Hot Properties (17 page)
He knelt on the bed and quickly, in desperate and frightened movements, licked her. Almost immediately she was wet, with that ferocious moisture her body could summon instantly. He pushed his mouth and nose and chin up and down, from side to side, obliterating the terrible memory of that vision of spiritual death.
He had no idea how long it took. It seemed only moments before her body kicked and heaved, her mouth making sounds of release. He felt intense pleasure at her pleasure, at letting her squeeze his head between her thighs.
After her climax, she pulled him up and kissed his mouth, wet from her sex. He looked into her eyes and said with great feeling:
“I love you.”
He was astonished that her reaction was to hold him close, hugging him as if he were a long-lost savior. He glanced at her face and saw there was the beginning of tears in her eyes.
Seeing her happiness, he felt the dreaded emptiness return, and regretted that he had spoken.
Fred looked at his checkbook. In the dim fluorescent light of Karl’s bathroom he saw that the balance was one hundred and twenty-four dollars and sixty-seven cents. It was eleven-thirty, a half-hour before people would be permitted to quit, and he was down, by his rough calculation, close to two hundred dollars. He had the money. Marion and he had a ten-thousand-dollar certificate of deposit, and he had eight thousand in stocks with his broker. But when he had told Marion he was going to forgo magazine assignments for a year, they had done a strict budget so that they could live on her salary with only occasional intrusions into the eighteen thousand they had in the bank. Fred had repeatedly gone over the set limits, using up four thousand in three months. This two hundred would be seen by Marion as an idiotic extravagance, if for no other reason than that he would have to break the ten-thousand-dollar CD.
“But I would have had to break it for the rent check anyway,” Fred argued to Karl’s bathroom mirror. “It’s ridiculous,” he answered the imagined rage of Marion. “We have fourteen thousand dollars and you’re making me feel poor.”
He heard his name called from the dining room, where Karl had set up the game. He stared into the mirror and said, “Wake up!” and then yanked open the bathroom door and stormed down the long narrow hallway. He saw a bubble of paint at the end of the hall. Karl lived in a pre-World War II building on West End Avenue. And though many elegant details remained—marble fireplace, elaborate moldings, sliding wood doors that separated the large dining and living rooms—the building wasn’t being kept up, and Karl’s place had many patches of peeling and cracked paint. Karl was the big winner that night, up over two hundred dollars, and as Fred made the turn out of the hallway, he hit his fist against the bubble of paint, shattering it into pieces that fell on the floor.
Entering the room, Fred could see a cloud of cigarette smoke that hung like an evil ghost over the table. There were several cups and plates swollen by mounds of ashes. The dead butts lay in them like drowned insects. The blue, red, and white poker chips blared their colors in this fog, either arrogantly stacked for precise counting by winners, or slumping, disheveled, in front of losers. Fred had a messy pile, a very small one, in front of his empty seat.
The other players were all writers he had met casually once or twice before at dinners with Karl or at publication parties Marion had been invited to. They were, in order of prominence, Sam Wasserman, the former investigative reporter who, with the publication of a bestselling book on the murder of a middle-class young woman, had become more than a reporter and less than a novelist, and, while writing additional factual but very melodramatic books on other fancy murders, wrote a regular column for
Town
magazine that had a broad range from political commentary to complaints about the service at Bloomingdale’s; next down the ladder of success was Tom Lear, also a former reporter, who had sold a piece on a crack New York city detective to the movies, wrote the screenplay—while several carping stories appeared claiming the detective in Lear’s article had taken credit for other people’s achievements—and it was now being shot on location in New York; a rung farther down was Paul Goldblum, who had published two highly praised but unprofitable novels, but had received a National Endowment grant and a plum creative-writing teaching job at Columbia University; staring up at his rear end Was Richard Trout, a New York
Times
Metro reporter and nothing else, but he talked ceaselessly of a book he planned to write on the recently notorious murder of a local congressman who was rumored to be gay; and, last, William Truman, a childhood friend of Karl’s, who was a poet—publishing mostly in academic journals no one read—and supported himself with the aid of an enormous trust fund whose source was his grandfather’s investment in real estate (Fred had been told that Grandpa Truman once owned half of Ohio).
