Hot Properties (65 page)

Richard slumped into his chair, his hands holding his head, as though he were keeping two broken pieces in place until the glue hardened. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“I’ve gotta get back to my boss.” Tony said. And he walked back into the sun, the Hollywood sun—glaring pallidly over the studio lots, as though weary of its ceaseless duty.

The police, the press, David’s family, and his friends all assumed that David must have heard the news on television—the startling flash that Chico had tried unsuccessfully to break to him by phone on the night he killed himself.

The old man wasn’t Gott. He was a former German soldier, unimportant and unwanted, who had hung about Neo-Nazi circles in Europe and South America. He might even have known Gott, certainly he had obtained genuine documents that he used to fool
Newstime.
From interrogations of a young man who had helped in the con, it came out that the plan was hatched not only to get money but also to create favorable publicity for the new Nazi movement by denying the charges outstanding against Mengele and Gott. These details hadn’t been broadcast on the night David hanged himself, but the shattering fact for a proud professional like David, the ghastly irony that everybody assumed had overwhelmed him—that the victim had been a foolish deluded old man, that his killer would pay for a pointless crime, a crime which might have been prevented if
Newstime
had doubted the story more (Tamar Gurion had learned of the meeting because of careless gossip by the stringer) had come over the airwaves at roughly the time David slung his rope over the pipes and ended his life.

Patty’s efforts to reach David, combined with
Newstime’s
expectation that David would return to the office, led to an early discovery of the body. Patty had regretted their phone conversation the moment it was over, but had assumed he was avoiding her repeated attempts to reach him at the magazine, and went there. After two hours passed without an answer at the loft, a nervous Chico escorted her downtown.

Chico fell apart at the sight of the body. He frantically tried to cut him down, talking inarticulately, unable to keep the ladder steady, pulling desperately at the shoes, until he finally collapsed, alternately screaming and weeping on the couch.

Patty’s first thought was to look for the collar and magazines. She was going to destroy them if they were present. She didn’t know why, but even if David had left them behind, she assumed he would want her to. She couldn’t find them. Then she phoned the police. She felt nothing. Not even surprise. She
was
shocked. But somehow it made sense. In the cab, Chico had talked about the situation with the Gott story in incoherent snatches. Obviously he and David were vulnerable, and in her talk with David on the phone she had heard how truly scared and alone he must have been for a long time.

I’m sorry, she said to his body. She held Chico’s head in her lap while he sobbed, hiding from the sight, and spoke in the still emptiness of her mind: I’m sorry, David. She looked at the huge abstract yellow painting, no tears, unafraid, and apologized. She waited for her own tears to flow. But sitting in the loft with the great Chico, this great man whom David had worked so hard to please, weeping like a child in her lap, she understood. The joke life had played on David was both too horrible and too funny to live through. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder, David, she said silently.

Betty nursed her and the magazine protected her through the cleanup that followed over the next few weeks. Although David’s suicide was a marvelous side-bar to the whole episode, as though finally acknowledging there was a brotherhood of the press, almost everybody kept a distant, even dignified distance from that aspect of the story. The gossip was furious, an item or two did appear in the real rags, but an unknown journalist’s idealistic suicide was dull compared to the field day they could have with the old man and his killer.

Her parents came to town for a few days. Betty convinced her to see a psychiatrist at least for a while. To the doctor she told the fact of David’s sexual secret, a secret made even more frustrating for her by the fact that she didn’t know its extent or importance in his life. The more she talked about him, the more the realization that she had lived with him and known precious little about him horrified her. Not because of what it implied, the desperate lonely sorrow he must have lived with, but because of what it meant about her. The therapy consoled her, forgave her, explained to her, but the fear that she was incapable of loving anyone without the distorting prism of her self-absorption keeping her a stranger to the secrets of his soul stayed with her.

