Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  It was ten o’clock at night when he arrived in New York. The city, unlike LA, was alive at that hour, in the pale faces of the pedestrians Tony saw weariness, anger, forced gaiety—as opposed to the tanned, rested, self-assured countenances of the LA movie people. But there was something much more daunting in the eyes of the New Yorkers, something much more difficult for him to match than the breezy confidence of the West Coast. There was the fierce will to succeed: eyes assuming each passerby was hostile: the walk brisk, as though stillness meant vulnerability. They moved, amid the cars, the drunks, the pickpockets, the drug dealers, they moved armored, bubbled in little worlds, smiling only for their companions, and turning masks to the outside world. In LA, people wanted to win; in New York, they had to. In LA, people did win; in New York, they were more often crushed. In LA, failure was death; in New York, it was merely a pause before another round of fighting. He didn’t want to struggle anymore—the armor weighed too much.

  Tomorrow the friends would call, wanting to know if he was getting a movie made, expecting stories of how he had been lionized. The writers would phone one by one, asking how it had gone, but really wanting to know if he had stepped up in class, out of the range of their punches, or whether he had taken a cut on the eye and would miss the next few events against them. I’m gonna write another play, he thought as the limo approached his apartment building. He had come home, the cold anger of the struggle infiltrating his sun-warmed West Coast heart. “I’ll write another play,” he said, nodding to himself, pumping his muscles for strength.

  The doorman hustled out of the lobby, almost wrestling with the chauffeur over his bag. Tony noted the difference in the doorman’s attitude between his arrival in a limo as opposed to a taxi. That a man who saw him every day changed his attitude over such a detail of success made the fierce blizzard of his soul complete.

  He put his key in the lock in a rage.

  Betty pulled it open before he was finished. She was dressed in a black silk nightgown (new to him) and holding a glass of champagne, smiling gleefully. “Darling!” she said, her thin voice vainly attempting to sound throaty and seductive. “Back from the Coast so soon?” She shook her red curls.

  He stared at her dully. The man who had always been too quick with an answer. On their first date she had been scared to talk much, afraid he would cut her to pieces over a naive comment. Her silence had seemed to him mysterious, a hint at profound secrets and knowledge. Now he stood stupidly, dumbstruck, not getting the joke, like a dullard from the Midwest flabbergasted by some arch, obscene New York play.

  “Come in, darling!” she continued bravely, sweeping her arm dramatically to welcome an entrance. “The caviar is on ice, the champagne on little pieces of funny brown bread with the crusts missing. Or vice versa.”

  “Hi,” he said, his voice tired. “That’s beautiful,” he added without enthusiasm, nodding at her nightgown. “When did you buy it?”

  “Buy it? Buy it? I didn’t buy it. Someone left it here last night—with his hat.” She broke herself up with this one, laughing so hard that her little breasts trembled against the lace frill at the top of her low-cut gown, bobbing into and out of view like buoys on a stormy sea. They were pretty— impertinent, cheerful, like her little girl’s face, her nipples smiling brilliantly, eager to please and yet sure of their ultimate distance and superiority. Laughing, she put the glass of champagne down and moved into his arms, holding him tight (the only suggestion that there was more to her mood than gaiety), and holding her mouth up to be kissed, closing her eyes before the contact. He watched himself kiss her, his hands sliding on the silk that made the curves of her body like a sculpture’s, flowing and smooth.

  “I missed you,” he said, interrupting the kiss, and then continuing it, her arms squeezing tighter. The fight, his body’s stiff resistance to the cold world, sagged, and he held her wearily, hopelessly, feeling her body, tasting her mouth, the sensations mingling dissonantly with Lois’ now more familiar shape and smell.

  She led him silently into the bedroom, apparently not resenting his reluctant manner. Why doesn’t she know there’s something wrong? he wondered as she pulled his shirt out of his pants and unbuckled his belt. He stood passively like a little boy, too tired to undress. Because she thinks I’m depressed over the script, he reminded himself. He took over and unbuttoned his shirt.

  I am, he told himself. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe I’ve confused myself over Lois and Betty to avoid facing the enormity of the danger I’m in. I don’t want this, he said to himself angrily, naked, moving toward his wife’s now nude body on the bed. I want to be a genius, he thought over and over as he jammed his penis inside her, roughly moving in and out, grunting with the effort as he pushed himself so hard it seemed he wanted to ram right through her body. I want to be a genius, he thought—I don’t want to be in love with anybody.

  Gelb began right away, getting up from the table, pulling Patty toward him when she extended a hand, kissing her on the mouth, his lips slightly open, enough to make it more than a greeting and just less than serious foreplay, a hand encompassing a buttock and squeezing, again with slightly more emphasis than friendliness and less than open seduction. “It’s great to see you. You look great,” he said in a breathless rush. Antony reunited with Cleopatra.

