His voice had cracked toward the end of his speech, and he wasn’t sure how that would sound. He hadn’t intended the effect, but it seemed after the fact like a nice touch.
“That was all great,” Dell said. “I’m glad we stuck with things. That felt really honest.”
While Melissa unpacked, Dell led Eddie into another room for an interview. It had been explained in the contract that he would be interviewed up to three times a day and that the company could use the footage any way they saw fit. Beyond this he didn’t know what to expect from these sessions.
“I just want you to stay relaxed,” Dell told him. “A lot of people on these kinds of shows tell me the interview is their favorite part. It’s a chance to really get your feelings across, to give the action some meaning.”
There was a stool in the middle of the room and a camera on a tripod about fifteen feet away. Eddie sat down and turned toward the camera, though it was hidden now by all the light shining in his face. Eddie had been in plenty of spotlights before. He’d looked out from stages where all you could see were lights above and darkness below and you had to take on faith that there was an audience somewhere in between looking at you.
“Look over here at me,” Dell said soothingly. He was seated just to the left of all the lights. “If you look right at the camera it really creeps people out. Since I’m the one you’ll be talking to, it should feel natural to just pay attention to me.”
As Eddie turned from the lights, his eyes began to adjust, but he still felt the heat coming off them. He was already sweating, and he imagined it would only get worse. Dell reached into his pocket and handed Eddie a cloth handkerchief. It seemed like the kind of magnanimous gesture a captor offers before the torture begins.
“This will take a bit of getting used to,” Dell explained as Eddie wiped his face. “First off, as you probably know, I’m going to be cut out of all of this, so I don’t want you to speak to me by name. And you need to repeat any question that I ask you before answering it. That part you’ll pick up pretty quickly. The other thing is that I want you to speak in the present tense. We call these interviews ‘ITMs’—in-the-moments. The idea is that we’ll run a scene, and then this will serve as a kind of internal monologue. So I don’t want you to tell me how you feel now about what happened with Melissa out there. I don’t even want you to tell me now in the past tense how you felt at the time. I want you to describe the feelings like you’re having them, like you’re still in the moment. Does that make sense?”
Eddie realized then that all of Susan’s voice-overs—her description of getting an ultrasound or her introduction of some artist at the gallery—were in this present tense. It seemed so natural when he watched it, but it was strange to be faced with doing it. He’d known that they would have access to everything about his external life, but now they wanted his thoughts, too.
“It makes sense,” Eddie said.
“So let’s start at the beginning,” Dell told him. “How does it feel to have Melissa back?”
Eddie considered the question.
“It feels good. I’m happy about it.”
“Don’t forget to repeat the question.”
Eddie wiped his forehead with Dell’s handkerchief. He’d expected to get used to the lights, but they seemed to be getting hotter as the interview progressed.
“How do I feel to have Melissa back? I’m happy about it.”
“Does it bother you to hear what her mother said?”
“Of course it bothers me.”
“Repeat the question.”
“Did it bother me to hear what she said? Yes, it bothered me.”
“Remember, present tense. In the moment. And names instead of pronouns, so we always know who you’re talking about even if we cut a few sentences.”
“Does it bother me to hear what Melissa’s mom said about me?” Eddie tried to put himself in the moment. “Of course it bothers me. The woman has never met me, and she’s passing judgment. Not that I care what she thinks, particularly. But I guess what she’s saying—that I’m a jerk who walked out on his pregnant wife—is something that a lot of people who have never met me think at this point.”
“And you don’t think it’s fair?”
“No, I don’t think it’s fair. I would still be with my wife if I could. That was her decision. Not that she didn’t have her reasons, of course.”
“You’re talking about the tape.”
Eddie hadn’t expected to be asked about the tape. It seemed that great effort had been made to separate their story from its origin, but perhaps that was no longer a goal now that he was going to be on the show.
“Yes, I mean the tape. But I had good reasons. I didn’t just do it for kicks.”
“What were those reasons?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Come on, Eddie. We’re getting at something here.”
Eddie thought about what he could say that wouldn’t get him in more trouble.
“I was broke. We needed money for our family.”
“You couldn’t think of a better way to make some money?”
“It seemed easy. And harmless.”
“You didn’t think it would harm Martha?”
“Not particularly. But to be honest I didn’t really care if she got hurt. That’s not my problem. For years we lived together, we were doing something together, and then I found out she’d never believed in me. She was just hanging around until something better came along. So when the time came I wasn’t too concerned about whether she got hurt.”
Eddie was amazed at what these lights and Dell’s friendly persistence could do. He’d given them more in a few minutes than he’d intended to give them for the entire show. He needed to protect himself.
“What about Susan?” Dell asked. “You didn’t worry that she would get hurt?”
“Do I really have to answer these questions?”
“Think of it as an opportunity. You were just saying how the press makes you look like a jerk. Now you can set the record straight, and I’ll put it on TV.”
“I shouldn’t have lied to Susan. Not just about the tape. I honestly regret that.”
