Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Yes, but only two were put on in a significant way. Youngsters at the Quest Guild and another production in the Harold Repertory in Chicago. The other productions aren’t worth talking about.”

  “Gosh, I’ve never heard anyone dismiss credits, no matter how awful.”

  “Well …” He considered explaining, but instead he summarized: “I know those credits don’t mean anything in the real world.”

  Gloria raised her eyebrows (they were dramatic and arched even when at rest) and stared.

  Tony laughed. “What?”

  “Now I understand where that toughness comes from in Youngsters. I saw it last summer and loved it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I felt there were problems with the production. I don’t think it did you justice. That girl, uh, the one with the funny face …”

  “Lonnie Kane? I love her work. I thought—”

  “No, no. She was marvelous. We represent her. She got some of the underpinnings in your play—I could hear strength in her. That’s what makes your humor so compelling. You’re not doing one-liners.”

  “Thank you. I didn’t know you represented Lonnie. What’s she doing now?”

  “She’s been swallowed up by sitcom pilots that don’t quite make it.”

  Tony laughed. “The Jaws of acting.”

  Gloria frowned. “Well, she’ll hit with one. Tell me, why haven’t you tried screenwriting?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I guess I worry about dealing with Hollywood. Because of my mother I do have bad associations with it.”

  “New York’s coming back, you know. More and more projects are originating and even being produced here. I’m not sure that you’d have to even visit Hollywood while doing screenwriting.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of bad association with Hollywood. It isn’t geography—it’s the profession.”

  Gloria again smiled that broad toothy grin—what was it? Tony wondered. Triumph? A secret knowledge? “I thought you might mean that,” Gloria said. “I can imagine what those years out there with your mother must have been like.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t too much fun for Mom, thinking she was about to be thrown into a concentration camp.”

  “But you were a baby when all that was happening.”

  “Yes, but the effect on me was still quite lasting.” Tony laughed hollowly and instantly felt stupid that he had. He sounded as if he were being coy about the McCarthy Period, as it was referred to by his mother and her friends. The McCarthy Period, with capitals to aid the sense of dread and tackiness, sort of a slapstick Hitler. But it only seemed farcical in retrospect. At the time, with people losing their jobs, committing suicide, with the Rosenbergs dying in the electric chair, there was little of the low comedy that now remains when seeing those black-and-white TV hearings; little of the idiotic spectacle of matinee idols proclaiming their devotion to America and their loathing of “communist infiltration” of show business. “It wasn’t fun,” he said in a low voice, thinking of all it had cost his family: the divorce, the paralysis of his mother’s career, her breakdown, his father’s panic and immoral behavior. Everything else in the history of his family was a flat terrain compared to the volcanic and geological monstrosities of the McCarthy Period.

  In college, Tony had used this family history to bed women, wooing with sentiment, making drama and romance out of the real pain and stupidity of his parents. He had corrupted his feelings and now suspected himself of fraud whenever he called attention to them, as if he were shoplifting from the store of his past, cheating the cash register of genuine feeling, selling the coinage of his soul.

  Gloria looked off sadly. “It’s hard to believe it was ever like that.”

  “Is it?” Tony could hear his voice take on his mother’s hard inconsolable anger. “I don’t think so. The man who backed the Screen Actors Guild in the expulsion of so-called communist sympathizers is now President of the United States. He was a tacky opportunist, as bad as the people whom we read about in Solzhenitsyn, the kind of person who informs on neighbors to get a better apartment. Reagan’s career was washed up, so he made a career of putting his rivals out of work, and thus he accidentally landed an even better job. It was ugly and petty and immoral and yet he’s President of the United States.” He heard his voice ring in the room.

  Gloria looked apprehensive. No. he realized, she looked embarrassed, as if he had opened his fly or thrown a tantrum. And the last was true. He had thrown his mother’s tantrum.

  “I’m sorry,” Tony immediately said. “I don’t know why I went into all that.”

  “No, no. I understand.”

