Hot Properties (61 page)

He cleared his throat after looking down, away from Sam’s eyes. “I gotta go,” he said.

“Don’t let it bother ya,” Sam said. “Being lied about is a measure of how successful you are. Tom wouldn’t bother if he weren’t jealous.”

Fred got up and walked quickly to the door. He didn’t want to embarrass himself further by showing how hurt he felt. He brushed past Sam, who got up, saying. “Don’t tell him I—”

“He has nothing to be jealous of,” Fred said in a gasp, an almost tearful gasp.

For a moment Sam looked into his eyes. He must have seen how effective his gossip had been—he looked away, ashamed. “Forget it,” Sam said.

Patty told herself over and over that Paula Kramer wasn’t going to call once it was past eleven o’clock. She tried to put out of her mind both the fantasy and the nightmare that assaulted her: Paula raving her novel into the surprise hit of the year while castigating Fred’s book; Paula patronizing her novel as slight and unimportant and enthusiastically rewarding Fred for his honesty and clarity of vision. She played out an imaginary interview and found herself pretending that Paula would spring the fact of her affair with Gelb as a surprise. Even in this make-believe, Patty had no defense for her act of opportunism—incompetent and unsuccessful opportunism at that.

The worst of her imaginings was that Paula would never call, that reading her novel wouldn’t cause a desire to interview her. Neglect seemed the most horrible of fates.

Patty tried to sleep, but the empty loft, dark, absorbing the passing guttural noise of trucks and off-key drunken songs, kept triggering new paranoid scenarios. She tried to remember what her novel was like: would it defuse the canon of criticism, or were there passages that might light Paula Kramer’s fuse to fire devastating salvos?

She got up to get her copy, given to her by Betty last week. The light blue cover with its feminine, girlish title print—
Surburban Dreams
—had filled her with despair. While David oohed and aahed (unconvincingly), Patty had decided to put it away and forget it. Now she sat up in bed like an ordinary reader and opened it.

She felt the pride of authorship. There was real paper, real typeface, real words. She tried to put her mind away from itself, from its expectations and knowledge of the book. She hoped to be a stranger while she read. But she couldn’t. She told herself (reading and laughing, reading and being impressed) that her story was ordinary, her language merely serviceable, but the truth was that, like a doting mother, the simplest accomplishments of her child, the pure beauty of its very existence, were thrilling. She was in love with her work, charmed by its wooing tone, and moved by its tragedies. She could no more dislike or separate herself from it than she could loath or divorce herself.

Patty read her whole novel straight through, enchanted, occasionally surprised by an awkward sentence, a transition made too abruptly, a narrative moment whose dramatic force seemed diffused by timidity, but generally impressed by her own intelligence, style, and imagination. She was a good writer. The novel probably would have been published even without Betty. Maybe another editor, a more influential editor, would have pushed it harder, believed in its commercial possibilities more, and have been more persuasive within the house.

When she finished, it was four in the morning. She felt exhilarated. She felt strong. She was going to leave David. Stick to her resolve not to resume her affair with Gelb, even if he did leave his wife. She’d get herself an agent and sell her next novel to a stranger. She held her slim volume in her hands like a prayer book and told herself: I am going to rely on this. I’m a writer. That will make sense of my life.

She went to the closets and began to pack clothes that she would need immediately: she didn’t have enough suitcases of her own for everything. She tried to think of an alternative to staying with Betty while she searched for a place to live. Other than going home to Philadelphia, there wasn’t one.

She had a favorite black cashmere turtleneck that she couldn’t find in her drawers, so she resorted to opening David’s drawers. In the bottom one, underneath some of his sweaters, she found a pile of pornographic magazines.

She stared at them uncomprehendingly for a moment. She closed the drawer at first, staring at it angrily. She laughed at herself. “What a prude.” she said out loud, and then reopened it. It was then that she noticed the top cover: it was an S/M magazine. She took out the pile and went through all of them; without exception, they were leather and whips—fierce women and penitent men.

