Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

  Where did he ever hear of Artie Shaw? And why on Earth would he want to grow up to be him? “Take—that—awayl" I yelled, pointing toward Europe.

  So he moped off, clarinet at half-mast, body doing a whole great exaggerated number on how mournful he felt. Clarinet! That's what Christmas is!

  Meantime, Ginger was nagging, saying, “That’s no way to act toward a child who’s taking an interest in something.”

  “Under this window?”

  “You could have spoken to him gently and reasonably.”

  “I didn’t feel gentle and reasonable.”

  “You certainly didn’t.”

  So much for sex; we spent the time instead arguing about me mistreating my children. Well, it made a change from our argument about me mistreating her children.

  Wednesday, July 13th

  STABBED!

  Betrayed!

  Bewildered.

  There must be a logical sequence of events here. The events are by no means logical, but maybe the sequence can become so.

  At about ten-thirty this morning, with me deep in the Central American rain forests among the Mayans, Vickie phoned. She bandied no words, but got to the point at once. “Hello, Tom,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Don’t worry, it isn’t you,” she said, sounding somewhat bitter.

  “It isn’t? Who is it?”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” she said. “You and I met the end of March, and the doctor says I was already pregnant then, and the way the timing works it must have been the last week in February, right after Washingtons Birthday. That’s when I took a week off and went to Club Med.”

  “Oh.”

  “So that’s that,” she said.

  I said, “Wait a minute. Vickie, you’re four and a half months pregnant, and you didn’t know it?”

  “Well, I’ve always been very irregular,” she said. “My GYN says it’s a neurotic reaction. I just thought, well, I’m crazier than usual because I’m fucking a writer.”

  Letting that one pass, I said, “So what now?”

  “Well, it’s too late for an abortion. I’m going to Fort Lauderdale, talk it over with my mother, brood about things. I may keep the kid, if it’s fairly attractive.”

  “How long—” My voice failed me, because I suddenly saw why she was phoning. “How long will you be gone?”

  “That’s hard to say. Depends on a lot of things. I’m asking for a year’s absence. Without pay, of course. Let my mother support me, the nasty bitch.”

  “You aren’t my editor any more,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about that, Tom,” she said. “There’s a couple books I’m really sorry to leave behind, and that’s one of them. I enjoyed working with you. You know, the fucking too, but also the book. It’s nice to work with a professional.”

  “Thank you,” I said, while my other hand crumpled mounds of paper. This is why she’s been gaining weight!

  “I’ll stay on till the end of the week,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll see they give you to somebody good.”

  There is no such thing. I said, “Not the man who edits the war books?”

  “Funny thing about Hiram,” she said. “He died last month.”

  “Hilarious.”

  “Died at his desk. Apparently he was there three or four days, nobody noticed. Finally one of the cleaning women one night, vacuuming around him, she noticed the smell.”

  “Well, somebody goes and somebody comes.”

  “It’s been nice coming with you, Tom. I don’t suppose you’ll be in the city the next few days.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m all tied up out here.”

  “Ah, well. Maybe next year sometime.”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  “So long, Tom,” she said.

  “So long. Say hello to your mother.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to,” she said, and that was that. Well, that ended the Mayans for today. Even though I’d heard Mary moving around downstairs, I abandoned my desk and my privacy at once, too shaken to worry about what she might want to say to me.

  The problem is, out here in the humid sunny heat, with everybody damn near naked anyway, Mary’s sexual encounters are getting steamier and steamier, and she just insists on telling me about them. “There was a man up at the beach in one of those very skimpy swimsuits,” she said the other day, “sitting on a towel facing me with his knees up and his legs spread. He kept looking at me, and sort of running his fingers up and down his own thigh, like this—” She showed me, running her own fingers up and down her own thigh, not quite to the swimsuit-covered crotch. “—and I could see he was getting an erection. Well, I—”

  “Mary, I don’t need to know all—”

  “It’s so different out here,” she went on, blandly, merely interested in her own story. “People wear so little, and they just let you see everything that’s happening to them. And this man’s suit was that very thin kind of shiny material— you know the kind I mean?”

  “Yes, Mary, I—”

  “I could see everythingshe told me, calm eyes round and innocent. “And it was a very thick one, too. But not too long, which was lucky, or it would have poked right out the top of the suit.”

  “Mary, look, you—”

  “And then he came over to ask me what time it was. I was sitting on the beach towel, you know, and he stood right next to me, and there it was, practically in my face. 1 could see the vein. And he said, ‘Do you have the time?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t have my watch with me,’ and then he smiled and sort of gyrated, like this.” And she did a slow round movement with her hips. She’s in very good physical condition, Mary, the muscles rippling beneath the flesh as she did a deliberate illustrative bump and grind.

  “Mary,” 1 said firmly, “if you wouldn’t look back at these people, they—”

  “They’ll just come over,” she said. “It’s because I’m alone. This man, I just told him, ‘I’m going for a swim now,’ and I did.”

  “So am I,” I said, and went away and leaped directly into the water, which steamed around me.

