Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (2 page)

“I had to show up. Since you won’t come down to see me anymore.”

In his first years out of college, Blakeman had thrown parties at his place several nights a week, and Eddie had never missed them. At the time, Eddie’s acting career had still seemed promising. Blakeman had been struggling to get started as a writer, copyediting on the side for the New York
Interviewer.
Now Eddie was a drama teacher, and Blakeman was on the
Interviewer
’s staff. He still threw the same parties, but Eddie hadn’t gone to one in years. He’d tried to keep up for a while, but he couldn’t stand in a room of writers and actors and filmmakers—even if most of them were “aspiring” writers and actors and filmmakers—and tell them he wasn’t going to aspire anymore. He’d watched himself become less interesting in other people’s eyes. Worse, he’d become less interesting in his own.

“Married life,” Eddie said. This was unfair to Susan, who
would have been happy to spend an evening at Blakeman’s from time to time.

“Talk to me when you’ve got kids at home,” Blakeman said. Everyone knew that Blakeman would never have kids at home. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing to tell,” Eddie said.

They left the building an hour later. Outside, someone made the predictable suggestion that they head to the stretch of bars on Second Avenue they’d snuck into during their last years at school. They stumbled across town until they arrived at an Irish pub that hadn’t existed back then but was indistinguishable in look and tone from the places that had. Above the bar a television set that in earlier days would have been showing whatever sporting event could be found now aired a reality show.

“Pure Bliss,”
Reilly said. “My wife is obsessed with that show.”

“Mine, too,” Wilkins said as he handed out plastic shot glasses filled with a green liquid that appeared to have toothpaste mixed into it. “I can’t say I mind watching with her. Justine Bliss is pretty cute.”

“Hey, Eddie,” said Reilly. “If you were still with Dr. Drake, you could have one of those shows. We’d all be on TV right now.”

Eddie swallowed his shot, which had an odd spiciness that made his nostrils itch.

“If he was still with Martha,” Justin said, “he wouldn’t be wasting his time with any of us.”

“I’m sure a master of the universe like yourself could manage an audience,” Reilly told Justin. “But the rest of us would be out of luck.”

On the trip across town they had lost all but about a dozen
classmates. Some of those remaining seemed ready to leave after an obligatory first drink. Eddie spotted Blakeman at the bar and thanked Wilkins for the shot before walking over. Blakeman bought a round, which they brought to a table in the corner.

“Catch me up,” Blakeman said. “How have you been?”

“What you were saying before,” Eddie answered. “About kids at home?”

Perhaps the alcoholic mouthwash had done it, but he felt like telling someone. For all the distance that had grown between him and Blakeman, Eddie didn’t have anyone else to tell. He had coworkers and a few couples that Susan invited over for dinner, but he didn’t have any real friends anymore.

“Sure,” Blakeman said, though he didn’t seem to know what Eddie was talking about.

“We’ve actually been trying for a while.”

“I can show you how it works, but I don’t think the men’s room has a lock.”

“It doesn’t seem to be happening,” Eddie pressed on.

“Aren’t there doctors for that?”

“Lots of doctors. Assisted reproductive technology. They call it ART.”

“I guess you know it when you see it.”

Eddie couldn’t even pretend to laugh.

“Sorry to hear it,” Blakeman said, once it was clear he couldn’t joke his way through the conversation.

“The thing is, for all that pain and trouble, Susan wants to keep at it.”

“And you don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t know whether it’s a good idea,” Eddie said. “I just know we can’t afford it. Insurance won’t cover most of it. We’re out of pocket more than ten grand in the past six months, and we’re broke.”

Eddie was nearly in tears. He didn’t know why he needed to tell Blakeman. There was nothing Blakeman could do about it.

“Do you remember Morgan Bench?” Blakeman asked.

Morgan was an old friend of Blakeman’s who used to hang around when Eddie and Blakeman were still close.

“Sure.”

“We’re having dinner tomorrow night. You should join us.”

“I don’t know.” Eddie was happy to be invited, but he resented the effort to change the subject. “I’ve got graduation and a reception afterward. But I’ll be free by dinner.”

“Try to make it work,” Blakeman told him. “I don’t just mean for the distraction. I think I can help.”

