Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  Fred spotted the owner seated only two tables away. Marion’s speech, in his mind, was as loud as a PA broadcast in a public school. “Shut up,” he said. “She’s right over there.”

  Marion smiled at Tom about Fred and put a hand on his head, patting it. “Poor boy. He lives in fear of everybody.”

  Tom’s eyes went to Fred, as though the proof of her observation was visible on Fred. The look burned through Fred. He imagined he could see Marion’s statement click into place for Tom, characterizing Fred for him, belittling him.

  “That’s bullshit!” Fred said, desperate to discredit Marion’s remark. “It’s rude, that’s all.”

  Marion looked triumphant. “See?” she said to Lear, who was watching with greater interest than he had shown all night.

  “See what?” Fred said. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Fred.” She said this like a command, a confident dog owner announcing: Heel. “Come on. I was teasing.”

  “Fred,” Tom Lear said gently. “We’re all afraid.”

  “It was rude.” Fred stared at the table. He felt hot in the face, unable to meet their eyes. Somehow he had been made into a jerk. “It was rude,” he heard himself repeat petulantly. He didn’t look up. He knew the shame and hurt would show too clearly on his face. There was a heavy silence before Tom said something—obviously to distract the conversation—about an article in that morning’s Times. Lear kept that going for a while, long enough so that the suggestion they get a check wasn’t placed too close to the angry exchange between Fred and Marion. It was smoothly done. The departure had no more than a trace of the embarrassment of that silence.

  But during that silence, during the long moment of peering at the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, while Lear and Marion said and did nothing to ease his wounded feelings, Fred had felt his bright new world collapse around him.

  David, the faithful spy, tattled effortlessly to Chico about the senior editors’ reactions to the cover-meeting argument. David had no worry that by repeating everything said he might harm anyone’s reputation with Chico, because the comments had been universally disparaging about Rounder, even the remarks made by two people whom Rounder had hired. A few joked about Chico’s childish manner but there was admiration for him as well for having called Rounder on his foolish naiveté. Thank God I didn’t volunteer to do this for Rounder, he told himself, watching the pleased expression on Chico’s face. They were having dinner together at an Italian restaurant near Newstime on a Thursday night that looked to be a virtual all-nighter for David. A major Midwestern bank had suddenly appeared near to collapse in midweek and they were scrambling to get a story together. David had put his best writer on it, but his early draft had been awful—the explanation of how it happened was muddled, and there was a complete absence of drama.

  “But there is no drama,” the writer complained. “The computers showed up with bad numbers.”

  “Somebody punched the numbers up on a terminal, didn’t they? That person had a reaction, didn’t he?” David asked. He wanted to grab the bureau reports and write the story himself. But he had done that early in his tenure as senior editor (doing a total rewrite on one of the aging hacks under him), and Harpo, figuring it out when David submitted the story—he could recognize David’s touch—told him that was not being an editor. “You’re supposed to help the writers write, not make it clear they don’t know how.” Since then he had left them to do the writing, even if that meant five or six revisions to get it right. But the frustration of standing by while someone floundered in waters he himself could easily swim never lessened. Tonight would be one of those late nights that, as a writer, he could have ended early.

  Why complain? It had its advantages. He could go to dinner with Chico and do himself some good. And he could drink! He sipped his third gin and tonic (when the thermometer reached seventy-five degrees that afternoon, he decided to inaugurate his summer beverage) and enjoyed Chico’s rapacious pleasure at hearing Rounder criticized. “That’s all,” David finished to the eager face.

  “Well,” Chico said. He looked off. “I wish Mrs. Thorn could have been there.”

  “She must know.”

  “Know what? How the staff feels?”

  “No. What a bad job he’s doing. She reads the magazine,” David said, and then laughed at the thought that maybe she didn’t read it.

  “Presumably. But she’s happy no matter what’s in Newstime, unless her Washington friends complain.”

