Hot Properties (7 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, her lower lip beginning to tremble.

“Hey, hey,” and they hugged again. After a while, he turned out the light. From her breathing, he knew she was falling asleep. He felt good. They had really broken through tonight. She had been resenting sex with him because she felt it was part of the jobs of her life. That was fascinating, he thought. He knew there was a novel in it: that kind of misunderstanding was what kept couples apart. People were too embarrassed to admit it; that’s why so few novelists wanted to take the subject on. What had happened between them was really touching, he thought. His erection had begun to shrink several times, and somewhat thoughtlessly he had stroked himself until he was flying at full mast again.

He couldn’t figure out how to plot a novel so that this lesson of marriage could be illustrated, and eventually he let his mind drift to the party. Abruptly, almost as if the image and sensation came from a different brain than his own, he vividly relived his profound excursion into Patty’s fluted mouth. A warm tickling in his penis, familiar and pleasant, began. He rubbed himself very quietly, thinking of how he could have reached down into her pink cotton top and picked one of those white melons, squeezing gently, lingeringly, rubbing her hard nipples …

He stroked without worrying … he took all of Patty in front of his bathroom door. Pulled her clothes off roughly, pushed his penis down her funneled mouth, drove into her pink vagina, without sentiment …

Marion moved!

His heart, already pounding from sexual excitement, seemed to close his throat, thumping with fear and shame.

Marion put her head on his shoulder, mumbled something, and her hand took his hard teased penis. Her cool fingers pulled gently at the head. She had known what he was doing all the time—and she approved! This was amazing, exciting in itself. She tickled him with her icy, delightful touch, and at last he splashed his belly with the warm white liquid, and felt his manhood shrivel in his wife’s hand while the vivid image of Patty’s body melted into sleep. Dark, cool, wet sleep.

CHAPTER 3

Gloria Fowler looks like a greyhound, Tony Winters realized with relief. He had been frustrated in his search for a description of her: he knew he would need one when telling the story of his meeting with her to his friends. Gloria was on the phone. She had swiveled to face the window on her right (its view of a squashed Sixth Avenue and an alley of glass skyscrapers was spectacular) so that Tony saw her long flared translucent nostrils in profile. The New York sun glowed a weary red behind her and lit her nose so that he could see minute veins. Her face was gaunt, each line sharply defined. Maybe she used to be a model, he thought. Her height, her thinness, and the tasteful, casual, and yet silken appearance of her long gray skirt, creamy white blouse, and knit sleeveless vest, all spoke of fashion.

“Bill, I think we can meet about it when the revisions are in—there’s no hurry. Yes! That’s right, enjoy the sun. Leave that to me. That’s what I’m paid for. Right, you didn’t know.” She smiled brilliantly into the phone.

She
is
beautiful. Tony decided, as if settling a dispute, while studying her mass of red hair (dyed? he wondered) that flowed up and back, almost as if it were startled off her head by a gusting wind. She hung up and the smile dissolved into an exhausted frown. She looked at Tony with resignation. “Actors!”

“Ah!” Tony raised his hand in warning. “Remember, my mother is one of that breed.”

“Oh, your mother’s a genius. Not one of these”—she gestured at the phone—“alleged stars.” Her smile reprised: high cheeks were raised like a curtain, revealing brilliant teeth.

“William Garth?”

“Yes, one of my clients is doing a script for him and, I’m afraid, the script isn’t quite right. Bill’s not getting any younger and I suppose he can’t be blamed for worrying over whether this writer can revise it properly.” Gloria reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and swiveled again so that her profile was against the gray wall. “I’m blabbing this for a reason.” She paused, her big brown eyes resting on him appraisingly. This meant her body was twisted away from him, her angle haughty and forbidding, rather as if she were on a throne looking over the pages for a potential knight. The cigarette—it was long, thin, and foreign—was placed in her mouth and lit in slow movements. She spoke while exhaling her first puff: “Have you done any screen-writing?”

Tony felt his buttocks tighten, his face freeze into a mask. He shook his head no, quickly realized that was an odd way to answer, and then said out loud, “No.” But his voice sounded young and tense.

