Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

“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 concede 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.