Hot Properties (27 page)

But is there any genius in editing by noticing what was on the front pages of every newspaper, and the lead item on the network news, and then ordering a story on the same subject? Was this a talent to be eulogized at the end of a long life? At three o’clock in the morning, staring sleepless into the impenetrable mist of eternity, could this role in life sustain him?

Patty, looking frail and cold, hunched over her typewriter, doesn’t ask herself such questions, David told himself. Why do I? I make sixty thousand dollars a year, can hire and fire men almost twice my age, and, if things go well can look forward to promotions that will lead to the top of my profession. Would he trade places with her, writing a trivial and silly entertainment for frustrated housewives? Did he want Tony Winters’ life, writing a tap dance for pretty Midwes-terners who had caught the public’s fancy with their epoxy teeth and surgically perfect breasts? All work is contemptible if judged by my standards, David decided.

Patty’s legs are short, he noticed. Thin and smooth now, but her thighs had potential for stockiness, he thought. With age, motherhood, the inevitable gaining of weight, youth sagging under the burden of time passing, they might someday be thick: the hearty legs of a Waspy, leather-skinned worshiper of a good time. Wasn’t that her real nature? he challenged himself.

She liked to play tennis, lie on the beach, chat with girlfriends over lunch—what separated her from a woman of her mother’s generation and class was a taste for modern clothes, dance, and sexual openness. And the willingness to marry a Jew.
Perhaps,
he cautioned himself. How did he know she’d marry him? He assumed it, of course, but was that based on anything besides egotism and a sexist assumption that all women want the legal commitment? He believed her crankiness about money was a passive request for a proposal. If they were married, his supporting her wouldn’t make her uncomfortable, he reasoned. She wouldn’t feel she owed him anything then, especially if she were the mother of his children.

Three months ago he would have married her gladly. She had brightened his gloomy, windowless existence, taking down the dusty curtains and opening the shutters, ventilating the smoky air of his recirculated ambitions and lighting the small lonely darkness of his obsession with
Newstime.
He felt free during the early months of their relationship. The nervous energy of sex had been drained and left him cheerful, his mind relaxed, taking all things, from washing dishes to reading and rereading the blues, as though they were equal pleasures. Instead of worrying whether his senior editorship would become permanent, he worked at his new duties with interest and full concentration, too content with life to fuss over whether it was secure or sufficient. He handled the writers who were now under him, men who used to be his peers, many of them older (who no doubt believed they should be in his spot), effortlessly, sure of his command. He wielded the sword of power so gracefully and gently that no one heard it cut the air or noticed its blade. He found himself complimenting and encouraging the writers, flattering them into making changes eagerly, not because he had figured this as a strategy, but because he felt generous. To them, to himself, to the city, to life—he wished everything well, wanting nothing to dispel the beautiful surface of his contented life. Patty, with her big eyes always there to listen as if he were a magic bird carrying jewels in his beak instead of tired office politics; with her full lips, always slightly apart, wet, as though he were a delicious candy she wanted to have melting inside her; Patty lying beside him every night with her slight slim body outfitted with the big warm breasts of a voluptuous seductress. Had he been threatened for an instant with losing her, he would have torn his clothes like a grieving peasant and raved at God for his injustice.

But now he was a stranger to that love, so far from those feelings that he would have denied he had ever had them. Patty’s attentiveness began to cloy. He began to suspect her of not paying attention to what he said, despite her glistening awed eyes. He noticed she asked the same questions about his colleagues no matter how many times he had already given a definitive answer. Once he caught himself in the middle of telling her a long story about Chico that he distinctly remembered having already reported. But she had leaned forward eagerly throughout, exclaiming at the appropriate moments, as though it were all new. He stopped himself and accused her. She flatly denied having heard the anecdote before, but from her flustered manner he knew she was lying. When he insisted, she revealed what he now believed was her real feeling about him: “All your
Newstime
stories sound the same. You can’t blame me for not knowing the difference.” Of course that was said in anger. She apologized later and took it back. “I love your office politics.” she said in bed, opening her warm mouth and taking his mouth hungrily, as though to suck his soul out. He let her and fucked her with his usual passion, but lying awake later while she curled her legs around him and fell asleep, he decided the apology was the lie. And though the taste of her was still on his tongue, and his penis lay wet with her moisture, she had become a stranger.

