Hot Properties (47 page)

Now came the applause. There would have been clapping no matter what they thought of the play—after all, everyone there had to suffer the same sort of evaluation at one time or another, and between compassion and fear there was never an insulting response at a reading. But this applause was loud, enthusiastic, and genuine. Tony had heard enough of the other kind to know the difference.

Hilary, while clapping, got up and moved in front of the actors seated on chairs, and turned to face the audience. “Well, that was delightful,” she said, smiling.

Delightful? Tony thought. It’s supposed to be either shattering or funny, but delightful? Sounds like a description of a magic act, not a good play.

“Tony,” she said, looking at him. “How can we be of help to you?”

She always asked this preposterous question, this fastball begging to be banged out of the park with a bat of sarcasm. And, predictably, Tony took his cut: “Got an empty theater?”

Laughter. Hilary smiled. “Not if we get plays like this,” she said, but hurried on, as though frightened by the commitment it implied. “Is there anything that surprised you about the play—hearing it read?”

“I thought it would be funnier,” Tony said. “But I don’t really want to talk about what I think. I’m sick to death of what I think. First I’d like to hear from the actors—who did a wonderful job,” he added, and began to clap, joined immediately by the audience.

When the applause died down, Hilary gestured to the row of performers seated on folding chairs, their copies of the play on their laps like prayer books. During the last six months, since he had dropped the screenplay, he had worked madly, joyously reworking his old play about the three civil-rights workers who were killed by the Klan, feeling younger, stronger, and happier with each day. Nearing the end, his confidence in the future had returned in earnest. He really believed this time it would happen, this time he would win the honors so long expected for him, so long taken for granted, and now so desperately needed for survival. He had broken free of the small autobiographical limitations of his early plays, he had forced his head through the birth canal and observed a world other than his own.

The actors began. Tony liked listening to their opinions and he sometimes changed things because of them, but never because of the content of their criticisms. Performers always believed their parts should be bigger, their motivations less selfish and explicated in greater detail. They were forever forgetting that their job was to tour the audience through a walk in the woods, not stop and discuss the bark of one tree endlessly. This time they were unusually content: they praised “the structure” (something they knew nothing about) and then talked about how much they “liked” their characters (the highest possible encomium). Then the audience of playwrights and directors began to comment. The toughest remarks at these readings were commonly from other writers, and that held true again, although the major criticism wasn’t posed aggressively.

“I didn’t think. Tony …” said Hal Turner, the most successful of the Uptown Theater playwrights, a likely candidate for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for his off-Broadway success.
The Evening,
a grim two-character play about a confrontation between a rapist and the husband of his victim. “I didn’t think,” he repeated, his eyes wandering to the ceiling musingly. Everyone fell silent, respectfully. “Though I loved many, many things, I didn’t feel, at the end, that you had really taken it far enough. I don’t think the ending is sufficiently dramatic.”

“You mean because the killing is offstage?” Tony said, his worst fear confirmed. He too had felt the ending was anticlimactic, but so far no one else had said anything.

“Uh … I’m not sure. I think your instinct to stay away from the killing is right. It wouldn’t really end the play, it would just kill the characters.”

“That’s an ending!” someone called out. Everyone laughed.

“You’ve raised terrific questions about these characters,” Turner went on. “You need to answer some of them.”

“Oh, but he does!” Hilary protested. “When—”

“He does answer some of them!” Turner quickly modified. “But I mean decisively, dramatically. I certainly wouldn’t want a talky finish, with everyone wrapping up their lives as though they know they’re about to die. I love the effect of the casualness just before they go off to be killed, the sense, the eerie sense, of them naturally assuming they will be back later and do this and that—it’s a powerful effect. But it leaves some of the play’s questions unanswered. Not unasked. But unanswered.”

“I don’t know that I
can
answer them,” Tony admitted. He glanced at Hilary and briefly worried that a frank discussion on his part might scare her off doing the play that fall— she seemed ready to commit. But when he returned his glance to Turner, a bright man whose talent he admired, an experienced playwright who was obviously sympathetic to Tony’s work, he wanted to continue. “I’ve asked myself over and over. Were these characters sincere? Were they risking their lives—sometimes I’m not even sure they really believed the threats—were they risking their lives out of pure altruism, or was it some kind of neurotic calling of their parents’ political bluff?”

