Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

“You didn’t say you love me.”

“I don’t. I’m attracted to you. I like power-hungry greedy bastards like you. David’s just like you — only younger and not as mean.”

“You like talking tough, don’t you? But you’re whistling in the dark. You’re conventional. You want the three kids and the station wagon—”

“And a big fluffy dog to slobber on the upholstery.”

“Right,” Gelb said, smirking. This kind of exchange had become a game with them. She liked it, the saying of horribly selfish unsayable things. The abandon of it was thrilling, like their sex, heightened by the constant knowledge of the taboos they were breaking.

“So what I want to know,” Patty said, “is when you dump me? When does a mistress get too old? Forty?”

“Thirty-five,” Gelb said matter-of-factly.

“You mean it, don’t you?” Patty said aloud as it occurred to her. “You’re really not kidding.”

“Of course I’m kidding, love,” he said tenderly, but he moved off the bed toward the dresser, fumbling in a pocket for cigarettes. “You’re the one who doesn’t love me, remember? You’re going to bed with me so your book’ll do well.” Gelb puffed furiously on the cigarette once, glanced at his wristwatch stretched out on the dresser like a sun-bather, and said, reaching for his pants, “I’ve gotta get back to the office.”

She stayed in bed until long after he was gone. She stared down at her naked body. Small, white, young. There was some tiring in the skin, the beginnings of looseness — but she was beautiful. She looked too small, however, her belly button innocent and lonely, hovering quizzically above the center of all the fuss — asking her unanswerable questions about all the grief of love and men.

David looked them in their eyes, searching for a hint that they knew. He paced up and down the broad, crowded, messy street, his legs so weak from dreadful anticipation that he had to stop every twenty paces or so and lean against a building or sit on a stoop. He had arrived on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-third fifteen minutes early, located the phone booths she mentioned, and now watched them anxiously, terrified to make the final call and equally worried that somehow, impossibly, all the phones would be busy at the appointed hour and stay so for too long. In fact, they were rarely in use so far, but he kept his eyes on them, vowing to take possession of one if he saw a rush to use them.

In between his starts and stops he looked up at the buildings, many of them lofts or brownstones, their shades drawn, wondering in which one she was located. He stared at the blank, dirty windows, the traffic groaning and roaring beside him, and thought: No one would hear the screams. They were anonymous, these buildings, all the entrances desolate, monitored by intercoms, no doormen, no happy tenants with busy comings and goings. Maybe they were all whorehouses, each room occupied by sex: Perverts Row.

He walked himself toward the phone booths, grabbing on to the parking meters for support. He had prayed that the booth next to his would be empty, but the moment after he had situated himself, quarter ready to put in, a man got into the one next to him, able to overhear. But that was silly: his end of the conversation wasn’t worth eavesdropping on. “Do it,” he said to himself, and dialed. It rang three, four times, and he began to relax. She wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have to go through—

“Hello?”

“This is … this is Bill.”

“You’re early,” she said. “Call back in five minutes.”

He hung up. They hadn’t finished chopping up the last one, he thought, but this time the fear really did seem ridiculous. In her hello there was the harried tone of a shopkeeper juggling customers, bored with the work — despite all the rhetoric, he knew she was just a whore. She’d do what he wanted. In any event, she certainly wouldn’t really hurt him.

Now the wait was unbearable because he was eager. He called back in three minutes. She was in control now. “I’m in 684 West Twenty-Third, next to the florist behind you about twenty feet.” He had noticed the building, suspected it of being likely. “I’m in three A. See you in a minute.”

He hung up and walked quickly, not meeting anyone’s eyes, into the building and stood in its tiny vestibule, looked at the intercom system, none of the apartment buzzers supplied with names, and rang three A. The buzz back was instantaneous. He moved quickly to open the locked door and bumped into a man with a horrendously guilty look in his eyes who quickly brushed by him and out.

That was her last customer, he thought, and, getting into the small elevator that was right there, having left off the guilty man, he recalled what he could of his face: pale, unshaven, the eyes worriedly not meeting his, a miserable, hunted look. It made him feel better. And as he rode up, he wondered why. All his reactions were the opposite of what they should be. But nothing about this obsession, and his pursuit of it, had ever made sense. Except now, walking down the narrow hallway, past, to his surprise, a laundry room (what the hell was it doing in a common hallway on the third floor?) and up to a quite ordinary door, at last he felt it was over. He would know now, and even if his fate were to be a terrible one, the awful wondering, the constant doubts would be gone. He rang the bell gladly.

Fred sat up in the bed, feeling foolish. He had finally moved toward Marion on the couch and started to kiss her. He had tried to put a lot of movement and passion into it, but it felt fake, and Marion saved the moment by smiling. “I think we’d better just get into bed,” she said. “We’re not strangers.”

He had undressed in the bedroom, their old bedroom, unchanged from when he had last slept there, while Marion disappeared into the bathroom. He wondered whether she was planning something, going to come out in some sort of sexy nightgown. He hoped not. It would seem pathetic, just like his maneuver on the couch. Whatever their situation, they certainly weren’t courting.

She didn’t. She came out in her robe, naked underneath, walking to the bed and shedding it before quickly crawling under the covers and snuggling into his arms. “What were you doing in there?”

“Putting in my diaphragm,” she said. “I didn’t want to stop to do it later.”

He had always complained about the effects of breaking off foreplay for the sake of contraception, so this too was another sweet attempt on her part to make things between them amicable. To improve on the past. It was their enemy. All the things they had done and the way they had done them were to be avoided. He felt the weight of her head on his chest heavily. The task semed too great.

He shook off this feeling, moved her head away, and again began kissing with mock passion. She went along this time, brushing a leg against his penis while he pressed his upper thigh against her groin. After a while the self-consciousness passed, he felt aroused, and she seemed to be also. He began to hope again that it might work.

He threw the covers off them. The lights were still on— she had usually insisted they be turned off and he realized that the fact they weren’t was another concession to him. He looked at her body. She kept her eyes closed, her hands urging him to return. He looked at her belly, her flabby maternal stomach, her thick bush of hair. It was the body of a real woman, not the models of magazines, but the real comfortable female form of nature. He loved it. Staring at it in the bright light, leaning down to kiss it, moving his hands under her soft substantial buttock, feeling the warmth and give and pliancy of her fat felt good.

She was tensing against his investigations, embarrassed (he realized for the first time) by her body, assuming he didn’t want it. But he did! He kissed and moved back to look, seeing things he had never noticed, feeling her sex, utterly different. Soft and warm. Home. He wanted to be inside her. Kept safe inside. No longer fighting the hard ungiving world.