Karl coughed. “Excuse me.” He cleared his throat. “But that’s silly. Writers have always decided who are good writers. What do you think literary critics are? Painters? They’re writers.” He laughed and looked around for support, but the vehemence of his tone caused only worried looks.
“Karl.” Bart said the word like a parent: a warning against throwing a tantrum. “With your first novel coming out, you can’t have that attitude.”
David Bergman, unaware that Bart was Karl’s agent, and irritated by his arrogant manner, got up from his chair and walked around the couch to face Bart, saying, “Why the hell shouldn’t he? Seems to me with his first novel coming out, it’s the best possible attitude. Artists can’t take the judgments of businessmen to heart—not if they hope to continue to be artists.”
“Editors aren’t businessmen.” Marion said.
“Of course they are!” Karl sputtered. His drink spilled as he put it down on the coffee table. “That’s why—”
Bart’s commanding voice interrupted: “So are writers.”
Karl shut up and looked at his agent with the wide-eyed, trusting, and slightly frightened expression of a dutiful student.
“Never forget it,” Bart said in the sonorous tone of a newscaster signing on: “A writer is a businessman first. And then, if you’re lucky, you can be an artist too.”
David Bergman looked at the other writers. Tony, though he wore a slight smile to indicate distance from Bart’s judgment, looked at the floor. Fred, his leg bouncing up and down nervously, nodded his enthusiastic agreement. Karl simply closed his mouth, clamping down on his unfinished objection. And Patty, for the first time, looked at David with wide-eyed interest.
“Look,” David said. “I know I’m a hack journalist. One of the advantages I have over other writers at Newstime is I admit it to myself. But I’m not a businessman. And these fellows, they’re not hacks. They can’t be businessmen. It would kill them to even try.”
Bart looked up at David slowly. “To get what they want—they’d better be.”
There was a silence, a few seconds of embarrassed uneasiness at Bart’s dramatic tone.
Brett. Bart’s date, stood up, her long blond hair swinging like a slow-motion shot for a commercial. David stepped back, startled.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Where’s the little girls’ room?”
No one answered at first. Then David put his arm out—a gentlemanly escort. “I’ll take you there.”
Brett was astonished. “You’re going with me?”
“Yes. I have to throw up now,” David answered with a charming smile. The room broke up—except for Patty, who continued to stare at David with intense interest. As far as anyone could remember, that was the party’s last interesting moment.
CHAPTER 2
Everyone left Fred’s party only a half-hour after coffee had been served. Tony started the exit, announcing he had an early appointment. Having been shown the way out, they all developed early appointments and left within a few minutes of each other.
David Bergman was pleasantly surprised to find that Patty lived near him in SoHo, and offered to split a cab with her.
“How long have you lived in SoHo?” David asked after giving their addresses to the cabdriver.
“Two years, but I lost my lease.”
“Oh. You found another apartment?”
“No, I’m apartment sitting for two weeks. I lost my lease because of a lunatic.”
David smiled at her deadpan delivery.
“No one believes me. My friends think I must have done something horrible. But I’m innocent, I swear!” She clutched David’s arm and begged: “Do you believe me?”
David laughed at her desperate gesture and language, because while she pleaded, her eyes twinkled mischievously, hinting, like starlight, at tomorrow’s unseen and powerful sun.
He was drunk. The party had made him uncomfortable. Tasting the bourbon over and over helped, and by the time Marion’s heavy meal of crab croquettes and lasagna arrived, his stomach felt full and he only wanted more cool liquid. But the booze didn’t soothe his uneasy memory of his behavior. He had heard himself arguing with every opinion the guests pronounced. It had begun with Bart about writers and businessmen, but he even found himself telling Fred the Yankees couldn’t win this year, quoting half-remembered opinions of Harold Yeller, Newstime’s sports columnist, as if he had thought them himself, or even understood them. David hadn’t watched a ballgame in years. Yes, the general feel of the evening had disgusted him. There was something pathetic about Fred’s formal arrangements: forcing them into some sort of community. Worst of all was the pretense that they were important, when, in fact, other than Bart (who, after all, was merely an agent), they were mediocrities. All of them standing in line at the New York cafeteria of young professionals: stuffed with opinions before the meal of life had even begun.
