Tony thought about this and then shook his head wonderingly. “Seems like a Rube Goldberg way of going about it. You hire somebody to watch somebody you hired. It’s bizarre.”
“Who’s your agent?”
“Gloria Fowler.”
Lois looked impressed. “She’s the kind of agent who’s got so many name clients that somebody like you might hire a manager to call her and bug her. Saves you the embarrassment. But it’s not something writers do. Actors do it. A writer only needs attention on one or two projects at most.”
There was a silence. Tony realized he had wanted to be with Lois to gather this sort of information. His mother and father could have supplied him with these details of the movie business, but he didn’t want to ask them, to give them the pleasure of playing at being his teachers. She had him here for sex. Or something. Maybe just company. But he wanted facts. He was scared to walk into that meeting tomorrow without knowing something, anything, about how Hollywood operated.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“What?” she said with a smile. She looked different now. The hard angles of her high cheeks were softer here in the dim light of her Spanish living room.
“I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight. I don’t like strange hotel rooms …”
She smiled, her eyes opening wide. He realized she suspected he was going to proposition her. So he hurried on:
“… and I’ve got this big meeting tomorrow. I don’t know shit about this business. Maybe you don’t either. But I’d like to tell you about the meeting and if there’s any advice you could give me, I’d appreciate it.”
Lois looked him in the eyes for a moment. Searched earnestly for an answer to something. “I know the feature business. I haven’t worked in it, but I know a lot about it. A …” She hesitated. “A guy I went out with is a top executive at International Pictures. All he talked about was the infighting, the deals. I had it coming out of my ears.”
“And that wasn’t what you wanted to come out of your ears, right?”
She nodded wearily. “Right.” She got up and stretched. Tony looked at her thin body arch: her stomach hollowed and her ribs showed; her pelvis pressed against the fitted pants; she was lean like a racing dog or a long-distance runner. “But you knew that, didn’t you?” she said casually, like an interrogator playing a trump card.
“Knew what?”
“About him,” Lois said.
“The guy at International?”
She nodded, closing her eyes angrily, as if she was disappointed that he pretended not to know her meaning.
“How would I know about him? I don’t get it.”
“From Billy.”
“Oh …” Tony nodded. “Boy, you are paranoid. You think I came here, pretended to be interested in you, because I knew you knew somebody at International.” Lois looked embarrassed but didn’t deny it. “Think about it,” Tony went on. “Does that make any sense? If I needed information that badly, wouldn’t I get it from my parents? Is this town that crazy? You want to know what’s really going on? Is my behavior confusing you?”
Lois stood still, obviously nonplussed. She thought she had him figured twice. First, he was a philandering husband; then, a scheming opportunist. Both times she was wrong. She looked as if that was rare for her. “I work in TV,” she said after a moment. “We’re used to very simple motivations.”
Tony laughed. He liked her a lot for that: it was clever, a quality he found sexy. “Okay, but I don’t know what my motivation is. I’m scared to be here. Not in your house. I mean in LA. This place brings up a lot of bad memories. I’ve been having a tough time with my plays. I haven’t had a hit off-Broadway. Never even been close to making Broadway. Gloria Fowler told me if I could cinch this deal, get this movie made, the studio might help finance my next play. Get some heat behind my name, maybe intimidate investors into backing me. I don’t know what she meant. It was vague. Maybe I’m a fool to believe her. I wouldn’t know. I don’t really know whether this Bill Garth project is a hot project or not. I don’t want to ask my parents. They’ll be too thrilled that I’m working in their business—I don’t want them to be thrilled about me. I didn’t know anything about you and this guy at International. I haven’t spoken to Billy in years. He drove me to Joe Allen’s and we talked about some episode he wrote for Mom’s show. He assumed I’d seen it. I hadn’t—”
Lois laughed. “What! You mean you haven’t seen the Emmy-winning car-wreck episode!” She burst out laughing again. “I love it. That’s great. Must have driven him crazy.”
“It did. Is it terrible of me?”
