Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

“Couldn’t possibly do that in a night,” Rounder said, beaming like a politician at a fund-raiser. “We’d better go,” he said to his wife.

Chico hurriedly seconded the notion, with a note of tension in his voice, as if staying out later than the boss was inappropriate. At the elevator door Cathy said to Patty, “Come up and have lunch with me next week. I’d like you to see the kids.”

“Love to.” Patty said with excessive enthusiasm.

“Don’t let Cathy give her any ideas,” Rounder said to David. There was polite laughter.

For an answer, Patty swung the heavy industrial doors closed on them all — David had to operate the cables — and she could hear their delighted amusement as the lights of the descending elevator cage flashed through the crack at her feet. “Doofus,” she said quietly about Rounder, and reached behind her to unbutton her dress. She was tired of its heavy presence on her body. She felt hot and itchy, as physically constricted by it as she had felt constrained by the evening’s formality.

She was in her bra and underpants, sprawled on the couch, when David returned. He opened his eyes at the sight, and then squinted so hard his eyes were reduced to slits. “Are you naked?” he asked, approaching.

Patty laughed. “You’re so blind,” she said, noting for the dozenth time how different David looked without his glasses. His eyebrows seemed thicker, his nose bigger, his eyes duller and smaller.

He sat next to her and peered at her belly. A red line circled her stomach an inch or so above her navel, created by the elastic of her stockings. He touched it gently and then bent over, saying, “What’s that?”

Patty laughed uncontrollably.

“Oh,” he said when his eyes were almost touching her body.

She pushed him away. “Stop studying me,” she said haltingly through her laughs.

David leaned back and stared toward the dining table. He looked solemn and distracted. “God, what a mess,” he said.

“What?” Patty said. “I thought it went very well.”

“No,” David said, and set his unfocused, squinting eyes on her. “I mean, all the cleaning that has to be done.”

“Yeah, you’d better get to it.”

He blinked at her. “Okay.” He brought a hand up and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll do it.”

“I have to get a job,” Patty said, looking thoughtfully at her slim body, wondering if it was staying slim enough. She had put back some of her weight since moving in with David, relieving her anxiety that she had become an anorexic. But now yesterday’s hope had become tomorrow’s worry. She patted her stomach, which was flat and firm, as though it were a beer belly. “I’m too fat and lazy,” she added.

“You have a job. If you’d only finish it.”

“That’s not a job,” she answered contemptuously.

“You wrote the first book in a few months. If you concentrated, you’d be finished with this one in a month.”

“I know,” she admitted. “I told you. I’m a lazy slob.”

“Talking that way only stops you from working.”

“I need a job. I need to have to be somewhere at nine in the morning. I can’t be self-motivating.”

“You were.”

“But I fell apart, didn’t I?”

“Stop trying to make me say what you want me to say,” David snapped. “ ’Cause then you turn it around and act like it came from me instead of from your cross-examination.” David got up in the middle of this outburst and moved to the table, beginning to stack the dessert plates, plopping them onto each other, the clattering implying anger.

“Why are you angry at me?” Patty asked, her eyes wide with innocence as they peered over the back of the couch.

“I’m not,” he snapped.

She stared at him while he carried his load of dishes into the kitchen, and continued when he reappeared to gather coffee cups. He noticed her when he turned to head again for the kitchen.

“What?” he said.

“How much money do I owe you?”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I want you to figure out how much I owe you for the rent and everything else.”

“Why?” he said with a sneering smile. “Are you moving out?”

“No. I want to pay you back when I start earning money again.”

“Well, you’re not earning money now, so why do you have to know now?” David argued.

“I want you to keep track.”

“ I don’t care about your earning money. You care about it.”

“I know!”

David opened his mouth to say more, but her admission puzzled him. He closed it, turned to go, and then abruptly wheeled back. “Then you keep track of it.” And walked out with a satisfied air, a lawyer closing a case.

Patty didn’t believe him. She thought his attitude toward her was dominated by the fact that she wasn’t earning her own keep. Within the last few months. David had left to her the doing of more and more housework. He used to make the bed in the mornings, occasionally cook dinner; often he called from the office and asked whether he should buy groceries on the way home. This party, however, had been dumped on her, like she was responsible for the domestic side of his being promoted, as if she were a suburban wife expected to focus on her husband’s career, as if … as if she were living her mother’s life.

Patty sat on the couch listening to David load the dishwasher, contempt for him filling her mind. I even had to supply the friends, she thought to herself, marveling at the fact that David didn’t know anyone, outside of Newstime, who he felt was impressive enough to invite over along with his bosses.

“You know …” David called out in a cheerful, eager voice, startling her.

She didn’t answer, unwilling to leave her abstract plane of judgments and rest on the ground with the reality of him.

“I really think Chico hates Rounder,” David said, emerging from the kitchen. His pants were wet at the thighs from rinsing plates.

Patty could only look at him: she had no voice to answer him.

“I don’t mean.” David continued eagerly, “just that Chico envies Rounder ’cause he was passed over for being Groucho. I think Chico actually hates the man’s guts.” David laughed self-consciously, embarrassed by his glee at this observation.

“I don’t think so,” Patty said coolly. She hadn’t thought about it, she merely wanted to disagree because she knew it would bother him. “It’s in your head. You want them to hate each other. So you have something to gossip about.”

David looked stunned. He stared stupidly at the floor for a moment. “God,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He turned and went back to the kitchen.

Patty looked at the spot he had deserted as if it were a hole in the earth expanding rapidly, heading in her direction, ready to swallow her. She got up abruptly and walked to the desk near the front windows, where she wrote. She sat at the metal chair, shivering at the cold on her naked legs, but not wanting to slow down to get a pillow or clothes. She put paper in the typewriter and began to write a scene for her heroine like that night’s dinner was for her: a series of small revelations about her fiancé that increased her longing for the dark, brutal stranger — a rescuer from the dull journey that life can so easily become.

Fred made a decision. He had tried to ignore the hostility of the others at the poker game, hoping they would eventually accept him as a player and ultimately begin to socialize with him. Fred had consciously avoided making a social move first, assuming it would meet with rejection. But now, utterly rejected, he was willing to face more.

Tom Lear, the journalist turned screenwriter, had been least unfriendly to him. Possibly because of his habit of disagreeing with everything Sam Wasserman did, or said, or believed. Tom had never been discourteous to Fred. Fred looked up his name in the phone book, pleasantly surprised by the good fortune of its being listed, and dialed.