Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  Finally he was brought in. Holder got up energetically, saying, “Sorry I kept you waiting. There’s been a disaster here today with a manuscript. It was delivered to the wrong …” He waved his hand at the air, dismissing it. “Sorry. Anyway, I won’t have a chance to talk to you, because I’ve got a meeting in a half-hour and I have to return calls … I’m way behind.” He picked up Fred’s manuscript from his desk, revealing a sweater with the elbow eaten through by the moth of his nervous manner. The first page of Fred’s one hundred pages was marked in numerous places and there were so many yellow flags sticking out (markers placed on the edge of the pages to indicate places where Holder had made changes or queried something) that it looked like a badly made paper duck. “I found a lot of things I didn’t like. I still love the basic idea. I’ve showed where I think things go wrong and what you should do about them. Obviously, you may not agree and want to drop the contract. But read it over, take your time, and let me know if you can make the changes. Then we’ll meet again and I’ll make sure I have plenty of time to talk.” Holder held out the tattered object with a touch of regret, as though he were surrendering something he wanted to hold on to.

  Fred stared at it for a second, a skeptical pedestrian peering at a flier thrust at him. He reached for it slowly, took it gingerly, afraid to bend the yellow stickers—there was hardly room to grasp his pages without bending one of them. He looked into Holder’s eyes and said, “I’ll make any changes you want.”

  Holder nodded, seeming neither surprised nor confirmed in his expectation. “Good boy,” he said.

  In Chico’s siege of Rounder’s job, David Bergman played the role of a keeper of secrets, an overzealous agent of the usurped prince, working to return the just to power. David’s intense dislike of Rounder, this stupid blue-eyed blond who had smiled and blundered his way into a job that rightfully belonged to men who had come up the ladder that David was now climbing, seemed at times greater than Chico’s. David stirred the already churning envy in Chico’s soul on a daily basis. He kept a precise inventory of the institutional injustice that was Chico’s lot and waved it in his face to enrage him further. In return, he learned the last remaining intimacies of Animal Crackers, and was told the status and presumptive fate of every employee, each time sworn to silence.

  And though this made him a great friend of Chico’s, his distance from his peers widened. He could not cheerfully drink and joke with men above whom the sword of Newstime’s wrath hung, no matter how invisible its presence to the victim. Nor could he resist, through slow hints and comments to Chico, corrupting the good opinion the Marx Brothers held of his rivals, whether their judgments were correct or not. In the dim light of morning, feeling lonely and repentant, David would swear to stop his machinations, but like an addict, he was seduced by Chico’s eager face, promising rewards of power and information and he let the drug flow freely between them.

  He was using Chico. Ironically, Chico no doubt believed the reverse was true, that he had made an ally of a bright young talent. Thus even David’s one remaining intimate relationship at the magazine was founded on a lie, that he was a soldier in Chico’s battle to defeat Rounder, while in fact he used his position to keep his rivals down. He didn’t admit any of this to Patty, and lived in the loft, skulking among its painted columns and soaring walls, alone with his loathing for himself.

  Nor did he dare tell anyone of his sexual obsession. During late nights at the magazine, he carefully arranged things to be free when the show with the pornographic ads came on, closing his door and turning on his television (a perk of senior editors), watching it with his face only inches from the screen so that he could switch channels instantly if someone knocked on the door.

  He began to notice at newsstands that there were magazines with photos of women in leather outfits, standing over chained men who writhed in mock abject pain. He would see words blazoned across the covers: bondage, sex, slave, discipline. They had magic for him, stunning his brain into dumbfounded stares, drying his mouth, awakening his otherwise dulled genitals. He looked for newsstands that carried such magazines and tried to calculate the likelihood that someone he knew might walk in if he were to attempt a purchase. There simply was no way to know. The only measure of safety he could give himself was to do the buying out of both his loft’s and Newstime’s neighborhoods. His other temptation was to call Mistress Regina as she ordered her slaves to do. He wanted to laugh at it, the stupid name, the bad camerawork, the lamely delivered lines, but there was no comedy in his desire, no objective higher ground for his mind to climb. He was stuck, transfixed by the secret lust, and paralyzed by its equally covert twin, his self-disgust at giving in.