  David vividly pictured Henry Kissinger, in a tuxedo, at a fashionable Washington dinner party, holding up a copy of Newstime over his (what? lobster newburg?) and making faces, holding his nose maybe and saying, “Yecch,” like a kid rejecting spinach. But no matter how silly he made the image, it still impressed him, as it had years ago when he joined the magazine straight out of college, just how important every word, every decision, every action that a writer or an editor of a national newsmagazine could be. Nobody notices you until you fuck up, he thought with masochistic pride. After all, it takes a pretty tough and remarkable person to withstand that pressure.

  “I got to get him off my back,” Chico said.

  David nodded. “He’s a disaster.” Is Rounder a disaster? he wondered the moment he had said so. David always retreated from absolute statements once he had made the initial advance. An uncertain general, he preferred to marshal the troops of judgment and seek higher ground rather than commit them to the mess and chaos of battle.

  Chico added to his regret by staring at him. His small eyes fixed on David. “Do you think he can last long?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. He had no idea. The truth was he found the firing and hiring of Grouchos hard to imagine or understand. Hiring Rounder had been so obviously wrongheaded. An inexperienced outsider was sure to create ill feelings among the veterans—and, predictably, he had. “Maybe she’d be too embarrassed.”

  “Mrs. Thorn? Embarrassed?” Chico smiled. Apparently that was impossible, a naive remark.

  “I guess not,” David said.

  “She has the selective memory of the rich.” Chico went on. “When she fires Rounder, she’ll probably also fire the president of Newstime, thinking, by then, that it was his fault she picked Rounder.”

  “We should let him sink,” David said thoughtlessly. He heard himself almost slur the last word. He stared at the water glasses, and they quavered in his vision. I must be drunk, he thought, wondering if his capacity was diminishing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stop protecting his ass!” David said, aggrieved, as though he, not Chico, were the main victim of Rounder’s presence. “He wants to ignore the Russian boycott and put Redford on, let him! He’s the editor in chief. Let him run it.”

  Chico shook his head. “I can’t. When she made the decision, she spoke to me privately, saying that eventually she wanted Rounder to become sort of the spokesman for the magazine, help the company formulate new projects, that I would be the editor in chief within a few years. She expects me to watch him. If he doesn’t keep his nose clean. I might be blamed for not having wiped it.”

  “Bullshit,” David said. He felt at ease with Chico: his equal. A sudden elevation of status that Chico’s manner— curious, interested, even slightly abashed—confirmed. “She’s suckered you. She knows she needs you to run the magazine. But if you run it for free, there’s no reason to promote you. She can’t ask you to do the work of Groucho without giving you the mustache.”

  Chico’s eyes widened, and for a second David wasn’t sure if he would take the use of the lower echelon’s jargon in good humor. Presumably Chico had once been a lowly employee, chipping away at the awesome statuary of his bosses with like chisels, but ascending the pedestal might have made him as humorless and cold as marble. Instead, he laughed. “I haven’t heard that for years!” he said, delighted. “That’s still the lingo?”

  “Nothing changes at Newstime,” David said in a mock announcer’s voice, “not even the ch
ildish nicknames.”

  But Chico had already lost his enjoyment of the slang, and was back to fretting over David’s advice. “You know, you’re right. I should let the fucking guy sink. Him and Ray.”

  Ray? That was Harpo, who, when Chico had fallen into his sullen fit at the cover meeting, had continued to explain why ignoring the Olympics would be a mistake. Rounder had humiliated Chico by finally giving the cover to Harpo to top-edit, but that wasn’t Harpo’s fault.

  “Ray thinks he’s going to kiss ass all the way to being number two,” Chico went on with surprising nakedness, his big head scrunched low on his shoulders like a football player’s. He looked ready to charge a running back, prepared to take a jolt and give an even worse one. “He thinks I can’t take it. That I’ll leave and he’ll inherit.”

  God, David thought, I’m so naive. He’s probably right. That’s why Harpo kept on arguing it out with Rounder. Not to support Chico, but to appear like a responsible number two, disagreeing but not pressing the point too far.

