Hot Properties (44 page)

“He doesn’t want to make exciting drama, Tony. He wants to make a hit movie.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m being a child about this. This isn’t my Sistine Chapel, this is his next World’s Fair.”

Gloria laughed. “Right, exactly. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. But then I think you’re going to have to reconsider writing for Hollywood. Because though you might have an easier time working with other people in the business, this kind of rewrite is going to confront you over and over. If you want the money and the glory, you have to pay your dues.”

Somehow, after he had spoken with her, he felt better. Nothing she had said altered anything, but the sting of his humiliation was salved. She had made him feel it was less personal, not a bullet aimed at him, Tony Winters, but rather at writers, any writer.

His next resolution was harder, both to bear and to execute. He had arranged with Lois that she would call him when she woke in the morning, since the three-hour time difference would mean that by then Betty would be out of the house.

Only moments after his conversation with Gloria. Lois phoned. “Hi,” she said in a sleepy voice, relaxed and inviting, broadcasting in its tone her circumstances—he could see the rumpled blue pastel bedsheets, the California sun bleaching the tiled windowsill, the white phone cord stretching from the night table across her breasts.

He had showered first thing to wash off the residues of last night’s copulation with Betty. He couldn’t bear speaking to Lois with his wife’s liquids still on him. “Are you in bed?”

“No, I’m in the kitchen,” she said, still in that dreamy tone. “I miss you so much already, it’s sick.”

Tony sighed. He hadn’t expected it to be easy, but the way she spoke to him made it impossible. “We have to talk,” he said sharply.

“Oh?” She was alert almost instantly. “I knew it!” she added with surprising energy and command. “I had a feeling last night it was going to happen—Judy said it was paranoia. But I was right! You went home and you got scared, right?”

“Well, don’t say it like I’m a wimp. Not scared, no. It’s just … this isn’t right.”

“What isn’t right?”

“Doing this. To you. To Betty. To me. It’s too much pain—it’s too hard. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I’m living with—I spend every minute with Betty scared I’m going to call her Lois.”

“And do you spend every minute with me scared you’re going—”

“No! God, no.” He sighed. He felt put upon, cast in a role he didn’t want to play. He wanted a rewrite, something more in a star’s part, where all the sympathy would be with him. Make his wife a bitch, or Lois a scheming home-wrecker, at least give him a tragic past so that there would be something to take the curse off his treating these two women so badly. “I have to make a decision—”

“Then decide to move out here. Live with me, Tony. I’m good for you. How much writing have you done since you married Betty?”

He frowned at the phone, irritated by her question. It didn’t bother him that it insulted his marriage—he was annoyed that it was something he had never thought about. “I don’t think Betty’s responsible for my not writing.”

“Okay. I love you, you schmuck. No one could love you more than I do. If you don’t appreciate that, you’re an asshole.” She hung up. All he heard was the click, but he knew she must have slammed the receiver down. He dialed her number immediately, but got no answer. He tried to imagine whether she was standing there weeping at the ringing phone or whether she had stormed out, driving to work furious. The latter, he thought admiringly.

He estimated how long it would be before Lois reached work, but when the time came, he didn’t call. Speaking to her weakened his resolve to say that they should not see each other for a while (something that was likely to occur in any event) and that a good test of the seriousness of their relationship would also be to maintain “a silence of letters and telephones. She had guessed correctly at his mealy-mouthed introduction anyway; perhaps more talk was redundant. He reasoned this way all day, explanations for his cowardly silence evolving by afternoon into a monologue that minimized how intimate he and Lois had been.

