Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  “I couldn’t betray people!” his mother screamed one night.

  Tony heard nothing for a long time, and then his father’s deep voice said, “You wouldn’t have been lying. They were communists. And they still are.”

  His mother screamed instantly: “Then so am I.”

  Tony hated his mother. She was ugly like that. Why did she get so upset? He knew she was right—he felt it—but why did she have to be so loud and silly? That’s what made his father angry, Tony felt, nothing else, just her ugliness.

  That was his father’s last night with them. A few months later, his mother took him to New York, where he had lived the rest of his life, except for summers in California, or other parts of the world, when he visited his father. By his ninth birthday, Tony didn’t want to be Superman. And he hated movies. By then, he would stay up late, worrying over why his mother was out so late again, and read plays. Soon, he spoke the parts aloud, and found himself crying, or dueling, or making love. He understood nothing of the plays, and yet he understood everything. He was still a baby, but he had become as old as humanity’s literature. He had never loved, or died, or ruled a kingdom: but at night, while buses belched beneath the window, he was a king, a lover, and he died a hundred terrible and wonderful deaths.

  Theater grabbed his life by the elbow, slowing its hurried pace, and replayed its exquisite arguments and loves. Plays glued his shattered loyalties together, and let him weep, not only for his brilliant and brave mother but also for his scared and weak father.

  Routine knowledge told him differently, but his heart couldn’t dispel the lesson of his boyhood: movies destroy.

  Patty noticed him, but it was too late. At the head of the BMT subway stairs, standing in a pool of his own urine, was a bum, laughing at her. His head moved jerkily from side to side as if he were dancing, only his feet were still, like a drunk jack-in-the-box.

  Patty tried to hurry past him, but the steps were steep, and she half-stumbled, preventing a fall by righting herself with an outstretched hand, placed, unfortunately, at the border of the bum’s piss. Horror shot through her so palpably that her nerves were stung, and she screamed.

  “What the fuck?” the bum mumbled, his eyes big and wounded and wondering, like a child’s.

  Before she could think, Patty was off the stairs and bouncing between hustling midtowners on their lunch break. I escaped, she thought, but that did not relieve her desire to scream or cry or beg someone—anyone—on this busy corner to hug her and take her away from this mad city and her hopeless life.

  She had trouble finding the restaurant. The sun glistened on the storefronts across the avenue. The lettering on the signs wavered and shimmered, as if beguiling her to misread them. She squinted while she walked, peering across the midtown traffic. She bumped into people and worried each time that her purse was gone or that a pickpocketing genius had unlatched it and removed her wallet without her knowledge. She walked past the restaurant because she was so concerned with the opposite side of the street, and ended up in a phone booth getting the address from Information. (Even that was a struggle: at first the operator claimed she wasn’t supposed to give out addresses; she relented when Patty explained it was only a restaurant, not a residence.) Thus, when Patty finally appeared at Betty Winters’ table, she was twenty minutes late.

  “I’m sorry,” Patty said breathlessly.

  “I’m crocked. I’ve had two glasses of wine,” Betty said with a tipsy smile. “What happened?”

  “I can’t find anything … I don’t know where I am or who I am.” Patty waved her arm distractedly. Her frizzy and wild hair flounced with the movement. The whole picture made Betty laugh. “I mean it,” Patty said in the nearest she could come to an angry tone with another woman, namely petulance.

  “I’m sorry. It’s the wine. So—I was talking with Howard Feingold about you. He needs an associate editor. He expects you to call.”

  “Oh.” This made Patty feel guilty at having snapped at Betty. “Where is he?”

  “Fire Books. Quality paper.”

  “Thank you. Do I know him?”

  Betty laughed again. “I don’t know. Do you?” She controlled her smile to ask seriously, “Are you okay? Tony said you seemed fine at Fred’s.”

  “Fred,” Patty repeated, remembering the kiss in the hallway. Had last night really happened? Everything in her life seemed to quiver in her consciousness, as if her memory were a poor television signal.

