Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

“I guess you did,” I said.

  “Got a pencil?”

  I lunged for one. “Yes, sir!”

  “Write this down. Area code two oh three. Four six five, nine nine five oh. Dewey gives you any more trouble, you phone me.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But there won’t be any more trouble. I straightened him right up.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Nice talking with you,” he demanded. “Looking forward to the book.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Very fond of Christmas,” he decreed, and shot the phone. At least, that’s what it sounded like.

  I can’t think about the Mayans now, not after F. Ringwald Heffernan. Could that call possibly have been on the level? I didn’t recognize the voice, and it’s too weird to be a joke. Anyway, it’s time to go turn the oven on to three- twenty-five.

  Done. In lieu of the Mayans, for the next half hour until Mary gets home, I’ll think about my own imperiled and changing lifestyle. I don’t quite know what’s happening any more, except that I seem to be spending more time downtown than uptown. This is partly caused by the continuing saga of the drifting Lance, and partly by Ginger’s sudden urge toward self-improvement.

  Lance first. The apartment sharing with his co-worker Bradford lasted just seventeen days. On the thirteenth of this month, two weeks ago today, he moved out, and I mean out. He’s gotten himself transferred to some other wholly-owned CBS subsidiary, doing some other arcane sociological research, but the point is that the new job is in Washington. Our nation’s capital. We had a drink before he left and he said, “There’s more women down there, the male-female ratio is very very good from my point of view. But better than that, I understand they’ve still got some women that are interested in men. Just think; never again will I be in a discussion about Givenchy.” He also said they don’t have herpes down there, but that sounds like fantasy.

  Anyway, now that he’s living in Washington he’ll be performing his daddy obligations a bit differently Every other weekend he’ll take the shuttle up to New York Friday afternoon and back down to DC Sunday evening. And guess where he’ll spend Friday and Saturday nights?

  Well, as he himself said (while Ginger stood thinlipped and narrow-eyed in the background), “You’re not really using the office any more, Tom, and it saves me a lot of hotel money.”

  As for Ginger, for reasons best known to herself she is suddenly taking two evening courses at the New School— Japanese political history on Tuesday and Thursday, European silent film on Wednesday—which has altered our lives in other ways. Three evenings a week, Gretchen and Joshua dine with their babysitter while I meet Ginger at seven thirty-five, when her courses get out, and we eat in some Village restaurant before going uptown.

  Changes make more changes. Since I’m working on 17th Street and the New School is on 12th Street, it makes no sense for me to go way uptown on those days, so I hang around here when the day’s work is done. I’ve been helping Bryan with his English homework, and Jennifer and I have a massive Scrabble tournament under way. I usually sit down at table with them and Mary, because what else would I do while they’re eating dinner? I eat lightly, but nevertheless this means I’m downing two dinners three nights a week, and I’m beginning to put those pounds back on that Vickie took off.

  I wonder what the Mayans did when things got too confusing.

  Thursday, September 29th

  YESTERDAY Hallmark said no, and today Cosmopolitan said no.

  The Hallmark thing was just a stab in the dark anyway, but the Cosmo rejection is annoying. They gave me an assignment to write about the world’s most famous jewels, and I did, and now it turns out some other editor there had already assigned some other writer an article on famous jewel thefts, so his article and my article cover an awful lot of the same territory. I’m not being rejected because I did it wrong, in other words, but because they did it wrong.

  This is a thing several magazines do; assign too many articles and overlapping articles and articles they’re not really sure they want, because it doesn’t cost them very much. With Cosmos “no” I got a tiny check, for what is called the kill fee; this means I agree to do the article for twenty-five hundred dollars, but if for any reason they choose not to run it, even if it’s because of their own error, all I get for my work is fifteen per cent. Three hundred seventy-five dollars for twenty-five hundred dollars worth of work .

  Theoretically, of course, I could now sell the same piece to some other magazine, but the slicks are all so specific and unique that it’s usually very hard to find a commissioned piece a second home. I suppose I could retype it, not underlining every fourth word, but it would still have the Cosmo girl’s magpie approach, and what other magazine will want (a) a survey of would-famous jewels (b) told in the style of a rapacious ninny? I’ll ask Mary when she gets home, she sometimes has good ideas on things like this.

  Yesterday she had a potentially very good idea, in re Happy Happy Happy, the greeting card book. After Annie called to say that Hallmark wasn’t interested and that she would now start making submissions to publishers while continuing to look for a patron among other card companies, Mary and I talked about the situation over coffee, and she suggested I take some of the completed sections, where my research and illustrations are in place, and turn them into magazine articles, maybe for somebody like Family Circle or Woman's Day or Parade or even Redbook. If we could get a few of them published that way, it would not only make the wrork start paying for itself but might also help to attract both a book publisher and a greeting card company sponsor. I called Annie with the suggestion this morning, and she’s pondering it. Meantime, I’m going through the material, basting it into a group of potential articles.

  Last night, over dinner in a Thai place called Toon’s on Bleecker Street, Ginger suddenly gave me an ultimatum that I’m still wondering what to do about. “If you’re going to live with me, Tom,” she said, “live with me. Several people have told me how sorry they are we split up, and when I say we haven’t split up they inform me, as though they think I’m the dimmest bulb in the world, that you’ve moved back in with Mary.”

