Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Tony laughed. “I know. They’ve been showing it on Channel Thirteen. Pretty hokey.”

“It was the era of working-class drama. If it wasn’t set in a kitchen, it wasn’t art.”

They moved through the lobby quietly. Tony felt younger with each step, more and more a child out with a parent. He kept his head down while in the wood-paneled elevator, like a shy little boy unable to meet the glances of strange adults. It all brought back vividly the discomfort he had felt when his father had had custody of him. Richard was a quiet, thoughtful, self-absorbed man whose conversational pattern with Tony was passive, waiting for Tony to begin lines of inquiry, and then supplying only the minimum amount of information necessary to satisfy. Tony had no recollection of his father ever showing any curiosity about his emotional life. There were merely the checklist questions: How’s Betty? Are you writing? Do you have enough money? Have you seen your mother lately?

“What do you want to drink?” Richard asked once they were in the room.

“A Remy,” Tony said, flopping onto the floral-patterned couch. He leaned forward and pushed at the low pile of magazines on the coffee table. He opened one of them to the theater guide, listing currently running plays with quotes from the major drama critics. He looked resentfully at the two comedies running on Broadway. One by a commercial slob, the other by an overrated feminist, he said to himself, and flipped the magazine closed.

Then he felt disgust at this self-revelation of his bitterly envious feelings.

Richard got off the phone with room service and slowly, thoughtfully started to take off his tie, while glancing at the square slips of phone messages he had been handed at the front desk.

“I haven’t worked on a play in almost a year,” Tony said. He seemed embarrassed: a sinner confessing.

Richard looked a little startled. “You’ve been busy on the screenplay.”

“I have?” Tony laughed.

“Well, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.” He frowned. “Yes.”

“Excuse me for a moment. I have to return a few of these calls.” Richard got on the phone and placed a series of calls to California. Tony marveled at his father’s manner while doing business. He sounded relaxed and confident, a pleasant man in his tone, but hard, unyielding in what he said.

“Fuck him if he wants more points.” he said to some star actor’s agent. “You may assume, at your peril, that we’ll do anything to keep a hit series. It isn’t so. If you stick to these numbers, it’ll be cheaper for us to put a flop in the time slot.” Richard spoke these harsh words in a slow, gentle way, looking in Tony’s direction with focused, even observing eyes, as if the conversation was only marginally important. There was no tension, no fear of defeat, in his voice. Tony couldn’t fit that piece of self-confidence in with the puzzle of his father’s cowardly adherence to the blacklist.

“He put people out of work!” Maureen Winters had shrieked at Tony shortly after he had been returned to her upon her release from the sanitarium. He was in cotton pajamas with “New York. Yankees” written across his chest, standing in a narrow hallway looking up at his distracted mother, her eyes red, her body fat and sagging. “Your father has no balls!” she shouted at her six-year-old son. “He screams at shadows!” she said moments before Maria, their housekeeper, ran out to carry Tony away. He remembered the swishing rush of Maria’s slippers playing accompaniment to Maureen’s strange words: “He screams at shadows!”

She was mad. Tony said to himself, watching his handsome, tanned, calm father managing millions as if they were tips. Tony always said his mother was crazy, but in a tone that implied artistic eccentricity, and that’s what he had convinced himself it was, he realized now, as the weight of his judgment sank in: she was mad.

But then why did his father give him up? Why did he let a madwoman take his son three thousand miles away?

Tony let his head fall back on the couch. He closed his eyes, because they had begun to burn with ancient grief. He doesn’t love me. That’s why, Tony said to himself, and squeezed his lids watertight.

Patty had asked aloud, shortly after Tony and Betty left, if anyone wanted to adjourn — she hesitated — to the living area. Only the women. Cathy and Louise, agreed. Rounder, Chico. and David didn’t say no, but they stayed put, to continue their discussion of changes that should be made to Newstime, becoming so absorbed that more than an hour went by before the men spoke to the women.

Patty didn’t mind the segregation, except on principle. In practice, Patty thoroughly enjoyed talking with Louise and Cathy. After she explained the flat-fee payment for romance novels to them, she complained that although writing the first one had taken only a few months, her second had been coming along very slowly, and speed was what made them profitable. She quizzed Cathy in detail on the difference between having a career and staying home with the kids. They compared good shops to buy clothes, matched the assets and liabilities of male and female single friends of theirs to see if they could create a good couple, and so on, in a relaxed rambling discussion of life, love, birth, housing, and favorite TV shows.

Occasionally Patty would eavesdrop on the boys (Patty thought of men and women as boys and girls, except when she felt anger or disapproval), and felt sorry for them that they could only discuss their jobs. She had grown used to the fact that David was obsessed with his work; she had decided that the explanation lay with his ambitious, self-critical, and demanding character. Tonight she wondered if it were a matter of gender — or at least gender training. Men are so alone, she thought to herself. To care only about one’s career implied an absence of friendship to her; it meant one’s companions were other people at work; bosses, rivals, or subordinates; relationships that were always fraught with tension, and in danger of collapse or disintegration. She, for example, had had several close friends at. Goodson Books — Marion, Fred’s wife, was one — but the intimacy didn’t really survive her departure. Once Patty’s daily presence as a player in the office game was over, although the good fellowship of being teammates remained, the loss of common strategies, alliances, and goals made conversation either baffling or boring.

“Are you and David thinking of marriage?” Louise asked, completely within the spirit of intimacy that had evolved in their talk.

Patty stiffened. She felt invaded by the question and caught herself feeling it was rude. Her reaction was unfair, considering how she had pressed Louise and Cathy about similar decisions in their futures. Confused, Patty sat up and laughed to cover her embarrassment and irritation. “Jeez,” she said, brushing a few stray hairs away from her high cheeks. “Who knows?” she added to the ceiling, as if flying off into the heavens was equally as likely or desirable.

“Do you want to?” Cathy said casually.

Patty laughed and felt herself blush. What the hell is wrong with me? she asked herself. Do I care about this? She cleared her throat, tried to look solemn, and said, “No comment.” The whole effect was hilariously out of character. Louise and Cathy laughed good-naturedly.

“I’ll tell my husband to issue a memo to all senior editors that Mrs. Thorn likes her senior men to be married,” Cathy joked, and they all burst out laughing at this notion, this image of themselves as girls from the fifties, scheming together to bag a man.

“Hey, hey,” Chico said from the table. “No fair. You’re not supposed to be having more fun than us.”

“Have you solved all the magazine’s problems yet?” Patty asked to divert any investigation of what they had been laughing about.