Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (17 page)

“I can’t believe you’re having triplets,” she said, running
her hand over Susan’s belly. “Carrying just one around is hard enough for me.”

“It’s a bit overwhelming,” Susan admitted, though she didn’t look overwhelmed. She looked beautiful, even next to Martha.

After a commercial break, an exterior shot established a new location, which Eddie recognized as the gallery. Inside, a camera ran across a series of small works in charcoal hanging on one wall. They were more inviting than Carl’s usual tastes. Eddie assumed this was by design. He knew the gallery was meant to be important to the show, but he was surprised that Martha would take the time to go into work with Susan. As the scene progressed, he realized that their visit was in fact over. It had already done its job, without any mention of Eddie. Anyone watching would have known that he was the thing connecting these two women, but they hadn’t even said his name. Martha’s presence was apparently enough to tell viewers everything.

“Carl von Verdant is one of the most highly respected dealers in the city,” Susan explained to the camera. “I’ve been working with him for five years now, and I’m currently the gallery’s associate curator.”

Eddie had never heard this title before. Susan had always been one of Carl’s assistants. In the past, she’d described him as brusque and condescending, but in the half hour that followed he asked her advice about everything—where to hang a piece, what to look for at an upcoming fair. The friendly conversations Susan shared with the other assistants—now presumably her subordinates—didn’t at all match her long-standing complaints about the gallery’s atmosphere. Eddie couldn’t be sure the depiction was false. Perhaps Susan had been exaggerating her problems at work. What Eddie saw on-screen was entirely believable.

Susan left the group to take a call from Richard Oh, a young artist whose debut show she was organizing.

“It’s going to be great,” she told Richard. “You’ll be the toast of New York.”

After the call, Richard spoke to the camera from a nondescript room somewhere. He was an Asian American in his early twenties. The right side of his head was shaved, the hair on the left pulled into a long pigtail.

“I’m so excited to be working with Susan Hartley,” he said. “She’s the reason I chose Von Verdant to represent me.”

Later in the show, a shipment of Richard’s work went briefly missing, creating the episode’s only real bit of drama. Carl yelled at two of the young assistants while Susan went about locating the lost packages. She was the calm center around which the gallery revolved. She advised Carl with confidence, and the answers she gave him were smart and knowledgeable, which didn’t seem to Eddie something that could be faked. Her job bore no resemblance to the menial frustrations she’d so often described to Eddie at home.

Had everything really changed for her so quickly? Their jobs had long been a shared source of disappointment in their lives. Perhaps Susan had been all along doing better than she’d let on. Perhaps she had persisted in presenting herself as a failure out of a sense of solidarity, or because she thought he wasn’t capable of appreciating her success. She’d probably been right to suspect this, if in fact she had suspected it.

There was a simpler explanation: he was watching a fictional television character, based only loosely on his wife, and he was wrong to compare the particulars of this character’s life to those of the Susan he knew. This seemed comforting at first, but it was ultimately troubling in its own way, because this fictional Susan already seemed so real after less than half
an hour. More than that: he wanted this Susan to exist. He liked her better this way.

After work, the assistants Carl had berated took Susan out to a bar, where they gossiped while she sipped on club soda. It was obvious that the others looked up to her, but there was also a sense of camaraderie. They joked about naming one of the babies after Carl. The scene was broken by an interview with Tomaka, the gallery’s youngest employee. She’d been working at the gallery for just a few months, but she was the prettiest of the assistants, and she’d been given the most screen time.

“Susan is the happiest we’ve seen her in years,” she said. “I think all these changes in her life have been really good for her.”

The show’s tone changed in the second half. Susan sat in a doctor’s waiting room while in a voice-over she explained that she was getting her first ultrasound.

“I’m scared to be doing this alone,” she said. “It makes me think how hard it’s all going to be.”

