Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  “And the action! There’s not enough action!” Foxx almost hopped with annoyance.

  “Yes, yes,” Garth said. He looked at Tony, his expression tired and bored. “The chase at the end is no good. It’s full of clichés.”

  “Okay,” Tony said, swallowing hard. He felt abashed, a boy who has peed in his pants on the first day of school. He didn’t even know if they were right, but each criticism hurt more and more, as though he were being punched repeatedly in the same spot, right on the already bruised skin. The fact that Garth was actually concealing the extent of his disappointment in the script made it all the more horrifying. Tony had felt the sting of rejection as a writer before. People who felt his work was still young, limited, too cold—usually the complaint was simply that it wasn’t commercial (not Broadway), but never that he was inept, so inadequate that he had to be protected from a truthful opinion.

  He listened to their dissection of his chase sequence at the end of the script. Foxx did most of the surgery, heedless of scars or of how thoroughly the patient had been anesthetized. Everything about it was bad, even down to how Tony had formatted the pages. “This reads like prose,” Foxx said with disgust. “You have to give us shots and angles, some kind of pacing, so we can picture it. It’s totally nonvisual.” Garth suggested he read some scripts they had selected for him so he could get an idea of how, as he put it, “a professional screenplay looks.”

  He felt his cheeks quiver with shame. They had beaten him at last. Really finished him. He nodded passively, not as a trick, not as a social hypocrisy, but because he felt they were right. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just a kid after all, someone who had never set foot on a movie set, who had no idea of what any of it entailed. Probably the script was bad. Worse, something that could never be done. An embarrassment.

  When they finished. Tony asked, “Are you sure you want me to do this rewrite?”

  They both looked startled. “Well, what the hell do you think we’re talking for?” Foxx said. “The fun of it? We expect you to make these changes.”

  “No. no,” Tony said. He knew this question revealed how hurt he felt, but he had to know the answer. “Do you have confidence I can do it?”

  Foxx stared at him in amazement.

  Garth frowned. “Doesn’t matter whether we have confidence, Tony. It matters whether you do,” he said, but sadly, as though having to point this out with another example of Tony’s ignorance.

  Later, Tony walked back across the legendary lot, only now its mythic past had dissolved in the face of his present misery. They were only ugly low buildings with an excessive amount of parking space, a McDonald’s of culture, fast food for the mind, where a decision as to whether you wanted your burger medium or rare was irrelevant since they all came out well-done. But even that thought, he realized, was a cliché, a well-worn fact of American life that looked even drabber on him, since he had volunteered to wear the uniform.

  Back in the car, he drove slowly, uncertain where to go. He had planned on visiting his mother’s set (Lois would be there) and having lunch with them all. He was expected there, no doubt in triumph, to report that Garth was planning on shooting his script. To admit the truth to them, even to his mother, was beyond imagining. In New York (perhaps), little would be thought of it. He could say blithely, “Oh, the assholes want a lot of stupid changes,” and the result might even reflect well on him. Writing for the movies in New York was almost a sure thing. If you succeeded you were considered clever, if you failed you were considered too refined a talent. In LA, failure had no subtleties. It was just pitied. The answer, of course, was to lie. Behave as though the changes were minor, that Garth and Foxx had been enthusiastic. But to will himself to that deception seemed almost as staggering as to will himself to tell the truth.

  He returned to his hotel. In the middle of the day, the halls occupied only by cleaning women and their carts, the choice felt lonely. His room had been straightened. It looked anonymous, his presence erased. He stared at the phone. For a moment his mind (always talking at him, never resting) went blank, relaxed. He felt tired. He wished he could move out of his life, like a hotel, out of his elegant but standard room, and find an eccentric villa, or even a dreary cave, but leave certainly. He picked up the phone and dialed Betty in New York. He had made no decision to, his hand seemed to have developed the desire.

  When he got her, her voice happy, pleased to hear from him, he had nothing to say.

