“Yeah, it wasn’t too much fun for Mom, thinking she was about to be thrown into a concentration camp.”
“But you were a baby when all that was happening.”
“Yes, but the effect on me was still quite lasting.” Tony laughed hollowly and instantly felt stupid that he had. He sounded as if he were being coy about the McCarthy Period, as it was referred to by his mother and her friends. The McCarthy Period, with capitals to aid the sense of dread and tackiness, sort of a slapstick Hitler. But it only seemed farcical in retrospect. At the time, with people losing their jobs, committing suicide, with the Rosenbergs dying in the electric chair, there was little of the low comedy that now remains when seeing those black-and-white TV hearings; little of the idiotic spectacle of matinee idols proclaiming their devotion to America and their loathing of “communist infiltration” of show business. “It wasn’t fun,” he said in a low voice, thinking of all it had cost his family: the divorce, the paralysis of his mother’s career, her breakdown, his father’s panic and immoral behavior. Everything else in the history of his family was a flat terrain compared to the volcanic and geological monstrosities of the McCarthy Period.
In college, Tony had used this family history to bed women, wooing with sentiment, making drama and romance out of the real pain and stupidity of his parents. He had corrupted his feelings and now suspected himself of fraud whenever he called attention to them, as if he were shoplifting from the store of his past, cheating the cash register of genuine feeling, selling the coinage of his soul.
Gloria looked off sadly. “It’s hard to believe it was ever like that.”
“Is it?” Tony could hear his voice take on his mother’s hard inconsolable anger. “I don’t think so. The man who backed the Screen Actors Guild in the expulsion of so-called communist sympathizers is now President of the United States. He was a tacky opportunist, as bad as the people whom we read about in Solzhenitsyn, the kind of person who informs on neighbors to get a better apartment. Reagan’s career was washed up, so he made a career of putting his rivals out of work, and thus he accidentally landed an even better job. It was ugly and petty and immoral and yet he’s President of the United States.” He heard his voice ring in the room.
Gloria looked apprehensive. No. he realized, she looked embarrassed, as if he had opened his fly or thrown a tantrum. And the last was true. He had thrown his mother’s tantrum.
“I’m sorry,” Tony immediately said. “I don’t know why I went into all that.”
“No, no. I understand.”
“Anyway, you can see why I might not instantly wish to write screenplays. In my subconscious, that industry is scary. After all, my mother didn’t work for ten years. Ten years of her prime. She became very unstable emotionally … well, I mean the scars are still there.”
Gloria now looked quite young and girlish. She hung her head and looked up at him, batting her eyes. He could see that she was trying to look sympathetic; but that didn’t make him feel she was being dishonest. “Now I feel quite foolish for having asked you here.”
“I didn’t mean that—”
“Because I must confess I hoped to convince you that you should be writing screenplays. Not only because the money is good. I think — from your brilliant play — that your ideas are sharp, new, and very funny. Very, very funny.”
Tony again felt himself tense, as if this praise concealed a trap.
Gloria continued, saying the following as if she were fully aware that it would sway him, “I’m going to come clean and tell you that I want to convince you to rewrite the script I was just discussing with Bill Garth.”
“Really?” This word rolled out of him, a trill of delight and amazement.
Gloria nodded solemnly. “Now. The question is: will you join me for an early lunch to talk further?”
Patty felt tiny. She was lying under a quilt in a bed floating on an island of glossy oak. The ceiling above her was like a firmament, the sprinklers a bizarre iron galaxy. The damn place was so big she felt as if she were only inches high. Also, she was exhausted. Her mouth stuck to itself from dryness, her head felt heavy. She was hung-over. Through her swollen eyes she peered at the windows — the distance was so great she felt as if she were Columbus searching for the coast of the New World — and decided from their gray light that it was early dawn.
She heard the squeal of faucets turning and then a rush of water rattling against the metal. David was taking a shower. Maybe I’m so dry because I swallowed him, she thought, disgusting herself with the notion. I could join him in there, she mused, imagining the two of them smeared with soap, screwing standing up, banging the tin of the shower stall. I gave him a good time, she told herself, and then laughed out loud. This got her to sit up. She fumbled for the pack of cigarettes on the white Formica night table and lit up after ripping it open to find the penultimate stick.
She surveyed the loft while smoking. Its magnificent space was tempting. David’s a nice guy, he was great at sex (aren’t they always in the beginning?), things here might become permanent. A boyfriend and a place to live.
The faucets groaned off and embarrassed her out of this calculation. I’m horrible, she decided, pressing out her cigarette and letting her legs out from under the covers, ready to head for the john.
David appeared, his hair damp, with an orange towel around his stomach. “Good morning,” he said, obviously happy. “You don’t have to get up.”
“What time is it?”
“Nine.”
“Oh. I thought it was sunrise. Can I take a shower?”
“Of course.” He shook his head to indicate how foolish her question was. “Mi casa es su casa.”
Patty looked blank.
“Feel at home,” he explained.
“How sweet.” she said, but her dry throat caught on something, and the words were rasped out.
“I’ll make some juice,” he said, and padded on his damp feet toward the kitchen. He left tracks. Patty waited until he was behind the partition before getting out and rushing in the chill air to the bathroom. She felt she must look awful, a conclusion that the mirror confirmed while she waited for the water to get hot.
She drenched her face with the hot spray in the shower and became more and more anxious over her appearance. She hadn’t seen a hair dryer in the bathroom. The lack of one would mean she’d look like a drowned cat over breakfast. Of course she had eyeliner and lipstick in her purse, but that was all the way over at the other end of this oak-and-plasterboard desert. She never liked to go to the man’s place for sex because of all this: the morning was the worst possible time to be separated from one’s own possessions. At her place, he could be worrying about getting into wrinkled and smelly clothes while she scrambled eggs with blow-dried hair and a freshly laundered outfit.
When she finally felt as if her body had absorbed some moisture, she stepped out of the stall to find a glass of orange juice balanced on the edge of the sink. “Oh,” she said.
David’s voice came from outside the bathroom: “I have to leave for work in ten minutes.”
“Okay, I’ll hurry.”
“No, no. The door locks when you leave, so you can stay. Relax. Make some eggs.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Do you have appointments today?”
“Appointments?” Patty said the word as if it were both exotic and unknown to her.
“Job interviews?”
“No.”
“Where can I reach you?”
That question was easily answered, but it was the job query that haunted her after David left for work. She had no job. Worse, she didn’t because she had been fired. That humiliation was three months old, but she still cringed from the shame of it, as if it were only hours old. Jobs. The thought of them left her standing paralyzed in front of the bathroom mirror for minutes on end: staring into her own eyes as if they were a stranger’s. In fact, she was blind. Her mind played over her last few weeks at Goodson Books.