Arts & Entertainments: A Novel

by Christopher Beha

  “What would you tell him?”

  “I wouldn’t use words. Let’s just say if I ever run into him I’ll leave an impression.”

  “That guy sounds like a real dirtbag,” the bartender said.

  “Bledsoe?” Eddie asked.

  “That Hartley guy.”

  “Well, he got his,” said the man at the bar. “Out on his ass.”

  His sharp laugh turned into a lengthy cough.

  “If Turner is really looking for Eddie Hartley,” Marian Blair told the camera back in the studio, “our spies might have found him. Reports have the erstwhile actor spending his first night away from his pregnant wife at the Metropolitan Hotel just blocks from his home.”

  A picture of the hotel appeared on-screen. Eddie hadn’t noticed anyone following him from the apartment the night before, or anyone waiting outside when he left that morning. But apparently he was easy to find.

  “That’s right around the corner,” the bartender said. “I know the guy who runs that place.”

  Eddie stood up, leaving his half-finished beer. Back on the street, he took out his phone and called the only person he could think to ask for help.

  “Congratulations on the triplets,” Blakeman said by way of greeting.

  “What have you gotten me into?”

  “I gave you an option. The last I heard you weren’t even going to take it.”

  “Well, I took it, and I’m in trouble now. I need a place to crash until everything calms down.”

  “Sure thing,” Blakeman said. “I’m at the office now, but I don’t imagine you’d want to come here to pick up keys, unless you want to give the Interviewer an exclusive. Just drop by the apartment any time after eight or so.”

  FOR A FEW YEARS Blakeman had shared a house on Washington Square with his cousin Charlie, but they’d been thrown out over an incident with the owner’s fish tank—an incident in which Eddie had played a small, forgotten part. After that Charlie left town, and Max returned to the loft on West Broadway where he’d lived right after college. In those days, Eddie and Martha had spent several nights a week there, but Eddie had hardly visited since Blakeman moved back. That evening, he arrived a bit later—and drunker—than he’d intended, having worked his way downtown by stopping in bars.

  A men’s clothing boutique had replaced the tobacco shop that once occupied the storefront downstairs. Eddie pressed the buzzer outside and the front door clicked open without a question. A key in the elevator unlocked the button for the second floor, and the elevator opened directly onto the apartment, where a party appeared to be in full swing. Blakeman hadn’t mentioned that he was expecting company, but it shouldn’t have surprised Eddie. Blakeman always expected company. One of his roommates, whose name Eddie couldn’t remember, stood near the door.

  “Handsome Eddie,” he said, as if Eddie were still a regular. “Grab a drink.”

  Eddie gave a casual nod and walked into the room. The apartment was large and entirely open apart from three small bedrooms in the back, separated by a thin wall of Sheetrock and plywood that Eddie had helped install a decade earlier. There was a kitchen area not far from the elevator, with a wooden butcher block that served as the bar, just as it always had. It was nearly ten o’clock, which felt late to Eddie, though it was barely time for a Blakeman party to be picking up. The place was packed, and even the crowd looked the same as always. Eddie felt the passage of time pressing in on him, just as he had when Patrick spoke about him at the church.

  His bouts of chronophobia had begun when he still lived with Martha. Whenever a new actor made a name on television or in the movies, Eddie would look up his date of birth. So long as these rising stars were mostly still older than Eddie, the habit gave him some satisfaction. He could almost see the years that separated them, and he could fill those years with all the things he needed to do to catch up. It all seemed possible. But the span of years slowly shrank, until the day when most new stars were younger than Eddie. Out of habit, he kept looking up actors’ ages even after he’d abandoned his career, and the rare occasion when someone older suddenly gained some attention could still excite him briefly. Then he remembered that it meant nothing, since he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Eddie fixed a drink and struggled to find some thought with which he might fight back the passage of time. He remembered the call from the reporter at Star Style, who’d called him a “hot commodity.” He hadn’t become “hot” in the way he’d wanted, but who ever did? Martha wanted to be doing Broadway instead of playing Dr. Drake. You didn’t always get to choose. Perhaps it would be possible to get some real work out of this. Susan wouldn’t like it, he knew, but why did it have to be up to her? He remembered the feeling he’d had after depositing the money, that he might do anything now. He had dismissed it at the time, he’d gone straight home, but now Susan had thrown him out. Didn’t she lose some rights for doing that? In the past two days, he’d lost a job he’d never wanted and a marriage that had never been as happy as it should have been. Perhaps life was telling him it was time to start over.

  He was still standing in front of the drinks when Blakeman approached, bringing along a small crowd.

  “Guys, this is my oldest friend, Handsome Eddie.”

  Eddie wished he hadn’t used the nickname, which had already found its way into the press. As he shook hands and introduced himself, he measured the level of recognition on each face. Blakeman had probably told them all that the Drake Tape guy was coming over. Perhaps he was the reason they were there. Eddie could almost tell from their looks which ones had seen the tape and which had only heard about it. It was strange when people you’d never met knew intimate details about you. He’d long imagined the feeling but didn’t much like it now.

