“Me too, actually.”
“I’m just asking,” Arthur said, “because you don’t seem like most of the others.”
“I don’t? Really?”
“I mean, did you always want to be an entertainment guy?”
“I used to be a photographer.”
“What kind of photography?” Arthur was finishing his cappuccino.
“Weddings and portraits.”
“And you went from that to writing about people like me?”
“Yes,” Jeevan said. “I did.”
“Why would you?”
“I was sick of going to weddings. The pay was better. It was less of a hassle. Why do you ask?”
Arthur reached across the table and turned off Jeevan’s tape recorder. “Do you know how tired I am of talking about myself?”
“You do give a lot of interviews.”
“Too many. Don’t write that I said that. It was easier when it was just theater and TV work. The occasional profile or feature or interview or whatever. But you get successful in movies, and Christ, it’s like this whole other thing.” He raised his cup in a cappuccino-signaling motion, and Jeevan heard the publicist’s heels clicking away on the floor behind him. “Sorry,” he said, “I know it’s a little disingenuous to complain about a job like mine.”
You have no idea, Jeevan thought. You’re rich and you’ll always be rich and if you wanted to you could stop working today and never work again. “But you’ve been doing movies for years,” he said in his most neutral tone.
“Yeah,” Arthur said, “I guess I’m still not used to it. It’s still somehow embarrassing, all the attention. I tell people I don’t notice the paparazzi anymore, but I do. I just can’t look at them.”
Which I appreciate, Jeevan thought. He was aware that his fifteen-minute allotment was trickling away. He held up the recorder so Arthur would notice it, pressed the Record button and set it on the coffee table between them.
“You’ve had considerable success,” Jeevan said. “And with that comes, of course, a certain loss of privacy. Is it fair to say that you find the scrutiny difficult?”
Arthur sighed. He clasped his hands together, and Jeevan had an impression that he was gathering his strength. “You know,” Arthur said clearly and brightly, playing a new, devil-may-care individual who wouldn’t sound in the playback like he was pale and obviously sleep-deprived with dark circles under his eyes, “I just figure that’s part of the deal, you know? We’re so lucky to be in this position, all of us who make our living as actors, and I find complaints about invasion of privacy to be disingenuous, frankly. I mean, let’s be real here, we wanted to be famous, right? It isn’t like we didn’t know what we’d be facing going in.” The speech seemed to take something out of him. He wilted visibly, and accepted a new cappuccino from his publicist with a nod of thanks. An awkward silence ensued.
“So you just flew in from Chicago,” Jeevan said, at a loss.
“Yes I did.” Arthur reached and turned off Jeevan’s recorder again. “Tell me something,” he said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Jeevan Chaudhary.”
“If I tell you something, Jeevan Chaudhary, how long do I have before it appears in print?”
“Well,” Jeevan said, “what do you want to tell me?”
“Something no one else knows, but I want twenty-four hours before it appears anywhere.”
“Arthur,” the publicist said from somewhere behind Jeevan, “we live in the information age. It’ll be on TMZ before he gets to the parking lot.”
“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be.
“What does that mean?” Arthur asked.
“It means I do what I say I’m going to do.”
“Okay, look,” Arthur said, “if I tell you something …”
“Guaranteed exclusive?”
“Yes. I’ll tell no one else, on condition that you give me twenty-four hours.”
“Fine,” Jeevan said, “I could give you twenty-four hours until it runs.”
“Not just until it runs. Twenty-four hours until you tell another living soul, because I don’t want some intern at wherever the hell you work leaking it themselves.”
“Okay,” Jeevan said. “Twenty-four hours before I tell another living soul.” He was pleased by the intrigue.