Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  Marion, to his surprise, smiled. “You’d turn into a humongous dumpling.” she said, patting his flabby belly. “I can’t eat Chinese again.”

  Fred beamed. “How about pizza?” And then guffawed at himself.

  “What a diet,” Marion said, and walked into the kitchen, opening the freezer, only to frown at its contents. “You want hot dogs?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Oh yeah. That’s much healthier than pizza.”

  Marion laughed and looked at him affectionately. He walked over, putting his arms around her and kissing her, like he did when they dated in college, his tongue out, pushing into her mouth rudely, anxiously selling his desire to penetrate her. Marion welcomed this embrace without enthusiasm, but with a gentle touch on the back of his neck. He broke off at this response and looked in her eyes. “I love you,” he said almost in a tone of apology.

  She smiled sweetly.

  The phone rang. Marion sagged. “You get it,” she said, her eyes looking pained at the sound of the second ring.

  “Hello,” Fred said cheerfully into the kitchen wall phone.

  “Hello, Fred? It’s Tom Lear.”

  “Oh.” A jolt went through him; a shock of transition. “Hello.”

  “I got your message. Listen, thanks for thinking of me. I really appreciate it.”

  He’s going to say no, Fred thought, and he felt the dark troubles of the world stir, a monster growling in the slime.

  “It should be a great game,” Fred said, hoping to appease the beast, remind it of its self-interest. Could Tom be so disdainful that even to sit next to Fred would spoil a superb basketball game?

  “Great? It’s the game of the year! Game of the century! At least—it’s the best game this week.”

  Fred laughed, but feebly. Suddenly he was uncertain of defeat. Tom sounded natural, at ease. Maybe he was going to accept.

  “Anyway,” Tom went on, “I do want to go to the game …”

  Here it comes, Fred thought.

  “… and I would have loved going with you, because you’re a real Knick fan, but I already accepted an invite from Sam Billings, the producer of my movie. He’s invited me into the studio’s box. I could beg off to do something else, but I think he’d be insulted if he spotted me there with you.”

  “The tickets I have are courtside,” Fred pleaded. “Do you know where the private boxes are? They’re way up top. In fact, they’re built above the cheap seats.”

  “Oh, I’ve been in the box before. You’re right, they’re terrible seats. Only good thing about it is the private bar. Most people end up watching the game on the TV in the box. Most ridiculous thing in the world. Go to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks on television.”

  “I don’t think your producer would spot us.”

  “Oh, if your tickets are courtside, the way I jump up and down, they’re sure to notice.” Tom laughed at himself. Fred did not. Tom cut himself off at the lack of response. “No, I’m kidding. I know he probably wouldn’t. But if, by some chance, he did, it would be very embarrassing. Anyway, I was going to suggest that you come up to the box at halftime and have a drink. Meet whoever’s there. Maybe a starlet or two.” Tom laughed. “I assume you won’t bring the wife.”

  Who am I going to bring? Fred wondered. Especially if he planned on visiting the box. He could hardly invite his old childhood friend Pete. Pete still used words like “farout” and “heavy.” “Um, I don’t think she wants to.” he said, not loudly. Marion was standing nearby, laying out hot dogs on a frying pan. Marion might want to go but Fred wasn’t sure he wanted her to come along. Not because he had any illusions about picking up starlets: he had an uneasy sense he didn’t want her on his arm in a private box at Madison Square Garden. It was a peculiar feeling. Marion, after all, was bright and well-spoken.

  “Well, whomever you bring, come up at halftime. It’s Box Nine. All right? I have to rush out to meet someone for a drink. Thanks again for the offer. I’ll be courtside in spirit.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “See you at the game.” He rang off.

  Fred hung up slowly. Marion opened a can of baked beans, pulling back the metal lid with a scraping noise. “Who was that?”

  “Tom Lear.”

  “About the poker game?”

  “No. He was inviting me to join him at one of the private boxes at the Garden.”

