Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

His Power Phone buzzed. “How we doing?” Chico’s voice blared into the room.

“I got a problem,” David said. Talking to this device on his desk was like speaking to a deity, as though Chico’s spirit inhabited the walls and David was on a mountain pleading for guidance.

“Come up.”

David’s relationship with Chico had become so relaxed that he prepared no speech, nor made any attempt at gloss. “Nelson’s story on Disney is a mess. I could redo it — I want to redo it — but it won’t make this issue.”

“Let’s kill it. Nation can use the space.”

“I don’t want to kill it forever—”

“David, it’s a boring story. Don’t aggravate yourself. Lose it.”

“It’s not. Nelson is a hack. I don’t know what he’s doing here. What the hell is he doing here? Why hasn’t he been fired?”

“Costs too much. Fucking Guild. Too much bother. Anyway, he’s all right—”

“He’s totally incompetent! What do you mean? I have to rewrite every word.”

“Not every word,” Chico said with a smile, amused by David’s anger.

“Every fucking word!”

Chico frowned. He cleared his throat, swiveled his chair away from the desk, and leaned back thoughtfully. David sighed wearily and sat down. “We’ll move him out of your section,” Chico said at last.

“Yeah? Who’ll take him?”

Chico laughed. “Somebody’ll take him.”

“I don’t want to lose the story.”

“We’ll see if it fits next issue,” Chico said in a dismissive tone and then shifted to his favorite topic: Rounder’s ineptitude. The effects of the new editor in chief’s indecisiveness about cover stories was beginning to be noticed by Mrs. Thorn. The business side had showed her the escalating costs since the new administration took over, overruns caused by closing the magazine late. “The profit margin for the last quarter is a disaster,” Chico said in a hushed voice.

“Want me to do a story on it?” David asked with a smile.

“I hear the Journal’s preparing one,” Chico answered, gloating. “It won’t be long now,” he concluded.

That vision, of their coup d’état’s approaching culmination, soothed David’s dismay at losing the Disney story. He let out some of his anger by calling Nelson on the phone — a trip down the hall would have been the polite way — and saying curtly, “Jeff? We’ve killed the Disney story. It’s dull.”

“Oh.” Nelson’s fear and shock were palpable in the one word, despite the relative anonymity of the phone. “You don’t want me to try a rewrite?” It was barely a question, and not at all a protest.

“No. Gotta run,” David said quickly, embarrassed by Nelson’s lack of spunk. He hung up and closed his eyes. He felt so old and inhuman, as though he were a decorative angel on the Newstime building, his smooth white face now lidded by New York’s dirt, the disembodied head yearning for mobility.

One of the pornographic magazine covers he saw on the way to work came clearly to mind: a tall dark-skinned woman, her long black hair shining, pulling back a kneeling young man’s hair and holding a whip in front of his mouth. Her teeth were gritted, almost in a snarl. The young man’s face was calm, patient, and rapturous, staring into her angry face with the baleful eyes of a faithful dog.

The memory aroused him. No image or picture of naked women had that effect anymore. He knew it was only a matter of time before the grip of this perverse fascination tightened on the throat of his timidity and strangled it. He flipped his Newstime appointment book to the last page, where he had scrawled Mistress Regina’s phone number. Why wait? Why pretend he could defeat this lust?

He got up to close the door to his office and moved quickly back to the phone, punching the numbers in fast, hoping to outrun his fear. But his hand froze after the sixth number. Couldn’t his secretary accidentally pick up in the middle of the call? True, he could call on his private line, but the capability for her to listen in still existed. He could wait until she went to lunch.

His heart was pounding, his face felt hot, the last number on the phone stared at him, challenging. Finally, out of fatigue of balancing on this high-wire of indecision and terror, he let his finger fall, as though gravity made the choice, on the final button.

He put his finger on the cradle knob to leave himself the option of cutting off the connection instantly while it rang. By the third ring, he relaxed, convinced there would be no answer (always in the back of his mind he had the conviction that Mistress Regina didn’t actually exist), and then she picked up.

“Hello,” the unmistakable voice said, throaty and angry.

He swallowed. He had no idea what to say.

She sighed, irritated. “Well, are you going to talk?”

Scared out of his wits, he pressed the knob down and then dropped the phone on the cradle like a hot coal. He breathed deeply, a man surfacing from underwater, gasping at life. He must have been holding his breath because he inhaled air quickly, as though he had been severely deprived.

He carried the sound of her voice home with him. He heard her contemptuous challenge over and over: “Well, are you going to talk?” Was he? He sat silently throughout the dinner Patty had arranged with Tony and Betty. David’s morose condition matched Tony’s sullen mood. The women did most of the talking — a lot of it, to David’s annoyance, about Patty’s novel.

He managed to ask Tony about his movie project, and though the answer sounded optimistic — (“They’re happy with it. But of course they want changes and I’m doing them.”) — David knew something was wrong. A few months ago he would have been happy to see Tony get his hair mussed and take a fall. But his own disgust and obsession were too powerful.

He took a kind of pride in his desperation and sorrow. The worries of these people seemed so trivial compared to his. They were like children still, worrying over their grades in school. He was in a battle for his soul.

Over the weekend, he thought constantly of her, but he stopped watching the cable show and never attempted another call. The moment of real contact had at once deepened his curiosity and increased his timidity.

On Monday, Rounder asked him to drop by his office after lunch. A private meeting with Rounder was rare and David had no clue as to what it might be about. He tried to reach Chico, but couldn’t. When he arrived at the appointed hour, he was surprised to find Chico also present.

“Hi, David,” Rounder said cheerfully. “We’ve been discussing your problem with Nelson and, uh … uh, we’ve decided you can replace him. It’ll be expensive, but it’s time to make a change, bring in a new face.”

“But—” David stopped himself. It had never occurred to him that Chico might act on his complaints. Newstime never took decisive action so quickly. He was appalled that something had been done.

“That’s what you wanted,” Chico said, frowning at him. He had been beaming before, as though he were presenting a Christmas gift.

“Yes,” David said. “I was … surprised, that’s all.”

“My advice is to tell him quickly,” Chico said. “Get the figures from Hal Bunting, you know, his profit-sharing and all of that, to soften the blow.”

“You mean I tell him?”

The two Marx Brothers both laughed, not spitefully, but with elderly sympathy. “Welcome to the joys of responsibility,” Rounder said.

“Yeah, you tell him,” Chico said. “Don’t feel bad. Remember, later on you get to tell some hopeful out there that he’s got his big break — a job at Newstime.”