Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

“It will be a start,” he said. “We’ll go from there.”

ON MONDAY MORNING, EDDIE brought his laptop into the living room to look up job listings. He didn’t have high expectations for his search, which he’d actually begun weeks before. He’d hoped to line up something he could start as soon as the school year ended so he could surprise Susan with the news. But he hadn’t found anything. If he’d taught a subject that showed up on the SAT or one of the AP tests, he could have spent the summer tutoring his own students, but any St. Albert’s parents willing to support their children’s acting ambitions sent them to arts camp for the summer. Every time he thought of waiting tables or bartending — the kind of work he’d done on and off throughout his twenties — he imagined a student or parent coming into the restaurant where he worked. What he wanted was an office job that no one would know he was doing. Every temp agency he called began by asking whether he had a degree. When he asked why that was necessary to fill in for a vacationing receptionist, he was told that there were more than enough college graduates eager to do the work.

He’d spent the previous five summers taking classes, in a halfhearted effort to meet the qualifications for his job at St. Albert’s, which had been temporarily waived in his case. The effort cost him thousands of dollars a year, but he was still hardly halfway to a degree. After six years of teaching without incident, he couldn’t imagine getting fired for abandoning these classes, so he’d given them up. He told the temp agencies that he was a few credits short. He hadn’t heard back from any of them, and he didn’t expect to do any better on his own.

Eddie closed the job board and searched for “Jay Rolling.” Morgan’s site wasn’t the first thing that came up, but it was on the first page, which seemed vaguely impressive, given the term’s more obvious meaning. It was exactly as he’d described it — photos of disabled people crossing streets in wheelchairs. The discovery was at once baffling and strangely reassuring. Not that Eddie had doubted Morgan’s veracity. He’d just assumed that there was something about the project he hadn’t understood, that it couldn’t possibly be as empty as it sounded. But it was exactly that empty. Based on the various comments and “likes” littered throughout the page, it seemed to have some kind of following, so perhaps on some level Morgan knew what he was doing. At the very least, he’d been right to guess that Eddie had something people would want to see.

Around the time Eddie became serious with Susan, he’d transferred the videos to discs and erased them from his hard drive so she wouldn’t come across them while using his laptop. That would have been the time to get rid of them entirely, and he’d considered it. As it was, he had not kept everything, but he hadn’t been particularly selective, either. He hadn’t wanted to look through them carefully enough to decide what was worth saving, or to consider what it meant to say that some part of his past was worth saving while some other part should be discarded entirely.

Instead he’d deposited them all at the bottom of a cardboard box filled with various souvenirs from his acting days. He’d been ready to throw the whole box out when he moved in with Susan, but she’d encouraged him to hold on to some things. They’d want to show their kids one day, she’d said. With black marker and weak irony he’d labeled the box “relics” before locking it in the building’s storage space.

The key to that space hung from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator door. Eddie remembered his resolution from the night before, to be rid of these things. He’d bring them straight out to the street, he decided as he collected the key. He’d break them in half and leave them in the trash on the corner. But in the elevator it struck him that there was no harm in getting a last glimpse of his younger self. It might even be cathartic in some way. Catharsis was an idea he held dear and explained carefully to his students, though so far as he knew he had never experienced it personally. He unlocked the storage space and used the key to cut through the packing tape that sealed the box shut.

At the top of the pile was a playbill from an off-off-Broadway show, his first professional job. In the spring of freshman year, a professor named Harold Edmundson had told Eddie about the play, which Edmundson had written. He’d gotten Eddie an audition for a staging on Minetta Lane, where Eddie had earned the part without a head shot or a résumé. The play was called Midnight with the Lotos-Eaters. It made no sense to Eddie whatsoever, but it was received well in those quarters that receive such things at all. The write-up in Time Out New York —now paper-clipped to the playbill in the box — named Edward Hartley an “attractive newcomer.” From those two words came various offers of representation. While his old St. Albert’s friends were deciding which major to declare, Eddie was choosing between Talent Management and William Morris. As breaks go, it wasn’t so big, but it felt big enough.

He got a part in another play, which was where he met Martha. He asked her out after their third rehearsal. It was shocking to him now that she’d wanted to be with him, but at the time everything just came as it should. He glowed with confidence. It felt natural to him that this beautiful talent should find him so attractive, and he made it feel natural to her. They began to build a life together around acting. He returned to school in the fall and signed up for his classes, but he couldn’t force himself to go when all these other opportunities existed. He had to take his chance. He told himself he could always go back if things didn’t work out. For a long time it had seemed that things were working out. That they finally had not Eddie discovered all at once, after it was too late.

Coming downstairs had been a mistake. Those days were best forgotten. Eddie tried to close the box, but it wouldn’t stay shut without the tape, and half-open it seemed to call to him. So much of his life was in there. He didn’t want to kneel over it, working through everything until he found the discs, so he brought the box up to the apartment, where he extracted the thin black CD case from it. He picked a disc at random.

There was nothing strange about seeing Martha on-screen, though she was younger than she looked on TV. What was strange was watching himself beside her. They sat facing each other on the edge of the bed. Martha’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a red St. Albert’s T-shirt from Eddie’s school days.

“There’s something you need to know about Daniel,” he said, reading from a script on his lap.

“I already know,” Martha answered. She held her own script close to eye level, but didn’t look at it as she spoke. “I’ve always known.”

Eddie had no recollection of rehearsing this scene. Because they were both working off scripts, he couldn’t even be sure which one of them was prepping the other. It was strange what stayed with you and what was lost over years spent memorizing other people’s words and speaking them as your own. He’d played Quintus in an experimental production of Titus Andronicus, and for months afterward, in bed with Martha, he’d ask, “What subtle hole is this, whose mouth is cover’d with rude-growing briers?” And she would tell him, “A very fatal place it seems to me.” He still sometimes thought the words while with Susan, though he certainly never recited them to her.

It didn’t make sense, what stuck. He’d been in a student horror movie in which he’d had to point off camera, to a collection of theoretical man-eating blobs, and scream, “Get those sons of green bitches.” Not “those green sons of bitches,” though the objects themselves were supposed to be green, but “those sons of green bitches.” He’d never seen the final cut, if there had ever been one, but that line would stay with him forever. He imagined lying on his death bed, surrounded by grandchildren awaiting his last words, a bit of advice or consolation before he shuffled off this mortal coil, and telling them, “Get those sons of green bitches.” But the scene they were enacting now was completely lost to him.