Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Page 8

  “Oh, I got a guy for you,” she said, with a nasty little grin. “He edits all our war books.”

  “What a shit you are,” I said, but I had to laugh when I said it.

  “Come on up, I’ll buy ya a drink,” she said.

  “It’s the least you can do-r” I told her.

  She had a tiny high-floor apartment in a once-graceful large old building in which the dignified big apartments were long ago chopped into these ant-runs. Books, posters, stereo equipment, and here and there a narrow place to sit. The kitchen was too small for two people; I stood in the doorway while she failed to find bourbon, and we agreed to switch to vodka and grapefruit juice. “It’s a food,” she said. “We won’t get drunk.”

  “Very important,” I agreed.

  She made the two drinks and turned toward the doorway with one in each hand. I reached out and cupped my hand around the back of her head and drew her close and kissed her lips.

  I was appalled at myself while I was doing it. I’m merely astonished now, but I may go on being astonished about that bit of autobiography the rest of my life. I’m not on the prowl for yet another woman, God knows, and I don’t go around throwing heavy-handed passes just because an opportunity appears. I didn’t even like Vickie Douglas. And yet I kissed her.

  It wasn’t a long kiss. Neither of us opened our mouths. At the end, I released her, and she stepped back and stared at me. “Now, why in hell,” she said, “did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully, knowing I’d found the one way to make an impossible situation worse. “I just did it. How many drinks are you going to throw in my face?”

  “I’m not sure.” She stood there, thinking, holding the glasses. She licked her upper lip, as though the taste would suggest an attitude. “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “maybe what we ought to do is just fuck.”

  Oh, my gosh. Mary, Ginger ... I can’t handle this, I thought, I’ve got to get out of here, undo this somehow. But it wras too late. With horror I watched her put the glasses down on the counter and turn toward me with an expression of expectant curiosity.

  I just couldn’t be that rude.

  The Christmas Book, I told myself. Do it for The Christmas Book.

  When I left there at quaiter to five we’d agreed she would stay on as my editor. We’ll be having another editorial meeting on Thursday.

  Thursday, April 28ih

  I own a tiger. Or maybe the tiger owns me. Whichever it is, I’m sure riding the tiger.

  Vickie and I have been burning bright for two and a half weeks now, and I must admit my guilt and terror are both at last receding, though by no means am I easy in my mind. How long can this possibly continue without Ginger suspecting? I am being very careful not to bring any new ideas home, but how can I be sure Ginger—whose intuitive and paranoiac antennae are wonderfully fine-honed—won’t notice some bedtime change in me? Also, I’m losing weight.

  On the professional side, what has happened is all to the good. Vickie has now become a tiger in the office as well, pushing The Christmas Book as though the Mafia had ordered her to. She’s agitating with the art and production departments to give us something spectacular for the dust jacket and the general package, she’s hustling the legal department and the rights department for all the necessary papers on both original material and reprints, and although it’s really too early to do so she’s talking it up in sales meetings, assuring everyone that Craig, Harry & Bourke will have a great year just because of The Christmas Book no matter what happens to the rest of the list.

  She is also trying to get the company to move right away to the next phase of our step deal, confirming their intent to publish, even though they don’t contractually have to come up with the next chunk of money until June first. But she’s arguing that I’ve already got many more than five famous names (none of my contributors are yesterday any more), and she points out passionately but reasonably that the sooner Craig makes that final commitment to go ahead with the book, the sooner they can start a major sales and promotion campaign.

  As for the book itself, it continues to shape up, though in strange ways. For instance, I now have Norman Mailer’s submission, and by God if it isn’t “Christmas on Death Row”! It’s not at all the same as Capote’s, it’s equally terrific, and I don’t know what the hell to do with it. If Vickie and I ever have a quiet moment together, I’ll ask her advice; she is my editor, after all.