As he spoke, Eddie realized how Susan must have felt. Just as he had felt when Martha left. She’d thought they were in something together, and she’d discovered he didn’t believe in it. But he did believe in it. He did want things to work. Was this only because he’d seen the new Susan?
“I wanted to start a family. That’s why I did it. I wasn’t trying to get revenge on Martha or to make myself famous. I wasn’t trying to recapture my old life. That life is over.”
Dell seemed satisfied with this.
“Let’s get back to Melissa. Are you worried that she’ll agree with her mother, that she’ll leave you?”
“Am I worried that Melissa will agree with her mother?” Eddie said, glad now for this convention, which gave him time to sort out an answer. It was at once easier and more difficult to answer a question that wasn’t about his real life. “Melissa doesn’t listen to what other people say. She knows the real me.”
“Are you in love with Melissa?”
“Am I in love with Melissa?” There had to be a right answer to this, but he wasn’t sure what it was. “We get along really well, and we have a lot of fun together, but we haven’t known each other all that long.”
“Are you still in love with your wife?”
Eddie remembered what Dell had said, about treating these questions as opportunities. What did he want to say to Susan? It had to be something true. Somehow she would recognize this one truth amid all the lies.
“Of course I’m in love with her.” Eddie wiped the sweat from his forehead again. “She saved my life. That sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. We met at a time when a lot of things had been going wrong, and she was the first good thing to happen in a long time. She came at just the right moment. I resisted that idea for a while. I don’t really know why. I was lucky to meet her when I did. It’
s taken all of this to show me that. I’m sorry,” Eddie said, catching himself. “I realize I’ve been using a lot of pronouns here. Do you want me to start over?”
“That’s all right,” Dell said. “I think that’s all we need. You did great.”
EIGHTEEN
EDDIE GOT UNDER THE covers with Melissa after changing for bed that night, but when she turned the lights off, he slipped out to sleep on the couch. In the morning he woke to find Hal kneeling on the floor, pointing his camera at him. Most of the crew were already in place. Eddie didn’t know where they’d spent the night or how long they’d been back in the room, watching him. Kara, the associate producer, smiled for the first time since Eddie had met her.
“How did you sleep?” she asked.
Eddie was surprised that she would speak to him so openly while they were “in scene,” as Dell had put it. He still didn’t understand all the conventions of this game.
“I slept all right.”
“Glad to hear it,” Kara told him. “You’ve got a full day.”
She didn’t mention the obvious fact that he’d started the night in a different place than where she found him now, but Eddie suspected he’d be asked about it during his interviews. He could say that he’d been having trouble sleeping, but it might be more dramatic to suggest a deeper problem. He’d been upset about what Melissa’s mother had said. He’d gotten used to sleeping alone again.
Sitting up, Eddie discovered that a morning erection had slipped through the fly of his boxer shorts. When he tucked it away, Kara laughed.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve seen it all.”
Was even this meant to sound reassuring? Eddie got up and walked to the bathroom. It was the one place in the suite where he could be alone. In the warmth of the shower he wondered what the day ahead would bring. Something dramatic, he guessed. Something that would make for good television. They had told him several times now he was just supposed to live his life, but he didn’t know how to do that, since he hadn’t really been living his life for months before the cameras came.
So much of Susan’s show consisted of her doing things— necessary things, like going to work or to the doctor. Eddie had nothing necessary to do. He’d sometimes made his senior drama students read Aristotle’s Poetics, and he thought now of a line from the book to the effect that characters exist for the sake of the action, not the other way around. If he’d been having trouble playing his character, perhaps it was because his character needed some action to perform. It would all get easier if he kept busy.
When Eddie got back to the bedroom, Melissa was gone. Some of the crew had left with her.
“She’s taking a shower in one of the other bathrooms,” Roma said after letting Eddie look around in confusion for a moment.
“How many bathrooms are there?” he asked. “It’s a hotel room.”
“It’s an imperial hotel room.”
Eddie wanted to put on Entertainment Daily while he waited for Melissa to shower, but he was embarrassed to watch in front of the crew. He thought he should be doing something better with his time. It was a strange worry to have. These people made television for a living. Before Eddie had decided on a course of action, Melissa returned in a plush Cue Hotel bathrobe.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
“What is it?”
“We’re going ice-skating!”
She’d always tried to appear adult and knowing in his presence, but now she was playing up her childishness.
“Why would we do that?”
Dell stepped in from the other room.
“We want you to express some surprise here, Eddie.”
“I am surprised,” Eddie said. “I’m quite surprised.”
“Surprised in a my-girlfriend-planned-something-nice-for-me way. Not a what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about way.”
“I’ll try it again.”
After Eddie had expressed sufficient excitement about the outing, Melissa dropped her robe and dressed to go out. She moved with complete naturalness, not shy before the camera but not aggressive or exhibitionist. Eddie doubted that anyone watching her strategically blurred figure would guess that she’d never shown herself to Eddie this way before, though they might get a sense of the fact from Eddie’s response. She turned to face him as she pulled on her underwear, even speaking to him, as if inviting him to look her over.
