Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Read online

  The specific of this fight was whether Ginger’s kids should come back from Lance right away last night, as soon as we ourselves got home, or should they come back today, after school. The fight had been poised for birth ever since the Saturday before last, when I took Gretchen and Joshua to their father’s apartment to stay while Ginger and I were in Puerto Rico, but neither of us had wanted to spoil our departure—nor our vacation—so the dispute merely seethed and bubbled beneath the surface, present but not active. The image of a volcano seems appropriate. Returning to New York amid a snowstorm and a monumental traffic tie-up had at last given the fight a soil in which it could grow (to mix my imagery just a teeny bit), and thus it all came about.

  (What Ginger fought with the cabdriver about was Puerto Rico, he being an emigrant from there.)

  That the rotten weather made the whole question of the kids’ return academic merely gave the fight added virulence. We would be lucky to get ourselves home on Sunday night, never mind the kids. Since I had been the one pressing the point of view that a brief overnight transition for the two of us between traveling and children would be a good idea, I was accused in the taxi of gloating over the storm, and off we went.

  Well, it all calmed down en route, though it did threaten to blow up all over again when two of the messages awaiting us on the telephone answering machine at home were from Mary, and both about her kids. That is, our kids. Bryan having been given a clarinet for Christmas—don’t ask me why kids want this or that, I’ll never fathom it—(a used clarinet from a pawnshop on Third Avenue), it now seemed a potentially good idea to give him clarinet lessons, so one of Mary’s calls was about the thirty-five-dollar-a-month lessons available through the school. The other message was about the police wanting Jennifer to make a statement about her mugging, and did I think it was a good idea for the kid to involve herself in all that any further.

  Ginger’s nostrils were flaring by that point, and she’d narrowed her eyes so much she looked like a leftover alien from Star Wars. We could have had round two of the day if the calls hadn’t annoyed me just as much as they did her. Mary had known I was in Puerto Rico, she knew when I was coming back, and dropping those two “innocent” messages on the machine was just another way to turn the knife of pseudodomesticity. I expressed that opinion aloud, Ginger’s eyes and nose returned to their accustomed shapes, and we went to bed to have the kind of sex that makes it all worthwhile, as outside the storm raged unabated.

  None of the other answering machine messages had been of much import, but when I finally got to the mail this morning there were seven responses to my solicitation for The ChristJnas Book, and I don’t know if I’m encouraged or not.

  Two of the letters, from Diana Trilling and Andy Rooney, merely asked, in one way or another, how much I was offering to pay. In fact, Andy Rooney’s letter, in toto, said, “Dear Mr. Diskant, How much? Yours, Andrew A. Rooney.” Now, that’s what I call a few words from Andy Rooney!

  But it wasn’t the shortest letter. That came from Joan Rivers, and it went:

  January 25

  Dear Thomas J. Diskant:

  What?

  Joan Rivers

  The longest response came from a literary agent named Scott Meredith, and for quite a while I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was a box, a big manuscript box about twice the normal depth, absolutely crammed full with manuscripts of short stories and articles and poetry. Some of the pieces seemed fairly recent, others were on yellowed dogeared paper with various stains, but all of them, by golly, were on the subject of Christmas.

  A letter from Scott Meredith had come with this armada of failed hopes, and in it Meredith explained that he was Norman Mailer’s agent, that Mailer might be interested in doing a small piece for The Christmas Book if the price were right, and in the meantime these other works by “outstanding writers, clients of mine” were probably right down my alley.

  No. Definitely not.

  The remaining three responses were also loony, each in its own way. Stephen King wrote a long enthusiastic sloppy letter saying The Christmas Book was a wonderful idea and he’d love to do something for it if he could think of something, and in the meantime he had these suggestions of other absolutely wonderful things I ought to put in the book, like “Death On Christmas Eve” by Stanley Ellin and “Christmas Party” by Rex Stout, and on and on.

