Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

by Christopher Beha

  Unfortunately Eddie wasn’t ugly. He was good-looking in an entirely conventional way, which turned out to be fatal. He couldn’t turn himself grotesque. Casting directors found him blandly inexpressive, and they made no effort to conceal their finding. He overcompensated, and all the subtlety went out of his work. He screamed and pulled at his hair. He could feel himself acting badly, which made him self-conscious, which made his acting worse.

  It was entirely different for Martha. She was a real beauty, a rarity. She might have made it somewhere on that alone. But on top of that she could actually act. Perversely, this was a skill that her looks had taught her. Beauty is a kind of cage, she’d told him once, late at night, when they’d been drinking. Real beauty separates you from everyone else, she’d said. He’d wanted to tell her that they were all encaged. Everyone was separated from everyone else. The bars of her cage just happened to look nicer than his. But he knew there was some truth to what she said. The assumption about having such a beautiful girlfriend was that you were constantly in fear of losing her. And he might have been, had she been merely beautiful in the way that he was handsome. But her kind of beauty acted as insulation. When they were out together, guys wouldn’t even talk to her, let alone try to take her home. She frightened people.

  There were obvious ways a person could respond to this condition. You could become utterly self-conscious all the time, or become utterly unself-conscious and narcissistic, accepting your difference as a prerogative and other people as not quite real. But there was something in between: you could be both self-conscious and unself-conscious at once, treat all these odd standoffish observers like an audience and perform for them in the way they seemed to expect. You could constantly give the impression that you were offering your entire self to the world, while always holding back the bit that mattered, protecting it. In this way, Martha had learned how to act.

  That she could act was obvious enough watching the scene in front of him. She made an impression just by giving him prompts. Anyone watching could have known that she would make it and he would not. Had he truly not known at the time? He remembered recognizing that he needed to work to get better. Watching now, he could see that he’d never been good enough. He put on another scene. It was a kind of torture, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  He’d had just enough success in the early days to keep him going. A few times a year he got bit parts on television shows. He acted in student films, unpaid work to get himself on-screen. He did small, independent theater, nothing bigger than those first two plays. But his agent kept sending him out, which seemed to be what mattered. Martha was clearly doing better, but there wasn’t any competition between them. They were happy together. So happy that years passed, and Eddie hardly noticed he wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Martha started making trips to the West Coast, auditioning for pilots. She got cast in two, and the second was picked up. Over the phone that night he’d spoken with great excitement about all the plans to be made. They’d been living together for almost six years—since they were both kids— and there had been an unspoken assumption that they would marry once one of them really broke through.

  “I’ve found myself a room,” Martha said. “With a girl Tina knows.”

  Tina was a friend of theirs who’d moved out to L.A. a few months earlier.

  “A room?” Eddie asked.

  “Yeah, you never know how long these shows will last, so I don’t want to get overconfident, start spending money I don’t have. Everyone tells me that. Save it away for the dry spells.”

  “Don’t you think we should get our own place?”

  “Oh, honey. I didn’t think it made sense. They’ll probably cancel the thing after half a season, and I’ll be right back in New York.”

  But he knew she would never be back in New York. If the show got canceled, she would get another show.

  “I just assumed you would want me there with you.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I’ll be so busy, and what would you do out here?”

  It took him a moment to understand.

  “What would I do? It’s L.A. I’m an actor.”

  “I know you are. It’s just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Since I’ve been here, I’ve realized how tough it is.”

  “You don’t seem to be having it that tough.”

  “But that’s just it. I’m at a real make-or-break point right now. I need to concentrate on my career. And if you move out to be with me, and you can’t find work, it’s going to put too much pressure on me. I can’t deal with it right now.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get cast for a show about a blind detective. I know that’s the gold ring we’ve been chasing all these years.”

  “Well, if you have such disdain for that kind of work, that’s all the more reason you shouldn’t come out here.”

  “Disdain?” Eddie said. “You fucking hate television. You’re the one who talks about art, who wants to be doing Chekhov at the Old Vic or whatever. And now you’re giving it up because some producer thinks you’re the next hot thing.”

  When she spoke again, she didn’t sound angry or hurt.

  “The way you’re handling all this just confirms that I made the right decision.”

  “So this was all decided before you even spoke with me?”

  “Eddie,” she said, and the tenderness in her voice calmed him, brought him to hopeful attention, so that what came next had maximum effect. “You’re dedicating your life to something you’ve got no talent for whatsoever. It’s killed me for years to pretend otherwise, and I can’t pretend anymore.”

  For a long time, Eddie had thought that Martha ended his career with this remark, said purely out of spite. But watching the video now, he could see that she really had known all along. It was all over her face as she tried to work with him. If anything, he wished she’d said something sooner. Why hadn’t she warned him? Not on her way out of his life, when the truth could only be destructive, but at a time when it was still possible to do something about it.

