Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Fred stared at the edge of Formica where it met the corner of his stainless-steel sink. There was a brown line of decay caused by moisture. He had never noticed it before. He saw himself standing in the living room of a forty-story building, sandwiched between row after row of hustling baby-boom middle-class thirty-year-olds, living off their salaries, subscribing to New York Magazine, feeling close to the rich, close to the famous, with the roar of the main pump of life’s most exciting engine in their ears. Until Bart had opened his mouth to deliver that talk. Fred thought he was about to be finely polished and screwed into the glistening motor of New York, his name typeset for the appropriate columns and invitation lists. These words of Bart’s were really a death sentence, a lifetime lease in this row of plasterboard mediocrity.

Bart was still talking: “… we need something sharper for you, with greater—”

“I have another idea,” Fred blurted.

Silence. Then, “Uh-huh.”

“Would you like to hear it?” Fred asked, not sure whether Bart would say yes.

“Yeah.”

“I want to write a male version of The Women’s Room. I want to show that men aren’t shits. There’s all this talk about monogamy and men fucking around when they hit forty. All that. The truth, and what no one is saying, is that men aren’t able to be monogamous. Women can be. Men fall in love and they’re horny, but those are two different things.” Fred blurted this out and then suddenly had nothing to say. He waited. This was his last flare. Either Bart slowed his huge liner and rescued him from his waterlogged lifeboat, or steered past and left Fred to die of thirst in an ocean of water.

“Well,” Bart said after a moment. “That could be interesting. But I need to hear a plot, something more.”

“See, I want to follow two people my age from their romance in college up to now, show all the stuff, the political years, the drug years, becoming professionals, the touchy-feely psychology of the seventies. You know I want to do all the junk that is on Phil Donahue and in the Living Section of the Times, and then show how it’s all down to this one basic difference.”

“Mmmm.” Bart fell silent, then spoke as if startled. “I think this has potential. Can you come up with enough of a story to write a proposal?”

“Sure!” Fred said happily.

“All right. There are several editors I can think of who are right. Bob Sand at Flanders, Carrie Winston at Ingrams. I’ll light a fire under them while you get started on the proposal.”

“How long should it be?”

“With this kind of story, don’t get too involved with plot details. Focus on how it’s a response to the feminist novel. That’s the hook. I have to go … get this in quickly, Fred, it could be very exciting.”

“Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”

He was saved! Spinning out of the darkness, from the towering deck of the luxury liner, landing with a plop in the waters of obscurity, came Fred’s lifesaver. He stopped only to pour a cup of coffee before he was at his typewriter. Nothing delayed or dismayed him as the pages appeared, blackened with his ideas, littering his desk while he invented effortlessly. It had never been like this before — he knew this story by heart. After all, it was the story of his marriage. And when a doubting voice wondered how Marion would feel about her life being thus exposed, Fred reminded himself that no great writer had ever hesitated to make a sacrifice of his life. At last, it had happened. Fred was in that great company of geniuses and artists. He was struggling to get over the railing, still soaked by the brackish water — but the liner had stopped and was ready for boarding.

David Bergman felt very much in demand. Writers from every section either dropped by or phoned. Two senior editors from the back of the book asked him to stop by their offices, and when he did, they too discussed the rumor. This sort of thing was general in the building that day. No one seemed to be working on the magazine.

None of the talk implied danger for David. Someone even suggested David might be promoted because of all the shifting around that would necessarily result from firing the editor in chief and replacing him from within, namely the managing editor. Someone would have to replace him, and someone the person he had replaced, and so on, in a complicated series of moves.

After a moment of anxiety over his job. David began to feel, while having all these gossipy conversations, that he wouldn’t really care if he had to leave Newstime. He could be hired by almost anyone. The Times, the Journal, Business Week, they would all be willing to hire him. Syms was sure to be hired elsewhere if he were fired, and Syms would certainly hire David. To be worried was idiotic. He had over twenty thousand dollars saved up in the profit-sharing plan, there was unemployment insurance, he would be free to do nothing for more than a year before getting a job could become an urgent financial problem. How many thirty-year-olds could make that boast?

What finally did begin to stick in his mind was Patty. Her mouth gliding up and down his penis — that took over, with mixed results. He hadn’t sat at a desk with an erection since junior high school, but the excitement below seemed divorced from his thoughts about Patty. She was just a blond girl. Silly and with great tits. Of course, she was accepted by everyone: the men wanted to look at her. But could he date her seriously? He imagined Patty accompanying him to a Newstime function. David, the classic smart Jewish boy walking in with a breast-flouncing chippie. The Marx Brothers would certainly snicker. And heart failure (at least) would strike David’s parents.

But the rigidity in his pants was unimpressed. Last night was, if not the best sex of his life, certainly the most carefree and explosive. The last of the senior editors had casually wandered in to whisper in hushed tones about the rumor. David kept his own counsel and pretended no interest in any possible promotion that might come his way. While he listened to the senior editor’s anxieties over his own job, he kept seeing Patty’s head move up and down with relentless mastery of his organ.

David was so unresponsive that the senior editor left him after a few minutes. David kept his eye on the door — he didn’t dare close it on a Monday with rumors turning sedentary writers into talky nomads; that would be suspicious — and squeezed his right hand underneath the belt of his gray pants, stretched the elastic band of his Jockey shorts, and got his cool fingertips to the head of his hard and frustrated penis. The constricted circumstances made any manipulation difficult, but he tried, his eyes watering from the effort of staring at the door and attempting to anticipate someone entering. He began to succeed in his fingering and the pleasure made his surveillance more difficult.

The phone rang.

Startled, David sat up abruptly, his swivel chair sliding toward the desk, banging his trapped wrist against the edge. He pulled his hand out of his pants and picked up the phone.

It was Chico, the managing editor. “David. I need to speak to you. Can you come up?”

“Sure.”

“Come up without mentioning it. Okay?”

Dutifully David took the stairs, assuming this would make his trip to Animal Crackers less obvious. You never knew who was in the elevators. David even went so far as to peer down the hallway from the stairway entrance toward the reception area of Animal Crackers to check whether it was clear before making his appearance. Chico’s secretary told him to go right in, and Chico, standing nervously at the window, told him to close the door. All this secrecy might mean nothing: Chico loved melodrama.