Patty had noticed David’s succession of bourbons. No one else was drinking hard stuff, for one thing, and David also seemed to cling to his glass in a somewhat tragic and desperate manner. She liked him for it. She felt he would understand her own desperation. Besides, Patty was raised in a Philadelphia suburb, and David’s drinking summoned a more manly image than seeing a shrink or complaining endlessly, as it seemed to her most New York men did when they were unhappy.
Their cab took Second Avenue down from Fred’s and Marion’s apartment on Sixty-seventh Street. They were passing the gaily colored Roosevelt tram, parked in its cocoon like a children’s toy of a giant race. They were through the midtown traffic and would be at David’s stop on West Broadway in ten minutes. She wanted him to ask her up, or at least suggest they go for a drink at the Spring Street Bar. It would be hours before Patty could sleep.
“What time is it?” she asked dishonestly, having seen eleven o’clock flash when they passed the Daily News Building.
“I don’t know. It feels like four in the morning, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, no. I’m speeding. I feel like I just got up.”
“I didn’t mean I was tired,” David said.
“Good. I want you to buy me a drink.”
David turned to her and showed surprise. Patty held her breath. She hadn’t planned to make the invitation. Everything, these days, seemed to fly out of her: not merely indelicate invitations to men, but also intimacies, anxieties, confessions of guilt, of meanness, details of her bowel movements, all sorts of high-security information that was normally guarded closely by censors.
“Okay.” David didn’t mean to sound perfunctory. He had been so caught up by the image of himself sniping and nattering at the party that seduction hadn’t occurred to him. But the surprise was pleasant. Patty’s blond hair, wanton mouth, and big eyes were excellent lures.
“If you’re tired, don’t—” she began.
“Don’t be silly,” David said, turning his attention to the possibilities. His voice deepened; he shifted toward her and smiled agreeably. “But let’s not go to a bar.”
Patty pursed her lips. “Your apartment?” she suggested, batting her eyes.
Tony expected his wife to be in bed reading. She was.
“Dollface.” he announced at the bedroom door.
“Hi!” Betty said, her high thin voice making this word gay and ringing. She spoke in fiat tones usually, but greetings were her strong suit. She lay in the bed wearing a long pin-striped nightshirt. Ensconced in the big pillows, her short curly red hair framed by the bright colors of the linens, she looked young—a dutiful daughter waiting for Daddy’s good-night kiss. Tony always felt slightly startled by his wife’s girlish face. Her short nose and pale blue eyes were eager, almost naive, whereas he knew her interior to be different: cynical, cautious, and mature. It was the latter, internal picture of her that he carried out with him to the world and subconsciously expected to find on his return.
“You’re awake,” Tony said, pleased. He took off his jacket and opened the closet door.
“Let me see you.” B
etty said.
Tony turned around. “What?”
“Put your jacket on. I want to see how you look.”
He obeyed with boyish sheepishness: showing himself to Mom for inspection.
“You’re putting on weight,” she said.
Tony sagged. “Great. For this I put my jacket back on?”
“Aw,” she laughed. “Don’t disappear,” she called after him as he went into the closet.
“How was your mother?” Tony asked, reappearing, with only his Jockey shorts on.
“Your greenies!” Betty said, delighted. She referred to the color of his underpants.
“I wore your favorites,” Tony said in a lofty tone.
“My mother! What about my mother!”
“Aha! I knew you’d forget. Tomorrow, when Fred calls to say he was sorry you couldn’t come, he’ll ask how your night out with Mom was.”
“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. I’ll remember.”
Tony closed the closet door and hurried under the covers, his hands immediately playing, ticklishly, up and down his wife’s body. She squirmed and giggled like a girl.
“Oh—oh—don’t! You’re waking me up!”
“God!” Tony shouted in his deepest and most dramatic of voices. Despite its masculine low register, whenever he used that tone, Betty heard Tony’s mother talking—Maureen Winters, a drink in her hand, standing atop the stairs, her hair prettily disheveled, calling out in a throaty voice: “God help me!”
