Hot Properties (29 page)

Before she had resorted to technique—when David had first silently approached and roughly kissed her, his hand rushing up and down her belly, her breasts, his lips touching hers lightly, then angrily—she had become excited. She sensed he was playing at something, angry at her, or himself, or just frustrated at life. There was so much passion in him, though, while he felt her possessively. His hands played on her like a baker kneading dough, treating her body like a senseless thing whose malleable qualities were merely a means to an end. He didn’t even demand surrender; there was no acknowledgment that she had a say in his actions. He touched her as if she were a sexual Ouija board designed to summon ungodly things from another world. It was so appropriate to her writing. She closed her eyes and could see him in riding boots, his cheeks flushed, grabbing her by the waist in a Victorian drawing room and kissing her furiously, his crop pressed against her back, preventing an escape.

The more she stretched against the world, the harder Patty fought for a sense of herself apart from men, the richer her fantasies of being sieged and controlled became. While his index finger rubbed her clitoris—so well! he had learned so precisely how she liked to be touched—she moaned and swiveled to encourage more. He used to kneel at this point and take her panties off (furiously, as though they were made of iron and demanded extreme force to remove), mouthing at her vagina devouringly. In the early months of their relationship, he liked her to come to orgasm with abject totality, as she had that first night, but she had been unable to repeat its intensity. To be sure, the climax would happen, but a part of her stayed back to report the joy, note its individual changes, observe David’s technique, and measure the force of the final quake.

She blamed the diminished involvement on him. She tried to pinpoint what he had altered from that first coupling. She decided at last that it was the fact that he had come first. That night, when he turned his attention to her, he had already been serviced. His penis sighed like a weary flag in the wind. She knew that everything he then did was for her. His enthusiasm for her body, knowing he had been drained of the natural excitement for lovemaking which always exists, that he wasn’t merely trying to sell her on making love to him, relaxed her utterly: secure in the seduction, trusting his flattering tongue and worshipful lips. She had surrendered that evening to sensation, not to him; given herself up to the power of her body’s lust to enjoy itself.

So when David broke off his rough handling and stood there, his erection showing in his pants, she decided to repeat the actions of that first night and satisfy him first, with the hope that his later servicing of her could flatter her subconscious into another glorious orgasm.

And though, when she unzipped him and slowly introduced his penis into her mouth, wetting more and more of him, so she could begin to slide up and down, her tongue flicking teasingly at the head during the brief separations, she had assumed that her action implied a deal (I do this, then you go down on me), still Patty felt no surprise at David simply pulling up his pants and walking off.

She felt irritated, the way one might at a broken promise, at a friend who had agreed to accompany you to a boring event in exchange for your presence elsewhere, and stiffing you when it was his turn. But there was no moral outrage. Possibly because she had chickened out once again at trying to get all of him in her throat; because she had tickled him just under the testicles to provoke a fast ejaculation: because she had done her loving perfunctorily, simply wanting to get to the good part. Whatever the reason, a sense of injustice didn’t well up in her. She sat physically on edge but still numb and weary from the effort of fighting off her slight revulsion at blowing him, and thought: You bastard. You’re gonna leave me like this. But there was no passion in it. There was no exclamation point of outrage, or even a question mark of betrayed shock. They were simply words, a knowledge that she had gotten a bad deal, without a sense that she truly deserved better.

A few moments passed, she lost her sense of time and place exploring her hollow anger, and then she found herself reading the last few lines she had written. Her heroine was discovering her fiancé to be dull and yet was repelled by the dark Brian’s (the potentially brutal but handsome mystery man) arrogant action of simply kissing her roughly on the veranda when she turned him down for a dance, despite her desire to accept, simply because his tone implied that he took a yes for granted. They’re both David, Patty said to herself. They are both sides of him. They’re the two sides of every male. Either they bore you to tears or they drive you to tears. That’s funny. She wrote the sentence down. It made no sense where it was. Her heroine had just slapped Brian. I can make it what she thinks about hitting him, she decided, and did so. She rolled the typewriter up a little and read over the paragraph. The new line sounded flip after the solemn prose above it. She almost X’ed it out, but when she read it over again, her last line was the only line she liked.

