“No, it isn’t that.” Fred felt stupid. He had let her think Tom had instigated this, and judging from her reaction, he would be teased if she found out the reverse was true. Now he had a particular reason for not wanting her to come. If she stayed home, he could keep her false impression intact.
“Oh, there isn’t room!” Marion said, pleased, a student guessing right on a difficult quiz. “He’s taking you.”
“Right,” Fred said. “Do you mind? I can call him back and cancel.”
“No, of course not. You always get to go to the good things. I’ll just stay home alone. Again.” This sort of teasing was unlike Marion. Her mood had unaccountably changed since her outburst over his lack of attention to domestic details.
“Since when do you want to go to a basketball game? I can always get us tickets, you know.”
“I’m kidding. I wanted to see what one of those boxes is like. And I’d like to meet Tom Lear.”
“You would?” This, too, surprised Fred. Marion made fun of other people for wanting to meet the well-known. She called Tony Winter a “star-fucker” with the contemptuous-ness of someone who wouldn’t look up from the newspaper to glance at Greta Garbo dancing with Howard Hughes.
“He’s a good writer. I loved his book.”
Fred fell silent at this. He watched her heat the beans and turn the franks, thinking that he should say something, lest she decide he was made jealous by her praise of another writer. He wasn’t. He also admired Tom Lear. His quiet came from feeling how distant he was from being spoken of that way. He thought of his half-finished manuscript, of his uncertainty whether it had any merit, or how he had not only been made to feel unwelcome at the poker game, but had actually been barred. Tom Lear was about his age, didn’t seem to know more, or to speak better — there seemed so little difference between them. And yet Fred felt that if Tom had been born a king in the eighteenth century and he a peasant, there couldn’t have been a greater gulf between them.
After dinner, Marion said she had some editing to do, and he returned to his study to write more. He was still at his desk when she took a bath. He was rewriting the opening paragraph for the twentieth time when she came in her nightgown to kiss him good night.
He rubbed her belly through the soft material and felt hard immediately. He kissed her, his tongue pushing in and out anxiously, while he roughly sneaked a hand inside her neckline and reached for a breast. She pulled away, giggling at the feel of his cold fingers. “I have to go to sleep,” she said, smiling to soften the rejection.
“Okay,” he said, and his eyes went to the pages in front of him.
“Don’t go to bed too late.” she said.
“Okay,” he answered, already hypnotized by his words, prepared to sit up through the lonely hours of the night, until, exhausted by the fever of his ambition, he could slide beside his wife and listen enviously to the tranquil breathing of her sleep.
David noticed an ambition had been realized without a clear moment for its recognition. He was a senior editor. Syms had moved along with his old boss to another magazine, and four weeks ago David’s temporary position senior-editing Business had been made permanent. His dinner was conceived as a kind of celebration, a social confirmation of his elevated work status, but it had felt to him more like the opening gong of a new fight. Somehow, because of his eyeglasses breaking, an illusion of danger had been created in his mind. Until his joke broke the sense that he was an object of analysis by the others, a figure of affectionate amusement, like a three-year-old running in the buff through a group of loving but condescending relatives, David had the feeling that he had won nothing through his promotion.
Indeed, was he any less a prisoner of the magazine as a senior editor than he had been as a writer? The Marx Brothers now directly vetoed his story ideas instead of doing so through a proxy. True, he could now argue his own case rather than rely on the persuasiveness of someone else, but the dull logic of national newsmagazine writing always triumphed. If interest rates fell below ten percent, could he choose to ignore it in favor of a possibly more significant but less visible phenomenon such as the world-debt crisis? No, he would have to wait until Argentina or Mexico actually defaulted before ordering a piece on its significance. He could, and had, succeeded in getting a sidebar (a two-column box in a different color and bordered by a black rule) explaining that the Federal Reserve might have loosened because of the debt fears, leading to lower rates — flatly contradicting the cover story, which gave credit for the lower rates to the economic recovery. But his predecessor would have fought and gotten just such a story. Such frustrations were constant. He knew, for example, that a shakeout in the computer industry was coming — all business insiders knew it — and he wanted to do the story now, not in three months when the Weekly, Business Week, and everybody else would be doing it because the rash of bankruptcies had begun.
But isn’t my complaint foolish? he asked himself. Here I am, a journalist, bitching that I’m a prisoner of events. The illusion of being an essayist, created by the circumstance of working at a weekly news organization whose appeal had to be one of summarizing, analyzing, and predicting the effect of events, since it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of newspapers, much less television’s blood-spattering “live” coverage, was just that — an illusion which made the editors of Newstime delusional; persuaded them that not only should they reach for a deeper understanding of American life than the rest of journalism, but that they actually possessed profound insights. Indeed. David himself could make the argument that his desire to jump the event of the computer shakeout was nothing more than publishing an insider consensus, which could, like so many others, turn out to be wrong: “experts” predicting the obvious because of its safe logic, making error easy to defend.
But is there any genius in editing by noticing what was on the front pages of every newspaper, and the lead item on the network news, and then ordering a story on the same subject? Was this a talent to be eulogized at the end of a long life? At three o’clock in the morning, staring sleepless into the impenetrable mist of eternity, could this role in life sustain him?
Patty, looking frail and cold, hunched over her typewriter, doesn’t ask herself such questions, David told himself. Why do I? I make sixty thousand dollars a year, can hire and fire men almost twice my age, and, if things go well can look forward to promotions that will lead to the top of my profession. Would he trade places with her, writing a trivial and silly entertainment for frustrated housewives? Did he want Tony Winters’ life, writing a tap dance for pretty Midwes-terners who had caught the public’s fancy with their epoxy teeth and surgically perfect breasts? All work is contemptible if judged by my standards, David decided.
Patty’s legs are short, he noticed. Thin and smooth now, but her thighs had potential for stockiness, he thought. With age, motherhood, the inevitable gaining of weight, youth sagging under the burden of time passing, they might someday be thick: the hearty legs of a Waspy, leather-skinned worshiper of a good time. Wasn’t that her real nature? he challenged himself.
She liked to play tennis, lie on the beach, chat with girlfriends over lunch — what separated her from a woman of her mother’s generation and class was a taste for modern clothes, dance, and sexual openness. And the willingness to marry a Jew. Perhaps, he cautioned himself. How did he know she’d marry him? He assumed it, of course, but was that based on anything besides egotism and a sexist assumption that all women want the legal commitment? He believed her crankiness about money was a passive request for a proposal. If they were married, his supporting her wouldn’t make her uncomfortable, he reasoned. She wouldn’t feel she owed him anything then, especially if she were the mother of his children.