Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Read online

  Anyway, Ginger and Lance’s kids live with Ginger and me; Helena and Barry’s kids are with Helena and Lance; the psychiatrist’s kids are with Barry and whatsername. The psychiatrist contributes support money and Barry takes up the slack; Barry contributes support money for Helena and her kids and Lance takes up the slack; Lance contributes support money for Ginger and the kids here, and I take up the slack. And I contribute support money for Mary and my kids. . . .

  And there’s the rub. Mary, as Ginger pointed out, doesn’t have a fella. Her freelance photography work and the research jobs probably bring in on average a little less than Ginger’s salary, which is nowhere near enough for the lifestyle we all seem to have acquired. So while everybody else in the world is supporting two half-households, which adds up to one household, which is just barely possible, / am supporting one and one-half households all by myself, I’ve been doing it for eleven months, and I’m drowning.

  Which is why The Christmas Book is so important. It could solve my money problems for a year, maybe two years; long enough, in any case, for Mary to give up the idea that I’m coming back. Long enough for her to find a fella.

  With Ginger, I live on West End Avenue near 70th Street; Mary and the kids live downtown, on West 17th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; a fairly decent neighborhood, very near the Village and with much the same charm, but at lower rents. Going off now to disrobe the tree, I wore the sweater Mary’d given me for Christmas, to placate her. (I’ve already told Ginger it was my kids who gave me the sweater, to placate her.)

  The Christmas decorations on Mary’s tree seemed more accurate, somehow. Does that make any sense? Christmases come and Christmases go, and over the years some of the old ornaments break or crumple or disappear, new ones are added, there’s a slow organic change, a continuous gradual shifting, every year subtly different and yet always the same, so that when you hear the phrase “Christmas tree” there’s always one proto-tree that comes into your mind, and the rest are merely imitation.

  I had time to brood about this because I spent an hour looking at the tree before we ever got around to undressing it. Mary met me at the door with cocoa and the news that the kids wanted to play Mille Bornes first, because it was alleged to be best with four. Since I was the one who’d given Jennifer the game for Christmas, and since the card table and chairs were already set up in the living room, 1 couldn’t very well say no, so we all traveled several thousand miles together, while from time to time I looked past Bryan’s head at the tree, thinking how accurate it was.

  Jennifer, my firstborn, is eleven, a savvy, skinny New York kid and an absolute shark at games. Fortunately she’s also lucky, because she cares intensely about whether she wins or loses. Bryan, nine years old, has already differentiated in his mind between sports (which are important) and games (which don’t matter), so that’s also good. Since Jennifer needs to win, and Bryan doesn’t care but does enjoy playing, they make a kind of better Lucy and Charlie Brown, without (I hope) the psychological damage always implicit in “Peanuts.”

  Jennifer won twice, then I won. (She’d gone eight hundred fifty miles without using any two-hundreds, a gamble that would have paid off big if I hadn’t scrambled to a graceless any-way-at-all win.) There had been talk about playing only three games, but when Jennifer was defeated on the third she got a set expression around the mouth, shuffled the cards like a pro, and said, “Just one more.”

  Mary said, “I’m not sure how long Tom can stay.”

  “I’ve got time,” I said airily, though I knew Ginger would already be pacing the floor on 70th Street. “I’ll be delighted to whup you twice in a row,” I told Jennifer, which made her grin like Clint Eastwood and hunker down to play. She won, too.

  After that, we put the table and chairs away and finally took care of the tree. Removing a rough-edged white snowball with a pale blue manger scene indented into one side, remembering that it was one of the few ornaments I’d brought with me from my parents’ home, making it almost the oldest part of the continuity, the accuracy, I tried to think how I might gracefully ask to take it with me now, but there seemed to be no way. Palm it, pocket it? No.

  By the end of the operation, Mary and I were alone, it having occurred to the kids that putting ornaments in boxes was work and not play. Also, I think they’re both sometimes uncomfortable around me these days, possibly because I’m uncomfortable around them. I have this feeling they’re not mature enough to realize how mature I am.