  From Jimmy Carter I got permission to do the book, I think. I’m not sure what his letter was, some sort of proclamation about the good and worthy work I was undertaking, but I began to believe he failed to understand the thrust of my original letter. (Or whoever actually answered it did.) And from Charles Schulz I got, in triplicate, a contract I was to sign which made it clear that I would not participate in any subsidiary rights to anything by him or about him or any character created by him that might appear in The Christmas Book or its promotion or advertising. Sheesh!

  So. I dropped lines to Trilling and Rooney saying I would pay “in the neighborhood of” a thousand dollars for a thousand words. I sent a note to King thanking him for all his suggestions and adding that what I was really looking forward to was his own original contribution to The Christmas Book. I wrote Carter that I hoped he could see his way toward contributing some personal thoughts on the subject of Christmas, and I penned a missive to Rivers saying that since she had dealt with motherhood twice, in her movie Rabbit Test and her book Having A Baby Can Be A Scream, maybe she had a stray thought or two about Christmas as well, and would she be willing to share it? I phoned the Scott Meredith Agency to request a messenger to come pick up these huddled masses they’d sent me, and included in the package a note describing my thousand dollar neighborhood, for Mailer’s consideration. Schulz’s contract I sent to Jack Rosenfarb, with a note saying, “You’ll probably know what to do with this.”

  Next, feeling virtuous from all my activity, I phoned Mary, who worked very hard at being a downer; not like her, but I think she was annoyed both by winter and by my having been away from it for a week. She said things like, “Bryan needs to see more of you,” and, “I think Jennifer feels the lack of a father particularly at this time, after the mugging,” and so on. I handled it well for a while, and then I didn’t handle it well at all, and then I hung up.

  While in Puerto Rico I’d thought of some more famous people I should hit on, so after the emotional upset of the Mary call I soothed myself by^sending the writer’s letter to ten more possibles: Arthur C. Clarke, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, John Kenneth Galbraith, Garrison Keillor, Henry Kissinger, Jonathan Schell, Mickey Spillane, William Styron and Paul Theroux. Plus the illustrator’s letter to these five: Roddy McDowall, Helmut Newton, Francesco Scavul- lo, Gahan Wilson and Jamie Wyeth.

  Lance just called. Gretchen and Joshua have arrived at his place from school, and he wants me to come get them. The storm continues, that’s why; if the weather were decent, he’d cab them across town himself. Selfish bastard.

  Sunday, February 13th

  ONE of the reasons people are always more complicated than you expect them to be is that they are always sillier than you expect them to be. Take holidays, anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions in general. In the course of any given year, each of us has to remember and deal appropriately with not only all the great public occasions—Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, my current meal ticket, Christmas, and all the rest—but with the proliferating private events as well. As families separate and reshuffle themselves and regroup in new combinations, there are more and more birthdays to remember, more and more anniversaries to acknowledge, more and more special occasions to commemorate.

  But separation itself? Isn’t that going too far? Now I have found out why Mary was so bad-tempered last week and why she put those two irritating messages on the answering machine while Ginger and I were away. It was because I was in Puerto Rico on February third.

  February third? What, you wonder, is February third, that it should have such importance, that it we were Hispani
c we would name a plaza for it? It is the date, last year, that I packed two suitcases and a liquor store carton and moved from downtown to uptown, thus ending my marriage and going public with Ginger. My crime this year is that I did not acknowledge the first anniversary of that momentous occasion, was not even present with Mary to—celebrate? mourn? remember? reaffirm?—and therefore she got mad.

  It took her a while to say so; until today, in fact, when I brought the kids back from their weekend with Daddy. She had still been cold and rather nasty yesterday morning when I picked them up—rather like the weather—but today she had changed back to her normal self, which is both patient and insidious. As the kids went off to their room to unbundle, Mary said, “Have a cup of coffee, you look cold.”

