Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (26 page)

“Don’t take it that way, Eddie.”

“This day has put things into perspective for me, too,” he continued. “We both knew this couldn’t last. I’m too old for you. You don’t really want to be with me.”

“That’s not true,” Melissa said. “What are you doing?”

She inflected the question as if she meant it to pierce through the veil of their narrative and reach Eddie directly. She wanted him to know he was making a mistake.

“I’m trying to be honest,” Eddie said. “With myself as much as with you. We should have tried that a long time ago.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “I went to see Patrick to tell him we weren’t getting back together. I’m a little mixed up right now, but I told you I’d stick it out, and that’s what I plan to do.”

“You don’t need to say that. You don’t owe me anything. Just follow your heart.”

“My heart wants to be with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “Ever since I heard the news about Justine, my wife and kids are all I can think about. It was wrong for us to do this. I realize that now. We just lost ourselves for a while. I can’t undo all the hurt I’ve caused, but I’m going to try to make things right. You belong with someone your own age, and I belong with my wife.”

Eddie felt the tears running down his cheeks. He tasted the hint of salt on his lips, and he had to hold back a smile. He was crying on command. He turned from Melissa and finished zipping his bag.

“Is this really it?” she asked.

“I love you,” Eddie said. “I want you to know that. You’ve got a long, wonderful life ahead of you. I hope you’ll think of me sometimes and smile.”

He worried he was overdoing it. But it wasn’t really possible to overdo these things. He put an arm around Melissa and he kissed her forehead in way that he hoped would appear fatherly.

“Tell Patrick I’m sorry,” he said. Then he picked up his bags and walked out of the room.

EDDIE FELT
A PIERCING
sense of solitude as he left the hotel. He didn’t regret what he’d done. He wasn’t even sad, exactly— just inexplicably lonely. Had he become so attached to Melissa that the idea of losing her could have such an immediate effect? The audience waiting outside looked disappointed by his appearance, as though they recognized this change in him right away. He headed up the block untouched until he got to the corner, where he turned to make sure Hal had made it safely through the crowd. But Hal wasn’t there. Eddie wasn’t being filmed.

Hal never fell behind. If he wasn’t there already, he wasn’t coming. Eddie continued walking, his sense of isolation more acute now that its source had revealed itself. He hadn’t meant to be banishing himself from the show. He’d only meant to take control of the story. Moody’s decision to cut him loose didn’t make sense. Eddie was a bit uncooperative, but he was also the most interesting thing about the show. He imagined ask
ing Moody about the decision, and just as he had the idea he stopped at a streetlight to find Moody next to him. For a moment he thought he was imagining it.

“What’s going on?” Moody asked lazily, as though they were old friends who’d just bumped into each other.

Eddie tried to take the same tone.

“I’m leaving Melissa.”

“So I gathered. I was hoping there might be something I could do to help you reconcile. Every relationship has its rough patches.”

“It’s too late. We’re done.”

The unlit cigarette bobbed in the corner of Moody’s mouth as he sighed contemplatively.

“Can I give you a ride?”

“Do you have someplace in mind?”

“I assumed that you did. You packed those big bags. I imagine you’re taking them somewhere. I’m just offering you a lift.”

He waved to a black town car creeping along beside them, which pulled over at his signal.

“I think I’d like to walk,” Eddie said.

“There’s nothing sinister going on here,” Moody insisted. “I’ve done a lot for you, and I’d just like ten minutes of your time.”

Eddie might have kept walking if he had anywhere to go. The trunk popped open and Moody took the bags. Eddie took a seat in the back of the car while Moody walked around to the other door. A tinted glass divider separated them from the driver, and the windows—also tinted—were closed. It was like leaving one world for another.

“Where can I take you?” Moody asked as the car pulled through the light. He smiled at the searching look on Eddie’s face. “You didn’t think it out beyond leaving the hotel?”

“I guess not.”

“It’s not too late to turn around. We’re making great television.”

“If I go back to Susan it would make great television, too.”

“You can’t do that right now, I’m afraid.”

