Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  While Lois laughed at this remark, Tony smiled and looked into her eyes, thinking about making love to her, and it was clear to him that she would be willing. She had been expecting to loathe him; she was someone who had little free time for meeting single men; she knew mostly television types like Billy; and, of course, though Tony made fun of talk about himself as a “serious writer,” he knew that in fact he was a serious writer, and therefore possessed a sort of impoverished nobility that still awed people who worked in Hollywood. All this added up to her being an easy target for a seduction.

  Now, despite the fact that he was already flirting with her and giving every indication that he had never met a woman so beautiful and interesting before, did he actually want to sleep with her? It was hard for him to even begin to answer this question. He always wanted people to want him. Often this concern obliterated whether he wanted them.

  Even now, as he noticed that her lips, thin and bloodless, did not appeal to him, that her hair was a dull brown, her breasts were small, that she had an arrogant attitude toward Billy and Helen, presumably because they were lower down on Hollywood’s totem pole, and that she was obviously dying to know the details of his business in LA—all these things made her unattractive—even so, he heard and saw himself wooing her as if nothing, nothing else on earth, could be more important than winning her.

  Patty’s week had been difficult. She saw David Bergman only once more. He was strangely indifferent and though they went to bed, he was passionless, ignoring her desires, while his own seemed to be satisfied perfunctorily. It had been the booze, she decided, and felt profoundly insulted.

  Her problems mounted each day, because every day cost money, and she had less of that commodity with each expense. Unemployment insurance didn’t cover everything, despite her efforts to economize. She had trouble sleeping until after a long struggle, which meant that she would fall asleep at four or five in the morning and be unable to wake up until noon. That made her search for a job even more difficult.

  Her life had no markers. Each day resembled the last. Life’s ordinary routine—sleeping, eating, bathing, cleaning—rose like dark hills for her exhausted will to climb.

  She got up one morning to discover she weighed under one hundred pounds, a first since childhood. In the Times that morning was a long article on anorexia. Patty diagnosed herself as a sufferer, and was haunted by images of bones piercing through a shrunken body. She became too upset to eat breakfast, confirming her terror, and she called Betty in a panic.

  “I need a doctor,” she said without even a hello.

  “What’s wrong!”

  “I’m anorectic!”

  Betty laughed. “I wish I was.”

  Patty began to cry. She tried to cover it by talking, but the words caved in like a rotten floor and dropped her into a basement of sobs.

  Betty’s tone changed sharply. “My God, Patty, are you all right? You’re not anorectic! Where are you?”

  “In the kitchen,” Patty whimpered, looking at her untouched breakfast. “I can’t eat.”

  “I want to see you. Are you dressed?”

  Patty tried to say yes, but sobbed instead.

  “Get in a cab and come here.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  “I can’t face midtown …”

  “Patty.” Betty said this like a mother: with stem love. “The cab will take you to the entrance. You get in an elevator and walk into my office. Midtown won’t touch you.”

  This is silly, Patty thought. I’m not having a breakdown. I don’t need to run to Betty’s office for her to take care of me. But while Patty told herself she was okay, she nevertheless rushed out of the apartment, caught a cab, and anxiously watched the street numbers go by, as if her eventual arrival might be in doubt, or that the closer she came to the solace of Betty’s office, the more easily she could bear life.

  And indeed, by the time she stepped out of the elevator onto Betty’s floor, a kind of lightheartedness took over, as if Patty’s presence there was part of a different life, as if she were merely visiting a peer during some free time grabbed from the hustle and bustle, meeting Betty to play squash, or for a drink, or for any of the reasons she used to visit Betty’s office. One of the editors she knew passed her in the hall, and Patty easily greeted him, and gave an impression of contentment that was genuine coin, even though the purse of its origin was otherwise dark, musty, and poor.

  Betty looked relieved on seeing her. She closed the door to her office. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m a wreck.”

  “You don’t look it. You look great.”

  “I feel like dying.”

