought Susan’s life into contact with the likes of Martha Martin, and this was enough to demand the world’s attention. Martha was a stand-in for all the events that had precipitated this premiere. All of this heartened Eddie somewhat. Even if he wasn’t included on the show, the story still required him to connect these two women now hugging each other on his TV. Soon they were both crying. Alex had been right: it humanized Martha. She seemed so caring, like a real person.

  “I can’t believe you’re having triplets,” she said, running her hand over Susan’s belly. “Carrying just one around is hard enough for me.”

  “It’s a bit overwhelming,” Susan admitted, though she didn’t look overwhelmed. She looked beautiful, even next to Martha.

  After a commercial break, an exterior shot established a new location, which Eddie recognized as the gallery. Inside, a camera ran across a series of small works in charcoal hanging on one wall. They were more inviting than Carl’s usual tastes. Eddie assumed this was by design. He knew the gallery was meant to be important to the show, but he was surprised that Martha would take the time to go into work with Susan. As the scene progressed, he realized that their visit was in fact over. It had already done its job, without any mention of Eddie. Anyone watching would have known that he was the thing connecting these two women, but they hadn’t even said his name. Martha’s presence was apparently enough to tell viewers everything.

  “Carl von Verdant is one of the most highly respected dealers in the city,” Susan explained to the camera. “I’ve been working with him for five years now, and I’m currently the gallery’s associate curator.”

  Eddie had never heard this title before. Susan had always been one of Carl’s assistants. In the past, she’d described him as brusque and condescending, but in the half hour that followed he asked her advice about everything—where to hang a piece, what to look for at an upcoming fair. The friendly conversations Susan shared with the other assistants—now presumably her subordinates—didn’t at all match her long-standing complaints about the gallery’s atmosphere. Eddie couldn’t be sure the depiction was false. Perhaps Susan had been exaggerating her problems at work. What Eddie saw on-screen was entirely believable.

  Susan left the group to take a call from Richard Oh, a young artist whose debut show she was organizing.

  “It’s going to be great,” she told Richard. “You’ll be the toast of New York.”

  After the call, Richard spoke to the camera from a nondescript room somewhere. He was an Asian American in his early twenties. The right side of his head was shaved, the hair on the left pulled into a long pigtail.

  “I’m so excited to be working with Susan Hartley,” he said. “She’s the reason I chose Von Verdant to represent me.”

  Later in the show, a shipment of Richard’s work went briefly missing, creating the episode’s only real bit of drama. Carl yelled at two of the young assistants while Susan went about locating the lost packages. She was the calm center around which the gallery revolved. She advised Carl with confidence, and the answers she gave him were smart and knowledgeable, which didn’t seem to Eddie something that could be faked. Her job bore no resemblance to the menial frustrations she’d so often described to Eddie at home.

  Had everything really changed for her so quickly? Their jobs had long been a shared source of disappointment in their lives. Perhaps Susan had been all along doing better than she’d let on. Perhaps she had persisted in presenting herself as a failure out of a sense of solidarity, or because she thought he wasn’t capable of appreciating her success. She’d probably been right to suspect this, if in fact she had suspected it.

  There was a simpler explanation: he was watching a fictional television character, based only loosely on his wife, and he was wrong to compare the particulars of this character’s life to those of the Susan he knew. This seemed comforting at first, but it was ultimately troubling in its own way, because this fictional Susan already seemed so real after less than half an hour. More than that: he wanted this Susan to exist. He liked her better this way.

  After work, the assistants Carl had berated took Susan out to a bar, where they gossiped while she sipped on club soda. It was obvious that the others looked up to her, but there was also a sense of camaraderie. They joked about naming one of the babies after Carl. The scene was broken by an interview with Tomaka, the gallery’s youngest employee. She’d been working at the gallery for just a few months, but she was the prettiest of the assistants, and she’d been given the most screen time.

  “Susan is the happiest we’ve seen her in years,” she said. “I think all these changes in her life have been really good for her.”

  The show’s tone changed in the second half. Susan sat in a doctor’s waiting room while in a voice-over she explained that she was getting her first ultrasound.

  “I’m scared to be doing this alone,” she said. “It makes me think how hard it’s all going to be.”

  You don’t have to do it alone, Eddie wanted to say. The doctor took Susan to an examination room and talked in an understated voice about the risks presented by multiples. Susan pulled her hospital gown over her belly, where the nurse applied a layer of gel. The doctor set down the transducer, and a picture came on the screen. It wasn’t clear to Eddie exactly what it showed, until all of a sudden it was. Those were his children. He was seeing them for the first time, alongside a million other people.

  The picture was replaced on-screen by a close-up of Susan’s crying face.

  “They’re so beautiful,” she said, looking into the camera. “I can’t believe they’re inside me. I’ve never been so happy. But it’s scary, too, knowing I have to go through all this by myself.”

  Eddie was sorry not to be there, sorry to see her scared, but he felt something else, too. She needs me, Eddie thought. She can’t do it by herself. Everyone said that Brian Moody knew what he was doing. He must have created this tension— between professional confidence and personal uncertainty— for a reason. To satisfy it, they would have to bring Eddie back. Susan had nearly said as
much. I’m not ready yet, she’d told him, which he took now to mean: we have to establish the story first.

  As the credits ran, Eddie searched for his name online and found a post titled “Take Him Back!” on what appeared to be a Christian television blog. It said that Moody would be sending a “strong message about the importance of the traditional family” if he reunited Susan and Eddie. The post compared Susan’s situation to that of Justine Bliss with a logic that struck Eddie as somewhat imperfect, though he was happy to read it. A small but persistent movement existed in his favor.

  But that movement could only be found by looking for it. Most pages that Eddie read had nothing good to say about him. In fact, the majority of commenters didn’t mention him at all. They talked about the visit from Martha, about the gallery, about the babies. Most of all, they talked about Susan. She seemed human and “relatable,” an ugly word that came up in nearly every post. Relatability was, apparently, the gold standard for a character, and Susan possessed it. The term connoted precisely the things about Susan that had made her suffer in Eddie’s eyes when compared to Martha. She was pretty but not overwhelmingly beautiful. She was smart but not intimidating in her intelligence. She was confident but not domineering. Vulnerable but not needy. Kind but not desperate for approval. She was just Susan, and everyone loved her. I loved her first, Eddie wanted to say, though he understood that in some sense he’d seen this Susan for the first time just when everyone else did.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER the premiere, more stories emerged about Susan’s need for help, her struggle to make it through alone. With each one Eddie felt closer to being back in the fold. Her situation had to change in some way to keep viewers interested. The question was how long the producers would play things out. He held off calling Alex, because he thought he would be in a stronger position when they came for him if he didn’t seem desperate to get back.