Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

Eddie hadn’t been ice-skating since he was a child, and he was exhausted after about an hour of it. He wanted to sit on a bench for a while, but there were more activities planned: lunch at the Carnegie Deli, a carriage ride through the park. He could already see how their fun-filled life was going to be contrasted to Susan’s difficult pregnancy. There was nothing he could do about that, and making a point of not enjoying himself would only reveal him as unpleasant. Anyway, he was enjoying himself, although it wasn’t the kind of day he would ever plan on his own behalf. It was supposed to conform to some universal idea of a romantic winter day in New York, and as such it was a day an actual New Yorker could only find ridiculous. If Susan had ever suggested they go for lunch at the Carnegie Deli, he would have told her it was a tourist trap. But this very fact made it novel to him. He’d spent his entire life in this city, and he’d never done these things that other people associated so closely with it. The fact that he wasn’t quite himself made it all right to enjoy such things now.

They had tickets that night for the Broadway opening of Unabomber: The Musical, but first they went back to the hotel to change. When Melissa went to the interview room, Eddie lay down in bed, hoping for a short nap, but his cell phone rang. Alex was calling. Eddie wanted to silence it, but the timing — the call arriving at the first moment he was free to answer — seemed meaningful.

“I hear you’re being difficult,” Alex said.

“What are you talking about?” Eddie was genuinely surprised. “I do everything they ask me to do.”

“But they’ve got to ask you first. That takes time and money. You don’t sleep where they want you to sleep. You don’t say what they want you to say, even when you know perfectly well what that is.”

“I’m trying to cooperate. There’s nothing in my contract about where I’m supposed to sleep. There’s nothing about what I’m supposed to say.”

“There’s nothing in your contract that says you get to watch your daughters being born, either. They’re running that shit live. You think they’re going to let someone they can’t trust go anywhere near one of those cameras when the time comes? Someone who won’t say what they want him to say? Someone who won’t sleep where they want him to sleep?”

“Who told you I was being a problem?” Eddie asked. “No one said anything to me. If they’d asked me, I would have done my best.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. Just keep in mind that the information is flowing. And they want you to step things up.”

“All right,” Eddie said. “I can do that.”

AFTER THE SHOW, THEY ate at a French restaurant in midtown, the kind of expensive place that Justin sometimes mentioned going to, in a tone that suggested he’d rather have had a burger. The maître d’ brought Eddie and Melissa to a booth in the back corner, where the effect of intimacy was somewhat undermined by the cameras already waiting for them.

“You’re a good skater,” Eddie said after they’d ordered cocktails.

“My stepfather used to take me when I was little. He was a semipro hockey player.”

Eddie had no particular reason to doubt this, but he did.

Over dinner, they split a bottle of wine, and they were both fairly drunk by the time they got home. Eddie hadn’t said anything to Melissa about sleeping in bed with her that night. It was awkward to mention, and he’d worried that someone might overhear. The nondisclosure agreement couldn’t possibly mean that just one wrong word in public would ruin him, but he wanted to please the producers, and each time he dropped the mask he found it harder to recover. He could speak to the crew so long as he was speaking as the Eddie they were filming. When he gave any indication that this Eddie wasn’t real, he struggled to get back into the part. He’d always found it a self-serious pretension when temperamental actors refused to break character — asking to be called “General Washington” in their trailers, eating craft service with wooden teeth. But now he found it necessary. Perhaps he should have learned the trick sooner, though such behavior wasn’t really indulged when the role in question was “Young Guy #1” in a toilet paper commercial.

Melissa gave him a long good-night kiss and draped an arm across his chest before turning the lights off. They both lay for a moment without moving before Eddie extracted himself from this embrace. The king-sized mattress was large enough to allow for plenty of distance between them, and Eddie moved to one edge, giving Melissa the rest of the bed.

He woke in the middle of the night to find that she’d rolled over and pressed herself against him. Her hand rested gently on his outer thigh, and it was moving slightly. He whispered her name, but he got only a light snore in response. For months he’d been starved for the kind of attention Melissa was unknowingly providing. He felt himself stirring, and he tried to pull away from her touch, but there was nowhere to go without falling out of bed. She might have been awake, teasing him while continuing on with her fake snore. He said her name again, and she rolled over to her side of the bed.

“THINGS SEEM TO BE going well between you and Melissa,” Dell told Eddie a few days later.

“They are.”

“Can you put that in a complete sentence, so we can use it?”

“Things are going really well with Melissa right now.”

It was true. Some kind of threshold had been crossed on the first night he’d stayed in bed with her. There was nothing sexual about it. He’d just woken up the next morning committed to the role. Everything was easier after that. Instead of making dozens of tiny decisions each hour, he’d made one big decision, after which the rest became instinctual. He did everything for the cameras, even when the cameras weren’t on. He hadn’t wavered since then.

He’d worried at first about losing himself in the part, but the more committed he became to showing the camera what it wanted, the more persistently he felt the presence of an unseen self. It was nothing so tangible as a voice, but if it had been it would have said something like, The person they’re looking at doesn’t exist, but I am in here, and I am real. It must have been that he’d had an inner self all along, but he’d never experienced it in this way. It had only developed in resistance to something. Susan would call the thing he was talking about his soul, Eddie thought. Whatever it was, he felt oddly protective of it. So long as he kept it inside, they couldn’t do anything to it. They could film every move he made, but they couldn’t film his mind. They could film him while he slept, but they couldn’t film his dreams.

Not that they didn’t try. Dell’s interviews were designed precisely to capture what went on inside, which might have been why Eddie still had trouble with them. Only once had he been completely honest in that room, in his first interview. Since then he’d dedicated himself to withholding. This frustrated Dell and the others, who tried various tactics to get what they wanted out of him. They became more adversarial. The sessions got longer. Melissa emerged from the interview room after twenty minutes with a smile on her face; Eddie got grilled for an hour. By now he was convinced that they turned up the temperature and brightened the lights as the hour wore on.

“Does that worry you?” Dell asked.

“Does it worry me that things are going well with Melissa?”

“No offense, but you haven’t got the best track record. Martha, Susan — they seem to have gone on to better things. Are you scared of losing Melissa?”