Hot Properties (35 page)

Fred copied Tom’s drink orders. By the time Marion arrived, he had had two Scotches and soda. Her appearance surprised him. It wasn’t simply that he had forgotten she was coming—he stared at her amazed, as though her very existence startled him. “Hi, Marion,” he said, kissing her on the cheek and sitting down. She remained standing (she looked flushed with excitement at being there. Fred noticed, but the observation meant nothing to him in his gloomy mood) behind a chair, and stared at Tom. Why is she doing that? Fred wondered.

“I’m Tom Lear,” Tom finally said.

“Thanks,” she said, laughing. “I’m Fred’s wife, Marion.”

“You haven’t met!” Fred said, genuinely surprised.

“How many drinks has he had?” Marion asked Tom, and laughed.

Tom smiled at her. “He
is
out of it tonight. What’s the matter with him?”

“No, really,” Fred said, making it worse. “You haven’t met?”

“Of course we haven’t met, Freddy,” Marion said. She called him Freddy when she was most contemptuous of him. “You know that. I complained about it enough, for Chris-sake.”

“Has he been keeping you from me?” Tom Lear asked with mock outrage. “He knew it would be magic between us. That’s why.”

Marion laughed and winked at Tom. Fred knew she meant to be flirtatious, but that subtle art was beyond Marion— she made it seem dirty somehow. Can’t she tell he’s making fun of her? he asked himself.

He found himself spending much of the evening listening to Marion with disapproval. She talked a lot. Asked briefly about
Indiana Jones
and then launched into a pompous lecture saying that scary movies damaged kids. Tom pretended to take her seriously. Fred thought, indeed he probably did consider her point well-taken, but Fred also saw the bored look in his eyes. Marion’s not pretty enough to be dull. Fred could hear him think. Tom’s eyes drifted to the door, probably hoping someone interesting would come in. Fred could feel, like a sympathetic itch, the restlessness in Lear’s body, the desire to be free of them.

Marion was oblivious, tipsy from her two glasses of wine, asking (too loudly) who was who at the other table, and puzzled by Fred’s morose air. “What’s with you?” she asked Fred when another (one of many) lulls in the conversation had caused Tom to stare off toward the bar.

“Nothing,” Fred said, afraid she was about to say something intimate and embarrassing.

She smiled, her eyes unfocused. “The food here sucks,” she said. Loud.

Tom’s eyes went to her instantly. The sentence shot through Fred like a current, startling every nerve. “Shhh,” he said, his head whipping one way and the other to check whether Elaine or one of the waiters had overheard. Tom, however, was laughing.

Marion looked at him. “Right? She’s got a great racket going. Lousy food, horrible decor, the worst tables made into the chicest. The woman’s brilliant.”

Fred spotted the owner seated only two tables away. Marion’s speech, in his mind, was as loud as a PA broadcast in a public school. “Shut up,” he said. “She’s right over there.”

Marion smiled at Tom about Fred and put a hand on his head, patting it. “Poor boy. He lives in fear of everybody.”

Tom’s eyes went to Fred, as though the proof of her observation was visible on Fred. The look burned through Fred. He imagined he could see Marion’s statement click into place for Tom, characterizing Fred for him, belittling him.

“That’s bullshit!” Fred said, desperate to discredit Marion’s remark. “It’s rude, that’s all.”

Marion looked triumphant. “See?” she said to Lear, who was watching with greater interest than he had shown all night.

“See what?” Fred said. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Fred.” She said this like a command, a confident dog owner announcing: Heel. “Come on. I was teasing.”

“Fred,” Tom Lear said gently. “We’re all afraid.”

“It was rude.” Fred stared at the table. He felt hot in the face, unable to meet their eyes. Somehow he had been made into a jerk. “It was rude,” he heard himself repeat petulantly. He didn’t look up. He knew the shame and hurt would show too clearly on his face. There was a heavy silence before Tom said something—obviously to distract the conversation—about an article in that morning’s
Times.
Lear kept that going for a while, long enough so that the suggestion they get a check wasn’t placed too close to the angry exchange between Fred and Marion. It was smoothly done. The departure had no more than a trace of the embarrassment of that silence.

But during that silence, during the long moment of peering at the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, while Lear and Marion said and did nothing to ease his wounded feelings, Fred had felt his bright new world collapse around him.

