Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

  “I’m afraid he is, Tom,” she said, and sat in her chair, and told me about Helena and Santa Fe and the sublet. “The sublet starts the sixteenth,” she finished, “next Monday, so Lance has to be out by then.”

  “He has to come here?'

  “What am I going to do, Tom?” I could see then that she was at wit’s end. Wringing her hands, she said, “It really isn’t Lance’s fault, I know it isn’t, but it’s awfully awkward.”

  “A similar phrase was going through my own brain.” “It’s such short notice.”

  “It sure is.”

  “I meant for Lance,” she said. “Helena didn’t say a word to him until Tuesday—to avoid a fight, she said—just before she left.”

  “For Santa Fe.”

  “Lance spent the last three days trying to find an apartment, but you know what that's like in this city.”

  “It has been done.”

  “Not in three days. Not when you had no idea you were going to have to even look for an apartment.”

  “Granted,” I said. “I still don’t see . . .” I gestured encompassingly around our living room. Our living room.

  “It’s just for a little while,” she said, “until he can find a place. After all,” she said, going on the attack slightly, “he does still pay part of the rent here.”

  If I’d had a beard, I would have muttered into it. “And don’t forget,” she went on, “we’re going to have Alar) living with us for two weeks, out on Fire Island.” “In a completely separate house,” I said. “And with plenty of advance warning. And I certainly don't want her there.”

  “Well, I don’t want Lance here,” she said, flaring a bit. “It could become very embarrassing. Besides, I think it could be bad for the children, seeing their father all the time.”

  “It could be bad for me seeing him all the time,” I said. I smacked my chair arm. “Whose chair is this going to be? And that’s another thing; you and he are still legally married, you know.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”

  “We’re not going to get into any hassle about conjugal rights, are we?”

  “Oh, don’t be absurd!”

  “All right, where’s he going to sleep?”

  “It’ll have to be in your office, but it’s just for a—”

  “My office! I’m working full-time on The Christmas Book, I have material all over—”

  “Lance won’t be there except when he’s asleep,” she said, “and you won’t be working in the middle of the night. You never did before.”

  “Work habits change.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “You’re moving your husband into this apartment,” I said, “and you’re telling me not to be silly.”

  She sighed. She unnarrowed her eyes and bit her lower lip and looked honestly troubled. “I know, Tom,” she said. “This is a terrible situation, nobody’s happy about it, and I blame the whole thing on Helena.”

  “In Santa Fe.”

  “But what am I going to do?” she asked. “Lance spent three days trying to find some other solution, but there just isn’t any. He wouldn’t have called me if he’d had any other choice, and I wouldn’t have said yes if I'd had any other choice.”

  “Move over,” I said. “Let me up there with you on the no-other-choice shelf. ”

  “It won’t be that bad,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, it will. But as you say, there’s nothing else to do.”

  “And it’s only for a few days.”

  “Sure,” I said, and Ginger came over and sat in my lap and thanked me for being understanding, and we kanoodled a bit.

  So the next day, Saturday, Lance arrived to pick up his kids for the weekend, and when he brought them back on Sunday he stayed. Many suitcases and liquor store cartons filled up my office, the sofabed in there stood open, and Lance fell ravenously on the vodka when it was offered. He was looking pretty damn hangdog, and although I was goddam annoyed at the situation, I couldn’t find it in my heart to be sore at Lance, so here we are with Lance living in what is, after all, his apartment. But at least he’s had the grace to sit on the sofa and not my chair the few times he’s been in the living room.

  In truth, the idea of it is much worse than the actuality. Lance works in a midtown office—he’s some sort of department head of a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS that does blue-sky demographic research—and he’s been arranging his dinners out in the world somewhere, so essentially we only see him for half an hour or so in the morning (he uses the kids’ bathroom) and maybe a while in the evening. The arrangement is now four days old, and has been less awkward than one might have expected. Nevertheless, he is there, in my office.

  And The Christmas Book, boxes and boxes of correspondence, tear sheets, Xeroxes, manuscripts, photos, tagged books, all of this compost that’s supposed eventually to grow a mighty volume, has been laboriously moved from its proper home around my desk into this bedroom, where Ginger drapes her pantyhose over it. It’s hard to take your life’s work seriously when it’s seen through a lot of double-layer crotches.

  Despite it all, however, the book is coming along, with more and more terrific input from my celebs. The Gore Vidal piece I was reading when Lance broke over my bow was a weirdly effective and chilling item, half essay and half story, on the idea that what Christ brought to the world was not life but death. Pre-Christianity, if I understand what he’s saying, was an innocent and happy pagan time because, although death existed, nobody cared much about its implications; instead, all living creatures devoted their attention to life. When Christ arrived, He brought with Him an obsession with death and what happens thereafter that darkened the world from His day till this. Makes a nice counterpoint to things like Garfield and the Coca-Cola tray.

