Hot Properties (41 page)

“Are you going to accept?” Patty asked.

“Yes, and I want to hire you.”

“To do what? Go to bed with you?”

Gelb smiled, shaking his head, astonished and delighted by her frankness. “I’m not hiring you to go to bed with me. I want you to go to bed with me, but I also want you to work for me. I got rid of you because I was so angry at the feelings I was developing for you—”

“You never said anything—all you ever did was yell!”

“No—”

“Yes, you yelled,” she teased, “you criticized, you never said a kind word—”

“Oh, come on, Patty! Nonsense!” Gelb leaned back, a hand pulling his jacket closed, armoring himself. “What about all those lunches and dinners to console you over the end of one relationship or another? You think it was easy?” He pushed his face at her, his body bumping the table so that the glasses trembled, their liquids shimmering. “Listening to you catalogue your sexual adventures? I’ll never forget that look you had on your face when you were dating the carpenter—”

Patty laughed, as much to relieve the pressure of his assault as at his absurb claims to unrequited passion. No amount of protest could convince her that this man, whose dark eyes glistened invulnerably, reflecting back any searchlight into his soul, was capable of sustaining love for anything, unless … unless he couldn’t have it. Maybe, incredible though it may seem, he had never been frustrated before. “Carpenter?” she said, and laughed again.

“Yes, the carpenter who you said was so damn good in bed? What the hell was he so good at anyway? You refused to tell me, as though it was something astonishing. What the hell was it? His penis was ten inches long?”

“Shhhh!” Patty said, convinced his voice was amplified, that the whole restaurant had interrupted their plots of power, their schemes for success, to listen to this verbal rape.

“Damn!” he said, sagging back and rubbing his forehead feverishly. “It was torture. And this past year, thinking you might get married any day. I found out what I could about David—”

“You did?” She was intimidated enough by him to be frightened by this. Maybe there was some harm he could do David. He was capable of anything, and the limits of his power were a mystery to her.

“Couldn’t sleep the night I was told by Rounder that David is the brightest star of the magazine. Thinks he’ll have his job one day.”

Patty looked off, away from his energetic body, from his insistent eyes, and considered how thrilled David would be to hear this. She wondered if David (secretly) would love the whole story: this powerful man of publishing taking David’s girl to the Four Seasons to seduce her, losing the battle, and speaking angrily, enviously of David’s future. If she wanted marriage from David, going home and telling the story would be the perfect cattle prod. She felt regret that a union with David wasn’t her ambition. She could have it so easily now. A free ride on David’s trolley to the top. David would love the story all right, he wouldn’t even bother to conceal his pleasure. She knew, from her experience of living with a victim of the virus of success, that to men like “David, and like Gelb, the praise of the powerful was a keener and more lasting medicine than the love of a woman.

“Are you going to marry him?” Gelb’s voice said sadly.

Patty returned to him, to the world, to the fine linen of the table, the ruins of their expensive lunch. What a sickening fraud it all was. Wasn’t it possible for everybody to satisfy lust, whether for power or sex, without all this elaborate finery and fakery? “No. I’m not going to get married. Not to anyone. Men are disgusting,” she said with conviction. “Why the heck would I want to marry any of ’em?”

“You don’t mean that,” Gelb said, made hopeful by a denial of betrothal. He smiled at her, grinning like a child who was confident that after a few more months of hinting, he would get the Christmas present he coveted. “Will you take the job?” he said, whispering the question as though it were a murmur of seduction.

“I feel like I’m a prostitute and we’re negotiating.”

“No,” Gelb protested. “I love how there are no games with you. No. I want to sleep with you whether you take the job or not, and I want you to take the job whether you sleep with me or not.”

“You mean you think I’d make a good editor, that everything you told me about how incompe—”

“Yes, it was all a lie. I’m a shit. I admit it. I’ll offer you forty thousand a year, that’s at least ten thousand more than someone of your experience should get. That’ll make up for it.”

“And what’s my job, exactly? Blow-jobs every afternoon? What are we talking about? I feel like I’m going crazy—”

Gelb laughed, shaking his head, his eyes on her, ravenous. “You’d be
my
editor. I’d give you major authors, let you acquire one or two novels in the first year. Don’t worry about the blow-jobs,” he added, and then giggled.

