“That’s fun,” she said, trying to generate interest in the matter. “So you’re telling me you’re going to be huge in Asia?”
“The thing is that the guy who made it couldn’t afford to pay us anything. He sold us shares in the movie instead. Now I’ve got some money coming to me.”
“What kind of money?”
“It’s tough to say how much it will be in the end. But the agency just got a check for twenty grand. They’re going to take out their fifteen percent and send the rest to me. That’s seventeen thousand dollars right there. And there might be more coming.”
The violence of the sound she let out surprised Eddie. She ran over to the couch and threw herself on his lap.
“It’s going to work this time.”
“I hope so, too.”
“No, it’s not hope. I’m certain it’s going to work.”
“I know how badly you want this,” he said. “I want it badly, too. But it can only help to be realistic. That way if it doesn’t work out, it won’t hurt so much.”
She was too happy even to be annoyed by him.
“When was the last time you got a serious residual check, not a few bucks here and there, but enough money to make a real difference?”
The answer was never.
“Probably five years.”
“Five years,” she nearly screamed at him. “For five years we haven’t needed this money, and it didn’t come. Now we do need it, and within a matter of weeks a check is in the mail.”
He tried to give himself over to the idea.
“You’ve got a point,” he said. “The timing is pretty striking.”
“So why would it not work out? Why would God give us this last chance if he wasn’t going to make good on it?”
That night they went out for dinner. When they returned home, both a little drunk, they had sex for the first time in more than a year not according to any schedule, not for any end but the pleasure of being together. After guiding Susan onto her stomach and then up onto her knees, Eddie ran his eyes like a lens over the length of her back.
SIX
AS SOON AS SUSAN left for work the next day, Eddie punched Morgan’s number into his phone and looked at it on the small screen. He flipped the business card—Meme Evangelist— around in his fingers. He put his phone back in his pocket. In an effort to keep himself from watching the video, he turned on the TV. He wanted to find her there, to see her as a television star, like everyone else did. Such a person lived on a screen, didn’t really have feelings, and couldn’t be hurt by anything he did.
First he tried the basic cable stations, which constantly showed the early seasons of Dr. Drake in syndication. When he didn’t find anything, he went to Entertainment Daily. The channel’s lead anchor, Marian Blair, was talking about Justine Bliss. Eddie had heard her reality show mentioned several times in recent days but otherwise knew nothing about her. From the segment he was watching he gathered that she was a teenaged country singer. Apparently she wasn’t eating, and her friends had fears for her life. Eddie had to admit she looked quite thin, especially when the split screen placed her next to her pudgy ten-year-old self.
“Is Justine’s life in danger?” Marian Blair asked. “Those closest to her think it is. They staged an intervention, and they’ve invited our cameras along. Stay tuned for an ED exclusive.” Now Marian turned to a different camera, and her expression softened. “Also after the break: reports of on-set canoodling and late night flights to Portugal. Is Dr. Drake in love? Will she leave Rex for Turner? Stayed tuned. I’m Marian Blair, and you’re watching Entertainment Daily.”
Eddie wondered whether Martha found it satisfying to have her life followed on these shows. Had she gotten what she wanted out of acting? Maybe she still dreamed of Broadway, still hoped to get noticed for her acting instead of her looks. Perhaps everyone nursed a private disappointment.
He turned the TV off and made the call.
“Handsome Eddie,” Morgan said. “Good to speak to you.”
“You, too. I’m calling to follow up on the conversation we had at dinner.”
“That’s great. What have you got for me?”
“I’d rather not talk about it over the phone.”
Morgan laughed.
“We’re doing full cloak-and-dagger here?”
“I’m a little skittish is all. If you drop by my apartment this afternoon, we can discuss it.”
“Before I get myself over there, are we talking about real deal?”
“We are.”
“I’ll be over around one.”