“No, of course not.” She moved to the uncomfortable couch and sat next to him. Not seductively. But like a close friend, unselfconsciously, leaning forward eagerly to pursue interesting gossip. “He thinks of you as a real writer. No doubt he had this fantasy when you called that it was because you knew about his success and admired him.”
“Oh.” Tony thought about this. “Well, I guess I’m too snobbish to ever admire somebody ’cause of TV writing. I mean, if theater didn’t have the compensation of making me feel superior, how could I stand the obscurity and poverty?”
Lois smiled. “Look, obviously I don’t know you very well, but I have gotten one thing straight about you. You think playwrighting is a calling, a religion. You’re not a snob. You believe in it.” She said this with frank admiration. Tony was pleased: he believed the compliment. “Anyway, tell me about the meeting.”
“Well, I’m supposed to have breakfast tomorrow morning at the Polo Lounge—”
She smiled. “Very good so far. Polo Lounge is good.”
“Is that more important than who’s at the meeting?”
“Probably.”
“I see. Well, it’s supposed to be with Bill Garth—”
“He’s actually going to be there?”
Tony hesitated. “What do you mean? Doesn’t he usually show up for meetings?”
Lois leaned back and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “He has a reputation for committing to projects, then firing lots of writers, I don’t know for sure—my friend at International hated him. Claimed that Garth screwed up project after project by never being satisfied with the script.”
“But Garth makes movies—so obviously he’s eventually satisfied,” Tony reasoned.
“Yeah, but usually they’re not scripts Garth himself has developed. I asked if he would be there because I was hoping this was a project International was developing for him, rather than he developing it for them.”
Tony shook his head as if he were trying to clear it of confusion. “Jesus, I’d better get on the next plane home.”
“No, no. Don’t let me frighten—”
“I’m not frightened. I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. Whoever heard of an actor not wanting to get something on? It makes no sense! It’s the opposite of everything I understand.”
“It’s ’cause Garth’s on top. He’s won an Academy Award. He’s had hits. Every script in town is offered to him. If he decides he wants to work, he’ll work. If he doesn’t like the script, they’ll change it. He doesn’t like the director, they’ll fire him. It’s a position most actors never get to—so his psychology is turned upside down. Instead of the studio vacillating, he vacillates. His power, all of it, resides in making a decision to do a movie. Once he commits himself, he loses his power. The film editor and the director can cut his scenes—”
“What? He doesn’t get final cut?”
Lois hesitated. “You know, you got me. I don’t know. If he demanded it, especially of a studio that needed a hit, he’d probably get it. See that?” she said with a smile, turning to him and putting her hand on his arm. “You stumped the expert.”
He smiled at her. Her hand felt warm and friendly. They looked into each other’s eyes. Tony’s contempt and distrust of her was gone. She seemed human now: the hard-angled leanness of a Hollywood bitch had softened in the dim light of her Spanish fantasy. His
suspicion that she was a dull, opportunistic, and selfish woman had evaporated in the dawning of her kind interest in his worry and her desire to advise him well. There was nothing of the one-upmanship toward Billy, nothing of the cynical pose at dinner of someone who believes that Copernicus was wrong: that the earth actually revolves around money. Once he had made it clear he didn’t want sex from her, she had relaxed and become ordinary. And, of course, now he had to admit it to himself: now. as their eyes searched each other’s, he did want to make love.
David moved carefully, lifting Patty’s arm off his waist. She had gone to sleep with his wet penis in her hand, her body pressed against him, their legs entwined, and her head resting in the crook of his arm. It was as if she wanted to merge with his body, melt into him; there was something forlorn about her clinging to him. She had serviced him, her mouth loving his prick until he climaxed. There had been no complaint that he brought her to orgasm lackadaisically with his hand. She had acted grateful for his presence, as if she felt lucky even to have him there.