“Just the plays.” She laughed. This made her hair seem particularly windblown. “Listen to me—“just the plays.’ I mean, of course, to say, your work has been exclusively for the theater?”

“I’ve written some short stories, but that’s all. Only my five plays.”

Gloria relaxed her queenly pose to lean forward. “Only? How old are you? Thirty?”

“Thirty-two.” He said this with genuine embarrassment. He felt young, too young, in her presence.

“And you’ve written
only
five plays?” she said, teasing.

“Well, you know, standards have been lowered. Shakespeare at thirty-two had written at least a dozen—”

“Oh, my God,” Gloria said, a hand covering her breast as if she were wounded. “You don’t judge yourself by that standard? Poor thing. I couldn’t bear to measure myself against genius—”

He knew this game. “I didn’t mean that, Gloria,” he snapped, surprising himself with his irritated tone. “I simply meant to say that writing five plays
isn’t
amazing, not that it isn’t an accomplishment. Of course I don’t compare myself to Shakespeare. Not unfavorably. Or favorably.” All this came out in a commanding though peevish tone. When he looked at her to see how she had reacted to it, he saw her smiling at him with a look of triumph and pleasure. He couldn’t understand why his response should delight her. He decided she must be trying to mollify him.

“Of course,” she said after a moment of gazing at him. “Were all the plays produced?”

“Yes, but only two were put on in a significant way.
Youngsters
at the Quest Guild and another production in the Harold Repertory in Chicago. The other productions aren’t worth talking about.”

“Gosh, I’ve never heard anyone dismiss credits, no matter how awful.”

“Well …” He considered explaining, but instead he summarized: “I know those credits don’t mean anything in the real world.”

Gloria raised her eyebrows (they were dramatic and arched even when at rest) and stared.

Tony laughed. “What?”

“Now I understand where that toughness comes from in
Youngsters.
I saw it last summer and loved it.”

“Thank you.”

“I felt there were problems with the production. I don’t think it did you justice. That girl, uh, the one with the funny face …”

“Lonnie Kane? I love her work. I thought—”

“No, no. She was marvelous. We represent her. She got some of the underpinnings in your play—I could hear strength in her. That’s what makes your humor so compelling. You’re not doing one-liners.”

“Thank you. I didn’t know you represented Lonnie. What’s she doing now?”

“She’s been swallowed up by sitcom pilots that don’t quite make it.”

Tony laughed.
“The Jaws
of acting.”

Gloria frowned. “Well, she’ll hit with one. Tell me, why haven’t you tried screenwriting?”

“I’ve thought about it. I guess I worry about dealing with Hollywood. Because of my mother I do have bad associations with it.”

“New York’s coming back, you know. More and more projects are originating and even being produced here. I’m not sure that you’d have to even visit Hollywood while doing screenwriting.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of bad association with Hollywood. It isn’t geography—it’s the profession.”

Gloria again smiled that broad toothy grin—what was it? Tony wondered. Triumph? A secret knowledge? “I thought you might mean that,” Gloria said. “I can imagine what those years out there with your mother must have been like.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t too much fun for Mom, thinking she was about to be thrown into a concentration camp.”

“But you were a baby when all that was happening.”

“Yes, but the effect on me was still quite lasting.” Tony laughed hollowly and instantly felt stupid that he had. He sounded as if he were being coy about the McCarthy Period, as it was referred to by his mother and her friends. The McCarthy Period, with capitals to aid the sense of dread and tackiness, sort of a slapstick Hitler. But it only seemed farcical in retrospect. At the time, with people losing their jobs, committing suicide, with the Rosenbergs dying in the electric chair, there was little of the low comedy that now remains when seeing those black-and-white TV hearings; little of the idiotic spectacle of matinee idols proclaiming their devotion to America and their loathing of “communist infiltration” of show business. “It wasn’t fun,” he said in a low voice, thinking of all it had cost his family: the divorce, the paralysis of his mother’s career, her breakdown, his father’s panic and immoral behavior. Everything else in the history of his family was a flat terrain compared to the volcanic and geological monstrosities of the McCarthy Period.