  “Anyway, you can see why I might not instantly wish to write screenplays. In my subconscious, that industry is scary. After all, my mother didn’t work for ten years. Ten years of her prime. She became very unstable emotionally … well, I mean the scars are still there.”

  Gloria now looked quite young and girlish. She hung her head and looked up at him, batting her eyes. He could see that she was trying to look sympathetic; but that didn’t make him feel she was being dishonest. “Now I feel quite foolish for having asked you here.”

  “I didn’t mean that—”

  “Because I must confess I hoped to convince you that you should be writing screenplays. Not only because the money is good. I think—from your brilliant play—that your ideas are sharp, new, and very funny. Very, very funny.”

  Tony again felt himself tense, as if this praise concealed a trap.

  Gloria continued, saying the following as if she were fully aware that it would sway him, “I’m going to come clean and tell you that I want to convince you to rewrite the script I was just discussing with Bill Garth.”

  “Really?” This word rolled out of him, a trill of delight and amazement.

  Gloria nodded solemnly. “Now. The question is: will you join me for an early lunch to talk further?”

  Patty felt tiny. She was lying under a quilt in a bed floating on an island of glossy oak. The ceiling above her was like a firmament, the sprinklers a bizarre iron galaxy. The damn place was so big she felt as if she were only inches high. Also, she was exhausted. Her mouth stuck to itself from dryness, her head felt heavy. She was hung-over. Through her swollen eyes she peered at the windows—the distance was so great she felt as if she were Columbus searching for the coast of the New World—and decided from their gray light that it was early dawn.

  She heard the squeal of faucets turning and then a rush of water rattling against the metal. David was taking a shower. Maybe I’m so dry because I swallowed him, she thought, disgusting herself with the notion. I could join him in there, she mused, imagining the two of them smeared with soap, screwing standing up, banging the tin of the shower stall. I gave him a good time, she told herself, and then laughed out loud. This got her to sit up. She fumbled for the pack of cigarettes on the white Formica night table and lit up after ripping it open to find the penultimate stick.

  She surveyed the loft while smoking. Its magnificent space was tempting. David’s a nice guy, he was great at sex (aren’t they always in the beginning?), things here might become permanent. A boyfriend and a place to live.

  The faucets groaned off and embarrassed her out of this calculation. I’m horrible, she decided, pressing out her cigarette and letting her legs out from under the covers, ready to head for the john.

  David appeared, his hair damp, with an orange towel around his stomach. “Good morning,” he said, obviously happy. “You don’t have to get up.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine.”

  “Oh. I thought it was sunrise. Can I take a shower?”

  “Of course.” He shook his head to indicate how foolish her question was. “Mi casa es su casa.”

  Patty looked blank.

  “Feel at home,” he explained.

  “How sweet.” she said, but her dry throat caught on something, and the words were rasped out.

  “I’ll make some juice,” he sa
id, and padded on his damp feet toward the kitchen. He left tracks. Patty waited until he was behind the partition before getting out and rushing in the chill air to the bathroom. She felt she must look awful, a conclusion that the mirror confirmed while she waited for the water to get hot.

  She drenched her face with the hot spray in the shower and became more and more anxious over her appearance. She hadn’t seen a hair dryer in the bathroom. The lack of one would mean she’d look like a drowned cat over breakfast. Of course she had eyeliner and lipstick in her purse, but that was all the way over at the other end of this oak-and-plasterboard desert. She never liked to go to the man’s place for sex because of all this: the morning was the worst possible time to be separated from one’s own possessions. At her place, he could be worrying about getting into wrinkled and smelly clothes while she scrambled eggs with blow-dried hair and a freshly laundered outfit.

  When she finally felt as if her body had absorbed some moisture, she stepped out of the stall to find a glass of orange juice balanced on the edge of the sink. “Oh,” she said.

  David’s voice came from outside the bathroom: “I have to leave for work in ten minutes.”

  “Okay, I’ll hurry.”

  “No, no. The door locks when you leave, so you can stay. Relax. Make some eggs.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Do you have appointments today?”

