Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  The secretary reappeared with Garth’s coffee. Tony lit a cigarette. He had no idea what to expect. Their manner was too matter-of-fact for him to assume disaster, but it wasn’t the tone of people who are delighted and ready to proceed. Garth wistfully watched Tony take a drag. “Aren’t you worried about cancer?” he asked.

  “No.” Tony said with a smile.

  Foxx laughed.

  Garth nodded. “Well, we’ve read the script. I’ve read it twice.” He looked at Foxx expectantly.

  “So have I,” Foxx said.

  “I haven’t,” Tony said with a nervous giggle.

  Garth ignored him. “I guess my feeling is that the character is there. But—”

  Foxx broke in, “The structure isn’t.”

  “It’s not suspenseful,” Garth said. “I always felt I was a step ahead of the picture.”

  “Can’t have that in a thriller,” Foxx said.

  Tony swallowed. He thought he had braced himself for a mixed reaction (was this merely a mixed reaction?), but the tightening presence of fear in his throat belied that assumption. He felt under pressure to respond. Foxx and Garth were both looking at him quizzically. “No, you can’t,” Tony agreed. “I thought I …” He was about to argue he had made the story surprising, but he realized that was foolish.

  “You think it is?” Garth prompted. The famous face looked timid and kindly, unsure of itself. Foxx, however, was frowning, certain of his judgment. That surprised Tony. He had expected, from the rumors of Garth’s temperament, the reverse.

  “Yeah,” Tony said timidly. “Weren’t you surprised that his brother turns out to be the FBI agent?”

  Foxx shook his head no, his lips pursing with disdain. Garth glanced at his producer. “I think it’s a good choice,” he said. “You haven’t …” Garth hesitated.

  “You telegraph it with all those little scenes between them. They have a tone that lets you know there’s more to that brother than just someone helping.” Foxx said all this thoughtfully, his eyes going to a small window next to the far end of the couch. It had no view. His refusal to look at Tony while criticizing suggested that the words were harsher than they sounded.

  “But that isn’t a structural problem,” Tony objected. But he felt his point was pedantic. “Not that that makes any difference. I just mean—you said there were structural problems, so I thought you hadn’t liked that choice, making your brother the villain.”

  “No, I like that,” Garth said eagerly, as though he were glad to have something positive to say. “There are a lot of things I like in it. I think there are terrific scenes for my character.”

  “Yeah,” Foxx said. “But not for her. Not for Meryl’s character.”

  “Yeah,” Garth agreed. “She’s, uh, she’s. I don’t know, kind of unpleasant, you know? You don’t like her. You don’t believe I would be in love with her.”

  You, a short twerp like you? Tony thought. In life, you’d be on your hands and knees thanking god that Meryl Streep was willing to pull her panties down for you. This bitter, and, Tony knew, wrong-headed thought cheered him up. “Okay,” Tony said with an easy smile. “I’ll be happy to fix her. But again, that’s not a structural problem.”

  Foxx turned his eyes to Tony. “All right, so they’re not structural. What difference does that make?” His tone was both angry and petulant. Tony felt that a whip had been cracked. Get in line, was Foxx’s message. Don’t try to act smarter than us.

  “You’re right,” Tony said, looking down at the floor, a child accepting a scolding.

  “This is a tough story,” Garth said.

  Tony felt a rush of good feeling for Garth. He had been warned by his mother, his father, Lois, his agent, and others that Garth treated writers like breakfast cereals, stocking his cabinets with a dozen varieties and switching brands every morning. But Garth seemed to be trying to soften the blows, treating Tony with unusual deference, as if Tony were a special case, not the typical Hollywood writer whom Garth could feel free to trample on.

  “It’s gotta be fun!” Foxx blurted, moving forward on the couch in his excitement. He got up when he reached the edge and paced across the small room in between Tony’s chair and Garth’s desk. “There’s no fun in your script. You’re a funny writer. I don’t know why you’ve made it so dark.”