Her novel came out. Of course it didn’t sell. But it got great reviews. Paula Kramer didn’t write about it in her devastating piece on Fred, but she did review it for the
Times Book Review,
hailing Patty as providing a remarkable combination of humor and tragedy, a writer who “is too intelligent to rely on the dogmas of feminism, but rather manages to remind us of the real effects sexism has on our lives, to
feel,
to understand with our hearts and not our minds.”

Gelb tried to phone right after the tragic news, but Betty, on Patty’s instructions, told him not to call again, and he obeyed. She made it. Without him. And without David.

Although in her eyes the fog of mystery and sorrow from David’s death obscured her docking in the literary port, all who knew her soon thought of Patty Lane as a brilliant talent whose ultimate success was only a matter of time. The tragic story of her lover only added to the fascination with which she was now regarded. She carried alone, in her weary heart, what she knew of the sad story. Now that the world believed she had no secrets, she possessed the first true secret of her life—a keepsake and a punishment, she believed, for completing the lonely journey of creation.

CHAPTER 18

On the fifty-second week that Fred Tatter’s
The Locker Room
appeared on the New York
Times
bestseller list (it had sunk from the number-one position recently, but was still in the top five), his agent held a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary. Bart didn’t stint on the cost—after all, Fred was a client whose earnings exceeded a million dollars a year.

Most of the publishing industry was invited, along with dozens of writers, as well as movie and television people—
The Locker Room
was scheduled to be a mini-series the next fall, and Fred’s new novel, although still unfinished, had been optioned for a feature film. Even enemies such as Paula Kramer, who had burned Fred on the interview, were asked. (The way Paula had suckered Fred, Bart explained to people, into a confessional that
The Locker Room
consisted of an account of cheating on Marion was that she pretended intimacy and then betrayed confidences, probably irritated that Fred didn’t make a pass at her.) More significant than these invitations to the people who had attempted to slow the juggernaut of
The Locker Room
was the fact that they all accepted—gladly. It became
the
publishing party of the season. Not to be invited was shameful.

The caterers used all five floors of Bart’s town house elegantly—two of the large rooms were finished for the party, providing a windfall of tax write-offs for Bart. Fred and Marion, at Bart’s request, arrived early and were installed in an upper bedroom which had been made the control center for the disc jockey selecting the music for the dancing on the third floor. Several of the Hollywood people who were involved on the mini-series and the planned film of Fred’s second book had not yet met him and Bart wanted them to chat intimately before the crush of the party.

Marion sat near the electronic boards, sipping champagne, and watched the disc jockey prepare. She had long since become bored with the slavish attention paid to Fred. She no longer simmered with quiet rage at the curious first looks she got from people when being introduced. The television people, she thought, seemed to look particularly snide on meeting her—no doubt thinking of the amusing fact that plump, round-faced, mousy-haired Marion was being played by Farah Fawcett in the mini-series. Go ahead, laugh, she answered them silently. I’ll console myself in my million-dollar co-op. Most women just get heartache from their husbands fucking around, she once told her shrink. At least I get furs.

Fred had them laughing in moments, the nervous eager-to-please hooting that seemed to be a reflex since he had become a favorite of the talk shows. The media had fallen in love with his unpretentious joking about publishing and his engaging guffaws at his self-deprecating stories. A recent carping piece on him in
Town
magazine called Fred the first stand-up-comic novelist. Marion was sick of the standards of his repertoire by now—his embarrassing moments before he made it: spilling coffee on himself before an important meeting; stepping on Pete Rose’s foot minutes before a World Series game; meeting Isaac Bashevis Singer at a writers’ conference, becoming confused, and complimenting him on writing
Portnoy’s Complaint
(Marion suspected he had made that one up for Johnny Carson); and then the sudden switch to an earnest but humble discussion of his new book’s themes.

“It’s about a strong woman,” Fred said to the rapt Hollywood crowd. “Not just because she’s an athlete—and great in bed,” he added with a guffaw that triggered a round of laughs from the movie and television people. “With both sexes!” he added when their chuckles waned, triggering a new explosion. Then he slapped himself playfully. “I’ve gotta be serious. No, not just ’cause of that, not just ’cause she challenges the sports establishment, but ’cause she’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, playing tennis, the rich people’s game.”