  “So do you,” she said, not resisting his embrace. She knew, here, visible in the Four Seasons, that he would never have the nerve to go too far, that he was counting on her playing the stammering, shocked, reluctant ingénue. She wanted to call his bluff, convinced he was acting out a fantasy he would never actually realize. Sure enough, he withdrew quickly, glancing nervously at the other tables and moving to his chair. She meant her compliment. He was tan and trim, looked younger than she remembered, probably because a year and a half had made no difference in his age, but had changed her perspective of how old that old was. David, despite his fifteen-year advantage on Gelb, seemed no younger in manner or energy. Less so, in fact. But he’s still an old man to me, she argued to herself. I’m not attracted to him.

  “I feel good,” he said. “Things are going well.”

  “They always went well for you,” she answered. The waiter interrupted. When she ordered a Perrier, Gelb insisted she have it with white wine, and the waiter ignored her protests, outraging her.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said.

  “They know who’s boss,” Gelb said, laughing, as though it were a joke, but it wasn’t, and they both knew it.

  “You’re not my boss anymore,” she said, not scoring on him, but a pleasant reminder, a stewardess stating an airline rule.

  “I want to be. Not your boss,” he added. “I want you to work with me.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You fired me. You told me I was incompetent. Suggested—”

  “No, no—”

  “—I go into advertising or selling shoes, I forget—”

  “I was lying!” he said in an angry, embarrassed tone. Patty paused. “I was lying,” he repeated, his eyes lowering apologetically.

  The drinks were brought. He took a sip and she did as well, feeling, even with the first taste of wine, the lightheadedness that hit her instantly with alcohol. The desire to run through every red light would soon follow. Don’t take another sip of it, she told herself, reaching for the water glass.

  “What do you mean?” she said at last.

  “Let’s order. Then I’ll make my confession.” Patty tried to order light, but he wouldn’t accept that, and once again she was left with no choice. He told the waiter to bring her shrimp in mustard sauce to start, and then a steak and salad—the kind of lunch she could never put down. To her horror he ordered an expensive bottle of red wine.

  “No matter how much I drink, I’m not going to bed with you,” she said, whispering the last part. Gelb opened his eyes wide, startled. “I’d only throw up anyway.”

  Gelb laughed, delighted. “You’re terrific,” he sai
d, beaming at her.

  “Yeah. A terrific piece of ass, you mean.” She sneered at him, her eyes daring him to contradict her.

  “Amazing,” he said. “I don’t know how I could have been such a fool.”

  “You fired me because I wouldn’t go to bed with you,” Patty said, knowing, for the first time, that it was true, really true. Along with it came the exhilaration of being unshackled from almost two years of self-doubt, of failure. She had told no one, not David, nor Betty, that she believed Gelb’s frustrated lust had been the cause of the debacle of her editorial career, partly because she didn’t think they’d think it credible and partly because she had never been able to accept it herself. Now she knew, looking at him, drinking her in, watching her as a consumer does a display of expensive goods he can’t afford, that it was yet another example of sexism, of the patina that had been glossed over the old rules. She looked at the restaurant, at the so-called power lunches that surrounded her, and they were dominated by men. Men, men, men with their blind hairy cocks that wanted warmth and shelter anywhere it could be found, who would sacrifice any promise, years of struggle, any principle, for their moment of sweaty release. What was in that white stuff anyway that they wanted so badly to be rid of it?

  “I fired you because I was falling in love,” he said quietly, his tan face solemn. He looked down at his ironed cuff and touched it.

  Patty stared at him. He must be kidding. She felt nervous. This was not going right, the map had misled her, the scenery missing the proper landmarks.

  Gelb looked up at her, his eyes serious. “I thought I just wanted an affair—God knows, I’ve had enough of them— but I couldn’t pursue it well, kept getting too aggressive, making mistakes because I wanted you so badly. I’d get furious at you, think of you on the weekends, the way you say things—I don’t know. I haven’t felt like this since I was a kid. I’m totally in your power. It’s been a year and a half and I can’t get you out of my head. You’re so beautiful …”

  “You want to sleep with me. That’s all it ever was. You want to sleep with me.” She pleaded this as though arguing with a recalcitrant bureaucrat for a passport renewal.

  “Sure. Of course it looks like that. And that’s part of it,” he said, laughing. “But you get over wanting to sleep with someone in less than a year. Look, I’m going about this wrong. I was in trouble that year. My job was on the line, I hated my marriage and couldn’t face it. Things have changed. I’m going to tell you something, something you can’t tell anyone—”

  “You’re getting a divorce,” Patty said wearily, stunned by his confidence in her gullibility.

  “No,” he said, surprised. “No. I wish I were. I’ve been offered the job of publisher at Garlands.”

  “No!” Patty said, appalled. Her bad luck stunned her. That morning she had discussed in detail with Betty, an excited and nervous Betty, how they would approach Betty’s publisher (Garlands) about switching Patty’s contract for a second romance novel to a contract with her to do Patty’s new novel. It would be hard for lots of reasons, even apart from the difficulty of being forgiven for the romance novel. Betty had no track record acquiring fiction, Patty obviously had no experience writing it, and so on and so on in the infuriating tautology of publishing logic: they don’t trust you unless you’ve been successful in the past, but how can you become so without someone trusting you? The plan was predicated on Betty’s belief that Patty’s partial manuscript was terrific and the strength of her own solid relationship with the editor in chief of Garlands. And now this meant that was all irrelevant, that Gelb would become the hurdle, that once again he was her boss.

