Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Page 11

  “Opera,” I said, catching up. “The Metropolitan Opera.”

  “Well, yes, of course.” Belatedly, Carl too was becoming puzzled. “What else were we talking about?”

  “Baseball,” I said.

  “The New York Mets,” Lance said, with some emphasis.

  “Oh, base-ball!” Carl did his airy wave again. “Macho ballet,” he said.

  Apparently, Vickie and Ginger were hitting it off somewhat better in the kitchen, so that by the time we sat down to our meal at least the women were relaxed. (Joshua and Gretchen had both been farmed out for a few hours, Gretchen dining at a school chum’s house, Joshua downtown with Mary and my kids. He would sleep over, and I would pick the whole crew up—sans Mary—in the morning.) We talked publishing gossip mostly during dinner, that being the one subject that could reach all the way from Carl to Lance, Carl for the evening pretending to be another editor at Craig rather than Vickie’s secretary. (One pretense among so many.) A few times I saw Ginger give Carl a puzzled look, but that was all.

  After dinner I went to the kitchen to make more drinks, and all at once Vickie was in the doorway, a devilish grin on her lips and a sparkle in her eyes as she hissed, “A menage a trois?” (I know there are those who claim you can’t hiss a word without an S in it, but that’s nonsense. In human speech, to hiss is to whisper forcefully. Pooh to Newgate Callendar.)

  At any rate, I was both startled and alarmed. “No, no,” I whispered. (Not being forceful, it wasn’t a hiss.) “Lance is just between apartments, that’s all. There’s nothing going on.”

  “I’ve never done that,” she mused, and gave another wicked smile. ‘Td like to be a sandwich!”

  “With Carl?”

  She raised her eyes to heaven. “He can be the lettuce leaf,” she said, and went away to the living room.

  Mercifully, it was an early evening; one postprandial drink and a brief description by Carl of a Bette Midler stage show he’d recently seen (complete with impersonations), and they were off, Carl a cowgirl Ariel and Vickie in her too-tight frowsy dress a lonely Caliban. At least he hadn’t described anything as a hoot.

  Later, in bed, Ginger employed the phrase “fag hag.” I blinked big innocent eyes: “What?”

  “Well, surely it’s obvious. Carl is gay as a jay.”

  “I thought he was a little—ambiguous,” I admitted.

  “Ambiguous? I thought he’d go down on the candelabra!”

  “Vickie’s never talked about him much,” I said, shrugging it off.

  Unsuccessfully. “That’s because she’s probably embarrassed,” Ginger said. “But she’s your typical fag hag; afraid of sex, afraid of adult relationships, so she wears frumpy, unattractive clothes and just hangs out with faggots. Did you see that dress?”

  “Yes, I did,” I admitted. I felt I should be defending

  Vickie somehow, but there was just no way to do it. And wasn’t this, under the circumstances, the best possible view for Ginger to take of Vickie? Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist adding, “I thought you two got along.”

  “We did,” Ginger said. “As a woman, I think she’s very sensible. But can you actually believe she’s having an affair with Carl?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Does she dress that way in the office?”

  “I don’t know, I suppose so, I never noticed that much. Not come-on, anyway.”

  Suddenly Ginger’s eyes were narrowed, and peering at me. “No,” she said.

  “No what?”

  “Not come-on. Did you like the ratatouille?”

  Quelle (as Carl would say) change of subject. I complimented her on dinner for a while, and we never did return to the topic of Vickie, so I didn’t find out what had been going on inside her head for that one tiny instant.

  This afternoon—being the day after—I had another brief and equally disquieting talk about Vickie, this one with Lance, in the Central Park Zoo, while the children amused themselves making faces at the monkeys. (The boys always want to look at the snakes, the girls always want to look at the cats, and they always compromise by looking at the monkeys.) “That editor of yours,” Lance said.

  “Oh?”

  “Is that really her boyfriend?”

  “Lance, I have no idea,” I said. “Ginger invited her to dinner, and that’s who she brought.”

