Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

“How about celebrity strip poker?”

“Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“You can’t act, Eddie. That’s the truth. You’ve never been able to. You’ve got a shot at fame here, but it’s not going to be Stanislavski or whatever the fuck you’re hoping for. You want to make something of this, I’m telling you, you’ve got to get Susan to go along. Once she’s in, sky’s the limit. Brian Moody wants to talk about a reality show. He’s the best producer out there. You’re not going to do any better than Moody.”

“We don’t want our own show.”

“Everybody wants their own show.”

“Not everybody.”

“Great, so I’ve got a client who doesn’t want to be on television? What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I want to be on television, just not like that. I don’t want to talk about Susan’s pregnancy on This Morning Live. She’s embarrassed enough about this whole thing as it is.”

“All right,” Alex said, the energy gone from his voice. “I’ll see what I can do in a more traditional line. I’m telling you now it’s going to be a harder sell.”

“I thought hard sells were your job,” Eddie answered.

Once off the phone, he sat on the couch with his cup of coffee and turned the TV on. He wanted to see if there was anything about him on Entertainment Daily. Despite what Alex had said, he still thought he could get real work out of all this. After a commercial, ED Morning News came on, hosted by a woman named Coco Kalman.

“Just a day after leaving his triplet-expecting wife, Drake Tape star Eddie Hartley was seen out on the town, and even canoodling with an apparently underage girl.” The screen cut to Eddie leaning toward Melissa’s face, his eyes half closed in drunkenness. “This photo was Teesed out last night by a user named SweetMelissa1987,” Kalman continued. “Along with the message ‘Spent the night with Mr. Drake.’ No word yet on SweetMelissa’s real identity or where Hartley’s night with the young hottie went from there. Entertainment Daily will be all over this story as it develops.”

Eddie turned off the TV and called Blakeman at work.

“How do I get on Teeser?” he asked.

Blakeman laughed.

“Where have you been hiding? All the best stars know how to work social media.”

“St. Albert’s always wanted us to be careful about this stuff, with all the students on it and everything.”

“That worked out pretty well for you.”

“I know. So explain what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Blakeman told Eddie where to find his laptop and walked him through opening an account.

“You might as well just use your own name, since no one will believe it’s really you.”

Eddie typed in the user name “EddieHartley” and was told it already existed. He tried “HandsomeEddie” with the same result. Then he tried “HandsomeHartley,” and that worked.

“She said I was a threadhead? Mr. Drake. What does that mean?”

“Go in that search box there and put in an asterisk and then type ‘MrDrake.’ One word, no period.”

The page’s layout confused Eddie. There looked to be about a dozen hits, which didn’t seem so bad, except that when he scrolled down more appeared. He reached the end, and it did it again. He kept going until he was in the hundreds. Who were these people? What could they possibly have to say about him? “Honey, gonna do you like *MrDrake,” one read. Another said, “Shaping up to be a two rub out mornin *DrakeTape *MrDrake.” Every few seconds another appeared. He searched for the user name SweetMelissa l987, and he found Melissa’s feed. At the top was the post from the night before: “OMG Spent the night with *MrDrake. Photographic evidence.” A link in the message brought up the photo he’d just seen on TV.

“She’s got 5,352 names in her tease circle,” Eddie told Blakeman. “Is that a lot?”

“It’s more than I’ve got.”

Eddie continued scrolling down the page, which showed replies to Melissa’s message. “Thatzz shit hot grrrrrl” was the first, from a user named NoNocaine. The one next said, “Dudes a creep but I’d get on it.” Beneath that was a message that read “Lulz that guy was my drama teacher!” Eddie clicked on the user name, but nothing in the profile immediately established whether it was really a boy from one of his classes.

“By the way,” Blakeman said, “I’m having some people over tonight.”

“Again?”

“More or less always, as you might recall. You might want to clean up a little bit. And try not to get quite so banged up this time. You know I don’t stand on formalities, but I mean more for your own benefit. From an image-management standpoint and all.”

“Is Melissa going to be back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d met her before last night.”

“Maybe I should just go somewhere else.”

“If you’re going to wind up in the paper either way, you might have to learn not to worry about it. You can’t control what they write, so just relax. And like I said, make yourself presentable.”

But Eddie wasn’t listening. While scrolling through another *MrDrake thread, he’d found a link to a poll on CelebretainmentSpot:

Should Susan Take Eddie Back?

*Yes, it’s for the kids!

*Maybe, but make him sweat first!

*No! She doesn’t need the jerk!

Click to see results.

“I’ll call you later,” he told Blakeman.

Yes, maybe, no. Eddie hesitated, as though weighing the pros and cons. Did people honestly believe they were in a position to form an opinion about the relationship of two people they’d never met, never even heard of a week before? Of course they didn’t. It was just for fun. Eddie wasn’t sure whether this made it better or worse. He guessed there would be a lot of maybes. That seemed fair enough. He clicked “yes” and was brought to the page that showed results. Eight percent of respondents agreed with him. Another 15 percent thought she should make him sweat. The other 77 percent said he should be gone for good.

He returned to the home page and clicked “yes” again. This vote wasn’t enough to change the results, which either meant that the whole system was fake or that the participation rates were higher than he’d thought. He didn’t know how many times he’d need to vote to change the answer, but he couldn’t bear Susan coming to this page and seeing that number. After three more clicks, “yes” ticked up to 10 percent. He kept clicking and refreshing until it got to 15. If Susan could see that at least some people in this world thought he deserved her mercy, it might make some difference for him. Once he’d accomplished that, he called her. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t pick up the phone.

“It’s Eddie,” he said to her voice mail. “I don’t know if you’ve seen this thing about the girl, but it’s not what it seems. I went to Blakeman’s last night, because I didn’t know where else to go. And there was a party going on. There’s always parties going on here. It’s not like I went out somewhere looking for fun. Patrick Hendricks’s girlfriend was here, and some people took some pictures. It’s like I was a celebrity or something. It was weird. Anyway, I definitely didn’t ‘canoodle’ anyone or anything like that. So, just call me when you can.”

Now that this photo was floating around, he didn’t imagine she would be taking him back too soon. If he wanted things to quiet down, the first thing he needed to do was make sure he wasn’t still at Blakeman’s when people started arriving that night.

NO ONE WAS WAITING outside when he left late that afternoon. But the tabloids didn’t need to send photographers after him when so many readers were prepared to do the job themselves.