“What do you mean by that?” Turned asked with the enthusiasm of a lonely soul discovering a kindred spirit. The others stayed quiet, fading into the background, as though they were medical students observing two surgeons conduct a dangerous and experimental operation.

“I guess this may come from my past,” Tony said, “but when one is raised by people who put a high value on dangerous political action, there’s a tendency to do what they want, carry it so far that it almost becomes a kind of rebellion …”

Turner smiled. “Yes, that’s what you mean by the funny scene with Stein’s mother.”

“Right, right.”

Turned frowned. “I’m not sure your point there was clear to the audience. It’s a funny scene. Maybe it’s too funny, makes everybody think it’s only there for the laughs, and they don’t realize it carries the real point of the play.”

There were murmurs of agreement from the others. Tony had almost forgotten they were there. He suppressed a surge of anger at them, convinced they were too dumb to have noticed such a subtlety whether he was right or wrong to have put it in the play. They were merely parroting the influential playwright’s opinion. “You all feel that?” Tony asked, to be polite.

“Yes,” said Polly Howells, the resident feminist whom Tony had been told despised his work. Someone quoted her as saying, “He’s just another one of those Yuppie playwrights who writes plays complaining his parents didn’t encourage him enough,” a remark that hurt all the more for its potential accuracy. “Yes, I missed that,” Polly said, obviously glad to have something to say. She always seemed so eager to give opinions. Tony had been surprised by how long she had stayed silent. “I like the play a lot, Tony. I really think its a big step forward for you …”

Tony smiled at her, narrowing his eyes. He hoped she’d realize he was close to murdering her and stop talking in such a condescending fashion.

On the contrary, she warmed to her words. “But I felt, in the end, that you kept going for the easy one-liners just when you were about to break through to the heart of the theme.”

“That’s putting it strongly,” Turner said in a hurt tone, as though she were attacking him. “And, you know, it ain’t so easy to write funny one-liners like Tony’s. I can’t do it. I’ve tried. And I think I’d be a better writer if I could. Tony keeps a good balance in this play between heavy drama and social satire. It ends up being very real precisely because he touched both extremes.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Polly said quickly. Tony smiled at her panicky withdrawal. She sucked up to Hal Turner constantly, always praised his work to excess, and it amused Tony to see how she didn’t even dare to question his opinions. “I think he has a wonderful play here. But, like you, I felt Tony buried some of his more serious questions—what is real political commitment? can we ever escape our parents’ expectations, no matter how far from home we go?— that he lost some of these in trying to be funny. Maybe you were a little scared to explore the pain involved here,” she added directly to Tony.

He had to admit she might be right in her dull sociological way. He knew this subject was a way for him to explore the challenge of his mother’s and father’s political past. Perhaps he made comedy out of the family scenes not because it was accurate or a good choice dramatically, but because he couldn’t look at the ugly face of his family without turning to stone.

He nodded after a pause, and that seemed to open the floodgates. Suddenly everyone, including those who had previously spoken only with praise of the play, found the same weakness, and hammered away with growing enthusiasm, like kids imitating each other.

Hilary cut it off at last. “All right, I think we’ve made our point to Tony.” There was self-conscious laughter. “I think we’re agreed we’ve got a good play here that needs some work at developing its theme.”

Tony got up wearily, and merely nodded yes to Hilary when she said he should call tomorrow to discuss the next step. He knew that the muck and the mire had risen once again—rewrite, discussion, compromise. He would have to struggle again: to get the play right, to get Hilary to put it on. He was tired of spinning his wheels in the snow, making what was once white, pure, and beautiful into brown sludge. Get me out, he asked New York’s night sky while walking home, after refusing Hal Turner’s invitation to have a drink. Get me out of this muddy ditch.

Because Patty wanted Gelb’s support for her novel to seem objective, she had insisted on absolute discretion. She demanded that he not gossip, that their meetings take place at an anonymous location, such as a hotel, rather than at the apartment of a friend who would have to be let in on the secret.