In college, Tony had used this family history to bed women, wooing with sentiment, making drama and romance out of the real pain and stupidity of his parents. He had corrupted his feelings and now suspected himself of fraud whenever he called attention to them, as if he were shoplifting from the store of his past, cheating the cash register of genuine feeling, selling the coinage of his soul.

Gloria looked off sadly. “It’s hard to believe it was ever like that.”

“Is it?” Tony could hear his voice take on his mother’s hard inconsolable anger. “I don’t think so. The man who backed the Screen Actors Guild in the expulsion of so-called communist sympathizers is now President of the United States. He was a tacky opportunist, as bad as the people whom we read about in Solzhenitsyn, the kind of person who informs on neighbors to get a better apartment. Reagan’s career was washed up, so he made a career of putting his rivals out of work, and thus he accidentally landed an even better job. It was ugly and petty and immoral and yet he’s President of the United States.” He heard his voice ring in the room.

Gloria looked apprehensive. No. he realized, she looked embarrassed, as if he had opened his fly or thrown a tantrum. And the last was true. He had thrown his mother’s tantrum.

“I’m sorry,” Tony immediately said. “I don’t know why I went into all that.”

“No, no. I understand.”

“Anyway, you can see why I might not instantly wish to write screenplays. In my subconscious, that industry is scary. After all, my mother didn’t work for ten years. Ten years of her prime. She became very unstable emotionally … well, I mean the scars are still there.”

Gloria now looked quite young and girlish. She hung her head and looked up at him, batting her eyes. He could see that she was
trying
to look sympathetic; but that didn’t make him feel she was being dishonest. “Now I feel quite foolish for having asked you here.”

“I didn’t mean that—”

“Because I must confess I hoped to convince you that you should be writing screenplays. Not only because the money is good. I think—from your brilliant play—that your ideas are sharp, new, and very funny. Very, very funny.”

Tony again felt himself tense, as if this praise concealed a trap.

Gloria continued, saying the following as if she were fully aware that it would sway him, “I’m going to come clean and tell you that I want to convince you to rewrite the script I was just discussing with Bill Garth.”

“Really?” This word rolled out of him, a trill of delight and amazement.

Gloria nodded solemnly. “Now. The question is: will you join me for an early lunch to talk further?”

Patty felt tiny. She was lying under a quilt in a bed floating on an island of glossy oak. The ceiling above her was like a firmament, the sprinklers a bizarre iron galaxy. The damn place was so big she felt as if she were only inches high. Also, she was exhausted. Her mouth stuck to itself from dryness, her head felt heavy. She was hung-over. Through her swollen eyes she peered at the windows—the distance was so great she felt as if she were Columbus searching for the coast of the New World—and decided from their gray light that it was early dawn.

She heard the squeal of faucets turning and then a rush of water rattling against the metal. David was taking a shower. Maybe I’m so dry because I swallowed him, she thought, disgusting herself with the notion. I could join him in there, she mused, imagining the two of them smeared with soap, screwing standing up, banging the tin of the shower stall. I gave him a good time, she told herself, and then laughed out loud. This got her to sit up. She fumbled for the pack of cigarettes on the white Formica night table and lit up after ripping it open to find the penultimate stick.

She surveyed the loft while smoking. Its magnificent space was tempting. David’s a nice guy, he was great at sex (aren’t they always in the beginning?), things here might become permanent. A boyfriend and a place to live.

The faucets groaned off and embarrassed her out of this calculation. I’m horrible, she decided, pressing out her cigarette and letting her legs out from under the covers, ready to head for the john.

David appeared, his hair damp, with an orange towel around his stomach. “Good morning,” he said, obviously happy. “You don’t have to get up.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine.”

“Oh. I thought it was sunrise. Can I take a shower?”

“Of course.” He shook his head to indicate how foolish her question was.
“Mi casa es su casa.”

Patty looked blank.

“Feel at home,” he explained.

“How sweet.” she said, but her dry throat caught on something, and the words were rasped out.

“I’ll make some juice,” he said, and padded on his damp feet toward the kitchen. He left tracks. Patty waited until he was behind the partition before getting out and rushing in the chill air to the bathroom. She felt she must look awful, a conclusion that the mirror confirmed while she waited for the water to get hot.