Hot Properties (57 page)

“Hi,” he said. His voice sounded rushed. “Where were you? Believe it or not, I have to fly to Brazil.”

“What?”

“You can’t say a word to anybody. This has to be absolutely secret. I’m flying to Brazil to interview, or possibly interview, Hans Gott.”

“Who?”

David looked up from folding his pants and smiled. “You wouldn’t know. He’s on the hit parade of Nazis. He was Mengele’s favorite helper. Decided who would live and who would die in the ovens. Also performed experiments on twins, dwarfs. Shot blue dye into the eyes of children, and so on … lovely man.”

“Oh. Yeah,” she mumbled, baffled by this turn of events. “I thought he was dead.”

“You’re thinking of Mengele. This one might be, too. The guy I’m supposed to meet could be a fraud.”

“Isn’t this dangerous?”

“We’re supposed to meet in a public place—I sure as hell am not going to meet him in a dark alley.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Don’t know. A few days?”

“Oh.” Patty sat on the bed and stared off, nonplussed. She felt deflated, and, oddly, sad to be left alone in the loft. She had wanted to walk out on him and be with Betty. Not wait in solitude for the return of a man she didn’t want anymore. And he looked so appealing right now—his cheeks flushed with excitement, his tone energetic and funny.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

She nodded.

“Won’t you?”

“I want to move out,” she said. The words floated out of her, levitating from her inner thoughts mystically, in violation of her mind’s censuring gravity.

“You’re that scared to be alone?” David asked, almost laughing with amazement.

“I’m sorry …” she said, and got up, wanting to walk away to shut herself up, but she couldn’t move, unable to figure out where to go.

David studied her back. She had taken to hunching her shoulders more, it seemed to him, since she had become a novelist. Was it bending over the typewriter?

Now he understood what she meant: she was leaving him, he thought dully. It didn’t surprise him, though it was unexpected. Since his regular visits to the Mistress, he had lived side by side with her, passengers. On a subway, sharing noise and light and movement, but not speaking or knowing each other. Strangers seated together on a dull trip.

Patty turned back. “Can I help?”

“You want to move out,” David said. “Break up, you mean.”

She stared at him like a frightened little girl. Her eyes wondered at him. What will you do? Don’t be angry. What will you do? Don’t hate me. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“My flight isn’t until tonight. Everything’s ready. I was just nervously packing.” He paused and cocked his head, asking calmly, “You’re going for good?”

Tears formed in her eyes: a deserted child, shrinking from the big horrible world. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, weeping between the words. “I feel like I’m going crazy. I shouldn’t be saying this now …” She hunched over, moving toward the bed as if she were collapsing uncontrollably and needed to cushion her fall.

He watched her coldly. He felt heartbroken for her: she lay on the bed like a broken doll. He was convinced that if he hugged her now, spoke of his love, she would reverse her decision to go. But the effort, both physical and emotional, of feeling and giving, the whole boring mess of vomiting up the truth, repelled him. He didn’t want to smell and look at his innards, to regurgitate his perversions, inadequacies, and failed hopes. “Is it anything in particular?” he asked.

“What?” she said, her voice muffled by the bed and her tears.

“Are you upset about something I can fix?” he answered in a grudging tone.

“No, it’s not you—I’m fucked up,” she said, and rolled over onto her back, her arms resting outward, crucified on a soft mattress. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” he answered perfunctorily. “So why are you moving out?”

“Kiss me,” she said, looking like a centerfold—yearning for an unseen lover, her body defenseless, the gates open to any violation.

David shook his head. He felt like laughing. “You’re crazy. What kind of breakup is this? If you’re walking out on somebody, you don’t interrupt it for a seduction.”

“I’m not walking out. I need some time—”

“Come on, Patty. I’m not a fool. That’s never the truth. You don’t have the guts to do it straight.”

She sat up, raised the drawbridge, filled the turret with guns, and unsheathed her sword. “I’m trying to be honest, I’m trying to talk about it. You’re the one who never says a damn thing. You’re so closed off and cold.”

“Right. You’re walking out—I’m the bad guy. That’s what this is about. Getting rid of your guilt. You want to leave and be a saint. You got it. Don’t bother to even argue for it. I concede it to you.” He walked away, propelled by his anger.

