Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (15 page)

But Alex had already hung up. Eddie called Susan’s cell phone and left a voice mail, his tenth in the past three days. He doubted that she was listening to them.

“It’s Eddie,” he said. “I saw you on TV. You looked really great. I just want you to know you don’t have to do this reality thing if it makes you uncomfortable. I’ll find a way to get us some money, something that keeps you and the babies out of the spotlight. I think we could figure all this stuff out, just the two of us, if we had a chance to talk. Give me a call when you can. I love you.”

Eddie knew it was useless. Who would turn down what Susan had been offered? Besides, she’d hardly looked uncomfortable. In fact, she’d looked made for the part. This producer knew exactly what he was doing. Alex hadn’t been exaggerating when he called Brian Moody the most successful reality-show producer in Hollywood, as Eddie learned from a quick search on his laptop. Moody’s imperiled Justine Bliss show was only one of more than a dozen currently on the air. One Web site called him “the genius behind
Baby Pageant
and
Dog Swap.”
He seemed to be taken in the press as something more than a simple producer. A strange kind of legend had built up around him. His Wikipedia page reported that he was a former priest who’d left a contemplative order to work in television. Other, less reliable sites made more elaborate, even baroque claims about his mystical inclinations.

The man made TV shows, Eddie thought. That was all.
Though if it was true that he had some religious background, that might explain how he’d convinced Susan to sign on. He would have spoken a language that she understood. Eddie preferred this idea to the alternative, which was that he didn’t know his wife as well as he thought he did. Long ago, Eddie had asked Susan if she’d ever dreamed of being a famous artist herself. It seemed a natural question. He hadn’t set out to teach acting, he’d come to it by way of trying to do the thing itself. He imagined that curators and gallerists and art critics similarly began as failed artists.

He remembered the conversation now. It had come on their very first date, the second time they’d met. They’d been introduced during Eddie’s first year back at St. Albert’s, at a dinner party held by Annie, who was still teaching then. Eddie had noticed Annie and another female teacher whispering and laughing when he was introduced on the first day of school that year. After years of disastrous auditions, being held to a standard that didn’t apply to the rest of the world, he’d become handsome again.

When Annie invited him over early that fall, he assumed she was interested in him, but the man who answered the door that night was obviously Annie’s boyfriend. There were about ten people at the party. Apart from Eddie they all seemed to know each other. The whole thing puzzled him until dinner, when he found himself seated next to Susan. She was very pretty, Eddie thought. Not Martha Martin pretty, but no one was, except for Martha herself. Susan had light brown hair that she wore pinned up and a full, freckled face. She had high, round cheeks and a wide mouth that was quick to form into a smile. But Eddie didn’t think of her physical appearance when he remembered that evening. He didn’t really picture a person at all so much as a hazy, warmth-conferring glow. The overwhelming impression she gave was that of kindness, generos
ity of spirit. Not until he recognized this did he realize how conditioned he’d become to being regarded with skepticism, measured and found wanting for the purposes for which he was presenting himself. He’d come to anticipate disappointing people.

“Annie tells me you’re an actor,” she said while serving herself from a large bowl of pasta. Before passing the bowl along, she filled Eddie’s plate without asking him. “What kind of stuff do you do?”

“Mostly theater.”

“It must be exciting.”

He’d become used to exaggerating his few accomplishments in such situations, or even lying outright, which he could do convincingly, since he’d seen a successful career up close and knew all the relevant details. But the combination of that warmth and the sense that there was nothing much at stake led him to say, “I’m not having a great time with it right now, which is why I’ve taken this teaching job.”

“Doesn’t every famous artist have these stories about the odd jobs they took before they made it big?”

“That doesn’t mean that everyone who does odd jobs goes on to make it big,” Eddie answered, having considered the point at some length. This wasn’t an attractive response, but for the moment he felt no need to be attractive.

“When you do make it, it’s going to be that much nicer to know that you worked for it. I see it with the artists at the gallery.”