The unity dissolved. He carried loneliness to work again, the job no longer a matter of killing time until he could be with Patty, but a chance to relax: not to have to watch everything he said, and judge her reaction, waiting for more hints of secretly held contempt.

Within a few weeks, every speech, every response, had become suspect. He believed her adulterous—not with another man, but with a low opinion of him. That was the lover he tried to catch red-handed, seducing her. He had had many successes at this morbid detective work. Tonight had been notable. From her joking that she had agreed to live with David because of the terrible apartment shortage in New York to her thrilled laughter at his myopic placement of the coffee cup into the cake.

Everyone had laughed when she claimed she had moved in with him because finding an apartment at a reasonable rent was impossible, as though to admit behavior so crudely

opportunistic proved it was untrue. But was it? David believed Patty was unconscious of her base motives, unable to see herself clearly, but the truth slipped out past the sentries of self-esteem and tact, under the disguise of her humor. The reason she could make life sound so amusing was this half-aware truth-telling: a cheerful cynic, absolving sins even as she confessed them. If he walked over now and accused her of getting involved with him so quickly because it was convenient, she would have been stunned, outraged he could think so little of her. If he cited her own comments, she would have contemptuously told him she had been kidding. Her humorous confessions made the blade of truth retractable. She came wielding a knife, but it landed softly, a stage prop providing only a split second of real fright, releasing its audience from terror at its penetration, to childlike joy at the wonder of inventive fakery. Look at that, she left everyone saying, he isn’t dead, he isn’t even wounded.

David squinted contemptuously in her direction. Her spine rippled as she hunched over the typewriter. Her long hair curved away from her neck, disappearing to fall on the other side of her shoulder. He could imagine it covering her thick nipple and warm breast. He knew, though he couldn’t see in his blinded state, there were very blond, almost invisible hairs at the base of her long neck right above the first rung of her vertebrae. He had often fallen asleep with his lips almost caressing them, his exhausted penis nestled in the firm silk of her ass. … Yes, she
is
a killer—but the gun is loaded with blanks.

David stood up, his headache pounding with the movement, and walked toward her. She typed without pause, more like a secretary copying an already written document than a novelist struggling to create. He fought off his surprise at the ease with which she invented by reminding himself it was only a stupid romance book. When he was within a few feet she stopped and looked at him. She had a blank look on her face, as though they were strangers in a public place: David someone she had noticed on the subway while she glanced up to see if this were her stop.

He put his hand on the back of her head, his fingers gripping her hair possessively. He turned her away from the typewriter toward him and pulled her up slightly to meet his lips. She was pliant, willing to be uncomfortably posed, partially off the chair, her neck back, her head paralyzed in his grasp, while his mouth and tongue fired away at her stationary full lips. She left her lips slightly open and only reacted when his tongue invaded, her teeth closing against the departure as he pulled away. David stopped to look at her, a puppet held aloft by his hand, her eyes closed, her mouth open, a fish mouthing at the water for food. She held her balance with the balls of her feet, so her belly was arched, her tight stomach flexed, her hip bones jutting out enough to open a view down her panties, her breasts thrust forward, her nipples making hard points in the soft translucent material of her bra.

With his free hand he reached inside her bra and found one erect nipple and squeezed. She moaned slightly and her hips, moved from side to side as though she were a lonely dancer pretending she had a partner. He let go and roughly pulled his hand out, the bra pulling off crookedly so it covered only the top of her breast. He ran the flat of his palm over her rippling stomach down to her bony pelvis and grabbed her cunt hard. His finger penetrated like a swimmer diving; there was no resistance to his invasion, only watery absorption.