  His job, the actual editing of the sections under him, became increasingly easy in its challenge, and increasingly elaborate and tedious in its execution. He had eased the task of getting story ideas approved by the Marx Brothers because of his intimacy with Chico, but handling the writers got harder. He fought for three weeks to get a story in on the economics of Disney’s amusement parks (it was a growing problem since Wait’s death and the eighty-two recession, and David wanted to do it before national attention was focused by a takeover), and won, largely because Chico backed him, only to be handed a story by a writer under him. Jeff Nelson, that missed the point and was impossibly dull.

  Nelson was a middle-aged man, a corporate retainer, just above a level of incompetence that would provoke firing, but well below true value. He was joked about regularly, “floated” from section to section, usually dumped on the newest senior editor, the least able to defend himself from being given an albatross. David had Irked Nelson (his relentless pleasantness was an essential reason for his long survival) and did nothing to remove him from his sections because David could assign Nelson stories David himself cared about and then freely rewrite them in his own style without the fuss and hurt feelings that caused the writers who had vestiges of self-respect and ambition still in them.

  But this time Nelson didn’t even do a good job of culling the bureau reports. David couldn’t make a landscape out of the flatly written facts because even they were absent. Besides, the story had come in late, leaving little time for David to request the files himself and go through them, if he also hoped to edit his other sections. “I’ll have to kill the piece,” he said aloud, staring at Nelson’s blues. He thought of how that was going to sound to the Marx Brothers. They had said all along that Disney having problems which hadn’t really surfaced was going to read dull or, worse, incomprehensible, and Nelson’s story was both. But David knew it could be wonderful. People didn’t think of Disney as a business. few knew how white-bread and religious its organization was, what an anomaly it was in the modern world, a feudal empire built by a bizarre man whose death had left it bewildered, an immensely profitable institution whose inner workings were at once silly and spooky. It was the kind of stuff that made him want to be a journalist, revealing the odd and weird nature of things that people took for granted. It was “soft” reporting, despised somewhat, certainly not respected in the way “hard-nosed investigative reporting” is, but it was the kind of writing that it seemed to David was more likely to say something worthwhile, precisely because the information wasn’t startling. Had America really learned anything from Watergate? Hadn’t its monstrous excesses allowed people to take it out of the realm of politics-as-usual and escape its implications about the real nature of government?

  His Power Phone buzzed. “How we doing?” Chico’s voice blared into the room.

  “I got a problem,” David said. Talking to this device on his desk was like speaking to a deity, as though Chico’s spirit inhabited the walls and David was on a mountain pleading for guidance.

  “Come up.”

  David’s relationship with Chico had become so relaxed that he prepared no speech, nor made any attempt at gloss. “Nelson’s story on Disney is a mess. I could redo it—I want to redo it—but it won’t make this issue.”

  “Let’s kill it.
Nation can use the space.”

  “I don’t want to kill it forever—”

  “David, it’s a boring story. Don’t aggravate yourself. Lose it.”

  “It’s not. Nelson is a hack. I don’t know what he’s doing here. What the hell is he doing here? Why hasn’t he been fired?”

  “Costs too much. Fucking Guild. Too much bother. Anyway, he’s all right—”

  “He’s totally incompetent! What do you mean? I have to rewrite every word.”

  “Not every word,” Chico said with a smile, amused by David’s anger.

  “Every fucking word!”

  Chico frowned. He cleared his throat, swiveled his chair away from the desk, and leaned back thoughtfully. David sighed wearily and sat down. “We’ll move him out of your section,” Chico said at last.

  “Yeah? Who’ll take him?”

  Chico laughed. “Somebody’ll take him.”