“I promise we’ll have fun.”
The SoHo Cue had granted the show complete access, and guests were being asked to do the same as they checked in. The clientele were the sort to be unfazed by such things, or else the sort to aspire to such unfazedness, so things proceeded smoothly throughout the hotel. Only when the camera crew left the lobby did the spectacle begin. Anyone who appeared on camera—even just an elbow or a leg—had to sign one of the waivers that Kara handed out like takeout menus. She didn’t offer money for cooperation, but almost no one refused her. Most of the time it wasn’t even necessary to flag these people down, since they naturally stopped to look as Eddie and Melissa passed.
The crew was small enough to get nearly lost amid the photographers and other onlookers who had taken to waiting for Eddie and Melissa outside the hotel. The minimal setup now struck Eddie as perhaps part of the point. In the past he’d occasionally wondered how these shows achieved the illusion of nonchalance, especially given what he knew about the effect a camera’s presence could have on someone who wasn’t properly trained to be in front of one. But the nonchalance was real, in a way. Not that anyone would ever forget that the cameras were there, but it was easy to forget that the footage being collected would be broadcast to the world. Now that there were onlookers, Dell and the others did less to intervene. Eddie and Melissa weren’t ever asked to repeat a gesture or clarify a statement. They just went about their business. It might almost have been a home movie.
A car took them to Rockefeller Center, where they stood for a minute beneath the enormous Christmas tree while tourists took pictures. A visit to that tree had been an annual tradition in Eddie’s family when he was growing up. Standing under it now, he thought about his parents. He regretted not going down to see them before the show started, and he regretted even more that he couldn’t tell them what was really going on. At least he might say something about his childhood holidays during his afternoon interview. If he expressed it properly, he felt sure it would make the show. It would make him more sympathetic to the rest of the audience, and his parents could hear him say nice things about them, if they watched.
He couldn’t be sure that they would. The last time they’d spoken, his mother had expressed such distaste for the whole thing. Of course, he’d expected her to be upset that he was running around with a younger girl while his wife was pregnant, and he’d done his best to assure her that it was a misunderstanding. But she seemed most upset by something he couldn’t possibly deny, which was that he was on a reality show. She said it was beneath a boy who’d been raised as he was. Beneath a St. Albert’s boy, she obviously meant, though she didn’t put it that way. If she had, he would have told her that it was the striver in her talking. The parents of his rich friends would be happy to watch their sons on TV. Such things were beneath no one anymore.
Skates were waiting for them at the rink, but Eddie and Melissa went through the show of giving shoe sizes and paying for rentals while Hal circled with the camera. Melissa stepped awkwardly onto the ice, grabbed Eddie’s arm, and brought him down with her.
“What happened?” she said, laughing.
“I think I broke my elbow.”
She was already standing back up, still laughing. She skated away, and it was obvious that the fall had been a performance. Melissa was an excellent skater. It was probably why this activity had been chosen. She looked beautiful as she moved, and Eddie thought of her body as he’d seen it just an hour earlier. For whom was she performing? Men watching on TV would envy Eddie for having her. He was near the point of envy himself. After a moment Melissa ci
rcled back and helped him off the ice.
Eddie hadn’t been ice-skating since he was a child, and he was exhausted after about an hour of it. He wanted to sit on a bench for a while, but there were more activities planned: lunch at the Carnegie Deli, a carriage ride through the park. He could already see how their fun-filled life was going to be contrasted to Susan’s difficult pregnancy. There was nothing he could do about that, and making a point of not enjoying himself would only reveal him as unpleasant. Anyway, he was enjoying himself, although it wasn’t the kind of day he would ever plan on his own behalf. It was supposed to conform to some universal idea of a romantic winter day in New York, and as such it was a day an actual New Yorker could only find ridiculous. If Susan had ever suggested they go for lunch at the Carnegie Deli, he would have told her it was a tourist trap. But this very fact made it novel to him. He’d spent his entire life in this city, and he’d never done these things that other people associated so closely with it. The fact that he wasn’t quite himself made it all right to enjoy such things now.
They had tickets that night for the Broadway opening of Unabomber: The Musical, but first they went back to the hotel to change. When Melissa went to the interview room, Eddie lay down in bed, hoping for a short nap, but his cell phone rang. Alex was calling. Eddie wanted to silence it, but the timing—the call arriving at the first moment he was free to answer—seemed meaningful.
“I hear you’re being difficult,” Alex said.
“What are you talking about?” Eddie was genuinely surprised. “I do everything they ask me to do.”
“But they’ve got to ask you first. That takes time and money. You don’t sleep where they want you to sleep. You don’t say what they want you to say, even when you know perfectly well what that is.”
“I’m trying to cooperate. There’s nothing in my contract about where I’m supposed to sleep. There’s nothing about what I’m supposed to say.”
Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Page 17
