Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  The screen went black and silent. David swallowed. His throat was dry. He stared at the blank image, angry. He desperately wanted to see more. It blipped and a telephone number appeared. “Call now, slave! And get the punishment you deserve!” a husky woman’s voice said, recognizable as belonging to the redhead he had seen. The telephone number stayed on while he heard the man’s voice say in a penitent whisper, “Yes, mistress.”

  It was replaced by another advertisement, this time for an escort service, a euphemism for prostitution. He knew there were explicit sex programs on cable television, but he hadn’t heard or read of what he was now seeing, a program which consisted of a series of commercials for various sex services. There was an ad for a massage parlor, but most were for the escort services, which David assumed were used by traveling businessmen, since the commercials stressed they served all Manhattan hotels. He sat through fifteen minutes of them (usually they showed a girl dancing, doing a striptease, or putting something—a lollipop, a banana—in and out of her mouth while a telephone number was superimposed), waiting for a recurrence of the redhead’s spot.

  He kept a good check on Patty, who, to his annoyance, seemed to be getting ready to quit. She was leaning back reading pages, her typewriter off.

  The erection he had while watching the redhead’s ad dwindled the moment it was off, and, to his amazement, no amount of girls, in bikinis, topless, or totally nude, with or without banana in mouth, stirred him. The implication was clear. He judged himself quickly, the defense having no evidence. He wondered how he could have had this sexual longing, or perversion (he reminded himself), without a hint or a prelude of it until that night. If he were a henpecked husband or a clumsy fool who pursued women that rejected him repeatedly, then it might make sense.

  And then she returned in a close-up. Her face was angular, her eyes black, her thin lips painted a vivid red. “Do you have a secret desire to be punished?” she asked contemptuously, as though she knew the answer was yes. “Mistress Regina will force you to admit your submissive desires. Call now for a consultation, worthless”—she made a solo of the word, drawing it out, chopping it into extra syllables, pausing both before and after it and then finishing with a hiss—“slave!”

  His throat was dry again, he was hard. His absorption was so complete that he hadn’t noticed his penis become stiff and large. But he felt it yearn against his pants for freedom. He had been struck a blow, deadening his brain, making him dumb with fascination.

  “How do you spell … ?” Patty’s voice said, sounding nearby. David leaned forward to hit the off button so abruptly that he lost his balance and had to grab the set to prevent himself from pitching forward onto the floor.

  “What?” he said, breathless, his face feeling hot. She stared at him. Damn. I’m blushing, he though with horror. He spoke through it. “I didn’t hear what you said. What do you need to spell?”

  She looked at his cheeks, then at the television, and then back to David.

  Why is she so fucking smart? he thought furiously. “I was watching a girl strip-tease on cable,” he said with a sheepish laugh. “When you startled me, I turned into a teenager. Hiding Playboy under the sheets.”

  Patty smiled, satisfied. “Is she still on?” she said, reaching for the television.

  “No!” David cried out, but to no avail. The set was still tuned to the channel David had been watching, but what appeared was simply a crawl listing the schedule of programs. David glanced at the clock. It was past the half-hour. The show he had seen was over.

  “Oh,” Patty said, disappointed. She smiled at David. “You don’t have to be embarrassed you like watching naked women.”

  “Thanks. That’s big of you.”

  “You pig,” she added with mock coolness.

  “Maybe you should punish me for it,” he said, his voice casual. He was horrified that he had said this, contemplating quickly that if he revealed this interest in sadomasochism she would be sure to put it in her novel. Even if she went along with it. Nothing she exposed about herself in her writing seemed to worry her.

  “My, my, we are getting kinky,” she said, walking away, staring at the pages she had brought with her. “Oh,” she said, turning back. “How do you spell ‘prosthesis’?”

  “P-r-o-s-thesis. What’s happening? You introduced a dentist to the story?”

  “Sort of,” she mumbled, walking off, back to her typewriter.