  “Good-looking woman,” he said, staring at the monkeys, who were making faces at one another. “She doesn’t know how to wear clothes, but that isn’t everything.”

  I thought I saw where his thoughts were trending, and I didn’t like it. “She was kind of frumpy,” I said. “Ginger thinks she’s a fag hag.”

  But he wasn’t to be deflected that easily. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, nodding, musing, pondering. “There’s a real woman inside there. Maybe she’s on the rebound or something.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “I don’t suppose you know her home number?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “We’ve already been introduced, last night,” he reminded himself. “I could call her at work.”

  “Yes, you could,” I said.

  Now what? Lance and Vickie? To solve the Lance problem must I recreate the Christmas Book problem? Is nothing to be simple any more, ever again?

  Thursday, June 30th

  IT’S not that I’m a nervous traveler. Its just that I’m all packed and ready, and we aren’t leaving until tomorrow.

  June has gone by in a blur. All of a sudden The Christmas Book is a major issue in my life again, and I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in an empty office down at Craig, Harry & Bourke, going over the copy-edited manuscript, straightening out worldwide copyright problems with the rights department, arguing with production about the quality of the first trial color pages (we have thirty-two, done in some new process that doesn’t look quite as cheap as it is), and generally behaving like an executive. Also, Vickie and I have managed to perform a few natural and unnatural acts in there, keeping one eye on the door.

  Time has suddenly become a major problem. Craig wants books in the stores by the end of October, which in publishing terms is yesterday. What with the urgency involved, plus the unwieldy size and shape of the manuscript itself, plus all the other details to be seen to, it just made more sense for Mohammed (me) to go to the mountain (the ms). Also, having an office full of Lance and a bedroom full of flung panythose didn’t help.

  Because of the hurry, and because of the size of the book, they didn’t wait for the copy-editing phase to be finished before sending the manuscript off to the typesetter, but sent it on in batches, and the first batch of galleys should by returning any day for me to proofread. In the meantime, just yesterday I finished the Cosmo jewel piece and mailed it to my editor there and have been finishing a piece for Geo but with this imminent move to Fire Island it just hasn’t been possible to think about the wonderful ancient Mayans of Belize. I’ll finish the piece next week, out there.

  Lance has dated Vickie two or three times, but I haven’t been able to get a straight answer from either of them as to precisely what this means. I don’t think they’ve been to bed together, or Lance would certainly have told me. Lance hasn’t mentioned anything about Vickie to Ginger, which I guess is just as well; it’s probably better for Ginger to go on thinking of Vickie as a fag hag.

  I am looking forward to comparative peace and quiet; not tomorrow, when we make the big move, but starting the day after. With Vickie here and me out there, editorial conferences will quite naturally be fewer, though The Christmas Book will of course require at least my occasional presence in New York. But even with Mary hanging around the first two weeks, I am anticipating a simpler and more comprehendable existence for the next month.

  As for tomorrow, the simplest and almost the least expensive method for transporting all these people and luggage turns out to be a rented station wagon, with driver. He is due to arrive at 17th Street tomorrow morning at ten, to pick up Mary and Bryan a
nd Jennifer and all their goods and chattels, then come uptown to get me, plus Joshua and Gretchen and this pile of baggage, which includes my typewriter and a liquor store carton filled with work necessities, such as pencils and a thesaurus. Also a carton full of sandwiches and apples and tomato juice and vodka. If the traffic on Long Island treats us decently, we’ll make the 1:00 ferry and have a picnic lunch in the rented house, and Ginger will leave work early and be on the 5:00 ferry. (She surprised me by very graciously accepting Marys offer to make dinner for everybody tomorrow night.) The weather is expected to be sunny and mild.

  I can’t help wondering what will go wrong.

  LATER

  Good God. Vickie just called. The galleys for the first quarter of the book, exclusive of artwork, will arrive at Craig from the typesetter in Pennsylvania some time tomorrow afternoon. Vickie has volunteered—there was simply no way I could say no—to bring them out to Fire Island on Saturday.

