Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

David tossed the magazine onto the coffee table. He stretched and then got up, avoiding her glare, and announced quietly to the floor, “I’m going to bed.”

Patty didn’t answer. She stared ahead, feeling rage, confusion about her work, a vague horniness that wandered through the other feelings like a lonely shopper browsing for the perfect purchase.

She reread her new pages. She loved them. The frank, unstylized prose, its easy access to the heroine’s emotions and imagination, the clear simple lines of character. It was real. So beautifully true. No fake adjectives about scenery she had never seen, peopled only by ordinary humans with incomes under six figures, and with a heroine who had been laid and was at least the equal of the men around her. The new words seemed like a friend, an intimate with whom anything could be said, any secret entrusted, someone to stay up all night with.

But what could she do with it? She had no story. She hadn’t even decided whether the opening scene was real or imagined. Certainly she couldn’t continue it as a portrait of her relationship with David. There was no story in that, and definitely not an interesting one. In fact, was her new character interesting to anyone but her? Who was she?

Maybe she’s Rounder’s wife? an impish voice asked. Rounder had the virtue of being at the top of Newstime, so his obsession with the job would be more reasonable and sympathetic than David’s. And Cathy Rounder was a Ph.D. and the mother of two, a much more stunning person than Patty herself. Imagine Cathy rubbing her clitoris in front of the six-foot-five blue-eyed Rounder! Send in the Marines, Cathy could say, and Patty roared at herself, followed by embarrassment at the viciousness and vulgarity of her imagination.

How could she write about a woman with two children? She knew nothing about it. I could have lunch with her, and play with the kids later, observe her daily routine. David wouldn’t mind. They might even socialize regularly. It would further his career and provide her with material for the book.

She moved her chair forward, read over her opening, made it a fantasy (the mirror within a mirror of this pleased her: Cathy masturbating to a fantasy of her masturbating), and then set up the character’s situation. The exposition seemed awkward, an anticlimax after Cathy’s climax, and also halfhearted. The arbitrary choice of Cathy and Rounder — real people — had stunted her ability to make up anything about them, as though she were suddenly writing a nonfiction piece about them for New York Magazine.

What if she were?

What if the opening fantasy was a fantasy of a magazine writer while writing a portrait of these prominent New Yorkers? That character could be me, a free-lance journalist, searching for the ideal couple ostensibly through my work, but really to reassure myself that it exists, she said to herself, so tired now that after thinking the thought, Patty was unsure if it even made logical sense, much less worked aesthetically. She decided to stop and read what she had tomorrow.

Patty got up, hiding the pages under the manuscript of the romance novel. The thought of David discovering her experimental story filled her with dread. She looked at him, huddled under the blankets like a frightened animal, and resented his presence.

She was careful not to disturb the blankets while getting in the bed. After a few minutes of lying silently, listening to his breathing to make sure he was asleep, Patty touched herself furtively, secretly, loving herself to a choked and cowardly orgasm, and then bunched a pillow in her arms to fall asleep in its soft embrace. …

“Fred!” Tom Lear called. He got up from a swivel chair placed in front of a television that was embedded in the paneling of a private box in Madison Square Garden. “Why doesn’t Hubie play Marvin and Cartwright together against Parish and McHale?” This was asked in place of a greeting.

Fred had just been let into the box by a tall handsome man in his sixties, who, instead of challenging Fred’s right to enter, asked, “Can you rebound?”

Fred had worried while on his way up that maybe Tom Lear would have forgotten his invitation and decided to wander off during halftime, or that Tom, given that the Knicks had lost the two games prior to this one, might not have come. He was startled by the distinguished man’s question and then enormously relieved at seeing Tom. “He can’t,” Fred answered Tom.

“Why not?” asked the door-opener, not aggressively, but with a quiet undertone of authority that implied he was used to being answered.

“Because,” Fred said with the nervous pride of a star pupil, “he has no backup if they get into foul trouble, and Webster can’t keep up with McHale on the fast break.”

“So?” Tom said, obviously enjoying this esoteric conversation, which now had the attention of everyone in the box. When Fred entered he got an impression of many people broken up into groups of twos and threes: a few on the couch at the rear; a pair by the bar; one lone person still looking out the balcony down to the court below; and others gathered around the television, studying the halftime statistics. “They won’t get any fast breaks with those two in,” Tom continued, “because McHale will have to keep ’em off the offensive boards.”

“Nah,” Fred said, shaking his head like a wise old man. “Webster isn’t a good offensive rebounder. He’s pretty good on the defensive boards, and he’s a great shot-blocker, but he won’t give ’em fits on the offensive boards. They’re too slow to play together for long, and besides, it leaves you thin for the second team.”

“Okay,” Tom said, sighing.

“Thank God!” someone at the bar said to the room. Then to Fred, “You have no idea how he’s been torturing us about this garbage. But nobody here knows enough about basketball to keep him quiet.” They all laughed and Tom hung his head, but the group’s attitude was friendly, indulgent, and warm toward Tom, like a family toward the favorite baby, pretending they were capable of criticizing him when, in fact, anything he might do delighted their hearts. Fred envied this with the keenness of a starving man watching another eat a feast.

“Who is this savior?” a woman by the television asked about Fred.

Fred noticed, as everybody’s eyes moved to study him, that the lone figure at the balcony was Tony Winters. Tony looked at him blankly, as though he didn’t know him.

“Fred Tatter,” Tom Lear said to the group, and then rattled off their names. It turned out that the distinguished man who had opened the door was Richard Winters, Tony’s father. Fred recognized one of the other names. Sam Billings, whom he knew to be the producer of Tom’s movie, but the rest were obscure. That made Fred anxious, since he couldn’t know who was important and who was not, a circumstance rather like walking through a mine field, in which any innocent twig might have the capacity to blow his career to kingdom come.

“Was Ray Williams really close to his sister or is that just bullshit?” the thin leather-skinned woman who was introduced as Melinda Billings asked. She had the emaciated body and cynical eyes of a woman who spent her life attempting to retain the allure of her youth, knowing all the while it was both hopeless and required. She referred to the Knick guard who had been playing poorly (and therefore earned the active abuse of fans) until that night. Williams had missed the previous playoff game when it was announced he had to attend the funeral of his sister, a forty-year-old victim of cancer. Tonight he returned and had played a brilliant and uncharacteristically mature half. The same fans who had vilified Ray now felt piously supportive and, presented with a good performance, were rapidly alibiing for Ray’s earlier play (he had been distracted by the wait for his sister’s death), and spinning out a fantasy in which the tragedy would spark a fundamental change in Ray, and he would now forever burn with the intensity of a superstar.