Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

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 preview 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.

“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.

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?”