  That wasn’t the only one, not by a long shot. Almost every day, Mary has another rutting male to tell me about. There was the time she was body-surfing and a man nearby, also body-surfing, kept managing to bump into her in the water, once getting his hand inside her bra. And the man who tried to adjust her bicycle seat while she was seated on the bicycle. And the man with the banana, who—

  Well. The point is, for my own peace of mind I’ve been avoiding Mary as much as possible while Ginger’s away in town, this being the week Ginger has to commute. (Mary won’t tell these stories in front ot Ginger, of course.) But today was a special case if there ever was one, and so, regardless of what pornography awaited me below, I went downstairs after my Vickie conversation, and into the kitchen, where Mary was boiling water for iced tea. I took a glass down from the shelf, put ice cubes in it from the freezer, then filled it about halfway with vodka. I had opened the refrigerator door and was reaching for the orange juice when Mary said, “Tom? Is something wrong?”

  “You remember Vickie Douglas,” I said, pouring orange juice.

  “Your editor, yes.”

  “She’s pregnant,” I said, putting the orange juice away.

  “Tom!” She stared at me.

  “Not by me,” I said in irritation, and knocked back half my drink. Then another ramification of the situation came to me—the realization that that irregular madwoman was capable of getting herself knocked up at her age despite all the aids and counsel of modern-day science, and if she hadn’t been preggers already when we’d met I could have been the father—and I knocked back the drink’s other half.

  “Tom, it’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Mary said.

  “You gonna tell me the sports next?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  “Vickie is taking a year’s leave of absence.
She is no longer my editor. The Christmas Book is an orphan.”

  “Well, that happened before,” she pointed out, “when Jack Rosenfarb left. You were worried then, and it worked out all right with Vickie.”

  “That was a special case,” I muttered. I was building a second drink. It would simply not be possible for me to climb into bed with Hambleton Cudlipp the Third. Nor could I see myself running this whole routine again if they gave me another Vickie Douglas, of whom there is a rich supply in New York publishing. “I’m doomed,” I said.

  The whistling teakettle whistled. Mary made tea while I made a screwdriver and took it out to the back deck. Standing in the sunshine, I surveyed the blackness of life. Mary came out and touched my arm and said, “It’ll be all right, Tom.”

  “It will not. We are precisely at the point where Craig can drop the ball.” I nodded at the little guesthouse. “Hows the accommodation?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Hot in the daytime, but I’m never in there in the daytime. Tom, don’t brood.”

  “The definition of insanity,” I said, “is ‘an inappropriate reaction to stimuli.’ Given the stimuli I’ve just been hit with, if I didn't brood I’d be crazy.” I swigged screwdriver.

  Mary took the glass out of my hand and put it on the table. “Don’t hurt yourself, Tom,” she said. “It isn’t your fault.”

  “I know that.”

  “So don’t make it worse. You’ll give yourself a headache and a hangover and an upset stomach, you’ll ruin the entire day—”

  “The entire day is ruined.”

  She came over and put her arms around me and drew my head down into the crook of her shoulder and throat. Patting the back of my head, holding my torso with her other arm, she murmured, “It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”

  Mary is several inches shorter than me, so it was a somewhat awkward posture I was in, knees bent slightly, head folded down like a hanging victim, and yet a sudden wave of comfort and warmth flowed over me as I stood there, much stronger and sweeter than anything the vodka could have done. Mary was in her bikini and my hands felt the warmth of her back. In my nose wras a faint aroma, a sweet duskiness, that reminded me of times long long ago.

  When a couple live together for years, they lose the knowledge of one another’s scent. But Mary and I had been apart now for seventeen months, and had become strangers again. Her fragrance was both new and old—and so was the feel of her body against me—and very disturbing.

  She stopped patting my head, but continued to hold me, and arched her back so she could look up at my face. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll survive,” I said, and kissed her.

  Very warm. The old-and-new again. Known but exotic. Complex. Memory and desire and regret and distant warning bells.

  She released me, stepped back, smiled. If she had smiled in some sort of triumph or conquest I would have hated her, but there was nothing in the smile but care and concern. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ll make coffee.”

  I sat under the beach umbrella, looking out at the sunlight. My thoughts were confused, but calmer. The problems of The Christinas Book seemed very far away; important, but not urgent.

  I did not go to bed with Mary, nor did she seem to assume I might. If there had been any hint of it from her, would I have followed through? I have no idea.

  The coffee helped, and further calm conversation with Mary helped, but I still got my headache. Now I shall go fling myself into the ocean.

  Sunday, July 17th

  MARY left this afternoon.

  Several times in the last two weeks I thought the situation might explode, but it never quite did happen. Ginger once or twice wanted an explosion, and I could see it, and I guess Mary could see it, too, because she very gently and quietly disappeared from view. I made the mistake once of pointing this out to Ginger: “You keep saying Mary’s devious,” I said, “but if she was devious wouldn’t she let you pick a fight with her?”

  “What do you mean, pick a fight?”

  “You’ve been spoiling for a fight all—”

  Well. That was a mistake, which took about a day and a half to rectify.