“Why not? We both know Melissa is going to wind up with Patrick. Why do you need to drag things out when everyone knows how it’s going to end?”

“Dragging things out is the whole point, Eddie. That’s all life is: dragging things out when everyone knows how it’s going to end.”

“Don’t you think it’s good for the story arc—for me to get back to Susan before the kids are born? People are feeling pretty sad about what happened to Justine. It would be nice to have a wholesome development.”

“You’re a villain right now, the object of everyone’s anger and sadness about Justine’s death, the emblem of everything that’s wrong with us. I can’t send you back to Susan. What’s wholesome about that? You need to be punished, so everyone feels like they’ve learned something. Maybe there’s some justice in the world and we aren’t as broken as we thought we were in our most cynical moments.”

“And how is that supposed to happen?”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. You do so much better when you don’t know. To begin with, you go back to Melissa and forbid her from seeing Patrick or her mother. Over the next few episodes, you become more and more controlling and paranoid.”

“Until she leaves me.”

“That’s right. None of this magnanimous older brother stuff.”

“And why would I do that?”

“We were hoping you would do it without meaning to.
Let’s face it, Eddie, your judgment isn’t always superlative. But we’re obviously past that now. I’d love to appeal to your better nature, tell you to do it because it’s what’s best for everyone, but I’m going to try the mercenary route instead. You’re going to do it because I’m going to pay you half a million dollars to do it.”

“I’ve got triplets,” Eddie said. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“The half a million is for you,” Moody told him. “That’s the first part of the deal. The second part is that I’ll take care of your wife and kids.”

“But I won’t be there?”

“It’s possible that you’ll work your way back. Right now Rex seems like a much more solid bet.”

“I want to be there when those kids are born.”

“Where’s your sense of justice, Eddie? If you get the big reward, what does that say about the ways of the world?”

“I don’t want to be a villain anymore. I want my life back.”

“You can’t have it,” Moody said. “I bought it, and it belongs to me.”

“It doesn’t,” Eddie said. “What you have is just a fiction. It’s pictures, it isn’t the real thing.”

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be running away. The pictures
are
the real thing. This is the life you wanted. You don’t get to have it both ways. I bought everything. After it’s all played out, I can get some good work for you. I’m sure we can find you a fine story arc. You can be on TV as long as you want.”

“But I have to give up my family first?”

“You already gave them up, Eddie. You signed everything over to me for a thousand dollars a week. This isn’t a choice I’m offering you, some Faustian bargain. We struck that bargain months ago.”

“I can tear the whole thing down,” Eddie said. “I don’t care about some nondisclosure agreement. You can sue me if you want, because I’ve got nothing.”

For the first time that Eddie had ever seen, Moody lit the cigarette he kept forever in his mouth. It was the only sign that Eddie had made an impression.

“How much do you know about my background?” Moody asked after taking a long first drag.

“I read that you used to be some kind of priest, that you escaped from a monastery.”

“That’s slightly overdone,” Moody said. “I was never ordained. And I didn’t live at a monastery. I was staying at a retreat house in Minnesota, run by the Order of St. Clement. Spent the summer there after my first year at the seminary. I understand you went to Catholic school. Have you ever been in a place like that?”

“We did an overnight retreat each year up in Westchester. Mostly I remember being bored.”

“Imagine that, but for a few months. There were about a dozen permanent residents. Maybe another dozen visitors like me, on retreats. Not all seminarians—some parish priests and some laymen just looking to recharge, I suppose. The entire time I was there, I felt intensely lonely. There wasn’t anyone in particular I was missing. I wasn’t especially close with my family. I didn’t have many friends. I kept to myself anyway, so I thought this would be just the thing for me. But I was miserable. Then this film crew arrived. For years the order had been sending a priest around to parishes throughout the state, asking for money and recruiting people to come on retreats, but that was too expensive. They wanted to make a video to send around instead. When the crew got there, something lifted for me.”

He paused as if he had offered Eddie a kind of riddle.

“So you had some contact with the outside world. A bit of normal conversation.”