Tony had abruptly rolled away and over onto his back. He stared at the ceiling. “We’re so damned domestic.”
Betty rearranged herself, retrieving her book. “Tell me about the party.”
Tony groaned. He rolled over again to his side, facing Betty. “Nothing happened. Boring.” His hand sneaked under the cover, heading for Betty’s thighs.
“Was Fred’s new agent there?”
Tony nodded. “Bart What’s-his-name.” His hand touched her thin, smooth, and elegant leg.
“Bart Cullen.” Betty pursed her thin lips with disapproval—a snobbish mannerism Tony disliked. “He’s a bizarre person.”
“He’s psychotic. I think he believes he gets ninety percent of his clients, not ten,” Tony said in a seductive whisper. He ran the flat of his hand up her hip to the side of her belly.
“Who else was there?”
“Your good friend Patty.”
“Oh! I have to call her!”
Tony moved closer. His hand moved over Betty’s stomach and up to her breast. Despite the frown she put on, her body undulated with pleasure. He gently followed the slight rise of her collarbone to her neck. There was a faint trace of a line just above her Adam’s apple and he touched it lightly. She shivered. “Fred and his wife, Bart and his girlfriend. A writer named Karl Stein—”
“Karl Stein? That sounds familiar.”
“He’s under contract to your colleague Bob Holder. Bart is his agent.”
“Right! Yeah, Bart only deals with Bob. Supposed to be a terrific novel.”
Tony dropped his hand to her hips and pulled her toward him, speaking softly as he warmed himself against her body. “Can’t be. He’s a frightened rabbit. He listens to Bart like he’s God.”
Betty closed her eyes and ran her hands down Tony’s back. “I don’t have any books.”
“You still get only two for the fall list?” He kissed the faint line and then moved up to her small, delicate ear.
“You’re terrible,” she said flatly.
“Hmmm.”
“You say Fred and his wife. Bart and his girlfriend. That’s terrible. Probably they talk about me that way.”
His penis stretched against the elastic band of his greenies. His immediate desire for her surprised him. When would he tire of her? He felt like a teenager on a date: barely one kiss and he was ready to climax.
Marion had cooked, so the cleaning-up was Fred’s job. This chore suited him. He suffered from insomnia, and mechanical activity helped stop him from percolating his anxious thoughts. Marion, exhausted and tense, had drawn herself a hot bath and was now happily soaking. Fred made good progress, revved up by the five cups of coffee he had nervously drunk after dinner. Half an hour after his guests departed, Fred had meticulously cleaned everything, even drying to a sparkle the stainless-steel sink.
He knocked on the bathroom door tentatively, worried that Marion wouldn’t allow him in. He liked to watch her in the bath, lying naked in the soapy water, but Marion was shy of exhibition. Fred argued that her reluctance made no sense: they had been married for seven years, surely he knew what her body looked like. “It’s my right to be private and have a bath alone,” she would answer, striking a note of finality that implied she would resort to hysteria if he pressed his point.
“Hi.” Fred said in a meek voice. “Can I come in?”
He heard her move in the water, a soft languid splash. “Sure,” she said. I should get my cigarettes, Fred thought as he entered, but he was too eager to see his favorite nude pose. There she lay, fitting neatly into the tub, her head resting against its sloping lip, in water made faintly blue by bath oils. “Wow. Hot enough?” Fred said. The steamy room seemed to be weeping. The wall of mirrors over the sink was fogged and dripping moisture.
“Mmmm,” Marion said, closing her eyes, relaxing into the soothing bath.
“So. What do you think?” Fred asked, staring at the spooky and sexy levitation of her pubic hairs to the water’s surface.
“What do you mean?”
“The party. How’d it go?”
Marion laughed. Her nipples punctured the water, floating like pink buoys. “It was okay.”
He reached forward. His hand penetrated the liquid and touched her stomach. She accepted this without movement or comment. “You think everyone had a good time?”
“I think so. Don’t you?”
Her skin, or the water, or both, felt oily. His hand skimmed over her belly and up to her breasts like a sleigh skimming on ice, gliding on her hilly countryside. “I don’t know. Everybody seemed stiff. Didn’t they?”