  Betty said nothing. She nodded seriously and looked expectant. But Patty didn’t want to elaborate. It was truer kept simple: detailing her problems made them sound small, and they didn’t feel small. In the aggregate they were suffocating, and made her want to disappear and die.

  “You need a job,” Betty said at last, as if this were a conclusion reached through intensive tests done by a crack medical team. “Why don’t you write something?”

  “Are you nuts? I need money. I have three hundred bucks in the bank.”

  “No, no. I mean, write a romance book, or, uh, you could do some ghost writing, something. But guaranteed money, not on spec.”

  “Can I write?” Patty said heavenward, with a sweet pleading air, like a child querying Santa Claus on his ability to give a special present.

  “Sure! Those things? I think of doing them all the time. Those romances are a formula. It’s like painting by numbers.”

  “I can’t believe it! I’ll become one of those hysterical writers screaming for more ads. I can’t do it. And how do we get a contract anyway? We have no experience.”

  Betty laughed. “So you do want to try?”

  “I can’t get a job again. I’m too passive. I’d never be promoted. I’d end up being the first eighty-year-old assistant editor in publishing.”

  Betty stood up. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Downstairs to the Shadow Books division. We’ll see Joe McGuire. He handles romances.”

  For a moment Patty stayed in her chair. It seemed preposterous: could it work? Had she been worrying herself to death over nothing? Could she just take an elevator down to an assignment, money, respectability, a sense of self, a return of appetite, the ability to pay for extermination of all the cockroaches in her sublet? Had this nightmare merely been an illusion of nerves?

  Betty nodded at the door. “Come on. Let’s do it.”

  Patty opened her mouth to protest: argue that failure would surely be the result.

  But Betty anticipated her: “No back-talk. I’m telling you it’ll work.”

  Patty got up. Betty made her feel competent. That this would be fun. She followed her out and smiled brilliantly at a cute male assistant who was watching her breasts bounce while she walked.

  Fred Tatter was waiting again. This time in Bart’s outer office. He had handed in an outline for The Locker Room, his novel on the incompatibility of men and women, two days after thinking of the idea. Bart had taken the weekend to read it, called to say he liked it, and made an appointment to see Fred the next morning. So Fred had spent a sleepless night trying to deduce what Bart intended from his terse comment of praise on the phone:

  “It’s good, Fred. Come in tomorrow at ten and we’ll talk.”

  A cryptographer handed a top-secret code could not have found more significant hidden meaning than Fred did in those two sentences. He began euphorically; decided that Bart was going to present him with an offer from a publisher and simply wanted to do it face to face. That fell by the wayside when Fred realized it was impossible. Not enough time had passed for Bart to get the outline to an editor and have it read. By three in the morning he had become pessimistic: Bart wanted major changes in the outline and simply wished to begin by softening up Fred with praise. By five in the morning Fred deci
ded that “It’s good, Fred” was a pretty weak compliment, so halfhearted that it was no better than saying “It stinks, Fred.”

  I poured my heart into that outline, Fred thought. It’s got my guts in it. And all he can say is, “It’s good.”

  Fred fell asleep on the couch at six, furious and despondent, resolved to break off with Bart if he suggested any changes, and prepared to demand why he was so abrupt and high-handed on the phone.

  But by the time Fred, bleary-eyed, his back aching from sleeping on the soft couch, arrived at the town house in the Village that Bart had bought—the bottom two floors for his office, the top three for living—he felt so worthless, so convinced that his only hope of success lay with the backing of a hot, powerful agent like Bart, that he was ready to throw out the outline and apologize for having handed in such a miserable piece of work.

  Fred looked at the beautiful built-in maple shelves that surrounded the marble fireplace in the waiting room. A hundred years ago it had been a fancy parlor room, and Bart’s architects had kept and restored that feeling, except for the Xerox machine that glistened on top of a large oak table near Bart’s secretary’s elegant desk. The shelves were filled with books by clients. Even if Fred had come in cocky, the sight of seven bestsellers within the last two years would have punched it out of him. In his state of mind, it almost felled him to his knees. He felt lucky that Bart’s secretary smiled at him, grateful he had been offered coffee, and terrified of the closed door to Bart’s office.

