Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

  Earlier that day she demanded the truth from Betty about her novel’s future, now only a month from publication. Unfortunately. Betty answered her: her book had a ten-thousand-copy printing, but there would be only one shared ad in the Times Book Review, and without a book club, unless the reviews were sensational, a paperback sale was unlikely. “People like it,” Betty said sadly. “But they feel it’s a quiet book, too similar to so many others that have come out to be a big seller.”

  “You mean it’s not thrilling like Fred Tatter’s book?”

  “Right now Fred’s book is controversial—it wouldn’t have been fifty years ago. It’s totally retro—it says men are biologically unfaithful. Just harmless hormones, not sexism. People want to hear that, even just to get angry at it. I hear some of the feminists like it because they think it shows that men are still disgusting. They say: we can use this as something to attack. That’s why all the talk shows want him. He’s getting on the Phil Donahue show ’cause Sara Farleigh wants to be on with him and tear him to shreds. He’ll be humiliated but his novel will sell thousands.”

  “Not a bad bargain.” Patty said.

  “I think it is,” Betty said, frowning. “Sure Fred’ll make money, but he’ll feel like a piece of shit.”

  “No.” Patty shook her head. “His book will be read. That’s really all that matters to a writer.”

  “Oh!” Betty sat up, an impatient governess. “That’s disgusting. Don’t say it.”

  “You’re not a writer. Betty,” Patty said. Her friend looked startled at Patty’s tone and demeanor: a trace of pity, of condescension. “You can’t understand. They may yell and scream at him, but they’re paying attention. That’s all that matters.”

  “You make writing sound like it’s being a spoiled brat.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  Betty looked at her for a while, solemnly. “You’re upset about your novel. I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m not. I was lucky to get it published. If it weren’t for you, it wouldn’t have been.”

  “That’s not true—it’s a terrific book.”

  “Thanks. But the next time I’ll submit my manuscript to strangers—then even the failures will feel good.”

  Betty no more believed this termination of their work relationship than Gelb accepted the end of their sexual one. Betty changed subjects nervously, asking how things with David were going, implying it was failed romance that had put Patty in such a bad mood. Betty immediately offered to put her up while Tony was away. These favors she would accept. But David’s sudden—and bizarre—trip had left her in limbo, wandering in a neighborhood half-changed with her life half-altered.

  The phone rang. Gelb again, she thought, reaching for it wearily. She almost didn’t pick it up. “Patty?” Betty was breathless. “I just got off the phone with Paula Kramer. She called to ask my feelings about Garlands publishing Fred’s novel …”

  Patty closed her eyes in despair, hearing Fred’s name mentioned again.

  “… I couldn’t say anything—except I talked about your novel. Said that was the sort of thing I felt analyzed modern relationships in a way I understood them. She got quite excited about the contrast between your novel and his—you know, given the hook that you’re both at the same house, both first novels, both being published the same month. She wants to interview you. I gave her your number. There’s a possibility she’ll include you in the piece she’s doing for the Times on young novelists.”

  “That’s great,” Patty said, unsure it was. Paula Kramer worried her. Her pieces, even when flattering, had an edge of smart-ass condescension that Patty enjoyed only when it was about people she disliked. “Has she read my book?”

  “Read it? She’d never heard of it until I told her about it. I’m pretty proud of myself. I really did a selling job.”

  She wants to be thanked again. Oh thank you thank you for helping sweet little me. Gelb was the same. When he had shown her the bookjacket cover, he boasted: “I insisted they hire Golum, best cover man in the business. Cost an extra five hundred.” She tried to forgive Betty for doing it—hers was the self-praise of insecurity; his, an itemized bill. “That’s great, Betty. Thank you.”

  “Listen, you sound lonely. Don’t you want to come and stay with me?”

  “I don’t want to miss Paula’s call,” Patty answered.

  “Oh, right! I better hang up.”

  For an hour she waited, expecting it to ring. When it did, it was Betty. “Did she call?”

  “No.”

  “I called to warn she might not for a few days. She asked me to messenger a copy of your novel over tomorrow. She might intend to read it first.”

  “Oh,” was all Patty said. But it changed everything. No one had yet read her book and flipped over it. If Paula Kramer was looking for a counterargument to Fred. Patty’s slim sardonic observations of the conflicts arising in a young woman raised to be Doris Day in a world that wanted Superwoman wouldn’t have sufficient clarity or stridency. Her story didn’t come to a definite conclusion like Fred’s—she simply wanted the reader to ride her heroine’s roller coaster and, at the end, know only what she knew: there were other rides, but that was the only one she had a ticket for. Maybe her book was boring. At least, unlike Fred’s, it had the virtue of truth.

  “So you can stay over,” Betty said. “You sound terrible.”

  “I’m just tired,” Patty answered, telling the truth. She was tired of being helped. Tired of all the little lies everybody told each other. Tired of this stupid city, with its expensive slums and overpaid egotists. “I’ll be fine here,” she said.

  Tony reached out of the car window and pressed the button. He glanced at the fifteen-foot-high gate, half-expecting it to open automatically. A voice squawked at him, sounding like a parody of a Japanese houseboy: “Yes? Who is?”