There was a noise from the street. She guiltily dropped the magazines and looked at the door until she realized the sound’s origin. She was scared. Maybe there was an innocent explanation—research for a story, and he was embarrassed to have … But that was hopeless. Was this what he wanted? To be tied up and whipped until there were red stripes on his ass? Did that explain the collapse of their sex life? She felt like a fool. She thought she understood David so well, had blamed herself for the poverty of their romantic life, charging it to her affair. She called herself a novelist and yet she had lived with a man for almost two years and didn’t know what was going on in his head.

Impassioned and angry, she went through all the drawers. She found a studded leather collar and a Polaroid photograph of a red-haired woman in a complete outfit, brandishing a riding crop. She didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but she knew it implied some sort of contact. He had obviously gone beyond masturbatory fantasies.

Was he having an affair with some bizarre sadistic woman? The images that flooded her mind were appalling, humiliating. The thought of him coming home to bed from some hole in the wall where he had let a pervert whip him was sickening.

She finished packing, not bothering now whether she had enough things. She wanted to get out. She made sure she had her copy of her manuscript and book. She waited until it was seven o’clock in the morning before phoning Betty. She still woke her up.

“I’m coming over right away.”

“Okay,” said a sleepy voice. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be over right away.” She hung up and looked at the magazines, the collar, the Polaroid lying on the coffee table where she had examined them.

Sooner or later she’d have to tell him. She’d rather do it without having to see his face.

She picked up her suitcase and walked out. She left them behind, exposed grotesque fossils of their now extinct relationship. That would suffice as her Dear John letter.

CHAPTER 17

After Tony had been cleaned up, Andrea Warren drove him back to Malibu in her car. He could remember only a few blurry moments of the drive, his face buried in the soft upholstery of the Mercedes. He woke up when he felt stillness: he saw Andrea’s small body at the door to Garth’s house, talking to two figures, who peered out at him. They came toward him eventually— he tried to get himself up, but his body had a mule’s stubbornness, moving only when forced to.

“Hey, man,” Garth’s face said to him. He felt arms reaching under him.

Helen, looking beautiful, her eyes sympathetic, her long hair falling on tanned shoulders like an innocent Tahitian girl’s, smiled sweetly: “We’ll get you to bed.”

They put his arms around their shoulders and became his crutches. Andrea held the wooden gate open. Tony’s head flopped from side to side, a helpless newborn. He rested on Helen’s shoulder and found himself looking straight down her nightshirt at those remarkable breasts, full and long, big nipples, standing with languid elegance, erect, but not arrogant. He kissed the top of her chest, his lips smacking. “God, they’re beautiful!” he shouted.

She laughed. A deep, throaty, amused noise, unselfconscious and welcoming. He heard Garth say: “He’ll be fine,” to someone, and then time skipped, a needle dancing across the record surface, making nonsense of the music.

Without Tony knowing how, he was in a bedroom. Garth stood a few feet away, naked except for bright blue underpants.

There was hot liquid in him. He forced his eyes open and saw a large mug at his lips, a light green pool lapping at his mouth, its gentle tide infiltrating, warming him, his head clearing. He heard the pleased chuckle again.

“He’s turning me on,” a voice at his side said.

“I don’t mind, if you don’t,” Garth answered, squinting with concentration.

Like a picture coming into focus, he could now see. His eyes must have been closed before. He was lying in their bed, naked. His right thumb was rubbing Helen’s nipple, while his palm caressed its underside. But she wasn’t looking at that, her eyes were on his genitals. Tony glanced down and saw he had an erection, so complete in its yearning that it arched above his belly, a missile angling for launch. She was holding a mug of tea to his mouth.

“I thought booze made you boys impotent,” she commented pleasantly to her husband. They spoke as if he weren’t conscious.

“He’s young,” Garth said with his patented ironic smile, almost a sneer, one comer of his mouth furrowing. Tony closed his eyes again. “And horny. It’s been two months. Told you we should have gotten him a girl.”

“Shouldn’t we let him sleep?” she asked in a halfhearted tone.

“This’ll deal with tomorrow’s hangover.”

“I’m not out,” Tony heard himself say. He wanted to shut up, continue pretending unconsciousness, but he was still too drunk to dissemble. He spoke the words together, all soft vowel sounds.