  “Did you have your meeting?” she asked.

  “Yes.” And he had no energy to continue.

  “What happened?” she asked, fear creeping into her tone.

  “They didn’t like it.” He couldn’t say more, and thinking about it, he really didn’t have to, That’s what it amounted to. pure and simple: they didn’t like it.

  “So they don’t want to go on?” Betty asked, gently, very gently, testing a hair-trigger spring.

  “Oh yeah.” Tony was surprised that she would think— even for a second—that it might be that bad. “No. they’re not firing me. They just want a total rewrite.”

  “Oh.” she said with relief. “Oh, I’m sorry,” but with pleasure returning to her voice.

  “Well, it’s kind of insulting.” Tony said, angry she found this situation relatively comforting. “I’m a …” for a second, he was going to say: I’m a genius. He caught himself with that monumental word of self-praise (and delusion!) right in his mouth, ready to sing out uncensored. Like his mad mother, capable of the most outrageous statements of egomania. I’m a genius? he asked himself. Since when?

  Am I losing my mind? Like her, when she met defeat? But that wasn’t defeat. That was political oppression. He had met defeat. And his mother was a genius.

  “What?” Betty asked into his uncompleted sentence.

  “They wouldn’t fire me, Betty,” Tony said darkly, furious at her, angrier at her than he felt toward Garth and Foxx. That was nuts too. He was falling apart.

  “All right,” she said. “Okay. Calm down. I didn’t say anything.”

  Now there was a silence. A silence he could fill with a thousand speeches. All of them words of regret. What had happened to him? To his youth of sheer promise, of bold confidence? Who or what had blocked off his clear view of the horizon? He had failed. As a playwright. As a screenwriter. And as a husband. The image of himself that he carried like an icon, that he was a handsome, happily married, brilliant young playwright in the early stages of a long, glamorous career, had been revealed as a stupid object of worship, a childish understanding of life. He was none of those things. He was an unsuccessful writer with a fucked-up marriage in the midst of a tacky affair. How he had become that was a mystery still, but the truth of it was no longer a revelation.

  “I love you,” he said in a low, cracked, despairing voice.

  “I love you,” Betty said back.

  “I’m tired. I’ll call you later, okay?” He thought of Lois. “Or maybe tomorrow morning. All right?”

  “Sure. Don’t feel bad!”

  “I won’t,” he said, hanging up, and feeling the weight of his sorrow crush him down onto the bedspread, forcing his legs up to a fetal position. He lay there, still, afraid to move, watching the afternoon California sun light up the curtains into a white neon glow, while he passed into a sleep of numb despair.

  Patty couldn’t say why, but once she gave her pages to Betty, joy flooded her being. She went home, put an old Stones album on the stereo—loud—and danced wildly to it, using the cast-iron columns as her partners and the long smooth wood floors as a vast stage for a solo that could rival Mick Jagger’s for exuberance. She was alone. Late at night. And happy. There was no longing for someone to be there, creating a personality for her. She didn’t miss David—still working late at the office—as she had in the first months of living with him. She could bear to be there without watching television. Without calling a friend. Without going to sleep. To be awake and alone had become possible.

  She e
xhausted herself dancing, and sat sweating, on the couch thinking all this. But soon she was drawn to the new manuscipt, to read the pages—she hoped—along with Betty. They were good. They excited her. She found herself mentally writing more when she reached the end, and soon she was drawn back to the typewriter. Concentration, always hard for her, had become automatic. She could break into the surface of her book as easily as diving into clear calm water and there was no effort in staying below, no need to come up for air. Nothing had ever been so completely her own.

  The phone rang. She stared at it for a moment, unconscious of what it was. She answered it abstractedly.

  “Hello, hello,” a male voice said with excessive cheerfulness. “Thank God it’s you. I didn’t know what I’d do if he answered.”

  Patty, still picturing her characters frozen in position, unspoken words in her mouth, had no idea who this was. “Well, that’s lucky,” she said.