Patty pulled the page out, put in a new sheet, and typed “Men either bore you to tears or they drive you to tears” as a sentence to begin something. A short story? A novel? A serious novel? Alone on the page, separated from her silly heroine with her silly feelings and her even sillier situation—who goes to formal balls and walks out on verandas anymore?—the sentence read grumpy; a nasty, unclever bit of whining disguised as feminism. An image of David kneeling at her feet, his tongue straining to lick her cunt, flashed into her self-disgust and excited her. She reached down and pressed her hand against her crotch. She was wet. Still wet from earlier? Or had that single image turned her on?

I should masturbate right here, she thought, and pleased herself with the devilish notion. She vividly pictured the scene: David sitting on the couch, glancing up in her direction, and seeing her, legs spread, rubbing herself to climax. What would he say? What if her silly heroine did that on the veranda after rejecting the dark Brian? This demure creature abruptly exposing herself and fingering away madly while the formal ball continued.

Damn this book, she said to herself, feeling imprisoned by it. A wave of loathing for it, for the rules of its genre, for the embarrassment of doing it, for the betrayal it represented of her sex, shuddered her resolve to write more. Patty didn’t care to identify herself as a feminist, or to get points from women for saying and believing the obvious, but still, these romance books really are beneath contempt, she decided. Writing one, forced to sit with its logic inside her head day and night, staring ahead, stony-eyed, at the narrow emotional highway her heroine was permitted, made Patty realize how much a part of the whole scene the stupid book was. She sits there and
reacts
to these bozos, Patty thought, enjoying her disgust. The contempt she felt was invigorating. Her brain had left a stuffy room; she could breathe the clean air of truth. It was almost as if having to think like that foolish bitch had stuck to her own brain, like cellophane to a shoe, and for months Patty had been standing idiotically on a street corner, comically shaking herself to be rid of it, until tonight, when she thought of the incredibly simple and effective idea that she could pull the stuff off with her hand.

I’m not gonna write this damn book, she decided.

She forced the dozens of questions that decision provoked out of her mind and leaned forward (I should put on some clothes. I’m freezing) and continued typing. She added to her lone sentence, writing away, without considering what her story was, concentrating instead on the scene she had imagined, namely an infuriated woman answering her mate’s insensitivity by brazenly masturbating. She was enjoying it, enjoying it the way she would have if she had had the nerve to do it herself. But as the description played itself out, she approached a fork in the road. Either her new heroine (reborn out of the ashes of sexist caricature) was fantasizing this behavior or actually doing it. Patty knew the choice would either infect or nourish the remainder of the work. Making it a fantasy would straighten and smooth the roadway, its destination sure, but perhaps the scenery would become dull and predictable. If her heroine, previously a sensible, reasonable, modestly behaved woman, was
actually
worn out by years of selfishness by her mate, doing it, taunting him with her own superior ability to satisfy herself … But was that true? Patty wasn’t most satisfied by bringing herself to climax. A man devoting himself to her body was her real thrill. What she had done for David was what she wanted for herself. That was the truth.

Could she write it?

Wasn’t it … in bad taste? No, she wasn’t worried about that, she was fearful of being hated for it. Men don’t want to know those things. And women, the truth is, don’t like to face them. Anyway, she reasoned, am I doing it? I have at least as much justification. Did I love myself in front of him? He’s still sitting there, stupidly reading
Newstime,
no doubt in an attempt to narrow his horizons even more.

I couldn’t do it. Even if I began to. I’d be too embarrassed to enjoy it. Climaxing in front of David—something she had presumably done dozens of times—seemed utterly vulgar if done by herself, especially without … without what? Without permission?

Do I need his permission to touch myself?

Jeez. I’m starting to sound like a dyke with hairy armpits. No, that’s wrong. It’s worse. That sounds like an academic who still does shave.

