Patty put her hand on his leg and stroked him soothingly. “No, David. Don’t be hard on yourself. What you do is really important.” She pointed to Dark Harvest. “This is trash.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t have to reassure me. I’m not depressed about my work. I just meant …” He stared off and didn’t continue.
Patty moved her hand up his leg, heading toward his groin. Her eyes were wide open and attentive, waiting for David to finish his sentence. But he said nothing. She reached his penis and rubbed.
His eyes focused on her.
“Yes?” she said with a smile, the knowing smile of a seductress.
He smiled. “You’re beautiful.”
She silently mouthed “thank you” and continued her massage of his erection.
“Mmmm,” David said, closing his eyes. When he opened them a moment later, he looked into Patty’s eyes. She watched her effect on him proudly.
“You like this?” she asked.
“Un-huh,” he said, feeling helpless. Happily, warmly helpless.
“What were you going to say?”
David laughed. “I don’t remember.”
“Good,” Patty said with a triumphant look.
“Good!” David laughed.
“That means,” she said, opening her mouth wide and leaning in to kiss him, “that I’m doing a good job.”
After his meeting with Bart and his purchase of several new Brooks Brothers shirts, Fred went home and called Marion at her office. He breathlessly told her the story.
She burst out laughing when he mentioned spilling the coffee.
“I’ve seen that white rug. Bart must have shit a brick.”
“No, no. It didn’t bother him. Anyway, listen! Stop laughing.”
“Sorry.”
“He’s given the outline to Bob Holder, who he says is already interested.”
“Holder’s already interested?”
“Well,” Fred said defensively. “Bart said that Holder thought it was a good premise. And he insisted that he get it exclusively.”
“Un-huh,” Marion said.
“What?” Fred said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Oh, sure. It’s just that …” She hesitated.
“What?” Fred demanded.
“Don’t get your hopes up, okay, Freddy? Holder likes to make a fuss. He wants everything exclusive. Doesn’t mean he’s gonna buy it.”
“I know that,” he snapped. “You don’t have to tell me that. I was just telling you what Bart said. Of course I know it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. Listen. I’d better get back to work.”
“Sure. Look. Let’s go out tonight. To a movie or something?”
“Uh, I don’t know. The nouvelle cuisine book is due to—”
“We’ll go to an early movie. Come on.”
“Okay, Fred. Call me later. I got to go.”
And she hung up. He looked at the receiver in his hand as if it had spat in his face. She had no faith in him, he decided. She thinks I’ll never be a novelist. He thought back to her reaction when he announced that he was going to turn down American Sport magazine articles for a year and try to get a contract for a novel.
“Fred, you won’t get a contract for a novel from outlines,” she had said with a tone of absolute knowledge about publishing. “First novels, unless they’re by people who are very famous for some other reason, are always written on spec.”
“That’s bullshit,” Fred had said. “What about Karl?”
“Fred, Karl had written six books on spec!”
Fred guffawed and jiggled his food. “If his publisher had read any of those manuscripts, he wouldn’t have given him lunch, much less a contract.” She had no answer for that. He told her: “Bart got Karl his contract, and if he takes me on, he’ll get me one.” She hadn’t argued, but he knew she didn’t believe it, despite the evidence of Karl and his stewardess novel. Fred knew why. Marion had once said about Karl, “I don’t know if Karl’s a good writer, but he looks, talks, and thinks like a novelist.” She didn’t believe that about Fred. He was merely a nice Jewish boy to her. Maybe she doesn’t want me to succeed, he said to himself. Maybe she’s scared if I become a rich famous novelist, I’ll leave her.
He clicked down the buttons of the phone, got a dial tone, and called Marion back.
When he got her, he burst out, “What do you mean Bob Holder always asks for an exclusive look?”
Marion laughed. “That’s what you called me back about? You’re gonna drive yourself crazy—”
“How do you know that? You don’t know Holder.”
“I’ve met him. I don’t really know him. But Betty works at Garlands. She makes fun of Holder doing stuff like that. He thinks he’s a hotshot, so—”
“He is a hotshot, honey.”
“Okay, so he is a hotshot. And he likes to act like one.”
“But Betty didn’t say, specifically, that Holder always asks for an exclusive look?”
“Fred,” Marion said in a gentle but thoroughly contemptuous tone, “everybody would ask for an exclusive look if they thought they could get it. What’s the harm? If you don’t like it, you can still say no. If you do, then you don’t have the pressure of competing interest. Maybe Bart made it sound like a great thing, but an editor getting an exclusive look just gives the editor leverage. It doesn’t help the writer.”
Fred stared out the window at the traffic and people below. He only noticed them when he felt like a failure or a fool. They went on with their lives, ignorant of him.
“Fred?” Marion said tentatively into his silence.
She had made him see that his excitement was over nothing. His conviction that Bart could somehow manipulate an important editor into buying his outline was a fantasy; he had sat in Bart’s office and listened to him pitch the elixir of success, and bought it, only to discover it was simply the plain water of uncertain promises. “Do you think Bart’s a bad agent?” he asked suspiciously, as if she had been keeping a secret.
Marion grunted. It sounded like a startled laugh. “No, I didn’t say that. He’s flattering Holder by giving it to him exclusively. And he’s letting him know that Bart really thinks it’s a hot idea. That’s great. I was just trying to get you to calm down. Not to expect too much. Holder hasn’t read it. Until he has, it doesn’t mean a thing.”
“I don’t need that, you know. I realize I may get turned down. I know I may be a failure. I don’t need you to remind me.”
“Fred.” Said very sternly: a warning not to continue. “I don’t want to talk about this. You’re paranoid. I’ll call you later.” And she hung up.
He let the hand with the receiver drop to his side, as if the dismal emotions of the conversation had made it too heavy to hold up. He leaned his head against the wall and looked again at the people below. A delivery truck with the New York Post had stopped at a corner news kiosk to unload an edition. Two boys of about fifteen, coming home from school, passed the stacks of newspapers. They were short and probably Jewish. One of them was fat. His wrinkled white shirttails were hanging outside his pants. The other was skinny and wore thick black glasses. They stopped and peered at the back of the Post. It would be a sports story that caught their interest. Fred at their age looked like them and also would have peered at the headline with total absorption. In those days, it never occurred to him that writing served any purpose other than graduating from school or proving that Mickey Mantle was a better hitter than Willie Mays. That dumpy kid with his shirttails hanging out was innocent. He had yet to learn, as Fred had, that his appearance would cut him off from most of the fantasies that men have: he would never be thought of as glamorous, as sexy, as profound. No one would look at him and say, “There are a poet’s eyes, a sculptor’s hands, an actor’s voice, or the tall inspiring body of a leader.” That kid, gawking with happy concentration at the Post’s sports headline, hadn’t been faced with the certain knowledge that no tall, beautiful blond would go to bed with him — unless he paid her. “Money,” Fred said aloud, as if he were hurling a curse down at the boy below. “Money and fame are the only things that will help.”