Hot Properties (12 page)

He sat in the back of his limousine during the ride from LAX to the Beverly Hills Hotel and played with the bar and the temperature-control dial—he wanted to see if he could tell the difference between sixty-eight and sixty-six degrees—and said to himself over and over, this isn’t depressing, this is fun! And though the difference between his childhood visits and this trip was obvious—to see a father who has given your mother a nervous breakdown and blacklisted his friends is presumably of a different quality than being summoned by a world-famous actor and a powerful producer to “save the script”—nevertheless, the pure thrill of it, the preposterous treatment of him by the driver and hotel clerks as if he were the scion of royalty, the silly extravagance of first-class travel, all of it, was wonderful, perhaps his first real Christmas ever.

Two messages were waiting for him at the desk, from his father and mother. Of course, their names didn’t mean that to the slavish clerk. She was the star of the number-one television sitcom and his father was the head of programming for a major network. As always their stature in television land amused Tony, but once upstairs, disappointed that his room was small (writers don’t get suites, I guess, he thought), the two names scrawled on the message-form slips depressed him, reminded him of the other LA, blew in to the air-conditioned room a Santa Ana of greed, cowardice, and disloyalty.

He decided not to phone, his excuse being that it was late and he had an early meeting. But he couldn’t sleep and after unpacking with a meticulousness totally unlike him, he wanted to talk to someone. New York was out of the question; it was already late there. He was stumped for a while, until he thought of Billy Feldman, the son of a neighbor of his father’s, also a child of divorce, with whom Tony would play during his summers in Beverly Hills. Tony’s father had mentioned the last time they talked that Billy was in town working in the business. Tony found him through information, living in Hollywood.

“Hey, man! How are you? This is incredible, I was just talking about you.”

“I’m in town. I can’t sleep. I was hoping …”

“Sure—where are you?”

Fifteen minutes later Billy arrived at the hotel entrance and waved away the valet-parking attendant as Tony approached. Billy was driving a BMW sports car, wearing a pink T-shirt and white shorts and a pair of sunglasses pushed back onto the top of his head.

“What’s this?” Tony asked, getting in. “The Hal Prince look?”

Billy looked puzzled.

“The glasses,” Tony explained.

“Oh.” Billy seemed worried suddenly, as if he had committed a gaffe. “I forget I have them on, I’m sorry.”

“I was teasing,” Tony said. He slapped Billy on the leg. “Thank you for rescuing me. I was so lonely in that hotel room.”

“I know what you mean, man. They’re the worst. What are you doing in a hotel anyway? Between your mom and dad you’ve got forty-five rooms to stay in.”

“I’ve never seen Mom’s place. Think it’s big?”

“I know it is. I was there last week.”

“You were! For what? Don’t tell me she had a party.”

“Script conference. Haven’t you heard? You haven’t!” Billy seemed slightly miffed. “I’m a writer on her series,” he continued, obviously proud of this fact, and hurt that Tony wasn’t aware of his accomplishment.

“You are! No kidding. That’s terrific!” Tony said with conviction. Billy relaxed and told the story of how he landed his job as a “story editor” on Tony’s mother’s series. His account was given in a tone that implied the anecdote had the significance of legend, the way a war veteran might talk of his participation in the Normandy invasion. In telling how he got the assignment to write an episode, Billy seemed to discount that he had known Tony’s mother, as well as the executive producer, since childhood.

“So they gave me a week to write the script. I didn’t fucking sleep at all. By the time I handed it in, I was sure it was shit. And I just felt—I mean, I’m sure I was overdramatizing—that this was my last shot. If this script didn’t go, I don’t know, I would have just given up. Gone back east or something.”

“So after you wrote one episode, they made you a story editor?”

Billy frowned. He seemed both confused and irritated. “Well, the script I wrote was the car-wreck episode.”

Tony nodded and waited. Billy looked away from the road to glance at Tony and saw that his explanation had been insufficient.

“You know?” Billy said, now a little doubt creeping into the tone of the war veteran: perhaps his listener had never heard of World War II.

“The car-wreck episode,” Tony repeated. “That was this past season?”

