“Fuck him if he wants more points.” he said to some star actor’s agent. “You may assume, at your peril, that we’ll do anything to keep a hit series. It isn’t so. If you stick to these numbers, it’ll be cheaper for us to put a flop in the time slot.” Richard spoke these harsh words in a slow, gentle way, looking in Tony’s direction with focused, even observing eyes, as if the conversation was only marginally important. There was no tension, no fear of defeat, in his voice. Tony couldn’t fit that piece of self-confidence in with the puzzle of his father’s cowardly adherence to the blacklist.
“He put people out of work!” Maureen Winters had shrieked at Tony shortly after he had been returned to her upon her release from the sanitarium. He was in cotton pajamas with “New York. Yankees” written across his chest, standing in a narrow hallway looking up at his distracted mother, her eyes red, her body fat and sagging. “Your father has no balls!” she shouted at her six-year-old son. “He screams at shadows!” she said moments before Maria, their housekeeper, ran out to carry Tony away. He remembered the swishing rush of Maria’s slippers playing accompaniment to Maureen’s strange words: “He screams at shadows!”
She was mad. Tony said to himself, watching his handsome, tanned, calm father managing millions as if they were tips. Tony always said his mother was crazy, but in a tone that implied artistic eccentricity, and that’s what he had convinced himself it was, he realized now, as the weight of his judgment sank in: she was mad.
But then why did his father give him up? Why did he let a madwoman take his son three thousand miles away?
Tony let his head fall back on the couch. He closed his eyes, because they had begun to burn with ancient grief. He doesn’t love me. That’s why, Tony said to himself, and squeezed his lids watertight.
Patty had asked aloud, shortly after Tony and Betty left, if anyone wanted to adjourn — she hesitated — to the living area. Only the women. Cathy and Louise, agreed. Rounder, Chico. and David didn’t say no, but they stayed put, to continue their discussion of changes that should be made to Newstime, becoming so absorbed that more than an hour went by before the men spoke to the women.
Patty didn’t mind the segregation, except on principle. In practice, Patty thoroughly enjoyed talking with Louise and Cathy. After she explained the flat-fee payment for romance novels to them, she complained that although writing the first one had taken only a few months, her second had been coming along very slowly, and speed was what made them profitable. She quizzed Cathy in detail on the difference between having a career and staying home with the kids. They compared good shops to buy clothes, matched the assets and liabilities of male and female single friends of theirs to see if they could create a good couple, and so on, in a relaxed rambling discussion of life, love, birth, housing, and favorite TV shows.
Occasionally Patty would eavesdrop on the boys (Patty thought of men and women as boys and girls, except when she felt anger or disapproval), and felt sorry for them that they could only discuss their jobs. She had grown used to the fact that David was obsessed with his work; she had decided that the explanation lay with his ambitious, self-critical, and demanding character. Tonight she wondered if it were a matter of gender — or at least gender training. Men are so alone, she thought to herself. To care only about one’s career implied an absence of friendship to her; it meant one’s companions were other people at work; bosses, rivals, or subordinates; relationships that were always fraught with tension, and in danger of collapse or disintegration. She, for example, had had several close friends at. Goodson Books — Marion, Fred’s wife, was one — but the intimacy didn’t really survive her departure. Once Patty’s daily presence as a player in the office game was over, although the good fellowship of being teammates remained, the loss of common strategies, alliances, and goals made conversation either baffling or boring.
“Are you and David thinking of marriage?” Louise asked, completely within the spirit of intimacy that had evolved in their talk.
Patty stiffened. She felt invaded by the question and caught herself feeling it was rude. Her reaction was unfair, considering how she had pressed Louise and Cathy about similar decisions in their futures. Confused, Patty sat up and laughed to cover her embarrassment and irritation. “Jeez,” she said, brushing a few stray hairs away from her high cheeks. “Who knows?” she added to the ceiling, as if flying off into the heavens was equally as likely or desirable.
“Do you want to?” Cathy said casually.
Patty laughed and felt herself blush. What the hell is wrong with me? she asked herself. Do I care about this? She cleared her throat, tried to look solemn, and said, “No comment.” The whole effect was hilariously out of character. Louise and Cathy laughed good-naturedly.
“I’ll tell my husband to issue a memo to all senior editors that Mrs. Thorn likes her senior men to be married,” Cathy joked, and they all burst out laughing at this notion, this image of themselves as girls from the fifties, scheming together to bag a man.
“Hey, hey,” Chico said from the table. “No fair. You’re not supposed to be having more fun than us.”
“Have you solved all the magazine’s problems yet?” Patty asked to divert any investigation of what they had been laughing about.
“Couldn’t possibly do that in a night,” Rounder said, beaming like a politician at a fund-raiser. “We’d better go,” he said to his wife.
Chico hurriedly seconded the notion, with a note of tension in his voice, as if staying out later than the boss was inappropriate. At the elevator door Cathy said to Patty, “Come up and have lunch with me next week. I’d like you to see the kids.”
“Love to.” Patty said with excessive enthusiasm.
“Don’t let Cathy give her any ideas,” Rounder said to David. There was polite laughter.
For an answer, Patty swung the heavy industrial doors closed on them all — David had to operate the cables — and she could hear their delighted amusement as the lights of the descending elevator cage flashed through the crack at her feet. “Doofus,” she said quietly about Rounder, and reached behind her to unbutton her dress. She was tired of its heavy presence on her body. She felt hot and itchy, as physically constricted by it as she had felt constrained by the evening’s formality.
She was in her bra and underpants, sprawled on the couch, when David returned. He opened his eyes at the sight, and then squinted so hard his eyes were reduced to slits. “Are you naked?” he asked, approaching.
Patty laughed. “You’re so blind,” she said, noting for the dozenth time how different David looked without his glasses. His eyebrows seemed thicker, his nose bigger, his eyes duller and smaller.
He sat next to her and peered at her belly. A red line circled her stomach an inch or so above her navel, created by the elastic of her stockings. He touched it gently and then bent over, saying, “What’s that?”
Patty laughed uncontrollably.
“Oh,” he said when his eyes were almost touching her body.
She pushed him away. “Stop studying me,” she said haltingly through her laughs.
David leaned back and stared toward the dining table. He looked solemn and distracted. “God, what a mess,” he said.
“What?” Patty said. “I thought it went very well.”
“No,” David said, and set his unfocused, squinting eyes on her. “I mean, all the cleaning that has to be done.”
“Yeah, you’d better get to it.”
He blinked at her. “Okay.” He brought a hand up and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll do it.”