  It was possible that he really did know some of these people from the last years when he was still in Blakeman’s circle, but that time was a bit hazy for him. He’d been drinking a lot. He wasn’t going out on auditions, because they made him sick. He vomited before each one, and when he got into the room he couldn’t remember his lines. The only words that kept any purchase in his head were Martha’s about his dedicating his life to something for which he had no talent.

  Her departure had created other problems, like making his rent, which had doubled when she moved out. More than doubled, in fact, since she’d been covering his shortfalls all those years. For that matter, she’d been paying for groceries, utilities, Internet, and cable. Years of working odd jobs, temping a few weeks at a time while trying to keep up with friends who had proper careers, had left him in bad financial shape. His debts had never worried him while they were piling up. He had the money he was spending, he just didn’t have it on him. It was stored someplace in the future. One of them—admittedly, more likely Martha—would be breaking through at any time, and a few thousand dollars would be trivial. It had never occurred to him that he wouldn’t be brought along when the breakthrough happened.

  A few months after Martha left, he got the job at St. Albert’s, through the intervention of Blakeman’s father, who was on the board of the school. He accepted it out of necessity, not thinking that he was giving up his acting career. But the job had led him to Susan, and Susan had made him feel that he didn’t need to keep trying to act in order to be happy. Another life presented itself. It would be quieter, but it wouldn’t be such a struggle. In the end, of course, it had turned into its own kind of struggle, one with no prospect of making him a star.

  But now Eddie felt like a star. He could see it in their faces, in the eagerness with which Blakeman introduced him. He was just making small talk, but people looked at him as though every word was fascinating. They crowded around, and he was hardly surprised when one drunken girl called out, “I know you.”

  It took Eddie a moment to realize he really did know her, because he couldn’t immediately connect this figure, in her dark makeup and short leather skirt, to the girl Patrick had introduced to him outside church last spring.

  “Melinda, right?�
�

  She laughed.

  “Melissa.”

  “Right. Sorry about that. How’s Patrick?”

  “We broke up.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s cool. It just wasn’t working out. He’s so serious, you know?”

  Eddie hadn’t found Patrick particularly serious.

  “Sometimes that can be good,” he said. “Maybe I should have been a bit more serious when I was your age.”

  “How are things at St. Albert’s?”

  “Not so hot,” Eddie said, suspecting that she already knew. “I got fired yesterday.”

  “That’s a bummer,” Melissa told him. “I got fired from my internship this summer. My boss caught me doing blow in her office.”

  “You seem to have recovered all right.”

  “Totally.”

  There was a lull in the conversation until one of Melissa’s friends approached.

  “Let me get a picture of the two of you,” she said.

  Melissa handed the girl her phone and put her arm around Eddie.

  “Get closer,” the girl said.

  Melissa squeezed up against Eddie. He didn’t mean to move, but her weight unbalanced him and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder to straighten himself up.

  “It’s totally cute,” the girl said after taking the picture. “I’ll text it to you.”

  Eddie told her his number and the girl sent him the photo. He took out his phone to look at it.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Totally cute.”

  Melissa put her head next to his and looked at the screen.

  “I like the way you fuck,” she whispered to him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I like the way you fuck in that video.”

  She was the first person that night to have mentioned the tape directly, and that fact briefly overshadowed the manner in which she’d brought it up.

  “I didn’t really mean for people to see it.”

  “You don’t have to act all embarrassed. It’s hot. I’d like to be fucked that way.”

  Eddie tried to remember whether girls had spoken this way when he was Melissa’s age. Certainly they hadn’t spoken this way to him, but perhaps they did to the older men who hung around at parties. Under the circumstances he seemed to have lost any grounds to protest.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll meet a nice guy who can, you know, take care of that for you.”

  “The world is crawling with nice guys,” she said. “Patrick’s the nicest guy I know. But I’d like to be fucked that way by you.”

  “I’m married,” Eddie said, somewhat irrelevantly. “And twice your age. And your boyfriend is a student of mine.”

  “He’s not your student anymore, or my boyfriend. It’s not like I’m some kid. I’m nineteen years old. Anyway, didn’t your wife throw you out?”

  “Did you read that in the paper?”

  “Good one. ’Cause I’m some lame who reads the newspaper. It was on Teeser. You’ve got your own threadhead and everything. ‘Mr. Drake.’ I hear she threw all your shit out on the street.”

  “She did.” It still didn’t seem quite real to him.

  “That sucks.”

  “It sucks,” he agreed.

  “But so do I.”

  It occurred to Eddie that being propositioned by beautiful nineteen-year-olds was another part of the fame he’d once wanted so badly.

  “It’s a little weird talking with you. I mean, knowing you just watched that thing.”

  “Because I’ve seen you but you haven’t seen me?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You can see me if that will even the score.”

  “I guess you’re not too hung up on privacy.”

  Melissa laughed.

  “Just to be clear, I’m getting a lecture about privacy from a guy who sold a sex tape for a hundred grand?”

  “How did you know how much I sold it for?”

  “Morgan told me.”

  “You know Morgan?”

