Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (22 page)

When Eddie got back to the bedroom, Melissa was gone. Some of the crew had left with her.

“She’s taking a shower in one of the other bathrooms,” Roma said after letting Eddie look around in confusion for a moment.

“How many bathrooms are there?” he asked. “It’s a hotel room.”

“It’s an
imperial
hotel room.”

Eddie wanted to put on Entertainment Daily while he waited for Melissa to shower, but he was embarrassed to watch in front of the crew. He thought he should be doing something better with his time. It was a strange worry to have. These people made television for a living. Before Eddie had decided on a course of action, Melissa returned in a plush Cue Hotel bathrobe.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said.

“What is it?”

“We’re going ice-skating!”

She’d always tried to appear adult and knowing in his presence, but now she was playing up her childishness.

“Why would we do that?”

Dell stepped in from the other room.

“We want you to express some surprise here, Eddie.”

“I am surprised,” Eddie said. “I’m quite surprised.”

“Surprised in a my-girlfriend-planned-something-nice-for-me way. Not a what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about way.”

“I’ll try it again.”

After Eddie had expressed sufficient excitement about the outing, Melissa dropped her robe and dressed to go out. She moved with complete naturalness, not shy before the camera but not aggressive or exhibitionist. Eddie doubted that anyone watching her strategically blurred figure would guess that she’d never shown herself to Eddie this way before, though they might get a sense of the fact from Eddie’s response. She turned to face him as she pulled on her underwear, even speaking to him, as if inviting him to look her over.

“I promise we’ll have fun.”

The SoHo Cue had granted the show complete access, and guests were being asked to do the same as they checked in. The clientele were the sort to be unfazed by such things, or else the sort to aspire to such unfazedness, so things proceeded
smoothly throughout the hotel. Only when the camera crew left the lobby did the spectacle begin. Anyone who appeared on camera—even just an elbow or a leg—had to sign one of the waivers that Kara handed out like takeout menus. She didn’t offer money for cooperation, but almost no one refused her. Most of the time it wasn’t even necessary to flag these people down, since they naturally stopped to look as Eddie and Melissa passed.

The crew was small enough to get nearly lost amid the photographers and other onlookers who had taken to waiting for Eddie and Melissa outside the hotel. The minimal setup now struck Eddie as perhaps part of the point. In the past he’d occasionally wondered how these shows achieved the illusion of nonchalance, especially given what he knew about the effect a camera’s presence could have on someone who wasn’t properly trained to be in front of one. But the nonchalance was real, in a way. Not that anyone would ever forget that the cameras were there, but it was easy to forget that the footage being collected would be broadcast to the world. Now that there were onlookers, Dell and the others did less to intervene. Eddie and Melissa weren’t ever asked to repeat a gesture or clarify a statement. They just went about their business. It might almost have been a home movie.

A car took them to Rockefeller Center, where they stood for a minute beneath the enormous Christmas tree while tourists took pictures. A visit to that tree had been an annual tradition in Eddie’s family when he was growing up. Standing under it now, he thought about his parents. He regretted not going down to see them before the show started, and he regretted even more that he couldn’t tell them what was really going on. At least he might say something about his childhood holidays during his afternoon interview. If he expressed it properly, he felt sure it would make the show. It would make him more
sympathetic to the rest of the audience, and his parents could hear him say nice things about them, if they watched.

He couldn’t be sure that they would. The last time they’d spoken, his mother had expressed such distaste for the whole thing. Of course, he’d expected her to be upset that he was running around with a younger girl while his wife was pregnant, and he’d done his best to assure her that it was a misunderstanding. But she seemed most upset by something he couldn’t possibly deny, which was that he was on a reality show. She said it was beneath a boy who’d been raised as he was. Beneath a St. Albert’s boy, she obviously meant, though she didn’t put it that way. If she had, he would have told her that it was the striver in her talking. The parents of his rich friends would be happy to watch their sons on TV. Such things were beneath no one anymore.

Skates were waiting for them at the rink, but Eddie and Melissa went through the show of giving shoe sizes and paying for rentals while Hal circled with the camera. Melissa stepped awkwardly onto the ice, grabbed Eddie’s arm, and brought him down with her.

“What happened?” she said, laughing.

“I think I broke my elbow.”

She was already standing back up, still laughing. She skated away, and it was obvious that the fall had been a performance. Melissa was an excellent skater. It was probably why this activity had been chosen. She looked beautiful as she moved, and Eddie thought of her body as he’d seen it just an hour earlier. For whom was she performing? Men watching on TV would envy Eddie for having her. He was near the point of envy himself. After a moment Melissa circled back and helped him off the ice.

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?”

Only a few days before, he would have protested this characterization.

“You want to know if I’m scared of losing Melissa? No, I’m not. Melissa knows the real me, and she’ll stand by me.”

“So you don’t think that Susan knows the real you?”

The main effect of these interviews was to make him eager to get out into the world. That was the easy part. Most days weren’t as busy as the first had been, but they had a similar structure to them. Eddie and Melissa slept in each morning, and the crew was already in place when they got up. Sometimes they were told what was planned that day, so they could discuss the activity over breakfast. Otherwise, they speculated instead. After their morning activity, they returned to the Cue. Liquor was provided at every turn—mimosas at breakfast, wine at lunch. The crew’s goal was to get them at least a little drunk for their afternoon interviews. After the interviews, which would have been exhausting in any case, they slept it off and prepared for the evening. They ate out every night. Naturally there was more to drink at dinner. They came home and went to bed, often falling asleep before they’d extracted themselves from their performed embrace.