Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (7 page)

She gave way to him easily and he leaned into her, setting his free hand on the crook where her bony hip gave way to the soft thickness of flesh. Once he’d positioned himself there he didn’t move except to run the camera from her splayed ass up the long ellipses of her back to her shoulders and the cropped blond hair on the back of her head. Instantly that hair fixed the scene in time. Eddie remembered that she’d cut it to play Viola in a production of
Twelfth Night.
She rocked front to back on her knees, lazily at first and then with more purpose. The camera followed her for a moment before fixing in place as her head moved in and out of the scene.

After a few minutes of this, the view went sideways, as though he meant to put the camera down, until she looked back over her shoulder at him, and the camera went upright to catch the hungry smile on her face. She stared at the lens and rocked in front of him more deliberately. This went on for precisely two minutes and eighteen seconds, measured at the bottom of the screen, before she pulled herself off him and turned over, showing her whole body. She put a finger in her mouth and then reached down to hook it inside herself.

He had not up until then been aroused by watching the video, but now he was stirred in a sad, desperate way. She was perfect. He had always thought so. If he let this scene out into the world, this was the part that would be played over and over again. She moved with an odd innocence, the only emotion on her face a kind of curiosity. Eddie had the sense now that she was acting. Perhaps he’d understood as much
then, because he turned the camera away from her, down to his own erection, as if to bring reality into the matter before quickly returning to her. When she withdrew her hand and brought it to her mouth again, he lowered himself onto the bed and her. The view turned awkward and uninviting—a bit of her shoulder, her jaw and ear, the headboard. Martha took the camera and turned it on him, lowering it slowly from his face to the point where his hips pressed against her thighs. The screen went blank.

Eddie closed his laptop, knowing that the only other option was to watch the thing again. More than once he’d been asked by a crude or drunk friend what it had been like with Martha Martin. He always shrugged the question off, not out of discretion but because he couldn’t really remember. Everything about that time—everything about her—had taken on a sheen of bitterness and regret, so that it was impossible to recover from it something so simple and pleasurable as two young people in love, enjoying each other.

He needed to get out of the apartment, to forget about things for a few hours. He ejected the disc and put it back in the case, which he placed on a shelf in the linen closet that Susan couldn’t reach without his help. He got in the elevator without knowing where he was going, but he quickly decided to head to Lexington Avenue to see what was playing at the movie theater. He would sit in the cool darkness of distraction. Susan would be home, soon after the movie was over, and they could talk about what they were going to do next. He got to the theater just in time for a showing of
Mantis 3
:
Slaying Mantis.
Blakeman’s review of this installment in the series suggested that it was just the kind of mindless fantasy he needed. He found a spot near the front of the empty theater as previews started. The first was for another movie
that also starred Mantis, as part of a superhero collective that was fighting to save the earth from aliens. Eddie thought he might watch that one when it came out. If he didn’t find a job and wasn’t taking classes, he might go to a lot of movies that summer.

The second preview was for a romantic comedy called
Life After Laura,
starring Turner Bledsoe as a young widower and Martha Martin as the grief counselor who falls in love with him. Eddie hadn’t known she’d started making movies. All the effort he’d spent over the years getting used to seeing her on-screen seemed to have been undone by a few hours spent exploring the past. That was his Martha up there, the same one he’d been watching all morning. Everyone thought they knew her, but they didn’t. They didn’t know that she’d run out as soon as she got her break, that she’d left him behind to start his life over. If they knew, no one would blame him for selling the tape.

He tried to estimate the value of what he had. There was no question that it was Martha. For three minutes she stared right into the camera, and it caught her face many other times throughout. The whole thing was about twenty minutes long, though he would have to cut out four or five that showed too much of him. Perhaps another three or four would go for reasons of quality, though he didn’t know how much that mattered in these things. At the very least he had ten full minutes of usable footage. If he was prepared to use it. Assuming Morgan was reliable, it was worth well more than they needed. There had to be some way of doing it so that it didn’t come back to him.