  I am to go over the galleys, according to this plan, while Vickie sunbathes the weekend away. On the afternoon of Monday, the Fourth of July, she will carry the corrected galleys back to New York; mission accomplished. I did explain that we were already pretty crowded out there, but she said that was okay, she didn’t mind, she’d bring a sleeping bag and just bunk on the living room floor.

  This is insane. Where do you go to enlist in the Foreign Legion? I am going to be in that small rented house over the Fourth of July weekend with Mary and Ginger and VICKIE! What kind of Independence Day do you call that?

  Sunday, July 3rd

  AND it isn’t even over.

  I was seated on the back deck a little while ago, reading the Sunday Times Magazine, and then I looked around at the three other people also on the deck, also reading sections of the Times, and I found myself thinking: 1 have been to bed with all three of these women.

  The thought did not make me feel like a harem master or anything particularly macho. In fact, all I felt at that moment was vaguely scared. Three women in bikinis in the sunshine, reading Travel and Arts and Leisure and The Week in Review. If they were suddenly to rise and turn on me, they could tear me to shreds. Sitting there, looking at them, thinking about it, I could find no very good reason why they wouldn't rise and turn on me. Dropping the Magazine—I hadn’t found the rift between the French Newer Left and the Roman Catholic Church all that fascinating anyway—I rose and announced in a loud confident voice that I really ought to do some more work on the galleys of The Christmas Book. Then I fled away up here to Ginger’s and my bedroom, where I have made a fairly useful desk out of a closet door lying across plastic milk crates stacked two high. We don’t particularly need a door on the closet up here anyway. (The knobs are at the back.)

  One thing we hadn’t foreseen in April, when we rented the place, was that in the summer this upstairs room would be an absolute oven in the daytime. I may have to buy a fan, if I’m going to do much work up here. In the meantime, baking here in the heat is still better than sitting down there among my women.

  From time to time I glance out the window at them, still all sprawled there, legs stretched out on the webbed chaise longues, sunglasses on faces, strategic bits of colored cloth interrupting the flow of flesh. A smell of rancid cocoanut rises from the suntan oil that makes that flesh so prettily gleam. From time to time they turn a page or exchange sections of the paper. Periodically Vickie rolls over onto her stomach, to sun her back, but is never comfortable that way and soon rolls back again. The only good thing I can say about the scene is that at least they aren’t talking to one another.

  Am I a misogynist? Am I one of those men who claim to love women but who secretly hate and fear them? Am I guilt- ridden? Do I feel I deserve to be torn limb from limb by a shock of bikini-clad avengers?

  Uhh, actually, no. Everything would be fine, perfectly normal, if it weren’t for the addition of Vickie. No matter how trapped I am, no matter how justified in the whole Vickie thing, Ginger would be very upset if she found out about it. When Ginger was The Other Woman, it was a very straightforward role; I was falling out of that previous nest, and she was passing by underneath. But now Ginger is simultaneously The Other Woman and The Wronged Woman, and debased in both roles.

  As for Mary, the one thing that has kept our relationship relatively smooth has been her belief that I have tried to be honorable. Failed sometimes, but at least tried. One of the reasons she wants me back is that she thinks I’m a decent guy. If she found out about Vickie, it would remove the dignity from the ending of our marriage; I would have proved myself unworthy to have left her.

  Whereas, if Vickie were to discover her main attraction for me was bookish rather than bawdy, she’d lead the posse.

  My women.

  Monday, July 4th

  I’M a nervous wreck.

  Of course Vickie would demand sex while she was here. She gave me several high-signs yesterday, once the heat in the bedroom had driven me back downstairs, but with two other adults and four children about the place all day Sunday it just wasn’t possible. And I’d assumed it would go on being impossible.

  But then came today. The beach is seven houses and a dune from here, and after breakfast everybody went there, leaving me to finish my work on the galleys before the bedroom becomes too hot to stand, and so Vickie could take them back to the city with her this afternoon. Suddenly, a little before eleven, here came Vickie skipping into the bedroom, smiling her lascivious smile and untying her strings. “Oh, no!” I said, but, “We’ve got time,” she assured me, giggling.