Having made this appointment, Eddie realized he’d done nothing to prepare. It had seemed that if he acted without planning, he wouldn’t be responsible for what followed. He opened the video and attempted to edit it. He’d become pretty good at this kind of work from putting together video résumés for casting agents. He cut the part where his own face was visible and a few other awkward moments. Eventually he was left with fifteen minutes, which he thought would be enough.
WHEN MORGAN ARRIVED THAT afternoon, he seemed as nervous as Eddie was, though he tried to project a sense of command.
“What have we got?” he asked skeptically.
“Just what you were looking for.”
“How long is the footage?”
“A little under twenty minutes.”
“That’s a good length,” Morgan said. Eddie wondered how such things were determined. “Can you see her tits?”
Eddie nodded.
“What about scag?”
Eddie wasn’t entirely sure what “scag” was.
“I’m not going to give you the whole director’s commentary. Why don’t you look at it and tell me what it’s worth?”
He didn’t want to be in the room while Morgan watched, but he didn’t want to leave him alone with the computer. It would be easy enough to put the file onto a zip drive and walk out with it. Eddie opened his laptop on the coffee table, started the clip, and retreated to the corner. He had a sudden fear that Susan would come home, eager to celebrate their good news. He locked the front door and waited there. The scene seemed much longer now than it had when he’d watched it alone. It was certainly long enough for Morgan’s purposes.
“Fuck,” Morgan observed when the video was done.
“So you’re interested in making a deal?”
“Definitely.”
“Before we go on, certain points are nonnegotiable.” Eddie hadn’t planned to say this, and now he considered what those points should be. “If anyone finds out that it’s me in the tape, I’m going to tell them it was stolen. I erased these scenes years ago, when Martha and I broke up. Before that, when we were still together, you borrowed my laptop over at Blakeman’s place. You stumbled on this file, and you e-mailed it to yourself. Maybe you just wanted to watch it, and you only now decided to sell it. At any rate, I had nothing to do with any of it. That’s all if it gets back to either of us. Ideally, it won’t.”
“You’ve thought this out.”
He hadn’t, really. There must have been something he wasn’t anticipating.
“Does that work for you?”
“If we plan it right, it won’t come back to either of us.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“You’re telling me it’s not negotiable, so it’s not negotiable. Let’s talk about the things that are negotiable.”
“How much can you offer?”
Morgan sat quietly for a bit, as if replaying the video in his head while making calculations.
“Twenty grand.”
Eddie had known it would be a struggle, but he couldn’t believe they were starting this low.
“At the party you said you could get me six figures.”
“I said six figures depending on what you had.”
“What I’ve got is better than you could have imagined. You see her from the front, from the back, close-up of her face. She practically states her name for the record.”
Morgan seemed to co
ncede the point.
“I didn’t realize you’d be asking me to risk my reputation.”
“Shopping the tape around doesn’t risk your reputation, but being called a thief does?”
“There’s no shame in porn these days. Might as well be Universal Studios. Listen, you’re laying down your terms, which are fair enough, but you can’t expect that they won’t affect the price.”
“So make me a reasonable offer.”
“Twenty-five.”
“If we don’t start talking real numbers,” Eddie said, “I’m going to take this thing somewhere else.”
“Your story only works with me.”
“I can come up with another backup story.”
“Are you sure you can trust someone else’s discretion?”
“I’ll work something out.”
“Are you sure you can trust my discretion once I don’t have a stake in this? Whatever story you want to tell blows up in a hurry if people know you tried to sell it to me and we couldn’t agree on a price.”
“You’re extorting me?”
“It’s not like that,” Morgan said. “I just don’t want to get cut out of something that was my idea in the first place.”
Eddie was trapped. Susan had already made the appointment at Hope Springs. He had to strike some kind of deal. But Morgan didn’t know that. Eddie recognized on Morgan’s face an expression that was painfully familiar to him—the look of a man desperate for something to break his way.
