The game ended at twelve-thirty. Goldblum forced Sam to agree to stay an extra half-hour and Fred went along, embarrassed to be the only one to leave at midnight. When they totaled up and Fred found himself writing two checks — one to Sam, one to Karl — for a total of three hundred and fifteen dollars, Truman asked, “That’s a record loss, isn’t it?” and the others smiled to themselves.
It was then that Fred swore to himself that at the very least, he would learn this stupid game and beat the shit out of Sam. Hell, out of all of them.
Patty and David spent Sunday together. She kept him busy advising her while she got started on her sample chapter for Shadow Books. She had half of it written by Monday morning when they separated for the first time in thirty-six hours.
By then they were so intimate Patty felt as if they had been a couple for a long time. David hadn’t repeated his “I love you” of Saturday night, but he hadn’t withdrawn either. Indeed, his desire that they be together seemed intense — he didn’t want to go out for a walk, or to a movie, or even for dinner. To her delight, he went to the supermarket and cooked her a suprisingly good meal. He made her take seconds, claiming (the first time a man had ever said this to her) that she was too skinny.
He wasn’t her romantic ideal. He showed signs of a middle-aged potbelly. His curly black hair was receding, and baldness by forty seemed inevitable. His skin was white and puffy, his eyes beady, his lips thick. But somehow the overall impression was better than the parts: he dressed well and carried himself with confidence. And his voice was pleasingly resonant; a calm fatherly tone came naturally to him. But most of all, what mitigated his physical ordinariness was his intelligence and his genuine interest in her. He listened to her hopes, her opinions, her reminiscences, with pleasure; taking part in her inner life as if it had become his own. He was a partner, discussing his career problems not with a mind to impressing her, but with a desire for advice and support. When she commented on the magazine, he weighed what she said carefully, never dismissing her perceptions as being ill-informed or silly.
That was not to say he didn’t fuss and fondle her body like other men. Indeed, it was the combination of his sexual and intellectual interest in her that pleased: they were usually divided. Since her college romance, men had either wanted her as a lover or as a friend. It had been integrated with her college boyfriend for the first year, but slowly his sexual interest waned. Or did it? Maybe her sexual interest waned. Could that happen with David? After a while, would she notice only the stomach and the disappearing hair and not the respect for her?
This debate went on in a distant whisper in her mind while they played house together — writing her chapter, cooking, cleaning, screwing, and watching television in bed. For the first time in a long while she felt at home in New York.
She called Betty fifteen minutes after David left for work.
“You’re up early,” Betty said.
“I’m in love!”
“Really?” Betty lost all her usual reserve — abandoned for the thrilled joy of a teenage girl.
“I spent the weekend with David. We had a fabulous time.”
“That’s great!” But now Betty’s reserve, her inherent skepticism of anything extreme, had crept back into her tone.
“Is it real?” Patty asked her pleadingly. “Or am I just boy crazy?”
Betty laughed. “Don’t ask philosophical questions. Enjoy. You’ve just met him.”
When Patty hung up, she felt the ease and calm in her body. Her confidence radiated steady warmth. She straightened the apartment quickly, not resenting the task, and settled at her desk to finish the sample chapter.
It flowed from her as if she had waited her whole life to write the life of a demure virgin who longed for a dark, handsome, and possibly brutal man to awaken her passions. She wrote through the morning and early afternoon and found, to her surprise, that she had finished a rough draft.
She read it over, only occasionally wincing at the florid language and cartoon characters. In fact, most of the time she was proud of her work. Just that she had written twenty pages impressed her. And that it seemed right, as professional as the books she had sampled, was thrilling.
She reread the pages, wondering at her heroine’s wild shifts in mood, riding a crest of hope like a surfer, covered with the spray of vigor and romance, only to crash ominously on the shore as the chapter ended, so the reader would turn the page eagerly … so Shadow Books would hire her to write the rest.
Maybe it isn’t such bullshit, Patty told herself, thinking of the past week. After all, she had paddled out into life’s ocean, stripped naked, and trusted herself to cold waves, been slapped and rebuked by them, only to rise glorious and young at last, commanding nature to carry her safely to the sun-blessed shore of love and work and happiness.
Tony Winters returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel at five-thirty in the morning still innocent of adultery. Only their talk had progressed to intimacies: Lois told him about her one-year marriage to a TV producer who went from taking cocaine once a week to a restless snorting that left him hopping with enraged incoherence by two o’clock every afternoon.
She asked a lot of questions about his mother, and he answered them honestly, not worried that to tell Lois (the producer of his mother’s series) such things might be indiscreet. Lois was too vulnerable, obviously scarred by her marriage, bluffing toughness; for Tony to believe she was capable of misusing such information.
But when he got back to the hotel, drunk with fatigue, his legs aching, his eyes watering, suffering from what felt like a broken back, his sinuses clogged and his throat sore from too much smoking, and stood himself under the shower, he abruptly lost his confidence in her. I’m a rube, he thought. She probably went out to dinner with me to get precisely that kind of gossip. He could vividly imagine her at work tomorrow telling the gang all the scandals, laughing at the pretentious, ignorant New York writer with two parents in show business who didn’t know a thing about movie deals.
He ordered coffee from room service to keep himself up until the eight-o’clock breakfast with Bill Garth and … and whom? He sat on the bed and realized with dread he had forgotten the producer’s name. One of the few powerful independent producers in the business, Lois had called him, claiming he, rather than Garth, would probably decide whether to hire Tony.
Room service arrived looking as sleepy as he, with the pink-and-green linen motif of the hotel, and he drank his coffee, his stomach rumbling angrily at its arrival. There was a wave of nausea moments later, so severe that Tony thought he was not only about to vomit but also that he was fatally ill. Could he cancel? he wondered, writhing on the bed while fighting off the queasiness.
But that passed.
What was that producer’s name? His cheek lay on the rough bedspread, and he felt warm about his eyes. He closed them and remembered being on the plane — the steady hum of the motor, the keen promise he had felt about the trip. It seemed like weeks ago, but it was only yesterday afternoon, a little more than …
There was ringing. Lots of ringing. Shut up. Shut up. I’m sleeping.
He gasped and sat up. There was bright sunlight all around him, so bright the sun seemed to be inside the room. He had overslept!
He grabbed the phone. He said something into it. It was supposed to be hello.
“Tony?” a female voice said doubtfully.
“Yes!”
“Hi, it’s Lois. I just wanted to make sure you were awake. Did you fall asleep?”
“Oh, God. Thank you. Yes. What time is it?”
“Seven-forty-five. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”