  “It’s Tony. Tony Winters.”

  “Please close behind you.”

  There was a buzz and the gate unlocked, the doors separating a few inches. He got out to open them wider, drove in. and then got out again to close them. The wide sweeping driveway curved around to an entrance with white columns that supported a structural awning. He glanced up at the place. It looked huge: the plantation home of a wealthy Southern family. “Here I am at Mom’s,” he said to himself.

  The Japanese who had buzzed him in opened the door as he approached. “Did you lock gate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tony!” his mother called from inside the house. He wandered toward the voice, entering a large living room crowded with couches. There were four of them forming a square in the center of the room, leaving only a foot or so between them to squeeze through. The rest of the room seemed to be taken up by end tables, except for one forlorn low Victorian chair in a corner.

  “Is your security gate supposed to work that way?” Tony asked, approaching the couches. He then noticed, buried in one of them, a smallish woman with a sharp chin, a long thin nose, and small clever eyes accented by arching sarcastic eyebrows, smoking a long thin cigar.

  “It’s there to encourage burglars and discourage guests,” the stranger said.

  Maureen laughed. “You’re too clever,” she answered the woman. “It’s broken, darling,” she said to Tony, draping an arm over the back of the couch, reaching for his hand. He took it and she pulled him toward her. He almost flipped over the couch. She kissed him (her breath smelled of wine; there was an open bottle on the glass coffee table) on the lips. “You look marvelous.”

  “Malibu tan,” said the small lady, putting her cigar gently onto an ashtray.

  “This is my dear friend Andrea Warren.” Maureen squeezed Tony’s face. “My beautiful brilliant boy.”

  “Hello,” Andrea said in a deep voice. Everything she said seemed sly and sarcastic.

  “Hi,” Tony said. He hated all his mother’s friends on sight. Experience had taught him they were invariably flatterers.

  “Do you remember Andrea?” Maureen asked.


  “Of course he doesn’t,” she said. He looked at her closely. Her pageboy haircut and smooth skin had fooled him: though at first glance she looked ten years younger, the graying streaks and crow’s-feet betrayed that she was his mother’s age. “He was a baby.”

  “We lived through the dark ages together out here before you were born and—”

  “He couldn’t have been more than two or three,” Andrea said to Maureen.

  “My dear, that whole decade is a fog to me.” She drank from her glass. “Everything is a fog. When I glance at the news and see Ronald Reagan, part of me thinks: ‘Is he still working?’ ”

  “No!” Andrea snapped. “He’s just renting the White House to take naps.”

  “I bet it is a good place to nap,” Maureen said. She patted the couch. “Jump in.”

  Tony smiled. “I practically have to.”

  “Kyoto!” Maureen yelled. “Bring a glass for my son!”

  They sat while the sun went down, drinking and talking. Tony felt drunk after only a few glasses, but soon that passed, and it seemed no amount of alcohol could influence the languid sense that time was passing very slowly, if at all, in the mountainous couches. Food was never mentioned, although he had been invited to dinner. With the second bottle of wine, cheese and crackers appeared, but only Tony partook. Maureen and Andrea seemed content to merely drink and smoke. They had him talk about living and working with Garth—he made the obvious jokes about a star’s egomania. “Oh, we actors are terrible!” his mother would comment periodically, more, Tony thought, to imply that she wasn’t that way than to acknowledge that she was. Andrea, he found out, had been the wife of a blacklisted writer who died in the sixties from a heart attack (“from a condition Joe McCarthy gave him,” Maureen said; “from booze and red meat,” Andrea answered), and had turned to producing herself. “She’s a great success,” Maureen commented. “She did The Last Dinosaurs.” Namely a TV movie about nuclear war ending all human life. “We sit and talk,” Maureen went on. “Talk and sit. About the old days. Right?”

  Andrea raised her glass, her mouth twisted in a smile of celebration and a frown of regret.

  “Before we knew the world was full of bastards,” Maureen concluded. There was a heavy pause. The moment of silence for all the wounded of the blacklist. Tony had long ago named it for himself. She looked at him coldly. “Like your father,” she said.

  “Maureen,” Andrea said sadly, the way one might react to a hopelessly spoiled child: scolding having given way to a perfunctory acknowledgment.

  “Don’t count on him to help you out.” Maureen went on. “If you agreed to go back to work on this script because you assume Daddy, being the big cheese at International, will give it a go, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  “I don’t count on him,” Tony said, looking away from her: everything else seemed to blur, however, until he returned to focus on her face. I’m very drunk, he realized.

  “Bullshit, you don’t. You should have stuck to writing plays. Not let them get their filthy hands on your art.”

  “Now, now,” Andrea interrupted. “The only people who haven’t sold out are the ones who haven’t been asked.”

  “That’s not true! You didn’t sell out,” Maureen said.

  “I had nothing to sell out,” Andrea answered.

  “What about you, Mom?” Tony said, unable to restrain his anger. “What the hell are you doing in I Love Lucy II?”

  “That’s not selling out, honey,” Maureen answered, saying “honey” as though it was an obscene word. “That’s staying employed.”