Altogether they had had only twenty days of physical contact. And though they had spoken on the phone almost daily (Tony had praised the fates that Betty never looked at New York Telephone’s itemized list of long-distance calls), most of their talk was no different from conversations with friends. (Even Tony, in the throes of rationalization, knew that this particular diminishment of his relationship with Lois was specious—the warm, gossipy conversations they had were what made him fall in love with her. The sex was great, but her absorption in his career and life was what had made him feel she was superior to Betty, who seemed slightly bored and depressed when hearing his anxieties and hopes.) But he told himself these lies over and over, masking the real face of their love, dressing it up in shabby cloth, and by nightfall the costume had become convincing, the ugly nose he had put on the face of their romance had made the loss seem unimportant and easy to bear.

He watched his wife when they went out to dinner, observed how many other men looked at her (there were plenty, he discovered, to his shock and irritation), and checked item by item Betty’s physical advantages. His wife was prettier. Any man would think him a fool to trade Betty for Lois. And, oddly, Betty seemed sexier, her perfect posture holding the breasts high, impertinently, exposing her long white neck, her eyes always on you, her mouth in a smirk of mild amusement. Lois was sincere, her thin body energetic, not sensual, her eyes guarded, often distracted, her flat breasts unimportant and undisplayed. Yet, in bed, Betty was dull, perfunctory, almost embarrassed, with none of the energy she displayed in conversation, while Lois was high-spirited, her tight body flowingly loose and embracing, her eyes sparkling from pleasure, her throat laughing with ecstasy. Maybe I’m responsible for the distinction, bored with Betty, and so making her boring.

For a week he thought of nothing else, and yet told himself how surprising it was that breaking up with Lois didn’t seem to bother him. He went to bed each night mildly outraged that Lois hadn’t phoned. He opened his mailbox with a little rush of anticipation, mounting as the days went by, that there would be something from her in there. She’s so damn proud, he thought to himself, imagining (somewhat hopefully) how miserable she must be.

He looked at the screenplay each morning, but couldn’t begin on the rewrite. The words themselves seemed drab and lonely on the page, as though they were uncollected orphans walking the streets aimlessly with runny noses and tattered shoes. It depressed him to meet their eyes and take them to the institution, to be washed with cold dirty water, dressed in uniforms, and left to the surveillance of cold-hearted taskmasters.

He did begin work on a play, as he had promised himself on arrival in New York. And although those words seemed cheerful, the bright students of an expensive school, clean faces pushing eagerly to the fore to be noticed—they still seemed like children. His plays didn’t have the stern power of an army assaulting the world with confidence and pomp, their mission profound, their audience cheering with ecstatic liberation.

He resumed his attendance at the Uptown Theater Company’s weekly readings. He hadn’t gone in more than a year and, to his surprise and delight, he was greeted like a brother returning from war: they asked awed questions about Hollywood, as if the experience was not only exciting, but deadly as well. Hearing the works in progress of fellow playwrights cheered him. Nobody was writing really well. Most were unable to execute even the simplest of structures, their characters frequently were unformed or their motivations inconsistent. The few whose skills at the craft of drama were sharp had no subject matter other than, usually, the story of their families. If they reached middle age, sometimes it was the story of their marriages instead. Tony had the same problem, and to be reminded that it was a universal condition made his illness seem less serious and easier to bear, though it also made him less patient with his own work, less eager to do it. The dialogue on his page the morning after a reading too often sounded like another’s, the story merely a rewrite of everything he had heard, in some ways more dramatic, often funnier, but never more profound.

He drifted through the days. Reading the paper, watching game shows, going to movies in the afternoon, writing a page of the screenplay once a week, discarding the play he had begun about his mother’s show, starting one on his summer visits to his father’s house, dropping that after a mere two scenes, and then taking out a draft of an old work, an ambitious drama about the three civil-rights workers who were killed in the South by Klansmen. He tried to rid it of its sixties “social-consciousness” tone, its obeisance to liberal principles, and focus it more on the questionable psychology of these middle-class kids who put themselves in jeopardy for a people and a life that, in truth, were no more their fault or responsibility than apartheid. But after a few weeks he concluded that the effect of his revisions was merely to diminish their heroism with obvious Freudian insights about middle-class family life; that he had managed, by a circuitous route, to take this story of the birth of social activism in the baby-boomer generation, an activism that he in fact believed had forever altered the terms of political debate, and turn it into just another play about how hard it is to fulfill the expectations of a Jewish mother without getting yourself lynched.