After years of work at an auction house, she explained, she’d recently moved to a gallery in Chelsea owned by a dealer named Carl von Verdant. She hoped the change would let her work directly with artists, instead of just rich collectors.

“Some of them have been struggling for years. But they’re just so committed to their art. And then Carl discovers them,
and like that their lives are changed. Maybe that will happen to you.”

“Do you represent anyone I might know?” Eddie asked, though he didn’t know any contemporary artists at all.

“Have you heard of Graham Turnbough?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“His work is very painterly.”

Did this just mean he was an actual painter? Eddie wondered. What made one painter more painterly than another?

“He’s going to be in a group show going up next week,” Susan said. “You should come by to check it out.”

The previous year had treated his confidence so badly that he might not have taken up Susan’s offer had it not been so obvious that he’d been brought to the party for the purpose of meeting her. At the opening, Susan found him drinking a beer he’d taken from an ice-filled trash bin and looking at an installation piece made of string and melted crayons, presumably not the work of the painterly Turnbough.

“I like it,” he told her.

“Do you?” she asked. “I think it’s kind of empty and dumb. But Carl doesn’t care what I think. I’m hoping once I’ve been here longer that will change.”

She laughed nervously, and Eddie could tell she’d had a few drinks in advance of his arrival.

“What kind of work do you like?”

“I guess this seems old-fashioned,” she told him, “but I like art with real belief behind it. Stuff that isn’t just about provoking people.”

“That doesn’t seem old-fashioned,” Eddie said. “When I was growing up, my parents didn’t take me to museums or anything like that, so the only art I saw was in churches.”

“That’s just it,” Susan answered, as though he’d said something very profound. “When I studied art history in college,
I specialized in the Renaissance, when all the great art was religious. Of course I knew that things had changed a lot since then, but I wanted to find that strain in contemporary art. Then I got out of school and started working in the art world, and I can’t even tell people that I believe in God. They find it ridiculous. But look at the ridiculous stuff that they believe in.” She waved at the piece in front of her, then laughed again. “I guess I shouldn’t be saying this so loudly.”

Her face was bright now, as if illuminated by wonder, and Eddie felt again the warmth he’d felt at Annie’s apartment. He hadn’t gone to the gallery that night with any particular expectation, but seeing that look on her face made him ask, “Can I take you to dinner when this thing ends?”

At dinner he’d asked the question about whether deep down she’d wanted to be an artist herself. In retrospect, it might have been an insulting question, since it suggested failure, but after all, he was unapologetically a failure himself. Susan hadn’t seemed offended. She’d spoken passionately about what art had meant in her life and her desire to live around it. She was in awe of great artists, and the idea that she could be one herself simply hadn’t occurred to her. She wanted instead to help great art get out into the world. She’d taken some studio classes in college, because she’d wanted to know more about the process she planned to spend her life thinking and talking and writing about. She hadn’t been very good at it, but that only gave her more respect for the people who did it well.

It was painful for Eddie to remember this side of Susan, mostly because remembering it meant admitting that he’d forgotten it for a time. Perhaps he’d just stopped seeing it, but it seemed at least as likely that it had been worked out of her over time. By years of menial treatment from Carl at the gallery, years of living with Eddie’s disappointment. She had turned
from these things to the prospect of motherhood, which had only brought more disappointment. The girl he’d sat at dinner with that night years before was on track to become the art world veteran of Sandra’s depiction. It had never occurred to Eddie that this might be another part of Susan’s disappointment. And now it seemed there might be a remedy to it. She didn’t have to play the part of long-suffering assistant. She didn’t have to play the part of childless wife. She could play whatever part she wanted.

AT THE BEGINNING OF
his third week at the Cue, Eddie went to the lobby newsstand to buy his magazines. This trip was already developing into a kind of weekly ritual, a way of marking the passage of days that were mostly spent alone in his room. He could follow Susan’s life—to some extent, he could even follow his own—hour by hour online or on TV, but there was something more meaningful about these pages held in his hand, which told only those stories that had risen above the daily chatter and solidified into something slightly more substantial.

