Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (8 page)

Eddie had known it would be a struggle, but he couldn’t believe they were starting this low.

“At the party you said you could get me six figures.”

“I said six figures depending on what you had.”

“What I’ve got is better than you could have imagined. You see her from the front, from the back, close-up of her face. She practically states her name for the record.”

Morgan seemed to concede the point.

“I didn’t realize you’d be asking me to risk my reputation.”

“Shopping the tape around doesn’t risk your reputation, but being called a thief does?”

“There’s no shame in porn these days. Might as well be Universal Studios. Listen, you’re laying down your terms, which are fair enough, but you can’t expect that they won’t affect the price.”

“So make me a reasonable offer.”

“Twenty-five.”

“If we don’t start talking real numbers,” Eddie said, “I’m going to take this thing somewhere else.”

“Your story only works with me.”

“I can come up with another backup story.”

“Are you sure you can trust someone else’s discretion?”

“I’ll work something out.”

“Are you sure you can trust
my
discretion once I don’t have a stake in this? Whatever story you want to tell blows up in a hurry if people know you tried to sell it to me and we couldn’t agree on a price.”

“You’re extorting me?”

“It’s not like that,” Morgan said. “I just don’t want to get cut out of something that was my idea in the first place.”

Eddie was trapped. Susan had already made the appointment at Hope Springs. He had to strike some kind of deal. But Morgan didn’t know that. Eddie recognized on Morgan’s face an expression that was painfully familiar to him—the look of a man desperate for something to break his way.

“I’ll admit that I can’t take this thing somewhere else,” Eddie said. “I wouldn’t know where to take it. What I can do is erase it with one press of a button, so neither of us gets anything out of it. I’m offering my life up for your profit, and I intend to get something out of it. I’m going to destroy this thing if you even mention to me a number lower than a hundred thousand dollars.”

“It’s going to take me some time to round up the money. I’ll have a bank check in three weeks.”

EDDIE TOLD SUSAN THAT
it would take a month for Talent Management to send his check. She didn’t ask any questions about the money or the movie. All that mattered to her was that things were going to work out. Just as Eddie had hoped, this one bit of good luck had been enough to restore her faith. They went the next week to Hope Springs, where Dr. Regnant greeted them like old friends he’d worried he would never see again. He told them the odds would be higher in the second round. He wanted to give Susan’s body a chance to recover, so he suggested putting off the next attempt until the end of the summer. Eddie thought Susan would be disappointed by the news, but she seemed willing to wait as long as it took, now that they had a plan in place. For his part, Eddie was relieved to have some time. Despite Blakeman’s promises, he wasn’t sure how reliable Morgan would prove to be.

But he didn’t need to worry. Almost three weeks to the day, Morgan called to say he had a check. Eddie was surprised that a guy whose main business was posting photos of wheelchairs could get together that kind of money in such time, but he didn’t question it. The next day, Eddie gave Morgan the video on a zip drive and erased it from his computer. This last part was only a gesture—the clip still existed along with the others on the disc—but Eddie really felt he was getting rid of it. It wasn’t his anymore, which meant he wasn’t responsible for what happened to it from there.

At the bank Eddie nearly walked up to the first open ATM. There was no reason he couldn’t deposit a hundred-thousand-dollar check right into the machine. Perhaps that’s what people like Justin Price did. But he needed to take care of some other things. He’d spent a good part of the past few weeks planning how to break up the cash. He handed the certified check to a teller and asked her to draw two others, made out to two different credit card companies. One was in the amount of
$17,233, the other $19,679. All of his debt, built up patiently over time, through more than a decade of persistent, sustained irresponsibility, was gone in an instant.

He put twenty thousand dollars into his checking account. This was roughly the amount he’d told Susan he would be getting from the horror film, and it would cover the costs of the treatment. He put the rest in a simple savings account. The bank teller tried to talk him into a slightly more sophisticated investment “vehicle,” but he wanted something he could move around as easily as possible.