  “Really?” Marion looked surprised. And pleased.

  “Yeah. What’s so amazing about that?”

  “I didn’t know you were friends.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess I’m the only person at the game who’s a basketball fan.”

  “So what did you say? Are we going to go?”

  Fred stared at her. “Uh …”

  Marion’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t ask if I could come,” she said, making an accusation, not asking.

  “No, it isn’t that.” Fred felt stupid. He had let her think Tom had instigated this, and judging from her reaction, he would be teased if she found out the reverse was true. Now he had a particular reason for not wanting her to come. If she stayed home, he could keep her false impression intact.

  “Oh, there isn’t room!” Marion said, pleased, a student guessing right on a difficult quiz. “He’s taking you.”

  “Right,” Fred said. “Do you mind? I can call him back and cancel.”

  “No, of course not. You always get to go to the good things. I’ll just stay home alone. Again.” This sort of teasing was unlike Marion. Her mood had unaccountably changed since her outburst over his lack of attention to domestic details.

  “Since when do you want to go to a basketball game? I can always get us tickets, you know.”

  “I’m kidding. I wanted to see what one of those boxes is like. And I’d like to meet Tom Lear.”

  “You would?” This, too, surprised Fred. Marion made fun of other people for wanting to meet the well-known. She called Tony Winter a “star-fucker” with the contemptuous-ness of someone who wouldn’t look up from the newspaper to glance at Greta Garbo dancing with Howard Hughes.

  “He’s a good writer. I loved his book.”

  Fred fell silent at this. He watched her heat the beans and turn the franks, thinking that he should say something, lest she decide he was made jealous by her praise of another writer. He wasn’t. He also admired Tom Lear. His quiet came from feeling how distant he was from being spoken of that way. He thought of his half-finished manuscript, of his uncertainty whether it had any merit, or how he had not only been made to feel unwelcome at the poker game, but had actually been barred. Tom Lear was about his age, didn’t seem to know more, or to speak better—there seemed so little difference between them. And yet Fred felt that if Tom had been born a king in the eighteenth century and he a peasant, there couldn’t have been a greater gulf between them.

  After dinner, Marion said she had some editing to do, and he returned to his study to write more. He was still at his desk when she took a bath. He was rewriting the opening paragraph for the twentieth time when she came in her nightgown to kiss him good night.

  He rubbed her belly through the soft material and felt hard immediately. He kissed her, his tongue pushing in and out anxiously, while he roughly sneaked a hand inside her neckline and reached for a breast. She pulled away, giggling at the feel of his cold fingers. “I have to go to sleep,” she said, smiling to soften the rejection.

  “Okay,” he said, and his eyes went to the pages in front of him.

  “Don’t go to bed too late.” she said.

  “Okay,” he answered, already hypnotized by his words, prepared to sit up through the lonely hours of the night, until, exhausted by the fever of his ambition, he could slide beside his wife and listen enviously to the tranquil breathing of her sleep.

  David noticed an ambition had been realized without a clear moment for its recognition. He was a senior editor. Syms had moved along with his old boss to another magazine, and four weeks ago David’s temporary position senior-editin
g Business had been made permanent. His dinner was conceived as a kind of celebration, a social confirmation of his elevated work status, but it had felt to him more like the opening gong of a new fight. Somehow, because of his eyeglasses breaking, an illusion of danger had been created in his mind. Until his joke broke the sense that he was an object of analysis by the others, a figure of affectionate amusement, like a three-year-old running in the buff through a group of loving but condescending relatives, David had the feeling that he had won nothing through his promotion.

