Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Patty’s efforts to reach David, combined with Newstime’s expectation that David would return to the office, led to an early discovery of the body. Patty had regretted their phone conversation the moment it was over, but had assumed he was avoiding her repeated attempts to reach him at the magazine, and went there. After two hours passed without an answer at the loft, a nervous Chico escorted her downtown.

Chico fell apart at the sight of the body. He frantically tried to cut him down, talking inarticulately, unable to keep the ladder steady, pulling desperately at the shoes, until he finally collapsed, alternately screaming and weeping on the couch.

Patty’s first thought was to look for the collar and magazines. She was going to destroy them if they were present. She didn’t know why, but even if David had left them behind, she assumed he would want her to. She couldn’t find them. Then she phoned the police. She felt nothing. Not even surprise. She was shocked. But somehow it made sense. In the cab, Chico had talked about the situation with the Gott story in incoherent snatches. Obviously he and David were vulnerable, and in her talk with David on the phone she had heard how truly scared and alone he must have been for a long time.

I’m sorry, she said to his body. She held Chico’s head in her lap while he sobbed, hiding from the sight, and spoke in the still emptiness of her mind: I’m sorry, David. She looked at the huge abstract yellow painting, no tears, unafraid, and apologized. She waited for her own tears to flow. But sitting in the loft with the great Chico, this great man whom David had worked so hard to please, weeping like a child in her lap, she understood. The joke life had played on David was both too horrible and too funny to live through. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder, David, she said silently.

Betty nursed her and the magazine protected her through the cleanup that followed over the next few weeks. Although David’s suicide was a marvelous side-bar to the whole episode, as though finally acknowledging there was a brotherhood of the press, almost everybody kept a distant, even dignified distance from that aspect of the story. The gossip was furious, an item or two did appear in the real rags, but an unknown journalist’s idealistic suicide was dull compared to the field day they could have with the old man and his killer.

Her parents came to town for a few days. Betty convinced her to see a psychiatrist at least for a while. To the doctor she told the fact of David’s sexual secret, a secret made even more frustrating for her by the fact that she didn’t know its extent or importance in his life. The more she talked about him, the more the realization that she had lived with him and known precious little about him horrified her. Not because of what it implied, the desperate lonely sorrow he must have lived with, but because of what it meant about her. The therapy consoled her, forgave her, explained to her, but the fear that she was incapable of loving anyone without the distorting prism of her self-absorption keeping her a stranger to the secrets of his soul stayed with her.

Her novel came out. Of course it didn’t sell. But it got great reviews. Paula Kramer didn’t write about it in her devastating piece on Fred, but she did review it for the Times Book Review, hailing Patty as providing a remarkable combination of humor and tragedy, a writer who “is too intelligent to rely on the dogmas of feminism, but rather manages to remind us of the real effects sexism has on our lives, to feel, to understand with our hearts and not our minds.”

Gelb tried to phone right after the tragic news, but Betty, on Patty’s instructions, told him not to call again, and he obeyed. She made it. Without him. And without David.

Although in her eyes the fog of mystery and sorrow from David’s death obscured her docking in the literary port, all who knew her soon thought of Patty Lane as a brilliant talent whose ultimate success was only a matter of time. The tragic story of her lover only added to the fascination with which she was now regarded. She carried alone, in her weary heart, what she knew of the sad story. Now that the world believed she had no secrets, she possessed the first true secret of her life — a keepsake and a punishment, she believed, for completing the lonely journey of creation.

On the fifty-second week that Fred Tatter’s The Locker Room appeared on the New York Times bestseller list (it had sunk from the number-one position recently, but was still in the top five), his agent held a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary. Bart didn’t stint on the cost — after all, Fred was a client whose earnings exceeded a million dollars a year.

Most of the publishing industry was invited, along with dozens of writers, as well as movie and television people— The Locker Room was scheduled to be a mini-series the next fall, and Fred’s new novel, although still unfinished, had been optioned for a feature film. Even enemies such as Paula Kramer, who had burned Fred on the interview, were asked. (The way Paula had suckered Fred, Bart explained to people, into a confessional that The Locker Room consisted of an account of cheating on Marion was that she pretended intimacy and then betrayed confidences, probably irritated that Fred didn’t make a pass at her.) More significant than these invitations to the people who had attempted to slow the juggernaut of The Locker Room was the fact that they all accepted — gladly. It became the publishing party of the season. Not to be invited was shameful.

The caterers used all five floors of Bart’s town house elegantly — two of the large rooms were finished for the party, providing a windfall of tax write-offs for Bart. Fred and Marion, at Bart’s request, arrived early and were installed in an upper bedroom which had been made the control center for the disc jockey selecting the music for the dancing on the third floor. Several of the Hollywood people who were involved on the mini-series and the planned film of Fred’s second book had not yet met him and Bart wanted them to chat intimately before the crush of the party.

Marion sat near the electronic boards, sipping champagne, and watched the disc jockey prepare. She had long since become bored with the slavish attention paid to Fred. She no longer simmered with quiet rage at the curious first looks she got from people when being introduced. The television people, she thought, seemed to look particularly snide on meeting her — no doubt thinking of the amusing fact that plump, round-faced, mousy-haired Marion was being played by Farah Fawcett in the mini-series. Go ahead, laugh, she answered them silently. I’ll console myself in my million-dollar co-op. Most women just get heartache from their husbands fucking around, she once told her shrink. At least I get furs.

Fred had them laughing in moments, the nervous eager-to-please hooting that seemed to be a reflex since he had become a favorite of the talk shows. The media had fallen in love with his unpretentious joking about publishing and his engaging guffaws at his self-deprecating stories. A recent carping piece on him in Town magazine called Fred the first stand-up-comic novelist. Marion was sick of the standards of his repertoire by now — his embarrassing moments before he made it: spilling coffee on himself before an important meeting; stepping on Pete Rose’s foot minutes before a World Series game; meeting Isaac Bashevis Singer at a writers’ conference, becoming confused, and complimenting him on writing Portnoy’s Complaint (Marion suspected he had made that one up for Johnny Carson); and then the sudden switch to an earnest but humble discussion of his new book’s themes.