It occurred to Eddie that he could spend this money any way he wanted, since Susan didn’t know it was there. For that matter, he didn’t have to go back to Susan at all. He could just walk away from everything. Something in him found the prospect attractive. But Susan was the only justification for what he’d done. She’d needed it so badly. The money would go to raising their child. It wasn’t all that much for that purpose, but to Eddie it felt like a lot.

THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
should have been perfect. For the first time in a decade, he didn’t spend a part of every day worrying about money. Once this sense of insecurity was gone, he realized how he’d lived in it. It had become his atmosphere, or a kind of first principle from which every element of his life emerged. Now it was gone.

Susan was happier than he’d ever seen her, happier than she’d been when they first started dating, before all this trouble began. She was convinced it was going to work this time. They had been given this reprieve; it had to have happened for a reason. There was simply no point in their being disappointed again. They decided to enjoy the time before treatments began. They started having sex again—real, spon
taneous sex, with no purpose but pleasure. When they went out for expensive dinners, Susan didn’t ask how they would pay for them.

Eddie tried not to think about the enormity of what he’d done. The video was going to be traced back to him eventually. There was no way that Martha would let him off the hook. Once it did, would Morgan stick to their story? Would Susan buy it? If Martha tried to sue Morgan, it would come out that he’d bought the tape from Eddie. How could it not? Once lawyers were involved Eddie’s cover story about stolen files would be dropped. Either this hadn’t occurred to Morgan, which meant that he’d thought this all out no more than Eddie had, or else he didn’t care, because he had no particular intention of keeping his promise. Eddie could do nothing to make him. If Susan found out what had happened before the treatments started, she wouldn’t let them go ahead. Everything would collapse again. But if the treatment worked out first, she might accept that he’d done it for her.

He called Morgan at the beginning of August.

“I’ve been wondering how this is going to go down.”

“It has gone down as far as you’re concerned,” Morgan said. “You don’t have anything to worry about from here.”

“I’m just curious. When do you think it’s going to break?”

“It’s tough to say, but not immediately. Once it’s out, it’s very difficult to control, so I’ve got to be sure to get the most out of the initial blast. Martha is definitely hot right now, but she could get hotter. If this movie she’s in does well, or if the rumors are true about this new guy and she really leaves Rex. So I’m going to sit on it for a bit. On the other hand, her stock could drop. Say, if
Dr. Drake
gets canceled.”

“Do you think that might happen?”

“I’m not fucking Nielsen or whatever. I’m just laying out the considerations I’ve got going through my head.”

“So when it goes out, how many people do you think will wind up seeing it?”

“If I do my job right, Eddie, everyone will see it. Fucking everyone. I mean, it’s going to be everywhere.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Of course it’s a good idea. What did you think the point of all this was?”

“I’m just wondering how it will affect Martha.”

“Wrong time to get a conscience, Eddie. What did you think you were getting into?”

“Aren’t you worried she’ll get litigious or something?”

Morgan laughed.

“Is that your concern? We have nothing to worry about. This is going to be great for Martha. At this point in her career, it’s just what she needs. She’ll be thanking you when it’s all over.”

“Can you do me a favor?” Eddie asked. “Give me a heads-up before doing anything. Just a few days, so I can work things out on my end.”

“Let me talk to my investor.”

“It’s just one guy?”

“Do you want to know?” Morgan asked.

“Not really.”

“I’ll see what he says.”

Meanwhile, Eddie and Susan returned to Hope Springs, and the process began again.

The Lupron shots were the easiest ones. The needle was small, and the drugs came from the pharmacy already mixed. Each morning before Susan went to work, Eddie took the vial from the fridge and filled a syringe. He brought it to their bed, where Susan waited with her shirt pulled up. During the first round, they’d experimented with ice cubes to numb her skin,
but Susan said the cold was worse than the shot, so now Eddie just wiped a bit of her belly with rubbing alcohol and pinched a quarter of pink skin. When he’d finished pushing the needle, he covered the syringe and put it into the red hazardous waste barrel that now sat in a corner of the bedroom.