  “Well …” Tony said, again his first impulse being to argue, followed by an equally strong impulse not to. The result was inarticulate hesitation.

  “Hitchcock wouldn’t do it that way,” Foxx said after a brief wait for Tony to say more. “He always kept the fun in his thrillers. Even Psycho is fun!”

  Psycho is fun? Tony asked himself. It gave him nightmares for six months. But he nodded in agreement, looking chastened. He wanted to slow Foxx down. He feared the producer was talking himself into believing Tony’s script was unsalvageable. Tony realized he had given up any notion of trying to defend what he had written; he was fighting now to stay on the project, to be allowed another chance to satisfy them. “I’ll be happy to rewrite it,” he said.

  Garth smiled. “You have to rewrite it,” he said in a gentle voice, but with a disdainful look in his eyes.

  “Of course,” Tony said. Somehow he had now aroused Garth, the last thing he had wanted. The harder he tried to act humble and harmless, the more aggressive they seemed to become.

  “Why did you hand it in if you weren’t sure of it?” Foxx asked. He put a hand in his pocket and looked down at Tony, jiggling the keys impatiently.

  This question stunned Tony. He wanted to cry foul. He hadn’t contested their opinions out of deference to them. It was unfair now to turn his niceness against him. He stared at Foxx, unable to respond.

  “I mean, are you happy with this draft?” Foxx continued, seeing Tony paralyzed.

  Tony looked at Garth, a plea for protection from these low blows. But Garth didn’t look like a referee; rather he stared at Tony as if he were the other member of a wrestling tag team, trying to decide if he would be needed to finish Tony off.

  “Uh …” came out of Tony, the groan of a wounded man. But resistance welled in him. He straightened in his seat—he noticed while doing so that he must have slumped quite low in the chair earlier—and banished the cautious censor that had accompanied him to the meeting. “Look, that’s a silly question. Do you think I want to hand in an unsatisfactory draft? Is that something a writer would want to do? You think I want to be fired? You think I want to fail? I liked the draft. I thought it worked. Do you want me to sit here and stubbornly argue about it? Would I be able to change your minds?” He snorted and allowed himself a sardonic smile. He returned Garth’s stare, challenging him to answer his questions. Foxx looked surprised, curious, studying Tony as though he had just entered the room with amazing news. “Right? If I told you you were wrong and sat here for an hour arguing and arguing, would you like that? Would you consider that professional? Helpful? My job is to give you a script you want. Not what I want. What you want. Isn’t that right?”

  Garth returned his daring glance, watching as though he were appreciating a performance. Foxx, however, seemed thrown. “Well,” the producer said, almost stammering, “if … I mean, if you think we’re off-base, if we’re missing something, then you should argue. Your name goes on the script. Not ours.”

  Tony stayed on Garth. He felt contempt for Foxx. He had backed down so easily. It was Garth who got stronger as Tony fought. Garth, who had seemed so pliant, ready to compromise, was the one who had suddenly gotten firm and unyielding. Tony stared at him. After a moment of this, Tony said, “Let’s go through the script. When I disagree, we’ll discuss it. But if you really don’t like something, I’m not gonna sit here and waste our time arguing, it’s your project.”

  Foxx jiggled his keys. Garth continued to study Tony. Then he said quietly, “Yeah. Let’s get to work.” He broke his pose and leaned forward, opening a copy of Tony’s draft.

  Foxx crossed back to the couch and opened a soft leather carrying case,
removing another copy.

  “I don’t have one,” Tony said forlornly.

  Foxx turned, surprised. “You don’t have a copy of the script?”

  Tony looked embarrassed. “No, I … uh …”

  Garth got up. “We’ve got more.” he said, smiling, and walked to shelves behind Tony. He handed him a script, and then, before moving on, he quickly rubbed the top of Tony’s head, tousling his hair with the affection of an older brother, the way he had in the Polo Lounge almost a year before.

  I won, Tony thought, opening his screenplay. I won, he told himself. I didn’t know this was a fight for survival, but I won it anyway.