  “And he’s slipped, you know that?” Chico also seemed to be slurring words. How many drinks had they had? Maybe it was four. Their glasses were suddenly full again, magically, though David remembered sucking the last drops from the ice only moments ago. “He used to be a terrific editor. The kind of editor you are now. Bold, decisive. In control of the writers. On top of the section. Now he’s focused on dominating the meetings. Getting more pages for his sections whether they deserve ’em or not.”

  “Yeah!” David said, wanting to encourage more talk, not to agree. None of it seemed true, but it was working out well for him. However, his “Yeah” had come out too enthusiastically. He sounded like a bloodthirsty fan. Yeah! Get ’em!

  Chico shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “You and I could do great stuff with the magazine …” He let it hang for a moment, opening his eyes before adding, “… if we were given a free hand.”

  David remembered from his college days, from the antiwar era, a favorite comeback used when someone would try to include another in a decision or action without actually asking for his agreement: “What do you mean, ‘we’, white man?” He smiled at the thought of saying this to Chico. But even with four (was it five now?) drinks in him, he didn’t have the nerve.

  But Chico did it for him. “You’d be perfect for Ray’s job,” he said.

  David, surprised and delighted, said without thinking. “I agree!”

  They talked around this subject for quite a while, drinking steadily. The booze seemed to hit David hard. He bumped into a table on his way out of the restaurant. Out in the night air, passing well-dressed couples walking back to their hotels from theater and dinner, he felt woozy. The faces loomed past him—big, frozen in his mind for a moment in the smiles or the pensive or laughing looks they happened to have. Chico walked with his head down, shuffling his feet on the pavement, as though he were a bored schoolboy reluctantly going back to his unhappy home. There were curious silences from the traffic, moments when the sound of David’s breathing seemed to be the loudest noise in the city. He felt empty. Not depressed or sad or lonely or abandoned. He felt absent. Expected back, but not there.

  Later, David sat in his office waiting for the writer to finish more changes he had felt were needed on the bank collapse. He replayed that moment when Chico offered him Harpo’s job. David knew it was no trick to give someone a promotion that you’re not in a position to grant. Still he felt flattered and excited. If Chico could somehow unseat Rounder and if he could dispose of Harpo and if he could fulfill his promise to David (incredible, impossible ifs, all of them), then David would become the youngest Marx Brother in the magazine’s history, a surefire successor to Chico. He might even make Groucho by the age of forty. His heart didn’t beat eagerly. The alcohol gave him a dispassionate eye. He regarded the prospect with quiet satisfaction. And somehow, he felt a reasonable certainty that the incredible just might happen.

  “But that makes no sense!” Tony whined. Garth leaned back in his chair, staring coldly. Foxx looked in Tony’s direction as though he were a weary tourist checking off a sight he was supposed to have seen because of its great reputation, but in fact found boring. Neither spoke, despite Tony’s urgent voice. “I mean,” Tony continued quietly, hoping to bury the tone of injury in his voice, “how could he have belonged to the movement and then become right-wing without some explanation?”

  “Can’t have political speeches.” Foxx said, a coffee-shop waitress informing a customer that an item on the menu was unavailable.

  “You don’t want me to be right-wing,” Garth said. “I’m turned off to politics. Not right-wing.”

  “That’s not enough of a conflict!” Tony complained. Again, impatience showed through the veil of modesty and reasonableness he had drawn over his true nature. Lois had told him, over and over, “Writers don’t have power in this town. They expect you to do the rewrites they want. No arguing. The only way you can get them to do what you want is to make it seem like it’s what they want.” Last night they had screwed three times and talked out this meeting. He had actually lain inside her with his sore and numbed penis while they planned strategy.

  It had all been for naught. He had, at the start, mollified them by announcing he’d do what they wanted, but as they went through the script, beginning with the very first line, picking away at his stage directions, his dialogue (my dialogue! my God, I’m famous for my dialogue!), his character choices, and even, incredibly, the names he had given to one of them, rage, incredulous fury, threatened to erode his submissive mask.