  He continued watching, making no effort to find scenes that would really interest Morgan. There wouldn’t be many, he knew. It wasn’t something they’d done on purpose. If you spent that much time alternately having sex and being on camera it was inevitable that you would occasionally wind up doing both at once. There had been some excitement to knowing the camera was capturing them, but afterward they forgot about it. They’d never looked at clips, at least not together. In one scene Eddie came across, they were kissing, and he thought he might have found what Morgan wanted. But they stopped and engaged in a discussion of the mechanics of on-screen chemistry. Eddie felt embarrassed for his younger self, trapped in this bubble of dramatic irony, where not just the audience but the other characters knew the simple truth that hadn’t dawned on him. And for the first time in years, he even felt some sympathy for Martha.

  Perhaps if he’d handled it differently after their conversation, she would have flown back to New York and they would have at least talked it out a bit. After all, they’d been together a long time. You didn’t end a thing like this with one phone call. They might have had a few nights together. Who knows what would have happened. Instead, he’d hung up and quickly called back. When she didn’t answer, he told her voice mail that she was a shallow, stupid cunt who didn’t want him in L.A. because she needed to be free to fuck strangers if she wanted to keep working. Then he drank half a bottle of bourbon and called to apologize, again to her voice mail. A week later her sister moved her things out. Eddie never saw Martha again.

  Except, of course, that he saw her everywhere. The blind detective show was canceled before it finished its first season, just as Eddie had expected. But another one quickly followed, also as Eddie had expected. This time Martha was the star. Dr. Drake was the youngest but most gifted member of a team of intensive-care doctors. She had some kind of special power or intuitive gift, could lay her hands on people and discover what was wrong
with them, like a human MRI. Since a medical procedural in which all matter of illness could be diagnosed and cured by the laying-on of hands would not make for much drama, the gift was an inconstant one. It was never explained why it worked when it did or why it didn’t when it didn’t.

  The show was an incoherent mess, lacking even the most basic internal logic. The dialogue was occasionally sharp or funny, but just as often sloppy and melodramatic. After watching the first few episodes, Eddie assumed that it too would be gone before it finished its first season. Five years later it was still on the air, the most popular scripted show on TV. To Eddie this was inexplicable. Naturally he’d tuned in every week, in the early years, but he was a special case. It couldn’t be that everyone found the show as utterly ridiculous as he did, that they all watched only because of her. Yet the more he saw, the more convinced of this he became. Martha’s beauty and charm were sufficient to keep millions of people engaged with a show that wasn’t just poorly written or schmaltzy but that on the most fundamental level didn’t make any sense. Was she a doctor or some kind of shaman or what?

  Even if he avoided NBC, which aired Dr. Drake, she was liable to turn up on another network, plugging a late-night spot. The new twenty-four-hour celebrity news channel, Entertainment Daily, seemed to devote more than half its coverage to Martha. He could turn off the TV, but she was everywhere online. He couldn’t even read the New York Herald in the morning without seeing her in some ad. If he put down the paper and went outside, she was on the side of the passing bus. Phone booths that no longer had working phones seemed now to exist only to taunt Eddie with her image. Eventually he learned to do what everyone else apparently did, which was to believe that she wasn’t actually real. In this way, she became for him what she’d already become for the rest of the world—not a human being at all, but a vessel into which could be poured all of his longing and his hope and finally all of his disappointment.

  This was the worst part about watching the clips: they made her the old Martha again. It had been seven years since Martha left—he’d now been with Susan nearly as long as he’d been with Martha—and he’d trained himself to look at her on TV without thinking of those days. But here he saw her as he had known her and the public had not, before she was Dr. Drake. Of course this was just what would make the video interesting. Perhaps interesting enough that Morgan would spend some money on one of these innocent clips of the two of them talking. Eddie could already imagine the Dr. Drake chat boards filling up with obnoxious comments about what a lousy actor he’d been, but he could live with that if everything else worked out.

  He clicked on another file, and there was again the brief blankness of the screen before it started up. The picture was different this time, the view shaky. The camera was off the tripod, presumably being held by Eddie himself, working its way around the room for a few seconds before settling on a scene. When it found Martha she was naked and prone, knees tucked under her body, which was arranged as though in a kind of salutation, her feet and ass hanging off the end of the bed while her arms stretched out in front of her. She seemed to be waiting for him, and he approached with the camera in hand, focused on her unmoving body.

  She gave way to him easily and he leaned into her, setting his free hand on the crook where her bony hip gave way to the soft thickness of flesh. Once he’d positioned himself there he didn’t move except to run the camera from her splayed ass up the long ellipses of her back to her shoulders and the cropped blond hair on the back of her head. Instantly that hair fixed the scene in time. Eddie remembered that she’d cut it to play Viola in a production of Twelfth Night. She rocked front to back on her knees, lazily at first and then with more purpose. The camera followed her for a moment before fixing in place as her head moved in and out of the scene.