  “People make mistakes,” I said.

  “Don’t you make one,” she said. “Come back uptown, work in your office the way you used to, stop all this ambiguity.”

  “Lance is—”

  “Stop that! Lance is here every other weekend, that’s all he’s here! All his things are out of your office now, the place is just empty almost all the time, there’s no reason for this!”

  “My research material is spread all over the—”

  “Pack it up!”

  I said, “Ginger, there’s no reason to. Everything’s fine just as it is.”

  “Are you living with Mary” she wanted to know, “or are you living with me?”

  “You, of course. I’m not sleeping with Mary, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “You’re not sleeping very much with me either,” she informed me.

  “We’ve both been busy,” I said, because in truth our sex life has slackened somewhat since the end of summer.

  “Tom,” she said, “do you know what next Wednesday is?”

  Was this a change of subject? It didn’t feel like it, somehow. “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  “The fifth of October,” she said sententiously, and sat there looking at me.

  The fifth of October. Not her birthday, not anybody’s birthday that I know. Not a holiday. Guy Fawkes is the fifth of November. I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Our second anniversary,” she said.

  Anniversary? Oh, for God’s sake, it was the first time we went to bed together two years ago! Like Mary remembering the date I left home!

  “Our anniversary.” I shook my head, not quite believing it.

  She pointed a chopstick at me. “If you haven’t moved completely back into the apartment by next Wednesday,” she announced, “you needn’t com
e back at all.”

  I looked at her. “Is that an ultimatum?”

  “I knew there was a word for it,” she said.

  Thursday, October 6th

  I have finished unpacking my office once again, I am back here in these familiar surroundings, and I’m still recovering from all that happened yesterday.

  Yesterday. The famed October fifth, the second anniversary of the coupling of Tom and Ginger, memorialized in the form of an ultimatum from Ginger to Tom, ordering him either to bring his office home or to get out forever.

  I had a week to dither over that selection, and so I did, hoping it would go away of its own accord, that Ginger would forget or change her mind or in some other fashion back away from the precipice, but yesterday morning she made it clear her attitude had not and would not change: “Don’t meet me after school tonight, Tom,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll be here,” she said, “unpacking all your research materials. I’ll come straight home from school and we can eat in tonight.”

  “Ah,” I said, while a cold hard hairbali formed inside my ribcage. “So you still want to make an issue of that, do you?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “There’s no issue. Either you’re here or you aren’t.”

  I could think of nothing just then to reply, though in the subway heading downtown a bit later I did engage in several impassioned interior monologues whose compelling logic, I lied to myself, would have left Ginger without an argument to her name. (Had I really had that much faith in my killer points, I could always have phoned her at her office once I got to mine—up-till-then mine—but somehow I didn’t feel quite up to it.)

  In the morning, I worked on query letters for greeting card articles, but my heart wasn’t in it. I spent most of the time mooning out the window at the airshaft, wondering by what absurd paths I had come to this crossroads. And what further absurd paths might still stretch out ahead.

  Mary and I had lunch together, and I told her at last about Ginger’s ultimatum, saying, “She’s jealous of you, you know. ”

  “That is silly, isn’t it?” she said, smiling a bit wistfully. “It should be the other way around.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Oh, of course it is.” Watching her spoon stir soup, she said, “Ginger’s just afraid of losing you. I’ve lost you.”

  “Come on, Mary,” I said.

  She looked up at me, an inquiring expression on her face. “You really don’t like being wanted, do you? A lot of men would bask in it, having two women want them, but it just makes you nervous.”

  “Things that make trouble make me nervous,” I said.

  She reached out to put her hand over mine, then apparently thought better of it and removed the hand. “I do miss you,” she said. “I think it’s been harder with you half- here like this. I’ve stopped telling you I want you back—”

  “I know.” I resisted the impulse to add, And Vm grateful.

  “I didn’t want to be the one to disturb the equilibrium.”

  “You can always count on Ginger to disturb the equilibrium.”

  She laughed, then said, “The mistake I made, I gave you the idea it was some kind of contest between us. If you stay away you win the contest, but if you come back I win. But it isn’t like that at all, it really isn’t, Tom.”

  Actually, it was exactly like that, an idea I’d never quite formulated for myself but which Mary had just very clearly and succinctly put into words. It was a contest; one of the reasons I was staying away was because I didn’t want to lose. I smiled at her, shaking my head, saying, “I think we’re both more mature than that.”

  “Do you?” She pondered that, studying her soup. “Maybe so,” she said.

  After lunch, bowing to the inevitable, I packed up all my papers and books into two liquor store cartons and a plastic shopping bag that said, “Have a nice day.” Mary had gone out right after we ate, so there were no awkward goodbyes. The typewriter, the two cartons and the shopping bag made a cumbersome burden, but I shlepped them down to the sidewalk, found a cab, traveled uptown, shlepped everything into the building and into the elevator and into the apartment and into the office, made myself a drink, watched the television news, at last unpacked everything, and had just about finished recreating my workspace— thousands of things taped and tacked to the walls, piled on the radiator cover, stacked on the spare chair—when Ginger came in from class. She entered the office, looked around at the familiar mess with a nod and a smile of satisfaction and triumph, and said, “There. That wasn’t so much trouble, was it?”

