Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

“Can I see you when you get out?”

This response deflated her.

“Meet me on the south end of the park at noon,” she said. “I’ll be coming out of class then.”

As soon as she left, Eddie turned on Entertainment Daily to watch reactions to the previous night’s episode. He was ready to hear people vilifying his treatment of Patrick. He would finally be the center of the story. Instead, Marian Blair announced that Justine Bliss was dead.

“The beloved singer’s long, courageous struggle ended a few minutes after midnight,” she told the camera. “The nation mourns the loss of a child.”

A montage of Justine played over her last single, “Gettin’ My V Worked Up.” Eddie had heard the reports in the previous few days — that she’d contracted pneumonia, that her condition was back to critical, that her family had been called to her bedside. He’d assumed these were efforts to revive interest in her story. But this news seemed definitive. He doubted that even Moody was at the point of faking deaths. Eddie felt unable to generate appropriate feelings of sadness and anger. All he could do was wonder how such feelings might be approximated for the camera.

To avoid overacting in response to his absence of genuine emotion, Eddie turned off the TV. He collected the morning papers from the hallway and brought them into the room. The Daily News showed a candlelight vigil that had taken place outside the hospital when word first broke after midnight. “A Star Burns Out,” the headline read. “Nation Mourns End of Our Bliss.” Eddie brought the paper back to bed and opened it to Peerbaum’s column, expecting an elegy for Justine. Instead he found a photo of himself with his arm wrapped protectively around Melissa. “Enough is enough,” the column began.

I’m writing this just a few moments after hearing what the whole world will have heard by the time these words are printed, that our angelic voice has been silenced. Like everyone else, I am sad. But I’m also angry, because this child didn’t have to die. We all let it happen. And I want to hold on to the anger, to remember how it feels, so that we might take action to make sure we don’t ever have to feel this way again.

I will always remember where I was when I got the news. I was finishing the column I thought you would all be reading this morning, a column about the rivalry between Eddie Hartley and Patrick Hendricks. That all seems silly and unimportant now, but I wonder if that isn’t part of the lesson. Last night, during the era that will forever be Before the End of Bliss, I watched Patrick Hendricks stand in a house of God and praise Eddie Hartley, and I watched Eddie dismiss Patrick with a word I can’t print in this paper.

What does this have to do with Justine? Let me fill in the blanks. Doesn’t the fact that Eddie Hartley was even allowed to teach a boy like Patrick in the first place tell us everything we need to know about ourselves? Isn’t it time we started taking lessons from people like Patrick instead?

Eddie skimmed to the bottom of the page, more or less taking in the substance of the arguments. He was famous for selling a sex tape, for abandoning his pregnant wife, taking up with an underage girl. These were the things the culture celebrated. Apparently they were also the things that had killed Justine. Eddie hadn’t literally pushed the girl down the stairs, of course, but he might as well have.

“In the wake of this tragedy,” the column concluded, “America is faced with the same choice facing Melissa: Patrick or Eddie? I hope we all choose wisely.”

Peerbaum had probably already finished his column about Eddie when the news came in. He was on a deadline, and so he’d repurposed what he had, seasoning it with moral outrage to cover the fact that it was no longer fresh. It might not have been fair, but that was beside the point. Peerbaum had helped to create Eddie; he obviously felt entitled to destroy him. But that wasn’t quite right. It wouldn’t destroy him at all. Peerbaum was building him up even bigger. Even on the day after Justine died, they were talking about him. People were interested.

The rest of the paper supported Eddie’s interpretation of Peerbaum’s column as a last-minute adjustment. Surprisingly little mention was made of Justine apart from the lead story. The news had come in when it was too late to scrap the issue. The page next to Peerbaum’s described the desperate effort of Melissa’s mother to separate her daughter from Eddie, to get her back with Patrick, who had always been a “calming influence” in her life. The article called Melissa’s mother a “classic beauty” and a “retired actress.” Eddie looked at the photo in a bottom corner of the page, and he remembered the sense he’d had when he saw her on the show, that she was familiar from somewhere. Oddly, the grainy newsprint of the head shot increased the feeling. He imagined staring straight into her eyes, her eyes staring back. A smudge on the page gave her face a dirty complexion, which settled the question. This woman had thrown the eggs at him.

At first he suspected Melissa’s intervention. It would have been easy enough to recruit her mother to help nudge their story along, push them onto the front page. But the incident coincided so neatly with Susan’s admission that she wanted Eddie back. The timing had been too good. Moody had done it. But why enlist Melissa’s mother? Eddie was still being too naive. This woman was an actor — an extra — hired for two different minor roles.

The satisfaction of discovery quickly collapsed when Eddie realized how many more questions the discovery raised. Who else was in Moody’s company of players? Not Melissa — they’d met long before Moody’s arrival in his life. Or so it had seemed. But how could he really know when Moody had arrived? Susan had spoken to Alex one day, and that evening she was throwing Eddie’s things out the window in the most dramatic fashion possible. If Moody’s involvement could reach back that far, it could go back much further. Moody found Morgan in Hollywood and sent him back to Blakeman’s apartment. Moody hired Martha Martin to be in that play with Eddie. Moody reached down from the sky to twist Eddie’s ankle on the basketball court during eighth grade tryouts. In all his life, there’d been no chance happenings. Everything had been willed by some invisible source obscure to Eddie, all for the purpose of a story being told. Everything had conspired to bring him to this point.

Eddie set down the paper and laughed. As he looked again at the image of Justine, it only made him laugh harder. It was a cruel laughter, and it might easily be used against him, but he couldn’t stop himself. Even her death seemed part of the vast web. How did he know Justine was real? He’d never seen her in person, only on TV or in magazines. Supposing she was real, it didn’t seem beyond Moody’s powers in that moment to bring death upon her and resurrect her when the story was done.

He knew this was all crazy. He had to pull himself together before he met Melissa. But this feeling — that he was walking through a world that had been meticulously constructed only so that he could walk through it — increased when he went outside. People recognized him, looking him over with anger or disgust. Others just went about their day. But even they seemed to be following directions. Eddie was walking through a soundstage. A church bell down the block sounded the hour as he arrived at the building on the south side of Washington Square that held Melissa’s class. Students began to stream out, but Melissa wasn’t among them. After a few minutes, a girl in a navy sailor’s coat and black jeans separated herself from a small group to approach him.

“You’re Eddie Hartley, right?”