“I’m not looking for a loan or anything.” This was true, but only because he had no means of paying one back.

“Of course not. I’m as broke as you are.” This might also have been true in some technology sense, though money was not something Blakeman had to worry about. “I’m just saying I think I can help.”

Eddie wanted to ask what kind of help he could offer, but Wilkins and Reilly descended on the table.

“We were just talking about those Melwood girls from our year,” Wilkins said. Melwood was the girls’ school around the corner from St. Albert’s.

“Do they still hang around the building after class?” Reilly asked Eddie. “With their uniform skirts rolled up?”

Eddie nodded while sipping his drink.

“Not a bad way to end the workday,” Wilkins said.

“They’re sixteen years old.”

“There’s no harm in looking,” Wilkins said. “That makes them as old as Justine Bliss, and look at the way she gets up on TV.”

As he spoke, he settled in across the table. The conversation about Blakeman’s help was over. But Eddie couldn’t stop
thinking about it. After the four of them had closed the bar a few hours later, he walked home with a single phrase in his head:
Blakeman can help.
He dared to say it out loud. Blakeman can help. A couple walking by in the opposite direction—they weren’t much older than Eddie’s students—turned to look at him and laughed.

THE GALLERY WHERE SUSAN
worked opened an hour after the start of the St. Albert’s school day, so Eddie usually beat his wife out the door. But she was already dressed to go when she woke him the morning after his reunion.

“Did you have fun?” she asked.

Eddie tried to piece together the later reaches of the previous evening, but the only fruit of this effort was a throb against the backs of his eyes. Had his brain been capable of generating a response, he would still have been unable to break his tongue sufficiently free from its surroundings to articulate it. He offered instead an affirmative cough.

“Was Blakeman there?”

Eddie remembered with some regret offering Susan as an excuse for his disappearance from Blakeman’s life. In fact, Susan liked Blakeman, and she didn’t understand why they saw so little of him. Eddie couldn’t tell either of them that Blakeman belonged to his old life with Martha.

“He invited me for dinner tonight,” Eddie managed after working his mouth into functioning order.

“That sounds nice. It would be good for you to get out a bit more. Maybe I’ll see if Annie wants to do something.”

Annie was Susan’s best friend from childhood. They’d moved together from Ohio to New York after college, and Annie had introduced Susan to Eddie, with whom she’d worked at St. Albert’s until leaving the year before, after the birth of her first child.

“See you this afternoon?” Eddie asked before Susan left.

Each year since their engagement she’d taken half a day off work to join him at graduation. She liked seeing the faces of the boys whose names she heard all year, chatting with the other teachers, feeling fully immersed in Eddie’s life.

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Eddie fell back to sleep after Susan left, and it was almost noon by the time he got across town to pack up his things at school for the summer. Rounding the corner, he saw Stephen McLaughlin sitting on a fire hydrant with his handmade sign propped up beside him. Eddie couldn’t read it from where he stood, but he knew exactly what it said. “Make St. Albert’s keep its word. Don’t evict a disabled man.”

Since its founding, St. Albert’s had occupied a mansion on Eighty-ninth Street between Madison and Fifth, donated by one of the rich Catholics who’d started the place, mostly third-and fourth-generation Irish who’d finally arrived in the higher reaches of society and wanted their own version of the private schools where rich Protestants sent their sons. The school had eventually expanded into an adjacent building, converting all the apartments into classrooms except the penthouse, where the young headmaster lived with his family. He’d stayed in the job for almost five decades. Shortly after his death, St. Albert’s went about taking possession of the apartment and found it
still occupied by his fifty-year-old son. For three years now, Stephen and the school had been locked in litigation. For the last two, he’d camped outside the building every day, picketing while parents dropped off and picked up their sons. Despite the message on the sign, Stephen had no disability that Eddie could discern apart from a fairly encompassing pot habit. Since taking up his place outside the school, he’d grown out a thick red beard, as if to appear slightly menacing or to give off a hint of indigence—though he’d refused an offer of three-quarters of a million dollars to vacate the apartment.

“Handsome Eddie,” he said. “It’s been a slow day.”