“You have to win every argument,” she shouted at his back. “Even when winning it means you lose.”

“God, you’re a real phrase-maker!” he answered, talking up to the ceiling. “I don’t know what the fuck that means!”

“It means, all I felt coming in here was confused. I wanted time to think things out. The way you’re behaving
does
make me want to leave!”

“That’s gotta be bullshit!” he yelled, his hands out in a furious plea. “Confused about what?” he said, turning on her. He walked at her angrily. She stood up, startled, as though his movement were threatening. “What? What is there to think about?”

“Uh, us …” she stammered. “We haven’t been having a good time together.” She gained confidence. “We haven’t fucked in two months.”

“I’ve been busy!” he cried out.

“Oh, the magazine! The magazine, the magazine, the magazine. It’s your answer to everything. You’re like some terrible cliché on a soap opera. What the hell are you working so hard for? You’re thirty-one years old—you act like a fifty-year-old man!”

“All right, all right. I’ll stop working so hard. I was scared,” he pleaded, lying, though it sounded very honest, to his surprise. “I got this big job—I didn’t think I could do it.” Tears formed at his eyes.

Patty looked amazed. “Oh,” she said, touching his arm with her hand. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” he said, laughing and sobbing at once.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and moved into his arms, hugging him.

“I kept thinking they were going to knock on the door and tell me it had all been a mistake.” he said, elaborating on this successful theme. It sounded so authentic, so convincing. He had reached for this explanation to avoid confessing about the prostitution—not to have to reveal the tableau of him wearing a collar and licking a woman’s boots.

“It’s not a mistake,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re brilliant.”

“Thanks,” he answered shyly.

They held each other for a while. For both, it was relief to be holding and loving anyone. “Where are you going to go?” he asked, meaning really: Are you still going?

“I’m going to stay with Betty. Tony’s got to go to LA for a month.”

David eased himself out of the embrace. “Oh. Well, that’ll be good for your book.”

“That’s not why I’m doing it,” she argued, a teenager complaining she had to stay out past eleven.

“I didn’t mean anything,” he answered. “I meant, you can keep her working on it. I know that’s not why you’re doing it.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling embarrassed. “I may not do it. I don’t know.”

“I …” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “I hope you don’t.” His chin quavered.

She looked ashamed and hugged him again.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” he answered.

CHAPTER 16

Tony watched them talk on Malibu beach. He stood above them on a wide deck supported by thirty-foot-high wooden stilts that looked inadequate to the task. The surf, which seemed gentle and casual as it approached the shore, broke abruptly and angrily at its finish: a horse rearing in horror at the row of two-million-dollar houses. Garth and Redburn, two of the most famous faces in America, stood in profile, elegant in their casual clothes, tranquil faces, and perfect hairdos, their words drowned by the Pacific’s noisy disgust at encountering land. The scene looked like a movie. An obvious thing to think, but fascinating nonetheless. Tony could make up the dialogue in his head—his eyes were the cameras.

“I hear the script’s going well,” Helen, Garth’s wife, said from behind him.

She was lying on a green-and-white-cushioned deck chair, wearing a black bikini on a body so spectacular that to be aroused by it was almost too passive a response. Hurling oneself on Garth and strangling him immediately, tossing diamonds at her, instantly swearing love and running off to the Crimean War—even they might be responses not commensurate with her beauty. And to make her more infuriating, she was pleasant, intelligent, modest, and kind. “We’re almost done,” Tony said.

“You sound relieved.”

“I am.”

“Has it been very hard on you? Staying here and working?”

Below, Garth gestured toward him. Redburn looked at Tony, his eyes squinting as he concentrated on the sight. The look was almost a product’s logo—the distant glance of a hero regarding the future fearlessly, or the past with brave regret. Garth dramatically held his arms out at full length and applauded Tony. Redburn smiled. Tony nodded and held his glass up in acknowledgment.

“He loves you,” Helen said. “He told me last night, he’ll miss you terribly when you go. Made me feel jealous.”

Tony turned her way, his eyes drawn (despite the constant warning lights he flashed them) to her firm full breasts, languidly arrogant in repose. He forced them up with effort, like pulling away from a magnet (it could be done, but it required steady pressure), and looked at her wonderful face. Her green eyes were bright and cheerful. “He’s been very nice to me,” Tony answered in the tone of an ancient retainer speaking of his master.

