Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (10 page)

           
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.

           
“I’m afraid he is, Tom,” she said,
and sat in
her
chair, and told me about Helena and Santa Fe and the
sublet. “The sublet starts the sixteenth,” she finished, “next Monday, so Lance
has to be out by then.”

           
“He has to come
here?'

           
“What am I going to do, Tom?” I
could see then that she was at wit’s end. Wringing her hands, she said, “It
really isn’t Lance’s fault, I know it isn’t, but it’s
awfully
awkward.”

           
“A similar phrase was going through
my own brain.” “It’s such short notice.”

           
“It sure is.”

           
“I meant for Lance,” she said.
“Helena didn’t say a word to him until Tuesday—to avoid a fight,
she
said—just before she left.”

           
“For Santa Fe.”

           
“Lance spent the last three days
trying to find an apartment, but you know what
that's
like in this
city.”

           
“It has been done.”

           
“Not in three days. Not when you had
no idea you were going to have to even
look
for an apartment.”

           
“Granted,” I said. “I still don’t
see . . .” I gestured encompassingly around our living room.
Our
living room.

           
“It’s just for a little while,” she
said, “until he can find a place. After all,” she said, going on the attack
slightly, “he
does
still pay part of the rent here.”

           
If I’d had a beard, I would have
muttered into it. “And don’t forget,” she went on, “we’re going to have
Alar)
living with us for two weeks, out on Fire Island.” “In a completely separate
house,” I said.
“And with plenty of advance warning.
And I certainly don't
want
her there.”

           
“Well,
I
don’t want Lance
here
,”
she said, flaring a bit. “It could become very embarrassing. Besides, I think
it could be bad for the children, seeing their father all the time.”

           
“It could be bad for
me
seeing him all the time,” I said. I smacked my chair arm. “Whose
chair
is this going to be? And that’s another thing; you and he are still legally
married, you know.”

           
She narrowed her eyes. “Meaning
what?”

           
“We’re not going to get into any
hassle about conjugal rights, are we?”

           
“Oh, don’t be absurd!”

           
“All right, where’s he going to
sleep?”

           
“It’ll have to be in your office,
but it’s just for a—”

           
“My office!
I’m working full-time on
The Christmas
Book
,
I have material all over—”

           
“Lance won’t be there except when
he’s asleep,” she said, “and you won’t be working in the middle of the night.
You never did before.”

           
“Work habits change.”

           
“Oh, don’t be silly.”

           
“You’re moving your
husband
into this apartment,” I said, “and you’re telling
me
not to be silly.”

           
She sighed. She unnarrowed her eyes
and bit her lower lip and looked honestly troubled. “I know, Tom,” she said.
“This is a terrible situation, nobody’s happy about it, and I blame the whole
thing on Helena.”

           
“In Santa Fe.”

           
“But what am I going to do?” she asked.
“Lance spent three days trying to find some other solution, but there just
isn’t any. He wouldn’t have called me if he’d had any other choice, and I
wouldn’t have said yes if
I'd
had any other choice.”

           
“Move over,” I said. “Let me up
there with you on the no-other-choice shelf
. ”

           
“It won’t be that bad,” she said.

           
“Oh, yes, it will. But as you say,
there’s nothing else to do.”

           
“And it’s only for a few days.”

           
“Sure,” I said, and Ginger came over
and sat in my lap and thanked me for being
understanding
,
and we kanoodled a bit.

           
So the next day, Saturday, Lance
arrived to pick up his kids for the weekend, and when he brought them back on
Sunday he stayed. Many suitcases and liquor store cartons filled up my office,
the sofabed in there stood open, and Lance fell ravenously on the vodka when it
was offered. He was looking pretty damn hangdog, and although I was goddam
annoyed at the
situation
, I couldn’t find it in my heart to be sore at
Lance, so here we are with Lance living in what is, after all, his apartment.
But at least he’s had the grace to sit on the sofa and not my chair the few
times he’s been in the living room.