David, the faithful spy, tattled effortlessly to Chico about the senior editors’ reactions to the cover-meeting argument. David had no worry that by repeating everything said he might harm anyone’s reputation with Chico, because the comments had been universally disparaging about Rounder, even the remarks made by two people whom Rounder had hired. A few joked about Chico’s childish manner but there was admiration for him as well for having called Rounder on his foolish naiveté. Thank God I didn’t volunteer to do this for Rounder, he told himself, watching the pleased expression on Chico’s face. They were having dinner together at an Italian restaurant near
Newstime
on a Thursday night that looked to be a virtual all-nighter for David. A major Midwestern bank had suddenly appeared near to collapse in midweek and they were scrambling to get a story together. David had put his best writer on it, but his early draft had been awful—the explanation of how it happened was muddled, and there was a complete absence of drama.

“But there is no drama,” the writer complained. “The computers showed up with bad numbers.”

“Somebody punched the numbers up on a terminal, didn’t they? That person had a reaction, didn’t he?” David asked. He wanted to grab the bureau reports and write the story himself. But he had done that early in his tenure as senior editor (doing a total rewrite on one of the aging hacks under him), and Harpo, figuring it out when David submitted the story—he could recognize David’s touch—told him that was not being an editor. “You’re supposed to help the writers write, not make it clear they don’t know how.” Since then he had left them to do the writing, even if that meant five or six revisions to get it right. But the frustration of standing by while someone floundered in waters he himself could easily swim never lessened. Tonight would be one of those late nights that, as a writer, he could have ended early.

Why complain? It had its advantages. He could go to dinner with Chico and do himself some good. And he could drink! He sipped his third gin and tonic (when the thermometer reached seventy-five degrees that afternoon, he decided to inaugurate his summer beverage) and enjoyed Chico’s rapacious pleasure at hearing Rounder criticized. “That’s all,” David finished to the eager face.

“Well,” Chico said. He looked off. “I wish Mrs. Thorn could have been there.”

“She must know.”

“Know what? How the staff feels?”

“No. What a bad job he’s doing. She reads the magazine,” David said, and then laughed at the thought that maybe she didn’t read it.

“Presumably. But she’s happy no matter what’s in
Newstime,
unless her Washington friends complain.”

David vividly pictured Henry Kissinger, in a tuxedo, at a fashionable Washington dinner party, holding up a copy of
Newstime
over his (what? lobster newburg?) and making faces, holding his nose maybe and saying, “Yecch,” like a kid rejecting spinach. But no matter how silly he made the image, it still impressed him, as it had years ago when he joined the magazine straight out of college, just how important every word, every decision, every action that a writer or an editor of a national newsmagazine could be. Nobody notices you until you fuck up, he thought with masochistic pride. After all, it takes a pretty tough and remarkable person to withstand that pressure.

“I got to get him off my back,” Chico said.

David nodded. “He’s a disaster.”
Is
Rounder a disaster? he wondered the moment he had said so. David always retreated from absolute statements once he had made the initial advance. An uncertain general, he preferred to marshal the troops of judgment and seek higher ground rather than commit them to the mess and chaos of battle.

Chico added to his regret by staring at him. His small eyes fixed on David. “Do you think he can last long?”

“I don’t know,” David said. He had no idea. The truth was he found the firing and hiring of Grouchos hard to imagine or understand. Hiring Rounder had been so obviously wrongheaded. An inexperienced outsider was sure to create ill feelings among the veterans—and, predictably, he had. “Maybe she’d be too embarrassed.”

“Mrs. Thorn? Embarrassed?” Chico smiled. Apparently that was impossible, a naive remark.

“I guess not,” David said.

“She has the selective memory of the rich.” Chico went on. “When she fires Rounder, she’ll probably also fire the president of
Newstime,
thinking, by then, that it was his fault she picked Rounder.”

“We should let him sink,” David said thoughtlessly. He heard himself almost slur the last word. He stared at the water glasses, and they quavered in his vision. I must be drunk, he thought, wondering if his capacity was diminishing.

“What do you mean?”

“Stop protecting his ass!” David said, aggrieved, as though he, not Chico, were the main victim of Rounder’s presence. “He wants to ignore the Russian boycott and put Redford on, let him! He’s the editor in chief. Let him run it.”

Chico shook his head. “I can’t. When she made the decision, she spoke to me privately, saying that eventually she wanted Rounder to become sort of the spokesman for the magazine, help the company formulate new projects, that I would be the editor in chief within a few years. She expects me to watch him. If he doesn’t keep his nose clean. I might be blamed for not having wiped it.”