  Patty had been keeping a secret. For the first time in her life, she had confided in no one. Usually, if Patty limited information to three or four people, that qualified as top security. Perhaps she had occasionally held it as low as two people. But this fact, that she had been writing a novel, a serious novel (or at least a nonromance book), for the past two months, was absolutely private.

  The pressure was becoming unbearable.

  She had written an amazing amount, nearly a hundred pages, and no matter how many times she read them over, she continued to admire and like them. As opposed to her one and a half romance novels, a rereading of which inspired nausea. She felt delighted with herself, with her newfound passion, and she ached to hand her pages to someone and get confirmation of her own good opinion. But who?

  David? As a critic, he frightened her. He was the type of person who compulsively pointed out misspellings and grammatical mistakes. No doubt there were a few, but any editor could catch them, and Patty knew they would be rare and unimportant. But the presence of even one would be noted by David. And he would judge her against major writers, evaluating her novel as though she had placed it as a candidate for the Nobel Prize against Tolstoy. Joyce, and Mailer.

  Betty? She would mark the misspellings and grammatical mistakes, but not mention them until she was through praising Patty. And every allowance would be made for her inexperience, her age, and the general difficulties of existence. No comparisons or impossible standards would be constructed for Patty’s hundred pages to hurdle.

  David would be too tough. Betty too easy.

  There were other friends, but they weren’t in publishing and had no expertise in judging writing other than the fact that they read books. Their response might tell her if it was good, but not how to improve it or how to finish it. The last was Patty’s worry. She had gone into her story blind, without a true plan. So far that hadn’t hurt her. She started each day with a shortened horizon, but somehow it moved as she moved, keeping just enough ahead of her so that she never fell off the edge into nothingness. Up until now she had been content with this daring voyage into an unknown sea, but lately she worried that without a map, without a navigator, she would never reach land.

  David could certainly help her there. He was so organized. his first impulse would be to plot the rest of her novel even if she had one figured. Betty, oddly, she wasn’t sure could. Theoretically, it was her job to do so. She was an editor. Her ambition was to edit novels. So far she had only worked on books that were acquired by her boss, always by established writers who either didn’t need or were contemptuous of Betty’s abilities. She often complained to Patty that she was no more than a copyeditor on those manuscripts. Her larger skills as an editor, helping to shape a book for example, had been limited to self-help books, at which she’d been successful. However, Betty despised that accomplishment. The truth was, it became obvious to Patty, that years of hearing Betty downgrade her career had infiltrated Patty’s mind and made her think of Betty as inexperienced and insecure—not someone to go to with confidence.

  How awful. Patty decided. I’m resetting the sexist trap Betty’s in. Because the men don’t take her seriously. I don’t. Patty decided to give her the pages, and caught herself feeling she honored Betty by doing so. That astonished and embarrassed her. Honor? Being given my manuscript to read is an honor? She laughed delightedly at herself. I must be a real writer, she thought. I’ve developed their egomania.

  She took her pages from their hiding place, buried at the bottom of a five-hundred-sheet box of typing paper, beneath two hundred or so blanks, and stored in the bottom drawer of her desk. She went out to a store to have Xerox copies made. She worried so over their safety (in contrast to her treatment of romance-novel pages) that she waited in the airless storefront despite its lack of seating and watched them process each page. She had arranged to see Betty for dinner, since Tony was in Hollywood, and David would be at Newstime until at least two in the morning, closing his sections of the magazine.

  In the afternoon she read over her first romance novel, thinking that if Betty vetoed continuing her new novel, she would have to return to that junk. It sickened her. She barely got through the first two chapters before giving up and feeling hopeless. If Betty told her to return to that, she would have to get a job. To write that silly stuff was worse than poverty.