Sure, I need his permission to touch myself in front of him. How would I like it if he, over breakfast let’s say, opened his fly and jerked off into a napkin? Or worse, onto the tablecloth?

She burst out laughing.

“Watch it,” David said without looking up. “I don’t think those books are supposed to be funny.”

His casual, contemptuous reference to the romance genre froze her laugh. For a moment she wondered if she despised the form simply because his attitude had insinuated itself into her. No, no, I knew this was crap, she argued. David was infuriating. I should do it. Right now. Pull my panties down, and. staring into his whitish squinting face, masturbate. Who needs you, Mr.
Newstime?

David tossed the magazine onto the coffee table. He stretched and then got up, avoiding her glare, and announced quietly to the floor, “I’m going to bed.”

Patty didn’t answer. She stared ahead, feeling rage, confusion about her work, a vague horniness that wandered through the other feelings like a lonely shopper browsing for the perfect purchase.

She reread her new pages. She loved them. The frank, unstylized prose, its easy access to the heroine’s emotions and imagination, the clear simple lines of character. It was real. So beautifully true. No fake adjectives about scenery she had never seen, peopled only by ordinary humans with incomes under six figures, and with a heroine who had been laid and was at least the equal of the men around her. The new words seemed like a friend, an intimate with whom anything could be said, any secret entrusted, someone to stay up all night with.

But what could she do with it? She had no story. She hadn’t even decided whether the opening scene was real or imagined. Certainly she couldn’t continue it as a portrait of her relationship with David. There was no story in that, and definitely not an interesting one. In fact, was her new character interesting to anyone but her? Who was she?

Maybe she’s Rounder’s wife? an impish voice asked. Rounder had the virtue of being at the top of
Newstime,
so his obsession with the job would be more reasonable and sympathetic than David’s. And Cathy Rounder was a Ph.D. and the mother of two, a much more stunning person than Patty herself. Imagine Cathy rubbing her clitoris in front of the six-foot-five blue-eyed Rounder! Send in the Marines, Cathy could say, and Patty roared at herself, followed by embarrassment at the viciousness and vulgarity of her imagination.

How could she write about a woman with two children? She knew nothing about it. I could have lunch with her, and play with the kids later, observe her daily routine. David wouldn’t mind. They might even socialize regularly. It would further his career and provide her with material for the book.

She moved her chair forward, read over her opening, made it a fantasy (the mirror within a mirror of this pleased her: Cathy masturbating to a fantasy of her masturbating), and then set up the character’s situation. The exposition seemed awkward, an anticlimax after Cathy’s climax, and also halfhearted. The arbitrary choice of Cathy and Rounder—real people—had stunted her ability to make up anything about them, as though she were suddenly writing a nonfiction piece about them for
New York Magazine.

What if she were?

What if the opening fantasy was a fantasy of a magazine writer while writing a portrait of these prominent New Yorkers? That character could be me, a free-lance journalist, searching for the ideal couple ostensibly through my work, but really to reassure myself that it exists, she said to herself, so tired now that after thinking the thought, Patty was unsure if it even made logical sense, much less worked aesthetically. She decided to stop and read what she had tomorrow.

Patty got up, hiding the pages under the manuscript of the romance novel. The thought of David discovering her experimental story filled her with dread. She looked at him, huddled under the blankets like a frightened animal, and resented his presence.

She was careful not to disturb the blankets while getting in the bed. After a few minutes of lying silently, listening to his breathing to make sure he was asleep, Patty touched herself furtively, secretly, loving herself to a choked and cowardly orgasm, and then bunched a pillow in her arms to fall asleep in its soft embrace. …

CHAPTER 9

“Fred!” Tom Lear called. He got up from a swivel chair placed in front of a television that was embedded in the paneling of a private box in Madison Square Garden. “Why doesn’t Hubie play Marvin and Cartwright together against Parish and McHale?” This was asked in place of a greeting.