  “Well, that goes for me too, Mom. I haven’t turned down Broadway—they turned me down.”

  “You didn’t try very hard,” she answered, looking lofty, though her consonants had become soft from drink. “You quit after three plays at the age of thirty.”

  “Let’s go out for dinner,” Andrea said casually.

  “And now,” Maureen concluded, closing her case, “you’re counting on Daddy to hand success to you like a Christmas present.”

  Tony held his breath: he teetered on the edge of his rage, frightened by its limitless horizon.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Maureen added, implying not apology but pride. “I can’t stop myself from telling the truth. I have no tact. It’s my curse. And my blessing.”

  “Fuck you, Mom,” Tony answered. The sentence was complete, said with plenty of clarity and gusto, unhurried by fear, enunciated with conviction. “I’m sorry there’s no McCarthy for me to blame my failures on. He’s a convenient partner for you—I wish I had one.” He felt quite triumphant with this construction of his retaliation. Glancing at Andrea to measure her shock, he saw instead a sympathetic face utterly unlike her look up till then.

  Maureen blinked at him. The liquor seemed to have just hit her. She put both hands down, steadying herself on the couch. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You know damn well what it means.” Tony thrust the words at her. She had hurt him all her life: he meant to give it back. But Andrea’s sorrowful eyes worried him.

  “I see,” Maureen concluded. She tried to stand, but lost her balance halfway up and sagged back. “You think my career wouldn’t have been any different.”

  “If you were so goddamn committed to your art, what the hell were you doing here in the first place? You came out here before the McCarthy—”

  “I came out here because of your father!” Her great voice lost its resonance. She was squawking from her throat, like an ordinary person in pain, and her face was squeezed from repressed tears, unlike the graceful slow flow that she could release on cue for the final close-up.

  “Oh come on,” Andrea said, trying to be light, but almost yelling. “We all came out here for the weather—let’s admit it.”

  “Even then he thought nothing of sacrificing anything for his career! You should have seen him, wooing me to do it!” She laughed—a mad stage laugh that almost dissolved into tears. “Said it would help me. Guaranteed stardom!” She had been speaking to the past, faces and voices long gone but still alive for her. She returned to Tony: “And now he’s fooled you with the same lies. Maybe you’re right, Tony. Maybe I would have cracked up anyway.” She brushed her graying hair off one ear, a trademark maneuver from her TV show. “Lord knows I was always fragile. And maybe you’re really my son: vain, facile, and in the end, weak. Too goddamned weak to ever really be anything but a mass of regrets.” She struck him with her eyes, glittering with clever anger. “Yes. Maybe this is just the town for you. Probably you didn’t give anything up. You never had it.”

  He felt hot. Around his throat and in his eyes there seemed to be a fire burning, the air superheated and un-breathable. He tried to fight the suffocation, to remember she was a frightened old woman, furious with ghosts, not him … but the room pulsed with fire, the scene from another world, its colors distorted, the faces inhuman. Who was he? A little boy? An old man? He felt his legs shrink. The couches were giants with long arms that entwined and mocked him to move. He could hear the voices from all those parties: “Look how handsome he is! He has your beautiful voice!” A famous writer, his old face unwrinkling with pleasure, saying: “You are a born writer, don’t let them destroy you.” The Japanese was in the room: had he bombed Pearl Harbor? He carried whiteness in his hand: a towel? Andrea was holding him: something spattered from his mouth—blood! He was spewing blood on his mother’s glass table. Chunks of his intestines spilling out also, bobbing helplessly in the thin red river. I must be dying, he thought sadly. Well, all great artists die young, he told himself gently, and watched more of his heart and stomach vomit out. …

  Hans Gott looked like his photo. “There is little of the arrogant Nazi left, after years of being hunted,” David found himself writing mentally. The eyes glared at everything, as though each little evidence of life—a buzzing fly, the warm breeze rustling leaves—was an outrage. The world was disobedient, his face seemed to scold.

  The arrangements h
ad tortured them all. In the end there was simply no way to guarantee Gott that they weren’t really Nazi-hunters or hadn’t sold him out in one fashion or another; just as there was no long-distance way for him to prove definitively that he really was Gott. Finally, however, he must have wanted the money for the interview desperately, because after they met all of his precautions, driving to two different locations (presumably so he could watch them to see if they were followed), one a public park, the other a cafe, they were instructed (from a phone booth, just like in a movie thriller) that they could find him in the Hilton coffee shop. The voice on the telephone warned them that there were armed men hidden to deal with any surprises.

  This was the first of the possibilities that arose for David to do the right thing. He could excuse himself abruptly (Chico would hardly risk blowing the interview by wasting time to argue that David must come along) and go up to his room rather than to the coffee shop. From there he could phone—what? the Israeli consulate? the local revenge group? the police? Gott, after all, had fled from Argentina fearful of extradition, and was in Brazil illegally. But David doubted any of those actions would succeed. Besides, he didn’t want to miss seeing Gott. And there was the suspicion that it was all some sort of practical joke. That there would be no one in the last booth of the Hilton coffee shop.