Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

Since the beginning of the semester in late January, she’d attended school just often enough to call herself a student without possibly learning anything. There’d been a spike in applications to the university since Melissa had joined the show, and so long as she mentioned the place once in a while she could have passed her courses without showing up at all. But Dell wanted her there occasionally for the sake of the story arc. On those days, Eddie usually walked her to campus and waited in a nearby coffee shop. Sitting among the students, he looked old and out of place, which was part of the point.

“What class?” he asked.

“It’s called Physician, Heal Thyself. It’s a seminar on the career of Martha Martin.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Melissa laughed.

“Yes, I’m fucking kidding you. It’s on postwar Italian cinema. Neorealismo.”

She rounded the last vowel out with an excited flourish.

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“I think I can find it myself.”

As far as Eddie could tell, there was nothing planned for him in Melissa’s absence. The prospect of a truly unscheduled day — his first in more than a month — appealed to him. There would still be an audience wherever he want, but nothing interesting enough to air was likely to happen, so he could relax a little bit.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said as they finished breakfast, speaking as much to the crew as to Melissa. If they had some other plan for him, they would have to let him know. But they didn’t.

“See you after class,” Melissa said. “We can do something nice tonight.”

Once the extent of Eddie and Melissa’s popularity became clear, Moody had sent a second cameraman to the Cue. Now Hal was assigned exclusively to Eddie. He followed quietly, but Eddie always knew he was there. The two of them left the room together and took the elevator downstairs. The crowd outside the Cue had grown in recent weeks, but Eddie felt something new as he exited the revolving door, some difference in the tone of their anticipation. They pressed in with more urgency than usual.

“What do you have to say to him?”

Eddie was asked all sorts of ridiculous things when he stepped into public. His job was to smile and keep walking. But it took discipline he didn’t yet have to ignore a direct question posed in this way.

“Say to who?”

“Patrick,” several voices called out at once.

The man who’d asked the initial question shoved a copy of the Daily News into Eddie’s chest. “Paddy’s Pain,” the headline read. “‘Creep Teach Stole My Girl.’”

“What do you have to say to him?”

Patrick was shown crying on the front page. The photo seemed to have been taken recently. He’d grown some fitful facial hair since going off to college, and his face looked fuller. He was holding up a photo within the photo — he and Melissa slow dancing together, perhaps at one of their proms.

“They’d already split up,” Eddie said. “I didn’t take her from him.”

This seemed to strike the crowd more as an admission than a defense. Eddie stood dumb while they took pictures of him holding the paper. He wasn’t sure whether Patrick knew what was actually going on, but it seemed likely that he did. Eddie hadn’t even thought about Patrick, so he didn’t know how his character was supposed to relate to him. He couldn’t play the scene. He folded the paper under his arm and walked back inside as the photographers pushed in. He felt on the point of crying himself, but he worried how the tears would look. Would they humanize him or dramatize his guilt? Would they seem calculated? If he held them back, he’d be blamed for his coldness instead. This was his problem — if he was anything less than completely committed, he became lost. If he stopped to make a decision, it was always the wrong one. If he connected the self inside with the show he was putting on, both would suffer. He needed to act on instinct, and instinct told him to retreat.

Back in the elevator, Eddie’s surprise turned to anger. He didn’t believe for a moment that Patrick was hurt. He just wanted a piece of the story. Melissa had probably recruited him. At the very least, she’d known it was coming, and she’d sent Eddie out to face it alone.

“Have you seen this?” he asked as he charged back into the room. He threw the paper down on the desk where Melissa sat with her laptop open, pretending to prepare for class.

She looked up with tears in her eyes. They trailed down her face, ruining the makeup that she hadn’t been wearing when Eddie left the room. The tears looked real enough, and they kept coming now. Eddie himself had never mastered crying on command.

“I’ve seen it.”

He was playing the scene all wrong. His anger would look defensive, even cruel. He realized they’d set him up for this, which only made him angrier.

“What are we going to do?” he asked, trying to control the tone of his voice.

“I don’t know.” Melissa seemed to be genuinely considering the question. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”

Eddie reached out for her, and she began to cry again.

“The important thing is that we still have each other,” he whispered, loud enough for his mike to pick up.

“But that’s just it.” She turned her face to meet his squarely. “I think I’m still in love with him.”

She couldn’t do this now.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“We had a deal.”

“Is that how you think of us? Like some kind of deal? An arrangement of convenience? This has all changed you. You’re not the same person I fell in love with. When I saw Patrick’s face on that newspaper, I remembered how simple things were back then. How innocent we were. I started having feelings for him again.”

Whatever effort he made now to get things under control had to happen on camera. Otherwise it wouldn’t be real.

“This isn’t a matter of convenience for me,” he explained. “When I say we had a deal, I just mean that we promised to stick together through the good times and the bad times. This is tough for both of us, and I don’t want to see Patrick hurt any more than you do. But we can get through it.”

Eddie’s voice weakened as he spoke. When he’d finished, he saw a look on Melissa’s face that he hadn’t seen before: he’d impressed her.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll stick it out for now.”

“TELL ME ABOUT WHAT happened out there,” Dell asked Eddie in the interview room after Melissa had left.

“You know what happened,” Eddie said. “I got ambushed. Everyone here knew what was coming except for me.”

Dell didn’t deny the fact.

“Why don’t we just stick with Patrick for the moment?”

“Fuck Patrick,” Eddie said. “This had nothing to do with him. You guys set me up. Moody probably put Patrick in touch with the papers personally.”

“That might be true. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how it happened. That’s not part of my job. But how it happened isn’t really the point. I’d like you to talk — in the moment — about seeing that paper. How do you feel as you look at that photo of Patrick?”

Eddie tried to return to character.

“I feel bad about it,” he said. “Patrick didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry he got hurt. He’s the best student I’ve ever had, and I wish him only the best.”

“And what did you feel when Melissa told you she still had feelings for him?”

Eddie took a slow drink of water. For the first time it struck him that this development might be a good thing. He didn’t want to stay with Melissa; he wanted to get back to Susan. If Melissa had somewhere else to go, it made it easier for them to separate.