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.
Her boss was Jerry Gelb, a big bearded man with a deep voice and little black eyes that never showed pity, love, or even an attention span. Gelb was angry all the time. Or at least in a very bad mood. But he liked Patty. He teased Patty the way she imagined an older brother would—Patty was the eldest of three; her only brother was six years her junior. Jerry called her Patsie (her nickname as a child) and would take her along on lunches with his two leading authors. They were Harold Gould (winner of two National Book Awards) and Roberta York, the formidable and ancient intellectual, who would cheer Patty up by describing her own frustrations as a secretary sixty years ago. Roberta talked about being kept late without pay, being pressured to sleep with the boss, and how she collapsed into tears when, after having rejected the boss, he would needle her mercilessly. “Things haven’t changed much,” Gelb would agree in a tone that implied he was innocent of such behavior. But Roberta’s talk didn’t stop him from screaming into Patty’s intercom when she made the mistake of letting a rejected writer through her screening of telephone calls.
“You’re paid twelve thousand dollars a year to remember to say, ‘He’s in a meeting,’ and you can’t even do that right! Get in here!”
Her mouth quivered as she entered, closing the door behind her so no one could hear his ranting.
“What do I have to do!” he yelled, standing up at his desk. Behind him was a view of Fifth Avenue swarming with tiny cars and insect people. “Do you know what that asshole”—he pointed with contempt at his phone—“screamed at me? I had to listen to a nut call me a liar and a thief because you don’t pay attention! When I tell you not to put someone through, listen to the name! Remember it!” he shrieked at her. Though his voice was basso, the attitude— his arms waving in the air, his eyes scanning wildly—was hysterical and shrill.
Tears spilled from her eyes. She put up no struggle against either his accusations or her shame. She thought and felt nothing but shame, appalling shame at her uselessness.
“I’ve warned you over and over. How often can I make the excuse to myself and to the other editors here whom you repeatedly screw up with your incompetence, how many times can I say,” and now he transformed himself into a mincing pose, holding his hands up in front of him, like a puppy begging for food, “ ‘Oh, poor little Patsie. she’s so silly and helpless, but we don’t mind ’cause she can bat her eyes so pretty.’ ”
Later, of course, she could answer this abuse. Later, she wouldn’t agree with his evaluation of her work. But while he yelled, there was no Patty inside her to step forward and argue back. She thought it the most peculiar thing about her, the sickest thing about her, the one trait she wished she could be free of forever: she accepted any role that people cast her in. The more Jerry Gelb claimed she was a ditsie blond, the more she became one. Only when alone could she be herself. But she loathed being alone.
However, these periodic fits by Gelb were always followed by weeks of pampering. He would take her out with clients, praise her to agents, buy her a trinket, behave, in a word, like a repentant lover.
Eventually the tantrums became less frequent. Gelb selected a new assistant to yell at. Patty was grateful for this neglect and thought it was a victory. At last Gelb had recognized her worth.
And then, one day, he summoned her to the office without there having been a fuck-up.
“How are you?” he asked. This time, he was the one who closed his door for privacy. It was five o’clock. The insects below were heading home.
“I don’t know,” she said, staring at him with a look of shock. This formal question about her health was unusual, and so she took it seriously.
“You don’t?” he looked distressed by her answer. “I thought things were going well. You have a boyfriend.”
“I do?”
“I thought so. The actor.”
“Oh, him. I haven’t seen him in months. He was never a boyfriend. I’ve been dating someone else.”
Gelb smiled encouragingly.
“I just broke up with him,” Patty added.
Gelb again looked as if this news were a great blow to him. “I’m sorry.”
Patty smiled at him languidly. “It’s all right,” she said, and then laughed. “Sweet of you to worry.”
“Are you busy tonight?”
“A friend at Rockers has tickets to a screening of
Raging Bull.”
“Oh, good.” At last an answer he wanted. He smiled nervously, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think a direct approach—”
Even at this moment, Patty had no suspicion that she was about to be fired. Gelb’s reputation was one of ferocity. He fired people on the spot. No leisurely hand-wringing chats in the office. Besides, he never let her feel that she was vulnerable to being fired. She was the ditsie blond, not a young turk who had to either produce or die.
“—but I’m going to have to let you go. We’ve had a ghastly year. One of the worst in publishing history. We overprinted on
Gold Search
and underprinted on
Jumpers,
we’ve suffered lower sales in every department because of the recession. Everything’s gone wrong that possibly could. We have to cut down on staff and you’re the choice.” He said all this very quietly, embarrassed. He said it all as if she knew it.
“I don’t understand.”
Gelb sighed and looked away. “You know that someone has to suffer when things go bad. It isn’t personal. Double-day let a third of its staff go yesterday. You aren’t the only one here who will lose a job.”
She went numb to sensation, as if being in his office were a dream. Colors blurred, his voice came from a distance.
FAILURE
—punched onto the page of her brain. The word dominated—
FAILURE
. She felt as if she had been sentenced to die. All her life, she had dreaded this sort of occurrence. Getting a failing grade in school, being caught with drugs, not being accepted into a good college, meeting boys you like who reject you, and getting fired from a job. At last,
FAILURE
had struck. She had managed to avoid all the other calamities, she had even begun to lower her defenses …
FAILURE
. Gelb considered her so pathetic that not only was he firing her, he was doing it nicely!
“Please don’t do that!” Gelb stood up. “There’s no reason to cry.”
She hadn’t realized she was weeping. She put a hand on her cheek and her fingers slid on the wet surface.
“You can stay here for a month while you look for another job. I’ll give you great references. There’s unemployment insurance. It’s a paid vacation.”
“You just said there are no jobs,” she whined.
“I did?”
“If things are so bad, then no one’s going to hire me.”
“Oh, there’ll be jobs in a little while. Besides, you’re what? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six.”
“You don’t have to stay in publishing. I think you might be happier in … advertising. Or maybe working in publicity at a publishing house.”
“You don’t think I’m any good at editing.” Through her tears, she had the bitter voice of a heartbroken child, a girl on Christmas morning discovering she has gotten no toys. She hated herself for this weakness. It wasn’t her real self.
“Of course you are,” Gelb insisted. He wrinkled his thick brows together. This made the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced. “You need a jolt. A fresh start.”
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-f 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.