  Carl Sagan has sent me a hot-air balloon defining the star the Wise Men followed; sure, why not? And Stephen King came through with a cute twist-ending story about a little boy who sees future events in the shiny ornaments on the Christmas tree. Joan Didion, talking out of the side of her immobile mouth, sent along a cheery discription of Christmas Eve on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, and I think John Leonard’s piece is about a marriage breaking up on Christmas morning. I think so. -

  On the visual side, Jules Feiffer sent along a nice strip of his dancer in her black leotard, plus a Santa Claus hat, doing a dance to Peace On Earth; she’s dubious, but hopeful.

  I’m not sure the Jill Krementz photo of the sidewalk Santas all gathered in a room to receive their instructions is exactly right for the book; somehow it’s more reportage than what I’m looking for. I’m still thinking about that one. (I showed it to Mary, who can be very judgmental about sucessful photographers’ work, and she regarded it with utter disdain. “Where’s the truth in it?” she wanted to know. Her girl-builds-birdhouse series was rejected by that youth magazine, and rejection always makes her start talking about truth and esthetics and artistic purpose. Nevertheless, this time she may be right.)

  The envelopes from Isaac Asimov I’m sending back unopened.

  And now I have a letter from an agent named Henry Morrison, telling me his client, Robert Ludlum, had intended to do a Christmas short-short story for the book, but by the time he’d set the scene and introduced the characters he had twenty-five thousand words on paper, so it looks like it’ll be his next novel instead—The Yuletide Log, perhaps—and therefore I shouldn’t count on a submission from Ludlum. Less baroque refusals have been received from

  James Michener, William Styron and Pauline Kael, but with the depth on the bench I already have I’m no longer troubled by anybody saying no.

  In fact, if it weren’t for Lance in the house, I wouldn’t have any troubles at all. (Apart from Mary, of course, weaving and unweaving Laertes’ winding sheet down there on West 17th Street, but that’s something else.) The best news in a long long time is that good old Vickie managed the near-impossible: She got Craig, Harry & Bourke to make a commitment and come up with the second payment almost
a month ahead of time! More than a week ago, while I was still recovering from Mother’s Day, Vickie called to say she’d gotten Wilson to agree to the early pick-up. Our delight was such that she left work early and we had an immediate editorial conference to celebrate.

  Things continue very well on the Vickie front. In fact, if the advent of Lance can be said to have a silver lining, it is that it has given Ginger enough to think about so she’s less likely to notice any little inadvertent clues I may have on or about my person; like soap, for instance.

  But how much longer can this go on? The situation is extremely fraught, I mean very very densely fraught.

  It is still very possible that this whole thing will blow up in my face, and I’ll lose everything: thrown out by Ginger, no more editorial conferences, and The Christmas Book at the mercy of an editor who hates me.

  In the meantime, before disaster comes—if disaster is to come—Vickie and I are averaging three conferences a week. She likes variety, Vickie does, drama, sweat, agony, fireworks, sequential explosions. And then I come home to Ginger, who expects to be treated like the girl I left my wife for. It takes it out of you. I mean it.

  Friday, May 27th

  I just delivered The Christmas Book

  Five days early!

  Just this week I got my final little cluster of submissions, and they were all fine, and they brought the book up to a size where any more would be too much of a muchness, so I closed the giant doors. And the last through were some of the best.

  Roddy McDowells lovely pictures of celebrities giving their children Christmas presents, for instance, which arrived just barely in time for inclusion, makes a very nice counterpoint right after Buckleys “Floating Celebration.” (Even Mary couldn’t find anything negative to say about those photos.) And until Paul Theroux sent in his grim and nasty piece about having a nervous breakdown alone in a motel room on Christmas Eve, far from one’s family, I hadn’t had anything that really wonderfully followed Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

  As for leading in to “A Christmas Carol,” I had originally planned to use Galbraith’s childhood-in-Canada reminiscence, but the Ann Beattie story I now have is much better for the job. In it, a young woman goes to three households on Christmas afternoon: her ex-husband’s, who is married to a woman with two children and a St. Bernard; her current boyfriend’s, he being a junior college English teacher endlessly planning to go live in Mexico; and her parents’, they being retired but unwilling to move to Florida until they can believe their daughter is “settled.” The story is called “Lies.”

  Let’s see; what else? Russell Baker sent along a deceptively slight piece about the Christmas presents given and received during each of the Seven Ages of Man. It’s funny and well observed, but also surprisingly sad when you stop to think about it. And from Calvin Trillin an oddity, a parody of a New Yorker-stye local journalism piece, the kind of thing where The New Yorker goes to somewhere in South Dakota or North Carolina and does an in-depth but oblique piece about some fierce local controversy. In this one—“Journal: Bethlehem”—there are interviews with innkeepers and shepherds and Roman soldiers and the local gossipmonger, all on the ostensible subject of Herod’s census but somehow circling around and around the birth of Christ. It’s nicely done, but the strange thing is, of course, that Calvin Trillin himself is the one who does those things in The New Yorker. It isn’t often a man parodies himself (at least not consciously), but I must say he did it well.

  As for Mailer and Capote and their Death Row pieces, about a month ago I wrote both of them explaining the problem and saying that, while very different, both pieces were wonderful, and I would like their permission to run them both, with an editorial comment from me about how these two items show how individual true genius is. I said I wanted to run them one after the other—in my format they’ll be about three pages each—either in alphabetical order or with their position determined by the toss of a coin or whatever method they would prefer.

