Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (3 page)

As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him. Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage, and it might have been more than a matter of logistics that had led him to give up altar service just as he started acting in his first play. In the decade after he graduated from St. Albert’s—the years of his life with Martha and his acting career—he went to church no more than twice a year, at Christmas and Easter with his parents. If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.

His teaching career had brought religion back to his life in a superficial way. School days opened in the chapel on the second floor, which had stained-glass windows, wooden pews, and a small pipe organ. The sessions began and ended with a hymn, but what passed in between was more assembly than religious ceremony. Each morning a different teacher gave a “chapel speech,” not a sermon or homily so much as a general didactic pep talk. Every faculty member was required to give at least two of these a year.

Eddie did the minimum. He didn’t think he had much in the way of advice to give, having come back to St. Albert’s because he’d made such a mess of his life. The best he could offer were cautionary tales. But he found that the boys appreciated funny stories from his own student days, which he
could shape in a way that suggested some moral, usually not one the events had suggested at the time. He never brought up God or faith in these talks. He didn’t have anything to say on those subjects.

He’d been dating Susan for a few months when she invited him to mass one Sunday, and he’d been going with her ever since. He wasn’t sure he believed the story the church was selling, but he liked about it the same thing he’d liked about acting: the understanding that someone was watching, that every action had a purpose and a meaning. Like Susan herself, it had come into his life at a time when he needed it. She had brought him back from a desperate place. What’s more, she had not even known she was doing so. She’d done it just by being herself. When things weren’t going well between them these days, he tried to remind himself of that.

Susan rose from the kneeler and opened her eyes just as the organ in the back brought the crowd to attention. The fifty-three members of the graduating class processed up the center aisle, singing the school song. Eddie watched them take their seats in the front three pews. They had been in seventh grade—little boys really—when Eddie started teaching. They’d been completely altered since he’d first met them. As had he, Eddie thought.

He remembered his own graduation, his mother’s pride at the idea that he would be the first in his family to go to college. Many more firsts were expected to follow. After he left NYU as a sophomore to act, his parents used the rest of the money they’d saved for tuition on a down payment for a house in Florida and took to expressing relief, when he called them there, that at least he hadn’t killed any girls in the park.

The pastor, Father Seneviratne, gave a brief blessing before welcoming Luce to the lectern. Hungover as Eddie was, he found it mercifully easy to ignore the man’s drone while danc
ing on the fuzzy edge of consciousness. Susan’s elbow brought him to attention when necessary. Luce finished by calling up Patrick Hendricks, the class’s valedictorian.

Patrick was Eddie’s favorite student, the only one in five years to show genuine, if modest, talent for acting. Eddie had tried to encourage him within reason, but he’d been glad to learn that Patrick was going to Dartmouth next year, which seemed far enough away from the temptations of professional work. He would be in a few student productions before finding other interests. After the usual introductory business, Patrick described his pride at representing his class, his love of St. Albert’s, which he’d attended since first grade, and his excitement for himself and his classmates as they embarked on the next stage of life. Eddie only came to real attention when he heard his own name.

“When I was a freshman, Mr. Hartley cast me in
The Skin of Our Teeth.
The very night the casting list went up, I went home and saw him on TV, in an episode of
Murder Squad
.”

This story was new to Eddie, and he wondered whether it was strictly true or altered somewhat for dramatic effect. His few guest spots on television didn’t make the air much, though this was the second time in as many days that someone had mentioned seeing one.

“Here was this real actor,” Patrick continued, “a professional actor teaching me how to do this thing. And I thought, I want to be like Mr. Hartley.”

By now Patrick had found Eddie’s pew, and he was looking at him as he spoke. Eddie smiled weakly back at him before looking down. Patrick was completely serious, in his way. But of course he didn’t really want to be like Eddie. He wanted to be the person Eddie had wanted to be at Patrick’s age, the person Eddie would have been if things had turned out differently.

Eddie gazed at the worn marble of the floor beneath him. Someone watching might have thought he was simply flattered or moved by pride, but his chest was tightening and he felt suddenly out of breath. The feeling didn’t subside as Patrick went on to other things, thanking his family and dropping a few inside jokes for the benefit of his friends, before ending on an earnest note of thanks.

After the ceremony Eddie looked for Patrick out on the sidewalk. He was standing near the corner, with a tall, pretty girl with light brown hair. Eddie thought he’d seen the girl hanging out in front of the school a few times.

“Thanks for the plug,” Eddie said.

“I meant it. It’s been a great experience learning from you.”

“You remember my wife?”

“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Hartley.” Patrick shook Susan’s hand. “This is my girlfriend, Melissa.”

“You must have been proud to see how he did up there,” Susan told the girl.

“Melissa’s graduating from Melwood next week,” Patrick said. “So we’re both proud. And she’s going to your old school, Mr. Hartley.”

“Did you go to NYU?” Melissa asked. “That’s so cool.”

“For about fifteen minutes. But that wasn’t the school’s fault. I’m sure you’ll have a great time there.”

“You know, I really owe you,” Melissa said, smiling almost flirtatiously. “I met Patrick through your plays. I mean, I went to go see one of my friends in one, and when I saw him onstage, I made her get me his number.”

She laughed a bit as though at her own boldness, though conversations Eddie had overheard in the halls suggested that girls her age were capable of being quite a bit bolder than this.

“I take full credit, then.”

“And Patrick really looks up to you. We’ve watched some
of your commercials and stuff on YouTube. I’m trying to act, too, so it’s really inspiring.”

“My parents are just getting the car,” Patrick said. “They’d be happy to give you both a ride to the reception.”

“I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to make it,” Eddie told them.

“You’re not?”