  Indeed, was he any less a prisoner of the magazine as a senior editor than he had been as a writer? The Marx Brothers now directly vetoed his story ideas instead of doing so through a proxy. True, he could now argue his own case rather than rely on the persuasiveness of someone else, but the dull logic of national newsmagazine writing always triumphed. If interest rates fell below ten percent, could he choose to ignore it in favor of a possibly more significant but less visible phenomenon such as the world-debt crisis? No, he would have to wait until Argentina or Mexico actually defaulted before ordering a piece on its significance. He could, and had, succeeded in getting a sidebar (a two-column box in a different color and bordered by a black rule) explaining that the Federal Reserve might have loosened because of the debt fears, leading to lower rates—flatly contradicting the cover story, which gave credit for the lower rates to the economic recovery. But his predecessor would have fought and gotten just such a story. Such frustrations were constant. He knew, for example, that a shakeout in the computer industry was coming—all business insiders knew it—and he wanted to do the story now, not in three months when the Weekly, Business Week, and everybody else would be doing it because the rash of bankruptcies had begun.

  But isn’t my complaint foolish? he asked himself. Here I am, a journalist, bitching that I’m a prisoner of events. The illusion of being an essayist, created by the circumstance of working at a weekly news organization whose appeal had to be one of summarizing, analyzing, and predicting the effect of events, since it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of newspapers, much less television’s blood-spattering “live” coverage, was just that—an illusion which made the editors of Newstime delusional; persuaded them that not only should they reach for a deeper understanding of American life than the rest of journalism, but that they actually possessed profound insights. Indeed. David himself could make the argument that his desire to jump the event of the computer shakeout was nothing more than publishing an insider consensus, which could, like so many others, turn out to be wrong: “experts” predicting the obvious because of its safe logic, making error easy to defend.

  But is there any genius in editing by noticing what was on the front pages of every newspaper, and the lead item on the network news, and then ordering a story on the same subject? Was this a talent to be eulogized at the end of a long life? At three o’clock in the morning, staring sleepless into the impenetrable mist of eternity, could this role in life sustain him?

  Patty, looking frail and cold, hunched over her typewriter, doesn’t ask herself such questions, David told himself. Why do I? I make sixty thousand dollars a year, can hire and fire men almost twice my age, and, if things go well can look forward to promotions that will lead to the top of my profession. Would he trade places with her, writing a trivial and silly entertainment for frustrated housewives? Did he want Tony Winters’ life, writing a tap dance for pretty Midwes-terners who had caught the public’s fancy with their epoxy teeth and surgically perfect breasts? All work is contemptible if judged by my standards, David decided.

  Patty’s legs are short, he noticed. Thin and smooth now, but her thighs had potential for stockiness, he thought. With age, motherhood, the inevitable gaining of weight, youth sagging under the burden of time passing, they might someday be thick: the hearty legs of a Waspy, leather-skinned worshiper of a good time. Wasn’t that her real nature? he challenged himself.

  She liked to play tennis, lie on the beach, chat with girlfriends over lunch—what separated her from a woman of her mother’s generation and class was a taste for modern clothes, dance, and sexual openness. And the willingness to marry a Jew. Perhaps, he cautioned himself. How did he know she’d marry him? He assumed it, of course, but was that based on anything besides egotism and a sexist assumption that all women want the legal commitment? He believed her crankiness about money was a passive request for a proposal. If they were married, his supporting her wouldn’t make her uncomfortable, he reasoned. She wouldn’t feel she owed him anything then, especially if she were the mother of his children.

