Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

by Christopher Beha

  “There’s nothing in your contract that says you get to watch your daughters being born, either. They’re running that shit live. You think they’re going to let someone they can’t trust go anywhere near one of those cameras when the time comes? Someone who won’t say what they want him to say? Someone who won’t sleep where they want him to sleep?”

  “Who told you I was being a problem?” Eddie asked. “No one said anything to me. If they’d asked me, I would have done my best.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that. Just keep in mind that the information is flowing. And they want you to step things up.”

  “All right,” Eddie said. “I can do that.”

  AFTER THE SHOW, THEY ate at a French restaurant in midtown, the kind of expensive place that Justin sometimes mentioned going to, in a tone that suggested he’d rather have had a burger. The maître d’ brought Eddie and Melissa to a booth in the back corner, where the effect of intimacy was somewhat undermined by the cameras already waiting for them.

  “You’re a good skater,” Eddie said after they’d ordered cocktails.

  “My stepfather used to take me when I was little. He was a semipro hockey player.”

  Eddie had no particular reason to doubt this, but he did.

  Over dinner, they split a bottle of wine, and they were both fairly drunk by the time they got home. Eddie hadn’t said anything to Melissa about sleeping in bed with her that night. It was awkward to mention, and he’d worried that someone might overhear. The nondisclosure agreement couldn’t possibly mean that just one wrong word in public would ruin him, but he wanted to please the producers, and each time he dropped the mask he found it harder to recover. He could speak to the crew so long as he was speaking as the Eddie they were filming. When he gave any indication that this Eddie wasn’t real, he struggled to get back into the part. He’d always found it a self-serious pretension when temperamental actors refused to break character—asking to be called “General Washington” in their trailers, eating craft service with wooden teeth. But now he found it necessary. Perhaps he should have learned the trick sooner, though such behavior wasn’t really indulged when the role in question was “Young Guy #1” in a toilet paper commercial.

  Melissa gave him a long good-night kiss and draped an arm across his chest before turning the lights off. They both lay for a moment without moving before Eddie extracted himself from this embrace. The king-sized mattress was large enough to allow for plenty of distance between them, and Eddie moved to one edge, giving Melissa the rest of the bed.

  He woke in the middle of the night to find that she’d rolled over and pressed herself against him. Her hand rested gently on his outer thigh, and it was moving slightly. He whispered her name, but he got only a light snore in response. For months he’d been starved for the kind of attention Melissa was unknowingly providing. He felt himself stirring, and he tried to pull away from her touch, but there was nowhere to go without falling out of bed. She might have been awake, teasing him while continuing on with her fake snore. He said her name again, and she rolled over to her side of the bed.

  NINETEEN

  “THINGS SEEM TO BE going well between you and Melissa,” Dell told Eddie a few days later.

  “They are.”

  “Can you put that in a complete sentence, so we can use it?”

  “Things are going really well with Melissa right now.”

  It was true. Some kind of threshold had been crossed on the first night he’d stayed in bed with her. There was nothing sexual about it. He’d just woken up the next morning committed to the role. Everything was easier after that. Instead of making dozens of tiny decisions each hour, he’d made one big decision, after which the rest became instinctual. He did everything for the cameras, even when the cameras weren’t on. He hadn’t wavered since then.

  He’d worried at first about losing himself in the part, but the more committed he became to showing the camera what it wanted, the more persistently he felt the presence of an unseen self. It was nothing so tangible as a voice, but if it had been it would have said something like, The person they’re looking at doesn’t exist, but I am in here, and I am real. It must have been that he’d had an inner self all along, but he’d never experienced it in this way. It had only developed in resistance to something. Susan would call the thing he was talking about his soul, Eddie thought. Whatever it was, he felt oddly protective of it. So long as he kept it inside, they couldn’t do anything to it. They could film every move he made, but they couldn’t film his mind. They could film him while he slept, but they couldn’t film his dreams.

  Not that they didn’t try. Dell’s interviews were designed precisely to capture what went on inside, which might have been why Eddie still had trouble with them. Only once had he been completely honest in that room, in his first interview. Since then he’d dedicated himself to withholding. This frustrated Dell and the others, who tried various tactics to get what they wanted out of him. They became more adversarial. The sessions got longer. Melissa emerged from the interview room after twenty minutes with a smile on her face; Eddie got grilled for an hour. By now he was convinced that they turned up the temperature and brightened the lights as the hour wore on.

  “Does that worry you?” Dell asked.

  “Does it worry me that things are going well with Melissa?”

  “No offense, but you haven’t got the best track record. Martha, Susan—they seem to have gone on to better things. Are you scared of losing Melissa?”

  Only a few days before, he would have protested this characterization.

  “You want to know if I’m scared of losing Melissa? No, I’m not. Melissa knows the real me, and she’ll stand by me.”

  “So you don’t think that Susan knows the real you?”