  He watched her back, disgusted. He wished they lived in an apartment rather than the open loft space, so he could go into a room and slam the door behind him. Then at least he could masturbate. He made that casual joke (maybe you should punish me for it), and she knew right away. Not all of her, but her instinct for the truth behind every casual statement was infallible. Both real privacy and real intimacy were impossible with her. She could penetrate any defense, and if you didn’t have one, she considered you contemptible and boring.

  He was nervous. Between the sexual excitement and the rush of horror at being caught, his body was confused. He paced into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, seeing not food but the leather-clad redhead holding her long crop, her face an unforgiving mask of ironic disdain. He was appalled and excited, afraid of his thoughts and obsessed with them. He wondered about a slew of practical matters. Was she really a prostitute? Of course. Presumably, if you wanted, after a nice spanking you could ball her, or whatever. What if she really liked beating men? Maybe she wouldn’t stop if she really hurt you. That possibility terrified him, but strangely caused his erection to return. So the danger excites me too, he observed clinically. There seemed to be no bottom to the depravity of his perversion. David had always thought of himself as a shrewd survivor, someone who looked out for himself thoroughly, perhaps even too cautious, unable to take the kind of risk great men needed for a final boost to attain an orbit of success. What could explain this thirst for harm? He didn’t ski or cross in the middle of the street, take any chances with his body. He always pointed the knife away from his body when slicing a bagel. How could he want to put himself at the mercy of a stranger, tied up, whipped, with no guarantee that it would stop short of real damage?

  Impossible. His thrill came from the security of voyeurism. Surely he would find being a participant disgusting and unpleasant. His erection would certainly disappear quickly when that crop left marks on his behind and not someone else’s. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was sadistic. Maybe he wanted to punish others.

  Oddly, this perspective comforted him. He wondered about that too. How despicable that being the tormentor seemed more respectable than being the victim.

  But another image of her, tall, scornful, her charms encased in seamless impenetrable leather, seduced his imagination and argued against the notion that watching the beating was the cause. He believed in that vision, the punishing unyielding woman. Is that the true nature of my mother? His stubborn, solicitous, small, overweight mother? Sure she had demanded a lot from him and his brother. They had to be successes, but there was no punishment, no going to bed without meals, certainly no physical discipline. Apparently amateur psychology couldn’t help him.

  I should see a psychiatrist, he thought without enthusiasm. He’d rather see the redhead. Or at least know more about her … it. To that end he was furious with himself for not having written or remembered the telephone number that had appeared at the end of the commercial.

  He looked at the cable-television guide to see whether what he had seen had a title and was a regular show. It was called HotSpots and seemed to be on almost every night of the week, its time varying from midnight to one in the morning. I’ll watch it tomorrow night, he thought, and write down the phone number.

  But this decision seemed insane moments later. What was he going to do? Call that number and make an appointment? Waltz to some address—God knows in what kind of neighborhood—and let that woman chain his hands and feet … It was insane. Yet a part of him didn’t believe she existed, that a real person would answer the phone. H
e wanted to call, if for nothing else than to confirm that all of it, from the images on the screen to his erotic response, was simply a mist of a tired imagination, briefly clouding his sound, clear mind. A harmless fog, easy to forget, and sure to evaporate under the heat of investigation.

  The farewell at the airport had been agony. Sadder and more hopeless than any good-bye Tony had ever spoken before. His affair with Lois, born of vanity, sustained by sexual appetite, had become, on this trip, painful and tragic. He wondered, closing his eyelids, hot from fatigue, and feeling the cool air from overhead his seat in first class, whether he had ever really been in love before. Didn’t the anguish of holding Lois in his arms—feeling her tears on his neck, this empty depression in his spirit that made the colors, tastes, and sounds of the world dull, metallic, and tinny—didn’t that represent true longing, and therefore true love?

  He was always glad to leave Betty. But, of course, he knew he would be coming back. It wasn’t a fair comparison. This was the first time in his life that he had been prevented from seeing as much as he liked of a woman he loved.

  And was he now? Couldn’t he go home and tell Betty their marriage was over? Get on the next plane back and return to the delighted, wise, and adoring embrace of Lois? After all, he didn’t require dispensation from the Church, there were no children who would be scarred forever, his parents certainly wouldn’t be in a position to disapprove. In fact, no one would give it a second thought. Other than Betty, of course.