  After a few minutes of this, the view went sideways, as though he meant to put the camera down, until she looked back over her shoulder at him, and the camera went upright to catch the hungry smile on her face. She stared at the lens and rocked in front of him more deliberately. This went on for precisely two minutes and eighteen seconds, measured at the bottom of the screen, before she pulled herself off him and turned over, showing her whole body. She put a finger in her mouth and then reached down to hook it inside herself.

  He had not up until then been aroused by watching the video, but now he was stirred in a sad, desperate way. She was perfect. He had always thought so. If he let this scene out into the world, this was the part that would be played over and over again. She moved with an odd innocence, the only emotion on her face a kind of curiosity. Eddie had the sense now that she was acting. Perhaps he’d understood as much then, because he turned the camera away from her, down to his own erection, as if to bring reality into the matter before quickly returning to her. When she withdrew her hand and brought it to her mouth again, he lowered himself onto the bed and her. The view turned awkward and uninviting—a bit of her shoulder, her jaw and ear, the headboard. Martha took the camera and turned it on him, lowering it slowly from his face to the point where his hips pressed against her thighs. The screen went blank.

  Eddie closed his laptop, knowing that the only other option was to watch the thing again. More than once he’d been asked by a crude or drunk friend what it had been like with Martha Martin. He always shrugged the question off, not out of discretion but because he couldn’t really remember. Everything about that time—everything about her—had taken on a sheen of bitterness and regret, so that it was impossible to recover from it something so simple and pleasurable as two young people in love, enjoying each other.

  He needed to get out of the apartment, to forget about things for a few hours. He ejected the disc and put it back in the case, which he placed on a shelf in the linen closet that Susan couldn’t reach without his help. He got in the elevator without knowing where he was going, but he quickly decided to head to Lexington Avenue to see what was playing at the movie theater. He would sit in the cool darkness of distraction. Susan would be home, soon after the movie was over, and they could talk about what they were going to do next. He got to the theater just in time for a showing of Mantis 3: Slaying Mantis. Blakeman’s review of this installment in the series suggested that it was just the kind of mindless fantasy he needed. He found a spot near the front of the empty theater as previews started. The first was for another movie that also starred Mantis, as part of a superhero collective that was fighting to save the earth from aliens. Eddie thought he might watch that one when it came out. If he didn’t find a job and wasn’t taking classes, he might go to a lot of movies that summer.

  The second preview was for a romantic comedy called Life After Laura, starring Turner Bledsoe as a young widower and Martha Martin as the grief counselor who falls in love with him. Eddie hadn’t known she’d started making movies. All the effort he’d spent over the years getting used to seeing her on-screen seemed to have been undone by a few hours spent exploring the past. That was his Martha up there, the same one he’d been watching all morning. Everyone thought they knew her, but they didn’t. They didn’t know that she’d run out as soon as she got her break, that she’d left him behind to start his life over. If they knew, no one would blame him for selling the tape.

  He tried to estimate the value of what he had. There was no question that it was Martha. For three minutes she stared right into the camera, and it caught her face many other times throughout. The whole thing was about twenty minutes long, though he would have to cut out four or five that showed too much of him. Perhaps another three or four would go for reasons of quality, though he didn’t know how much that mattered in these things. At the very least he had ten full minutes of usable footage. If he was prepared to use it. Assuming Morgan was reliable, it was worth well more than they needed. There had to be some way of doing it so that it didn’t come back to him.

  As the preview dragged on, Eddie began to laugh at the screen. It might have been taken as laughter at Martha’s bad jokes, but he kept it up after the p
review ended and another, for a notably unfunny war movie, began. He was still at it during the feature’s opening credits, when a woman sitting several rows behind him asked him to stop.

  HE WAS BACK IN the apartment when Susan got home.

  “How was your day?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said. But she didn’t look fine. She looked tired. And he was tired of seeing her so tired. “Did you do anything about dinner?”

  He hadn’t thought about dinner after stuffing himself with popcorn.

  “We could order something.”

  “It’s so expensive. We agreed we were going to have some discipline about this stuff this summer. It’s the first day of your vacation and we’re already fucking up this plan.”

  “I’ll make something.”

  “Don’t bother,” she told him. “There’s no difference at this point anyway. We’re kidding ourselves.”

  He could just tell her the truth, and they could decide together. She could determine whether one more shot at a child was worth whatever would come out of this. But telling her meant admitting that he’d saved these videos all this time. He could promise her that he hadn’t looked at them, which had been true until now, but how could she believe it? Beyond that, how could he force her to make this choice? If he was going to do it, he had to do it himself.

  “I was going to make something,” he said. “But I got some news today.”

  “Did you find a job?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “I got a call from Alex at Talent Management. Apparently this stupid horror film I was in years ago has become something of a cult hit. In South Korea of all places.”

  He didn’t know why he’d said South Korea, but he found the audacity of the lie strangely appealing.