When he phoned again at two-fifty, knowing this would be his last chance, he was sure of defeat. “Hold on, Fred,” the secretary said. Even her tone had become urgent and fearful.
“Fred.” Bart said, anxious, a general pinned by enemy fire, trained to fight off panic, “I’ve tried Bob three times. He hasn’t called me back. I don’t think that means anything. Your meeting’s — what? — in a couple of minutes?”
“Yeah.” The sound of his own voice appalled Fred. It was hoarse with dread.
“Call me after you’re done.”
“But …” he began, and then fell silent. Fred breathed hard, as though he could suck in words and thoughts from the air to fill the vacuum that nervousness had made of his brain.
“Yes?” Bart said after a few moments of silence.
“I don’t know.”
“Look, you’d better get to the meeting. Just don’t commit yourself to anything. Listen to me. Report it to me. We’ll discuss it. You don’t have to make any decisions on the spot. Okay?”
“He’s gonna reject the book.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t think he will. He would have called me first. Don’t assume that. Now, come on. Relax. Get going.”
“Okay,” he said, hanging up without a good-bye, like a doctor on call rushing to an emergency. He hustled across the street and into the lobby. At the reception area he was sweating, relieved that he had gotten there a minute before three.
Then Holder kept him waiting a half-hour. During the slow agony of the minutes passing, Fred passed into a state of hopeless resignation. He considered begging Holder for a chance to do a complete rewrite, but he doubted if even that would be accepted.
Finally he was brought in. Holder got up energetically, saying, “Sorry I kept you waiting. There’s been a disaster here today with a manuscript. It was delivered to the wrong …” He waved his hand at the air, dismissing it. “Sorry. Anyway, I won’t have a chance to talk to you, because I’ve got a meeting in a half-hour and I have to return calls … I’m way behind.” He picked up Fred’s manuscript from his desk, revealing a sweater with the elbow eaten through by the moth of his nervous manner. The first page of Fred’s one hundred pages was marked in numerous places and there were so many yellow flags sticking out (markers placed on the edge of the pages to indicate places where Holder had made changes or queried something) that it looked like a badly made paper duck. “I found a lot of things I didn’t like. I still love the basic idea. I’ve showed where I think things go wrong and what you should do about them. Obviously, you may not agree and want to drop the contract. But read it over, take your time, and let me know if you can make the changes. Then we’ll meet again and I’ll make sure I have plenty of time to talk.” Holder held out the tattered object with a touch of regret, as though he were surrendering something he wanted to hold on to.
Fred stared at it for a second, a skeptical pedestrian peering at a flier thrust at him. He reached for it slowly, took it gingerly, afraid to bend the yellow stickers — there was hardly room to grasp his pages without bending one of them. He looked into Holder’s eyes and said, “I’ll make any changes you want.”
Holder nodded, seeming neither surprised nor confirmed in his expectation. “Good boy,” he said.
In Chico’s siege of Rounder’s job, David Bergman played the role of a keeper of secrets, an overzealous agent of the usurped prince, working to return the just to power. David’s intense dislike of Rounder, this stupid blue-eyed blond who had smiled and blundered his way into a job that rightfully belonged to men who had come up the ladder that David was now climbing, seemed at times greater than Chico’s. David stirred the already churning envy in Chico’s soul on a daily basis. He kept a precise inventory of the institutional injustice that was Chico’s lot and waved it in his face to enrage him further. In return, he learned the last remaining intimacies of Animal Crackers, and was told the status and presumptive fate of every employee, each time sworn to silence.
And though this made him a great friend of Chico’s, his distance from his peers widened. He could not cheerfully drink and joke with men above whom the sword of Newstime’s wrath hung, no matter how invisible its presence to the victim. Nor could he resist, through slow hints and comments to Chico, corrupting the good opinion the Marx Brothers held of his rivals, whether their judgments were correct or not. In the dim light of morning, feeling lonely and repentant, David would swear to stop his machinations, but like an addict, he was seduced by Chico’s eager face, promising rewards of power and information and he let the drug flow freely between them.
He was using Chico. Ironically, Chico no doubt believed the reverse was true, that he had made an ally of a bright young talent. Thus even David’s one remaining intimate relationship at the magazine was founded on a lie, that he was a soldier in Chico’s battle to defeat Rounder, while in fact he used his position to keep his rivals down. He didn’t admit any of this to Patty, and lived in the loft, skulking among its painted columns and soaring walls, alone with his loathing for himself.
Nor did he dare tell anyone of his sexual obsession. During late nights at the magazine, he carefully arranged things to be free when the show with the pornographic ads came on, closing his door and turning on his television (a perk of senior editors), watching it with his face only inches from the screen so that he could switch channels instantly if someone knocked on the door.
He began to notice at newsstands that there were magazines with photos of women in leather outfits, standing over chained men who writhed in mock abject pain. He would see words blazoned across the covers: bondage, sex, slave, discipline. They had magic for him, stunning his brain into dumbfounded stares, drying his mouth, awakening his otherwise dulled genitals. He looked for newsstands that carried such magazines and tried to calculate the likelihood that someone he knew might walk in if he were to attempt a purchase. There simply was no way to know. The only measure of safety he could give himself was to do the buying out of both his loft’s and Newstime’s neighborhoods. His other temptation was to call Mistress Regina as she ordered her slaves to do. He wanted to laugh at it, the stupid name, the bad camerawork, the lamely delivered lines, but there was no comedy in his desire, no objective higher ground for his mind to climb. He was stuck, transfixed by the secret lust, and paralyzed by its equally covert twin, his self-disgust at giving in.
His job, the actual editing of the sections under him, became increasingly easy in its challenge, and increasingly elaborate and tedious in its execution. He had eased the task of getting story ideas approved by the Marx Brothers because of his intimacy with Chico, but handling the writers got harder. He fought for three weeks to get a story in on the economics of Disney’s amusement parks (it was a growing problem since Wait’s death and the eighty-two recession, and David wanted to do it before national attention was focused by a takeover), and won, largely because Chico backed him, only to be handed a story by a writer under him. Jeff Nelson, that missed the point and was impossibly dull.
Nelson was a middle-aged man, a corporate retainer, just above a level of incompetence that would provoke firing, but well below true value. He was joked about regularly, “floated” from section to section, usually dumped on the newest senior editor, the least able to defend himself from being given an albatross. David had Irked Nelson (his relentless pleasantness was an essential reason for his long survival) and did nothing to remove him from his sections because David could assign Nelson stories David himself cared about and then freely rewrite them in his own style without the fuss and hurt feelings that caused the writers who had vestiges of self-respect and ambition still in them.