Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

Eddie opened the next file. It was longer, more than ten minutes, and once it started he remembered it well. He’d been called in to audition for a sitcom pilot. The part was the star’s boyfriend, with whom she broke up in that first episode, but he’d had some idea that if he did well enough they might write him into a recurring role. Just being asked to try out was one of the highlights of his career to that point. The show had not been picked up in the end, which was all the same to Eddie, since he hadn’t been given the part. His preparations were difficult to watch, and not just because he knew how it turned out. It was painful to remember how hopeful he’d been, to acknowledge the obvious fact that he wasn’t any good.

In the end, the problem had been his face. This was a surprise, since it had gotten him into acting to begin with. He was handsome enough for his appearance to be a distinct advantage in most areas of life, but there were actually quite a lot of good-looking people out there, when it came down to it. Being among that group wasn’t nearly enough, if you wanted to survive on your looks. You needed to be one in a million. If you weren’t, it was better not to be handsome at all, to be interestingly flawed or even a kind of gargoyle in the manner of a Peter Lorre. This was the route of the memorable character actor, possibly a more inviting one than that of the leading man.

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.