“Bong!” Sam Wasserman said on Fred’s entrance. “Final round.”
“Come on!” Paul Goldblum said. “You’re not quitting at midnight.”
“I gotta get home and finish my column,” Sam said in a grave tone, like a surgeon announcing he had a patient on the table waiting for an emergency operation.
Tom Lear, the only writer present who felt himself equal in stature to Wasserman, let out a loud Bronx cheer.
Karl smiled nervously. “It’s your deal, Fred.”
“Those of us who still have to write prose, instead of that stuff with skinny margins—” Sam Wasserman began to say angrily to Tom Lear, the reporter turned screenwriter.
William Truman, the poet, interjected quietly, “Don’t forget, poetry has skinny—”
But Lear was already answering Sam: “I’m sorry, Sam, I forgot. You’re still a serious writer. You haven’t sold out like me.”
“Damn right—” Sam began.
But Lear rolled on, “What’s your column this month? Comparing lambskin rubbers to ribbed rubbers? Or maybe you’re gonna take on somebody heavy, like another attack on Joe Garagiola?”
Fred guffawed, opening his mouth and leaning back with enjoyment. Wasserman looked at him: it was a cold and angry look. Sam’s attitude toward Lear was combative but friendly. When he spoke now to Fred, it was with the contempt people reserve for irritating inferiors: “Deal the cards. Or don’t you know how to do that either?”
This comment silenced everyone—it was
too
openly hostile, cruelly dismissive, exposing Fred’s vulnerability. Everyone knew that an attack on Fred’s playing was really a statement directed at his being a social interloper. At least Fred thought everyone believed it was.
“Okay, okay,” Fred said, his face reddening.
“That’s what I like about you, Sam,” Tom Lear said. “You win so gracefully.”
Fred shuffled and dealt in silence. Most of the game had been that way. The dialogue was limited to macho exchanges referring to the strategies or outcomes of hands. But it was the just-completed exchange, until it was suddenly directed at him, that Fred had hoped would dominate the evening. He loved being with these guys. Even Sam’s contempt for him didn’t lessen his desire to hang on to this group. If anything, it whetted his desire to stay.
He found himself up against Sam in the hand he dealt, as if a writer were controlling the events. As he raised and was raised back at the climax. Fred convinced himself that he would win simply because Wasserman had been unfair. But he didn’t win, and Sam let him know he thought Fred entirely merited his bad luck.
“I’m showing a boat, I’m betting a boat. Haven’t bluffed a hand all night. What the hell you doing staying in—and raising at that?”
Karl spoke softly. “All right, Sam. You won the hand. That’s plenty. A lecture isn’t necessary.”
“Let him go on,” Tom Lear said. “Maybe it’ll be his next column.”
“Don’t you know,” Sam said to Fred, “that you don’t raise a possible lock hand? You shouldn’t’ve been in there, but if you were in there, you shouldn’t’ve been raising.”
“Yeah,” Paul Goldblum said, “you got some nerve, Fred. Making Sam’s winning hand really pay off. He was actually trying to let you win.”
“Look, don’t listen to these assholes,” Sam said. “I’m trying to help you out a little bit. It’s basic poker. You don’t raise a possible lock.”
“Okay,” Fred said earnestly. “Thanks for the advice.” What he didn’t say was that he didn’t understand Sam’s terminology, didn’t know what a lock hand was, or what he was supposed to avoid in the future. But he behaved contritely, hoping to make himself so docile that Sam would feel he was too pathetic to attack. Fred knew he couldn’t face him down directly, but he swore to himself that he would someday. Get a book contract, write a bestseller, a bigger bestseller than Sam’s was.
The game ended at twelve-thirty. Goldblum forced Sam to agree to stay an extra half-hour and Fred went along, embarrassed to be the only one to leave at midnight. When they totaled up and Fred found himself writing two checks—one to Sam, one to Karl—for a total of three hundred and fifteen dollars, Truman asked, “That’s a record loss, isn’t it?” and the others smiled to themselves.
It was then that Fred swore to himself that at the very least, he would learn this stupid game and beat the shit out of Sam. Hell, out of all of them.
