Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (23 page)

All the while another order was being imposed, one that Eddie knew about but couldn’t apprehend. All of this was happening in the service of the show. It only had meaning once it was shaped and aired, and he couldn’t know what that meaning was until they appeared in an episode. The crew collected far more material than they could possibly use—enough material to make almost anything they wanted.

They’d been shooting for almost three weeks when Dell told them they would be featured that night. He didn’t say anything more, except that he wanted to film them watching themselves.

“This is so awesome,” Melissa said as the opening credits ran. She seemed not quite to have believed that this was coming, as though she’d been auditioning for a part she’d only now received. The episode began as many did, with Susan seated at the front desk of the gallery, talking with her coworkers. This time, Tomaka was reading the
Daily News.

“Listen to Peerbaum’s column,” she said. “ ‘Handsome Eddie Hartley has been making the rounds with his teenage girlfriend. Most recently, the pair were spotted canoodling in a back booth at Paradise Regained, the new hot spot in the Meatpacking District.’”

“Can you imagine being that girl’s mom?” Susan asked.

It was such a perfect segue that Eddie couldn’t believe it had been spontaneous. The next shot showed Melissa on television for the first time. A title at the bottom of the screen introduced her in midconversation with her mother.

“You don’t understand,” Melissa said. “He’s really sweet. He’s just been misunderstood.”

“No man who leaves his pregnant wife is ‘really sweet.’”

Melissa’s mother seemed familiar to Eddie, though she didn’t look all that much like her daughter. He’d probably seen a photograph of her somewhere without remembering it. “I don’t think he’s good for you.”

The argument continued while they drove to the airport. Melissa went through security, and the screen showed a plane taking off before fading to commercial.

“You’re getting a lot of airtime,” Eddie told her, trying to sound happy about it.

When the show came back, Melissa was in a cab to the Cue. Shots of her ride home were interspersed with shots from the interview room.

“Of course I think about these things my mom says,” Melissa told Dell. “About how Eddie is no good. But people don’t understand him like I do.”

Eddie sat in the hotel room with his head in his hands, waiting for Melissa to arrive. Watching the scene, Eddie’s excitement at seeing himself back on television was tempered by surprise at how old he looked. When he pictured himself in his mind, he was twenty-one or twenty-two, as he’d been dur
ing the bulk of his television work. Occasionally those images could still be found on TV, and nothing had come along to replace them. He didn’t just look old but also nervous and ill at ease, though this suited the tone of anxious anticipation.

In some ways, the fact that he was watching from the same room he saw on-screen was stranger than the fact that he was watching himself. Eddie almost expected the show to unfold in real time, as though Melissa were out in the hall with her suitcases at the same time that she was sitting next to him.

“I’m back,” Melissa said as she walked through the door.

Eddie watched himself hurry to meet her.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I missed you.”

They kissed, and Melissa said, “I missed you, too.”

“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked as Melissa turned away.

“You know how my mother is,” she said. “She doesn’t think that we should be together. She doesn’t think it’s good for me.”

The screen cut to Eddie in the interview room, looking as uncomfortable as he’d felt at the time. “Does it bother me to hear what Melissa’s mom said about me?” he asked. The fact that he was asking himself the question made him sound defensive, and the sweat running down his face made him look guilty. “The woman has never met me, and she’s passing judgment. Not that I care what she thinks, particularly.”

They cut back to Melissa.

“I guess it’s because my own dad left while my mom was still pregnant with me, and we never heard from him again. I think about what Susan is going through.”

Back in the interview room, Eddie said, “To be honest I didn’t really care if she got hurt. That’s not my problem.”

After a brief shot of Melissa unpacking with tears in her eyes, the show went to commercial.

“I was talking about Martha and the tape,” Eddie called
out, knowing that Dell was listening to them from the other room. “I never said I didn’t care if Susan got hurt.”

