Hot Properties
Page 37
“Heavy shit,” he answered. “You wanna go on a date?”
She cocked her head at him, her eyes, which only minutes before had been manufacturing tears, now clear and sparkling. “Sure,” she said with a smile.
The rumors flounced down Newstime’s halls, an ingénue seducing everyone from his work, peeking in doors to mock the dull with laughter, the quick with worrisome teasing. David was often asked to confirm, deny, or amplify the various stories. But he couldn’t enjoy his position, since he knew the truth. He was obliged to be silent, and knowing the reality, he couldn’t enjoy speculation.
Chico told him that Rounder was out of favor with the queen about a week before the news buzzed in the lower honeycombs of the hive. The focus of the complaints were the cost overruns due to the editor in chief’s indecisiveness and his penchant for running “soft-news” covers during hot-news weeks. It only added to Chico’s and David’s amusement that the latter grievance of Mrs. Thorn’s— Rounder’s love of features—was the reason she hired him in the first place, preferring a man with commercial instincts rather than Chico, whose background was in hard news.
“It won’t be long now,” Chico told him. “One more fuck-up and he’s gone.” Chico’s strategy during the last six months had been to do nothing to restrain Rounder’s desire to run soft stories, and to put no pressure on the editor in chief to make decisions quickly. Chico credited David with the conception of this plan, and praised him repeatedly for it. “I would’ve kept doing his job for him,” Chico said gratefully, “if it weren’t for your advice.”
Although David was encouraged by these words, he also noticed, now that the moment of Chico’s mating flight, alone—in joyous ecstasy above the hive with the queen—was imminent, that the promises earlier made about promoting David to Marx Brotherhood weren’t repeated.
Whether it was tension over this or the wait for the expected great event. David felt irritable all the time, scratching against the stubbly surface of the unkempt world. It was obvious to everyone at the magazine, David felt sure, that Chico deserved to be Groucho, and that he would also be elevated. Yet it had not happened—they were still stuck in this temporary and unsatisfactory universe.
And then one Wednesday morning the buzz grew fierce with the news that Mrs. Thorn had flown in from Washington unannounced and was headed upstairs for a conference with Chico and Rounder. It was confirmed moments later over the phone when David picked up his line, to be greeted by Chico saying without a hello, “This is it! This is it!”
“You think?”
“Definitely. Gotta go.”
David closed his door to keep out gossips, knowing he couldn’t successfully pretend he wasn’t excited, and somehow feeling that to reveal his expectations would jinx them. He tried to imagine the scene taking place above him. He couldn’t. The real face of power at Newstime, despite his intimacy with Chico, despite his presence at all the cover and run-through meetings, remained in shadow, as difficult to picture as what Mrs. Thorn was like undressed in bed.
For a few unbearable minutes he sat and waited. Then he flipped to the back of his appointment book where the telephone number he had called so often was scribbled. He gently lifted the receiver and got an outside line, pausing, a man at the edge of cold water, wanting its refreshment but squeamish at its first shock. He pressed the numbers and let it ring. She answered, as always, in an angry tone:
“Yes?”
“Is this the mistress?” he asked, surprised at his husky voice, so choked the words were barely escaping the constriction of his throat.
“Yes?” Even more irritated and impatient.
“I saw your ad,” he said, and felt a burst of sweat release from his underarms. At last he had done it! He hadn’t hung up in a panic like all the other times.
“Your age and occupation?” she snapped instantly.
He hadn’t been ready for this. It panicked him. “What?” he said, flabbergasted.
“Your age and occupation,” she repeated, bored.
“Uh, I’m thirty-one. I, uh, I’m an executive.”
“I offer dominance and submission. I have a completely equipped dungeon located in Chelsea. It’s a hundred for the hour and it’s a full hour. Do you want to make an appointment?”
“Uh …” He swallowed hard. His breath was so short, his heart’s percussion resounding so frighteningly throughout his body that he almost felt too weak to remain conscious. “I’ve never done this … can I ask some questions?”
“You’ll have a consultation with the mistress to discuss your limitations before the session begins. It’s important you understand, however, that this is dominance and submission. There’s no sex.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, his surprise at this statement overcoming his shy terror.
For the first time, she sounded startled, surprised by his return of serve. “Well, it means slavery, basically.” She recovered her stern tone and went on: “Do you have a particular fetish?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I thought I might like to be forced to …” Overwhelming embarrassment flooded his consciousness, followed by incredulity at the fact that he was actually having this conversation. He cleared his throat. “To worship you.”
“You mean body worship?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Anal worship is permitted. Pussy worship is not.”
He loved her saying that—the flat tone, so matter-of-fact that she could have been someone ordering a large orange juice with the breakfast special. Now he wanted to provoke more discussion of her rules. “Uh … can I worship your breasts?”
“No!” Now she was furious, speaking rapidly, the words clipped. “That’s not dominance. That’s sex. You go to a prostitute for that!” And she hung up.
David stared at the phone, abashed. And amazed. Could she really mean it? She wasn’t a prostitute? She could afford to turn down someone willing to pay a hundred dollars an hour just to lick her breasts?