  Up till now, the religious side of Christmas—and it does have a religious side, mustn’t forget that—had been pretty absent from the new contributions, and I’d been filling it in mostly from older material, but that is at last changing. Joyce Carol Oates’ piece, an interior monologue by the Virgin Mary in the manger, is all rather murky, as though it were menopause rather than childbirth she’d just gone through, but her reflections on the female role in the religious impulse, however ornately expressed, are pretty good.

  Somehow I never really expected to hear from Richard Nixon, not even after I got his how-much letter, but here by

  God is a neatly-typed piece about Nixon meeting with Khrushchev on Christmas Eve and the two of them discussing Christianity. Nixon portrays himself as a kind of super insurance salesman, all honest concern and noble patter, and Khrushchev as gruff but innately honest, with talk of Christmas and religion forcing him into acknowledgment of his peasant past. Nixon himself seems to have no past, which may be what makes him our representative American.

  Someone else I thought I’d heard the last of was Mario Puzo, after that snotty letter his person sent me, but just the other day I got his contribution, and its wonderful. He tells about going to midnight Mass with his family as a little kid, and the flavors of Roman Catholicism, of America and of his family’s Italian heritage are blended together into a rich and heartening stew.

  On the visual side, LeRoy Nieman’s three Wise Men on a hilltop with a whole hell of a lot of bloodshot sky behind them and several odd rough-hewn patches of white or blue paint placed at random in irrelevant spots is not exactly terrible. I am taking it because (a) he’s a name, and (b) it might get the book some ink in Playboy. I console myself with the thought that if I’d been putting this book together just a few years ago I would have had to make room for Peter Max.

  Or would he have said no? Edward Albee has, and so have Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, Sam Shepard and Jasper Johns. I’d been thinking of putting together a followup letter for those people I haven’t heard from at all—which is only thirty out of seventy-five, a damn good response—but now I think I don’t need it; I’m getting some heavy hitters here.

  I have returned Isaac Asimov’s article about Mrs. Claus’s functions up there in Santa Claus’s workshop at the North

  Pole. I have also returned Mr. Asimov’s piece about the etymology of the name Santa Claus, with all the other things Saint Nicholas is called around the world. I think the man is trying to drive me crazy.

  Sunday, May 8th

  MOTHER’S DAY!!!!!

  I am in here hiding from everybody. As the sun moves to the horizon and our ship sinks slowly in the west, we bid farewell to the friendly huts and rude natives of ... of home, I guess.

  This weekend began to unravel on Friday, when I stayed so long at Vickie’s place that I had to tear straight home by cab in order to be here by a plausible hour—the story was that I had met with my editor in her office, naturally, not in her bed, and there’s a limit to how late I can return from somebody’s office—and Ginger was already home from her office when I got there. She kissed me hello, then wrinkled up her nose and said, “What’s that smell?”

  Oh, my God. What musk, what rutting scent of lust, what steamy reminder of passion still lurked on my flesh?

  Trying desperately not to look guilty, I said, “Smell? What smell?”

  She sniffed. She frowned. She sniffed again. She gave me a very skeptical look. “Soap,” she said.

  “Oh!” My mind fishtailed wildly. I smelled my hands, which
were trembling. “It must be that damn stuff in the men’s room,” I said. “You know, that pink liquid they give you? I pressed on the thing, and it squirted all over the place. You can still smell it, huh?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes were very slightly narrowed, but frown lines of indecision were visible on her brow.

  “I’ll go wash it off,” I said, and made it away from those scanning eyes as rapidly (but casually) as I could.

  Ginger said no more about it, though during dinner she did say, “We ought to invite this new editor of yours to dinner sometime. I really ought to meet her.”

  Everything in life happens because something else happened before it. In this case, soap had led directly to a dinner invitation. Pretending I didn’t see the connection, I said, “That’s a good idea. She’s very important to us, we ought to cultivate her.” Ooh; was that too ambiguous?

  Maybe not. Ginger nodded, eyes completely unnarrowed, and said, “Is she married?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Boyfriend, then. Or girlfriend?”

  “Gee,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “Who should we have for a third couple?”

