Hot Properties (26 page)

Fred had done many pieces on the Knick management during their losing seasons, when they were widely criticized in the New York press. Fred’s interviews were soft, easy, and made them look good. He had earned the right to request good seats for any game. It pleased him that he had acquired this weapon in his battle to be liked by the writing boys through his own writing. He phoned the Knick office after calling Tom and arranged for the tickets, and then sat back at his typewriter, resuming work on his novel with renewed vigor, producing effortlessly for the first time in months.

He finished a chapter at five-thirty. Marion would be home soon. Tom Lear, if he had been out to lunch, would have come home by now and gotten his message. He read over the chapter, his mind distracted by waiting for a bell to ring. He thought about having sex with Marion. He’d have to ask, of course. He might get her to agree if he offered to give her a back rub. He tried to remember when he had last gone down on her and brought her to orgasm orally. Well, he told himself defensively, when was the last time she gave me a blow-job? The prospect of negotiating through all these preliminaries drained the desire for the ultimate goal. What he really wanted was for her to arrive, magically strip off her clothes, open her legs, and let him take her on the parquet foyer floor, pulling him to her with enthusiasm, moaning with joy. Fast, fast, fast, without all the garbage, the tentative shy touching. Why couldn’t she come home one night and say, “Fuck me,” and like it? Why couldn’t she slip under him and let his penis invade her throat? Why wouldn’t she get on her haunches, without being asked, without being seduced, and beg for it up the ass?

Because she doesn’t enjoy sex, he told himself with anger, a saddened, dissipating fury. She doesn’t really enjoy anything. Not work, or sex, or me.

Marion arrived shortly after this judgment. She rang the bell and Fred found her slumped against the hallway wall, her leather bag drooping at the end of a hand. She opened her fingers and let it drop. He said, “Hello!” valiantly, trying to discourage her performance of fatigue.

Marion closed her eyes and let her head rest against the wall.

“Come on!” Fred said, irritation erupting through his brief attempt at good cheer. “Wake up.”

She opened her eyes and walked into his arms, burying her head in his shoulder and sighing. He was home to her: a safe port whose criticisms and praise were equally familiar, and becalmed of harm or excitement.

This physical request, that he be her protector, secure and comforting, made him feel hopeless.
He
needed help: rescue from the battering storms of his constructions into the dangerous world; not a plea for shelter, a plea he was both unwilling and unable to answer.

She put her arms around him and squeezed, saying, “Mmmm.” But it was a sound of childish coziness, not a passionate preliminary. He eased her away, pulling her arms off. She kept her face on him, leaning forward, threatening to topple if he moved away.

“Come on,” he said, trying to keep irritated emphasis out of his tone.

Marion abruptly breathed in deeply and straightened, her face impassive, and returned to the doorway to get her bag.

“Rough day?” Fred asked.

“The worst.” She walked past him, taking off her trench coat and hanging it up. “Did you buy anything for dinner?”

“No,” Fred said. He rapidly calculated that if he hoped to get lucky with her, he’d better compensate for his oversight. “I thought we’d order Chinese,” he said casually, pretending to a carefully thought-out plan.

“Not again,” she moaned. “Why didn’t you buy some steaks? You never think of buying anything. What would you do if I weren’t living here?”

Fred guffawed. “Order Chinese,” he said, delighted by this witticism.

Marion, to his surprise, smiled. “You’d turn into a humongous dumpling.” she said, patting his flabby belly. “I can’t eat Chinese again.”

Fred beamed. “How about pizza?” And then guffawed at himself.

“What a diet,” Marion said, and walked into the kitchen, opening the freezer, only to frown at its contents. “You want hot dogs?” she asked doubtfully.

“Oh yeah. That’s much healthier than pizza.”

Marion laughed and looked at him affectionately. He walked over, putting his arms around her and kissing her, like he did when they dated in college, his tongue out, pushing into her mouth rudely, anxiously selling his desire to penetrate her. Marion welcomed this embrace without enthusiasm, but with a gentle touch on the back of his neck. He broke off at this response and looked in her eyes. “I love you,” he said almost in a tone of apology.

She smiled sweetly.

The phone rang. Marion sagged. “You get it,” she said, her eyes looking pained at the sound of the second ring.