  I was, but I said, “I ought to get back uptown.” “It’s already made,” she said, and because I could see the irritability had departed (a trend I want to encourage) I said fine, and we sat together in the kitchen over coffee and Entenmann’s pound cake. We talked about the kids for a while—it turns out Jennifer doesn’t have to involve herself with the police any more, after all—and then Mary said, “Why did you choose that particular time to go to Puerto Rico?”

  “You mean winter?”

  “I mean that week.”

  “That was when Ginger could get off from work,” I said. I hadn’t the slightest idea where the conversation was going.

  “No other reason?”

  “What other reason is there?”

  “February third?”

  I looked at her, shaking my head, waiting for her to go on, while she leaned forward slightly, gazing at me in an expectant testing kind of way. Then she leaned back, relaxing, shaking her head, saying, “You don’t remember.”

  “February third.” 1 frowned, casting my mind back. “Good God, is that when— Let’s see, the third was a Thursday this year, so it would have been Wednesday last—” Then it came to me. That was the date all right, that was the moment when seven months of distress and trouble and finagling and sneaking around had finally come to a head and I had at last broken out of this cocoon, or egg, or whatever it was.

  It all began the summer before last, part of which we spent in a rented house on Fire Island, where I was one of the few males who didn’t commute daily or weekly to a job in the city. Mary and I had been drifting apart—at any rate / had been drifting apart—and either there were more targets of opportunity among the solitary daytime wives that summer or I was in a mood to be more aware of them; whatever the reason, I took my opportunities where I found them, feeling both pleased with myself and guilty, until I realized Mary knew what was going on and did not ever plan to say a word about it.

  That was the finish. Of everything, ultimately, but initially it was the finish of both the pleasure and the guilt. I think I could have stood anything else from Mary: raging arguments, brokenhearted pleas, stern admonitions, her own revenge infidelities, you name it. But to be humored, to matter that little, took the starch out of more than my sails. There was no more catting around that summer, but one evening when we were alone for dinner—both kids “eating over” with friends, as the local argot had it—I broke a buzzing long silence by saying, “Mary, this marriage is over.”

  She looked at me calmly. “No, it isn’t, Tom,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  “You’re just resisting being a grown-up,” she said. “You want one more round before the bars close.”

  One last fling. The seven year itch. The last hurrah. All that easy dismissal. “Mary,” I said, “you are reducing me to Dagwood Bumstead, and that’s why this marriage is over.” But it wasn’t over that moment, or that easily. We continued to live together, and in the fall I started up with Ginger, who over the summer had broken up with Lance. (We’d met the Patchetts several years before, and had become friends.) Maybe in my summertime flings I’d been trying to attract Mary’s attention, I’m not sure about that, but when I took up with Ginger I made damn sure there’d be no chance for Mary to do her shrinking head act again. I was sly, I was slippery, I was plausible, and I was not found out. Ginger and I originally got together in October, and by late November we both knew we could have a long-term thing together if we wanted. But families don’t break up before Christmas, so we waited.

  Pre-Christmas shopping is, of course, the perfect cover for the adulterer. We’re all off on mysterious errands all the time anyway. But then Christmas itself is a downer, if you know you’re about to pack up and leave this crowd gathered happily around this tree, which may be why I stalled and dawdled all the way through January, until Ginger asked me straight out whether I was going to leave my wife, “because if you aren’t, you’re going to leave me. I won’t play Back Street, Tom.”

  So that’s when I did it. February third, the anniversary of which I had been so unfeeling as to forget. Nodding at Mary, in her kitchen, I said, “That’s when I left.”

  She offered a sad smile and said, “I had been hoping it was when you would come back.”

  “Mary,” I said.

  She raised her hand to stop me. “I know, we just keep saying the same things over and over again. I hope you’ll come back, you hope you won’t.”

  “I know I won’t.”

  “I’ll wait,” she said.