  The main effect of these interviews was to make him eager to get out into the world. That was the easy part. Most days weren’t as busy as the first had been, but they had a similar structure to them. Eddie and Melissa slept in each morning, and the crew was already in place when they got up. Sometimes they were told what was planned that day, so they could discuss the activity over breakfast. Otherwise, they speculated instead. After their morning activity, they returned to the Cue. Liquor was provided at every turn—mimosas at breakfast, wine at lunch. The crew’s goal was to get them at least a little drunk for their afternoon interviews. After the interviews, which would have been exhausting in any case, they slept it off and prepared for the evening. They ate out every night. Naturally there was more to drink at dinner. They came home and went to bed, often falling asleep before they’d extracted themselves from their performed embrace.

  All the while another order was being imposed, one that Eddie knew about but couldn’t apprehend. All of this was happening in the service of the show. It only had meaning once it was shaped and aired, and he couldn’t know what that meaning was until they appeared in an episode. The crew collected far more material than they could possibly use—enough material to make almost anything they wanted.

  They’d been shooting for almost three weeks when Dell told them they would be featured that night. He didn’t say anything more, except that he wanted to film them watching themselves.

  “This is so awesome,” Melissa said as the opening credits ran. She seemed not quite to have believed that this was coming, as though she’d been auditioning for a part she’d only now received. The episode began as many did, with Susan seated at the front desk of the gallery, talking with her coworkers. This time, Tomaka was reading the Daily News.

  “Listen to Peerbaum’s column,” she said. “ ‘Handsome Eddie Hartley has been making the rounds with his teenage girlfriend. Most recently, the pair were spotted canoodling in a back booth at Paradise Regained, the new hot spot in the Meatpacking District.’”

  “Can you imagine being that girl’s mom?” Susan asked.

  It was such a perfect segue that Eddie couldn’t believe it had been spontaneous. The next shot showed Melissa on television for t
he first time. A title at the bottom of the screen introduced her in midconversation with her mother.

  “You don’t understand,” Melissa said. “He’s really sweet. He’s just been misunderstood.”

  “No man who leaves his pregnant wife is ‘really sweet.’”

  Melissa’s mother seemed familiar to Eddie, though she didn’t look all that much like her daughter. He’d probably seen a photograph of her somewhere without remembering it. “I don’t think he’s good for you.”

  The argument continued while they drove to the airport. Melissa went through security, and the screen showed a plane taking off before fading to commercial.

  “You’re getting a lot of airtime,” Eddie told her, trying to sound happy about it.

  When the show came back, Melissa was in a cab to the Cue. Shots of her ride home were interspersed with shots from the interview room.

  “Of course I think about these things my mom says,” Melissa told Dell. “About how Eddie is no good. But people don’t understand him like I do.”

  Eddie sat in the hotel room with his head in his hands, waiting for Melissa to arrive. Watching the scene, Eddie’s excitement at seeing himself back on television was tempered by surprise at how old he looked. When he pictured himself in his mind, he was twenty-one or twenty-two, as he’d been during the bulk of his television work. Occasionally those images could still be found on TV, and nothing had come along to replace them. He didn’t just look old but also nervous and ill at ease, though this suited the tone of anxious anticipation.

  In some ways, the fact that he was watching from the same room he saw on-screen was stranger than the fact that he was watching himself. Eddie almost expected the show to unfold in real time, as though Melissa were out in the hall with her suitcases at the same time that she was sitting next to him.

  “I’m back,” Melissa said as she walked through the door.

  Eddie watched himself hurry to meet her.

  “Welcome home,” he said. “I missed you.”

  They kissed, and Melissa said, “I missed you, too.”

  “What’s the matter?” Eddie asked as Melissa turned away.

  “You know how my mother is,” she said. “She doesn’t think that we should be together. She doesn’t think it’s good for me.”

  The screen cut to Eddie in the interview room, looking as uncomfortable as he’d felt at the time. “Does it bother me to hear what Melissa’s mom said about me?” he asked. The fact that he was asking himself the question made him sound defensive, and the sweat running down his face made him look guilty. “The woman has never met me, and she’s passing judgment. Not that I care what she thinks, particularly.”

  They cut back to Melissa.

  “I guess it’s because my own dad left while my mom was still pregnant with me, and we never heard from him again. I think about what Susan is going through.”

  Back in the interview room, Eddie said, “To be honest I didn’t really care if she got hurt. That’s not my problem.”

  After a brief shot of Melissa unpacking with tears in her eyes, the show went to commercial.

  “I was talking about Martha and the tape,” Eddie called out, knowing that Dell was listening to them from the other room. “I never said I didn’t care if Susan got hurt.”

  The show was more than half over, and it had been dedicated almost entirely to them. Eddie thought they would have to go back to Susan after these commercials, but they returned to Melissa telling Eddie that she was taking him ice-skating. They didn’t use the look of excited surprise Eddie had attempted to generate after Dell’s direction. Instead they went with his spontaneous response.

  “Why would we do that?”

  Then they showed Melissa back in the interview room.

  “I know Eddie’s upset about my visit home. It’s been a real strain on our relationship. I thought it would be nice to give him a surprise. Take his mind off of things.”

  Melissa skated expertly across the screen with a smile on her face, racing toward Eddie on the ice.

