Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Fuck him if he wants more points.” he said to some star actor’s agent. “You may assume, at your peril, that we’ll do anything to keep a hit series. It isn’t so. If you stick to these numbers, it’ll be cheaper for us to put a flop in the time slot.” Richard spoke these harsh words in a slow, gentle way, looking in Tony’s direction with focused, even observing eyes, as if the conversation was only marginally important. There was no tension, no fear of defeat, in his voice. Tony couldn’t fit that piece of self-confidence in with the puzzle of his father’s cowardly adherence to the blacklist.

  “He put people out of work!” Maureen Winters had shrieked at Tony shortly after he had been returned to her upon her release from the sanitarium. He was in cotton pajamas with “New York. Yankees” written across his chest, standing in a narrow hallway looking up at his distracted mother, her eyes red, her body fat and sagging. “Your father has no balls!” she shouted at her six-year-old son. “He screams at shadows!” she said moments before Maria, their housekeeper, ran out to carry Tony away. He remembered the swishing rush of Maria’s slippers playing accompaniment to Maureen’s strange words: “He screams at shadows!”

  She was mad. Tony said to himself, watching his handsome, tanned, calm father managing millions as if they were tips. Tony always said his mother was crazy, but in a tone that implied artistic eccentricity, and that’s what he had convinced himself it was, he realized now, as the weight of his judgment sank in: she was mad.

  But then why did his father give him up? Why did he let a madwoman take his son three thousand miles away?

  Tony let his head fall back on the couch. He closed his eyes, because they had begun to burn with ancient grief. He doesn’t love me. That’s why, Tony said to himself, and squeezed his lids watertight.

  Patty had asked aloud, shortly after Tony and Betty left, if anyone wanted to adjourn—she hesitated—to the living area. Only the women. Cathy and Louise, agreed. Rounder, Chico. and David didn’t say no, but they stayed put, to continue their discussion of changes that should be made to Newstime, becoming so absorbed that more than an hour went by before the men spoke to the women.

  Patty didn’t mind the segregation, except on principle. In practice, Patty thoroughly enjoyed talking with Louise and Cathy. After she explained the flat-fee payment for romance novels to them, she complained that although writing the first one had taken only a few months, her second had been coming along very slowly, and speed was what made them profitable. She quizzed Cathy in detail on the difference between having a career and staying home with the kids. They compared good shops to buy clothes, matched the assets and liabilities of male and female single friends of theirs to see if they could create a good couple, and so on, in a relaxed rambling discussion of life, love, birth, housing, and favorite TV shows.

  Occasionally Patty would eavesdrop on the boys (Patty thought of men and women as boys and girls, except when she felt anger or disapproval), and felt sorry for them that they could only discuss their jobs. She had grown used to the fact that David was obsessed with his work; she had decided that the explanation lay with his ambitious, self-critical, and demanding character. Tonight she wondered if it were a matter of gender—or at least gender training. Men are so alone, she thought to herself. To care only about one’s career implied an absence of friendship to her; it meant one’s companions were other people at work; bosses, rivals, or subordinates; relationships that were always fraught with tension, and in danger of collapse or disintegration. She, for example, had had several close friends at . Goodson Books—Marion, Fred’s wife, was one—but the intimacy didn’t really survive her departure. Once Patty’s daily presence as a player in the office game was over, although the good fellowship of being teammates remained, the loss of common strategies, alliances, and goals made conversation either baffling or boring.

  “Are you and David thinking of marriage?” Louise asked, completely within the spirit of intimacy that had evolved in their talk.

  Patty stiffened. She felt invaded by the question and caught herself feeling it was rude. Her reaction was unfair, considering how she had pressed Louise and Cathy about similar decisions in their futures. Confused, Patty sat up and laughed to cover her embarrassment and irritation. “Jeez,” she said, brushing a few stray hairs away from her high cheeks. “Who knows?” she added to the ceiling, as if flying off into the heavens was equally as likely or desirable.