  “Tony said you went home with someone, a journalist.”

  “We shared a cab,” Patty said. She had intended to tell Betty of her passionate night with David Bergman, but Betty’s eagerness to hear gossip turned off Patty’s desire to give it. “No more talk about me,” Patty said with pert emphasis. “I’m sick of me.”

  “Well, I’m very boring. I have no gossip.”

  “How about work?”

  “I don’t have enough books for my list. I had something earlier in the week, but Jeffries said no.”

  “How does he expect you to fill your list if he doesn’t let you buy books?”

  “I asked him that. He said, ‘Dear, your job isn’t simply to buy books, but to buy good books.’ Anyway, Howard Feingold is nice. You should call him.”

  “Okay. But do we want to work in publishing? Have these middle-aged men saying no to our books and calling us ‘dear’?”

  “Yeah!” Betty said, making a fist and shaking it in the air. Then she laughed. “I should tell him to stop calling me ‘dear.’ My God, it’s been five years. You’d think he’d start treating me like one of the guys.”

  “Did he ever make a pass?” Patty asked with abrupt curiosity.

  Betty blinked. “No. You know that.”

  “I did? I’m sorry.” Patty did know, but from time to time she asked, hoping Betty would answer truthfully. Patty was convinced her denials were false.

  “How could you forget? That’s the story of my career. Everyone thought I was promoted to senior editor so fast because I had slept with Jeffries.”

  “Oh,” Patty said, as if that were also news. Of course, it wasn’t.

  Betty sighed and lifted her glass. She held it wearily. “I can’t win. I only get credit because of the men around me. My uncle got me the job, Jeffries’ praise has made me important within the house, and my Tony, my beautiful Tony, he gives me the authors with his contacts.” Betty drained the glass.

  Patty leaned forward earnestly. “Your life is wonderful! You’re the ideal!”

  “No, no. The ideal is me with a baby.”

  “You want a baby?”

  “I mean, according to the women’s magazines. We don’t want to totally repress femininity for the sake of career drives.”

  “I don’t know.” Patty stared off. “I’d like to squash my femininity right now. Squash it like a roach and flush it down.”

  Betty, though she smiled, blinked her eyes. She was astonished and somewhat appalled by Patty’s vehemence. “I think you’d better call Howard Feingold this afternoon. You need a job.”

  “Am I promiscuous?” Patty said, staring earnestly into Betty’s eyes.

  Betty stared back for a moment, and then laughter burst from her, as if she had been shocked into it. “What? Where did that come from?”

  “I HS’ed with David Bergman last night.”

  “HS’ed!” Betty said in a loud, irritated tone, pursing her lips. She didn’t know what Patty meant, and Betty always reacted impatiently to anything she couldn’t understand.

  “Had Sex.”

  “Oh.” Betty laughed again. “You did? Great! So you did like him.”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked if I was promiscuous.”

  “Because you went to bed with one man?”

  “Well …” Patty was also thinking of Fred’s kiss. She wasn’t comfortable mentioning it, but she wished she could solicit Betty’s opinion—she tried desperately to think of some way to explain her situation without going into details. But there was no w
ay. “Did you sleep with Tony right away?” she asked, which, of course, gave entirely the wrong impression.

  “We met while we both apprenticed in the Berkshires during the summer. We worked together and even did a scene together before we really, you know, dated. Not dated, but spent time alone. I knew him a few weeks before we slept together. But there’s nothing wrong with going to bed with David Bergman the first time you meet him. God, I sound like a decadent Dear Abby.”

  Patty listened admiringly. “And he proposed then?”

  “No!” Betty laughed. “God, no. I had a terrible time with him for more than a year. I know he was involved with at least one other woman.”

  “The louse.”

  Betty ran a hand through her red hair—the gesture seemed defensive. “No, he wasn’t a louse. He didn’t want to be married that young.”

  “How did you convince him?”