  Well. Both writers immediately telephoned me—an experience, let me tell you—demanding to see the other guy’s work. I sent out Xeroxes with a request for a fast reading, and early this week I got approval from both; apparently, neither of them feels terribly threatened by the other. Capote did insist on alphabetical order, while Mailer suggested a refinement I rather like, which is to run the pieces together, on facing pages, with slightly different typefaces. So that’s what I’m doing, with my own introductory comments on a right-hand page followed by six pages of their work, with Capote’s piece on the left sides (to give him alphabetical precedence). A skimmer who reads it all as one six-page Death Row article will probably come away crosseyed, but that’s okay.

  With luck, this turning,in of the manuscript will bring to an end, or at least give temporary respite from, another problem that’s been getting increasingly tricky; namely, Ginger’s desire to give dinner to my editor and her boyfriend. I’ve been stalling and dancing on that one, not even mentioning it to Vickie, although of course I do realize the eventual meeting is inevitable.

  (Speaking of food and Vickie, while I am continuing to lose weight—nine pounds these last six weeks—Vickie is absolutely blooming. There had originally been a boniness about her that reminded me a little too specifically of the narrow-eyed lady waiting for me at home, but in the last few weeks she’s become sleeker, just a bit fuller all over.)

  In any event, after delivering the book I came home to find Lance already back from work (yes, he’s still here, dammit; almost two weeks now), and he helped me shlep all the rest of the Christmas Book materials out of the bedroom and pile them in one corner of my office, near his cartons of stereo equipment and framed transparencies from Fantasia. Then he bathed in Brut and polished his bald spot to a high gloss and went hopefully out to a party (I’m using hopefully correctly there; hope I didn’t confuse you). And now I’m waiting for Ginger to try on every garment she owns before we go out for our celebratory the-book-is-done-and-we’ve- spent-the-advance dinner.

  I wonder what I’ll do next.

  Tuesday, May 3lst

  LANCE and I are both in the doghouse with Ginger. What happened was, we got drunk. “Stinking drunk,” in Ginger’s felicitous and original phrase.

  We have just had a long weekend, yesterday being Memorial Day, and long weekends are hell on separated daddies. You don’t have the kids Saturday and Sunday, you have the kids Saturday and Sunday and Monday. They’ve seen the Central Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, they’ve seen the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island ferry has ceased to enchant. Strolling around quaint neighborhoods like Chinatown and Greenwich Village is something your native New York kid never wants to do. Movies are over in less than two hours, and there you are on the sidewalk, and now what the hell?

  To complicate matters, I now seem to have four weekend children instead of the standard two. Lance used to come obediently and take his away on Saturday and return them on Sunday, like everybody else, but now that he’s living in the goddam apartment he no longer has to visit his children, so he doesn’t. Also, the weekend is the best time for his two searches: an apartment, and a woman. It doesn’t seem right to leave Joshua and Gretchen home alone when every other middle-class child in New York is out being entertained by daddy, so I’ve been bringing them along; the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Saturday to see the spring flowers, and the Cloisters on Sunday, because we hadn’t been there for a while.

  Yesterday, Monday, the traditional Memorial Day itself, I took the kids to lunch in a Columbus Avenue fern bar and then we walked down to one of the small movie houses near Lincoln Center to see some raunchy R-rated French film the kids wouldn’t be allowed admittance to without the presence of a consenting adult, but when we got there that showing was sold out and there was no other movie in the neighborhood they all wanted to see. My capacity for invention had just reached overload, so we stood around on the sidewralk until Jennifer took pity on me and said,
“Let’s go home and play Uno.” '7bHome has become a strange and slippery word these days, impossible to define except in context; in the circumstances of that moment, by “home” Jennifer meant my place on West End Avenue rather than her place on 17th Street, which everyone else automatically understood.)

  So we went home, and Lance was there, wandering around stripped to the waist; which I thought was inappropriate. “I thought you were going apartment-hunting,” I said.

  “I’ve been,” he told me. “No luck. I thought you were taking the kids to the movies.”

  I explained our misfortune, and went on to the bedroom to change out of my jacket, where I found Ginger, in a thoroughly bad mood for some reason, dressed in her robe and stripping the bed. “If you’re going to change your plans,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me. I intended to get a lot of cleaning done around here today.”

  “The movie was sold out.”

  Ginger banged open both bedroom windows. “Well, get out of here” she said. “I have to air this place out.”

  “It is a little musty,” I agreed.

  “Out.”

  Back in the living room, Lance apparently was feeling some belated sense of parental responsibility, because, having put a shirt on, he offered to join our little group and—since Ginger was, through various crashing noises deeper in the apartment, making it clear she didn’t want any of us around right now—he even had a suggestion: “Let’s go over to the park and do a little touch football, the Patchetts against the Diskants.”

  Everybody thought that was a great idea. Bryan went to help Joshua clamber through his closet until he found his football, which was only slightly soft, and then we six left Ginger to her cleaning and her bad temper as we made our way eastward across 70th Street to Central Park, tossing the football back and forth along the way.