  “Appointments?” Patty said the word as if it were both exotic and unknown to her.

  “Job interviews?”

  “No.”

  “Where can I reach you?”

  That question was easily answered, but it was the job query that haunted her after David left for work. She had no job. Worse, she didn’t because she had been fired. That humiliation was three months old, but she still cringed from the shame of it, as if it were only hours old. Jobs. The thought of them left her standing paralyzed in front of the bathroom mirror for minutes on end: staring into her own eyes as if they were a stranger’s. In fact, she was blind. Her mind played over her last few weeks at Goodson Books.

  Her boss was Jerry Gelb, a big bearded man with a deep voice and little black eyes that never showed pity, love, or even an attention span. Gelb was angry all the time. Or at least in a very bad mood. But he liked Patty. He teased Patty the way she imagined an older brother would—Patty was the eldest of three; her only brother was six years her junior. Jerry called her Patsie (her nickname as a child) and would take her along on lunches with his two leading authors. They were Harold Gould (winner of two National Book Awards) and Roberta York, the formidable and ancient intellectual, who would cheer Patty up by describing her own frustrations as a secretary sixty years ago. Roberta talked about being kept late without pay, being pressured to sleep with the boss, and how she collapsed into tears when, after having rejected the boss, he would needle her mercilessly. “Things haven’t changed much,” Gelb would agree in a tone that implied he was innocent of such behavior. But Roberta’s talk didn’t stop him from screaming into Patty’s intercom when she made the mistake of letting a rejected writer through her screening of telephone calls.

  “You’re paid twelve thousand dollars a year to remember to say, ‘He’s in a meeting,’ and you can’t even do that right! Get in here!”

  Her mouth quivered as she entered, closing the door behind her so no one could hear his ranting.

  “What do I have to do!” he yelled, standing up at his desk. Behind him was a view of Fifth Avenue swarming with tiny cars and insect people. “Do you know what that asshole”—he pointed with contempt at his phone—“screamed at me? I had to listen to a nut call me a liar and a thief because you don’t pay attention! When I tell you not to put someone through, listen to the name! Remember it!” he shrieked at her. Though his voice was basso, the attitude— his arms waving in the air, his eyes scanning wildly—was hysterical and shrill.

  Tears spilled from her eyes. She put up no struggle against either his accusations or her shame. She thought and felt nothing but shame, appalling shame at her uselessness.

  “I’ve warned you over and over. How often can I make the excuse to myself and to the other editors here whom you repeatedly screw up with your incompetence, how many times can I say,” and now he transformed himself into a mincing pose, holding his hands up in front of him, like a puppy begging for food, “ ‘Oh, poor little Patsie. she’s so silly and helpless, but we don’t mind ’cause she can bat her eyes so pretty.’ ”

  Later, of course, she could answer this abuse. Later, she wouldn’t agree with his evaluation of her work. But while he yelled, there was no Patty inside her to step forward and argue back. She thought it the most peculiar thing about her, the sickest thing about her, the one trait she wished she could be free of forever: she accepted any role that people cast her in. The more Jerry Gelb claimed she was a ditsie blond, the more she became one. Only when alone could she be herself. But she loathed being alone.

  However, these periodic fits by Gelb were always followed by weeks of pampering. He would take her out with clients, praise her to agents, buy her a trinket, behave, in a word, like a repentant lover.

  Eventually the tantrums became less frequent. Gelb selected a new assistant to yell at. Patty was grateful for this neglect and thought it was a victory. At last Gelb had recognized her worth.

  And then, one day, he summoned her to the office without there having been a fuck-up.

  “How are you?” he asked. This time, he was the one who closed his door for privacy. It was five o’clock. The insects below were heading home.

  “I don’t know,” she said, staring at him with a look of shock. This formal question about her health was unusual, and so she took it seriously.

  “You don’t?” he looked distressed by her answer. “I thought things were going well. You have a boyfriend.”

  “I do?”

  “I thought so. The actor.”