  ‘‘I wish you wouldn’t. And there’s no point remembering that date any more, it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I’ll remember it anyway,” she said, and smiled.

  Tuesday, February 15lh

  WHY do I let Mary sucker me this way? I just get hell afterwards from Ginger.

  Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. My attitude toward holidays generally is that they are a terrible interruption in the life of a freelancer—nobody’s around in any of the offices to answer my calls—and my attitude toward Valentine’s Day in particular is that it’s on a par with having a feast day for coronary thrombosis. Don’t people realize the awful harm done by romance? All those cutesy red valentine hearts should be edged in black. “Be my valentine,” is an insidious sentence to teach a child. (As with most general festive occasions, we busy adults have also left this one to be observed by our children.)

  The whole thing is a ghastly mistake anyway. St. Valentine, if there ever was a St. Valentine, had nothing to do with hearts or romance or Hallmark Cards. Way back

  when, there may actually have been two priests named Valentine, both martyred during the reign of the emperor Claudius—and he seemed such a nice fellow on television, too—or the two stories may refer to the same ill-treated priest, or he may just be a legend after all, like St. Christopher. The point is, his feast day on February fourteenth has to do with martyrdom, not love and sex; or am I missing something here?

  Anyway, apparently St. Valentines remembrance day got mixed up somewhere along the line with a Roman festival called Lupercalia on February fifteenth, one day later, which was itself pretty weird. The Luperci were a group of priests who, every February fifteenth, would start the day by sacrificing some goats and a dog. (There was no particular god or goddess they were sacrificing to, this was just something they did.) Then they cut lengths of thong from the skins of the sacrificed goats and ran naked around the walls of the Palatine the rest of the day, hitting people with the thongs.

  All of this was more necromancy than religion, an occult act that was supposed to make a magic ring around the city, keeping good luck inside and bad luck out. And (this may at last be where the modern Valentines Day idea got started) being hit by one of those thongs on that particular day was supposed to cure sterility.

  (A kind of fresh pork sausage with ground pignoli nuts, cumin seed, bay leaves and black pepper was eaten that day, as part of the ritual, and became so identified with Lupercalia that when the emperor Constantine turned Christian he banned the eating of sausage, which of course immediately created a whole army of sausage bootleggers, and may explain why A1 Capone always looked like a sausage.)

  In any event, Mary phoned yesterday afternoon t
o say I should come to dinner because Jennifer had returned from school distraught that she hadn’t received enough Valentine cards and was therefore humiliated with her peer group.

  “Enough? What do you mean enough? How many sexual propositions is a decent eleven-year-old girl supposed to receive in one day?”

  “Sex has nothing to do with it, Tom,” Mary said, “as you very well know. Valentines have to do with popularity and friendship.”

  “It’s a holiday in honor of lust, that’s what it is,” I insisted. “One of the seven deadly sins, commemorated. And named after a saint.”

  “Stop being silly, Tom. Jennifer needs you.”

  So I went, of course, and Jennifer didn’t really need me, of course, it was all simply another part of Mary’s doomed campaign to recapture me, which I told her over coffee, at the end of the meal, after the kids had gone into the living room to watch television. “Jennifer’s fine,” I said accusingly.

  “Yes,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding. “You helped a great deal, Tom.”

  “I didn’t help at all. There was nothing to help about.” “Jennifer always keeps a stiff upper lip when you’re around,” she told me. “She knows you like it.”

  It was time—past time—to change the subject. “Well,” I said, staring wildly around the kitchen in search of subject matter, “I see the super finally fixed that broken shelf.”

  “He sent a carpenter,” she said.

  “A real one? Good.”

  “A great big tall man,” she said, “with tattoos on his arms.”

  “Ah.”

  “Emilio must have told him I was living alone,” she said, Emilio being the super.

  Why didn’t I see it coming? Nevertheless, I didn’t. “Oh?” I said. “Why’s that?”

  “He kept being very suggestive.”