  I put the naked tree in the hall, to carry down to the street when I left, and returned to the living room to say my farewells. On hands and knees there Mary picked needles one by one out of the carpet. “Well,” I said, “1 guess I’m off.”

  Kneeling, she sat back on her haunches, her cupped hands in her lap filled with pine needles. “Tom,” she said, “do you remember Jack Horton?”

  “Sure,” I said. About my age, skinny and worried- looking, he lives in the neighborhood; we have mutual friends, we meet occasionally at parties, we’ve never been close.

  “Sit down a minute,” she said.

  Reluctantly, I sat facing her in “my” chair.

  “I ran into Jack Horton at Key Food this afternoon,” Mary said, “and he put his hand on my breast.” She touched her fingertips to the spot.

  I was surprised, and said so: “Jack Horton? Doesn’t sound like him.*

  “I know,” she agreed. “It’s because men know I’m alone now,” she said. “It’s happened before, I’ve told you about it.”

  “Yes, you have.” And she has, four or five times in the last couple of months, and with increasing detail, it seems to me. And always described in the same manner: not angry or upset or offended or anything, just calmly interested in this phenomenon that when a woman isn’t already with a man other men come around and start copping feels.

  “Of course,” she said, “he pretended he was just admiring my dalmatian pin.”

  That would be a free-form, black-and-white mosaic pin Bryan had found at some Arab junk jewelry place in the Village and had given Mary for Christmas, announcing the weird-shaped lumpy thing was a dalmatian, as in the Walt Disney movie. I said, “Well, maybe that’s what he was doing.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “He made sure he rubbed his knuckles back and forth on my nipple, like this.” She demonstrated, watching her own knuckles with absorption.

  Mary’s campaign to get me back does not, I’m happy to say, include dressing up “sexy.” At this moment she was barefoot, wearing old jeans and a dark blue high-neck sweater. But we were married a long while, it wasn’t physical disinterest that broke us up, and I don’t need suggestive clothing to remind me who’s inside there. Watching her watch herself rub her nipple, I said, “Uh, like that, huh? What did you say?”

  Her hand returned to help the other hand hold pine needles. “Of course, I pretended not to notice,” she said. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t hard, though, or who knows what he would have thought.”

  What I thought then was, He's a fella. Mary, maybe he likes you, he’s decent, why not follow through? That was what I thought, but not at all what I could say. “He probably didn’t mean it,” I said. “You should have said something right then, he probably would have turned red with embarrassment.”

  “Oh, he meant it,” she said. “It’s because you’re away.”

  “Speaking of that,” I said, bright and casual. “Ginger and I are thinking more seriously about marriage now, so we’ll both have to get divorces, of course.”

  “I don’t think Lance would like that,” Mary said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because then he’d be free to marry Helena, and Lance doesn’t want to marry Helena.”

  It had been a mistake to mention marriage; all I’d been trying to do was change the subject, plus reinforce the notion that since she and I were never never never going to get back together, why didn’t she catch a couple of these passes or go to a few parties and find a fella? But marriage is Mar
y’s subject, as I should have remembered.

  Still pretending to talk about Ginger’s ex, she went on, “Lance is just playing hookey. Helena’s an afternoon movie to him, that’s all.”

  “I have to go now,” I said, and came home back to Ginger’s reproaches, which I have fled by coming into my office to “work.”

  Well, if I’m working, let’s work. There are a couple of magazine pieces aborning on this desk, and galleys of The Films of Jack Oakie to correct, but my mind is still all caught up in The Christmas Book. Will Jack Rosenfarb take it? There isn’t much time; maybe I should phone somebody else, make another appointment for next week just in case.