  “I don’t want to lose the story.”

  “We’ll see if it fits next issue,” Chico said in a dismissive tone and then shifted to his favorite topic: Rounder’s ineptitude. The effects of the new editor in chief’s indecisiveness about cover stories was beginning to be noticed by Mrs. Thorn. The business side had showed her the escalating costs since the new administration took over, overruns caused by closing the magazine late. “The profit margin for the last quarter is a disaster,” Chico said in a hushed voice.

  “Want me to do a story on it?” David asked with a smile.

  “I hear the Journal’s preparing one,” Chico answered, gloating. “It won’t be long now,” he concluded.

  That vision, of their coup d’état’s approaching culmination, soothed David’s dismay at losing the Disney story. He let out some of his anger by calling Nelson on the phone—a trip down the hall would have been the polite way—and saying curtly, “Jeff? We’ve killed the Disney story. It’s dull.”

  “Oh.” Nelson’s fear and shock were palpable in the one word, despite the relative anonymity of the phone. “You don’t want me to try a rewrite?” It was barely a question, and not at all a protest.

  “No. Gotta run,” David said quickly, embarrassed by Nelson’s lack of spunk. He hung up and closed his eyes. He felt so old and inhuman, as though he were a decorative angel on the Newstime building, his smooth white face now lidded by New York’s dirt, the disembodied head yearning for mobility.

  One of the pornographic magazine covers he saw on the way to work came clearly to mind: a tall dark-skinned woman, her long black hair shining, pulling back a kneeling young man’s hair and holding a whip in front of his mouth. Her teeth were gritted, almost in a snarl. The young man’s face was calm, patient, and rapturous, staring into her angry face with the baleful eyes of a faithful dog.

  The memory aroused him. No image or picture of naked women had that effect anymore. He knew it was only a matter of time before the grip of this perverse fascination tightened on the throat of his timidity and strangled it. He flipped his Newstime appointment book to the last page, where he had scrawled Mistress Regina’s phone number. Why wait? Why pretend he could defeat this lust?

  He got up to close the door to his office and moved quickly back to the phone, punching the numbers in fast, hoping to outrun his fear. But his hand froze after the sixth number. Couldn’t his secretary accidentally pick up in the middle of the call? True, he could call on his private line, but the capability for her to listen in still existed. He could wait until she went to lunch.

  His heart was pounding, his face felt hot, the last number on the phone stared at him, challenging. Finally, out of fatigue of balancing on this high-wire of indecision and terror, he let his finger fall, as though gravity made the choice, on the final button.

  He put his finger on the cradle knob to leave himself the option of cutting off the connection instantly while it rang. By the third ring, he relaxed, convinced there would be no answer (always in the back of his mind he had the conviction that Mistress Regina didn’t actually exist), and then she picked up.

  “Hello,” the unmistakable voice said, throaty and angry.

  He swallowed. He had no idea what to say.

  She sighed, irritated. “Well, are you going to talk?”

  Scared out of his wits, he pressed the knob down and then dropped the phone on the cradle like a hot coal. He breathed deeply, a man surfacing from underwater, gasping at life. He must have been holding his breath because he inhaled air quickly, as though he had been severely deprived.

  He carried the sound of her voice home with him. He heard her contemptuous challenge over and over: “Well, are you going to talk?” Was he? He sat silently throughout the dinner Patty had arranged with Tony and Betty. David’s morose condition matched Tony’s sullen mood. The women did most of the talking—a lot of it, to David’s annoyance, about Patty’s novel.

  He managed to ask Tony about his movie project, and though the answer sounded optimistic—(“They’re happy with it. But of course they want changes and I’m doing them.”)—David knew something was wrong. A few months ago he would have been happy to see Tony get his hair mussed and take a fall. But his own disgust and obsession were too powerful.

  He took a kind of pride in his desperation and sorrow. The worries of these people seemed so trivial compared to his. They were like children still, worrying over their grades in school. He was in a battle for his soul.

