Hot Properties (5 page)

Patty liked this dramatic gesture and poetic idea. David had seemed sour at the party: a stiff, slightly obnoxious young man who believed he knew everything. That also attracted her. She liked to win the good opinion of difficult people, but this blushing and fanciful David was even better. Patty believed sensitive men were easier to go to bed with, because, though their performance was sometimes problematic, they made more lenient judgments. Patty looked at the empty space and tried to imagine David’s scene. She couldn’t. The dazzling floor, those delicate columns, the beautiful peacock-colored rugs, all spoke to her of money, ease, self-assurance; things that had eluded her since she came to New York. She had grown up in this kind of comfort in suburban Pennsylvania and, so far, no one she knew in New York had it. No, for Patty, this loft was not haunted by immigrant women.

She turned herself toward David, kicked off her shoes, and put both feet under her. This made her into a small package that David could easily imagine carrying to his bed. “I don’t like to think of them,” she said looking sad.

“My grandmother was one of them,” David said quietly.

“She worked here!” Patty’s eyes opened in alarm.

“No, no,” David said, laughing. “She worked in a sweatshop in the city. I don’t know where.”

“Maybe it was here,” Patty said, her eyes scanning the loft as if she might find David’s grandmother in the shadows.

“No, I doubt it,” David said. He thought this last remark of Patty’s impossibly dumb. His penis had begun to warm and swell in his pants (he could feel the tip press outward, like mercury rising to show fever) but this one dizzy comment chilled his passion. “Do you want more wine?” he asked. She nodded. He leaned forward to get the bottle. As he did, their bodies were now touching, and Patty’s hand landed on his thigh next to the thermometer of his lust. He almost tipped the bottle over, though her touch was gentle.

He steadied his grip and carefully poured her more wine. Her hand now crept onto his penis and passed down and then back up its length once, like a blessing. He tried to think of something to say. A casual remark. But nothing was in his mind other than the sensation of his rapidly rising mercury. Heat, growth, his pants suddenly tight: a clatter of feelings that pleasurably shouted down any thought.

He fought it off (he didn’t want to show pleasure, he never liked to) and managed to finish pouring and replace the bottle without letting a moan of smoky joy emit from the furnace below. He turned his head toward her, ready to say something noncommittal, but when his eyes met hers, he discovered she had leaned toward him, and now his lips were only inches from her wet and fluted mouth.

They kissed.

While they did, her hand covered his groin. She gripped him as if his penis were a handle with which she could pick him up and carry him anywhere. He felt intensely excited by this dominated sensation; that she was ruthlessly feeling the merchandise, ready to squeeze for a reward or depart as a punishment.

Now, as their mouths opened and flattened and pecked, he was growing, growing so hard that she could bunch his wool pants around his prick and stroke.

It’s wearing a mitten, he thought, and wanted to giggle at this silly idea. He was happy! He felt like a gurgling infant, secure in the grasp of this small woman who seemed to see right through his dark suit, tortoise glasses, dark beard, and formal manner. She knew how to handle him: with the confidence of a mother soothing her baby, and a whore’s precise manipulation. He was at her mercy.

He had become so fascinated by the drama below that he lost interest in returning her kiss and became a receptacle: her tongue probing his mouth restlessly. He closed his eyes and rested his head back on the couch. She leaned over him, her mouth covering his, her hand rubbing and stroking his penis. I’m being raped, he thought with a thrill of delight.

Her hand left. He felt his stiff member twitch, begging for more contact. But it was only a pause for her to unzip him. His pants sighed open as if exhausted by her. He felt cool air while her fingers scurried under the elastic band of his Jockey shorts, and, awkwardly, pulled them halfway down. She nudged his ass, again with a combination of motherliness and business practicality; with another yank his underpants were off. How completely he was in her spell: flattened against the couch, his tail wagging in the air, waving shamelessly for love!

Her small hand took his penis by its base, and her fingers twined around it. While she kissed, pressed, tongued, and bit his lips and mouth, she ran her grip up and down its length. His position and her matter-of-fact manipulation struck David as comic, but nonetheless pleasurable. His penis arced in the cool air, yearning for more, and yet was soothed with each stroke. The world was obliterated but for one sensation: the planet had been reduced to an appendage.