Eddie’s mother had started working at St. Albert’s as Mr. McLaughlin’s secretary, and Stephen—then in his twenties and unemployed—often babysat the infant Eddie. Apart from Eddie’s parents, Stephen had known him longer than anyone alive.

“School’s out,” Eddie told him. “Graduation starts at the church in a few hours. You ought to set up shop over there.”

“Thanks, Handsome E.”

Stephen rose from the hydrant and picked up his sign while Eddie let himself into the building. He had a key to the rickety elevator, but he still thought of it as vaguely off limits to him, as it was to students, and he rarely used it. He walked up the back stairs to the faculty lounge on the second floor, which was already stripped almost bare. Most of the other teachers had cleared their things out the day before, while Eddie had been at his reunion. Eddie went through the papers in his small cubby with dutiful care before throwing the entire pile out. He left the lounge and walked up two more flights to the black box theater that held his drama classes.

Looking up at the stage, Eddie imagined himself playing Gayev in
The Cherry Orchard
or Eugene in
Biloxi Blues.
He didn’t usually get nostalgic at school. It was the place he
worked every day, a fact that generally overwhelmed any memories of that earlier time. But the reunion had put those days in his mind, and with the building empty the weight of the present was not enough to suppress the past. The first time he’d been in that theater as an adult, he’d been shocked at how small it was, since it had seemed enormous when he’d performed there. He’d never felt nervous or excited before the performances, just enveloped in the thing he was doing. The curtain would go up, and for a few hours he felt more real than he did anywhere else.

Before acting, he’d never had something the other boys envied, as he envied their wealth and their easy sense of entitlement. His first years at St. Albert’s had not been particularly happy ones, and his unhappiness was made worse by the fact that he could never criticize the place at home. His education had been his parents’ second great gift to him, after their prenatal move to America. They’d held out great hopes for the transformative possibility of Eddie’s mere presence at a school that had educated the sons of mayors, governors, senators, and one president. At home, they spoke of the place in the respectful tones they usually reserved for Cardinal O’Connor or the Clancy Brothers. When a St. Albert’s graduate strangled his girlfriend with her bra in Central Park during Eddie’s childhood, even this incident brought an odd credit to the place, since the pages of
Newsday
and the
Post
insistently contrasted the Preppy Murderer’s lurid crime with his refined pedigree. When a parochial school kid killed his date, it didn’t make the front page.

All this talk about the privilege of attending such a place had accentuated the feeling that he didn’t quite belong there. But that had changed when the drama teacher, Mr. Carlton, started casting him in plays. Eddie wouldn’t even have audi
tioned without the twisted ankle that kept him off the basketball court one winter with nothing to do after school. His success had solidified his long-standing but intermittent friendship with Blakeman, the most popular kid in the grade. The two of them and Justin Price formed the nucleus of an “artistic” clique—Blakeman the writer, Eddie the actor, and Justin the musician—that came to dominate their class at St. Albert’s through their high school years. It was then that Blakeman began calling him “Handsome Eddie,” and the name caught on. Eddie understood it wasn’t entirely a compliment, but who didn’t want to be handsome? Another member of their circle, Eddie Doyle, became “Bright Eddie,” because he was in the honors sections and Handsome Eddie was undistinguished in the classroom.

Now Bright Eddie was fighting in Afghanistan and Handsome Eddie was a teacher. He expected his old friend to appreciate the irony of this, but no one seemed surprised when he first took the job. The mediocre student was precisely the one destined to stay in the classroom, the unspoken assumption seemed to go. The smart ones earned enough money to send their sons to the school.

Graduation started at three, and it was after two thirty by the time Eddie had finished boxing up his papers and the props he used for acting exercises. He went straight downstairs and crossed the street to St. Agnes Church. Susan had already found an open pew inside, and she knelt with her eyes closed. She wasn’t ostentatious about her faith—they’d dated for weeks before he had any idea how important it was to her—but she couldn’t enter a church without saying at least a short prayer. Eddie always wondered what went through her head at these times. He didn’t much understand how prayer worked, though of course he could recite various
standards. What Susan did was more in the way of improvisation, Eddie imagined, and he’d never had much talent for that.