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Wallingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested Arlington Road. He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thrillers made her too tense.
"Eyes Wide Shut?" Wallingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. "Kubrick's last--"
"He just died, right?"
"That's right."
"All the eulogizing has made me suspicious," Mary said.
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p; A smart girl, all right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. "It's with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman."
"It ruins it for me that they're married," Mary said.
The lull in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a position to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; all of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they'd simply stopped.
"Let's not go to a movie, Pat. Let's go to your place. I've never seen it. Let's just go there and fuck some more."
This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. "Okay, Mary," Wallingford said.
He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wallingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especially in New York, everyone recognized disaster man. But when Patrick was paying the bill, he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop's patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: "A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat."
It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. "All this for you alone?" she asked.
"It's just a one-bedroom, like yours," Wallingford protested. But while this was strictly true, Patrick's apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of all, from Mary's point of view, was that his apartment's one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby's crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.
"The baby could go there," as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, "and I'd still have a little privacy."
"You'd like to trade your apartment for mine--is that it, Mary?"
"Well ... if you're going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like all you'll really need to have in New York is a pied-a-terre. My place would be perfect for you!"
They were naked, but Wallingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he'd lost the heart to "fuck some more," as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown--there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.
"You'll get used to the noise," Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wallingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her small, soft belly, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months' time. "You've got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat," she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.
He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he'd underestimated about her. Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted--the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that really what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if all he really wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?
"Poor penis," Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. "It must be tired," she went on. "Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin."
"We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for both our plans." She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.
"Smart boy, Pat. And you're basically a good guy, too--no matter what anybody else says."
"It would appear that I'm perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool," was all Wallingford said in reply.
He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wallingford said on-camera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.
When it was evident that Wallingford wasn't up to having sex again, Mary said they might as well go to work a little early. "I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer," was how she expressed it. "I have a few ideas," she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown.
Her timing was almost magical. Patrick listened to her talk about "closure," about "wrapping up the Kennedy thing." She'd already written the script, he realized.
Almost as an afterthought--they'd cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom--Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. "If I were you, Pat," she confided, "I wouldn't worry about Fred. I wouldn't give him a second thought."
At first, Wallingford believed that the newsroom women were all abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they all knew. But Fred had been fired--that was the reason for the women's mercurial chatter. Wallingford was not surprised that Mary wasn't shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women's room.)
Patrick was surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wallingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton's innocuousness struck Patrick as potentially dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people--even Fred, even Patrick Wallingford. But Wharton's only reference to Wallingford's small rebellion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred's subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word "unfortunate." Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.