David got her arm off him and then slowly disengaged his leg. She stirred at that and turned around, her slim silky buttocks angled into him. She has a beautiful body, he told himself wonderingly. Wonderingly, because it was the kind of body that he had lusted for in high school and college and had never succeeded in getting. Now he had it and there was no sense of triumph or delight. The fantasy was no better than the reality—Patty was fabulous in bed. Her golden-haired vagina was moist and pink, her breasts firm, her stomach fiat and yet soft, her hips smooth but flowingly curved.
And she was so yielding! Her mouth was a willing slave, opening abjectly for his tongue, his penis, swallowing whatever he chose to inject. Why didn’t this thrill him? Wasn’t it his dream?
He couldn’t claim, as he tried to convince himself after their first and second dates, that she was merely a dumb blond, a mind and soul too numb to feel deeply or understand his life. Patty was bright, maybe not intellectual, but he had never liked that in women or men. She exuded cheerfulness and wit, qualities he not only enjoyed but also considered rare. Why weren’t these additions to her delicious body a cause for celebration? He ought to be madly in love, he told himself. To have this beautiful and charming woman cling to him was a great piece of good fortune. But he felt lonely in her presence. Lonely and false, as if he weren’t really experiencing the sex and the conversation, as if he were in disguise, reaping rewards that justly belonged to someone else.
This thought frightened him. He felt a chill of horror, as if his soul was about to break out and spin into the black universe, divorced from human life.
David moved and hugged Patty’s back, putting his arms around her waist. She moved and hugged his arms to her, saying, out of a half-sleep, “Mmmm.”
He put his cheek against her smooth back and pushed out any thought, absorbing her warmth. His fingers stroked her soft belly. He brushed her pubic hair and she arched up, catching his hand in her pelvis.
He moved quickly, in the dark, down, pushing his face in her buttocks. She opened her legs and rolled on her back, moaning in a sleepy voice as he put his mouth to her vagina.
He knelt on the bed and quickly, in desperate and frightened movements, licked her. Almost immediately she was wet, with that ferocious moisture her body could summon instantly. He pushed his mouth and nose and chin up and down, from side to side, obliterating the terrible memory of that vision of spiritual death.
He had no idea how long it took. It seemed only moments before her body kicked and heaved, her mouth making sounds of release. He felt intense pleasure at her pleasure, at letting her squeeze his head between her thighs.
After her climax, she pulled him up and kissed his mouth, wet from her sex. He looked into her eyes and said with great feeling:
“I love you.”
He was astonished that her reaction was to hold him close, hugging him as if he were a long-lost savior. He glanced at her face and saw there was the beginning of tears in her eyes.
Seeing her happiness, he felt the dreaded emptiness return, and regretted that he had spoken.
CHAPTER 6
Fred looked at his checkbook. In the dim fluorescent light of Karl’s bathroom he saw that the balance was one hundred and twenty-four dollars and sixty-seven cents. It was eleven-thirty, a half-hour before people would be permitted to quit, and he was down, by his rough calculation, close to two hundred dollars. He had the money. Marion and he had a ten-thousand-dollar certificate of deposit, and he had eight thousand in stocks with his broker. But when he had told Marion he was going to forgo magazine assignments for a year, they had done a strict budget so that they could live on her salary with only occasional intrusions into the eighteen thousand they had in the bank. Fred had repeatedly gone over the set limits, using up four thousand in three months. This two hundred would be seen by Marion as an idiotic extravagance, if for no other reason than that he would have to break the ten-thousand-dollar CD.
“But I would have had to break it for the rent check anyway,” Fred argued to Karl’s bathroom mirror. “It’s ridiculous,” he answered the imagined rage of Marion. “We have fourteen thousand dollars and you’re making me feel poor.”
He heard his name called from the dining room, where Karl had set up the game. He stared into the mirror and said, “Wake up!” and then yanked open the bathroom door and stormed down the long narrow hallway. He saw a bubble of paint at the end of the hall. Karl lived in a pre-World War II building on West End Avenue. And though many elegant details remained—marble fireplace, elaborate moldings, sliding wood doors that separated the large dining and living rooms—the building wasn’t being kept up, and Karl’s place had many patches of peeling and cracked paint. Karl was the big winner that night, up over two hundred dollars, and as Fred made the turn out of the hallway, he hit his fist against the bubble of paint, shattering it into pieces that fell on the floor.