“I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t do any of those things—”

“Yes I would!” he whined.

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not a fool. There’s nothing in the world you care more about than business. You wouldn’t trust me with anything that might affect your job.”

“You’re wrong,” he said solemnly.

She paused, looking into his unyielding eyes, daring him to maintain his pose. He did, regarding her unflinchingly. “Why are you still married to Elaine? If you’re so damn unhappy? Dump her. You can have all the little girls of publishing at your feet.”

“Honey, I can have them at my feet anyway. I want you,” he said in a dramatic, ominous tone. “You want me to leave her? Before you’ll start anything with me?”

“No!” she exclaimed, horrified that he seemed to think she was taking him seriously. “I’m just babbling, you know—”

“Will you leave David for me? I’d leave Elaine if that’s the only way I can have you. But then I want all of you. I’m not sharing you with a
Newstime
wunderkind.”

Patty gripped the soft cushion of her chair, feeling herself loosened from the surface of reality. Any moment, she feared, she might spin off into the madness of space, with no up or down, no gravity to restore balance. “I have to go,” she said. She needed distance from his baffling presence, fast, before she made a fatal error in responding to his outrageous and incredible proposals. “Please,” she begged, almost crying. “Please. I have to go.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “But you have to promise you’ll call.”

“I will.”

“Soon.”

She had to breathe deeply to speak. “I will. Okay? I really have to go.” She moved to get up.

“Wait,” he said, signaling for the waiter. “I’ll get you a cab.”

“You have to eat your lunch,” she pleaded.

“Fuck it,” he said, and asked for the check.

She couldn’t protest, afraid of another round of losing to his insistence on doing things his way. She sagged against the chair weakly and waited patiently until he finished, allowing him to take her by the elbow on the way outside.

On the street, the city was too bright—the sunlight shimmering on the blank rising towers of glass, harshly iluminating every curb and gutter, examining all the crumpled papers and trails of urine, nakedly exposing each suit’s wrinkle, every stocking’s tear. The wan pale faces of harried pass-ersby seemed bleached, cruelly open to the flooding rays. Gelb moved her through it all without any cooperation on her part, as though he had levitated her above the sidewalk and could push her like a store mannequin, face frozen in expression, legs stiff, eyes blank and lifeless.

When he got in the taxi with her, she made no protest, although it was unexpected and made little sense. He was only a few blocks from his office, she thought; walking it would be much quicker. But her mind’s observations were heard only faintly: she was still in shock from the awful bad luck of her life. Only that morning she had had the book and a way to get it published and now these prizes were being snatched from her with terrible precision, as though a malicious intelligence was against her.

Gelb gave the two addresses and, when he leaned back, put his arm around her. She didn’t look up at him, or away; she kept her eyes down, seeing the flowing line of his pants leg, the big, very adult shoes straddling either side of the transmission’s hump. After some moments of dreadful heavy silence, she felt his head move near hers, his lips brush her ear, and then a whisper. “I’ve missed you.” He kissed her neck. Shivers ran down one side of her body— the rest of her was numb. “I’ve wanted to do this for so many years,” he whispered again, his voice breathy, his tone desperate.

Now, rapidly, as though he had to quickly finish the ice cream before it melted, he kissed her cheek, just next to her mouth, her eyes (she closed them dutifully, like a toy doll), and then her lips, his wine-hot mouth busy and angry.

She didn’t respond.

She didn’t fight it, either.

He would get out soon, she knew. She needed time and freedom from his presence to escape this trap fate had baited, to stop the steel jaws from snapping her in two. He said more things, more wildly romantic things, before getting out. She nodded and managed to croak out, ” ’Bye,” to satisfy him so that he would shut the door and let her go.