Her mouth was gone. But he didn’t care. His head was thrown back, his legs spread and turned outward … and then, a hot liquid touched the head of his penis. When it departed, the cool air was cooler. And then lava covered him again, became a sea, a sauna, a sucking furnace, a bath—he opened his eyes and looked down to watch her blond head move up and down, her cheeks puffed, her lips opening and closing on the tip of his aching sex.

“This is rape,” Betty said. Laughing, she tried to wriggle away and, in the attempt, her short red curls tickled Tony’s neck. He was on top, pressing his pelvis onto hers, groaning melodramatically.

“Love me like a rock, oh baby,” Tony said, but in a basso classical actor’s voice. “Let me put the pedal to the metal.”

“What!” Betty laughed helplessly, her body trembling from her giggles.

“Whoa,” Tony said, gripping the bed to steady himself.

“Pedal to the what!”

“It’s a macho phrase, darling. Oh, that’s right, you didn’t come to the screening of
Smokey and the Bandit.
Pedal to the metal. It means floor it.”

“Floor what?”

“The car. The accelerator. My God!”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said, and now kissed him languishingly, her lips lingering as she ended the contact, pulling away reluctantly.

“More,” Tony said.

Betty moved her head back to get a more distant view of her husband. Her pale blue eyes studied him lovingly. But there was pride and possession in the look also, as though she was contemplating a family heirloom. She brushed his hair off one ear. “You need a haircut.”

Tony leaned in and kissed her again. “Oh, that’s sexy.”

She winked. “It’s late for me, Tony. I have to be up in six hours. Your day is just starting.”

“Come on, that’s not true. I have a meeting at eleven-thirty.”

“With whom?”

Tony groaned and rolled off his wife. And then kept on rolling, his arms and legs flailing in the air as he went off the bed. He hit the floor with a harsh thud.

“Tony!” Betty sat up, alarmed, and peered over the edge of the bed to see him.

“Yes, darling,” Tony answered casually.

“You’re nutty.”

“Thank you, darling.”

Betty relaxed. “Who is your meeting with?”

“Gloria.”

“Gloria Fowler? How did that happen?”

“She called me.” Tony raised his eyebrows in an attempt to look snooty. “Said she admires my plays and wondered if we might have lunch.”

Betty whistled.

“You think she wants to represent me?”

“Does she do theater?”

“No, she doesn’t really. But other people in the agency do. She might want me to write movies.”

“Movies!” Betty reached for a pack of cigarettes on the night table beside her. “What would make her think you’d want to write movies?”

“Well.” Tony stood up and walked majestically toward the window, his legs stepping high and deliberately in front of him, a soldier on the march. “Don’t you think I can?”

Betty’s eyes were on his greenies. “Do you want to write movies?”

“God, you say it as if I’ve announced I want to fuck a leper.” He peered out a window at the street tragically.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. It’s fine if you want to write movies.”

“Thank you. Now we just have to get a studio to agree.” He turned to face her, smiling pleasantly. She looked at his flat stomach and followed the line of black hair that ran from his navel to the bulge in his greenies.

“Come here,” she said.

He did, approaching with a skeptical look. When he reached the side of the bed, she took his hand and pulled him down, her arms wrapping around his broad and bony back. She ran her fingers down his spine. “You have doe’s skin,” she said in a whisper.

“I think I should be saying that to you,” he answered.

“Let’s do it quickly. I don’t want to be up for hours,” she said with a kiss on his cheek. She moved her way up to his earlobe and nibbled on it.

“You flatter me,” Tony said. “It’s never taken hours.”

She smiled and slipped out from under him, opening the night-table drawer to remove the blue plastic diaphragm case, and then tiptoed quickly toward the bathroom. As she modestly shut the door behind her, she winked at him, like a girl at summer camp sneaking out of her bunk to do mischief.

Fred had left the bathroom, stung by his wife’s rejection. When, with an attitude of disdain, she took his hand off her body and placed it on the cold and slippery porcelain, he wanted to smash her. That deadly look of boredom and contempt—it was humiliating.

“I have to get cigarettes,” he said in a clipped voice, and left the room, closing the door behind him with a bang: hard enough to register a protest, but just short of actually slamming it.