  “I met him here a few weeks ago.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  “If you want my opinion,” she said, “you got ripped off. You could have sold it for twice as much.”

  “You should have been my agent. Maybe we can go into business together.”

  “No, I’m serious. I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s superhot. I’d watch it again even if there wasn’t anyone famous in it.”

  Eddie was surprised at how reassuring it felt to hear this. In spite of himself, he was enjoying talking to her.

  “So what are you going to do from here?” Melissa asked. “I mean, what are you going to make of all this?”

  The obvious answer was that he was going to convince his wife to take him back. That he was going to find a way to return everything to normal as soon as he could. But he knew that answer would disappoint her, and he couldn’t bring himself to give it.

  “I have some ideas,” he said. “But I don’t want to talk about them. It’s private.”

  “Private,” Melissa said, and she laughed again. “Suit yourself. Do you want another drink?”

  TEN

  WHEN HE WENT TO make a pot of coffee in Blakeman’s kitchen the next morning, Eddie found a note on the counter.

  Off to work. Make yourself at home. Aspirin in the cabinet beside the fridge. I left the paper, thought it might interest you. —Blakeman

  Beside it was a copy of the Daily News. “Who Is Handsome Eddie?” the headline asked. It showed a still shot of the video, Eddie’s body leaning into Martha’s. Some parts of the shot had been blurred, but it revealed a lot for the newsstand. Where Eddie had carefully cut out his own face, the paper had superimposed an image from a commercial he’d done years ago. In it, he wore the expression of a man eagerly accepting a stick of cinnamon chewing gum. It was a grotesque contrast, the forced smile on top of the thrusting body. He should have known that he would become part of the story. Now that he had, his efforts to conceal himself were damning. He would have been better off just leaving his face visible.

  Below the picture the front page read “Details Emerge of Dr. Drake Tape Bum: See Pages.” Eddie flipped to the spread, which attempted to tell the story of his life. It was filled with old head shots and playbills—most of them, it seemed, from the box that Susan had emptied out onto the street. But there were also more personal items, including a photo of Eddie, Justin, and Blakeman standing on a corner in their school uniforms, their arms over each other’s shoulders. It looked to be from about seventh grade.

  “At the Upper East Side’s elite St. Albert’s School, where he earned the nickname ‘Handsome Eddie,’” the caption read, “Hartley’s friends included Justin Price, now a megarich hedge fund manager and prominent philanthropist, and longtime lit scenester Max Blakeman.” This might please Blakeman, Eddie thought, but Justin wouldn’t be happy to see it. Although he was a familiar figure from charity boards and benefits, Justin kept his personal life out of the news. He had a very simple metric for success—money—and he didn’t need public approval. He didn’t even want public attention.

  But Eddie had wanted attention. Now that he had it, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. Did the quality of the attention matter? He remembered Melissa telling him that he could be a star, wondering what he planned to make out of all this. He set the paper on the table and called Talent Management.

  “Where were you yesterday?” Alex asked when Eddie got through to him.

  “Were you trying to reach me?”

  “Are you kidding? I called ten times.”

  “I turned my phone off. I was getting a lot of calls.”

  “No shit you were getting calls. We’ve got a real story on our hands.”

  “I know. I was hoping you could help me with that.”

  “Before we go any further, what’s this shit about a movie in China?”

  “Korea,” Eddie corrected him. “It’s a much smaller market.”


  “Now you’re a funny man?”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied about that.”

  “What do I care if you lie? Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been asked to help out with some domestic deception. But come up with something semi-plausible. Then tell your fucking accomplice, so I don’t have your wife asking me about checks I don’t know about. That’s Bullshitting 101.”

  “I was going to tell you. Everything got out of hand so quickly.”

  “Water under the bridge. This story has real potential. We’ve got not one but two wronged women, both pregnant. And triplets! The tabloids love these multiple births. I’m going to have a lot of opportunities for you.”

  “That would be great. I need some opportunities right now.”

  “The first thing we do is get you and Susan on the morning show circuit. Tell your side of the story and whatnot.”

  “She threw me out.”

  “Don’t I know it. I read the paper. What are the chances you two patch things up?”

  “We’ll straighten it out eventually.”

  “Eventually is great, but how about right now?”

  “I’m guessing it’s going to take a little bit of time. She seems pretty hurt by things.”

  “You aren’t going to get many invitations to appear by yourself. People want Susan. They want those triplets. I could get you on one of the twenty-four-hour entertainment channels, but if you want the Today show or This Morning Live, you’re going to have to get her on board.”

  “I don’t want to go on talk shows and talk about Martha or the tape or my triplets or any of that. That’s not the kind of opportunity I’m looking for. I want to act, Alex. I think this is my chance to have a real career.”

  “How about celebrity strip poker?”

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “You can’t act, Eddie. That’s the truth. You’ve never been able to. You’ve got a shot at fame here, but it’s not going to be Stanislavski or whatever the fuck you’re hoping for. You want to make something of this, I’m telling you, you’ve got to get Susan to go along. Once she’s in, sky’s the limit. Brian Moody wants to talk about a reality show. He’s the best producer out there. You’re not going to do any better than Moody.”