“Uh, I don’t know. I thought I might like to be forced to …” Overwhelming embarrassment flooded his consciousness, followed by incredulity at the fact that he was actually having this conversation. He cleared his throat. “To worship you.”
“You mean body worship?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Anal worship is permitted. Pussy worship is not.”
He loved her saying that — the flat tone, so matter-of-fact that she could have been someone ordering a large orange juice with the breakfast special. Now he wanted to provoke more discussion of her rules. “Uh … can I worship your breasts?”
“No!” Now she was furious, speaking rapidly, the words clipped. “That’s not dominance. That’s sex. You go to a prostitute for that!” And she hung up.
David stared at the phone, abashed. And amazed. Could she really mean it? She wasn’t a prostitute? She could afford to turn down someone willing to pay a hundred dollars an hour just to lick her breasts?
He imagined kneeling behind her as she lowered her ass onto his mouth, and felt hard. He replayed in his mind her controlled dull voice: “Anal worship is permitted. Pussy worship is not.” He rubbed himself through the pants, his penis straining against his underpants, and wanted desperately to speak to her again.
He picked up the phone to call back — without noticing that the line light was on. Through the receiver he heard the media writer Charlie Huddleston saying to his secretary:
“You mean Little Chico isn’t up there with them for the beheading?”
His secretary was laughing, which covered the sound of David picking up the receiver.
“Do you think he’ll take you up to Animal Crackers with him?” Huddleston went on.
“God forbid,” she said, still giggling.
“Is he really bad to work for?” Huddleston said.
“No. But he’s no fun. Spends most of the time in there with the door closed. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Probably drinking,” Huddleston said. “He’s bombed every Friday night. I guess its tough being a prodigy. Well, you better buzz me through.”
“Okay,” she said, and instantly David’s intercom rasped.
He felt no rage. He flipped the button.
“Charlie Huddleston on two,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, and got on again. He noticed with interest that Huddleston’s tone with him had the same casualness and ease, maintaining a respectful friendliness with no effort. “Hi! I’m hearing wild rumors. Should I be preparing a transfer-of-power story?”
“Gee, Charlie, I don’t know. Hey, you know there was something I wanted to ask you. Get confirmation.”
“What’s that?” Huddleston said.
“I heard from somebody that I’ve got a nickname at the magazine.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, nervousness creeping in.
Let’s make him wonder, David thought. “Yeah. Have you heard it? Little Chico.”
“No kidding,” Charlie said, now definitely shaky and confused. “I haven’t heard that.”
“Oh, good. It’s kind of insulting.”
“Yeah, it is. Oh, there’s my other phone. I’d better—”
“Sure.” David said with a smile. “Bye.” He hung up, feeling good. Feeling lucky. In control.
Tony stretched forward in his chair to relieve the dull ache in his back. The last lines were being said. He noticed with pleasure that they had the right tone of finality. The audience at this reading of his new play — the other members of the Uptown Theater and. especially important, its artistic director. Hilary Bright — were rapt, their expressions concentrated. There had been a lot of laughs, not quite as many as he had hoped, a few sounded automatic, polite, but the “heavy” scenes had played even better than he had expected. The success of this reading was important: Hilary Bright had arranged it to help her determine whether his play was ready for the Uptown Theater to do a production of it this fall.
Now came the applause. There would have been clapping no matter what they thought of the play — after all, everyone there had to suffer the same sort of evaluation at one time or another, and between compassion and fear there was never an insulting response at a reading. But this applause was loud, enthusiastic, and genuine. Tony had heard enough of the other kind to know the difference.
Hilary, while clapping, got up and moved in front of the actors seated on chairs, and turned to face the audience. “Well, that was delightful,” she said, smiling.
Delightful? Tony thought. It’s supposed to be either shattering or funny, but delightful? Sounds like a description of a magic act, not a good play.
“Tony,” she said, looking at him. “How can we be of help to you?”
She always asked this preposterous question, this fastball begging to be banged out of the park with a bat of sarcasm. And, predictably, Tony took his cut: “Got an empty theater?”
Laughter. Hilary smiled. “Not if we get plays like this,” she said, but hurried on, as though frightened by the commitment it implied. “Is there anything that surprised you about the play — hearing it read?”
“I thought it would be funnier,” Tony said. “But I don’t really want to talk about what I think. I’m sick to death of what I think. First I’d like to hear from the actors — who did a wonderful job,” he added, and began to clap, joined immediately by the audience.
When the applause died down, Hilary gestured to the row of performers seated on folding chairs, their copies of the play on their laps like prayer books. During the last six months, since he had dropped the screenplay, he had worked madly, joyously reworking his old play about the three civil-rights workers who were killed by the Klan, feeling younger, stronger, and happier with each day. Nearing the end, his confidence in the future had returned in earnest. He really believed this time it would happen, this time he would win the honors so long expected for him, so long taken for granted, and now so desperately needed for survival. He had broken free of the small autobiographical limitations of his early plays, he had forced his head through the birth canal and observed a world other than his own.
The actors began. Tony liked listening to their opinions and he sometimes changed things because of them, but never because of the content of their criticisms. Performers always believed their parts should be bigger, their motivations less selfish and explicated in greater detail. They were forever forgetting that their job was to tour the audience through a walk in the woods, not stop and discuss the bark of one tree endlessly. This time they were unusually content: they praised “the structure” (something they knew nothing about) and then talked about how much they “liked” their characters (the highest possible encomium). Then the audience of playwrights and directors began to comment. The toughest remarks at these readings were commonly from other writers, and that held true again, although the major criticism wasn’t posed aggressively.
“I didn’t think. Tony …” said Hal Turner, the most successful of the Uptown Theater playwrights, a likely candidate for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for his off-Broadway success. The Evening, a grim two-character play about a confrontation between a rapist and the husband of his victim. “I didn’t think,” he repeated, his eyes wandering to the ceiling musingly. Everyone fell silent, respectfully. “Though I loved many, many things, I didn’t feel, at the end, that you had really taken it far enough. I don’t think the ending is sufficiently dramatic.”
“You mean because the killing is offstage?” Tony said, his worst fear confirmed. He too had felt the ending was anticlimactic, but so far no one else had said anything.