The show was more than half over, and it had been dedicated almost entirely to them. Eddie thought they would have to go back to Susan after these commercials, but they returned to Melissa telling Eddie that she was taking him ice-skating. They didn’t use the look of excited surprise Eddie had attempted to generate after Dell’s direction. Instead they went with his spontaneous response.

“Why would we do that?”

Then they showed Melissa back in the interview room.

“I know Eddie’s upset about my visit home. It’s been a real strain on our relationship. I thought it would be nice to give him a surprise. Take his mind off of things.”

Melissa skated expertly across the screen with a smile on her face, racing toward Eddie on the ice.

“I think I broke my elbow,” he complained.

Everything was being presented to make him look as unpleasant as possible, until a turn came. Melissa helped Eddie off the ice, and they skated around together. Eddie smiled a genuine smile. The cameras followed them off the ice.

“She saved my life,” Eddie said back at the hotel. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “That sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. We met at a time when a lot of things had been going wrong, and she was the first good thing to happen in a long time. She came at just the right moment. . . . I was lucky to meet her when I did. It’s taken all of this to show me that.”

The credits rolled as Eddie and Melissa rode a carriage through the southern entrance of the park. When the show was done, Eddie said nothing about that closing line. They’d taken the only true thing he’d said in weeks and twisted it to mean something else entirely, but that bothered him less than he thought it should. It had been a mistake to think that any
declaration to Susan would make it through to her by these means. Anyway, expressions of love weren’t going to get him back to her. He would get back when it was clear that his return would make good television. This episode could only help in that regard. In the meantime, he needed to guard that inner self more carefully. They could only touch what he let them have.

THE CALLS BEGAN BEFORE
the credits were over. Some didn’t surprise him. He’d been hoping to hear from his parents, and despite their tone he was glad that they’d watched the show. They asked what on earth was going on with this little kid, when he was going to straighten things out with Susan, how their unborn granddaughters were coming along. Eddie tried to answer all these questions in a fashion that would reassure them while also providing usable footage for the show. The conversation took place on speakerphone, with the crew listening. After his parents hung up, Kara called them back to get permission to air their voices.

The next call came from an unrecognized number. After a moment’s consideration, Dell told Eddie to pick up. Eddie said hello, and a voice he didn’t recognize replied.

“Who is this?” Eddie asked.

“C’mon, Handsome Eddie,” the voice answered with some embarrassment. “You know who this is. It’s John Wilkins.”

“Wilky,” Eddie said. “Sorry about that. How have you been?”

“I’ve been great. Ever since our reunion I’ve been thinking that we ought to get together more often. Like old times.”

“That would be nice.”

“My wife and I were just saying how we’d love to have you and Melissa over for dinner.”

“I’ll have to check our schedule. Things are pretty busy right now.”

“Just let me know a night that works for you, and we’ll sort things out on our end. I don’t know if you remember, but my wife does interior design. In all modesty, I’ve got to say, our apartment looks great. I think it would really work on camera.”

When Eddie got off the phone, Dell came out from the other room.

“Who was that?”

“A guy I went to school with. We weren’t even friends, really.”

“What does he do? What’s he like?”

“He’s a lawyer,” Eddie said. “He’s got a couple of kids, I think.”

“Don’t bother calling him back,” Dell said.

Other calls came—from St. Albert’s classmates, from cousins, from actors he’d worked with on student films and tiny plays, from seemingly anyone he’d ever met who still had his cell phone number and wanted to be on TV.

Shortly after the next episode aired, Eddie opened a copy of
CelebNation
to find an article with the headline “Handsome Eddie’s First Kiss.” There was a full-page photo of a woman with short blond hair sitting on a couch with two young boys in her lap. It was the dimples—not on her face, but on the kids—that gave her away.