  “Do you want to?” Cathy said casually.

  Patty laughed and felt herself blush. What the hell is wrong with me? she asked herself. Do I care about this? She cleared her throat, tried to look solemn, and said, “No comment.” The whole effect was hilariously out of character. Louise and Cathy laughed good-naturedly.

  “I’ll tell my husband to issue a memo to all senior editors that Mrs. Thorn likes her senior men to be married,” Cathy joked, and they all burst out laughing at this notion, this image of themselves as girls from the fifties, scheming together to bag a man.

  “Hey, hey,” Chico said from the table. “No fair. You’re not supposed to be having more fun than us.”

  “Have you solved all the magazine’s problems yet?” Patty asked to divert any investigation of what they had been laughing about.

  “Couldn’t possibly do that in a night,” Rounder said, beaming like a politician at a fund-raiser. “We’d better go,” he said to his wife.

  Chico hurriedly seconded the notion, with a note of tension in his voice, as if staying out later than the boss was inappropriate. At the elevator door Cathy said to Patty, “Come up and have lunch with me next week. I’d like you to see the kids.”

  “Love to.” Patty said with excessive enthusiasm.

  “Don’t let Cathy give her any ideas,” Rounder said to David. There was polite laughter.

  For an answer, Patty swung the heavy industrial doors closed on them all—David had to operate the cables—and she could hear their delighted amusement as the lights of the descending elevator cage flashed through the crack at her feet. “Doofus,” she said quietly about Rounder, and reached behind her to unbutton her dress. She was tired of its heavy presence on her body. She felt hot and itchy, as physically constricted by it as she had felt constrained by the evening’s formality.

  She was in her bra and underpants, sprawled on the couch, when David returned. He opened his eyes at the sight, and then squinted so hard his eyes were reduced to slits. “Are you naked?” he asked, approaching.

  Patty laughed. “You’re so blind,” she said, noting for the dozenth time how different David looked without his glasses. His eyebrows seemed thicker, his nose bigger, his eyes duller and smaller.

  He sat next to her and peered at her belly. A red line circled her stomach an inch or so above her navel, created by the elastic of her stockings. He touched it gently and then bent over, saying, “What’s that?”

  Patty laughed uncontrollably.

  “Oh,” he said when his eyes were almost touching her body.

  She pushed him away. “Stop studying me,” she said haltingly through her laughs.

  David leaned back and stared toward the dining table. He looked solemn and distracted. “God, what a mess,” he said.

  “What?” Patty said. “I thought it went very well.”

  “No,” David said, and set his unfocused, squinting eyes on her. “I mean, all the cleaning that has to be done.”

  “Yeah, you’d better get to it.”

  He blinked at her. “Okay.” He brought a hand up and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll do it.”

  “I have to get a job,” Patty said, looking thoughtfully at her slim body, wondering if it was staying slim enough. She had put back some of her weight since moving in with David, relieving her anxiety that she had become an anorexic. But now yesterday’s hope had become tomorrow’s worry. She patted her stomach, which was flat and firm, as though it were a beer belly. “I’m too fat and lazy,” she added.

  “You have a job. If you’d only finish it.”
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  “That’s not a job,” she answered contemptuously.

  “You wrote the first book in a few months. If you concentrated, you’d be finished with this one in a month.”

  “I know,” she admitted. “I told you. I’m a lazy slob.”

  “Talking that way only stops you from working.”

  “I need a job. I need to have to be somewhere at nine in the morning. I can’t be self-motivating.”

  “You were.”

  “But I fell apart, didn’t I?”

  “Stop trying to make me say what you want me to say,” David snapped. “ ’Cause then you turn it around and act like it came from me instead of from your cross-examination.” David got up in the middle of this outburst and moved to the table, beginning to stack the dessert plates, plopping them onto each other, the clattering implying anger.

