Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

When he got in the taxi with her, she made no protest, although it was unexpected and made little sense. He was only a few blocks from his office, she thought; walking it would be much quicker. But her mind’s observations were heard only faintly: she was still in shock from the awful bad luck of her life. Only that morning she had had the book and a way to get it published and now these prizes were being snatched from her with terrible precision, as though a malicious intelligence was against her.

Gelb gave the two addresses and, when he leaned back, put his arm around her. She didn’t look up at him, or away; she kept her eyes down, seeing the flowing line of his pants leg, the big, very adult shoes straddling either side of the transmission’s hump. After some moments of dreadful heavy silence, she felt his head move near hers, his lips brush her ear, and then a whisper. “I’ve missed you.” He kissed her neck. Shivers ran down one side of her body— the rest of her was numb. “I’ve wanted to do this for so many years,” he whispered again, his voice breathy, his tone desperate.

Now, rapidly, as though he had to quickly finish the ice cream before it melted, he kissed her cheek, just next to her mouth, her eyes (she closed them dutifully, like a toy doll), and then her lips, his wine-hot mouth busy and angry.

She didn’t respond.

She didn’t fight it, either.

He would get out soon, she knew. She needed time and freedom from his presence to escape this trap fate had baited, to stop the steel jaws from snapping her in two. He said more things, more wildly romantic things, before getting out. She nodded and managed to croak out, ” ’Bye,” to satisfy him so that he would shut the door and let her go.

Fred enjoyed sleeping on the couches of his friends. He liked waking up in other house-holds, whether bachelor or married. With the single men he had the fun of sloppiness and adolescent talk. With the couples there were the pleasures of studying the wife in T-shirt and panties or nightgown at the breakfast table and receiving her sweetly feminine attentions. Having been thrown out by Marion turned out to be an enhancement of his image. People seemed to like him all of a sudden, especially the more he talked of his regret over his failed marriage, the difficulty he had talking openly with Marion. As soon as Fred noticed that the more he blamed himself for not being receptive to Marion’s feelings, not giving her room for her desires, the more he portrayed himself as a man chained by the traditions of male chauvinism, trying to break free but discovering new bonds with each success; the more he attacked himself, excusing Marion, the more people believed the opposite, felt sorry for him, and seemed to enjoy his company.

He stayed with Karl for a few days, and then Tom Lear, and then he began to be passed about among their set, like an adorable puppy whom everybody wants to cuddle and hold, but finds, after a few days, that walking him every night is too much of a bother.

Fred understood that he could wear out his welcome quickly, and he made sure to be scrupulous in leaving money for groceries and the telephone, as well as an expensive bottle of wine or something the house needed, on departure. When he felt guilty that he was deceiving these people, pretending to tragic emotions, assuming an air of melancholy and loneliness that in fact was nonexistent, he reminded himself of how they had lied to him. He discovered, as a by-product of living in these so-called friends’ apartments, that they all had active and intertwined social lives from which he and Marion had been excluded. He also discovered a lot of contempt for Marion. The talk about her — begun in an effort to convince him he wasn’t all to blame, but continuing with an unseemly relish — the disdain for her intellect, her lack of style, her provincial background, and so on, were things that Fred, in his heart, knew could also be said about him. He smiled and accepted the criticism of his wife as though it pleased. He did nothing to stop them, indeed he often provoked more, but he loathed them for it, and felt sorry for her. And, ultimately, for himself.

They were terrible snobs, just as Marion had always said. Because she wasn’t pretty, because she didn’t know how to dress, because she wasn’t glib or flattering, because she didn’t apologize for editing cookbooks, and claimed no desire to be more than a hack editor, she was disdained. The truth, it seemed to him, was that she possessed a realism they were incapable of. She knew that they were all less than they thought they were — she had listened to their fantasies of becoming major writers or whatever, without the proper amount of awe and seriousness. It was a bargain they had all made with each other: I’ll pretend you’re great, and you pretend I am too.

People are never who they say they are, Marion had once complained about them. It was true. Every journalist was really a novelist, every editor really a writer, every art director really a painter, every graduate student really a professional. And they combined this fantasy life with an astonishing arrogance toward the famous. Philip Roth was a narcissistic bore, Meryl Streep was too technical and unemotional, the New York Times critics were always wrong, successful books always bad, hit plays always trivial, and so on, in a joyless competition with the greats of their day, the whole discussion conducted in a tone as though they were equals, people whose obscurity was only a temporary condition and certainly unmerited.

He lied so much about the drama of his marriage, he exaggerated it into such a complicated and difficult problem that the reality bored him. When he phoned Marion at the office the day after she threw him out, she suggested they go to a marriage counselor and live separately for a while. He agreed, furious at her, but after a few nights of his journeying among friends, he was glad for the arrangement. It took more than two weeks before they saw each other at all, meeting for a cup of coffee half an hour before an appointment with a therapist that Marion had arranged.

The session with the psychologist was dull. Mostly they each covered the facts of their relationship and made their complaints about the marriage in formal, almost sociological terms. Fred made much of the fifty minutes when telling his friends, saying it was good to air the feelings and have a referee to prevent the conversation from turning into meaningless shouting. Actually there had never been such a danger. At one point Marion began to cry while attempting to say that she thought Fred considered her unattractive and then Fred was glad for the presence of the psychologist since that complaint had always presented him with insuperable difficulties. Instead of Fred’s having to deny the truth of her charge, the psychologist was there to ask Marion solemnly. “Do you think you’re unattractive?” Fred guessed immediately that the therapist wouldn’t ask him if she was right (psychology has a wonderful way of ignoring the obvious, Fred thought) and stay focused on Marion’s low self-esteem. The whole thing seemed overdramatic to him. Not that he didn’t believe in psychiatry, or felt the counseling wouldn’t work, simply that it seemed of a piece with the overcrowding of the New York world. Two people couldn’t even fall in and out of love by themselves.

He tried not to think of the future. He assumed they would get back together, that his current condition was temporary and therefore should be enjoyed rather than wasted in melancholic solitude. He went out every night, spent a fortune on dinners and entertainment (he went to four Broadway shows those first two weeks, swallowing the forty-five-dollar ticket prices without a hard gulp, much less choking), and sublet a one-room office from a friend of Karl’s for four hundred dollars a month, picking up his typewriter and papers while Marion was at work. He spent as though the money he was withdrawing from his and Marion’s joint account was a college allowance from his parents and the consequence was going to be a scolding, not bankruptcy.