He took the magazines from the rack and paid without looking at them, eager to get back upstairs before being caught on his errand. There was no sign that anyone in the lobby recognized him, but he had already learned that someone was always watching. On his second morning at the hotel, having realized he’d be staying a while, he’d gone shopping for clothes. No photographers waited when he left the
hotel, and no one stopped him outside or even paid him any particular attention that he noticed. But the next morning, a report on CelebretainmentSpot documented his slide into shopping addiction, complete with a list of every purchase he’d made the day before. An anonymous friend expressed worry that Eddie’s new lifestyle was ruining him.

When he finally left his room again a few days later, the seeming normalcy of the world outside was enough to lull him back into complacency. That evening his entire day was documented online, in bits and pieces, videos Teesed out, eyewitness accounts on gossip sites. He’d responded politely to a flirtatious barista at the coffee shop, but in the photo he was leering at her. A sneeze at the lobby bar became a drunken scowl.

All the magazines spoke of their “spies” in the streets. They used the word self-mockingly, but it was exactly right. Eddie felt like a man awaiting trial in a police state. None of the evidence would be falsified, because if you followed someone everywhere you eventually found something real you could use against him. Actual police states, he knew, hardly needed spies. Instead, they taught their citizens to spy on each other. This was how it seemed to him—he was constantly being watched, but there was no one doing the watching. In such a world, no one could be trusted. So he stayed in his room. Ignoring it all might have been easier than locking himself away. They could write what they wanted; no one was making him read it. But these magazines and gossip sites were his only sources of information about Susan, who still wouldn’t answer his messages. So long as he kept up with them, he had nearly as much access to her as he’d had when they were living together. She’d become a top story. CelebretainmentSpot’s Bump Watch tracked her belly on a daily basis. On
This Morning Live,
a celebrity obstetrician held up
an artist’s rendering of the fetuses and recited a long list of possible developmental complications.

The New York
Herald’s
Art & Entertainment section, keeping slightly above the fray, profiled Carl von Verdant. Susan had always complained that Carl didn’t let her do anything besides answering the phone, but now he told the paper that he supported his “protégée” completely. He only hoped that the show wouldn’t be a distraction, because he depended so much on her talents. The paper had interviewed half a dozen artists represented by the gallery, including Graham Turnbough, who said that Susan had one of the sharpest eyes in the business. The
Herald
wondered whether her show would raise the level of the conversation on television, introducing viewers to serious artists. “A funny thing happened on the way to tabloid infamy,” the article concluded. “It turns out Susan Hartley is the real deal. She might even prove to be that rarest thing: a reality television heavyweight.” Eddie knew better than anyone that this was a concoction, but he found himself looking at Susan through the eyes of all the fascinated onlookers. Maybe she really was a “heavyweight,” or could turn out to be one. Maybe he’d actually given her a gift, the chance to put her life on the track she wanted for it. He wanted to be on the track with her.

Back in his room, Eddie took the magazines out of the brown paper bag and looked them over. The cover of
CelebNation
showed Martha walking down the street in dark glasses, with a shawl over her head, looking as mournfully dignified as a widow at a state funeral. The getup was not actually meant to conceal anything. Instead it announced her as herself in disguise. She so captured every bit of attention in the frame that Eddie didn’t immediately recognize his apartment building behind her.

“Dr. Drake Makes House Call,” he read. “Martha goes in person to comfort Susan.”

He flipped inside the magazine to find a story about the two women banding together, showing solidarity.

“We had a great talk,” Susan told CelebNation after her meeting with Martha, which those in the know said lasted nearly an hour and included plenty of tears. “It meant so much that she would travel all this way just to see me.” But as for the deets on her convo, Susan was tight-lipped. “You’re going to have to tune in to the premiere of Desperately Expecting Susan, only on the 2True Network.”