Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Sam shook his head. “He’s smooth. You should be careful what you say to him.”

“Like what? You mean, ideas?”

“No, no. He’s not a thief. Tom hates other people’s success. I don’t know why. We writers aren’t in competition, right? I mean, it’s not like batting averages — there’s no such thing as somebody leading the league in writing. Just because Anna Karenina is a masterpiece, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to read Crime and Punishment.”

“That’s true,” Fred said. It sounded all right, but it wasn’t true nevertheless. No doubt Dostoevsky had been sick and tired of hearing about how great Tolstoy was: he probably compared how many full-page spreads he got in the Moscow Times Book Review and fumed if Raskolnikov came up shy of Anna’s ad budget.

Sam nodded at Fred with great significance. “I don’t know why Tom feels another writer’s success has to be diminished for him to feel good about his work.”

Fred felt a headache coming on. Sitting in the stuffy room playing cards had wearied him, and the cognac seemed to go to his head. The lamp lights glared harshly. “I … I don’t see that in Tom. He’s … I’ve never heard him put down another writer’s work. I mean, he kids around with you — but that’s to your face.”

“He’s not kidding.” Sam stood up. “Do you want some more?”

“No thanks. I’d better be going.” Fred felt uneasy, almost trapped.

Sam picked up the bottle on his desk and started pouring more into his snifter. “Maybe he isn’t backbiting when he talks about your book. I just assumed he was lying.”

This is bullshit. Fred told himself. Sam was an asshole, he’d known that from the moment he met him. He couldn’t trust anything Sam might have to say about Tom — Sam was jealous of Tom’s more glamorous reputation and was often stung by his wit. “Lying about what?” Fred asked, emphasizing “what” in a challenging and skeptical way.

Sam shrugged. “He talks as if Bob Holder wrote the book.” He sucked on his teeth and went on casually: “Says he had you rewrite it almost page by page.” Now he looked Fred straight in the eyes. “Told me you gave him the first hundred pages to read before you submitted them to Holder. He says not one word of those pages is now in the book.”

Fred’s confidence that these must be lies constricted: he had given his original hundred pages to Lear; they were completely different now. Sam could have known about the pages only from Tom. There had to be some truth to this story. In a moment, all of Tom’s recent praise, social invitations, jokes about the careers of other writers — things he cherished, the one close friendship he had formed with a talented writer before success — they decayed in his heart, like the memory of an adulterous lover’s kisses and protestations of love, mocking him for his gullibility. To be unloved was enough of a burden — to be made a fool of as well seemed unendurably cruel.

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.