Entering the room, Fred could see a cloud of cigarette smoke that hung like an evil ghost over the table. There were several cups and plates swollen by mounds of ashes. The dead butts lay in them like drowned insects. The blue, red, and white poker chips blared their colors in this fog, either arrogantly stacked for precise counting by winners, or slumping, disheveled, in front of losers. Fred had a messy pile, a very small one, in front of his empty seat.
The other players were all writers he had met casually once or twice before at dinners with Karl or at publication parties Marion had been invited to. They were, in order of prominence, Sam Wasserman, the former investigative reporter who, with the publication of a bestselling book on the murder of a middle-class young woman, had become more than a reporter and less than a novelist, and, while writing additional factual but very melodramatic books on other fancy murders, wrote a regular column for Town magazine that had a broad range from political commentary to complaints about the service at Bloomingdale’s; next down the ladder of success was Tom Lear, also a former reporter, who had sold a piece on a crack New York city detective to the movies, wrote the screenplay—while several carping stories appeared claiming the detective in Lear’s article had taken credit for other people’s achievements—and it was now being shot on location in New York; a rung farther down was Paul Goldblum, who had published two highly praised but unprofitable novels, but had received a National Endowment grant and a plum creative-writing teaching job at Columbia University; staring up at his rear end Was Richard Trout, a New York Times Metro reporter and nothing else, but he talked ceaselessly of a book he planned to write on the recently notorious murder of a local congressman who was rumored to be gay; and, last, William Truman, a childhood friend of Karl’s, who was a poet—publishing mostly in academic journals no one read—and supported himself with the aid of an enormous trust fund whose source was his grandfather’s investment in real estate (Fred had been told that Grandpa Truman once owned half of Ohio).
“Bong!” Sam Wasserman said on Fred’s entrance. “Final round.”
�
��Come on!” Paul Goldblum said. “You’re not quitting at midnight.”
“I gotta get home and finish my column,” Sam said in a grave tone, like a surgeon announcing he had a patient on the table waiting for an emergency operation.
Tom Lear, the only writer present who felt himself equal in stature to Wasserman, let out a loud Bronx cheer.
Karl smiled nervously. “It’s your deal, Fred.”
“Those of us who still have to write prose, instead of that stuff with skinny margins—” Sam Wasserman began to say angrily to Tom Lear, the reporter turned screenwriter.
William Truman, the poet, interjected quietly, “Don’t forget, poetry has skinny—”
But Lear was already answering Sam: “I’m sorry, Sam, I forgot. You’re still a serious writer. You haven’t sold out like me.”
“Damn right—” Sam began.
But Lear rolled on, “What’s your column this month? Comparing lambskin rubbers to ribbed rubbers? Or maybe you’re gonna take on somebody heavy, like another attack on Joe Garagiola?”
Fred guffawed, opening his mouth and leaning back with enjoyment. Wasserman looked at him: it was a cold and angry look. Sam’s attitude toward Lear was combative but friendly. When he spoke now to Fred, it was with the contempt people reserve for irritating inferiors: “Deal the cards. Or don’t you know how to do that either?”
This comment silenced everyone—it was too openly hostile, cruelly dismissive, exposing Fred’s vulnerability. Everyone knew that an attack on Fred’s playing was really a statement directed at his being a social interloper. At least Fred thought everyone believed it was.
“Okay, okay,” Fred said, his face reddening.
“That’s what I like about you, Sam,” Tom Lear said. “You win so gracefully.”
Fred shuffled and dealt in silence. Most of the game had been that way. The dialogue was limited to macho exchanges referring to the strategies or outcomes of hands. But it was the just-completed exchange, until it was suddenly directed at him, that Fred had hoped would dominate the evening. He loved being with these guys. Even Sam’s contempt for him didn’t lessen his desire to hang on to this group. If anything, it whetted his desire to stay.
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