  “Ginger,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

  She looked at me, calm and happy, and in her eyes 1 could see her preparing to let me have my. little face-saving statement, whatever it might be. “Yes?”

  “I’m leaving you,” I said.

  I was astonished to hear me say that, but nowhere near as astonished as Ginger, who stared at me in absolute paralysis, her face melting like Vincent Price’s statues in House of Wax. She didn’t argue, didn’t tell me I must be kidding, didn’t say a word at all. She just stood there while J picked up the phone and dialed. When Mary answered, I said, “Can I come home now?”

  Mary laughed; uproarious laughter, her face turned partly away from the phone. I waited through it, grinning sheepishly, while Ginger burned a pure white in the corner of my eye, and at last Mary said, “Yes, Tom, of course. Come on home.”

  I hung up, put one of the liquor store cartons on the desk, and started taking things off the wall. And at last Ginger spoke, one word only: “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “when I get down there, Mary won’t smile the way you did just now.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “It’s one of them.”

  She watched me for a while as I repacked the cartons, then went away to the kitchen and made banging and crashing noises. Ginger is not famous for taking things calmly, so I packed as rapidly as I could, wanting if possible to be out of there before the storm broke.

  I was on the second carton when she returned to the doorway and stood there again, watching, a drink in her hand. After a minute, she said, “I won’t put up with this, you know.”

  I said nothing, just kept packing.

  “If you go,” she said, “you don’t come back. I’m not Mary. I’m nobody’s doormat.”

  “I was wrong, Ginger,” I said, packing and packing. “I owe you an apology. I owe everybody an apology. I wasn’t leaving Mary, after all. I thought I was, but I wasn’t.”

  “It took you two years to find that out?”

  “I’m slow,” I said.

  “You’re a truly terrible creep,” she told me.

  “Probably so, probably so.”

  “And what happens to me?”

  “You’re a survivor,” I told her. “Don’t worry about yourself. ”

  “Because you're certainly not going to worry about me.”

  “Gee, I’m not,” I said, rather surprised at the discovery. I paused in my packing to face her frankly and say, “Ginger, we both knew this wasn’t permanent. Remember on your birthday, when I got all weird and asked you to marry me? I’ve never seen anybody look so horrified in my life.”

  “You were drunk.”

  “Of course I was. Fortunately, you still had your wits about you. We’ve both known,” I said, “that this would end some day. The only difference is, we both thought it would end when you were ready.”

  “I did know it,” she agreed, nodding heavily, rather like Medea. “I knew that bitch would get you back some day.” I masking-taped the top of the second carton, dropped the roll of tape into the shopping bag, picked up both cartons.

  “Looks like you were right,” I said, and carried the cartons away to the front door.

  When I returned, she hadn’t moved, was still in the doorway with arms folded and drink at the ready under her chin. She watched me pick up the typewriter and shopping bag— “Have a n
ice day,” it said—and as I edged past her she narrowed her eyes to teeny tiny slits and said, “You deserve each other.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  In the cab on the way downtowm, cartons at both elbowrs, typewriter on lap, shopping bag somewhere around my ankles, I replayed the conversation in my mind, with emphasis on the parts that had referred to Mary, beginning with the finish, and the question of whether I deserved her. Plus Ginger’s earlier comparison of herself with Mary and her use of the word “doormat.”

  It would be stupid, I told myself, merely to exchange one set of guilts for another. I have behaved badly toward Mary, and toward a whole lot of other people—Gretchen comes to mind—but Mary seems willing to forgo the pleasures of resentment and moral superiority for the less certain but more complex pleasures of the status quo ante. If I am incapable of taking her at face value, if I go downtown prepared only to be hangdog and ashamed of myself, what’s the point in going? What have I accomplished? The object of all this thrashing around is to make it possible to stop thrashing around.

  On the other hand, to arrive on 17th Street whistling and carefree, without any acknowledgment of what I’ve put Mary through for twenty months, would be exactly treating her in Ginger’s word, as a doormat. And in fact she wouldn’t put up with that. I know Mary; I know her limits. What Ginger misreads as passivity I understand to be selfknowledge and strength. “Uhh, cabby,” I said, through the bullet holes in the Lucite, “stop at a florist, will you?” The dumb-cluck, little-boy errant husband always comes home with flowers.

  Mary laughed when she saw them; they were in my teeth. The long cone of florist’s paper dangled down my front like some surrealist necktie while I bit down hard on the bunched paper at the cone’s base, tasting staple, the meantime carrying everything else. “Let me help you with that,” she said, took the flowers, turned them right side up, and closed the door after me as I staggered in.

  Reeling a bit, I lunged my way through the apartment and left my office in the office. Mary meanwhile had gone to the kitchen to put the flowers in water in a vase, so I followed her in there and said, “Mary, I’m sorry.”