  What a monstrous betrayal of her! She was faithful, endured all his moods, had been solicitous of his work and ambitions—no more trouble to him than a faithful dog. God, where did all this contempt for her come from? There had been no inkling of it until he slept with another woman. Was it merely a way of justifying himself? Belittling what he had and had had with Betty to lessen his guilt?

  He was seated next to an executive who made the coast-to-coast trips often. Tony had had a brief conversation with him after takeoff, ending it (pleading fatigue) when the man began to brag about the number of women he had slept with on his trips. The executive, while claiming how great his emotionally nomadic life was, how it had helped maintain his marriage, was downing drink after drink, his language deteriorating along with his motor skills. Tony worried that that man’s first indiscretion had seemed to him as romantic and grand as Tony’s now did and that one day Tony would be slurring his words at some young man, talking of pussy and happy marriages.

  He wanted to avoid cliché in his life as desperately as he wanted to avoid it in his plays. The screenwriter who breaks up the marriage of his youth as he makes it in Hollywood seemed to Tony too obvious a dramatic choice. Besides, he wasn’t making it, he had flopped. He had a chance to redeem himself with the set of revisions (which would really end up being a complete rewrite, given Garth’s and Foxx’s objections), and he now felt that how well he met this challenge would determine the course of his career for years to come, perhaps for the rest of his life. For the great artist, life should be an unbroken series of success; anything else, he thought, implied mediocrity. At thirty, Shakespeare had written Hamlet, Tennessee Williams had Streetcar making Brando’s reputation (he too was under thirty), Arthur Miller had earned the right to compete with presidents of the United States to screw Marilyn Monroe because of Death of a Salesman, Stoppard had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern running on Broadway. Mamet had already been hailed for American Buffalo—there simply wasn’t much of a tradition in the theater for undiscovered genius. After all, in the end, it was still show business, which made the phrase “undiscovered genius” oxymoronic. Nobody went around looking for unproduced plays of fifty years ago, there are no art dealers finding genius in the manuscripts of obscure writers of the last century, no academics demanding productions of unknown nineteenth-century playwrights. The famous of today may not be the famous of tomorrow in the theater, but the unknown were sure to remain rotting in the ground.

  And he was rotting. Inside, strapped into a seat on a plastic bullet speeding through the air, maggots eating at his confidence, his energy, his will to continue. Five years ago, no woman, no love, no emotion would have distracted him from concentrating on his work. Every time he closed his eyes, Lois was on his body, kissing his penis, holding him in her tight desperate embrace. She listened to his every word, weighed each anxiety as though it were gold, studied his moods, picked him up at the airport on arrival, and drove him there on departure, a precious package of happiness for her that she protected with the fierce will of a mother. She loved him, apparently without any restraint, irony, or condescension. She loved him hopelessly, knowing she would be hurt, expecting to be discarded, exposing her heart to the sword of betrayal. He could run her through, cut her aorta in half, splatter the floor with her gushing blood, and still her eyes would look at him with unblinking adoration.

  He was despicable. It was terrible being on the plane alone, unable to escape from this conclusion. He had two women who loved him and he was betraying them both without a single legitimate complaint against either one.

  The trip took too long. He squirmed in his seat, the boredom relieved only by occasional premonitions that their plane was about to explode. Over and over an image of his charred body, still strapped into the red-white-and-blue design of the seat, perhaps clutching his wineglass, projected onto his mind a horrible internal slide show. He tried to sleep during the movie, but he would start awake the moment his body relaxed, convinced they were abruptly falling out of the sky. Finally he gave up trying, asking the stewardess for coffee, and stared forward at the low plastic ceiling. He wondered if he could make a play out of his observations of the behind-the-scenes actions on his mother’s sitcom. He tried to imagine it onstage, how he could get their inner lives out during scenes of them at work, but he decided it would be false and melodramatic. Besides, he could think of three plays running off-Broadway that used Hollywood as a setting. Then there were all those musicals that were really about show business. Playwrights had nothing to write about but their attempts to make money in tinseltown, and now he was becoming one of them. He remembered making this point about those three off-Broadway plays last year when they were in the works. He had bitterly ripped them apart at every social occasion, usually to everyone’s approval, accusing the authors of having no subject other than their own greed. And now he was one of them.

