Free Arts & Entertainments: A Novel by Christopher Beha Page B

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 ora 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