“I’ll admit that I can’t take this thing somewhere else,” Eddie said. “I wouldn’t know where to take it. What I can do is erase it with one press of a button, so neither of us gets anything out of it. I’m offering my life up for your profit, and I intend to get something out of it. I’m going to destroy this thing if you even mention to me a number lower than a hundred thousand dollars.”
“It’s going to take me some time to round up the money. I’ll have a bank check in three weeks.”
EDDIE TOLD SUSAN THAT it would take a month for Talent Management to send his check. She didn’t ask any questions about the money or the movie. All that mattered to her was that things were going to work out. Just as Eddie had hoped, this one bit of good luck had been enough to restore her faith. They went the next week to Hope Springs, where Dr. Regnant greeted them like old friends he’d worried he would never see again. He told them the odds would be higher in the second round. He wanted to give Susan’s body a chance to recover, so he suggested putting off the next attempt until the end of the summer. Eddie thought Susan would be disappointed by the news, but she seemed willing to wait as long as it took, now that they had a plan in place. For his part, Eddie was relieved to have some time. Despite Blakeman’s promises, he wasn’t sure how reliable Morgan would prove to be.
But he didn’t need to worry. Almost three weeks to the day, Morgan called to say he had a check. Eddie was surprised that a guy whose main business was posting photos of wheelchairs could get together that kind of money in such time, but he didn’t question it. The next day, Eddie gave Morgan the video on a zip drive and erased it from his computer. This last part was only a gesture—the clip still existed along with the others on the disc—but Eddie really felt he was getting rid of it. It wasn’t his anymore, which meant he wasn’t responsible for what happened to it from there.
At the bank Eddie nearly walked up to the first open ATM. There was no reason he couldn’t deposit a hundred-thousand-dollar check right into the machine. Perhaps that’s what people like Justin Price did. But he needed to take care of some other things. He’d spent a good part of the past few weeks planning how to break up the cash. He handed the certified check to a teller and asked her to draw two others, made out to two different credit card companies. One was in the amount of $17,233, the other $19,679. All of his debt, built up patiently over time, through more than a decade of persistent, sustained irresponsibility, was gone in an instant.
He put twenty thousand dollars into his checking account. This was roughly the amount he’d told Susan he would be getting from the horror film, and it would cover the costs of the treatment. He put the rest in a simple savings account. The bank teller tried to talk him into a slightly more sophisticated investment “vehicle,” but he wanted something he could move around as easily as possible.
It occurred to Eddie that he could spend this money any way he wanted, since Susan didn’t know it was there. For that matter, he didn’t have to go back to Susan at all. He could just walk away from everything. Something in him found the prospect attractive. But Susan was the only justification for what he’d done. She’d needed it so badly. The money would go to raising their child. It wasn’t all that much for that purpose, but to Eddie it felt like a lot.
THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED should have been perfect. For the first time in a decade, he didn’t spend a part of every day worrying about money. Once this sense of insecurity was gone, he realized how he’d lived in it. It had become his atmosphere, or a kind of first principle from which every element of his life emerged. Now it was gone.
Susan was happier than he’d ever seen her, happier than she’d been when they first started dating, before all this trouble began. She was convinced it was going to work this time. They had been given this reprieve; it had to have happened for a reason. There was simply no point in their being disappointed again. They decided to enjoy the time before treatments began. They started having sex again—real, spontaneous sex, with no purpose but pleasure. When they went out for expensive dinners, Susan didn’t ask how they would pay for them.
Eddie tried not to think about the enormity of what he’d done. The video was going to be traced back to him eventually. There was no way that Martha would let him off the hook. Once it did, would Morgan stick to their story? Would Susan buy it? If Martha tried to sue Morgan, it would come out that he’d bought the tape from Eddie. How could it not? Once lawyers were involved Eddie’s cover story about stolen files would be dropped. Either this hadn’t occurred to Morgan, which meant that he’d thought this all out no more than Eddie had, or else he didn’t care, because he had no particular intention of keeping his promise. Eddie could do nothing to make him. If Susan found out what had happened before the treatments started, she wouldn’t let them go ahead. Everything would collapse again. But if the treatment worked out first, she might accept that he’d done it for her.
