Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

Eddie walked a few blocks to the Cue Hotel on Thompson Street. It was a celebrity favorite, and he thought it could be trusted for discretion. At the front desk they told him that a luxury suite was the only thing available on short notice. Eddie was shocked at the price they quoted, but he could afford it, for now. The fact that his windfall wasn’t nearly enough to raise triplets made it seem strangely dispensable. And Susan wouldn’t want this money to support their children. He was like a man in a screwball comedy, obliged to spend all he had and come out of it with nothing. Only then could he return to his family, cleansed. With this in mind he felt a kind of satisfaction when he handed over the cash for three nights in a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

The flat-screen TV on the bedroom wall was as wide as the king-sized bed facing it. A laptop computer sat on an ornate writing desk in one corner. In another was a wooden bureau, but Eddie had nothing to put in it. Beyond the bedroom a separate sitting room was filled with a leather couch and a starkly modern coffee table piled with the kind of expensive photography books that Susan actually liked to look through, here meant to sit untouched to suggest sophistication.

Eddie had once thought that such rooms would be a regular feature of his life. Perhaps he’d wanted that as much as he’d ever wanted to act. In those early days the flush future had seemed as real to him as the actual life he was living. The worst part about giving up, when it had come time to give up, was knowing that all those years had been wasted. That time would never be turned into the story of early struggles leading to success. He should have quit years before, when it would still have been easy to go back to school, before his parents bought the house in Florida, before he’d acquired credit card debt it would take him decades to pay off.

But maybe it would amount to something after all. Those years had left him in debt, but they had also left him with that video, which had erased the debt and then some. Those years had paid for the procedures that conceived his children. Eventually all this business would pass, and he would return home. Susan would take him back, because she would do whatever was best for these kids. Even if they never got back what they’d had before, they would have something new.

But was this what he wanted? He would not have chosen for things to have gone this way, but was it really so terrible? Here he was in a luxury suite in the Cue, and people were talking about him on TV. If he could make everything go back to how it had been, he wasn’t sure that he would. He sat on the bed and turned the TV to Entertainment Daily. He was almost surprised that they weren’t talking about the tape.

“Justine Bliss was picked up on the streets of Silver Lake just hours ago,” Marian Blair intoned. “Police say she was incoherent and had been wandering the Los Angeles neighborhood for hours. Friends tell us they are praying for her recovery. But they say she won’t get better until she fixes her toxic relationship with her father.” She turned to look into another camera. “That leads us to today’s Entertainment Daily U Decide poll question: Is Tom Bliss part of the problem or part of the solution? Text one for ‘yes’ and two for ‘no’ to EDUDECIDE. Standard messaging rates apply.

“Now for some happier news. Fans who have been calling for more of Susan Hartley are about to get their wish. Tomorrow morning she’ll be appearing on This Morning Live, where the pregnant gallerist will open up to Sandra West about her future as a single mom and rumors that she’s about to sign a reality deal.”

Eddie turned off the TV. His immediate reaction was a sense of betrayal, though he couldn’t say in exactly what way he’d been betrayed. He had spent a lot of time in the past few days thinking about what he could make of his new fame, but he hadn’t imagined Susan having similar thoughts. And he’d been waiting to hear from her before doing anything. He’d turned down his own chance to get them on This Morning Live. He wondered what Alex would think when he found out that Susan had gone ahead on her own. Why had she agreed to do it? She didn’t want that kind of attention. She’d said as much when she threw him out of the apartment. But he knew she was scared about paying for these kids. He couldn’t blame her for taking a shot that might make her some money. Instead, he blamed himself for passing up the chance. If he’d known she was willing to do the show, he would have asked her himself. They might have been on it together.

Before going to bed, he dialed down to the front desk and asked for a wake-up call to get him up before the show began.

HE WATCHED THE FIRST hour of This Morning Live with the volume turned down while he searched online for stories about Susan. CelebretainmentSpot and half a dozen other sites reported that she would be making a “major announcement” on the show. Several commenters guessed that she had lost the babies. Some of them took an inexplicable glee at the possibility, and there was speculation that she’d never been pregnant at all. Others shouted this speculation down. Within fifteen minutes and fifty comments, the conversation had moved beyond Susan to what appeared to be long-standing arguments between pseudonymous opponents. Eddie kept reading after it had all stopped making any sense to him. It was strangely absorbing in spite of its uninviting tone. He became so immersed, in fact, that he almost missed the beginning of Susan’s segment.

“The celebrity world has a new darling,” Sandra West said, coming back from commercial. “Susan Hartley was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight when an explicit video surfaced showing her husband getting intimate with Dr. Drake star Martha Martin. Then the stylish art world veteran showed her fierce side, sending her husband out the door— and his things out the window — just as news arrived that she was pregnant with triplets. Now, for the first time anywhere, Susan sits down to discuss what comes next. Thanks so much for being here, Susan.”

The camera turned now to show Susan sitting next to Sandra in the studio.

“Thanks for having me,” she said.

Her face was bright and inviting, and she neatly fit the part Sandra had described — a stylish art world veteran.

“First of all,” Sandra said, “I want to ask what went through your head when you first saw that infamous video.”

She talked as though Eddie had cheated on his pregnant wife. No one hearing the story for the first time would know that the video was a decade old.

“To be honest,” Susan said, “I still haven’t looked at it. I’m not sure I could stand to see it. I’m trying to keep positive, not just for me but for the babies. I think they can feel that, if I have a negative experience. It’s like, if I watched it, they’d be watching it, too. And I don’t want them to have to see their father that way.”

Her hand shook lightly as she reached for her water. Otherwise she seemed entirely calm. Eddie understood how appealing she would be to the morning audience. She appealed to him, too, more than she had in a long time. When she spoke, she kept her face at the right angle to the camera and the host, something that Eddie knew did not come naturally. She had obviously been given some training. Her poise seemed the product of more than a few hours’ work. She might just have been a natural, but Eddie knew that such people were rare.

“That’s such an inspirational attitude,” Sandra said. “It seems like your husband has only gotten himself into more trouble in the past few days, running around with young girls.”

“I’m trying to keep positive, but Eddie just isn’t a very mature person. I hope for his own sake he gets there eventually, but he’s not there now. I don’t think he’s ready to be a father. I think that’s a lot of it. That’s why it’s best for both of us if I go through this process by myself.”