Marion ignored his massage and answered in a polite tone. “Well, nobody knew anybody very well. Patty was crazy, throwing herself at every man.” Fred’s hand covered her groin, gathering her floating wisps of hair, and he pressed, one finger splitting her lips and entering briefly.
She winced.
Fred removed his intruding finger and stroked her thigh. “She’s lonely.”
“She acts horny, not lonely,” Marion said, frowning. She reached down and lifted Fred’s hand off her. “I’m trying to relax,” she said, placing his hand on the cool rim of the bathtub.
David Bergman’s loft was impressive. He knew that. The twenty-five hundred square feet he rented had had its beautiful oak floor sanded and sealed to a glistening shine with polyurethane. The meticulous tape job done on the plasterboard ceiling made the seams invisible. His cast-iron columns, standing in a dramatic row down the center of the space, were painted white, highlighting their fine details against the planks of glistening oak. His kitchen was a self-contained unit of handleless black Formica cabinets above a shimmering row of stainless-steel appliances. His large bathroom was outfitted with an elaborate marble sink, its faucet handles saying hot and cold in delicate blue letters. His bathtub could fit two and he had the luxury of a separate shower stall. Otherwise, the space was open. Wide open: eyes could look upward, past the gay yellow sprinkler pipes to a fourteen-foot ceiling: and then scan, when standing at one end, across the twenty-five hundred square feet to a set of windows at the other end. Even his furniture (though there wasn’t nearly enough to fill the place) was fine. Two large Oriental rugs floated on the floor like exquisite lily pads; two huge couches made an angle bordering one of the rugs; there was a long French country table near the kitchen exit, accompanied by a set of Breuer chairs; and, at another end of the loft, a king-size bed rested against one wall. In this cavern, it looked like a big pillow.
The effect of
this splendor on Patty was increased by the deceptive prelude of the building’s seedy entrance. Three of the floors were still used for industrial purposes and thus the elevator was a dark, unfinished shell, roofless and spooky. It didn’t even operate automatically. David started it up by manipulating two cables, and the loud whirring noise of the elevator’s engine sounded labored. It lurched at the start. “Whoa,” Patty said, startled, and staggered backward, balancing herself against the rear wall.
David smiled. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. That’s the way it always sounds.”
Thus she was dazzled when David swung open the tall metal doors of the dim and scary elevator (she imagined rats and spiders and all sorts of horrible things lurking about) into the sweeping, brilliant loft.
Touring it made conversation natural. David had inherited the loft from his older brother, who had been a SoHo pioneer. David called him that with a sneer. “At the time, everybody thought he was crazy. There wasn’t a name for this area and this place was a filthy mess, the ceilings sagging, the oak floor a dirty, unrecognizable brown.” David’s brother had gotten a lot of work when SoHo conversions became fashionable. He made enough money to realize his dream: he moved to a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.
“Maybe one day I’ll be that lucky,” David said as they settled on one of the couches. He had supplied her with wine and reheated a cup of that morning’s coffee in a desperate attempt to sober himself up. When Patty leaned forward to replace her glass on the coffee table after taking a sip, the pink cotton top billowed away from her breasts like a sail picking up a gentle breeze, and he saw (in astonishing detail) the firm creamy white terrain that had so discombobulated Fred. A green-blue vein ran vertically across her right breast, winding like a stream down a mountain’s face, disappearing into the chasm of her cleavage. On her left breast, a startling brown beauty mark was frozen in orbit about her nipple. All this he saw in the time it took for her to reach forward. Her big eyes rolled like a doll’s, down and then up as she straightened. He saw her see that he was seeing. He felt his face flush. His pale cheeks were all that his dark glasses and brown beard exposed, but they were enough— they turned red. His blushing wasn’t unusual. David liked to think of himself as a sophisticate, but nature had given him the cheeks of a bride. Years ago, he had made peace with them by training himself to talk through their flare-ups. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said loudly, noticing that she was smiling and staring at the display. “But I feel like I’m part of a warehouse sale. Or a parked car. It’s too big.” He paused, hoping she wouldn’t call attention to his embarrassment.
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