She swiveled on his hand, her body twisting and rocking, her head cradled in his hand. She was like an obscene doll designed for decadent children. She’s a whore, he thought with a dark, harsh inner voice whose tone was alien. And she was so wet, so totally enthralled by sexual feeling: her eyes closed, her lips sighing to be kissed, her body bucking with desire. He could feel nothing but contempt for this abandon, it made her worse somehow that she could enjoy sex with him if she didn’t love him. And he knew she didn’t love him. The jokes were the truth, the protests of love were the jokes.

He pulled his hand out. She quivered sadly at its departure and her behind rested once again on the chair. There was a moment in which he stood there, over her, doing nothing. Her head was down, looking like a penitent awaiting a blessing. Slowly—he thought reluctantly—she reached up to his groin and rubbed his erection through the material. He didn’t move or look down: he stared off impassively, waiting to see if she would do his bidding without even a hint. There was a moment of uncertainty, when she shifted on the chair, drawing one of her legs up under her. But then her small hands came up to his belt and began to strip him.

Silently, motionless, he stood there while she exposed his penis and took it in her mouth, her head rocking steadily below him, the warm funnel sliding with dull regularity, as though she were a sleepy farmgirl milking a cow. He could almost see her dull sense of duty as she serviced him. Flashing into his brain while he put his hands on her head and urged her to take more and more of him each time; answering his question while he felt himself emptied into her mouth: She can enjoy it when I make love to her because she pretends it’s someone else. When she makes love to me, it’s her job, her rent check.

She kept his shrinking penis inside and sucked and licked slowly, a pro finishing with meticulous care. He patted her on the head and walked away. Silent. Ignoring the obvious civility of doing something for her. He waited for a protest, for a demand that would disprove his theory. He sat on the couch and picked up that week’s
Newstime.
After a few long moments of quiet anticipation, while he stared at the magazine typeface, the black letters dissolving into meaningless zigzags, he heard her typewriter begin again. You really earned it tonight, Patty, he said to himself, and tried to laugh bitterly. Wisely.

Instead, he felt tired. And the dull throb of his headache returned.

Tony Winters stood at the bathroom mirror studying his just-shaved face. It had the puffed whitish look of a baby’s. His hair was lustrous from the shampoo. He looked good: young, open, his eyes shining with optimism. He felt almost as if he were seeing a photograph of himself as a college freshman; smooth-faced, eager, beaming cheerfully at the hostile world, confident it would welcome and praise him.

He walked out, the heels of his new shoes sounding a dramatic approach, into the kitchen. Betty was there, dressed for work, reading the
Times.
He noticed a headline slug at the top of Section C: “
BUNTING, NEW PLAY AT CIRCLE REP OPENS
.” and decided he wasn’t up to reading either a rave (depressing—it could have been me) or a pan (infuriating—why are they putting that on instead of reviving my plays’?). Betty was reading the
Hers
column. He laughed at that. She glanced up casually and then steadied her gaze. “You look so handsome,” she said.

“Thank you, darling,” he said casually, but he was pleased she had confirmed his bout of self-admiration at the mirror.

“Why are you so dressed up?”

Tony walked to the stove so he wouldn’t be looking at her when he answered. “Got a lunch date with Bill Hadley.”

“Who’s Bill Hadley?”

“My roommate freshman year.” He poured himself coffee. “I feel like I’m in college today.”

“You
do,”
she said, smiling delightedly. “Your short haircut makes you look like a boy.” She put out her hand as he neared the table, and her arm went around his waist. He bent over and met her lips. When he pulled away after a quick peck, she insisted, and brought him back for a longer kiss.

I should have stayed in bed until she left, he thought, waiting for her to release him.

When she did, he took Section A from her and looked at the stories, reading paragraphs senselessly, waiting, waiting, waiting …

“Don’t you have to be at work?” he asked, unable to restrain himself.

Betty glanced at their designer wall clock with its minimalist lines instead of numbers. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’m late.”