  Garth watched him. Tony was stuck in the middle of his desire to insultingly reject their criticisms and his desire to pleasantly persude them they were wrong. The famous eyes seemed sadistically detached from the emotion in the room. Foxx, at least, looked wary of Tony, slightly scared by the vehemence of his voice. But Garth had a laughing quality in his glance, a gamesman coolly observing an opponent’s desperate attempt to escape an inevitable defeat.

  “Then your character has no conflict,” Tony said after a pause, softening his tone. “You simply become someone to whom events happen and, in the end, you won’t be changed by them.”

  “My conflict,” Garth said, the emphasis sounding disciplinary, “my conflict is over whether I love Meryl’s character.”

  “Meryl would never play this part,” Foxx said bitterly.

  Garth glanced at him. “We’ll get to that. Let’s stay—”

  “What do you mean?” Tony asked. He was hurt by Foxx’s tone.

  “It’s a nothing role.”

  “A nothing role!”

  Garth interrupted. “I want to stay on my character. My character’s conflict is whether I love her or not.”

  “You’re not conflicted over whether you love her,” Tony said, now not bothering to conceal his disdain. “You love her. You’re conflicted over whether you can trust her.”

  This silenced Garth. He nodded. Interested. Not at all, apparently, wounded by the way Tony had made his point. “Isn’t that, ultimately, the same thing?” Garth asked.

  “No. You can love somebody you don’t trust. That’s a tragedy.”

  “Oh, great,” Foxx said to the wall. “Now we’re writing a tragedy!”

  “No we’re not! That’s not what I said!” Tony whined like a boy whose parents are teasing him. “If what he wants”— Tony pointed at Garth—“was done, we’d be writing a tragedy!” My God, he thought, slumping back, exhausted, into his chair, now I’ve said it: “we’d be writing.” That’s what this is, all right. A collaboration. They’re writing it with me. Two people who couldn’t compose a witty telephone message.

  “It doesn’t work!” Garth said with pleasant enthusiasm. “What you say sounds fine in the abstract but it doesn’t work on paper. It’s unsympathetic.”

  “It worked in The Maltese Falcon!” Tony said. Lois had advised him to come up with past movie successes. Arguing by analogy, she said, was common and respected. “The whole relat
ionship between Bogart and Astor is about whether he can trust her. Same thing in North by Northwest. The second half of the film is about whether she is or isn’t a spy.”

  Sure enough, these references entranced them. Garth nodded and then peered at his desk. Foxx’s head snapped up, his eyes studying the ceiling as though something had begun to crash through. Tony felt a surge of confidence. He sat up. Do I finish them off? Or, if I push, will they get stubborn and push back just for the hell of it? “Maybe I didn’t execute it well,” Tony said, handing them a token of self-humiliation, “but I think my concept is right. Your character has to once again make the political choice he faced in the sixties, only now it is a woman—Meryl’s character—who has become, if you will, the Vietnam war, the physical embodiment of whether he will have the courage to oppose society and defend what is right.”

  “North by Northwest is fun!” Foxx said, suddenly furious. “It’s not some symbolic story about the most depressing war in American history.”

  “Oh come on, Jim,” Garth said.

  “Come on, what?” Foxx pleaded, his hands spread out, begging Garth. “This project is starting to sound like Apocalypse Now—without the action.”

  “No!” Tony said. “It’s a gothic thriller. Like Marathon Man or Three Days of the Condor. They were hits.”

  “Exactly!” Garth said to Foxx. “I’m not Cary Grant. And besides, I want to play a real character. I want this picture to have some meat to it. No one’s really done a great picture about the struggles of antiwar activists. Tony’s figured a way to do a contemporary thriller—which makes it commercial—but with a real theme.”

  “Well, then, why were you so down about this draft?” Foxx asked. Garth nervously glanced at Tony. “You said—”

  Garth cut Foxx off. “I was disappointed in the execution of some things. I always liked the concepts. I think there’s nice stuff here, but Tony needs to work more on the characters.”