  When it did open, Fred got up quickly, forgetting his cup of coffee was filled to the brim and would spill. It did, most of it going on his best beige pants.

  Bart’s secretary exclaimed.

  Bart merely stared impassively.

  The hot coffee burned into his thigh painfully.

  The secretary rushed over with a roll of paper towels from her desk, handed Fred some, and bent down to mop up what had landed on the white rug. She looked up at Fred. “Are you okay? Is that burning you?”

  “No,” Fred said angrily.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” He had dabbed at the wet spot on his pants, but that made the burn hurt more, so he stopped and held out the paper towel to the secretary. “Sorry about the rug.”

  “Won’t hurt it,” she said. “Maybe you should put some water on the pants. It’ll stain.”

  “Nah.” Fred waved his hand as if he usually wore a pair of pants only once and then threw them out. His leg hurt. He got an image of it swelling into an enomous pus-filled blister.

  Bart, still standing at the door calmly, said, “Come in, Fred.”

  “Sure,” Fred said, now carrying the coffee in both hands.

  Bart’s office must have been the dining room. It had tall, elegant windows, a large fireplace, and elegant moldings in the center of the ceiling that once supported a chandelier. There were no books in this room, but there were two large leather couches—distinctly inconsistent with the dominant motif of French country antiques—a large armchair opposite Bart’s desk, and an enormous globe underneath the nearest window. The world was literally at Bart’s fingertips.

  Fred winced as he sat in the armchair.

  “Are you all right?” Bart asked in a tone suggesting surprise that he could possibly be in pain.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I just got off the phone with Bob Holder at Garlands. We were discussing your outline. I’m sending it to him this afternoon. He’s promised to give an answer in two days, if I give it to him exclusive.”

  Bart’s tone was matter-of-fact, so listless that Fred didn’t react. He nodded slowly.

  “I think he’s a good choice, don’t you?”

  “Uh, Bob Holder?” Fred repeated.

  “Yeah, he’s the hot young editor at Garlands. And they’ve really been the aggressive packager of fiction in the last couple years.”

  “It’s great.” Fred said in a stunned tone.

  “Off an outline I don’t know how big an advance I can get—”

  “You think he’ll buy it?”

  Bart stared at him. “Why not?”

  “You think the outline’s really good?”

  “It’s fair. You’re not terrific at writing outlines. But it’s been my experience the best outline writers come out with lousy novels. And vice versa. I told that to Bob. He agreed. He’s had the same experience.”

  Fred laughed nervously. Fair. He said the outline was fair. “He knows I haven’t written a novel?”

  “If Bob likes the idea, he’ll trust my judgment that you can pull it off. We’ve done very well together.”

  Fred nodded, stupefied by this strange conjunction: Bart thought the outline was fair, but he had given it to his big-money editor at one of America’s most prestigious publishers, and was confident he would make a deal. Was Bart that influential? Could this man whose rug Fred had just spilled coffee on really announce to an editor that someone was a good writer and be taken at face value? If so, rather than reassuring Fred, it made him very nervous. He tried to think how he should react: with profuse thanks? Or was that too craven, indicative of a total lack of confidence in himself? But if he took it in stride, mightn’t Bart feel Fred was ungrateful, ignorant of how big a favor Bart had given away?

  “This is great,” Fred said, still in the slow speech of a victim of bad news.

  “Of course Bob agrees with me that you should make some changes when you get to the actual writing of the novel.”

  “I don’t understand. Has Bob read the outline?”

  “No. But I told him the story line. We both think the hero shouldn’t be Jewish—”

  “But I’m Jewish.”

  Bart paused. “Tatter?” he asked.