           
In truth, the idea of it is much
worse than the actuality. Lance works in a midtown office—he’s some sort of
department head of a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS that does blue-sky
demographic research—and he’s been arranging his dinners out in the world
somewhere, so essentially we only see him for half an hour or so in the morning
(he uses the kids’ bathroom) and maybe a while in the evening. The arrangement
is now four days old, and has been less awkward than one might have expected.
Nevertheless, he is there, in my office.

           
And
The Christmas Book
, boxes
and boxes of correspondence, tear sheets, Xeroxes, manuscripts, photos, tagged
books, all of this compost that’s supposed eventually to grow a mighty volume,
has been laboriously moved from its proper home around my desk into this
bedroom, where Ginger drapes her pantyhose over it. It’s hard to take your
life’s work seriously when it’s seen through a lot of double-layer crotches.

           
Despite it all, however, the book is
coming along, with more and more terrific input from my celebs. The Gore Vidal
piece I was reading when Lance broke over my bow was a weirdly effective and
chilling item, half essay and half story, on the idea that what Christ brought
to the world was not life but death. Pre-Christianity, if I understand what
he’s saying, was an innocent and happy pagan time because, although death
existed, nobody cared much about its implications; instead, all living
creatures devoted their attention to life. When Christ arrived, He brought with
Him an obsession with death and what happens thereafter that darkened the world
from His day till this.
Makes a nice counterpoint to things
like Garfield and the Coca-Cola tray.

           
Carl Sagan has sent me a hot-air
balloon defining the star the Wise Men followed; sure, why not? And Stephen
King came through with a cute twist-ending story about a little boy who sees
future events in the shiny ornaments on the Christmas tree. Joan Didion,
talking out of the side of her immobile mouth, sent along a cheery discription
of Christmas Eve on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, and I
think
John Leonard’s
piece is about a marriage breaking up on Christmas morning. I
think
so. -

           
On the visual side, Jules Feiffer
sent along a nice strip of his dancer in her black leotard, plus a Santa Claus
hat, doing a dance to Peace
On
Earth; she’s dubious,
but hopeful.

           
I’m not sure the Jill Krementz photo
of the sidewalk Santas all gathered in a room to receive their instructions is
exactly right for the book; somehow it’s more reportage than what I’m looking
for. I’m still thinking about that one. (I showed it to Mary, who can be very
judgmental about sucessful photographers’ work, and she regarded it with utter
disdain. “Where’s the
truth
in it?” she wanted to know. Her
girl-builds-birdhouse series was rejected by that youth magazine, and rejection
always makes her start talking about truth and esthetics and artistic purpose.
Nevertheless, this time she may be right.)

           
The envelopes from Isaac Asimov I’m
sending back unopened.

           
And now I have a letter from an
agent named Henry Morrison, telling me his client, Robert Ludlum, had intended
to do a Christmas short-short story for the book, but by the time he’d set the
scene and introduced the characters he had twenty-five thousand words on paper,
so it looks like it’ll be his next novel instead
—The Yuletide Log
,
perhaps—and therefore I shouldn’t count on a submission from Ludlum. Less
baroque refusals have been received from

           
James Michener, William Styron and
Pauline Kael, but with the depth on the bench I already have I’m no longer
troubled by anybody saying no.

           
In fact, if it weren’t for Lance in
the house, I wouldn’t have any troubles at all. (Apart from Mary, of course,
weaving and unweaving Laertes’ winding sheet down there on West 17th Street,
but that’s something else.) The best news in a long long time is that good old
Vickie managed the near-impossible: She got Craig, Harry & Bourke to make a
commitment and come up with the second payment almost a month ahead of time!
More than a week ago, while I was still recovering from Mother’s Day, Vickie
called to say she’d gotten Wilson to agree to the early pick-up. Our delight
was such that she left work early and we had an immediate editorial conference
to celebrate.

           
Things continue very well on the
Vickie front. In fact, if the advent of Lance can be said to have a silver
lining, it is that it has given Ginger enough to think about so she’s less
likely to notice any little inadvertent clues I may have on or about my person;
like soap, for instance.

           
But how much longer can this go on?
The situation is extremely fraught, I mean very very densely fraught.