  Over dinner, Patty listened to Betty’s politely worded complaints about Tony. She spoke circuitously, joking casually about being married to a traveling salesman, but when Patty confirmed that this was only Tony’s third trip to LA since first signing to write the screenplay. Betty couldn’t explain why such brief and rare separations should bother her. Betty moved off the subject and returned to a more familiar bitching: about how she remained unable to find a novel she both wanted to publish and could. Agents no longer bothered to submit fiction to her because she had been thwarted so many times by the ed board (the editorial committee that decided what to publish), and without such submissions the odds she would see a terrific first novel were poor. Two other editors her age, both men, had gotten novels through the board, and a few, and one in particular, had been quite successful, so that even if an agent found himself with a new good writer and wanted to submit his work to a young editor at her house, she would be the last choice.

  “Why don’t you quit?”

  “And do what?” Betty snapped.

  “I mean, and go to another house.”

  “Where are the offers?” Betty said.

  “I thought Caruthers offered you a job.”

  “Same job I have now. They wanted someone to work under Phyllis Racknell. I would have been line-editing her multigenerational sagas and acquiring more self-help books.” Betty frowned at the table. “I get offers like that. No reason to take them. Wouldn’t change things.”

  “Then leave publishing,” Patty said. She was angry at Betty’s whining. First, because it made her not want to give her what she had written, and second, because her attitude seemed self-defeating, more concerned with seeing herself as a victim rather than triumphing over her obstacles. Other women had made it in publishing. Escaped their domineering mentors, gone to less classy houses, taken chances on unknown writers, and eventually carved out a niche for themselves. Phyllis Racknell had, for example. Patty didn’t say so, but she suspected Betty had turned down that offer because Phyllis was a woman, and if Betty couldn’t gain her independence from her, no one would believe her cries of sexism. Even if they were true.

  And Patty was especially, given her own situation, irritated by Betty’s beef that agents didn’t send her their new hot young writers. Was she only willing to put herself on the line for unknowns who were already stamped with “potential”?What was so great about signing young writers who were in demand? Any imbecile could do that. Patty would have no trouble being an editor the way most of them were: taking huge chances on novelists like Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and the occasional new writer, like some punk who had been writing for Esquire for three years, and knew every publishing person in town. Betty bitched because she wasn’t able to break into that circuit. Well, tough shit, Patty thought, feeling bitter about her own exclusion from that world.

  We’re a pretty fucked-up pair, Patty said to herself, looking at Betty while a waiter poured them coffee. The thought amused her. She was pleased to thin
k of herself as Betty’s equal, even if it was a miserable peerage. She knew instinctively that Betty was no happier being married to Tony than Patty was living with David. The moaning about Tony’s absence wasn’t the longing of a loving wife; it sounded more like the petulance of a neglected child for whom separation only made clear how little intimacy there was normally. “What does Tony say?” Patty asked, to approach this assumption the long way.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “He doesn’t pay attention.” Betty shook her head as though to rid herself of these thoughts. She didn’t want to confess these problems. “He’s busy. He’s under pressure about this script.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “I don’t know. He had a meeting today with Garth.” She stared off for a moment. “He hasn’t called. Maybe it went on all day. I’ll call him when I get home.”

  “Is this a meeting where they’re going to tell him if they make his movie?”

  Betty shook her head. “Tony says it doesn’t happen that way.”

  “How does it happen?”

  “He says there are … I don’t know. That a lot of people have to agree before they make the film.”

  “But they pay well, right? And he can still write his plays.”

  “He hasn’t worked on a play in a year.” Betty admitted this in a tragic tone, a wife of thirty years telling her friend that her husband had become an alcoholic.

  “We’re not worried about Tony, are we?” Patty asked.

  “No.” Betty smiled. “No. we’re not.”

  “He’s been getting on our nerves.” Patty supplied the complaint for her. “Too obsessed with his work.”

  “Poor us,” Betty said, laughing.

  “We don’t live our lives through our men, though.”

  “Of course not.” Betty agreed, trying to keep her face straight. Patty looked so earnest, Betty couldn’t even be sure how much of it was joking. “How’s the torrid romance novel, by the way? Are you close to finishing?”