  “I didn’t. I had given up. Even decided that we had only a few more months to go before breaking up.” Betty paused and stared off with a glazed look in her eyes.

  Patty waited. She felt it was important to know why Tony married Betty: maybe the answer to what could make a relationship work was something simple and definite, something Patty could put into action and in one sweep change her life. Marry David Bergman with all that loft space, get a job from Howard Feingold, and have a mature lifelong friendship over expensive lunches with Betty. “What!” Patty finally asked with furious impatience.

  “Oh!” Betty said, startled. She laughed. “I’m sorry, I was thinking of how he proposed. He showed up dressed like an English professor and sang ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face’ and then handed me slippers.”

  “Oh,” Patty said with noticeable disapproval.

  “It was cute.” Betty argued.

  “Sounds degrading.”

  “Degrading?” Betty straightened. “He was joking. And besides, he has a beautiful voice.”

  “So what changed his mind?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You never asked him!”

  “Oh, I asked him. But what makes Tony so charming at a cocktail party, that is, his gift for a pleasantly clever answer, in human terms, makes him slippery and unknowable. When I’m depressed, I think to myself that someone he truly loved rejected him, and when I’m happy, I decide that he recognized my virtues.”

  “I’m sure it’s that,” Patty said, leaning so far forward that she was halfway out of her chair. “He loves you.”

  Betty looked at her with cool curiosity. “Thanks. I’m glad to be reassured.”

  Betty’s tone set off an alarm. Patty scurried for an exit. “So when should I call Howard Feingold?”

  “He said anytime. He’ll be happy to talk to you about a job.”

  “Great. Now you have to get me a boyfriend.”

  Betty laughed. “Maybe you’ve got one.” She laughed again, and with her laughter, relaxed. Patty did also, now that the bells had been turned off and there was no more worry that a burglar had entered Betty’s fine store to steal her prize possession.

  Fred’s heart was pounding so hard it felt as if it were surging up through his lungs and might hop out into the air, leaving him without nerve or confidence. But he did manage to answer the secretary without spilling any blood. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

  And there was the silence and the loneliness of being on hold, reduced to a flashing light on Bart Cullen’s phone. Fred wanted a cigarette, but the pack was on the coffee table and his phone cord couldn’t stretch that far. He moved the distance anyway, and tried to reach, balancing on one foot, holding the receiver with his shoulder, and pulling the cord so tight its curls disappeared. Idiot, he said to himself, if you had put the phone down right away and got them, you would have had time. But now Bart might come on any second and Fred didn’t dare risk greeting him with silence.

  Why are you so frightened? he asked himself. He’s only your agent. Who cares what he thinks? But they’ve become so powerful, his pounding heart reminded him, that publishers use them as adjunct editors, weeding out the amateurs, and, through the contracts of their successful clients, establish minimums for unproven writers. If Bart backed one of his ideas, he would get a contract. Fred was sure of that.

  There was still nothing on the line but the whoosh of electronic obscurity. The cigarettes lay temptingly on the table. He tried to stretch the receiver an extra few inches …

  … and the phone was yanked out of his hands, snapped back to its mother by the taut cord, flying through the air, smacking into the wall, and finally clattering to the floor. The noise horrified Fred. He grabbed his pack of cigarettes and dashed to pick up the receiver, sure that Bart had been listening and deduced it all, and was laughing even now at foolish Fred.

  “Hello?” he cried desperately into the phone. Nothingness answered him. So he lit his cigarette. With the first drag, he inhaled self-assurance and a dim sense of peerage with Bart.

  “Hi,” a voice said.

  Fred almost didn’t answer because the greeting was so quiet and lugubrious. “Bart?”

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “Fine …”

  “Thanks for last night.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’ve just gone through the material—”

  An abrupt silence. Then Fred overheard Bart talking to someone else.