  “I know it’s late. I’m sorry. Can you talk?”

  “Yeah,” she said, puzzled. And then she recognized the voice. It was Jerry Gelb! Her old boss, the villain who had shattered her self-esteem. He sounded so odd.

  “What? He’s asleep?”

  “You mean David?”

  “If that’s your boyfriend.”

  “No, he’s at work. Is this you, Jerry?”

  “Yeah!” he said with a combination of bravado and sheepishness. “I’m bombed. I’m snookered. I’ve been thinking about you. I had to call.”

  “It’s one o’clock in the morning,” Patty said, but she knew, with a clarity that had utterly escaped her when she worked for him, why he was phoning.

  “I know, I know,” he said, again with a mix of shame and pride. “I’m cracking up. I can’t forget you. Your beautiful big eyes. How are you? I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.” she said with a sarcastic lilt.

  “You do?”

  “Sure. I always miss men who reduce me to tears on a daily basis.”

  “Oh, come on. Surely I wasn’t that bad.”

  “No. I was.”

  He laughed. “Touché. You sound great. Any chance we could meet for lunch tomorrow?”

  Patty wondered if she could have asked for a better revenge than this drunken call. She had control of him now. Sex had put him out of control, and being fired had put her out of his control. She could so easily torture him now, without any fear. “What do you want to have lunch for?” she asked sweetly. Too sweetly for it to be meant honestly.

  But Gelb didn’t seem to notice. “My God.” He sighed. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.” Again, she almost sang the words. A siren luring him to disaster.

  “Don’t make me say it. I’ve made enough of a fool of myself. I have to see you.’ You sound great. You sound beautiful!” he added.

  This ceaseless flattery and boyish confession of adoration began to intrigue her. She tried to summon up her image of him as a middle-aged man, but the youthful voice on the phone interfered. “I am,” she heard herself say. “I’ve gotten thin and beautiful.”

  “You were always thin and beautiful!” he protested.

  I could get him to say anything. She marveled at this power, relished it. “I can’t have lunch with you,” she said.

  “Why not?” That sounded more like the old Gelb. Demanding, arrogant, controlling.

  “My boyfriend wouldn’t like it.”

  “So don’t tell him.” Gelb laughed.

  “That would be dishonest.” Patty cooed. I’m mean, I’m mean, she thought, delighted.

  “Come on! Say yes. Go ahead and tell him. Tell him you’re having lunch with your old boss. Nothing strange about that.”

  “He would think it was strange. Having lunch with the man who fired me. He would want to know what you wanted.”

  “I need your advice,” Gelb said.

  “My advice? What about?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “How are you going to get my advice if it’s a secret?”

  “I can’t talk about it on the phone. But …” He hesitated. “I may have a job for you.”

  “You want to hire me?” Patty said, flabbergasted. Would he really go that far just to get laid? Hire somebody he believed was incompetent? Wouldn’t a whore be cheaper and less of a fuss?

  “Come to lunch. I’ll tell you about it.”

  “You can tell me now.”

  “No.” He was firm. “Come to lunch. You have nothing to worry about. I’m not going to assault you in a restaurant.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “How about the Four Seasons? You love that place.”

  “Okay,” she said, without considering it. She could cancel. She didn’t care how rudely she treated him.

  “Great! See you there at twelve, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Love you. Bye.” And he hung up before she could refuse to accept so intimate a statement. He had managed to leave her feeling furious. He had gotten her to agree to see him. And he had insulted her by sneaking that farewell—the good-bye of an accepted lover—in at the end. She looked at the pages in her typewriter, unseeing, back in her past, living again as a confused and scared young woman battered by embarrassments. She wished she could have it all back to replay her stupid responses. Maybe at lunch she could do that. Desert Gelb, leave him with his erection at the table, laugh at his unsatisfied desire for her.

  The heavy lock on the door to the hallway turned. David was home. Patty moved hastily, guiltily, putting away her manuscript and her thoughts. Both felt like betrayals of David.