  We did, too, but only just. She had barely managed to reassemble herself and be in the kitchen making a big quart bottle of packaged lemonade when Ginger arrived. “Oh, dear,” I heard Vickie say. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Mmm,” said Gingers voice. “Hows Tom going?”

  “Sore as a bear,” Vickie told her. “I guess those galleys are driving him crazy. I called up to him, but he just growled.”

  So Ginger didn’t come upstairs to inspect the site of the skirmish, and soon both women went back to the beach with the bottle of iced lemonade and a handful of plastic cups, and I went to take my second showrer of the day.

  But not my last. At lunchtime everybody descended, including me carrying the finished galleys in their big sloppy envelope, and we sat around the table on the deck, under the big beach umbrella, making cold cut sandwiches and drinking white wine spritzers. (The children stuck to lemonade.)

  After lunch, Vickie went off to Jennifer and Gretchen’s room to change, while Mary and the kids went back to the beach, Mary wearing a bikini and two cameras, with a third camera in the canvas bag she carried, down among the suntan oils and paperback books and crumpled tissues. Then Ginger and I walked Vickie to the dock, where she and the galleys took the three-ten ferry and life became slightly more plausible.

  Walking back to the house, Ginger gave me an updated assessment of Vickie, making several negative observations with which I wholeheartedly agreed. Then she said, “How do you feel, surrounded by all these women?”

  “Like an Oriental potentate,” I said.

  She considered that, as though it had been a real answer, then said, “Really?”

  “Not really. For one thing, I don’t have my pick of the harem.”

  “You’re damn right you don’t.” Then she linked her arm with mine and gazed around at the day and said, “It’s beautiful out here.”

  “It sure is.”

  “I hate having to go back to work.”

  “It’s only one week,” I pointed out. Ginger had had to pull some strings and request special favors to get most of July off, and at that she couldn’t wangle the entire month. Next week, from the eleventh till the fifteenth, she’ll have to commute, getting up every morning to take the 7:15 ferry— locally known as the “Death Boat”—then returning on the 6:05; the “Daddy Boat,” though not in this case.

  “I don’t like leaving you here alone,” she said.

  “I won’t be alone. I’
ll have the kids. And Mary.”

  “That’s what I don’t like about it.”

  “Oh, come on, Ginger,” I said. “Don’t try to tell me you’re jealous of Mary.”

  “She wants you back.”

  “Granted.”

  “She’ll work her wiles on you when I’m gone.”

  “Mary doesn’t have any wiles,” I said.

  She laughed, and disengaged her arm from mine. I said, “Don’t get mad for no reason.”

  Brooding, she said, “Sometimes I’d like to know what a man thinks about.”

  “Sex.”

  She nodded. “Good idea.”

  So it was back up to the bedroom we went. It must have been way over ninety in there by then, but did that stop us? Unfortunately not.

  So there I was, engaged in perfectly legitimate intercourse with my mistress, while my wife was up at the beach and my girlfriend was off on the 3:10, when all of a sudden a perfectly awful noise threw the both of us off-stride and then some. It sounded like a cat fight, it sounded like mongooses mating, it sounded like a beached whale, it sounded like the death-cry of an elk, it sounded like ... I don’t know what it sounded like.

  But, looking out the window, I found out what it was. It was Bryan, blowing into the clarinet he’d been given last Christmas. I’ve been paying for lessons, of course, and Mary had told me he was being fairly diligent with his practice, but since I don’t actually live with the kid I’d never heard these terrible sounds before, so naturally I screamed out the window, “Bryan! For God's sake!"

  He stopped squawking, looked up at me, and smiled happily. “That’s Jingle Bells," he said.

  “The hell it is! Take that thing off into the sand dunes somewhere if you’re going to play it! Take it to Atlantique!”

  Behind me, Ginger was saying, “Don’t discourage him, Tom, let him play.”

  “Play!” I yelled at her. “You call that play?”

  “I don’t get to practice anywhere,” Bryan complained on my other flank. “How am I going to grow up to be Artie Shaw?”