  We chatted about that. 1 wondered if Ginger’s mind was running as rapidly behind her idle chatter as mine was behind mine. After a while, Gretchen—we eat with the children—changed the subject (my heart warmed to her) by saying, “I did a painting for Jennifer’s birthday.”

  The next day—yesterday, now—was to be (has now been) Jennifer’s twelfth birthday. Gretchen continues to be an inextinguishable visual artist, though her Christmas drawings for my book have at last dribbled away to nothing. (I was thinking for a while of sending her to Isaac Asimov.) It was now my job to ask to see this painting and to be supportive, so I did and was.

  It was pretty good, actually, within its limitations. Jennifer’s birthday being in May, and that being traditionally and famously the month of flowers, Gretchen had done, on a twelve-by-sixteen sketchpad sheet, a watercolor of a field ablaze with flowers. From across the room it looks almost like a later Jackson Pollock drip painting, but up close it is all these flowers, lovingly copied from books and magazines and calendars, crowded in great colorful profusion over the entire sheet of paper.

  I did not say it looked like a January-sale pillowcase from Macy’s. I told Gretchen it was beautiful, and that I was sure Jennifer would love it, and we all admired it for a while. I was very, very good, and much later in bed Ginger said, “Gretchen knows you don’t like her.”

  I said, naturally, “What?”

  “If you could see the way you look when you talk to her. ” “That’s ridiculous. I told her how great the picture was.”

  “She could tell what you really thought. We all could tell. Gretchen happens to be my daughter, you know.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “And what’s that tone of voice supposed to mean?”

  “Ginger, I didn’t come to bed to fight.” Nevertheless, we fought. I have nothing against Gretchen, but somehow that isn’t enough for Ginger. I’m not sure, on the subject of Gretchen, what would be enough for Ginger. The argument didn’t get anywhere simply because there was nowhere for it to go, but on the other hand it showed no sign of ending, so after a while I got up and sat in the living room and sulked. Ginger didn’t follow me, either to make up or continue the fight, and when I went back to the bedroom—either to make up or continue the fight—she was asleep, so that was that.

  Then came yesterday, Jennifer’s birthday. I know as well as Ginger, as well as anybody, that this heavy nuclear family schtick of Mary’s is all a plot to get me back—even though it’s exactly the same way she acted when we were together, which helped to send me away in the first place—but I’ve nevertheless really got to be present for my daughter’s birthday, whether it w'orks in with my ex-wife’s scheming or not. But try to use logic in these things; go ahead.

  It was hard to tell whether Ginger’s morning coolness was a carryover from the bedtime argument or a statement of attitude about the current day’s program; whichever it was, I pretended to see nothing wrong, got through the morning with no harsh words from anybody, and at eleven-thirty Joshua and Gretchen and I took the subway downtown for Jennifer’s birthday lunch.

  Complicated families lead to complicated arrangements. Ginger’s kids and I arrived at noon for a buffet party/ lunch to which about a dozen of Jennifer’s female friends had also been invited. At two that crowd left, and Mary and I had the four kids—ours and Ginger’s—for an hour, during which the boys went off to Bryan’s room to play and Mary discussed Gretchen’s painting with her in a very good and supportive way, asking the names of individual flowers, complimenting the kid on so accurately getting the comparative sizes of all the different ones, and telling her she should title the picture “Heavenly Field,” because it’s so much better than real-world fields. Flowers from different parts of the world and flowers that bloom at different seasons all blossom together in this picture: “Like a chorus of flower angels,” Mary said at one point. She didn’t overpraise, but she made her interest so clear that the birthday girl, Jennifer, who had at first been rather obviously indifferent to the present, eventually said she would put it on the wall in her room. Gretchen, naturally, basked in all this attention, grinning from ear to ear and swinging her feet back and forth under her chair, as though it were her birthday.