  David found her standing awkwardly in the middle of the room waiting for him. She felt like a teenager who has frantically put out the illicit cigarette and desperately fanned at the residual odor and smoke.

  “Hey! You’re up!” he said with the exuberance of a drunk. Were all the men in the world loaded tonight? she wondered. He went to her unsteadily and hugged her. She didn’t want the embrace and moved quickly out of it.

  “Did you close the section?”

  “I have to go in tomorrow for a while. Check on a few things. Basically it’s done.”

  “What happened? The world blow up?”

  “No. … What did you … ? Oh, you had a dinner with Tony’s wife.”

  “Betty. Her name is Betty.”

  “My, my.” David looked amused at Patty’s seriousness. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be sexist.”

  “I was just telling you her name. God, am I in a foul mood,” she said, by way of apology. In fact, she had been in a great mood until Gelb called.

  “Why? Did she say something?”

  “Who?” Patty, thinking of Gelb, couldn’t imagine what woman he meant.

  David smiled. “Tony’s wife,” he said pointedly.

  Patty smiled back. It was this, his wit, that she had once been so fond of. Still was fond of. “No.”

  “Well …” He moved to her, gently putting an arm around her. “What is it?”

  Patty felt a sudden revulsion at her behavior, at her distrust of David. “I gave something to Betty to read.”

  “Something?”

  “A novel I’ve been writing.”

  “You mean, not the romance novel?”

  “No, a serious … Something of my own.”

  “No kidding!” David looked startled. “How long have you been working on it?”

  “A month. A few weeks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure I could keep it up. I wanted to wait until I was really into it. Am I terrible?”

  “No. I understand. I would be the same way.”

  “You mean to say you wouldn’t tell me if you were working on a novel?”

  David laughed. “Just like you.”

  “But that’s terrible!” Patty insisted, her face a perfect mask of shock and outrage. “Don’t you trust me?”

  David smiled. “I never know when you’re kidding.”

  “Good,�
�� Patty answered. “Don’t you want to read what I’ve written?”

  “Sure.” But he looked doubtful, his eyes red, his feet unsteady.

  “You’re too tired.”

  “No!” he said firmly, but then sagged. “Is there any coffee?”

  “You can read it tomorrow.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes. You want me to read it now.”

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  “Get me the pages and some coffee.”

  Patty hustled over to the desk, pulling the manuscript out of its grave, buried under several hundred sheets of blank typing paper in the bottom drawer.

  David laughed. “You really didn’t want me to know.”

  She smiled and gave him the pages, rushing out of the room to the kitchen, relieved to have something to do.

  The coffee took forever to heat up. She couldn’t hear anything while she waited—no paper rustling, no laughter, no groans—and she became convinced he had fallen asleep. But no. He was sitting up reading attentively. As she approached with the coffee, she got a view of his profile. His lips were pressed tight, his chin up. He looked prissy and dissatisfied. She knew it. He was going to hate her novel, probably spoil her desire to go on. She should never have succumbed to her hungry vanity. She handed him the coffee.

  He looked up. His eyes looked funny. Patty thought for a moment that his wide and confused eyes were due to drunkenness, but when he took the cup and stared longer at her, she knew it was the writing. “They’re good,” he said, his tone surprised.

  “You haven’t read very much. Maybe you won’t like the rest.”

  David’s eyes slowly returned to her pages. “They’re good,” he said again slowly, a man in shock, repeating unbelievable news to himself. “They’re good,” he mumbled once more.

  CHAPTER 11

  I’m gonna give it to her. Fred thought furiously. He looked at the shadowed figure of Marion in the taxi. The seat made her look small, a fat little girl, her head barely reaching above the window. I’m gonna let her have it, he thought again, the excitement of his resolution pumping through him. She thinks I’ll take it quietly like I always do, but I won’t. I’m gonna call her bluff. She can’t get away with making a fool of me anymore.