“Tony, your mom won an Emmy for the car-wreck episode. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen that show!”

“Well …” Tony was about to say that he vaguely remembered seeing a few minutes of an episode about a car wreck, when he realized that such a comment would be more insulting than saying he had never seen it. Obviously Billy believed the car-wreck episode, if one saw it, would haunt the memory.

“Here we are!” Billy announced, in time to prevent Tony from saying anything.

“Joe Allen’s!” Tony exclaimed with genuine delight. “I forgot they have one in LA.”

“I thought it might make you less homesick,” Billy said.

When they walked in and Tony saw the familiar brick walls and the long old-fashioned bar at the entrance, he said, “You’re right.”

“Yeah, the first year I moved out here permanently, I ate here three times a week. I would’ve come more, except I was embarrassed. And broke.”

Billy walked past the headwaiter and on into the back room, heading for a table with two young women and room for two others. Tony followed, dismayed at the prospect of having to meet people. Billy introduced the women as Helen, his roommate, and her friend, Lois.

“As in Lane,” Billy added with a grin.

“And you’re Billy, as in the Kid,” Lois answered in a quiet drawl. The response, and the vague suggestion of hostility in her tone, interested Tony.

While they ordered drinks, and Tony, his stomach clock disordered, first decided he was hungry and ordered a hamburger, then had no desire for it on its arrival, they discussed their reasons for being in LA. All of them were New Yorkers. Billy, like Tony, was raised by his mother and had been visiting LA for years before he moved, but Helen and Lois both came to LA after college and worked as secretaries for movie studios. Helen was now a film editor (Tony eventually was able to determine without asking directly that she was still basically an assistant film editor, which could mean anything from being the real talent behind her boss to being the person who organized the loose strips at the end of the day—the lower end of the spectrum was more likely) and Lois had become a sitcom writer. Indeed, she had made it: she was the producer of his mother’s series, a title which meant that she supervised the assignments, acceptance, and final polishing of all the episodes, as well as writing four or five herself.

They all knew Tony’s story, to his surprise, but it turned out his mother was fond of bragging about his plays and (when he guessed this, and asked them, they cheerfully admitted it) implying that they wrote garbage for TV while her brilliant son was a “serious writer.”

Tony’s wringing this admission from them made them all great friends, especially when Tony laughed at his mother’s description of him as a “serious writer.” Tony said, “That means I don’t make any money.”

While Lois laughed at this remark, Tony smiled and looked into her eyes, thinking about making love to her, and it was clear to him that she would be willing. She had been expecting to loathe him; she was someone who had little free time for meeting single men; she knew mostly television types like Billy; and, of course, though Tony made fun of talk about himself as a “serious writer,” he knew that in fact he
was
a serious writer, and therefore possessed a sort of impoverished nobility that still awed people who worked in Hollywood. All this added up to her being an easy target for a seduction.

Now, despite the fact that he was already flirting with her and giving every indication that he had never met a woman so beautiful and interesting before, did he actually want to sleep with her? It was hard for him to even begin to answer this question. He always wanted people to want him. Often this concern obliterated whether he wanted them.

Even now, as he noticed that her lips, thin and bloodless, did not appeal to him, that her hair was a dull brown, her breasts were small, that she had an arrogant attitude toward Billy and Helen, presumably because they were lower down on Hollywood’s totem pole, and that she was obviously dying to know the details of his business in LA—all these things made her unattractive—even so, he heard and saw himself wooing her as if nothing, nothing else on earth, could be more important than winning her.

Patty’s week had been difficult. She saw David Bergman only once more. He was strangely indifferent and though they went to bed, he was passionless, ignoring her desires, while his own seemed to be satisfied perfunctorily. It had been the booze, she decided, and felt profoundly insulted.

Her problems mounted each day, because every day cost money, and she had less of that commodity with each expense. Unemployment insurance didn’t cover everything, despite her efforts to economize. She had trouble sleeping until after a long struggle, which meant that she would fall asleep at four or five in the morning and be unable to wake up until noon. That made her search for a job even more difficult.