  “Oh, him. I haven’t seen him in months. He was never a boyfriend. I’ve been dating someone else.”

  Gelb smiled encouragingly.

  “I just broke up with him,” Patty added.

  Gelb again looked as if this news were a great blow to him. “I’m sorry.”

  Patty smiled at him languidly. “It’s all right,” she said, and then laughed. “Sweet of you to worry.”

  “Are you busy tonight?”

  “A friend at Rockers has tickets to a screening of Raging Bull.”

  “Oh, good.” At last an answer he wanted. He smiled nervously, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think a direct approach—”

  Even at this moment, Patty had no suspicion that she was about to be fired. Gelb’s reputation was one of ferocity. He fired people on the spot. No leisurely hand-wringing chats in the office. Besides, he never let her feel that she was vulnerable to being fired. She was the ditsie blond, not a young turk who had to either produce or die.

  “—but I’m going to have to let you go. We’ve had a ghastly year. One of the worst in publishing history. We overprinted on Gold Search and underprinted on Jumpers, we’ve suffered lower sales in every department because of the recession. Everything’s gone wrong that possibly could. We have to cut down on staff and you’re the choice.” He said all this very quietly, embarrassed. He said it all as if she knew it.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gelb sighed and looked away. “You know that someone has to suffer when things go bad. It isn’t personal. Double-day let a third of its staff go yesterday. You aren’t the only one here who will lose a job.”

  She went numb to sensation, as if being in his office were a dream. Colors blurred, his voice came from a distance. FAILURE—punched onto the page of her brain. The word dominated—FAILURE. She felt as if she had been sentenced to die. All her life, she had dreaded this sort of occurrence. Getting a failing grade in school, being caught with drugs, not being accepted into a good college, meeting boys you like who reject you, and getting fired from a job
. At last, FAILURE had struck. She had managed to avoid all the other calamities, she had even begun to lower her defenses … FAILURE. Gelb considered her so pathetic that not only was he firing her, he was doing it nicely!

  “Please don’t do that!” Gelb stood up. “There’s no reason to cry.”

  She hadn’t realized she was weeping. She put a hand on her cheek and her fingers slid on the wet surface.

  “You can stay here for a month while you look for another job. I’ll give you great references. There’s unemployment insurance. It’s a paid vacation.”

  “You just said there are no jobs,” she whined.

  “I did?”

  “If things are so bad, then no one’s going to hire me.”

  “Oh, there’ll be jobs in a little while. Besides, you’re what? Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “You don’t have to stay in publishing. I think you might be happier in … advertising. Or maybe working in publicity at a publishing house.”

  “You don’t think I’m any good at editing.” Through her tears, she had the bitter voice of a heartbroken child, a girl on Christmas morning discovering she has gotten no toys. She hated herself for this weakness. It wasn’t her real self.

  “Of course you are,” Gelb insisted. He wrinkled his thick brows together. This made the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced. “You need a jolt. A fresh start.”

  She whined and complained for more than an hour. Gelb canceled a drink date and took her downstairs to an Indian restaurant where she ate so many hors d’oeuvres that she didn’t need any dinner. Gelb offered to buy that for her as well.

  Now, as she stared into David Bergman’s mirror, what her mind retained was the shameful memory of her childish reaction to Gelb dismissing her. And her gullible acceptance of his story that firing her was part of a general cutback. Within a month after she left, the new assistant was given her old job, and last week Patty had learned from Marion that Gelb seemed to be having an affair with Patty’s successor. Only then did Patty realize how completely naive she was: Gelb had often asked her out on evening dates that she casually refused. Gelb took her rejections so calmly that Patty convinced herself he didn’t mind. She hadn’t put out, so he fired her. This conclusion amazed her. She had grown up reading in novels and seeing in movies exactly that scene played out, but it seemed a part of the fictional world, not the life she saw and experienced. Her father never had any affairs, she believed. And Gelb merely seemed like another version of her father: a big, disgruntled man who was frightened by tears and emotion in others. To think of him as a sexual being was both impossible and slightly revolting.