“We’ve got a family occasion we just can’t get out of. But I was really proud to see you up there making that speech, and I appreciate the things you said about me. I hope you’ll come by the school when you’re home on vacation, so we can catch up and I can hear all about how you’re doing.” He had a sense that he was speaking a bit manically now. “Congratulations to you too, Melissa. I’m sure you’ll stick longer down at NYU than I did.”

“WHAT WAS ALL THAT
about?” Susan asked when they got back to the apartment.

Eddie couldn’t say what it had been about. He had still not quite recovered from the feeling that had locked on to him during Patrick’s speech.

“I had some kind of attack.”

“You had an attack because a kid complimented you?”

“He complimented a version of me that doesn’t exist.”

Eddie suspected that Susan might find this beside the point, but she appeared to find it instead precisely the point.

“But you wish that version existed. Because you’re not happy with our life.”

“And you’re happy?” Eddie asked. “You don’t wish things were different?”

He shouldn’t have said it—not because it was cruel, but
because it invited a conversation they’d already had too many times.

“I do wish our life was different,” Susan said. “Because I wish we had a child—together. You wish you were rich and famous so you weren’t stuck with me. So you could go win back Dr. Drake.”

“Martha has nothing to do with this conversation.”

“Isn’t she what you think about when Patrick calls you an actor? That’s why you get so sick you have to run away.”

They’d hardly mentioned Martha before trying to have a child. She hadn’t been all that famous when Eddie and Susan started dating, and Susan wasn’t impressed by that kind of fame anyway. She didn’t watch much TV. She read novels and books about art and what she called “theory,” which Eddie took to mean books that belonged on a college syllabus, not in a civilian home. She made it most of the way through
The New Yorker
each week. That a person Eddie had dated was on her way to being a star had interested her only abstractly. What had mattered to her about Eddie’s past was that it had ended by bringing them together. This was part of what he’d first loved about her.

All that had changed when they started pulling the money together for their first attempt at in vitro, and the full extent of the debt Eddie had built up while living with Martha became clear to her. After the failure of that first try, he’d made the mistake of expressing some ambivalence about undertaking another. If they couldn’t even afford to conceive a child, how would they manage everything that came with it? They lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, and they had no obvious way of getting more space on their current salaries. Not to mention food and diapers and whatever else was involved. If the child was a girl and couldn’t go to St.
Albert’s, there would be school to worry about. They should have discussed money sooner. They’d avoided it precisely because they hadn’t wanted to talk about the past. But it was unavoidable now. Eddie was broke, Martha was extravagantly wealthy, and suddenly the difference mattered. Susan had responded to Eddie’s hesitation by suggesting for the first time that Eddie had never quite gotten over Martha, that he dreamed of running off with Dr. Drake.

In the first year of their marriage, it might have been fair for Susan to accuse Eddie of wishing for another life. How could he not? Plenty of people who’d been a lot less close than he had to becoming rich and famous harbored such wishes. And naturally he’d thought often of Martha. But even then he didn’t want to win her back. He didn’t want to share in her success. He wanted that success all to himself, and he wanted Martha to have his failure. Anyway such wishes could only live so long without sustenance from the outside world. Long before Susan’s accusations started, the sheer corrosive force of time had swept away from Eddie any sense that life could be different. These days it would have been fairer to say that Susan dreamed that he could ask Martha for fifty thousand dollars.

“I’m sorry you had that attack,” Susan said. “And I’m sorry I made you feel bad about it.”

So it always went. The flashes of anger and disappointment were just that—flashes. She was always eager to reconcile, because she took for granted that finally they were in it all together. Perhaps this was the reason she’d only started making these claims about Martha after they had stopped being true.

“I appreciate your taking the day off,” Eddie said. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She looked at him suddenly with the old appreciative ex
pression he used to be able to find so reliably on her face. She was still capable of showing that expression at any time, but it was qualified now, bestowed as a gift and just as easily withheld.

“I can cancel this dinner with Blakeman tonight. We could do something together.”

“That’s all right,” Susan said. “I told Annie I’d have dinner with her.”

“We’re going to get this all figured out.”

“Sure we will,” Susan answered while taking a book down from a shelf. This meant she would spend the rest of the afternoon reading on the couch. Eddie would have to read, too, or else idly browse online; the television distracted Susan while she read, and there was nowhere in the apartment to escape from it when it was on.

“I really mean it. I just have this feeling something’s going to happen.”

He wanted to tell her that Blakeman was going to help, but it would have sounded ridiculous. Susan sat down and opened her book.

“Let’s worry about it in the morning,” she said without looking up from the page.

WHILE RIDING THE
6
TRAIN
downtown, Eddie developed some ideas about the nature of Blakeman’s help. He assumed it had something to do with Morgan Bench. When Eddie knew him, Morgan had been a gossip columnist at the
Daily News
and briefly notorious for something Eddie couldn’t remember, making the lower left quadrant—the bad one—of
New York
magazine’s Approval Matrix. The last Eddie had heard, he’d quit the paper and moved out to L.A. to work on screenplays. Perhaps something he’d written was getting made, and he had a part for Eddie. Even if it had nothing to do with Morgan, Blakeman’s help might have been in this line. Blakeman had spent several years as a movie critic, and he still knew people in the business.

The address he’d given Eddie was on the Lower East Side, not far from the apartment Eddie had shared with Martha after dropping out of school. He rarely had occasion to come to the neighborhood these days. The restaurant’s entrance was
below street level, and the place made no effort to advertise itself. Experience had taught Eddie that the easier such an establishment was to walk by without noticing, the more expensive it would be. He hoped that Blakeman planned to pick up the check. Inside, the hostess was dressed like the proprietor of a brothel in a spaghetti western, but she had dark, Asian features and spoke with an accent Eddie couldn’t place. She brought him to the table where Blakeman and Morgan were waiting. They both stood up to greet him.