  “Why are you angry at me?” Patty asked, her eyes wide with innocence as they peered over the back of the couch.

  “I’m not,” he snapped.

  She stared at him while he carried his load of dishes into the kitchen, and continued when he reappeared to gather coffee cups. He noticed her when he turned to head again for the kitchen.

  “What?” he said.

  “How much money do I owe you?”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I want you to figure out how much I owe you for the rent and everything else.”

  “Why?” he said with a sneering smile. “Are you moving out?”

  “No. I want to pay you back when I start earning money again.”

  “Well, you’re not earning money now, so why do you have to know now?” David argued.

  “I want you to keep track.”

  “I don’t care about your earning money. You care about it.”

  “I know!”

  David opened his mouth to say more, but her admission puzzled him. He closed it, turned to go, and then abruptly wheeled back. “Then you keep track of it.” And walked out with a satisfied air, a lawyer closing a case.

  Patty didn’t believe him. She thought his attitude toward her was dominated by the fact that she wasn’t earning her own keep. Within the last few months. David had left to her the doing of more and more housework. He used to make the bed in the mornings, occasionally cook dinner; often he called from the office and asked whether he should buy groceries on the way home. This party, however, had been dumped on her, like she was responsible for the domestic side of his being promoted, as if she were a suburban wife expected to focus on her husband’s career, as if … as if she were living her mother’s life.

  Patty sat on the couch listening to David load the dishwasher, contempt for him filling her mind. I even had to supply the friends, she thought to herself, marveling at the fact that David didn’t know anyone, outside of Newstime, who he felt was impressive enough to invite over along with his bosses.

  “You know …” David called out in a cheerful, eager voice, startling her.

  She didn’t answer, unwilling to leave her abstract plane of judgments and rest on the ground with the reality of him.

  “I really think Chico hates Rounder,” David said, emerging from the kitchen. His pants were wet at the thighs from rinsing plates.

  Patty could only look at him: she had no voice to answer him.

  “I don’t mean.” David continued eagerly, “just that Chico envies Rounder ’cause he was passed over for being Groucho. I think Chico actually hates the man’s guts.” David laughed self-consciously, embarrassed by his glee at this observation.

  “I don’t think so,” Patty said coolly. She hadn’t thought about it, she merely wanted to disagree because she knew it would bother him. “It’s in your head. You want them to hate each other. So you have something to gossip about.”

  David looked stunned. He stared stupidly at the floor for a moment. “God,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He turned and went back to the kitchen.

  Patty looked at the spot he had deserted as if it were a hole in the earth expanding rapidly, heading in her direction, ready to swallow her. She got up abruptly and walked to the desk near the front windows, where she wrote. She sat at the metal chair, shivering at the cold on her naked legs, but not wanting to slow down to get a pillow or clothes. She put paper in the typewriter and began to write a scene for her heroine like that night’s dinner was for her: a series of small revelations about her fiancé that increased her longing for the dark, brutal stranger—a rescuer from the dull journey that life can so easily become.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fred made a decision. He had tried to ignore the hostility of the others at the poker game, hoping they would eventually accept him as a player and ultimately begin to socialize with him. Fred had consciously avoided making a social move first, assuming it would meet with rejection. But now, utterly rejected, he was willing to face more.

  Tom Lear, the journalist turned screenwriter, had been least unfriendly to him. Possibly because of his habit of disagreeing with everything Sam Wasserman did, or said, or believed. Tom had never been discourteous to Fred. Fred looked up his name in the phone book, pleasantly surprised by the good fortune of its being listed, and dialed.

  He got a phone machine.

  His irritation at this left him baffled when the beep came. He hung up without speaking. Within moments he knew what his message should have been, but now he worried that if he called back immediately. Tom would know Fred had been the hang-up. He let two hours go by, assuming that the intervening messages after his hang-up would obscure any connection.

