Why are you so frightened? he asked himself. He’s only your agent. Who cares what he thinks? But they’ve become so powerful, his pounding heart reminded him, that publishers use them as adjunct editors, weeding out the amateurs, and, through the contracts of their successful clients, establish minimums for unproven writers. If Bart backed one of his ideas, he would get a contract. Fred was sure of that.
There was still nothing on the line but the whoosh of electronic obscurity. The cigarettes lay temptingly on the table. He tried to stretch the receiver an extra few inches …
… and the phone was yanked out of his hands, snapped back to its mother by the taut cord, flying through the air, smacking into the wall, and finally clattering to the floor. The noise horrified Fred. He grabbed his pack of cigarettes and dashed to pick up the receiver, sure that Bart had been listening and deduced it all, and was laughing even now at foolish Fred.
“Hello?” he cried desperately into the phone. Nothingness answered him. So he lit his cigarette. With the first drag, he inhaled self-assurance and a dim sense of peerage with Bart.
“Hi,” a voice said.
Fred almost didn’t answer because the greeting was so quiet and lugubrious. “Bart?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“Fine …”
“Thanks for last night.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ve just gone through the material—”
An abrupt silence. Then Fred overheard Bart talking to someone else.
“I’ll get back to him — Fred? Sorry. Uh, I, uh, looked over the proposals. They’re good, but — I don’t think this kind of market is looking for this sort of book. I mean, we wouldn’t be attacking the point of least resistance. This is sort of paperback-original material. You can make good money in that, but I think we should be trying for more. We are a complete agency, we like to develop books that have a long life — hardcover, soft, good foreign sales, movies, television. I don’t like to automatically cut off those things. Uh …”
Fred stared at the edge of Formica where it met the corner of his stainless-steel sink. There was a brown line of decay caused by moisture. He had never noticed it before. He saw himself standing in the living room of a forty-story building, sandwiched between row after row of hustling baby-boom middle-class thirty-year-olds, living off their salaries, subscribing to New York Magazine, feeling close to the rich, close to the famous, with the roar of the main pump of life’s most exciting engine in their ears. Until Bart had opened his mouth to deliver that talk. Fred thought he was about to be finely polished and screwed into the glistening motor of New York, his name typeset for the appropriate columns and invitation lists. These words of Bart’s were really a death sentence, a lifetime lease in this row of plasterboard mediocrity.
Bart was still talking: “… we need something sharper for you, with greater—”
“I have another idea,” Fred blurted.
Silence. Then, “Uh-huh.”
“Would you like to hear it?” Fred asked, not sure whether Bart would say yes.
“Yeah.”
“I want to write a male version of The Women’s Room. I want to show that men aren’t shits. There’s all this talk about monogamy and men fucking around when they hit forty. All that. The truth, and what no one is saying, is that men aren’t able to be monogamous. Women can be. Men fall in love and they’re horny, but those are two different things.” Fred blurted this out and then suddenly had nothing to say. He waited. This was his last flare. Either Bart slowed his huge liner and rescued him from his waterlogged lifeboat, or steered past and left Fred to die of thirst in an ocean of water.
“Well,” Bart said after a moment. “That could be interesting. But I need to hear a plot, something more.”
“See, I want to follow two people my age from their romance in college up to now, show all the stuff, the political years, the drug years, becoming professionals, the touchy-feely psychology of the seventies. You know I want to do all the junk that is on Phil Donahue and in the Living Section of the Times, and then show how it’s all down to this one basic difference.”
“Mmmm.” Bart fell silent, then spoke as if startled. “I think this has potential. Can you come up with enough of a story to write a proposal?”
“Sure!” Fred said happily.
“All right. There are several editors I can think of who are right. Bob Sand at Flanders, Carrie Winston at Ingrams. I’ll light a fire under them while you get started on the proposal.”
“How long should it be?”
“With this kind of story, don’t get too involved with plot details. Focus on how it’s a response to the feminist novel. That’s the hook. I have to go … get this in quickly, Fred, it could be very exciting.”
“Right. Thanks. Good-bye.”
He was saved! Spinning out of the darkness, from the towering deck of the luxury liner, landing with a plop in the waters of obscurity, came Fred’s lifesaver. He stopped only to pour a cup of coffee before he was at his typewriter. Nothing delayed or dismayed him as the pages appeared, blackened with his ideas, littering his desk while he invented effortlessly. It had never been like this before — he knew this story by heart. After all, it was the story of his marriage. And when a doubting voice wondered how Marion would feel about her life being thus exposed, Fred reminded himself that no great writer had ever hesitated to make a sacrifice of his life. At last, it had happened. Fred was in that great company of geniuses and artists. He was struggling to get over the railing, still soaked by the brackish water — but the liner had stopped and was ready for boarding.
David Bergman felt very much in demand. Writers from every section either dropped by or phoned. Two senior editors from the back of the book asked him to stop by their offices, and when he did, they too discussed the rumor. This sort of thing was general in the building that day. No one seemed to be working on the magazine.
None of the talk implied danger for David. Someone even suggested David might be promoted because of all the shifting around that would necessarily result from firing the editor in chief and replacing him from within, namely the managing editor. Someone would have to replace him, and someone the person he had replaced, and so on, in a complicated series of moves.
After a moment of anxiety over his job. David began to feel, while having all these gossipy conversations, that he wouldn’t really care if he had to leave Newstime. He could be hired by almost anyone. The Times, the Journal, Business Week, they would all be willing to hire him. Syms was sure to be hired elsewhere if he were fired, and Syms would certainly hire David. To be worried was idiotic. He had over twenty thousand dollars saved up in the profit-sharing plan, there was unemployment insurance, he would be free to do nothing for more than a year before getting a job could become an urgent financial problem. How many thirty-year-olds could make that boast?
What finally did begin to stick in his mind was Patty. Her mouth gliding up and down his penis — that took over, with mixed results. He hadn’t sat at a desk with an erection since junior high school, but the excitement below seemed divorced from his thoughts about Patty. She was just a blond girl. Silly and with great tits. Of course, she was accepted by everyone: the men wanted to look at her. But could he date her seriously? He imagined Patty accompanying him to a Newstime function. David, the classic smart Jewish boy walking in with a breast-flouncing chippie. The Marx Brothers would certainly snicker. And heart failure (at least) would strike David’s parents.