“It wasn’t really that. The film crew didn’t talk with us. They were big on that. They didn’t want to alter what they were observing. What lifted me was the idea that there was an audience. All my life I’d wanted to do good. I’d been an altar boy. I’d studied theology in college and gone to the seminary, where I was first in my class. But none of it mattered once no one was watching. If I believed in God, I would have believed that he was watching, right? But it turned out I didn’t. Somehow I got that far along without even asking myself the question.”

Moody had kept the windows closed, and the back of the car was filling with smoke. He stopped to flick ash from his cigarette, and he lazily applied it to the floor mat with his foot.

“But the crew had their own problems. The things that were really going on in that place couldn’t be captured on film, because they were meant for God, not for the audience. They happened inside people. I watched all this, and somehow I knew what the audience would want to see. I started to intervene in little ways. When I saw someone praying, I suggested that he look up a bit more, or put his hands in a reverential pose. All minor stuff. I expected some resistance from the priests, but they cooperated completely. The order had cut back their budget, and they were hoping this film would save the place. They would happily tilt their heads a few degrees in one direction if it would make a difference. And it did make a difference. I knew it would.”

“So you found your talent,” Eddie said.

“It’s not a talent, exactly,” Moody clarified, ignoring Eddie’s sarcasm. “It was just good timing. These priests, they wanted the video to lead the audience to God. But I realized
they had it all wrong. They needed the audience because there is no God. The more I considered it, the more I saw in the audience everything I’d been taught to see in him. Never visible, but always present. Many and one at the same time. We exist for the audience—on a basic level, it created us. The audience gives us free will, but it expects us to use that freedom in a way that pleases it. If we don’t, we are banished to hell. Do you know what hell is?”

Eddie laughed. “Getting taken off the air.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Moody said. It was the first time Eddie had seen him angry, but he quickly regained his usual calm. “The next week, the documentary crew packed up, and I asked to come with them. I told them I could help in the editing process. I knew what the place was really like, and I knew how to capture it on-screen. They’d seen that the tinkering I’d been doing had given them better footage, so they offered me an unpaid internship. Two years later I was running the production company.”

“So you went from the priesthood to
Date Rape Drive-In
and
Puppy Mill Tycoon
.”

“It turns out the audience wanted
Puppy Mill Tycoon
,” Moody said simply. “They wanted
Date Rape Drive-In
.”

“That sounds like a story you tell so you don’t have to feel bad about lying to people and making work that isn’t any good.”

Moody dropped his cigarette to the floor of the car and stomped it out before lighting another.

“I don’t know what you mean when you say that word, good. I’m not being facetious. I really don’t. Probably you really don’t know either. In the world I used to live in, good is whatever God wants. That’s it. There’s no other measuring stick. There is no good before God. When we say that God is
good, all we’re saying is that God is God. In the world I live in now, it’s the same thing. There’s only one criterion. What does the audience want? Does the audience want you to be honest? Does the audience want you to be kind?”

Moody paused, and Eddie realized he was once again expecting a response.

“The audience wants us to be interesting,” Eddie said.

“You’re getting there,” Moody said. “But it’s simpler than that. The audience only has one way of expressing its interest—by watching. They might watch because they love you. They might watch because they hate you. They might watch because they’re sick. Doesn’t matter. Is that good or bad? The question doesn’t make any sense. Good is whatever the audience watches.”

“But if the audience is so important, don’t you want to improve them? Couldn’t you train them to want something better?”

“You still don’t get it, Eddie. There is no ‘something better.’ The audience is all there is.”

“It’s a nice little parable,” Eddie said. “But it has nothing to do with me.”

“Here’s what it has to do with you. You think I’ve got no standards. But I do have standards. And I don’t care about the money. The money is just a manifestation. I care about the audience, and I won’t defy them. I want you to know that you can’t threaten me. You want to tell the world it’s all bullshit? If you do that I’ll lose a lot of money, and I’ll never recover that five million from you. But I’d rather lose that money than do something the audience doesn’t want. It’s important that you believe me when I say this. Don’t try to call my bluff, because I’m not bluffing.”