“He said he thinks you could make a great director. Says you really understand actors.”

Tony ignored the compliment. Hollywood prophesied future success only slightly less casually than it offered absolute predictions of utter failure. “It must have been hard on you to have a houseguest for two months. You’ve been very patient.”

“Aren’t we both wonderful?” she said.

Tony smiled. “I mean it.”

“You don’t really like us,” she said. Not argumentatively, accusingly, but not stating a fact, either.

“Oh, no, no,” Tony said, startled by her comment.

“Don’t feel you have to—”

“I don’t. If I’ve behaved distantly, it’s only because of my problems. He’s a great star—you are a great beauty. For someone like me—vain, greedy, childish—it’s pretty hard to take.”

This little speech was the first time he had spoken informally, intimately. She sat up—Tony’s eyes slipped their leash for a moment and looked at her crotch, barely covered, the surrounding skin of her hips and thighs unblemished, without a ripple of fat or looseness—and looked at him eagerly. “You don’t seem anything like that. You’re self-confident, you’re very at home with yourself.”

Tony giggled. He couldn’t believe she meant that about him—he felt so uncomfortable with himself, as though his ego was infested by fleas: he was scratched raw from the restless itch of its countless wounds. “You’re kidding,” he said, and giggled again.

“No,” she said. “Both of us have talked about it. We wondered if it was our life here.” She nodded at the beach and the house. “Everybody here is conscious of being judged, talked about … you seem to be sure of your value, no matter how things are going.”

“God, I wish that were true. Thank you. But all I’ve felt since I came here is envy.” Tony looked out at the dynamic duo below. “He’s got everything. Fame, money, talent, power.” Tony looked at her, letting all his lust and longing show. “And you. He even has you.”

She showed neither encouragement nor dislike. She simply seemed to accept his comment as a fact.

“I’m sorry to talk about you like that,” Tony said, now nervous that he had said something which was both offensive and possibly untrue. He barely knew this woman. She was stunning, but he felt no love for her. He had spoken, as always, exaggerating a momentary feeling into a dramatic speech. It was his curse, his addiction to taking center stage no matter what, even if it cost him respect and love. He wanted to be interesting to her. He had played the part of modest, patient servitude to her husband for eight weeks of the run. Now he wanted the lead. “I know you’re not a possession of his. That makes it even more irritating. If he had your love simply because he’s famous, then I could be contemptuous. I’m fond of being contemptuous. But I can’t. You really love him.”

Now she was the one to laugh, pause, and then laugh again. “You really mean that to be a question. If you want to go to bed with me, why don’t you just say so?”

“No, no.” Tony pleaded. He felt terror. He had blundered his way into a mess, trying to show off. He put his glass down and put his hands out to plead. “I didn’t mean that. Going to bed with you wouldn’t make me envy him less. I meant simply that being with the two of you is hard. You have everything. I’m just here for a while. Then I’ll go back—to what? To the absence of all this.” He pointed to the house like a magician indicating the objects he was soon to make disappear. “What you both have is a constant reminder of my …” What? What was so terrible about his life? “… my … my mediocrity.”

She had resumed her normal manner: calm, interested, welcoming. “You’re not a mediocrity,” she said sharply, as though someone had insulted a close friend of hers.

“Well,” Tony said, wanting out of this conversation, turning back to look at the tableau under him, more than ten million in talent chatting against the surf, “I feel like one here.” He felt his chest tremble. He breathed out slowly to rid himself of it. At last he had spoken the truth. To an almost total stranger, he had confessed what he dreaded about Hollywood. Not Joe McCarthy or his father’s coldness. Not his mother’s smothering insanity or Garth’s narcissism. Here, he was insignificant—an amoeba in an ocean of whales. He expected at any moment to be swallowed whole—a tasty hors d’oeuvre for the giant mammals.

The flight to Brazil seemed to take forever. Chico accepted all the drinks that were offered, from the champagne before takeoff to the pre-lunch cocktail, to the wine during the meal, straight on through to the cordial. David matched him sip for sip, although he was quite drunk just from the cocktail. Chico passed out near the end, his head sliding off the seat and resting against the window. David felt sick during descent but he fought the nausea off by calling to mind the Mistress and her punishments—guaranteed to arouse him and prove a distraction.