Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Read Free Page A

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 heworked 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 auditioned 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