  “My great-grandfather’s name was Teittlebaum. He couldn’t speak English, so the official gave him the name of Tatters. ’Cause of the condition of his clothing. By the time my great-grandfather found out what ‘Tatters’ meant, he had grown fond of it. He dropped the S so people wouldn’t make the connection.”

  Usually this story brought a smile to people’s faces. Bart contemplated it rather as if Fred had told him an intriguing and sobering paradox. “Why does that mean your hero has to be Jewish?”

  “It doesn’t. Just that for my first book I thought I should …” Fred trailed off. He really didn’t know why. “You know.”

  “Do you see this as an autobiographical novel?”

  “I guess not.”

  “ ’Cause if you do, maybe we could make it nonfiction. A male answer to The Second Sex.”

  “No, no. It’s definitely a novel.”

  “All right. Bob and I think it’s better if the hero is non-Jewish. There are too many complaining books about Jewish men and sex.”

  “You’re right,” Fred agreed, embarrassed. Did the proposal give away how frustrated and inadequate he felt in bed? Just another Jewish boy upset that he doesn’t have a big prick?

  “In fact,” Bart continued, “maybe the book shouldn’t take place in New York. Seems to me almost every novel I read is located in New York. You know, I was brought up in Detroit and, uh. New Yorkers think of the rest of America as provincial, but the fact is it’s New York that’s insulated. New York books are too self-conscious. I think readers would be more interested to find out how men feel in the rest of the country. Maybe you could set it in my hometown. Ever been to Detroit?”

  “Yeah, sure. I did a couple pieces on the Tigers for Sport.” Detroit’s a shithole, Fred said to himself bitterly, mostly because he couldn’t say it out loud.

  “What do think about setting it there?”

  Fred swallowed and looked away from Bart’s cold eyes. He felt as if these weren’t merely suggestions. That the timing of this conversation—immediately before submitting the outline to Bob Holder—implied a threat if Fred didn’t go along. Perhaps Bart would use his influence with Holder only if Fred agreed to these plot and character changes. He hated them, though.

  “You want to set the book in Ne
w York,” Bart said in what seemed like an impatient and disappointed tone.

  “No, no,” Fred said quickly, meaning to answer Bart’s impatience. He realized—with horror—that he had just accidentally agreed to setting it elsewhere.

  “You’re just not sure about Detroit?” Bart prompted.

  Fred nodded, abashed. Why didn’t he argue? Why was he letting his novel be changed without a fight?

  “Detroit was just a notion. The important thing is to keep it out of New York. As long as you agree, that’s fine.” Bart leaned back with a satisfied expression. “This is going to be a big book, Fred. I considered making a hard-soft deal with Bob. He already brought it up—but now I don’t think so. We may get seven figures for the paperback rights if you can pull it off.”

  Fred was electrified. Not by the talk of seven figures; that he knew was gossamer. It was Bob Holder bringing up a possible hard-soft deal. That meant he was already partly disposed toward making a deal even before seeing the outline. Jesus, why hadn’t he worked on the outline harder and longer? “Holder’s really excited, huh?”

  “You know, it’s interesting, Fred. This idea of yours— it’s hot. Minute I heard it, I knew you had something. And Holder, who has, I think, the best instincts for commercial fiction in the country, was hopping. He was terrified I was going to give anyone else a shot at it.” ”

  Fred felt scared. He learned forward. “Bart. Listen. Maybe, given all these changes, I should rewrite the outline before Holder sees it.”

  “I’ve already sent it to him. Don’t worry. He doesn’t expect much from the outline. I told him you’d done it in a rush, that you’ll be eager to sit down with him before writing and really work out a detailed plot so there’ll be no surprises when you hand in the manuscript. You know, it’s best to involve an editor. Get their ego into the book. Make ’em feel almost as if they wrote it. Then they fight like a motherfucker for a big printing, ad budget. I think if you work closely with Holder, he’ll go to the mat and really fight for the book.”