As the preview dragged on, Eddie began to laugh at the screen. It might have been taken as laughter at Martha’s bad jokes, but he kept it up after the preview ended and another, for a notably unfunny war movie, began. He was still at it dur
ing the feature’s opening credits, when a woman sitting several rows behind him asked him to stop.

HE WAS BACK IN
the apartment when Susan got home.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. But she didn’t look fine. She looked tired. And he was tired of seeing her so tired. “Did you do anything about dinner?”

He hadn’t thought about dinner after stuffing himself with popcorn.

“We could order something.”

“It’s so expensive. We agreed we were going to have some discipline about this stuff this summer. It’s the first day of your vacation and we’re already fucking up this plan.”

“I’ll make something.”

“Don’t bother,” she told him. “There’s no difference at this point anyway. We’re kidding ourselves.”

He could just tell her the truth, and they could decide together. She could determine whether one more shot at a child was worth whatever would come out of this. But telling her meant admitting that he’d saved these videos all this time. He could promise her that he hadn’t looked at them, which had been true until now, but how could she believe it? Beyond that, how could he force her to make this choice? If he was going to do it, he had to do it himself.

“I
was
going to make something,” he said. “But I got some news today.”

“Did you find a job?”

“Not quite,” he said. “I got a call from Alex at Talent Management. Apparently this stupid horror film I was in years ago has become something of a cult hit. In South Korea of all places.”

He didn’t know why he’d said South Korea, but he found the audacity of the lie strangely appealing.

“That’s fun,” she said, trying to generate interest in the matter. “So you’re telling me you’re going to be huge in Asia?”

“The thing is that the guy who made it couldn’t afford to pay us anything. He sold us shares in the movie instead. Now I’ve got some money coming to me.”

“What kind of money?”

“It’s tough to say how much it will be in the end. But the agency just got a check for twenty grand. They’re going to take out their fifteen percent and send the rest to me. That’s seventeen thousand dollars right there. And there might be more coming.”

The violence of the sound she let out surprised Eddie. She ran over to the couch and threw herself on his lap.

“It’s going to work this time.”

“I hope so, too.”

“No, it’s not hope. I’m certain it’s going to work.”

“I know how badly you want this,” he said. “I want it badly, too. But it can only help to be realistic. That way if it doesn’t work out, it won’t hurt so much.”

She was too happy even to be annoyed by him.

“When was the last time you got a serious residual check, not a few bucks here and there, but enough money to make a real difference?”

The answer was never.

“Probably five years.”

“Five years,” she nearly screamed at him. “For five years we haven’t needed this money, and it didn’t come. Now we do need it, and within a matter of weeks a check is in the mail.”

He tried to give himself over to the idea.

“You’ve got a point,” he said. “The timing is pretty striking.”

“So why would it not work out? Why would God give us this last chance if he wasn’t going to make good on it?”

That night they went out for dinner. When they returned home, both a little drunk, they had sex for the first time in more than a year not according to any schedule, not for any end but the pleasure of being together. After guiding Susan onto her stomach and then up onto her knees, Eddie ran his eyes like a lens over the length of her back.

AS SOON AS SUSAN
left for work the next day, Eddie punched Morgan’s number into his phone and looked at it on the small screen. He flipped the business card—
Meme Evangelist
— around in his fingers. He put his phone back in his pocket. In an effort to keep himself from watching the video, he turned on the TV. He wanted to find her there, to see her as a television star, like everyone else did. Such a person lived on a screen, didn’t really have feelings, and couldn’t be hurt by anything he did.

First he tried the basic cable stations, which constantly showed the early seasons of
Dr. Drake
in syndication. When he didn’t find anything, he went to Entertainment Daily. The channel’s lead anchor, Marian Blair, was talking about Justine Bliss. Eddie had heard her reality show mentioned several times in recent days but otherwise knew nothing about her. From the segment he was watching he gathered that she was a teenaged country singer. Apparently she wasn’t eating, and her
friends had fears for her life. Eddie had to admit she looked quite thin, especially when the split screen placed her next to her pudgy ten-year-old self.

