She whined and complained for more than an hour. Gelb canceled a drink date and took her downstairs to an Indian restaurant where she ate so many hors d’oeuvres that she didn’t need any dinner. Gelb offered to buy that for her as well.
Now, as she stared into David Bergman’s mirror, what her mind retained was the shameful memory of her childish reaction to Gelb dismissing her. And her gullible acceptance of his story that firing her was part of a general cutback. Within a month after she left, the new assistant was given her old job, and last week Patty had learned from Marion that Gelb seemed to be having an affair with Patty’s successor. Only then did Patty realize how completely naive she was: Gelb had often asked her out on evening dates that she casually refused. Gelb took her rejections so calmly that Patty convinced herself he didn’t mind. She hadn’t put out, so he fired her. This conclusion amazed her. She had grown up reading in novels and seeing in movies exactly that scene played out, but it seemed a part of the fictional world, not the life she saw and experienced. Her father never had any affairs, she believed. And Gelb merely seemed like another version of her father: a big, disgruntled man who was frightened by tears and emotion in others. To think of him as a sexual being was both impossible and slightly revolting.
I’ve been a fool, she told herself, bringing her relentless replay of the scenes in Gelb’s office to a close. She got herself out of the bathroom and found the pot of coffee David Bergman had made for her. He’s sweet, she decided. And he wants sex, she reminded herself. Like every man, young and old — he wants it.
Fred had huddled under the covers when Marion woke him for a good-bye kiss. She was off to her job, but Fred, still waiting for Bart’s reaction to his book proposals, had nothing to do. He burrowed into the bed, remembered his kissing Patty and his pleasant experience before steep, and then, his insight into Marion’s feelings. There’s a novel in that, he told himself in a determined tone.
He had trouble falling back to sleep. He wanted to talk. Fred glanced at the clock—9:03. Too early to phone anyone. Tony Winters never got up before eleven. David wouldn’t reach his office until ten, and Karl had let it be known among his friends that he wrote all morning until one o’clock and preferred not to be disturbed. Fred would have to wait alone for Bart to call.
It would be an important conversation, Fred thought. Bart had just taken him on as a client and the five book proposals were the first test of their relationship. Each outline was roughly thirty pages in length, and they varied tremendously in subject. There was an outline for a novel about a visiting Russian hockey team (held hostage by an insane American fan), and another called Showcase, about the owner of a Madison Square Garden-type organization, with a plot chock-full of corrupt boxing promoters, virile athletes, and beautiful women rock stars. Fred had one scenario that turned the kidnapped-Russian-hockey-team idea into a subplot of Showcase. Shifting to more somber material. Our Baby told the story of a couple whose response to being forbidden by court order from treating their dying three-year-old child with laetrile was to kidnap their baby from the hospital and flee to Mexico, where their son eventually dies. Back in the States they face two trials, one on criminal charges and their own divorce. In the end, they were found not guilty and fall in love with new people, providing Fred with what he believed was a compulsory happy ending. Fred’s next two ideas were satirical. Nothing But the Truth was based on the premise that if someone existed who was incapable of any kind of deception, even the most mild white lie, that this trait would cause havoc with his friends and lovers, cost him his job, and finally leave him ruined and alone. Kickoff, the last of Fred’s proposals, was the closest to Fred’s area of expertise. Kickoff told the story of a middle-aged national sports columnist, divorced, with three children and heavy alimony payments, the sort of man who drinks too much and dreams of writing a novel, but instead plays poker, flirts with waitresses, and gets into fights with drunks. Kickoff lacked the formal plotting of Fred’s other proposals. Instead, it meandered about, exploring the columnist’s frustrated and blocked relationships with his ex-wife and kids, with the mounting pressure from younger sportswriters angling for his job, his own bouts with alcoholism, and his need for love. Ultimately, he finds it, but in a surprising and (Fred hoped) commercial way: he gradually falls in love with the quarterback of the Super Bowl team. Fred’s proposal described his hero’s gradual discovery of his homosexual longings, and his agony before he declares himself to the quarterback. Kickoff’s happy ending occurs when the hero finally screws up his courage, announces his feelings, and it turns out that the quarterback is also gay. The book finishes with the columnist straightening out (so to speak) all his messed-up relationships and starting work on his novel.
The five ideas were merely ideas, but having worked out the proposals almost made Fred feel he had realized them, that they were books already written. In fact, if he were to get a contract, he worried whether he would feel enough enthusiasm to write them.
Fred got out of bed and, while allowing his plots to run through his mind, followed a morning routine. He showered, shaved while coffee percolated on the stove, and sipped the coffee while he dressed. The five stories had been constantly in his mind for the last four months. Thus obsessed, Fred forced anything he did to relate to the five stories. When reading novels, he noticed any similarities of theme or character development to those he planned. At movies, he checked to see what was popular, making mental notes to himself to change this twist or that turn. He churned relentlessly, worrying whether gay themes were too shocking for the general public, whether any book that has a character die of cancer could be bought for the movies, and so on, gears of anxiety meshing uneasily with creativity, both uniting to turn Fred’s great engine of commercial success.
But a new gear was in place, the story he wanted to tell to illustrate his marriage lesson of last night. Even his mashing of Patty faded as a sensual memory and became a plot point. He could tell the story of all men, basically polygamous creatures struggling to restrain themselves to achieve the more honorable state of monogamy. Women don’t want to fuck around, he said to himself, and men want, intellectually, to be the same, but they naturally desire more. This, Fred thought, was a great theme, a serious and provocative idea that could trigger a great novel. But did he have the clout to sell it, never having written a novel before?
Only Bart Cullen could answer that question and Fred now began to jiggle his leg, smoke cigarettes, and distractedly leaf through the Times, waiting for his phone to ring.
For a senior writer at Newstime. Monday morning was a light day. The senior editors would meet upstairs with the editor in chief, the managing editor, the executive editor, and the assistant managing editors, a group referred to by everyone as the Marx Brothers. Potential stories were discussed, and later the senior editors would come down from Animal Crackers (an umbrella term for the main conference room and the offices of the Marx Brothers) and inform the senior writers (such as David) what they probably would write about that week. It was one of the many elaborate conventions that could easily be eliminated, but it made the corporation feel it was working a full week, rather than just the mad rush from Wednesday through Saturday, when almost all the writing and artwork were done. Only the back of the book (reviews, lifestyle and the like) was prepared in advance. In the Nation section, David’s department, everything depended on the latest events, and, indeed, what had catapulted David to his early grasp of a senior-writer position was his cool ability to write cover stories in a matter of hours when a major event broke late in the week.