“It’s got everything,” the producer who had optioned the novel said.

“It’s a female
Rocky,”
another said.

“But more serious,” the producer said. “Much more serious.”

“Oh, yeah,” Fred said with a broad wink. “I’m thinking of writing half the book in German.”

Ha, ha, Marion said to herself while the rest split their sides, outdoing each other in showing enjoyment.

Downstairs, they could hear that the party had begun in earnest, and started to move. The movie producer of the new book, Jim Foxx, took Fred by the elbow as they approached the stairs and pulled him aside, practically knocking Marion to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then continued to Fred in a whisper: “I’m thinking of Tony Winters to do the adaptation.”

“Oh, yeah?” Fred said with woozy surprise. He’s already tipsy, Marion noted.

“He wrote a terrific movie for me.”

“Yeah, with Bill Garth, right?” Fred asked.

“Oh, that’s right,” Foxx said, pretending he had just remembered. “Tony said you two are good friends.”

“Oh, yeah?” Fred said with a gleam in his eye. “Well, you know, in the last year, a lot of people have suddenly become my good friends.”

Foxx laughed hard—but nervously. “Of course, of course. Isn’t the world terrible? But he’s a good writer.”

“Yeah, he’s good,” Fred said with a tone of critical omniscience. “But in his plays he’s never really put it all together. Someday he’ll have a big smash.” Fred started down the stairs. He looked back at Marion and smiled. “Though Betty’s probably getting tired of waiting, right?” He guffawed and moved toward the noise of the crowd.

At the sight of him, they applauded good-naturedly. A few shouted mocking toasts, but many stared at him with glistening, fascinated eyes, as though trying to decode the mysterious formula that had made him a star.

In the rear of the front room, smiling but not applauding, stood Patty Lane. To the publishing people she was a familiar sight and provoked much gossip. She wore a black silk men’s shirt, just covering the tops of her naked thighs. The buttons were open halfway down her chest, so that anyone standing at an angle to her could thoroughly view the sheer black bra she was wearing. Her escort was Raul Sabas, the Broadway musical-comedy star whose obvious effeminacy and open admission of homosexuality had led to a ceaseless flow of gossip that he was in fact experimenting with women. Raul was dressed in an identical silk shirt (though he wore black leather pants with it), also open halfway down his chest, and he and Patty seemed very chummy, Raul’s arm often gathering her for a delighted squeeze at one of her witticisms. Their presence together intensified the talk about them, but the five or six people in the room who were “really in the know” about the mysterious Patty Lane (her status as a cult author was growing daily due to the surprisingly strong sales of the quality-paperback edition of her first novel) whispered to others the current rumor that Sabas was a beard—in fact, they suspected she was flirting with lesbianism.

Standing with this unusual couple was Tony Winters, tan from another long trip to Los Angeles, wearing jeans, polo shirt, and a blue satin windbreaker with the title of his forthcoming movie on the back. Leaning on him wearily was his wife, Betty, looking, by contrast with her husband and friends, absurdly conventional and out of sync, dressed in a demure enormous maternity dress that visually inflated her fifth month of pregnancy to eight-month proportions. Betty, the ones “in the know” explained, had quit her job, intending to devote herself to raising the child, and that was the reason Patty Lane’s new contract wasn’t with Garlands. Betty cited her husband’s frequent absences in LA as the reason she felt her baby would need a nonworking mother, but those “in the know” mumbled that the couple’s move to the West Coast was only a matter of time.

This foursome huddled together while Fred made his way through the crowd, greeting people boisterously, pumping hands like an electioneering politician. Something Tony said caused his group to burst out laughing, a quartet abruptly playing a different sheet of music from the room’s orchestra.

“What’s so funny?” Fred called out, following the curious glances of people around him toward the two couples. “Hey, Patty! You look great.” The crowd parted for him to walk up. “Tony, Betty, how are you? Raul Sabas!” Fred said, putting his hand out enthusiastically. “I love your work.”