He found a pack on the coffee table. There were only two cigarettes inside and he knew he would be up for hours. “Fuck.” he said, and got his coat. “I’m going down for cigarettes,” he shouted at the bathroom door.

“What?” Marion asked, her voice made faint by the closed door.

Fred opened it and said, “I’m out of cigarettes. Do you want something?”

Marion, her face a mask of indifference, shook her head.

Fred suddenly couldn’t maintain his anger: his look pleaded for mercy. “Are you angry at me?”

Marion’s eyes widened with surprise. “No. I’m taking a bath. I don’t want visitors when—”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” He shut the door and left, walking angrily, his feet stamping on the gray-carpeted floors. He stood at the bank of elevators and muttered to himself, accompanied by the hollow noise of wind rushing down the shaftways. “She really doesn’t want me around.” An elevator door slid open as he said this and there was a couple, dressed formally, inside. Fred suspected that they had heard him and he stepped in with his head down, embarrassed. This marriage isn’t going to last, he thought to himself, peering at the logo of Otis Elevator on the floor. This thought was loud and final in his skull. He knew the marriage wasn’t going to end that night, but inevitably it would have to: they had no desire for each other, they squabbled constantly, the entire relationship was joyless.

Or was it? Outside, he crossed the street along with a mass of people leaving the Beekman movie theater, and remembered last Saturday when they had stayed home and read and played a few hands of gin. That had been fun. He cheered up, entered the stationery store, and stood behind a few people lining up for tomorrow’s
Times.
Next to him, hanging by large metal clips, were copies of magazines. Many were pornographic. Fred leafed through one, pausing momentarily at a picture of a young, thin, tanned blond with her legs spread, and nothing on but black stockings. My God, is that what a woman looks like! he thought. What possible kinship could that creature have with Marion? Marion: her mousy hair, her round, sad face, her small breasts already sagging, her toneless stomach, her lumpy buttocks. And the dull look: what did Marion’s blank judgmental eyes have in common with the sparkling blue gems that laughed at him off the page of this seedy magazine?

His turn at the counter allowed him only a fleeting look at the page, but he carried the contrast with him back to the apartment.

Marion was in bed. Her hair had been flattened by washing. This made her face look even rounder and more expressionless.

“Hello,” she said cheerfully.

“You cooked a great meal,” Fred said, undressing at the closet. He tossed the clothes on its floor. Marion watched each item: she wanted them hung up or neatly folded.

“I got it from an author.
The Fat and Happy Italian Cookbook.”

Fred laughed. This meant he was about to say something funny. He turned to Marion, his pants in his hands. “Maybe you should convince Goodson to market the book with food samples.”

“I wish we could.” Her eyes stayed on the pants.

Fred, rather than using a hanger, absently hooked the pants by one of their loops on a wall bracket meant for ties.

“Fred!” Marion sat up. “What are you doing! That’ll ruin them.”

“Huh?” He stared at her.

“Your pants. Hang them up.”

Fred obeyed. He was as thoughtless and as stupid as a child, Marion thought. “I think Bart really knows what he’s doing. You know? He’s psyched out what’s going on.” Fred finished hanging up his pants and walked to the window, opening it slightly.

“No,” Marion protested. “It’s too cold.”

“They send up heat all night, you know.”

“My hair’s wet. Wait until it’s dry.”

He shut the window, went to the bed, took off his underpants, and got under the covers.

Marion knew, because he had taken off his shorts, that he planned to make love to her. Otherwise he slept in them.

“Why don’t you do something different with your hair?” Fred said. “Maybe you should get a perm.” He was proud of himself for suggesting she change her hairstyle. If he found her unattractive, wasn’t the healthy reaction a frank attempt to discuss the problem?

“A perm!” She frowned.

That was her frown of intense disapproval. It infuriated him. “You don’t care enough about your appearance,” he said. “We both take the way we look for granted.”

“Speak for yourself, buster.” Marion turned on her side, pulling up the covers to her ear. “Turn out the light, okay? I’m going to sleep.”

Fred felt the disappointment of this statement keenly. He had his hand on his penis—it was already swelling. He had assumed they would screw. “Honey,” he said in a small voice.