“What?” Helen asked, moving the cup away.

Tony opened his eyes. At first he couldn’t focus on anything. “I’m awake!” he shouted, so his words would be clear. He stared at her, seeing that she was also nude. He told himself to let go of her breast, but his hand held on. Looking into her eyes, he forgot everything else. They were all that existed in the universe. Again, he wasn’t sure who he was—he felt very young, lying in bed with a beautiful motherly woman smiling lovingly at him. “I’m only pretending to be drunk!” he yelled again, slurring his words so badly that “drunk” came out “drugged.”

He heard Garth laugh. “It’s a very good performance,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Tony said in his direction, but when he swung his head that way, he felt his stomach swish and slosh sickeningly, a bag full of water precariously connecting his torso to his legs. He groaned.

“Easy,” she said, and he felt her arms, very warm, come around him. He closed his eyes. Her breasts pressed against his tired, tired face. Her heat swelled over him, a mother bear protecting her cold child.

“I’m asleep,” he mumbled and let go of the world.

The rest is silence, David Bergman repeated to himself, hearing Richard Burton’s long hiss of sorrow from his high-school drama-class days, the sour-faced teacher standing rapturously beside the big box of a turntable. David moved through the nightmare with a still mind, becalmed of anxiety. The rest is silence, a dead actor’s voice told him.

Chico had taken it hard. He shouted and pleaded with the Brazilian police, switching from nervous pleas for understanding to arrogant demands for freedom from questioning. He had made a brief feint at pretending they didn’t know who the dead man was—but he soon gave that up and began shouting for the right to communicate with
Newstime.
Not only to have this story explode in their face but also to be scooped on it was the cause of Chico’s agony.

He hasn’t realized yet, David coolly observed, that our careers are over. Neither of them would ever be Groucho.

After twelve hours they were freed and permitted to leave the country.
Newstime
having agreed to release and in fact surrendering all the information they had on Gott. In a brief phone conversation with Rounder. Chico had been told that
Newstime
was making a completely open response to the event.

On the flight home, they had in hand the first burst of world news coverage. The pertinent embarrassment, that
Newstime
had been in the process of paying Hans Gott for his story, was mentioned only in passing—David knew it would take until the second editions for the criticisms to begin. The simple facts were that his killer, Tamar Gurion, arrested at the scene peacefully, was the descendant of a Jewish family—most of whom, she claimed, had been victimized in the camps by Mengele and Gott. Whether the dead man was in fact Gott was still in question, and it was this problem that obsessed Chico throughout the flight.

“I think we owe it to Mrs. Thorn to make no comment until we’ve talked it out with her and Richard,” Chico said, knowing they would be mobbed by reporters at the airport. David noticed Chico was now calling Rounder by his first name—usually he contemptuously referred to him as Rounder, sometimes as Round Robin.

“I thought he said we should be open,” David said. “Doesn’t that mean answering all questions?”

“We have to talk it all out and then hold a news conference. We’re going to be making appearances anyway.”

“Appearances?”

“Nightline,
the
Today Show,
they’re all gonna talk to us—but you have to do your piece on the killing first.”

David stared off. So he would have to preside over this indignity. Report his own stupidity, cowardice, and avarice as though they were merely the virtues of being an innocent bystander. What platitudes would he have to invent about the young woman, whose eyes seemed so calm and happy as she killed? Predictably, he would have to take the attitude she wasn’t a hero or a villain, but tragically, another victim. He thought of her, alone now, in a jail filled with … what? Were they monsters too? Would she be electrocuted, guillotined, poisoned, hanged, shot? I guess the guards won’t rape or beat her since she’ll have to be shown to the cameras a lot, he tried to console himself. He prayed that the malicious old man really was Gott. If she had destroyed herself over a fake—the ultimate non-news story—the tone he would have to adopt in the piece … His stomach churned at the thought. He looked at Chico, talking feverishly, a dead man not knowing the killing blow had been struck, a megalomaniacal chicken missing his swelled head, and wished he could choke him. Stuff all the bullshit back down into his throat and out the right end. The rest is silence, he said to himself in bitter silence.