  “I think I broke my elbow,” he complained.

  Everything was being presented to make him look as unpleasant as possible, until a turn came. Melissa helped Eddie off the ice, and they skated around together. Eddie smiled a genuine smile. The cameras followed them off the ice.

  “She saved my life,” Eddie said back at the hotel. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “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 was lucky to meet her when I did. It’s taken all of this to show me that.”

  The credits rolled as Eddie and Melissa rode a carriage through the southern entrance of the park. When the show was done, Eddie said nothing about that closing line. They’d taken the only true thing he’d said in weeks and twisted it to mean something else entirely, but that bothered him less than he thought it should. It had been a mistake to think that any declaration to Susan would make it through to her by these means. Anyway, expressions of love weren’t going to get him back to her. He would get back when it was clear that his return would make good television. This episode could only help in that regard. In the meantime, he needed to guard that inner self more carefully. They could only touch what he let them have.

  THE CALLS BEGAN BEFORE the credits were over. Some didn’t surprise him. He’d been hoping to hear from his parents, and despite their tone he was glad that they’d watched the show. They asked what on earth was going on with this little kid, when he was going to straighten things out with Susan, how their unborn granddaughters were coming along. Eddie tried to answer all these questions in a fashion that would reassure them while also providing usable footage for the show. The conversation took place on speakerphone, with the crew listening. After his parents hung up, Kara called them back to get permission to air their voices.

  The next call came from an unrecognized number. After a moment’s consideration, Dell told Eddie to pick up. Eddie said hello, and a voice he didn’t recognize replied.

  “Who is this?” Eddie asked.

  “C’mon, Handsome Eddie,” the voice answered with some embarrassment. “You know who this is. It’s John Wilkins.”

  “Wilky,” Eddie said. “Sorry about that. How have you been?”

  “I’ve been great. Ever since our reunion I’ve been thinking that we ought to get together more often. Like old times.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “My wife and I were just saying how we’d love to have you and Melissa over for dinner.”

  “I’ll have to check our schedule. Things are pretty busy right now.”

  “Just let me know a night that works for you, and we’ll sort things out on our end. I don’t know if you remember, but my wife does interior design. In all modesty, I’ve got to say, our apartment looks great. I think it would really work on camera.”

  When Eddie got off the phone, Dell came out from the other room.

  “Who was that?”

  “A guy I went to school with. We weren’t even friends, really.”

  “What does he do? What’s he like?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Eddie said. “He’s got a couple of kids, I think.”

  “Don’t bother calling him back,” Dell said.

  Other calls came—from St. Albert’s classmates, from cousins, from actors he’d worked with on student films and tiny plays, from seemingly anyone he’d ever met who still had his cell phone number and wanted to be on TV.

  Shortly after the next episode aired, Eddie opened a copy of CelebNation to find an article with the headline “Handsome Eddie’s First Kiss.” There was a full-page photo of a woman with short blond hair sitting on a couch with two young boys in her lap. It was the dimples—not on her face, but on the kids—that gave her away.

  She’d acted with him in The Crucible, his first play at St. Albert’s. Eddie was Giles Corey—not a starring role, but big
for an eighth grader. While his friends formed layup lines on the court in the St. Albert’s basement, Eddie and a sophomore from Melwood named Karen sat Indian-style backstage, reading lines with knees touching. Karen was pretty in a pudgy, dimply way, and she sat with her uniform skirt hiked up to show gym shorts beneath. She smelled of something chalky and floral. Eddie didn’t know whether all girls smelled this way, since he hadn’t been that close to one for any length of time. The other boys in his class knew girls in the natural course of things. Over the summer they sailed and took tennis lessons with girls in Bridgehampton, and they came back to school with stories obviously embellished but rooted in some kind of fact. Once a week Blakeman and some half dozen others went to dancing school, where they learned with these same girls to foxtrot and to waltz. (Eddie had thought this was a joke the first time he’d heard about it, but it was true.) These experiences in hand, they walked unembarrassed on free afternoons the few blocks uptown to Spence or down to Melwood and waited outside for school to let out. Meanwhile, Eddie took the train home with his mom.

  Back in Queens the boys knew girls for the simple reason that they went to school with them. Despite the odd anachronism of its separate, single-sex entrances, the parochial school that Eddie would have attended in the absence of his St. Albert’s scholarship mingled the genders completely, and the few neighborhood boys he was friendly with were sexually precocious in ways that would have shocked the swagger out of his ultimately sheltered classmates. When Tommy Lanetti told Eddie about cutting school to finger Jennifer Minovic in the back of the Sunnyside Center movie theater during a lunchtime screening of Turner & Hooch, Eddie could tell by his style of recounting that every word was true.

  Around Karen, Eddie was quiet and shy, and she responded teasingly. After the third or fourth rehearsal, she invited him to walk her home. In the lobby of her building on Fifth, she introduced Eddie to the doorman and the elevator operator, calling each by his first name. It thrilled Eddie to refer to grown men in this way. Upstairs the apartment was empty. Karen fetched cans of Coke from the kitchen, and they sat drinking them on the living room couch.