  Her horror at his announcement was misunderstood by Gelb. He interpreted it as surprise that Garlands would move him—a man with a violently commercial reputation— into a house better known for publishing quality books. “Look,” he said in a sales-conference tone, “there are business realities in publishing that now even Garlands can’t afford to ignore.”

  “Are you going to accept?” Patty asked.

  “Yes, and I want to hire you.”

  “To do what? Go to bed with you?”

  Gelb smiled, shaking his head, astonished and delighted by her frankness. “I’m not hiring you to go to bed with me. I want you to go to bed with me, but I also want you to work for me. I got rid of you because I was so angry at the feelings I was developing for you—”

  “You never said anything—all you ever did was yell!”

  “No—”

  “Yes, you yelled,” she teased, “you criticized, you never said a kind word—”

  “Oh, come on, Patty! Nonsense!” Gelb leaned back, a hand pulling his jacket closed, armoring himself. “What about all those lunches and dinners to console you over the end of one relationship or another? You think it was easy?” He pushed his face at her, his body bumping the table so that the glasses trembled, their liquids shimmering. “Listening to you catalogue your sexual adventures? I’ll never forget that look you had on your face when you were dating the carpenter—”

  Patty laughed, as much to relieve the pressure of his assault as at his absurb claims to unrequited passion. No amount of protest could convince her that this man, whose dark eyes glistened invulnerably, reflecting back any searchlight into his soul, was capable of sustaining love for anything, unless … unless he couldn’t have it. Maybe, incredible though it may seem, he had never been frustrated before. “Carpenter?” she said, and laughed again.

  “Yes, the carpenter who you said was so damn good in bed? What the hell was he so good at anyway? You refused to tell me, as though it was something astonishing. What the hell was it? His penis was ten inches long?”

  “Shhhh!” Patty said, convinced his voice was amplified, that the whole restaurant had interrupted their plots of power, their schemes for success, to listen to this verbal rape.

  “Damn!” he said, sagging back and rubbing his forehead feverishly. “It was torture. And this past year, thinking you might get married any day. I found out what I could about David—”

  “You did?” She was intimidated enough by him to be frightened by this. Maybe there was some harm he could do David. He was capable of anything, and the limits of his power were a mystery to her.

  “Couldn’t sleep the night I was told by Rounder that David is the brightest star of the magazine. Thinks he’ll have his job one day.”

  Patty looked off, away from his energetic body, from his insistent eyes, and considered how thrilled David would be to hear this. She wondered if David (secretly) would love the whole story: this powerful man of publishing taking David’s girl to the Four Seasons to seduce her, losing the battle, and speaking angrily, enviously of David’s future. If she wanted marriage from David, going home and telling the story would be the perfect cattle prod. She felt regret that a union with David wasn’t her ambition. She could have it so easily now. A free ride on David’s trolley to the top. David would love the story all right, he wouldn’t even bother to conceal his pleasure. She knew, from her experience of living with a victim of the virus of success, that to men like “David, and like Gelb, the praise of the powerful was a keener and more lasting medicine than the love of a woman.

  “Are you going to marry him?” Gelb’s voice said sadly.

  Patty returned to him, to the world, to the fine linen of the table, the ruins of their expensive lunch. What a sickening fraud it all was. Wasn’t it possible for everybody to satisfy lust, whether for power or sex, without all this elaborate finery and fakery? “No. I’m not going to get married. Not to anyone. Men are disgusting,” she said with conviction. “Why the heck would I want to marry any of ’em?”

  “You don’t mean that,” Gelb said, made hopeful by a denial of betrothal. He smiled at her, grinning like a child who was confident that after a few more months of hinting, he would get the Christmas present he coveted. “Will you take the job?” he said, whispering the question as though it were a murmur of seduction.

  “I feel lik
e I’m a prostitute and we’re negotiating.”

  “No,” Gelb protested. “I love how there are no games with you. No. I want to sleep with you whether you take the job or not, and I want you to take the job whether you sleep with me or not.”

  “You mean you think I’d make a good editor, that everything you told me about how incompe—”

  “Yes, it was all a lie. I’m a shit. I admit it. I’ll offer you forty thousand a year, that’s at least ten thousand more than someone of your experience should get. That’ll make up for it.”

  “And what’s my job, exactly? Blow-jobs every afternoon? What are we talking about? I feel like I’m going crazy—”

  Gelb laughed, shaking his head, his eyes on her, ravenous. “You’d be my editor. I’d give you major authors, let you acquire one or two novels in the first year. Don’t worry about the blow-jobs,” he added, and then giggled.

  “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t do any of those things—”

  “Yes I would!” he whined.

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’re not a fool. There’s nothing in the world you care more about than business. You wouldn’t trust me with anything that might affect your job.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said solemnly.

  She paused, looking into his unyielding eyes, daring him to maintain his pose. He did, regarding her unflinchingly. “Why are you still married to Elaine? If you’re so damn unhappy? Dump her. You can have all the little girls of publishing at your feet.”