She’d acted with him in
The Crucible,
his first play at St. Albert’s. Eddie was Giles Corey—not a starring role, but big for an eighth grader. While his friends formed layup lines on the court in the St. Albert’s basement, Eddie and a sophomore from Melwood named Karen sat Indian-style backstage, reading lines with knees touching. Karen was pretty in a pudgy, dimply way, and she sat with her uniform skirt hiked up to show
gym shorts beneath. She smelled of something chalky and floral. Eddie didn’t know whether all girls smelled this way, since he hadn’t been that close to one for any length of time. The other boys in his class knew girls in the natural course of things. Over the summer they sailed and took tennis lessons with girls in Bridgehampton, and they came back to school with stories obviously embellished but rooted in some kind of fact. Once a week Blakeman and some half dozen others went to dancing school, where they learned with these same girls to foxtrot and to waltz. (Eddie had thought this was a joke the first time he’d heard about it, but it was true.) These experiences in hand, they walked unembarrassed on free afternoons the few blocks uptown to Spence or down to Melwood and waited outside for school to let out. Meanwhile, Eddie took the train home with his mom.

Back in Queens the boys knew girls for the simple reason that they went to school with them. Despite the odd anachronism of its separate, single-sex entrances, the parochial school that Eddie would have attended in the absence of his St. Albert’s scholarship mingled the genders completely, and the few neighborhood boys he was friendly with were sexually precocious in ways that would have shocked the swagger out of his ultimately sheltered classmates. When Tommy Lanetti told Eddie about cutting school to finger Jennifer Minovic in the back of the Sunnyside Center movie theater during a lunchtime screening of
Turner & Hooch
, Eddie could tell by his style of recounting that every word was true.

Around Karen, Eddie was quiet and shy, and she responded teasingly. After the third or fourth rehearsal, she invited him to walk her home. In the lobby of her building on Fifth, she introduced Eddie to the doorman and the elevator operator, calling each by his first name. It thrilled Eddie to refer to grown men in this way. Upstairs the apartment was empty. Karen fetched
cans of Coke from the kitchen, and they sat drinking them on the living room couch.

“You’re kind of hot,” Karen said. “You know that, right?”

Eddie wasn’t sure whether she expected an answer, but he told her, “I guess.”

Karen laughed.

“You’re going to be starring in these plays by the time you’re my age.”

She said this as though they were of an entirely different generation. Her attitude implied a hard-won knowledge she wished to convey to him but knew could only be had by subjecting one’s soul to the smithy that was ninth grade. When she’d finished her Coke, she set the can down and calmly kissed him. They went on for half an hour, until Eddie told her he had to be home for dinner.

So it had been for the remaining five weeks of rehearsal. They always messed around right out in the living room, suggesting to Eddie that there was no risk of an adult coming home. Perhaps Karen’s parents wouldn’t have been bothered by discovering him on their couch, his hand beneath their daughter’s uniform skirt. The whole thing was so strange to Eddie that he couldn’t know.

The arrangement only lasted as long as the play. When Karen’s father brought a bouquet of flowers backstage at the last performance, she didn’t introduce him to Eddie. When he casually brought up the possibility of seeing each other over Christmas break, Karen explained that her family was going to Jamaica. Eddie wasn’t sure she would have appreciated an eighth grader waiting unannounced outside her school, so he made no effort to track her down in the spring. What had already happened was enough. He had confidence for the first time in his life, and that confidence was bound intimately to
the belief that he could act. And Karen was right: by sophomore year, he was the star of the show.

All of this had retreated to a dark corner of his memory until he picked up the magazine that day. But he recognized Karen on the page, and it came flooding back. Perhaps she was really the one to blame for setting him on the disastrous path toward acting. Though it didn’t seem so disastrous anymore. This article more than anything else made Eddie realize something he’d been too busy to understand sooner: he was a regular on a television show. He’d gotten what he’d always wanted.

Karen worked in finance now. She was divorced and raising her sons on her own. She described rehearsing
The Crucible
with Eddie. “He was younger than me,” she said. “But he was kind of a wild one. He talked me into taking him home after rehearsal. I have to say I wasn’t too surprised when I saw that tape. I could have told you back then he had it in him.”

“WHAT ARE WE DOING
this morning?” Eddie asked over breakfast a few weeks later.