Her horror at his announcement was misunderstood by Gelb. He interpreted it as surprise that Garlands would move him — a man with a violently commercial reputation— into a house better known for publishing quality books. “Look,” he said in a sales-conference tone, “there are business realities in publishing that now even Garlands can’t afford to ignore.”
“Are you going to accept?” Patty asked.
“Yes, and I want to hire you.”
“To do what? Go to bed with you?”
Gelb smiled, shaking his head, astonished and delighted by her frankness. “I’m not hiring you to go to bed with me. I want you to go to bed with me, but I also want you to work for me. I got rid of you because I was so angry at the feelings I was developing for you—”
“You never said anything — all you ever did was yell!”
“No—”
“Yes, you yelled,” she teased, “you criticized, you never said a kind word—”
“Oh, come on, Patty! Nonsense!” Gelb leaned back, a hand pulling his jacket closed, armoring himself. “What about all those lunches and dinners to console you over the end of one relationship or another? You think it was easy?” He pushed his face at her, his body bumping the table so that the glasses trembled, their liquids shimmering. “Listening to you catalogue your sexual adventures? I’ll never forget that look you had on your face when you were dating the carpenter—”
Patty laughed, as much to relieve the pressure of his assault as at his absurb claims to unrequited passion. No amount of protest could convince her that this man, whose dark eyes glistened invulnerably, reflecting back any searchlight into his soul, was capable of sustaining love for anything, unless … unless he couldn’t have it. Maybe, incredible though it may seem, he had never been frustrated before. “Carpenter?” she said, and laughed again.
“Yes, the carpenter who you said was so damn good in bed? What the hell was he so good at anyway? You refused to tell me, as though it was something astonishing. What the hell was it? His penis was ten inches long?”
“Shhhh!” Patty said, convinced his voice was amplified, that the whole restaurant had interrupted their plots of power, their schemes for success, to listen to this verbal rape.
“Damn!” he said, sagging back and rubbing his forehead feverishly. “It was torture. And this past year, thinking you might get married any day. I found out what I could about David—”
“You did?” She was intimidated enough by him to be frightened by this. Maybe there was some harm he could do David. He was capable of anything, and the limits of his power were a mystery to her.
“Couldn’t sleep the night I was told by Rounder that David is the brightest star of the magazine. Thinks he’ll have his job one day.”
Patty looked off, away from his energetic body, from his insistent eyes, and considered how thrilled David would be to hear this. She wondered if David (secretly) would love the whole story: this powerful man of publishing taking David’s girl to the Four Seasons to seduce her, losing the battle, and speaking angrily, enviously of David’s future. If she wanted marriage from David, going home and telling the story would be the perfect cattle prod. She felt regret that a union with David wasn’t her ambition. She could have it so easily now. A free ride on David’s trolley to the top. David would love the story all right, he wouldn’t even bother to conceal his pleasure. She knew, from her experience of living with a victim of the virus of success, that to men like “David, and like Gelb, the praise of the powerful was a keener and more lasting medicine than the love of a woman.
“Are you going to marry him?” Gelb’s voice said sadly.
Patty returned to him, to the world, to the fine linen of the table, the ruins of their expensive lunch. What a sickening fraud it all was. Wasn’t it possible for everybody to satisfy lust, whether for power or sex, without all this elaborate finery and fakery? “No. I’m not going to get married. Not to anyone. Men are disgusting,” she said with conviction. “Why the heck would I want to marry any of ’em?”
“You don’t mean that,” Gelb said, made hopeful by a denial of betrothal. He smiled at her, grinning like a child who was confident that after a few more months of hinting, he would get the Christmas present he coveted. “Will you take the job?” he said, whispering the question as though it were a murmur of seduction.
“I feel like I’m a prostitute and we’re negotiating.”
“No,” Gelb protested. “I love how there are no games with you. No. I want to sleep with you whether you take the job or not, and I want you to take the job whether you sleep with me or not.”
“You mean you think I’d make a good editor, that everything you told me about how incompe—”
“Yes, it was all a lie. I’m a shit. I admit it. I’ll offer you forty thousand a year, that’s at least ten thousand more than someone of your experience should get. That’ll make up for it.”
“And what’s my job, exactly? Blow-jobs every afternoon? What are we talking about? I feel like I’m going crazy—”
Gelb laughed, shaking his head, his eyes on her, ravenous. “You’d be my editor. I’d give you major authors, let you acquire one or two novels in the first year. Don’t worry about the blow-jobs,” he added, and then giggled.
“I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t do any of those things—”
“Yes I would!” he whined.
“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not a fool. There’s nothing in the world you care more about than business. You wouldn’t trust me with anything that might affect your job.”
“You’re wrong,” he said solemnly.
She paused, looking into his unyielding eyes, daring him to maintain his pose. He did, regarding her unflinchingly. “Why are you still married to Elaine? If you’re so damn unhappy? Dump her. You can have all the little girls of publishing at your feet.”
“Honey, I can have them at my feet anyway. I want you,” he said in a dramatic, ominous tone. “You want me to leave her? Before you’ll start anything with me?”
“No!” she exclaimed, horrified that he seemed to think she was taking him seriously. “I’m just babbling, you know—”
“Will you leave David for me? I’d leave Elaine if that’s the only way I can have you. But then I want all of you. I’m not sharing you with a Newstime wunderkind.”
Patty gripped the soft cushion of her chair, feeling herself loosened from the surface of reality. Any moment, she feared, she might spin off into the madness of space, with no up or down, no gravity to restore balance. “I have to go,” she said. She needed distance from his baffling presence, fast, before she made a fatal error in responding to his outrageous and incredible proposals. “Please,” she begged, almost crying. “Please. I have to go.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “But you have to promise you’ll call.”