  If I peddle it to somebody else, who should that be? Hubert Van Driin? The editor-publisher for whom I did the Jack Oakie book, Hubert Van Driin is an insane right wing psychopath, and his company, Federalist Press, is much smaller than Craig, Harry & Bourke, but my Christmas idea just might connect with the nostalgia side of him. I could promise a still photo from a Wilderness Family movie; surely those people have done at least one Christmas-in-the-cabin sequence. On the other hand, Hubert is RC, from the

  Torquemada branch, and he might well get all pop-eyed and incensed at the secular side of Christmas. Hard to know, hard to know.

  Dear :

  In conjunction with the publishing company of Craig, Harry & Bourke, I am compiling a book about Christmas. This is not intended, either by the publisher or myself, to be merely another standard compilation of the over-familiar and the over-anthologized, i.e., Dickens, Dylan Thomas, “Twas the night. . . , ” etc.

  Christmas is many things to many people. The Christmas Book will reflect that, presenting the full panorama of western mans most popular and meaningful holiday in a colorful, carefully-prepared, seriously-inten- tioned volume which we confidently expect will find its way under most every Christmas tree in America in the years to come.

  In addition to Christmas art through the ages, and such rare and unknown treats as Kipling's “Christmas in India,” the publishers and I intend a strong contemporaneous flavor by actively seeking out original stories, essays, reminiscences or whatever from the major writers and thinkers of our time. Your name could hardly be left off such a list, which is the reason for this letter.

  The Christmas Book will stand or fall not on its callings from the libraries of the past but on the contributions from people like yourself who will tell us what Christmas means today, in modern America. Fees are negotiable, but would certainly compare favorably with what you would expect for any equivalent piece in todays market.

  Since we intend to be in the stores this autumn, our deadline for inclusion in The Christmas Book must be no later than June 1st, although some small leeway might be possible in a very few special cases. I hope you find this concept as intriguing as we do, and will be inspired to give us your unique contribution to the literature of Christmas. May I hear from you soon?

  Sincerely,

  Thomas J. Diskant General Editor

  Monday, January lOlh

  ABSOLUTELY insane! No more than twenty minutes after I phoned to make my appointment to see Hubert Van Driin at his office this Wednesday morning, Jack Rosenfarb called to say Craig, Harry & Bourke was “interested.”

  A mingy word, that. A cheap, sneaky, self-protecting fake of a word. “Interested.” Interest is like smoke; it may mean fire, or it may dissipate in the wind.

  “There’s a good deal of interest around the shop in your idea,” is the way Jack put it. “But the feeling is, we’d like to see something on paper.”

  There’s nothing an editor likes more than reading words he hasn’t had to pay for. They’d all like to see something on paper. When I was first in New York. . . .

  Ah. When I was first in New York, what a wealth of things I did not know. Entire encyclopedias of awful truths were unknown to me. What I brought with me to the big city nineteen years ago was a truly awesome ignorance, a change of clothing, and the belief that my memory of a pink- walled garage surrounded by snow in sunlight was the most important thing on Earth.

  That’s not how I would have phrased it then, of course. I knew I was a writer, I knew that much, and I knew I’d grown up in a small town in southern Vermont that was absolutely full to the brim with reality, and I felt I could snare that reality in a net of words, a great open-mesh net of all the words I’d ever learned in Vermont, that net I would toss with a masterly flick of the wrist over that pink-wfalled garage, and pull the cord, and I’d have it!

  I think it worked, actually. I did office temporary work, and knocked out a few magazine articles to pay the rent on the studio apartment on West 101st Street, and spent most of my time hunched over the typewriter, putting the words down while that pink wall stood and gleamed in my imagination. Pink-walled garage out behind Bill Brewsher’s house, with the white snow around it in the sunlight. We got really good snow in Vermont, really white and glistening, not like this trash around here. Every time I thought about Bill, or Candy, or Jack and Jim Reilly, or Agnes, or any of them, I always saw them as bundled-up fevered darknesses in front of that shining wall.