Patty and David spent Sunday together. She kept him busy advising her while she got started on her sample chapter for Shadow Books. She had half of it written by Monday morning when they separated for the first time in thirty-six hours.
By then they were so intimate Patty felt as if they had been a couple for a long time. David hadn’t repeated his “I love you” of Saturday night, but he hadn’t withdrawn either. Indeed, his desire that they be together seemed intense—he didn’t want to go out for a walk, or to a movie, or even for dinner. To her delight, he went to the supermarket and cooked her a suprisingly good meal. He made her take seconds, claiming (the first time a man had ever said this to her) that she was too skinny.
He wasn’t her romantic ideal. He showed signs of a middle-aged potbelly. His curly black hair was receding, and baldness by forty seemed inevitable. His skin was white and puffy, his eyes beady, his lips thick. But somehow the overall impression was better than the parts: he dressed well and carried himself with confidence. And his voice was pleasingly resonant; a calm fatherly tone came naturally to him. But most of all, what mitigated his physical ordinariness was his intelligence and his genuine interest in her. He listened to her hopes, her opinions, her reminiscences, with pleasure; taking part in her inner life as if it had become his own. He was a partner, discussing his career problems not with a mind to impressing her, but with a desire for advice and support. When she commented on the magazine, he weighed what she said carefully, never dismissing her perceptions as being ill-informed or silly.
That was not to say he didn’t fuss and fondle her body like other men. Indeed, it was the combination of his sexual and intellectual interest in her that pleased: they were usually divided. Since her college romance, men had either wanted her as a lover or as a friend. It had been integrated with her college boyfriend for the first year, but slowly his sexual interest waned. Or did it? Maybe her sexual interest waned. Could that happen with David? After a while, would she notice only the stomach and the disappearing hair and not the respect for her?
This debate went on in a distant whisper in her mind while they played house together—writing her chapter, cooking, cleaning, screwing, and watching television in bed. For the first time in a long while she felt at home in New York.
She called Betty fifteen minutes after David left for work.
“You’re up early,” Betty said.
“I’m in love!”
“Really?” Betty lost all her usual reserve—abandoned for the thrilled joy of a teenage girl.
“I spent the weekend with David. We had a fabulous time.”
“That’s great!” But now Betty’s reserve, her inherent skepticism of anything extreme, had crept back into her tone.
“Is it real?” Patty asked her pleadingly. “Or am I just boy crazy?”
Betty laughed. “Don’t ask philosophical questions. Enjoy. You’ve just met him.”
When Patty hung up, she felt the ease and calm in her body. Her confidence radiated steady warmth. She straightened the apartment quickly, not resenting the task, and settled at her desk to finish the sample chapter.
It flowed from her as if she had waited her whole life to write the life of a demure virgin who longed for a dark, handsome, and possibly brutal man to awaken her passions. She wrote through the morning and early afternoon and found, to her surprise, that she had finished a rough draft.
She read it over, only occasionally wincing at the florid language and cartoon characters. In fact, most of the time she was proud of her work. Just that she had written twenty pages impressed her. And that it seemed right, as professional as the books she had sampled, was thrilling.
She reread the pages, wondering at her heroine’s wild shifts in mood, riding a crest of hope like a surfer, covered with the spray of vigor and romance, only to crash ominously on the shore as the chapter ended, so the reader would turn the page eagerly … so Shadow Books would hire her to write the rest.
Maybe it isn’t such bullshit, Patty told herself, thinking of the past week. After all, she had paddled out into life’s ocean, stripped naked, and trusted herself to cold waves, been slapped and rebuked by them, only to rise glorious and young at last, commanding nature to carry her safely to the sun-blessed shore of love and work and happiness.
Tony Winters returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel at five-thirty in the morning still innocent of adultery. Only their talk had progressed to intimacies: Lois told him about her one-year marriage to a TV producer who went from taking cocaine once a week to a restless snorting that left him hopping with enraged incoherence by two o’clock every afternoon.
She asked a lot of questions about his mother, and he answered them honestly, not worried that to tell Lois (the producer of his mother’s series) such things might be indiscreet. Lois was too vulnerable, obviously scarred by her marriage, bluffing toughness; for Tony to believe she was capable of misusing such information.