He called Morgan at the beginning of August.
“I’ve been wondering how this is going to go down.”
“It has gone down as far as you’re concerned,” Morgan said. “You don’t have anything to worry about from here.”
“I’m just curious. When do you think it’s going to break?”
“It’s tough to say, but not immediately. Once it’s out, it’s very difficult to control, so I’ve got to be sure to get the most out of the initial blast. Martha is definitely hot right now, but she could get hotter. If this movie she’s in does well, or if the rumors are true about this new guy and she really leaves Rex. So I’m going to sit on it for a bit. On the other hand, her stock could drop. Say, if Dr. Drake gets canceled.”
“Do you think that might happen?”
“I’m not fucking Nielsen or whatever. I’m just laying out the considerations I’ve got going through my head.”
“So when it goes out, how many people do you think will wind up seeing it?”
“If I do my job right, Eddie, everyone will see it. Fucking everyone. I mean, it’s going to be everywhere.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Of course it’s a good idea. What did you think the point of all this was?”
“I’m just wondering how it will affect Martha.”
“Wrong time to get a conscience, Eddie. What did you think you were getting into?”
“Aren’t you worried she’ll get litigious or something?”
Morgan laughed.
“Is that your concern? We have nothing to worry about. This is going to be great for Ma
rtha. At this point in her career, it’s just what she needs. She’ll be thanking you when it’s all over.”
“Can you do me a favor?” Eddie asked. “Give me a heads-up before doing anything. Just a few days, so I can work things out on my end.”
“Let me talk to my investor.”
“It’s just one guy?”
“Do you want to know?” Morgan asked.
“Not really.”
“I’ll see what he says.”
Meanwhile, Eddie and Susan returned to Hope Springs, and the process began again.
The Lupron shots were the easiest ones. The needle was small, and the drugs came from the pharmacy already mixed. Each morning before Susan went to work, Eddie took the vial from the fridge and filled a syringe. He brought it to their bed, where Susan waited with her shirt pulled up. During the first round, they’d experimented with ice cubes to numb her skin, but Susan said the cold was worse than the shot, so now Eddie just wiped a bit of her belly with rubbing alcohol and pinched a quarter of pink skin. When he’d finished pushing the needle, he covered the syringe and put it into the red hazardous waste barrel that now sat in a corner of the bedroom.
As far as Susan knew, Eddie was still looking for work, since their financial problems were far from over. But Eddie knew there was more money, and he was too anxious to go job hunting. He’d started following Martha more closely, looking for developments in her public life that might send Morgan into action. He turned on the TV as soon as Susan left each morning. He bought all the gossip magazines and read them at coffee shops, throwing them out before coming home. There was a lot to follow—Entertainment Daily and half a dozen other channels; Star Style, Peeper, and CelebNation. Martha had definitively split from Rex, and her publicist confirmed that she was dating Turner Bledsoe.
She had left Rex just as his status as Hollywood’s leading heartthrob was coming into doubt. His big summer movie was a box office disappointment, and his new girlfriend, Carla Lender—the head chef on the cooking-and-dating show Butter Me Up—was an obvious step down from Martha. Meanwhile, Martha’s romance with Turner had helped make Life After Laura into a hit. She was bankable now. According to Star Style, she was considering half a dozen new projects, and the upcoming season of Dr. Drake would be her last. Eddie found dozens of message boards dedicated to predicting how the series would end. Would the true nature of Drake’s gift finally be revealed? Would she marry the hospital administrator with whom she’d alternately flirted and fought through the duration of the show? Serious consideration was being given to alternate theories that Drake was either an angel or a space alien. In either case the final episode would close with her ascension into the skies. Eddie spent entire days on this, and there was always more.
Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Page 6