“Hello,” Fred said cheerfully into the kitchen wall phone.

“Hello, Fred? It’s Tom Lear.”

“Oh.” A jolt went through him; a shock of transition. “Hello.”

“I got your message. Listen, thanks for thinking of me. I really appreciate it.”

He’s going to say no, Fred thought, and he felt the dark troubles of the world stir, a monster growling in the slime.

“It should be a great game,” Fred said, hoping to appease the beast, remind it of its self-interest. Could Tom be so disdainful that even to sit next to Fred would spoil a superb basketball game?

“Great? It’s the game of the year! Game of the century! At least—it’s the best game this week.”

Fred laughed, but feebly. Suddenly he was uncertain of defeat. Tom sounded natural, at ease. Maybe he
was
going to accept.

“Anyway,” Tom went on, “I do want to go to the game …”

Here it comes, Fred thought.

“… and I would have loved going with you, because you’re a real Knick fan, but I already accepted an invite from Sam Billings, the producer of my movie. He’s invited me into the studio’s box. I could beg off to do something else, but I think he’d be insulted if he spotted me there with you.”

“The tickets I have are courtside,” Fred pleaded. “Do you know where the private boxes are? They’re way up top. In fact, they’re built above the cheap seats.”

“Oh, I’ve been in the box before. You’re right, they’re terrible seats. Only good thing about it is the private bar. Most people end up watching the game on the TV in the box. Most ridiculous thing in the world. Go to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks on television.”

“I don’t think your producer would spot us.”

“Oh, if your tickets are courtside, the way I jump up and down, they’re sure to notice.” Tom laughed at himself. Fred did not. Tom cut himself off at the lack of response. “No, I’m kidding. I know he probably wouldn’t. But if, by some chance, he did, it would be very embarrassing. Anyway, I was going to suggest that you come up to the box at halftime and have a drink. Meet whoever’s there. Maybe a starlet or two.” Tom laughed. “I assume you won’t bring the wife.”

Who
am
I going to bring? Fred wondered. Especially if he planned on visiting the box. He could hardly invite his old childhood friend Pete. Pete still used words like “farout” and “heavy.” “Um, I don’t think she wants to.” he said, not loudly. Marion was standing nearby, laying out hot dogs on a frying pan. Marion might want to go but Fred wasn’t sure he wanted her to come along. Not because he had any illusions about picking up starlets: he had an uneasy sense he didn’t want her on his arm in a private box at Madison Square Garden. It was a peculiar feeling. Marion, after all, was bright and well-spoken.

“Well, whomever you bring, come up at halftime. It’s Box Nine. All right? I have to rush out to meet someone for a drink. Thanks again for the offer. I’ll be courtside in spirit.”

“You’re welcome.”

“See you at the game.” He rang off.

Fred hung up slowly. Marion opened a can of baked beans, pulling back the metal lid with a scraping noise. “Who was that?”

“Tom Lear.”

“About the poker game?”

“No. He was inviting me to join him at one of the private boxes at the Garden.”

“Really?” Marion looked surprised. And pleased.

“Yeah. What’s so amazing about that?”

“I didn’t know you were friends.”

“Oh. Well, I guess I’m the only person at the game who’s a basketball fan.”

“So what did you say? Are we going to go?”

Fred stared at her. “Uh …”

Marion’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t ask if I could come,” she said, making an accusation, not asking.

“No, it isn’t that.” Fred felt stupid. He had let her think Tom had instigated this, and judging from her reaction, he would be teased if she found out the reverse was true. Now he had a particular reason for not wanting her to come. If she stayed home, he could keep her false impression intact.

“Oh, there isn’t room!” Marion said, pleased, a student guessing right on a difficult quiz. “He’s taking you.”

“Right,” Fred said. “Do you mind? I can call him back and cancel.”

“No, of course not. You always get to go to the good things. I’ll just stay home alone. Again.” This sort of teasing was unlike Marion. Her mood had unaccountably changed since her outburst over his lack of attention to domestic details.

“Since when do you want to go to a basketball game? I can always get us tickets, you know.”

“I’m kidding. I wanted to see what one of those boxes is like. And I’d like to meet Tom Lear.”

