She showed neither encouragement nor dislike. She simply seemed to accept his comment as a fact.
“I’m sorry to talk about you like that,” Tony said, now nervous that he had said something which was both offensive and possibly untrue. He barely knew this woman. She was stunning, but he felt no love for her. He had spoken, as always, exaggerating a momentary feeling into a dramatic speech. It was his curse, his addiction to taking center stage no matter what, even if it cost him respect and love. He wanted to be interesting to her. He had played the part of modest, patient servitude to her husband for eight weeks of the run. Now he wanted the lead. “I know you’re not a possession of his. That makes it even more irritating. If he had your love simply because he’s famous, then I could be contemptuous. I’m fond of being contemptuous. But I can’t. You really love him.”
Now she was the one to laugh, pause, and then laugh again. “You really mean that to be a question. If you want to go to bed with me, why don’t you just say so?”
“No, no.” Tony pleaded. He felt terror. He had blundered his way into a mess, trying to show off. He put his glass down and put his hands out to plead. “I didn’t mean that. Going to bed with you wouldn’t make me envy him less. I meant simply that being with the two of you is hard. You have everything. I’m just here for a while. Then I’ll go back — to what? To the absence of all this.” He pointed to the house like a magician indicating the objects he was soon to make disappear. “What you both have is a constant reminder of my …” What? What was so terrible about his life? “… my … my mediocrity.”
She had resumed her normal manner: calm, interested, welcoming. “You’re not a mediocrity,” she said sharply, as though someone had insulted a close friend of hers.
“Well,” Tony said, wanting out of this conversation, turning back to look at the tableau under him, more than ten million in talent chatting against the surf, “I feel like one here.” He felt his chest tremble. He breathed out slowly to rid himself of it. At last he had spoken the truth. To an almost total stranger, he had confessed what he dreaded about Hollywood. Not Joe McCarthy or his father’s coldness. Not his mother’s smothering insanity or Garth’s narcissism. Here, he was insignificant — an amoeba in an ocean of whales. He expected at any moment to be swallowed whole — a tasty hors d’oeuvre for the giant mammals.
The flight to Brazil seemed to take forever. Chico accepted all the drinks that were offered, from the champagne before takeoff to the pre-lunch cocktail, to the wine during the meal, straight on through to the cordial. David matched him sip for sip, although he was quite drunk just from the cocktail. Chico passed out near the end, his head sliding off the seat and resting against the window. David felt sick during descent but he fought the nausea off by calling to mind the Mistress and her punishments — guaranteed to arouse him and prove a distraction.
On the ground they were met by the Newstime stringer, Ken Michaelson. Their condition was obvious. “First class is murder, isn’t it?” he said, laughing, taking Chico’s carry-on.
“It’s hot here,” was all the bleary-eyed Chico said.
It was. And humid. The strange land passed by David soundlessly in the air-conditioned car — because of the cars, architecture, and old-fashioned neon signs. Rio looked as though it were existing in a time zone ten years in the past. He felt like a vulgar American. It seemed as though everyone who looked at them knew exactly who they were— American businessmen loaded with dough and prissy assumptions. But I’m not, David wanted to answer. I’m a writer.
“You guys better get some sleep,” Ken said as he pulled into the Hilton. “Our man may want to meet tonight.”
“Where?”
“He didn’t want to talk about that until you arrived.”
They checked in. The Hilton seemed to be trying to fool its customers into believing they were really in the United States. There was barely an accent in the staff’s talk, the technology all looked up-to-date, and there was an absence of Latin decor — the only false note was the excessive deference added to the usual respect with which they were treated. There was a distinctly un-American servility to it— a subservience that made David nervous again. The gross Americans who have to be placated or they bomb the hell out of you, he imagined them thinking. Chico’s reaction was the opposite. Once in their undistinguished two-bedroom suite (Chico thought they should be accessible to each other at all times), he commented: “I love it here! They’re so friendly.”
Yeah, Chico thinks abject slobbering is friendship, David thought, his eyes burning from drunkenness and fatigue. He had a foul metallic taste in his mouth and every swallow brought up an aftertaste of the wine, the gin, the soggy meat, the sweet Drambuie. “I’ll let you guys nap and get in touch with our man,” Ken said before going.
Chico rang the desk and asked them to put all calls through and keep ringing no matter how long it took. “See you,” he said to David, and disappeared into his bedroom. David considered unpacking and then fell on the bed — he toppled onto it like a statue falling, the way he used to as a kid. The room shifted in his vision when his head settled on the pillow. “I’m gonna be sick,” he said to himself, and clutched the bedspread to hold on, squeezing his eyes tight. A thought, playing clearly above all this nausea, came into his mind: I could kill him. I could get a knife from dinner and kill Gott. He tried to laugh. But whether it was the booze or his seriousness, he couldn’t. His mind winked out on a vivid picture of him plunging a silver hotel knife into a rather small old man’s belly. Just as he passed out, the blood pouring over his fantasy hand, Chico stood up outraged, yelling: “Wait until after the interview, you idiot!”
Fred stood still and the world gathered speed, whirling faster and faster about him, a tornado forming to elevate him above all he had known, beyond anything he had ever dreamt. Bob Holder made up a story about a woman tennis star, discussed it with Gelb, offered Bart a hundred-thousand-dollar hardcover contract for Fred to write it, and besides the rather tentative “Yeah, okay” that he spoke in acceptance, that ended his participation in the incredible event. When he told Tom Lear the news. Tom’s reaction was almost as astonishing: “I think Bart may have sold you cheap. After your book comes out, maybe you could have gotten a quarter-million.”
His phone rang each day with new people and more surprises. The publicist from Garlands called daily with new requests for TV appearances, newspaper and magazine interviews, laughing when Fred confessed, “What am I gonna say?”
“Just tell them what the book’s about,” she answered breezily. “You’ll be great.”
Four weeks before publication, Longacre Books, the largest paperback publisher in the country, made a floor bid for The Locker Room of two hundred thousand dollars in exchange for a ten-percent topping privilege. It meant simply that if no other house made an offer, they were obliged to buy it for that amount; and if there were higher bids, they had the right to top them by coming up with ten percent more.
Fred hung up, returning to the dinner table (Marion and he were eating fish sticks), and told her the news. “Tom was right!” she cried out. “Bart undersold you on the tennis book.”
“Marion!” Fred shouted. “Last year I earned twenty thousand dollars.”
“I know,” she said, smiling. “We’d better talk to somebody about the money.”
“You mean, like taxes?”
“I mean, like, what to do with it.”