CHAPTER 12

Fred enjoyed sleeping on the couches of his friends. He liked waking up in other house-holds, whether bachelor or married. With the single men he had the fun of sloppiness and adolescent talk. With the couples there were the pleasures of studying the wife in T-shirt and panties or nightgown at the breakfast table and receiving her sweetly feminine attentions. Having been thrown out by Marion turned out to be an enhancement of his image. People seemed to like him all of a sudden, especially the more he talked of his regret over his failed marriage, the difficulty he had talking openly with Marion. As soon as Fred noticed that the more he blamed himself for not being receptive to Marion’s feelings, not giving her room for her desires, the more he portrayed himself as a man chained by the traditions of male chauvinism, trying to break free but discovering new bonds with each success; the more he attacked himself, excusing Marion, the more people believed the opposite, felt sorry for him, and seemed to enjoy his company.

He stayed with Karl for a few days, and then Tom Lear, and then he began to be passed about among their set, like an adorable puppy whom everybody wants to cuddle and hold, but finds, after a few days, that walking him every night is too much of a bother.

Fred understood that he could wear out his welcome quickly, and he made sure to be scrupulous in leaving money for groceries and the telephone, as well as an expensive bottle of wine or something the house needed, on departure. When he felt guilty that he was deceiving these people, pretending to tragic emotions, assuming an air of melancholy and loneliness that in fact was nonexistent, he reminded himself of how they had lied to him. He discovered, as a by-product of living in these so-called friends’ apartments, that they all had active and intertwined social lives from which he and Marion had been excluded. He also discovered a lot of contempt for Marion. The talk about her—begun in an effort to convince him he wasn’t all to blame, but continuing with an unseemly relish—the disdain for her intellect, her lack of style, her provincial background, and so on, were things that Fred, in his heart, knew could also be said about him. He smiled and accepted the criticism of his wife as though it pleased. He did nothing to stop them, indeed he often provoked more, but he loathed them for it, and felt sorry for her. And, ultimately, for himself.

They were terrible snobs, just as Marion had always said. Because she wasn’t pretty, because she didn’t know how to dress, because she wasn’t glib or flattering, because she didn’t apologize for editing cookbooks, and claimed no desire to be more than a hack editor, she was disdained. The truth, it seemed to him, was that she possessed a realism they were incapable of. She knew that they were all less than they thought they were—she had listened to their fantasies of becoming major writers or whatever, without the proper amount of awe and seriousness. It was a bargain they had all made with each other: I’ll pretend you’re great, and you pretend I am too.

People are never who they say they are, Marion had once complained about them. It was true. Every journalist was really a novelist, every editor really a writer, every art director really a painter, every graduate student really a professional. And they combined this fantasy life with an astonishing arrogance toward the famous. Philip Roth was a narcissistic bore, Meryl Streep was too technical and unemotional, the New York
Times
critics were always wrong, successful books always bad, hit plays always trivial, and so on, in a joyless competition with the greats of their day, the whole discussion conducted in a tone as though they were equals, people whose obscurity was only a temporary condition and certainly unmerited.

He lied so much about the drama of his marriage, he exaggerated it into such a complicated and difficult problem that the reality bored him. When he phoned Marion at the office the day after she threw him out, she suggested they go to a marriage counselor and live separately for a while. He agreed, furious at her, but after a few nights of his journeying among friends, he was glad for the arrangement. It took more than two weeks before they saw each other at all, meeting for a cup of coffee half an hour before an appointment with a therapist that Marion had arranged.

The session with the psychologist was dull. Mostly they each covered the facts of their relationship and made their complaints about the marriage in formal, almost sociological terms. Fred made much of the fifty minutes when telling his friends, saying it was good to air the feelings and have a referee to prevent the conversation from turning into meaningless shouting. Actually there had never been such a danger. At one point Marion began to cry while attempting to say that she thought Fred considered her unattractive and then Fred
was
glad for the presence of the psychologist since that complaint had always presented him with insuperable difficulties. Instead of Fred’s having to deny the truth of her charge, the psychologist was there to ask Marion solemnly. “Do you think you’re unattractive?” Fred guessed immediately that the therapist wouldn’t ask him if she was right (psychology has a wonderful way of ignoring the obvious, Fred thought) and stay focused on Marion’s low self-esteem. The whole thing seemed overdramatic to him. Not that he didn’t believe in psychiatry, or felt the counseling wouldn’t work, simply that it seemed of a piece with the overcrowding of the New York world. Two people couldn’t even fall in and out of love by themselves.