  At three Lance arrived to take his two away for the rest of the weekend, and Mary and Jennifer and Bryan and I settled around the kitchen table to play the boardgame version of Uno—one of my presents to the birthday girl— until five-thirty, when I left to walk down to the Village, meeting Ginger in front of the Waverly, where we saw the six o’clock showing of the movie, followed by dinner in a very pleasant neighborhood restaurant called the Paris Commune, over on Bleecker Street. I frequently feel I’m in a commune myself, with this olio of parents and children all swimming around in the same stew, but Ginger and I were out of the stew for once last night, and it was one of the best evenings in memory: no edginess, no complication, no defensiveness, no guilt.

  Then came today. Goddam Mother's Day! A fake, a palpable fake, nothing real in it at all. Nothing even sentimental, if you look at it with a cold clear eye. It’s the cynical invention of greeting card manufacturers and candy- makers, that’s all it is, a lot of Republican bastards making a dollar off everybody’s guilt trips.

  Mother’s Day was started in 1907, an early example of economic pump-priming, one of the desperate ploys to push consumer spending during the Panic of that year (which was the same year, by the way, that immigration into this country was first legally restricted—so much for sentiment). In that same year, proving it was really the moment to work motherhood for all the profit it contained, Maxim Gorky published his proletarian novel, titled with modest simplicity Mother, in which a mother is tricked by the Czar’s secret police into betraying her son, a revolutionary, during the failed 1905 rebellion in Russia. How’s that for shamelessness? (Not on the part of the secret police; on the part of the writer.)

  Mother’s Day. They oughta put back the other two syllables.

  There was no way, of course, that Mary could let Mothers Day go by without making use of it in this indefatigable campaign of hers; the kids required my presence to help them honor their origin. Sure they did.

  As for Ginger, my being dragged away to Mary’s place two days in a row would have made her testy all by itself; the fact that her own kids were away with Lance and there was nobody around to honor her as a mother put her right completely round the bend. Oh, I can’t tell you.

  In fact, I won’t tell you. I behaved at least as badly as anybody else. I am in here hiding from everybody, and in my considered opinion mothers shouldn’t be honored, they should be shot on sight.

  Thursday, May 19th

  LANCE is living in my office.

  I type that, and even I can’t believe it, but there it is. Lance is living in my office, just down
the hall from here. The one place I had in the world where I could close out everybody and everything and just breathe free for a little while, and now Lance is living in it, and I’ve set up my typewriter on this folding table here in the bedroom.

  I don’t blame the poor bastard; he doesn’t want this any more than I do or Ginger does. It just happened, that’s all.

  What has occurred here, Helena threw him out. Lance swears he wasn’t involved in any hanky-panky with any other woman, that it wasn’t actually him at all, that what Helena had had enough of suddenly was New York City. And perhaps another thing Helena had had enough of was Helena, because her abrupt decision (Lance says it was abrupt, anyway) was to change everything. She took her kids out of school, she told Lance the relationship was through, she sublet the apartment, and she went to Santa Fe.

  Santa Fe!

  Is this the act of a rational woman? Santa Fe, from East 93rd Street?

  Whatever the situation, the point is that Lance lived with Helena in Helena’s apartment (just as I am living with Ginger in Ginger’s apartment), so when Santa Fe called to Helena with its siren call, Lance had to leave. (Although Helena was subletting her apartment, she would not sublet it to Lance because she was ending their relationship.)

  Robert Frost said it: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Apparently that’s still true, even under such weird conditions as here maintain. Last Friday evening Lance phoned—I assumed it had to do with his weekend romp with his kiddies—and when Ginger got off the phone and returned to me in the living room she looked a little glazed. “Lance is moving in here for a while,” she said.

  I thought she was kidding. I offered a wide sick smile like Steve Martin seeing a punchline, and Ginger said, “I hope it won’t be for long.”

  “Ha ha,” I suggested, but I wasn’t really laughing. (I’d been in my living room chair, with my after-dinner drink, reading Gore Vidal’s piece for The Christmas Book, and this return to the mundane world was a very difficult transition.) “Lance is not moving in here,” I said.