  “Hello, Tom. This is Fred Tatter. I have two courtside tickets to the Knicks-Celtics playoff game tomorrow night. My fellow Knick fan can’t make it. I thought I remembered your saying you love basketball. I need to know by tonight—I don’t want the ticket to go to waste. Could you call me?” He rattled off his number casually, in a tone that implied Tom already had it but was being saved the trouble of looking it up. Fred laughed to himself afterward, thinking of the dilemma he had placed Tom in. Lear had gone on and on recently about how much he had loved the glory days of the Knicks and how he looked forward to their being in the playoffs this year. The game Fred had invited him to was scheduled for the night of the poker game.

  Fred had done many pieces on the Knick management during their losing seasons, when they were widely criticized in the New York press. Fred’s interviews were soft, easy, and made them look good. He had earned the right to request good seats for any game. It pleased him that he had acquired this weapon in his battle to be liked by the writing boys through his own writing. He phoned the Knick office after calling Tom and arranged for the tickets, and then sat back at his typewriter, resuming work on his novel with renewed vigor, producing effortlessly for the first time in months.

  He finished a chapter at five-thirty. Marion would be home soon. Tom Lear, if he had been out to lunch, would have come home by now and gotten his message. He read over the chapter, his mind distracted by waiting for a bell to ring. He thought about having sex with Marion. He’d have to ask, of course. He might get her to agree if he offered to give her a back rub. He tried to remember when he had last gone down on her and brought her to orgasm orally. Well, he told himself defensively, when was the last time she gave me a blow-job? The prospect of negotiating through all these preliminaries drained the desire for the ultimate goal. What he really wanted was for her to arrive, magically strip off her clothes, open her legs, and let him take her on the parquet foyer floor, pulling him to her with enthusiasm, moaning with joy. Fast, fast, fast, without all the garbage, the tentative shy touching. Why couldn’t she come home one night and say, “Fuck me,” and like it? Why couldn’t she slip under him and let his penis invade her throat? Why wouldn’t she get on her haunches, without being asked, without being seduced, and beg for it up the ass?

  Because she doesn’t enjoy sex, he told himself with anger, a saddened, dissipating fury. She doesn’t really enjoy anything. Not work, or sex, or me.

  Mario
n arrived shortly after this judgment. She rang the bell and Fred found her slumped against the hallway wall, her leather bag drooping at the end of a hand. She opened her fingers and let it drop. He said, “Hello!” valiantly, trying to discourage her performance of fatigue.

  Marion closed her eyes and let her head rest against the wall.

  “Come on!” Fred said, irritation erupting through his brief attempt at good cheer. “Wake up.”

  She opened her eyes and walked into his arms, burying her head in his shoulder and sighing. He was home to her: a safe port whose criticisms and praise were equally familiar, and becalmed of harm or excitement.

  This physical request, that he be her protector, secure and comforting, made him feel hopeless. He needed help: rescue from the battering storms of his constructions into the dangerous world; not a plea for shelter, a plea he was both unwilling and unable to answer.

  She put her arms around him and squeezed, saying, “Mmmm.” But it was a sound of childish coziness, not a passionate preliminary. He eased her away, pulling her arms off. She kept her face on him, leaning forward, threatening to topple if he moved away.

  “Come on,” he said, trying to keep irritated emphasis out of his tone.

  Marion abruptly breathed in deeply and straightened, her face impassive, and returned to the doorway to get her bag.

  “Rough day?” Fred asked.

  “The worst.” She walked past him, taking off her trench coat and hanging it up. “Did you buy anything for dinner?”

  “No,” Fred said. He rapidly calculated that if he hoped to get lucky with her, he’d better compensate for his oversight. “I thought we’d order Chinese,” he said casually, pretending to a carefully thought-out plan.

  “Not again,” she moaned. “Why didn’t you buy some steaks? You never think of buying anything. What would you do if I weren’t living here?”

  Fred guffawed. “Order Chinese,” he said, delighted by this witticism.