Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

The photographers were still outside when they left, just as Melissa had predicted. If anything, there seemed to be more of them. The night had turned cold, and they were wrapped in scarves and gloves. They followed Eddie and Melissa, getting three minutes of access for the hour they’d spent waiting. Eddie wasn’t sure what to say when they got back to the hotel. It seemed like they’d done enough for one night to get the story under way.

“Take your shirt off and get in bed,” Melissa told him.

“What have you got in mind?”

“Just trust me.”

With his shirt off and the covers pulled up above his waist, Eddie appeared naked. Melissa lay down next to him. She took off her own shirt and pulled one bra strap down her arm. She leaned toward Eddie until he felt her firmness against his shoulder.

“Sit back and close your eyes,” she said. “Like you’re sleeping.”

Eddie heard the click of her phone taking a picture. When he opened his eyes, she was sitting up, typing with her thumbs.

“How’s this for a start?” she asked, showing Eddie the Teeser post on her phone: “I wore out *MrDrake.”

HE SLEPT ON THE floor that night and woke to the sound of Melissa snoring lightly in his bed. He stood up and looked around the room. The bottle of champagne he’d ordered sat empty on the bedside table, along with two glasses. Melissa had slept in nothing but a Cue bathrobe, which had come open in the night, leaving her body exposed. Eddie walked over to the bed to cover her up. As he reached for the robe, she opened her eyes.

“Easy, perv. You didn’t pay for that.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie told her. “I wasn’t, I didn’t mean to—”

Melissa laughed.

“Just fucking with you. I was awake the whole time.”

She closed her eyes again, and the soft snore started back up. She still hadn’t covered herself. Eddie couldn’t help looking at her bare body, though he knew she could open her eyes at any moment, so he went to the bathroom, hoping she’d be dressed by the time he got out. His back hurt from sleeping on the floor, and he let the hot water in the shower pour over it.

If they kept this up, Eddie thought, they would need a better sleeping arrangement. He didn’t want to call down to the lobby for a cot, which would become its own story. Perhaps the leather couch would be more comfortable than the floor, though it looked too short for him. He wondered how people managed to live entire lives built around deceptions of this kind. They probably just shared the same bed.

When he came out of the bathroom, Melissa was sitting up with the paper open and the TV on.

“How does it look?” he asked.

“Not so good,” she told him. “Justine Bliss is in a coma.”

THAT MORNING, MARIAN BLAIR hosted the Entertainment Daily news hour from the emergency room. There didn’t seem to be anything to report about Justine’s condition, but there was no possibility of reporting anything else. Every fifteen minutes, Marian listed all the drugs that had been found in Justine’s system after she collapsed at the top of a staircase in her father’s house. In the absence of other information, she put a microphone into the faces of waiting patients, asking what had brought them in. Eddie and Melissa were mentioned only in the ticker running at the bottom of the screen, which every few minutes read “Lower East Side Lolita Steps Out with Handsome Eddie, More @ EntertainmentDaily.com.”

“I read that book for class,” Melissa said as she sat down at the computer to look them up. “Lolita was twelve. I’m not even a minor. And I don’t live on the Lower East Side. I’m in student housing on Mercer Street.”

Nonetheless she seemed pleased.

“This girl is in a coma,” Eddie said.

“We can wait it out. Her condition will stabilize in the next day or two. She’ll get better.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“Either way, there won’t be much else to report after a while.”

Melissa clearly admired the daring of the dark story line. She acted as though Justine were offstage somewhere, drinking a Diet Coke and watching the coverage, waiting to be called back into a scene. The bruises on her face on the cover of the Post were the work of an expert makeup artist. The tube parting her lips into that oddly alluring oval didn’t continue down her throat and into her lungs. She could spit it out at any moment to ask a friend how her performance had gone.

For the first time since she’d come over to the hotel, it struck Eddie how young Melissa was.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” he asked.

“My parents, qua parents, aren’t superinvolved,” Melissa said. “But I’m sure they’re happy for me.”

“What makes you so sure?”

He’d never seen her look uncomfortable before.

“My mother was this beautiful model,” she said, “and all she ever wanted was to be a big star. But it didn’t work out for her. She says getting pregnant kind of fucked that up. My dad’s some big deal out in Hollywood, but they didn’t really stick, and I don’t know him. Anyway, my mother didn’t make it, but she married my stepdad, who’s superrich and actually a pretty good guy. They split up, but he’s raised me on and off. He’s the one who paid for me to go to Melwood, and he’s paying for college and all that. My mother is still kind of back and forth to the West Coast trying to do shit, so I don’t see a ton of her. But she’ll be thrilled to hear my name on Entertainment Daily.”

“Speaking of college, don’t you need to go to class today?”

“I’m dropping out.”

“Don’t do that,” Eddie told her. “Even I made it through a year.”

“Kidding, Dad. Today is Saturday.”

“I kind of lost track,” Eddie said.

By the end of the day Justine’s condition was stable, but she was still comatose. The doctors had lowered her body temperature to counteract the lack of oxygen going to her organs, and medical experts on every channel explained the significance of this process. Respiration and pulse were at safe levels, but the fall had damaged her cerebral cortex, and these same medical experts couldn’t come to any consensus about her brain functioning or her chances of recovery.

“Don’t you think this will tire people out on the whole celebrity thing?” Eddie asked Melissa. They were seated together at the desk in the corner, looking at the open laptop as they browsed through gossip sites.

Melissa laughed.

“You mean like Princess Di did? Or Anna Nicole Smith? The Herald will get a good op-ed out of it. There will be a full day of hand wringing about what’s ‘really’ responsible. Then we’ll all move on. You know what people will be asking next week?”

“What?”

“Who’s fucking Handsome Eddie?”

“You think we’ll get picked up?”

“This Justine stuff is fascinating, but it’s depressing as hell. People don’t want to go overboard with the sad stuff. Mostly, they want to be able to judge people, and they can’t judge a girl in a coma. If she was older and had some kids, they could judge her for being selfish and irresponsible. But she’s too young for that. Maybe they can judge her father for a little while, but that’s his daughter in the coma, so that will only last so long. They can judge, like, the culture at large, but that means judging themselves, so that gets tiresome, too. And there’s another episode of Desperately Expecting Susan to watch on Tuesday. Everyone will want an excuse to return their attention to the usual entertainment. We give them a nice opportunity.”

“So what do we do?”

“I need to run some errands. Get some stuff from my dorm. I’ll come back tonight. Tomorrow during the day we’ll go out — brunch at Balthazar or something. Then you take me shopping. Buy me a nice piece of jewelry. Don’t worry, you can take it out of my pay. We come back here, we hang out for the night. I’ve got a media studies class Monday morning. You can drop me off at school. That image is going to drive people crazy.”