“You would?” This, too, surprised Fred. Marion made fun of other people for wanting to meet the well-known. She called Tony Winter a “star-fucker” with the contemptuous-ness of someone who wouldn’t look up from the newspaper to glance at Greta Garbo dancing with Howard Hughes.

“He’s a good writer. I loved his book.”

Fred fell silent at this. He watched her heat the beans and turn the franks, thinking that he should say something, lest she decide he was made jealous by her praise of another writer. He wasn’t. He also admired Tom Lear. His quiet came from feeling how distant he was from being spoken of that way. He thought of his half-finished manuscript, of his uncertainty whether it had any merit, or how he had not only been made to feel unwelcome at the poker game, but had actually been barred. Tom Lear was about his age, didn’t seem to know more, or to speak better—there seemed so little difference between them. And yet Fred felt that if Tom had been born a king in the eighteenth century and he a peasant, there couldn’t have been a greater gulf between them.

After dinner, Marion said she had some editing to do, and he returned to his study to write more. He was still at his desk when she took a bath. He was rewriting the opening paragraph for the twentieth time when she came in her nightgown to kiss him good night.

He rubbed her belly through the soft material and felt hard immediately. He kissed her, his tongue pushing in and out anxiously, while he roughly sneaked a hand inside her neckline and reached for a breast. She pulled away, giggling at the feel of his cold fingers. “I have to go to sleep,” she said, smiling to soften the rejection.

“Okay,” he said, and his eyes went to the pages in front of him.

“Don’t go to bed too late.” she said.

“Okay,” he answered, already hypnotized by his words, prepared to sit up through the lonely hours of the night, until, exhausted by the fever of his ambition, he could slide beside his wife and listen enviously to the tranquil breathing of her sleep.

David noticed an ambition had been realized without a clear moment for its recognition. He was a senior editor. Syms had moved along with his old boss to another magazine, and four weeks ago David’s temporary position senior-editing Business had been made permanent. His dinner was conceived as a kind of celebration, a social confirmation of his elevated work status, but it had felt to him more like the opening gong of a new fight. Somehow, because of his eyeglasses breaking, an illusion of danger had been created in his mind. Until his joke broke the sense that he was an object of analysis by the others, a figure of affectionate amusement, like a three-year-old running in the buff through a group of loving but condescending relatives, David had the feeling that he had won nothing through his promotion.

Indeed, was he any less a prisoner of the magazine as a senior editor than he had been as a writer? The Marx Brothers now directly vetoed his story ideas instead of doing so through a proxy. True, he could now argue his own case rather than rely on the persuasiveness of someone else, but the dull logic of national newsmagazine writing always triumphed. If interest rates fell below ten percent, could he choose to ignore it in favor of a possibly more significant but less visible phenomenon such as the world-debt crisis? No, he would have to wait until Argentina or Mexico actually defaulted before ordering a piece on its significance. He could, and had, succeeded in getting a sidebar (a two-column box in a different color and bordered by a black rule) explaining that the Federal Reserve might have loosened because of the debt fears, leading to lower rates—flatly contradicting the cover story, which gave credit for the lower rates to the economic recovery. But his predecessor would have fought and gotten just such a story. Such frustrations were constant. He knew, for example, that a shakeout in the computer industry was coming—all business insiders knew it—and he wanted to do the story
now,
not in three months when the
Weekly, Business Week,
and everybody else would be doing it because the rash of bankruptcies had begun.

But isn’t my complaint foolish? he asked himself. Here I am, a journalist, bitching that I’m a prisoner of events. The illusion of being an essayist, created by the circumstance of working at a weekly news organization whose appeal had to be one of summarizing, analyzing, and predicting the effect of events, since it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of newspapers, much less television’s blood-spattering “live” coverage, was just that—an illusion which made the editors of
Newstime
delusional; persuaded them that not only should they reach for a deeper understanding of American life than the rest of journalism, but that they actually possessed profound insights. Indeed. David himself could make the argument that his desire to jump the event of the computer shakeout was nothing more than publishing an insider consensus, which could, like so many others, turn out to be wrong: “experts” predicting the obvious because of its safe logic, making error easy to defend.