  Over the weekend, he thought constantly of her, but he stopped watching the cable show and never attempted another call. The moment of real contact had at once deepened his curiosity and increased his timidity.

  On Monday, Rounder asked him to drop by his office after lunch. A private meeting with Rounder was rare and David had no clue as to what it might be about. He tried to reach Chico, but couldn’t. When he arrived at the appointed hour, he was surprised to find Chico also present.

  “Hi, David,” Rounder said cheerfully. “We’ve been discussing your problem with Nelson and, uh … uh, we’ve decided you can replace him. It’ll be expensive, but it’s time to make a change, bring in a new face.”

  “But—” David stopped himself. It had never occurred to him that Chico might act on his complaints. Newstime never took decisive action so quickly. He was appalled that something had been done.

  “That’s what you wanted,” Chico said, frowning at him. He had been beaming before, as though he were presenting a Christmas gift.

  “Yes,” David said. “I was … surprised, that’s all.”

  “My advice is to tell him quickly,” Chico said. “Get the figures from Hal Bunting, you know, his profit-sharing and all of that, to soften the blow.”

  “You mean I tell him?”

  The two Marx Brothers both laughed, not spitefully, but with elderly sympathy. “Welcome to the joys of responsibility,” Rounder said.

  “Yeah, you tell him,” Chico said. “Don’t feel bad. Remember, later on you get to tell some hopeful out there that he’s got his big break—a job at Newstime.”

  Back in his office, once he had the information from Bunting about the compensations for being fired after fifteen years at Newstime—they were considerable—David knew that if he delayed the confrontation, it would become harder. He asked Nelson to come in right away.

  Nelson was a small man anyway, but he looked more shrunken than usual. He came in apologizing: “Sorry about the Disney story. I couldn’t get a fix on it.”

  David nodded. Now that he had the human being in front of him, he had no idea how to announce the facts.

  “There wasn’t a real peg,” Nelson went on, encouraged by David’s silence. “I’m not sure—”

  “Uh, I didn’t want to talk about that,” David blurted out to stop him from continuing a conversation that implied an ongoing presence at Newstime. “I have bad news,” he said, the only line he had prepared in advance.

  Nelson tensed, his eyes scared. “Oh,” he said, and folded his hands in front of him, his mouth closed, his shoulders hunched, like a flower closing.


  David starting talking, speaking vaguely at first about how valuable a change can be for someone who’s worked for many years at one place. Nelson looked away immediately, staring at David’s radiator. David said that he had been satisfied with Nelson’s work, but wanted to bring in someone new. “Maybe I’m insecure,” he said with a laugh, starting to feel comfortable, “and need to have only people I’ve hired working for me.” This like everything else, got no response. He started going over the details, how long Nelson could take before leaving, the fact that David and Chico would both provide excellent references, and he began to give the current status of his profit-sharing.

  “I know what’s in there.” Nelson said. “Can I go now?” he asked, his tone angry, but his body, like his choice of words, sullenly childish.

  “Sure. I’m sorry—”

  “Un-huh,” Nelson said, and walked out.

  Chico phoned later in the day to ask if he’d spoken with Nelson. “I’m impressed, very impressed, you did it so quickly,” Chico told him after David recounted the story. “Well, you’ve made your bones,” he continued, and let out a grim chuckle.

  “It wasn’t too bad,” David said. “But I sure hope I don’t ever have to fire somebody again.”

  “For your sake,” Chico said, laughing, “I sure hope you do.”

  Tony made two resolutions when he awoke in New York the first day back. He acted on them immediately, first calling Gloria Fowler and frankly reporting how badly the script conference had gone.

  She listened, interrupting him only to call out (probably to impress him with her concern) to her secretary to hold all her calls. When he was done, she said, “Do you want to refuse to do the rewrite?”

  Tony hesitated. “I have that option?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be paid the outstanding amount on the contract.”