  The Pink Garage Gang was bought for two thousand five hundred dollars by the fifth publisher who saw it. Print order three thousand, no advertising, no publicity. No paperback sale, no foreign rights sale. No movie interest. From time to time they sent me royalty statements; the last one, eleven hundred dollars of the advance was still unearned.

  By the time The Pink Garage Gang was published I was more or less making my living with my typewriter. No more novels, though. I actually didn’t have any more novels in my brain, I was too busy. Then, a few years ago, back in Vermont, a Burlington & Northern freight locomotive that somebody had forgotten to turn off or something got loose all by itself one night and trundled at a few miles an hour all the way up the state to the Canadian border before it stopped. All by itself. You may have read about it in the paper. It was winter, and everybody was in bed asleep, and the locomotive rolled slowly by, going north. It went right through my town. It was a moonlit night, and a few people here and there in the state looked out their windows, holding a glass of warm milk in their hand, and they saw the dark bulk of the locomotive go by.

  For a while, I thought about that. I smiled sometimes, and thought about the locomotive basting a seam up through Vermont. God, that novel was real to me. I could see it, I could see everything in it, I knew everything in the world about that story. It was all so clear and detailed, I can still remember so much of it, that every once in a while there’s a split second when I think I wrote it.

  Jan 10

  Jack Rosenfarb Craig, Harry & Bourke 745 3rd Ave.

  New York, NY 10017 Dear Jack:

  As you recall from our conversation of last week, and your telephone call to me this morning, I have it in mind to do a large glossy gift-book anthology on the subject of Christmas. I would combine already existing literature and artwork on the subject with original material solicited from the most prestigious writers and artists of our day, a list to include such as Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Andy Warhol, Jerzy Kosinski, LeRoy Nieman, Jules Feijfer and Robert Ludlum, among many others. I see my own function as general editor of this anthology, engaged both in selecting the materials from the past and negotiating with the contributors of the present.

  In my previous work, as you know, I have frequently acted as a compiler and interviewer, experience which will stand me in good stead in re The Christmas Book.

  As I mentioned to you last week, I would very strongly want this book to appear this calendar year, early enough for the Christmas season. Because time is relatively short, and because you have expressed some doubt as to whether Craig, Harry & Bourke would be the right publisher for this project, I have made a preliminary discussion with someone from another house. My own feeling, however, is that The Christmas Book would be given its most careful and conscientious presentation with you as its editor, so I hope we can shortly come to a meeting of minds.

&nb
sp; Yours.

  Tom Diskant

  Wednesday, January 121b

  WHAT a day. My daughter Jennifer got mugged this morning, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Well, no, I don’t mean it that way, I just mean it caused me to postpone my meeting with Hubert Van Driin.

  I was just about to leave for that meeting—in fact, 1 was tying my tie—when the phone rang and it was Mary, sounding more solemn than usual (she’s often serious, seldom solemn), saying, “Tom, could you come over right away?” “Gee, I’m sorry, Mary,” I said. “I’m just off to a meeting at Federalist Press.”

  “Couldn’t you cancel it? I wouldn’t ask, but Jennifer was mugged on her way to school.”

  So I canceled, of course. Van Driin took it well, with his normal reaction to the world we live in: “The barbarians are among us, Tom. They came through the gates a long time ago, the liberals just waved the bastards in. Animals. The Duke knew.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I said, and left the apartment, and went down to 17th Street, where I found Mary and Jennifer in the kitchen, both bravely not having hysterics.

  My kids go to public school because that’s all I can afford. (That Ginger’s kids go to private school, at Lance’s expense, is an unstated bone of contention between Mary and me, never mentioned.) Bryan had sixty cents taken from him at school last year, which technically counts as a mugging though he wasn’t harmed or actually threatened in any way, but this was Jennifer’s first experience of street crime. Both the kids know enough not to offer resistance if you are outweighed, out-meaned or outnumbered; still, an assault for money is a tough experience for any person, and particularly so for an essentially nonviolent kid, as both of mine are.