He imagined kneeling behind her as she lowered her ass onto his mouth, and felt hard. He replayed in his mind her controlled dull voice: “Anal worship is permitted. Pussy worship is not.” He rubbed himself through the pants, his penis straining against his underpants, and wanted desperately to speak to her again.
He picked up the phone to call back—without noticing that the line light was on. Through the receiver he heard the media writer Charlie Huddleston saying to his secretary:
“You mean Little Chico isn’t up there with them for the beheading?”
His secretary was laughing, which covered the sound of David picking up the receiver.
“Do you think he’ll take you up to Animal Crackers with him?” Huddleston went on.
“God forbid,” she said, still giggling.
“Is he really bad to work for?” Huddleston said.
“No. But he’s no fun. Spends most of the time in there with the door closed. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Probably drinking,” Huddleston said. “He’s bombed every Friday night. I guess its tough being a prodigy. Well, you better buzz me through.”
“Okay,” she said, and instantly David’s intercom rasped.
He felt no rage. He flipped the button.
“Charlie Huddleston on two,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, and got on again. He noticed with interest that Huddleston’s tone with him had the same casualness and ease, maintaining a respectful friendliness with no effort. “Hi! I’m hearing wild rumors. Should I be preparing a transfer-of-power story?”
“Gee, Charlie, I don’t know. Hey, you know there was something I wanted to ask you. Get confirmation.”
“What’s that?” Huddleston said.
“I heard from somebody that I’ve got a nickname at the magazine.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, nervousness creeping in.
Let’s make him wonder, David thought. “Yeah. Have you heard it? Little Chico.”
“No kidding,” Charlie said, now definitely sha
ky and confused. “I haven’t heard that.”
“Oh, good. It’s kind of insulting.”
“Yeah, it is. Oh, there’s my other phone. I’d better—”
“Sure.” David said with a smile. “Bye.” He hung up, feeling good. Feeling lucky. In control.
Tony stretched forward in his chair to relieve the dull ache in his back. The last lines were being said. He noticed with pleasure that they had the right tone of finality. The audience at this reading of his new play—the other members of the Uptown Theater and. especially important, its artistic director. Hilary Bright—were rapt, their expressions concentrated. There had been a lot of laughs, not quite as many as he had hoped, a few sounded automatic, polite, but the “heavy” scenes had played even better than he had expected. The success of this reading was important: Hilary Bright had arranged it to help her determine whether his play was ready for the Uptown Theater to do a production of it this fall.
Now came the applause. There would have been clapping no matter what they thought of the play—after all, everyone there had to suffer the same sort of evaluation at one time or another, and between compassion and fear there was never an insulting response at a reading. But this applause was loud, enthusiastic, and genuine. Tony had heard enough of the other kind to know the difference.
Hilary, while clapping, got up and moved in front of the actors seated on chairs, and turned to face the audience. “Well, that was delightful,” she said, smiling.
Delightful? Tony thought. It’s supposed to be either shattering or funny, but delightful? Sounds like a description of a magic act, not a good play.
“Tony,” she said, looking at him. “How can we be of help to you?”
She always asked this preposterous question, this fastball begging to be banged out of the park with a bat of sarcasm. And, predictably, Tony took his cut: “Got an empty theater?”
Laughter. Hilary smiled. “Not if we get plays like this,” she said, but hurried on, as though frightened by the commitment it implied. “Is there anything that surprised you about the play—hearing it read?”
“I thought it would be funnier,” Tony said. “But I don’t really want to talk about what I think. I’m sick to death of what I think. First I’d like to hear from the actors—who did a wonderful job,” he added, and began to clap, joined immediately by the audience.
When the applause died down, Hilary gestured to the row of performers seated on folding chairs, their copies of the play on their laps like prayer books. During the last six months, since he had dropped the screenplay, he had worked madly, joyously reworking his old play about the three civil-rights workers who were killed by the Klan, feeling younger, stronger, and happier with each day. Nearing the end, his confidence in the future had returned in earnest. He really believed this time it would happen, this time he would win the honors so long expected for him, so long taken for granted, and now so desperately needed for survival. He had broken free of the small autobiographical limitations of his early plays, he had forced his head through the birth canal and observed a world other than his own.
The actors began. Tony liked listening to their opinions and he sometimes changed things because of them, but never because of the content of their criticisms. Performers always believed their parts should be bigger, their motivations less selfish and explicated in greater detail. They were forever forgetting that their job was to tour the audience through a walk in the woods, not stop and discuss the bark of one tree endlessly. This time they were unusually content: they praised “the structure” (something they knew nothing about) and then talked about how much they “liked” their characters (the highest possible encomium). Then the audience of playwrights and directors began to comment. The toughest remarks at these readings were commonly from other writers, and that held true again, although the major criticism wasn’t posed aggressively.
“I didn’t think. Tony …” said Hal Turner, the most successful of the Uptown Theater playwrights, a likely candidate for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for his off-Broadway success. The Evening, a grim two-character play about a confrontation between a rapist and the husband of his victim. “I didn’t think,” he repeated, his eyes wandering to the ceiling musingly. Everyone fell silent, respectfully. “Though I loved many, many things, I didn’t feel, at the end, that you had really taken it far enough. I don’t think the ending is sufficiently dramatic.”