  The plane began its descent. He could feel the subtle pitch forward, the shift in engine noise. Soon it would be worse, his ears would pop, the seat-belt sign would come on. A vivid picture of his plane lancing into another jet filled his mind—he saw his limbs fly off, his head roll into a stranger’s lap. And he would be nothing. Dead, he would be forgotten in weeks, talked of occasionally as a tragic case of a young artist whose chance was robbed by cruel fate, killed not only figuratively but also literally by the movie business.

  He sat rigid during the landing, closing his eyes when the wheels touched down and the ferocious roar of the engines crashed over him like the ocean’s surf. He saw himself skipping, flying through the air amid wreckage, a bright ball of fire, his life consumed.

  During the long moment of his imagined death, he remembered arching into Lois, her body sighing with pleasure, and then she opened her eyes, saying. “I love your penis inside me,” in a rushed whisper.

  He was met by a limousine, a prerequisite he had forgone after his first trip to LA, but Lois had insisted he take it this time: “Cheer you up for the rewrite,” she said. When they weren’t screwing—it was screwing, all right, done casually, in the middle of breakfast, or desperately, tragically, at dawn, a lovemaking that transited from ordinary conversation to naked embrace with the fluidness of a movie—Lois kept encouraging him, telling stories of famous screenwriters doing draft after draft of scripts, reviled throughout by the studio, director, and star, only to triumph in the end with the ultimate rewards, a hit and an Oscar. People in LA finished stories with “And he won the Academy Award,” or more often, “And it grossed a hun
dred million,” the way a Christian might finish a tale of someone’s life by saying, “And he went to heaven.”

  He made fun of her, belittling her values, and she went on undaunted, without anger at his resistance. She knew, unlike Betty, how much he really wanted all of it, the money, the stupid award, the interview on Entertainment Tonight, and she persisted in her whisper of ambition, “You can do this rewrite. You didn’t really concentrate on the first draft. You know what they want. Your ideas are brilliant. You’ll knock ’em dead with a new draft. Garth wouldn’t have flown you out and spent all that time meeting with you unless he had confidence in you.” And so on, her energy for feeding his ego rivaling a doting grandmother’s. She told him he was a genius. Handsome. Kind. A great lover. There was no virtue he didn’t possess, according to Lois, and he believed her, cherishing some of her more outrageous compliments, especially the sexual ones. She claimed he moved inside her so well that foreplay was either unnecessary or overkill.

  He started each conversation skeptically, convinced her view of him was too good to be true, watching patiently for a giveaway of her true feeling. She wants me to leave Betty and knows she can’t afford to criticize me, he thought, feeling quite sympathetic with her circumstance. In her position he would also try this tactic.

  But two of her friends had told Tony, during brief private conversations, that they had never seen her happier, and she did seem different than when they first met. Her thin glum face had relaxed, her unsmiling expression becoming wistful and soft. She laughed easily, had boundless energy, and, according to his mother (when he asked, as a preliminary to confessing the affair, which he then abandoned), had become so good at supervising scripts that offers for other series were coming in at a regular flow, forcing the executive producer to sweeten her deal.

  “Listen to any advice she gives you about the business,” his mother had said in her guttural, slightly drunk voice (warmly cynical, a critic had called it). “She’s got the Midas touch.” The last said so that you knew she both admired and despised such a gift. But it was the best she could ever say about someone who “is absolutely without talent, who wouldn’t know a Ming vase from a Tupperware container,” a contemptuous phrase Maureen Winters had been using since her nervous breakdown about anyone who wasn’t an artist and yet had succeeded in show business. But Tony didn’t feel contemptuous of Lois—the confidence with which she moved in the Hollywood world dazzled him.