Her life had no markers. Each day resembled the last. Life’s ordinary routine—sleeping, eating, bathing, cleaning—rose like dark hills for her exhausted will to climb.

She got up one morning to discover she weighed under one hundred pounds, a first since childhood. In the
Times
that morning was a long article on anorexia. Patty diagnosed herself as a sufferer, and was haunted by images of bones piercing through a shrunken body. She became too upset to eat breakfast, confirming her terror, and she called Betty in a panic.

“I need a doctor,” she said without even a hello.

“What’s wrong!”

“I’m anorectic!”

Betty laughed. “I wish I was.”

Patty began to cry. She tried to cover it by talking, but the words caved in like a rotten floor and dropped her into a basement of sobs.

Betty’s tone changed sharply. “My God, Patty, are you all right? You’re
not
anorectic! Where are you?”

“In the kitchen,” Patty whimpered, looking at her untouched breakfast. “I can’t eat.”

“I want to see you. Are you dressed?”

Patty tried to say yes, but sobbed instead.

“Get in a cab and come here.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“I can’t face midtown …”

“Patty.” Betty said this like a mother: with stem love. “The cab will take you to the entrance. You get in an elevator and walk into my office. Midtown won’t touch you.”

This is silly, Patty thought. I’m not having a breakdown. I don’t need to run to Betty’s office for her to take care of me. But while Patty told herself she was okay, she nevertheless rushed out of the apartment, caught a cab, and anxiously watched the street numbers go by, as if her eventual arrival might be in doubt, or that the closer she came to the solace of Betty’s office, the more easily she could bear life.

And indeed, by the time she stepped out of the elevator onto Betty’s floor, a kind of lightheartedness took over, as if Patty’s presence there was part of a different life, as if she were merely visiting a peer during some free time grabbed from the hustle and bustle, meeting Betty to play squash, or for a drink, or for any of the reasons she used to visit Betty’s office. One of the editors she knew passed her in the hall, and Patty easily greeted him, and gave an impression of contentment that was genuine coin, even though the purse of its origin was otherwise dark, musty, and poor.

Betty looked relieved on seeing her. She closed the door to her office. “Are you all right?”

“I’m a wreck.”

“You don’t look it. You look great.”

“I feel like dying.”

Betty said nothing. She nodded seriously and looked expectant. But Patty didn’t want to elaborate. It was truer kept simple: detailing her problems made them sound small, and they didn’t feel small. In the aggregate they were suffocating, and made her want to disappear and die.

“You need a job,” Betty said at last, as if this were a conclusion reached through intensive tests done by a crack medical team. “Why don’t you write something?”

“Are you nuts? I need money. I have three hundred bucks in the bank.”

“No, no. I mean, write a romance book, or, uh, you could do some ghost writing, something. But guaranteed money, not on spec.”

“Can I write?” Patty said heavenward, with a sweet pleading air, like a child querying Santa Claus on his ability to give a special present.

“Sure! Those things? I think of doing them all the time. Those romances are a formula. It’s like painting by numbers.”

“I can’t believe it! I’ll become one of those hysterical writers screaming for more ads. I can’t do it. And how do we get a contract anyway? We have no experience.”

Betty laughed. “So you do want to try?”

“I can’t get a job again. I’m too passive. I’d never be promoted. I’d end up being the first eighty-year-old assistant editor in publishing.”

Betty stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs to the Shadow Books division. We’ll see Joe McGuire. He handles romances.”

For a moment Patty stayed in her chair. It seemed preposterous: could it work? Had she been worrying herself to death over nothing? Could she just take an elevator down to an assignment, money, respectability, a sense of self, a return of appetite, the ability to pay for extermination of all the cockroaches in her sublet? Had this nightmare merely been an illusion of nerves?

Betty nodded at the door. “Come on. Let’s do it.”

Patty opened her mouth to protest: argue that failure would surely be the result.

But Betty anticipated her: “No back-talk. I’m telling you it’ll work.”

Patty got up. Betty made her feel competent. That this would be fun. She followed her out and smiled brilliantly at a cute male assistant who was watching her breasts bounce while she walked.