You don’t have to do it alone, Eddie wanted to say. The doctor took Susan to an examination room and talked in an understated voice about the risks presented by multiples. Susan pulled her hospital gown over her belly, where the nurse applied a layer of gel. The doctor set down the transducer, and a picture came on the screen. It wasn’t clear to Eddie exactly what it showed, until all of a sudden it was. Those were his children. He was seeing them for the first time, alongside a million other people.

The picture was replaced on-screen by a close-up of Susan’s crying face.

“They’re so beautiful,” she said, looking into the camera. “I can’t believe they’re inside me. I’ve never been so happy. But it’s scary, too, knowing I have to go through all this by myself.”

Eddie was sorry not to be there, sorry to see her scared, but he felt something else, too. She needs me, Eddie thought. She can’t do it by herself. Everyone said that Brian Moody knew what he was doing. He must have created this tension— between professional confidence and personal uncertainty— for a reason. To satisfy it, they would have to bring Eddie back. Susan had nearly said as much. I’m not ready yet, she’d told him, which he took now to mean: we have to establish the story first.

As the credits ran, Eddie searched for his name online and found a post titled “Take Him Back!” on what appeared to be a Christian television blog. It said that Moody would be sending a “strong message about the importance of the traditional family” if he reunited Susan and Eddie. The post compared Susan’s situation to that of Justine Bliss with a logic that struck Eddie as somewhat imperfect, though he was happy to read it. A small but persistent movement existed in his favor.

But that movement could only be found by looking for it. Most pages that Eddie read had nothing good to say about him. In fact, the majority of commenters didn’t mention him at all. They talked about the visit from Martha, about the gallery, about the babies. Most of all, they talked about Susan. She seemed human and “relatable,” an ugly word that came up in nearly every post. Relatability was, apparently, the gold standard for a character, and Susan possessed it. The term connoted precisely the things about Susan that had made her suffer in Eddie’s eyes when compared to Martha. She was pretty but not overwhelmingly beautiful. She was smart but not intimidating in her intelligence. She was confident but not domineering. Vulnerable but not needy. Kind but not desperate for approval. She was just Susan, and everyone loved her. I loved her first, Eddie wanted to say, though he understood
that in some sense he’d seen this Susan for the first time just when everyone else did.

IN THE DAYS AFTER
the premiere, more stories emerged about Susan’s need for help, her struggle to make it through alone. With each one Eddie felt closer to being back in the fold. Her situation had to change in some way to keep viewers interested. The question was how long the producers would play things out. He held off calling Alex, because he thought he would be in a stronger position when they came for him if he didn’t seem desperate to get back.

The next week’s show began at the gallery, where Susan prepared for Richard Oh’s opening. His work had been safely shipped to the gallery, and the assistants helped Susan install it. Most of it had the appearance of melted wax in various vomitous shades.

“Susan has really been Richard’s champion,” Carl told the camera. “She’s the one who turned me on to him, and she’s the one who brought him in to the gallery.”

It was an atypical bit of selflessness on Carl’s part, but it also seemed to suggest that the blame would be on Susan if the show didn’t succeed. After a few more shots of Richard’s work, they cut to her.

“The medium is melted-down G.I. Joe figurines,” Susan explained. “It’s such a haunting evocation of the horrors of war. This one is called
Fallujah.”
She pointed to a hardened brown blob fixed to the wall. “It’s amazing how something so seemingly abstract can have such an emotional impact.”

Now they cut to Richard, who had let the pigtail down from the unshaved side of his head.

“It’s incredibly exciting to have someone like Susan Hart
ley embrace your art,” he said. “Everyone thinks so highly of her taste.”

In Eddie’s memory, these openings had always been casual affairs, with garbage cans full of PBR and a few bottles of white wine on a table near the door. People came in for a free drink and took a lap around the show before moving on to the next gallery. But now they were setting up something rather more elaborate. There was a brief bit of phony drama when the caterers called to say they were stuck in traffic.

“I’m launching a career here,” Susan said dramatically. “Everything has to be on time.”

Later they showed her back at the apartment, picking out a dress that would elegantly handle her growing bump.