  Three months ago he would have married her gladly. She had brightened his gloomy, windowless existence, taking down the dusty curtains and opening the shutters, ventilating the smoky air of his recirculated ambitions and lighting the small lonely darkness of his obsession with Newstime. He felt free during the early months of their relationship. The nervous energy of sex had been drained and left him cheerful, his mind relaxed, taking all things, from washing dishes to reading and rereading the blues, as though they were equal pleasures. Instead of worrying whether his senior editorship would become permanent, he worked at his new duties with interest and full concentration, too content with life to fuss over whether it was secure or sufficient. He handled the writers who were now under him, men who used to be his peers, many of them older (who no doubt believed they should be in his spot), effortlessly, sure of his command. He wielded the sword of power so gracefully and gently that no one heard it cut the air or noticed its blade. He found himself complimenting and encouraging the writers, flattering them into making changes eagerly, not because he had figured this as a strategy, but because he felt generous. To them, to himself, to the city, to life—he wished everything well, wanting nothing to dispel the beautiful surface of his contented life. Patty, with her big eyes always there to listen as if he were a magic bird carrying jewels in his beak instead of tired office politics; with her full lips, always slightly apart, wet, as though he were a delicious candy she wanted to have melting inside her; Patty lying beside him every night with her slight slim body outfitted with the big warm breasts of a voluptuous seductress. Had he been threatened for an instant with losing her, he would have torn his clothes like a grieving peasant and raved at God for his injustice.

  But now he was a stranger to that love, so far from those feelings that he would have denied he had ever had them. Patty’s attentiveness began to cloy. He began to suspect her of not paying attention to what he said, despite her glistening awed eyes. He noticed she asked the same questions about his colleagues no matter how many times he had already given a definitive answer. Once he caught himself in the middle of telling her a long story about Chico that he distinctly remembered having already reported. But she had leaned forward eagerly throughout, exclaiming at the appropriate moments, as though it were all new. He stopped himself and accused her. She flatly denied having heard the anecdote before, but from her flustered manner he knew she was lying. When he insisted, she revealed what he now believed was her real feeling about him: “All your Newstime stories sound the same. You can’t blame me for not knowing the difference.” Of course that was said in anger. She apologized later and took it back. “I love your office politics.” she said in bed, opening her warm mouth and taking his mouth hungrily, as though to suck his soul out. He let her and fucked her with his usual passion, but lying awake later while she curled her legs around him and fell asleep, he decided the apology was the lie. And though the taste of her was still on his tongue, and his penis lay wet with her moisture, she had become a stranger.

  The unity dissolved. He carried loneliness to work again, the job no longer a matter of killing time until he could be with Patty, but a chance to relax: not to have to watch everything he said, and judge her reaction, waiting for more hints of secretly held contempt.

  Within a few weeks, every speech, every response, had become suspect. He believed her adulterous—not with another man, but with a low opinion of him. That wa
s the lover he tried to catch red-handed, seducing her. He had had many successes at this morbid detective work. Tonight had been notable. From her joking that she had agreed to live with David because of the terrible apartment shortage in New York to her thrilled laughter at his myopic placement of the coffee cup into the cake.

  Everyone had laughed when she claimed she had moved in with him because finding an apartment at a reasonable rent was impossible, as though to admit behavior so crudely

  opportunistic proved it was untrue. But was it? David believed Patty was unconscious of her base motives, unable to see herself clearly, but the truth slipped out past the sentries of self-esteem and tact, under the disguise of her humor. The reason she could make life sound so amusing was this half-aware truth-telling: a cheerful cynic, absolving sins even as she confessed them. If he walked over now and accused her of getting involved with him so quickly because it was convenient, she would have been stunned, outraged he could think so little of her. If he cited her own comments, she would have contemptuously told him she had been kidding. Her humorous confessions made the blade of truth retractable. She came wielding a knife, but it landed softly, a stage prop providing only a split second of real fright, releasing its audience from terror at its penetration, to childlike joy at the wonder of inventive fakery. Look at that, she left everyone saying, he isn’t dead, he isn’t even wounded.

  David squinted contemptuously in her direction. Her spine rippled as she hunched over the typewriter. Her long hair curved away from her neck, disappearing to fall on the other side of her shoulder. He could imagine it covering her thick nipple and warm breast. He knew, though he couldn’t see in his blinded state, there were very blond, almost invisible hairs at the base of her long neck right above the first rung of her vertebrae. He had often fallen asleep with his lips almost caressing them, his exhausted penis nestled in the firm silk of her ass. … Yes, she is a killer—but the gun is loaded with blanks.