“Bullshit,” David said. He felt at ease with Chico: his equal. A sudden elevation of status that Chico’s manner— curious, interested, even slightly abashed—confirmed. “She’s suckered you. She knows she needs you to run the magazine. But if you run it for free, there’s no reason to promote you. She can’t ask you to do the work of Groucho without giving you the mustache.”

Chico’s eyes widened, and for a second David wasn’t sure if he would take the use of the lower echelon’s jargon in good humor. Presumably Chico had once been a lowly employee, chipping away at the awesome statuary of his bosses with like chisels, but ascending the pedestal might have made him as humorless and cold as marble. Instead, he laughed. “I haven’t heard that for years!” he said, delighted. “That’s still the lingo?”

“Nothing changes at
Newstime,”
David said in a mock announcer’s voice, “not even the childish nicknames.”

But Chico had already lost his enjoyment of the slang, and was back to fretting over David’s advice. “You know, you’re right. I should let the fucking guy sink. Him and Ray.”

Ray? That was Harpo, who, when Chico had fallen into his sullen fit at the cover meeting, had continued to explain why ignoring the Olympics would be a mistake. Rounder had humiliated Chico by finally giving the cover to Harpo to top-edit, but that wasn’t Harpo’s fault.

“Ray thinks he’s going to kiss ass all the way to being number two,” Chico went on with surprising nakedness, his big head scrunched low on his shoulders like a football player’s. He looked ready to charge a running back, prepared to take a jolt and give an even worse one. “He thinks I can’t take it. That I’ll leave and he’ll inherit.”

God, David thought, I’m so naive. He’s probably right. That’s why Harpo kept on arguing it out with Rounder. Not to support Chico, but to appear like a responsible number two, disagreeing but not pressing the point too far.

“And he’s slipped, you know that?” Chico also seemed to be slurring words. How many drinks had they had? Maybe it was four. Their glasses were suddenly full again, magically, though David remembered sucking the last drops from the ice only moments ago. “He used to be a terrific editor. The kind of editor you are now. Bold, decisive. In control of the writers. On top of the section. Now he’s focused on dominating the meetings. Getting more pages for his sections whether they deserve ’em or not.”

“Yeah!” David said, wanting to encourage more talk, not to agree. None of it seemed true, but it was working out well for him. However, his “Yeah” had come out too enthusiastically. He sounded like a bloodthirsty fan. Yeah! Get ’em!

Chico shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “You and I could do great stuff with the magazine …” He let it hang for a moment, opening his eyes before adding, “… if we were given a free hand.”

David remembered from his college days, from the antiwar era, a favorite comeback used when someone would try to include another in a decision or action without actually asking for his agreement: “What do you mean, ‘we’, white man?” He smiled at the thought of saying this to Chico. But even with four (was it five now?) drinks in him, he didn’t have the nerve.

But Chico did it for him. “You’d be perfect for Ray’s job,” he said.

David, surprised and delighted, said without thinking. “I agree!”

They talked around this subject for quite a while, drinking steadily. The booze seemed to hit David hard. He bumped into a table on his way out of the restaurant. Out in the night air, passing well-dressed couples walking back to their hotels from theater and dinner, he felt woozy. The faces loomed past him—big, frozen in his mind for a moment in the smiles or the pensive or laughing looks they happened to have. Chico walked with his head down, shuffling his feet on the pavement, as though he were a bored schoolboy reluctantly going back to his unhappy home. There were curious silences from the traffic, moments when the sound of David’s breathing seemed to be the loudest noise in the city. He felt empty. Not depressed or sad or lonely or abandoned. He felt absent. Expected back, but not there.

Later, David sat in his office waiting for the writer to finish more changes he had felt were needed on the bank collapse. He replayed that moment when Chico offered him Harpo’s job. David knew it was no trick to give someone a promotion that you’re not in a position to grant. Still he felt flattered and excited. If Chico could somehow unseat Rounder and if he could dispose of Harpo and if he could fulfill his promise to David (incredible, impossible ifs, all of them), then David would become the youngest Marx Brother in the magazine’s history, a surefire successor to Chico. He might even make Groucho by the age of forty. His heart didn’t beat eagerly. The alcohol gave him a dispassionate eye. He regarded the prospect with quiet satisfaction. And somehow, he felt a reasonable certainty that the incredible just might happen.