Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

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.