“You mean because the killing is offstage?” Tony said, his worst fear confirmed. He too had felt the ending was anticlimactic, but so far no one else had said anything.
“Uh … I’m not sure. I think your instinct to stay away from the killing is right. It wouldn’t really end the play, it would just kill the characters.”
“That’s an ending!” someone called out. Everyone laughed.
“You’ve raised terrific questions about these characters,” Turner went on. “You need to answer some of them.”
“Oh, but he does!” Hilary protested. “When—”
“He does answer some of them!” Turner quickly modified. “But I mean decisively, dramatically. I certainly wouldn’t want a talky finish, with everyone wrapping up their lives as though they know they’re about to die. I love the effect of the casualness just before they go off to be killed, the sense, the eerie sense, of them naturally assuming they will be back later and do this and that—it’s a powerful effect. But it leaves some of the play’s questions unanswered. Not unasked. But unanswered.”
“I don’t know that I can answer them,” Tony admitted. He glanced at Hilary and briefly worried that a frank discussion on his part might scare her off doing the play that fall— she seemed ready to commit. But when he returned his glance to Turner, a bright man whose talent he admired, an experienced playwright who was obviously sympathetic to Tony’s work, he wanted to continue. “I’ve asked myself over and over. Were these characters sincere? Were they risking their lives—sometimes I’m not even sure they really believed the threats—were they risking their lives out of pure altruism, or was it some kind of neurotic calling of their parents’ political bluff?”
“What do you mean by that?” Turned asked with the enthusiasm of a lonely soul discovering a kindred spirit. The others stayed quiet, fading into the background, as though they were medical students observing two surgeons conduct a dangerous and experimental operation.
“I guess this may come from my past,” Tony said, “but when one is raised by people who put a high value on dangerous political action, there’s a tendency to do what they want, carry it so far that it almost becomes a kind of rebellion …”
Turner smiled. “Yes, that’s what you mean by the funny scene with Stein’s mother.”
“Right, right.”
Turned frowned. “I’m not sure your point there was clear to the audience. It’s a funny scene. Maybe it’s too funny, makes everybody think it’s only there for the laughs, and they don’t realize it carries the real point of the play.”
There were murmurs of agreement from the others. Tony had almost forgotten they were there. He suppressed a surge of anger at them, convinced they were too dumb to have noticed such a subtlety whether he was right or wrong to have put it in the play. They were merely parroting the influential playwright’s opinion. “You all feel that?” Tony asked, to be polite.
“Yes,” said Polly Howells, the resident feminist whom Tony had been told despised his work. Someone quoted her as saying, “He’s just another one of those Yuppie playwrights who writes plays complaining his parents didn’t encourage him enough,” a remark that hurt all the more for its potential accuracy. “Yes, I missed that,” Polly said, obviously glad to have something to say. She always seemed so eager to give opinions. Tony had been surprised by how long she had stayed silent. “I like the play a lot, Tony. I really think its a big step forward for you …”
Tony smiled at her, narrowing his eyes. He hoped she’d realize he was close to murdering her and stop talking in such a condescending fashion.
“That’s putting it strongly,” Turner said in a hurt tone, as though she were attacking him. “And, you know, it ain’t so easy to write funny one-liners like Tony’s. I can’t do it. I’ve tried. And I think I’d be a better writer if I could. Tony keeps a good balance in this play between heavy drama and social satire. It ends up being very real precisely because he touched both extremes.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Polly said quickly. Tony smiled at her panicky withdrawal. She sucked up to Hal Turner constantly, always praised his work to excess, and it amused Tony to see how she didn’t even dare to question his opinions. “I think he has a wonderful play here. But, like you, I felt Tony buried some of his more serious questions—what is real political commitment? can we ever escape our parents’ expectations, no matter how far from home we go?— that he lost some of these in trying to be funny. Maybe you were a little scared to explore the pain involved here,” she added directly to Tony.
He had to admit she might be right in her dull sociological way. He knew this subject was a way for him to explore the challenge of his mother’s and father’s political past. Perhaps he made comedy out of the family scenes not because it was accurate or a good choice dramatically, but because he couldn’t look at the ugly face of his family without turning to stone.
He nodded after a pause, and that seemed to open the floodgates. Suddenly everyone, including those who had previously spoken only with praise of the play, found the same weakness, and hammered away with growing enthusiasm, like kids imitating each other.
Hilary cut it off at last. “All right, I think we’ve made our point to Tony.” There was self-conscious laughter. “I think we’re agreed we’ve got a good play here that needs some work at developing its theme.”
Tony got up wearily, and merely nodded yes to Hilary when she said he should call tomorrow to discuss the next step. He knew that the muck and the mire had risen once again—rewrite, discussion, compromise. He would have to struggle again: to get the play right, to get Hilary to put it on. He was tired of spinning his wheels in the snow, making what was once white, pure, and beautiful into brown sludge. Get me out, he asked New York’s night sky while walking home, after refusing Hal Turner’s invitation to have a drink. Get me out of this muddy ditch.