Rafael Yglesias: Hot Properties

“We don’t know who,” Marion answered. “Yesterday we came in and somebody had thrown out all the old stuff and bought new things.”

“Incredible,” Tony agreed, shaking his head. “It’s incredible how primitive people’s reactions are. An actor I went to Yale with got it and I visited him in the hospital last week …”

Fred met Marion’s eyes, his look telling her what a fool she’d made of herself. Marion returned the glance defiantly and looked back to Tony.

“… and even though I argued with close friends of his who refused to visit, I must admit it, when I walked in I was scared to even sit down, much less shake his hand.”

“You didn’t shake his hand!” Patty said.

“Patty!” Marion warned.

“Well, we don’t know. They don’t know how people get it.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—” Marion started.

But Tony cut her off. “Patty,” he said gently, “if AIDS could be communicated by a handshake, millions of people would have it. And not only that, there would be no way to protect against getting it. The world would have to sit back, let those who die, die, and like the Black Plague, only those with natural resistance would survive.” Tony leaned close to Patty. “Nevertheless, I didn’t shake his hand.”

At this Fred and Patty laughed hard. Marion leaned back with a disgusted look, as if giving up on all of them.

The intercom buzzed. Marion got up and answered it. They all heard the amplified voice of the doorman. “Bart Cullen to see you.”

“I didn’t know you had a new agent.” Tony said to Fred.

“Yeah, Bart Cullen. He handles Fredericka Young.”

Patty whistled.

“Who’s Fredericka Young?” Tony asked.

“You don’t know?” Fred said, amazed. “I guess she doesn’t go to Elaine’s.”

“Maybe she does,” Tony said dryly. Fred, envious of Tony’s ability to be seated at Elaine’s (the renowned show-business, literary, and amorphous-celebrity restaurant), often teased Tony about his regular attendance there. The kidding irritated Tony because he knew Fred’s real complaint was that Tony didn’t invite him along. “Doesn’t mean I know her. Who is she?”

“She wrote All My Sins.”

Marion, at the door, called into the hallway, “This way, Bart.”

Tony, recognizing the title as the number-one bestseller of last year, said in a whisper, “My God, and he got ten percent?”

Fred nodded solemnly.

“Fred!” Patty said with excitement. “He’ll make you rich.”

Fred guffawed nervously, getting up to greet Bart, who at that moment appeared at the front door. “That’s the idea,” he said to Patty and Tony.

They turned to look at Fred’s hope for success. Bart was the opposite of the caricature of the agent: he was tall, thin, with a full head of red hair. His long nose, pale blue eyes, and thin unsmiling mouth made him look like a Flemish painting: a mournful, industrious, and religious man. But his companion fit the image of a wheeling-and-dealing agent: she was a tall blond model with the perfect features of modern surgery and the brilliant white teeth of industrial enamel.

While Fred introduced them (the model’s name was Brett, which Tony thought was probably acquired at the same time as her teeth), the intercom buzzed again and soon they were joined by Karl Stein. Karl was also represented by Bart— indeed. Karl had provided the introduction that led to Fred becoming a client. Karl was a short, sad man with black and gray hair that hung from the center of his head like draperies. His thick black beard gave the impression of religious commitment: a martyr.

In a sense he was a monk of the Order of Novelists. After college, Karl had begun his first book, finished it within a year, and sent it to publishers. He got fifteen rejections. Meanwhile, he began work on another novel. Over the next ten years he wrote six manuscripts, none of them finding a publisher. A friend persuaded him to meet someone he knew at Penthouse magazine and Karl wrote a piece for them on a sex club in New York that led to the first check he received as a writer. After a few more pieces for Penthouse, other assignments followed — from Playboy, then Esquire, and so on. A piece for Playboy on stewardesses attracted Bart’s attention. Bart called Karl, suggested he fire his current agent, hirt Bart, and write an outline based on the notion of tracing three generations of a family of stewardesses, from the prop age to the Concorde. Karl’s ten-page proposal on this idea won for him the book contract that his six devotions did not. He had finished Stewardess by the time he walked into Fred’s dinner party and had only five months to wait for his first novel to appear.

The last guest to arrive was David Bergman, someone Fred knew slightly in college and had cultivated after he spotted David’s name listed on the masthead at Newstime as a senior writer. Marion had invited Patty partly because of David. He was single and a good catch. To be a senior writer at his age was a remarkable achievement, and besides, Marion liked David. He looked responsible and decent. In his double-breasted pin-striped suit, white shirt, and red tie, he didn’t look at all like a writer, she thought, without any irony or self-consciousness that she, the wife of a writer, was so impressed by that.

Other than David, who asked for bourbon, the new arrivals asked for white wine. Fred couldn’t resist a gibe. “Well, I’m glad I read the Living Section of the Times this month.”

Blank looks.

“Everybody’s drinking wine!” Fred said with the tone of Sherlock Holmes naming the murderer.

“I’m not,” David said mildly.

The rest looked puzzled and there was an awkward silence. Tony broke the tableau: “Fred, this is a most provocative remark. But we don’t understand it.”

Patty laughed violently, mostly at Tony’s tone of utter contempt and the embarrassed look on Fred’s face. She started to cough and choke, trying to stop herself, knowing her laughter was insulting — indeed, Fred’s face turned red.

“I didn’t mean it as a put-down,” Fred stammered. “Don’t you remember the piece a couple of weeks ago saying that hard liquor before dinner was passé?” Fred said this, appealed it really, to Karl, who (generally worried by any gathering larger than three) peered about in a bewildered and suspicious manner. He looked startled by Fred’s question. In fact, he was made nervous by Fred including him in something that seemed to be an embarrassing mistake.

“No — I didn’t hear what you said,” Karl answered in so guilty and halting a manner that when Tony leaned forward and patted Karl on the knee, saying, “Don’t worry, Karl, we’ll give you a makeup test later,” everybody laughed. They laughed nervously, because they were acquaintances burdened with the need to pretend intimacy and friendliness, and the strain needed relief.

Fred, knowing he had somehow made a fool of himself, desperately grabbed at a new subject. “Say, we got to get Patty a job.” Fred’s foot jiggled anxiously. “Come on, this room is full of people with connections. Patty’s terrific. She’s smart, she’s cute, she knows editing.”

Patty wished she was back in the bathroom again — this time to slit her wrists.

Karl frowned at her, increasing her discomfort. “You’re sure you want to go back into publishing?”

“Of course!” Fred answered for her. “We have to make sure all our friends become important editors so they’ll publish our books!” Fred guffawed, scanning the room with glistening eyes for others who would enjoy his open statement of opportunism. Fred suffered from the delusion that to confess to calculation was disarming and sophisticated. He believed it simultaneously revealed himself as aware of such conniving, disapproving of it, and yet showed he was prepared to take advantage of it himself — a combination of attitudes that Fred thought was self-aware and humorous (like a Woody Allen hero, Fred would have said) rather than the tail of the comet of self-doubt that raged constantly throughout the galaxy of his insecurities.