Then his ideas all turned to farcical satires, the desperate resort (he knew) of all young writers without new stories to tell, or new insights into old ones. He briefly considered using his knowledge of being a Hollywood child to write a black comedy based on the circumstances of Ronald Reagan’s son—he could easily imagine offending everybody with that one. Might even be a hit. He started it, but the sour tone of his dialogue, the grotesque prospect of yukking it up about a senile opportunist who was in fact making fools of the American people, killed his desire to make fun. It really wasn’t amusing. He would agree with the outraged responses: to josh about the horrible is to eat without paying the bill. Art might not be as important as he believed, but it had to have some objective beyond tickling the funny bone of sophomores and leaving the dull-witted with their mouths open.

He began to regard himself as having a terminal illness. He was dying as an artist. He had no faith that the cold engine of his imagination could be started, no matter how many times he replaced the batteries or friendly passersby brought out cables to jump-start it. The feeling wasn’t dramatic or desperate. It was the sure knowledge that came each morning when he stared at the typewriter, sipping his coffee, that every word in his mind, every character, every story, every setting, every theme that drifted out of the misty chill in his brain turned out to be a bore. A cliché, a character he knew nothing of, or a circumstance that had been done and done and done. The muscles were dying, paralyzed by dismay and hopelessness. He no longer believed that time would rescue him, that the inevitable accumulation of experience and writing would lead him to a final victory.

And if he turned to the screenplay, this numbness of creation was made worse, because after all, that wasn’t even art. If he couldn’t be a hack either, what was to become of him? He had to earn a living. He had to have something to say at dinner parties when asked what he did.

He started having trouble falling asleep, perhaps because his days were so lethargic. Often evening came without his having been more venturesome than going from his study to the kitchen. He watched television as though afraid of silence, keeping it on from the moment Betty left, turning it off only when they had dinner. The effort of conversing when, on his side, there was nothing to report other than despair, drove him to turn the TV back on after clearing the dishes, this time to create silence.

After a while Betty stopped asking if he had written that day, her studious avoidance adding to the sense that he was a victim of a fatal illness, that his condition was too terrible even to be mentioned. She took to reading in the bedroom and he stared stupidly at the set, excited only when a favorite movie was on, though even that would remind him of how miserably he had failed with his screenplay. For the first time in his life, he regularly watched his mother’s show, perversely waiting through the credits to watch Lois’ name scroll by. He began to play a sick little game, imagining a moment from their lovemaking at the instant the letters appeared—her head bobbing on his cock, the look of her cunt as he approached it with his lips.

When he tried to fall asleep, the long dreary day of inactivity and repressed thought would make his brain feverish. In the dark of the bedroom, incidents from his life were replayed each time he closed his eyes, startling him awake with their horror and pain. His mother screaming, his father greeting him at the airport with dulled eyes and perfunctory hellos, images of falling out of windows, the world detonating in the white blast of nuclear death, and he would be up, out again in the living room, watching late movies and all-night news programs, falling asleep only when fatigue was so great that no coherent thought could be formed to scare him.

Finally Betty couldn’t stand his mood. She appeared at three in the morning. Tony hadn’t shaved or showered for two days. He was sullenly eating a bag of potato chips and watching sitcom reruns. Betty stood in the doorway in her pin-striped nightshirt, squinting slightly from the bright light, but with no sleepiness in her eyes, though she had gone to bed hours before.

“Hi,” he said, worried. “I thought you were asleep.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked sternly.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Why not?” she snapped.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Do you want to tell me or not? Because if you don’t want to tell me, then maybe you shouldn’t be living here.”

Tony smiled. “Come on.” he said.

“Come on, what? You’re like a zombie. You think it’s fun living with you?”