Thus she was infuriated when, on the day she went up to Garlands to deliver to Betty the final chapter of her novel, Gelb “happened” to drop by, feigning (badly, Patty thought) surprise at her presence.

“What are you here for?” he boomed.

“Her novel’s finished!” Betty announced with a wide smile, as though it were the accomplishment of a precocious child. “She’s a big girl and goes in the potty now,” was her tone. Patty loathed them both. She felt rage at being at their mercies, an anger redoubled by the fact that she had to pretend intimacy with them. Her child was in their care: its health in the hands of a lech and a coward. Why the hell doesn’t Betty have the sense to screw him, Patty thought, and really make sure of a big print run?

“When can I read it?” Gelb asked.

This is hopeless, Patty thought, noticing the look of astonishment on Betty’s face. Betty still thought of Gelb’s arrival at Garlands as a disaster, assuming that Gelb bore ill will toward Patty—a notion Patty encouraged—and now the big bozo was blowing it. “I’ll give it to you right away,” Betty said.

“I have to go,” Patty said.

“We’re having lunch!” Betty said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Patty admitted.

“You are? I don’t have a lunch. I’ll join you,” Gelb said. Patty was so disgusted, she almost stuck her tongue out at him. He wants everybody to know, she decided. Pride of ownership.

Betty looked seasick. “Great,” she said.

The three of them stood there for a moment. Betty opened her drawer, coming out with the bathroom key. “But Patty and I had better freshen up first.”

“Okay,” Gelb said.

“I’m fresh enough,” Patty said, not wanting to have to answer Betty’s questions yet.

So now Betty was stuck, the ladies’ room key in hand. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and walked out, turning her head away from Gelb and signaling violently with her eyes at Patty. Betty’s attitude toward Gelb was what Patty’s once was—a schoolgirl’s toward the principal—but having seen his lumpy buttocks while he stood at the bathroom sink angling his head to see if he had trimmed all his nostril hairs had altered Patty’s perspective.

Gelb moved at her the instant Betty was gone, his hands out. “How dare you!” Patty said, outraged, as he took possession, his hands reaching for her ass, his lips kissing her neck. “You’re making it so fucking obvious! You might as well come in with my panties in your teeth!”

He laughed into her hair and then murmured, “You’re so beautiful—I got a hard-on in the cab just thinking of you.”

“Fabulous,” Patty said, and pushed at his chest. “Anyone can see! Will you stop!”

He moved away. “Who cares if they find out?”

“I do! Everyone will think it’s the only reason I’m being published.”

“Nonsense,” he answered with a devilish smile. “Everybody knows I’m not that nice.” And then he laughed, delighted.

“Hilarious. I can’t trust you. The affair’s over.”

“Bullshit,” he said confidently, but his eyes were worried. “Your orgasms are too good. Last time you almost shattered the chandelier.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. If a dog licked my clit that long I’d come.”

Betty breezed in, her face set in a wide smile. Patty and Gelb both looked at the floor like guilty children. “All set?” Betty said with an even brighter smile.

On his way to see Holder for his weekly meeting, Fred passed Patty, Betty, and Gelb in the hail. His routine for the last six months had been to submit rewritten pages each Friday and meet with Holder on Monday and be given changes. This was to be the last of their conferences, since Fred was handing in the final ten pages.

“What are you doing here?” Fred asked Patty without even a hello. “Returning to editing?”

“Patty’s just handed in her novel. We’re publishing it in the fall,” Betty said triumphantly and—Fred thought—as though it were somehow a slap in the face. It did worry him.

“You’ve written a novel?” he asked Patty.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Patty said in a sarcastic and disgusted tone that also smacked of confidence and control. “I walk and talk too—I’m a real bargain.”

“Oh, stop,” Betty said. “Fred, you know Jerry Gelb? This is Fred Tatter. We’re publishing him also. When, Fred?”

“I guess in the fall,” he answered, terrified, now that he knew for sure that Gelb was Gelb, the man himself. Patty used to work for him, Fred remembered, and now felt better, assuming that’s why she had gotten a contract. Sure, and Betty, her best friend, is her editor. He regained his balance. “We’ll be on the same list. We should have a joint pub party.”