“It’s times like these when I really wish I had someone going through all this with me,” she said. “I’ve got a lot riding on this. Not just for my own career. I really believe in Richard, and I want this night to be perfect for him.”

So much of their life in the past two years had been wrapped up in their failure to conceive that a failure at work hardly seemed to register. But now he could see how badly Susan wanted this show to succeed. She had a whole emotional life attached to her work that Eddie had never known. Eddie felt himself rooting for Susan, as he imagined most viewers would, and he was relieved to see people waiting around the block to get inside the gallery. A velvet rope kept them in a line more in keeping with a movie premiere than the first exhibition of an unknown artist. Inside, Susan eloquently explained the importance of Richard’s work to various well-dressed people who were labeled by way of subtitles as prominent collectors or socialites or art critics. The only name familiar to Eddie was that of the lead art critic at the
Herald.
Susan had mentioned her in the past mostly to complain that she never came to their
shows. As the evening wound on, all of the works were sold, checks for thirty or forty thousand dollars were written on the spot.

The cameras cut back outside, where a black car pulled up to the curb. A driver emerged to open the passenger door. Eddie could tell from the response of the people still waiting in line that whoever came out of the car was famous, but it took a moment for him to recognize Rex Gilbert. As Rex walked up to the gallery door, the screen cut to Tomaka.

“I’m like, oh my God, Rex is in our gallery,” she said. “We’re all trying to keep ourselves together.”

She was replaced by Susan, who looked at the camera more calmly.

“Rex is famous in the art world as more than just a dilettante with some money to throw around,” she said. “He’s a great collector. So it’s a real honor for him to come to this show. Mostly, I’m just happy for Richard.”

Susan was waiting at the door when Rex came inside. She introduced herself and showed him around.

“Unfortunately, our major pieces have already sold,” she told him. “But Richard is working on a very exciting new series. I could arrange a private showing if you’re interested.”

“I would love a private showing,” Rex said.

Susan handed him a business card, and the camera turned to capture Tomaka and another assistant looking on.

“Rex Gilbert is flirting with Susan,” Tomaka said. “I’m totally going to die.”

Susan walked Rex back to the door.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here while there was still more work available, but I certainly like what I saw.”

He passed his eyes over Susan and smiled.

“Some of it is still available,” Susan said. She kissed him
on both cheeks and stood watching in the doorway while he walked back to his waiting car.

Eddie turned off the TV as the credits ran. They might have picked Rex, of all people, just to torture him. But really there was nothing to worry about, he assured himself. It was a cameo, like Martha’s appearance the week before. A star of Rex’s caliber wouldn’t get himself stuck in this story. He just wanted to look like he was serious about art. His last three movies had been disappointments, and his popularity had been declining since he’d split with Martha. Establishing some high culture credibility would be good for him. It was easier than getting involved in politics or directing an indie script.

Every site Eddie checked had Rex and Susan on its home page. CelebretainmentSpot ran a story that had obviously been waiting to post the moment the episode ended. “Hollywood’s worst-kept secret is out. Rumors have been swirling for weeks about Rex and Susan spending time together. Our spies say the two have been privately inseparable since the visit to her popular Chelsea gallery depicted on tonight’s show. Rex’s friends are hoping that the prospect of a family might be enough to finally tie down Hollywood’s most notorious bachelor.”

Eddie closed the computer and called Talent Management.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked Alex. “Rex Gilbert wants to start a family with my pregnant wife?”

“It’s quite a story, isn’t it?”

“I thought you were supposed to be getting me on the show?”

“Let’s be honest, Eddie. Between you and Rex there’s a bit of a difference in interest level.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be my agent’s job?”

“You’re not exactly doing me any favors.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t
do
anything. Granted, you spread out naked in the hallway once, which wasn’t bad. But since then you don’t even leave the fucking hotel room.”

“I was trying to stay out of trouble.”

“Who told you to do that? If you want to get on this show, you need to get yourself
into
trouble. No one gives a shit about you right now.”