“Is Justine’s life in danger?” Marian Blair asked. “Those closest to her think it is. They staged an intervention, and they’ve invited our cameras along. Stay tuned for an ED exclusive.” Now Marian turned to a different camera, and her expression softened. “Also after the break: reports of on-set canoodling and late night flights to Portugal. Is Dr. Drake in love? Will she leave Rex for Turner? Stayed tuned. I’m Marian Blair, and you’re watching Entertainment Daily.”

Eddie wondered whether Martha found it satisfying to have her life followed on these shows. Had she gotten what she wanted out of acting? Maybe she still dreamed of Broadway, still hoped to get noticed for her acting instead of her looks. Perhaps everyone nursed a private disappointment.

He turned the TV off and made the call.

“Handsome Eddie,” Morgan said. “Good to speak to you.”

“You, too. I’m calling to follow up on the conversation we had at dinner.”

“That’s great. What have you got for me?”

“I’d rather not talk about it over the phone.”

Morgan laughed.

“We’re doing full cloak-and-dagger here?”

“I’m a little skittish is all. If you drop by my apartment this afternoon, we can discuss it.”

“Before I get myself over there, are we talking about real deal?”

“We are.”

“I’ll be over around one.”

Having made this appointment, Eddie realized he’d done nothing to prepare. It had seemed that if he acted without planning, he wouldn’t be responsible for what followed. He
opened the video and attempted to edit it. He’d become pretty good at this kind of work from putting together video résumés for casting agents. He cut the part where his own face was visible and a few other awkward moments. Eventually he was left with fifteen minutes, which he thought would be enough.

WHEN MORGAN ARRIVED THAT
afternoon, he seemed as nervous as Eddie was, though he tried to project a sense of command.

“What have we got?” he asked skeptically.

“Just what you were looking for.”

“How long is the footage?”

“A little under twenty minutes.”

“That’s a good length,” Morgan said. Eddie wondered how such things were determined. “Can you see her tits?”

Eddie nodded.

“What about scag?”

Eddie wasn’t entirely sure what “scag” was.

“I’m not going to give you the whole director’s commentary. Why don’t you look at it and tell me what it’s worth?”

He didn’t want to be in the room while Morgan watched, but he didn’t want to leave him alone with the computer. It would be easy enough to put the file onto a zip drive and walk out with it. Eddie opened his laptop on the coffee table, started the clip, and retreated to the corner. He had a sudden fear that Susan would come home, eager to celebrate their good news. He locked the front door and waited there. The scene seemed much longer now than it had when he’d watched it alone. It was certainly long enough for Morgan’s purposes.

“Fuck,” Morgan observed when the video was done.

“So you’re interested in making a deal?”

“Definitely.”

“Before we go on, certain points are nonnegotiable.” Eddie hadn’t planned to say this, and now he considered what those points should be. “If anyone finds out that it’s me in the tape, I’m going to tell them it was stolen. I erased these scenes years ago, when Martha and I broke up. Before that, when we were still together, you borrowed my laptop over at Blakeman’s place. You stumbled on this file, and you e-mailed it to yourself. Maybe you just wanted to watch it, and you only now decided to sell it. At any rate, I had nothing to do with any of it. That’s all if it gets back to either of us. Ideally, it won’t.”

“You’ve thought this out.”

He hadn’t, really. There must have been something he wasn’t anticipating.

“Does that work for you?”

“If we plan it right, it won’t come back to either of us.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“You’re telling me it’s not negotiable, so it’s not negotiable. Let’s talk about the things that are negotiable.”

“How much can you offer?”

Morgan sat quietly for a bit, as if replaying the video in his head while making calculations.

“Twenty grand.”