  “I’ll get back to him—Fred? Sorry. Uh, I, uh, looked over the proposals. They’re good, but—I don’t think this kind of market is looking for this sort of book. I mean, we wouldn’t be attacking the point of least resistance. This is sort of paperback-original material. You can make good money in that, but I think we should be trying for more. We are a complete agency, we like to develop books that have a long life—hardcover, soft, good foreign sales, movies, television. I don’t like to automatically cut off those things. Uh …”

  Fred stared at the edge of Formica where it met the corner of his stainless-steel sink. There was a brown line of decay caused by moisture. He had never noticed it before. He saw himself standing in the living room of a forty-story building, sandwiched between row after row of hustling baby-boom middle-class thirty-year-olds, living off their salaries, subscribing to New York Magazine, feeling close to the rich, close to the famous, with the roar of the main pump of life’s most exciting engine in their ears. Until Bart had opened his mouth to deliver that talk. Fred thought he was about to be finely polished and screwed into the glistening motor of New York, his name typeset for the appropriate columns and invitation lists. These words of Bart’s were really a death sentence, a lifetime lease in this row of plasterboard mediocrity.

  Bart was still talking: “… we need something sharper for you, with greater—”

  “I have another idea,” Fred blurted.

  Silence. Then, “Uh-huh.”

  “Would you like to hear it?” Fred asked, not sure whether Bart would say yes.

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to write a male version of The Women’s Room. I want to show that men aren’t shits. There’s all this talk about monogamy and men fucking around when they hit forty. All that. The truth, and what no one is saying, is that men aren’t able to be monogamous. Women can be. Men fall in love and they’re horny, but those are two different things.” Fred blurted this out and then suddenly had nothing to say. He waited. This was his last flare. Either Bart slowed his huge liner and rescued him from his waterlogged lifeboat, or steered past and left Fred to die of thirst in an ocean of water.

  “Well,” Bart said after a moment. “That could be interesting. But I need to hear a plot, something more.”

  “See, I want to follow two people my age from their romance in college up to now, show all the stuff, the political years, the drug years, becoming professionals, the touchy-feely psychology of the seventies. You know I want to do all the junk that is on Phil Donahue and in the Living Section of the Times, and then show how it’s all down to this one basic difference.”

  “Mmmm.”
Bart fell silent, then spoke as if startled. “I think this has potential. Can you come up with enough of a story to write a proposal?”

  “Sure!” Fred said happily.

  “All right. There are several editors I can think of who are right. Bob Sand at Flanders, Carrie Winston at Ingrams. I’ll light a fire under them while you get started on the proposal.”

  “How long should it be?”

  “With this kind of story, don’t get too involved with plot details. Focus on how it’s a response to the feminist novel. That’s the hook. I have to go … get this in quickly, Fred, it could be very exciting.”

  “Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”

  He was saved! Spinning out of the darkness, from the towering deck of the luxury liner, landing with a plop in the waters of obscurity, came Fred’s lifesaver. He stopped only to pour a cup of coffee before he was at his typewriter. Nothing delayed or dismayed him as the pages appeared, blackened with his ideas, littering his desk while he invented effortlessly. It had never been like this before—he knew this story by heart. After all, it was the story of his marriage. And when a doubting voice wondered how Marion would feel about her life being thus exposed, Fred reminded himself that no great writer had ever hesitated to make a sacrifice of his life. At last, it had happened. Fred was in that great company of geniuses and artists. He was struggling to get over the railing, still soaked by the brackish water—but the liner had stopped and was ready for boarding.

  David Bergman felt very much in demand. Writers from every section either dropped by or phoned. Two senior editors from the back of the book asked him to stop by their offices, and when he did, they too discussed the rumor. This sort of thing was general in the building that day. No one seemed to be working on the magazine.

  None of the talk implied danger for David. Someone even suggested David might be promoted because of all the shifting around that would necessarily result from firing the editor in chief and replacing him from within, namely the managing editor. Someone would have to replace him, and someone the person he had replaced, and so on, in a complicated series of moves.