Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

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.