As far as Susan knew, Eddie was still looking for work, since their financial problems were far from over. But Eddie knew there was more money, and he was too anxious to go job hunting. He’d started following Martha more closely, looking for developments in her public life that might send Morgan into action. He turned on the TV as soon as Susan left each morning. He bought all the gossip magazines and read them at coffee shops, throwing them out before coming home. There was a lot to follow—Entertainment Daily and half a dozen other channels;
Star Style, Peeper,
and
CelebNation.
Martha had definitively split from Rex, and her publicist confirmed that she was dating Turner Bledsoe.

She had left Rex just as his status as Hollywood’s leading heartthrob was coming into doubt. His big summer movie was a box office disappointment, and his new girlfriend, Carla Lender—the head chef on the cooking-and-dating show
Butter Me Up
—was an obvious step down from Martha. Meanwhile, Martha’s romance with Turner had helped make
Life After Laura
into a hit. She was bankable now. According to
Star Style,
she was considering half a dozen new projects, and the upcoming season of
Dr. Drake
would be her last. Eddie found dozens of message boards dedicated to predicting how the series would end. Would the true nature of Drake’s gift finally be revealed? Would she marry the hospital administrator with whom she’d alternately flirted and fought through the duration of the show? Serious consideration was being given to alternate theories that Drake was either an angel or
a space alien. In either case the final episode would close with her ascension into the skies. Eddie spent entire days on this, and there was always more.

When he wasn’t following the intricacies of Martha’s career, he was watching the two of them together on his computer. He didn’t watch the clip he’d sold to Morgan, just the everyday images of their old life. At times he would watch a scene that reminded him of something, and he would go into the closet and search the relics box for an old photograph or script. He would emerge eventually to find that an hour had passed. It had been a mistake to bring the box upstairs, to invite her back into his life. He’d thought it would be harmless to remember from a safe distance what it had been like to be in her thrall, but there was no safe distance.

And he wasn’t just following Martha. Justine Bliss had admitted her problem and agreed to check herself in to the hospital. Entertainment Daily had exclusive access to her first days there. They reported every meal she ate and every morning weigh-in. Meanwhile Sandra Scopes, three-time winner of
Scavenger: Urban Adventure Edition
, had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

“There’s a lesson here,” Sandra told Marian Blair. “If it can happen to me it can happen to anyone.”

“Anyone who watched Sandra in the roller derby challenge of
Scavenger Detroit,
” Marian assured her viewers, “knows she’s not a quitter.”

“Burt Wyman got a DUI,” Eddie told Susan one morning while flipping through a copy of
CelebNation
that he’d found in the Hope Springs waiting room.

“Who on earth is that?”

“He was the runner-up in the last season of
We Drink Too Much.”

“You watch that show?”

“It’s very popular.”

“Put that thing down.”

She laughed as she said it, but Eddie followed her command. More and more she addressed him in this imperative mode. Clean up the kitchen. Turn off the TV. Be gentle with that needle. They moved from Lupron to Menopur and Follistim, which was a good sign, except that the drugs made her angry and manic. She needed constant reminders of why they were doing all this. Eddie considered it a good day when she was too tired to be mad at him.

Otherwise everything seemed to be working out. On the morning that Eddie told Susan about Burt’s relapse, Regnant announced that they had a good number of suitable eggs. They needed to get ready for retrieval.

Two days later the nurses brought Susan to the room where her follicles would be removed. She was put under general anesthesia for the procedure. For once Eddie had his own job to do. This time he didn’t have to go off site, to the farthest reaches of the West Side. It amazed him how much nicer a room you were given for this business once you paid five figures. The array of auxiliary materials provided was astonishing. A few months from now, he imagined, the Martha Martin tape would be included in the Hope Springs library.

Regnant called the next week to say that things looked good, though it didn’t sound that great.

“It’s not the ideal scenario,” he admitted. “But I’m honestly pretty happy with where we are. We’ve got three fertilized embryos, which is a lower number than I’d hoped. None of them have developed into blastocysts yet, but that’s not necessarily a problem. I’d like to go ahead and implant all three of them. I think that’s our best bet.”