  Otherwise, both women were rather good about it. They went to the beach together—with all the kids—and they talked together civilly enough. There was tacit agree- mcnt that Ginger was boss of the kitchen and Mary a guest eating Gingers meals, except that the five days Ginger had to go to work in the city Mary volunteered to make dinner and Ginger accepted the offer. Every evening, if we weren’t all playing a boardgame or something with the kids, Mary would retire to her guesthouse and read while Ginger and I did whatever we did in the main house.

  Fair Harbor on Fire Island is a very communications-biz community, with television people and ad agency people as well as writers and editors and a sprinkling of showfolk. I know a few of these people, mostly through business contacts, and one of the guys, a magazine editor named Herm Morgenstern who by summer is a feared and ruthless volleyball player—he finishes most summers absolutely swathed in Ace bandages—said to me on the beach one day, grinning, “Tom, I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “The women.” He shook his head in admiration. “Jeezuz. The wife and the girlfriend, all in the same house. You all bunk in together, do you?” His tongue was somewhat hanging out.

  “Hey, no,” I said. “It’s nothing like that at all, Herm. Mary and I are separated, she has her own little guesthouse, there’s nothing going on at all.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding, smirking. “Sure.”

  I was reminded of Vickie assuming Ginger and Lance and I had a menage a trots, and I imagine Herm wasn’t the only person in Fair Harbor making the same assumption about Ginger and Mary and me. I suppose other people’s lives always look more exciting; it’s hard to believe that everybody’s as disorganized and screwed-up and ordinary as ourselves.

  It’s funny, but the place feels incomplete without Mary prowling around, hung with cameras, looking for not-quite- good-enough photo opportunities. A few empty film containers are still to be seen here and there, little black plastic jars with gray plastic tops, and they remind me of her; Mary’s need to be a successful photographer, Mary’s softness that makes the goal impossible.

  Why did all that make her somehow belong here? I don’t know. 1 only know we’d established a status quo here, the seven of us, against all odds, and now I find myself missing it. Afraid I might make the mistake of letting Ginger see the way I feel, I have come up to the evening- cooled bedroom to work on the second batch of Christmas Book galleys. Last Friday, Vickie, in her final official act before motherhood—if that kid is smart, it’ll leave the womb running—messengered this second portion of the galleys over to Ginger’s office, and Ginger brought them out with her that evening, and I’ve been working on them ever since.

  There wasn’t time to correct them all before Mary’s departure today, unfortunately, or she could have taken them with her. Somehow I’ll have to get them back to Craig this week.

  I wonder who I’ll address them to?

  Tuesday, July 19th

  I knew Dewey Heffernan was trouble when he phoned yesterday to introduce himself. “This is Dewey Heffernan,” said a voice so young and eager my first thought was that this at last was Jennifer’s first boyfriend, an advent we’ve all been anticipating with some suspense, and not a little dread. But, no; Jennifer was apparently still prepubescent, because this Dewey Heffernan was to be my new editor.

  The publishing world contains more disasters than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Huck.

  “I’m really excited about this, Tom,” Dewey Heffernan said, while I stood with the phone in my Fire Island living room in my swimsuit and Earth Day T-shirt and slowly died. “May I call you Tom?”

  You may not call me at all, fella. “Sure,” I said.

  “And I hope you’ll call me Dewey.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “I just want you to know,�
�� he said, “when Miss Douglas told me I was going to take over The Christmas Story I just—”

  “The Christmas Book," I said.

  “I’ve loved Christmas since I was a little kid,” he assured me. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me on this job.”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  Dewey was calling to suggest that he and I meet and have lunch when I came to the city with the corrected galleys. So that’s what happened; this morning, I shook the sand off, put on actual clothing with shoes for the first time in two weeks, gathered up my galleys, and took the 10:15 ferry to catch the 11:07 train to meet Dewey Heffernan at the Tre Mafiosi at one o’clock.

  The transition from Fire Island to New York is always traumatic, even without Dewey Heffernan. On Fire Island there are no automobiles, no tall buildings, very little noise. I almost never wear shoes there, and certainly not socks. Unless there’s something somebody wants to watch on television, we never know the exact time, and couldn’t care less. The air is clearer and less humid, and the temperature is usually five to ten degrees cooler than in the city. Last week, Ginger had had to make that awful transition five days in a row (while worrying unnecessarily about me alone out here with Mary), but now Mary was gone (I’d seen no point in describing our nonsexual encounter to Ginger) and Ginger was in full residence, and / was the one who had to leave Eden for Mordor.

  And Dewey Heffernan. I arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early, planning to have a drink at the bar while waiting, and he was already there. Now, I had an excuse for being early, since I was tied to railroad and ferry schedules, but for him the restaurant was a mere five minute walk from the office, so his presence so early was a baffling but troubling sign.

  So was his presence, if you know what I mean. With Vickie, and earlier with Jack Rosenfarb, I had always lunched at one of the banquettes or alcoved tables around the edges of the room, but this time the maitre d’ led me to a tiny table in the middle of the place, at which sat something that might have been Raskolnikov, if it had had any gumption.