Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Now, despite the fact that he was already flirting with her and giving every indication that he had never met a woman so beautiful and interesting before, did he actually want to sleep with her? It was hard for him to even begin to answer this question. He always wanted people to want him. Often this concern obliterated whether he wanted them.

Even now, as he noticed that her lips, thin and bloodless, did not appeal to him, that her hair was a dull brown, her breasts were small, that she had an arrogant attitude toward Billy and Helen, presumably because they were lower down on Hollywood’s totem pole, and that she was obviously dying to know the details of his business in LA — all these things made her unattractive — even so, he heard and saw himself wooing her as if nothing, nothing else on earth, could be more important than winning her.

Patty’s week had been difficult. She saw David Bergman only once more. He was strangely indifferent and though they went to bed, he was passionless, ignoring her desires, while his own seemed to be satisfied perfunctorily. It had been the booze, she decided, and felt profoundly insulted.

Her problems mounted each day, because every day cost money, and she had less of that commodity with each expense. Unemployment insurance didn’t cover everything, despite her efforts to economize. She had trouble sleeping until after a long struggle, which meant that she would fall asleep at four or five in the morning and be unable to wake up until noon. That made her search for a job even more difficult.

Her life had no markers. Each day resembled the last. Life’s ordinary routine — sleeping, eating, bathing, cleaning — rose like dark hills for her exhausted will to climb.

She got up one morning to discover she weighed under one hundred pounds, a first since childhood. In the Times that morning was a long article on anorexia. Patty diagnosed herself as a sufferer, and was haunted by images of bones piercing through a shrunken body. She became too upset to eat breakfast, confirming her terror, and she called Betty in a panic.

“I need a doctor,” she said without even a hello.

“What’s wrong!”

“I’m anorectic!”

Betty laughed. “I wish I was.”

Patty began to cry. She tried to cover it by talking, but the words caved in like a rotten floor and dropped her into a basement of sobs.

Betty’s tone changed sharply. “My God, Patty, are you all right? You’re not anorectic! Where are you?”

“In the kitchen,” Patty whimpered, looking at her untouched breakfast. “I can’t eat.”

“I want to see you. Are you dressed?”

Patty tried to say yes, but sobbed instead.

“Get in a cab and come here.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“I can’t face midtown …”

“Patty.” Betty said this like a mother: with stem love. “The cab will take you to the entrance. You get in an elevator and walk into my office. Midtown won’t touch you.”

This is silly, Patty thought. I’m not having a breakdown. I don’t need to run to Betty’s office for her to take care of me. But while Patty told herself she was okay, she nevertheless rushed out of the apartment, caught a cab, and anxiously watched the street numbers go by, as if her eventual arrival might be in doubt, or that the closer she came to the solace of Betty’s office, the more easily she could bear life.

And indeed, by the time she stepped out of the elevator onto Betty’s floor, a kind of lightheartedness took over, as if Patty’s presence there was part of a different life, as if she were merely visiting a peer during some free time grabbed from the hustle and bustle, meeting Betty to play squash, or for a drink, or for any of the reasons she used to visit Betty’s office. One of the editors she knew passed her in the hall, and Patty easily greeted him, and gave an impression of contentment that was genuine coin, even though the purse of its origin was otherwise dark, musty, and poor.

Betty looked relieved on seeing her. She closed the door to her office. “Are you all right?”

“I’m a wreck.”

“You don’t look it. You look great.”

“I feel like dying.”

Betty said nothing. She nodded seriously and looked expectant. But Patty didn’t want to elaborate. It was truer kept simple: detailing her problems made them sound small, and they didn’t feel small. In the aggregate they were suffocating, and made her want to disappear and die.

“You need a job,” Betty said at last, as if this were a conclusion reached through intensive tests done by a crack medical team. “Why don’t you write something?”

“Are you nuts? I need money. I have three hundred bucks in the bank.”

“No, no. I mean, write a romance book, or, uh, you could do some ghost writing, something. But guaranteed money, not on spec.”

“Can I write?” Patty said heavenward, with a sweet pleading air, like a child querying Santa Claus on his ability to give a special present.

“Sure! Those things? I think of doing them all the time. Those romances are a formula. It’s like painting by numbers.”

“I can’t believe it! I’ll become one of those hysterical writers screaming for more ads. I can’t do it. And how do we get a contract anyway? We have no experience.”

Betty laughed. “So you do want to try?”

“I can’t get a job again. I’m too passive. I’d never be promoted. I’d end up being the first eighty-year-old assistant editor in publishing.”

Betty stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs to the Shadow Books division. We’ll see Joe McGuire. He handles romances.”

For a moment Patty stayed in her chair. It seemed preposterous: could it work? Had she been worrying herself to death over nothing? Could she just take an elevator down to an assignment, money, respectability, a sense of self, a return of appetite, the ability to pay for extermination of all the cockroaches in her sublet? Had this nightmare merely been an illusion of nerves?

Betty nodded at the door. “Come on. Let’s do it.”

Patty opened her mouth to protest: argue that failure would surely be the result.

But Betty anticipated her: “No back-talk. I’m telling you it’ll work.”

Patty got up. Betty made her feel competent. That this would be fun. She followed her out and smiled brilliantly at a cute male assistant who was watching her breasts bounce while she walked.

Fred Tatter was waiting again. This time in Bart’s outer office. He had handed in an outline for The Locker Room, his novel on the incompatibility of men and women, two days after thinking of the idea. Bart had taken the weekend to read it, called to say he liked it, and made an appointment to see Fred the next morning. So Fred had spent a sleepless night trying to deduce what Bart intended from his terse comment of praise on the phone:

“It’s good, Fred. Come in tomorrow at ten and we’ll talk.”

A cryptographer handed a top-secret code could not have found more significant hidden meaning than Fred did in those two sentences. He began euphorically; decided that Bart was going to present him with an offer from a publisher and simply wanted to do it face to face. That fell by the wayside when Fred realized it was impossible. Not enough time had passed for Bart to get the outline to an editor and have it read. By three in the morning he had become pessimistic: Bart wanted major changes in the outline and simply wished to begin by softening up Fred with praise. By five in the morning Fred decided that “It’s good, Fred” was a pretty weak compliment, so halfhearted that it was no better than saying “It stinks, Fred.”

I poured my heart into that outline, Fred thought. It’s got my guts in it. And all he can say is, “It’s good.”