Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (18 page)

           
It’s like one of the plagues of
Egypt
; a plague of editors. No, that’s
worse
than the plagues of
Egypt
.

           
THE quick brown fox jumped over the
lazy dogs.

           
It feels strange to be back in this
room again, working at this table. Strange and a little scary; I’m not sure I
know what it means.

           
All I know is what happened.
Yesterday, Lance brought the kids back from
Marin
County
, happy and bouncing and full of stories about redwood trees and the
Pacific Ocean
and the strange-looking males of
San Francisco
. Unfortunately, Lance also brought himself
back, and in the middle of the afternoon it became obviou's he intended to
stay. I said, “Lance, what about the other arrangements you were making?”

           
“They didn’t pan out,” he said. “But
I’ve still got some possibilities.”

           
So as soon as I could I cornered
Ginger in the bedroom and said, “Ginger, this has got to stop.”

           
“Well, I didn’t invite him back,”
she said. She seemed irritated with both of us.

           
“He can’t take over my office
again,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”

           
“Well, then, tell him so.
You
tell him.”

           
“I’ll be delighted,” I said, but
when I turned toward the door she cried, “Tom!”

 
          
I looked back at her: “What?”

           
“We can’t do that! It is his place,
too, he still pays rent, he—”

           
“So do I pay
rent!
In fact, I
live
here. Does Lance live here?”

           
“I don’t know what you mean.”

           
“I mean, are we just putting Lance
up until he finds a new apartment, or has he moved back in?”

           
“He has
not
moved back in!”
This was the most appalling idea she’d heard since my proposal of marriage.

           
“It sure looks like he has,” I said.
“And the worst of it is
,
he’s moved into
my
office.”

           
“It can’t be much longer, Tom,” she
said, switching gears, deciding to try to placate me.

           
“It’s already been too long. You
know, I could always go work downtown.”

           
“You mean, at Craig?
At Annie’s?”

           
“No. The room I used to use as an
office is—”

           
“You mean at
Mary's
?”

           
“She told me a while ago, if I ever
needed an office, the one I used to have is—”

           
“That bitch!”

           
“Mary isn’t pushing me
out
of
places to work, Ginger,” I said. “If Lance moves into that office tonight, I’ll
start using my old office tomorrow.”

           
“Go right ahead, then,” she said. “I
think it’s ridiculous to make such a fuss, but if that’s what you want to do .
. .”

           
“That’s what I want to do,” I said,
although of course it wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do
was force Ginger to kick Lance out, figuring she would certainly do so if the
alternative was that I’d be spending every day with Mary.

           
But somehow it didn’t work out. I
moved firmly forward, ostentatiously packing up my typewriter and a carton of
notes and reference books, and Ginger didn’t say a word on the subject. I
phoned Mary to ask if the offer was still good, and she said yes, and I said
I’d be down this morning, and Ginger stood firm. Lance moved into my office
last night, and my office moved out this morning. I left a different message on
the answering machine up there, directing callers to reach me down here, and
brought everything I needed down in a cab.

           
Like the room uptown, this one is
simply the smallest bedroom in the apartment, similarly with a view of an
airshaft. The few times I’d looked in the doorway here over the last year or so
my old table and chair and wastebasket were still in place, but the room had
become increasingly filled with stored cartons or mounds of off-season or
outgrown clothing. Mary has always had a small portable inconvenient darkroom
in our bathroom (how nice it has been to start the days without those acrid
smells or that cumbersome boxy machinery in the way), and would hang her prints
to dry on a cord stretched over the tub, but a few months ago a clothesline
appeared in my ex-office, extending from a nail over the door to a nail over
the window, and from it has dangled a gallery of her game attempts at art or
commerce or at least legibility: winos asleep in doorways, close-ups of snowy
fire escapes, a tiny girl studying a mosquito bite.

           
But this morning the clothesline was
gone, and so were the cartons and the clothing. The room was bare and clean,
exactly as I’d left it eighteen months ago. Mary had gone out to the Picture Collection
at the Mid-Manhattan Library on a research job, and had left a note: “Wont be
back
till late. Help yourself in the kitchen.”

           
I have helped myself in the kitchen.
I have wandered around the apartment, looking into the kids’ rooms and into
Mary’s room while memories have
stirred,
and I have
felt increasingly uneasy. For some reason, the troubles we had, the bad times,
the abrasions 'when we were throwing each other off like heavy colds after
taking an antibiotic, all those moments and feelings have faded away like
invisible ink. Even the chemical sti-nk bleeding into the bedroom through the
closed bathroom door no longer irritates. All I can find here now, out of the
past, is our sporadic happiness.

           
I’m beginning to believe Thomas
Wolfe had it wrong: it isn’t that you can’t go home again, it’s that you
shouldn’t.

           
WHAT really pisses me off is that
even
Annie
thinks I’m wrong. She won’t say so, but I can tell from the
tone of her voice.

           
I am talking about Dewey Heffernan
and Craig and the
Heavy Metal
artist named Korban. It turns out that
Korban, despite the juvenile content of his material, is not a Dewey- style
eager amateur but a professional illustrator with an agent and an attorney and
probably an accountant and a broker and a personal hitman as well. They are
referred to by Annie generically—and admiringly—as “Korbans people,” and their
attitude is simple and straightforward. Their man was commissioned to do a
certain piece of work for a certain agreed-on sum; he did the piece of work,
and he is now to be paid the agreed-on sum. There are no
alternatives,
there is no other way to look at the thing.

           
As for the
thing
, the comic
strip, there’s no way to look at that at all. At Annies insistence, I agreed
last Friday at least to gaze upon the result of Mister Korban’s inspiration and
labors, with as open a mind—and eyes—as possible, so Friday afternoon somebody
from Craig messengered a Xerox of the thing to my office—uptown, before I came
down here to Mary’s—and I taped it to the wall over the desk and spent some
time brooding at it.

           
At first I almost thought, what the
hell, why not. The thing is, I’ve been getting into high gear with this
greeting card history—I’ve got cards and photos of cards and doggerel verses
from cards all
over
this room now, taped to the walls and the back of
the door, stacked on the radiator cover, spreading out over the floor like pink
and gold ivy—and Korban’s irreverence was initially an almost pleasant respite
from the saccharine overdose I’ve been taking. Also, his draftsmanship is
excellent, and he pays careful attention to detail; the elbows are as
meticulously rendered as the pudendae.

           
However.
I
spent last weekend with my kids, and then with the trauma of Lance’s return,
and then with the move downtown, by the end of which I had come to the
conclusion that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, but when I saw it again on
Monday—while taping it up, along with everything else, in this new/old office—I
realized it was impossible, so I phoned Annie and said so. “Whatever you want,”
she said, dubiously.

           
What’s wrong with Korban’s
work—apart from the thuggish crudity of the mind behind it—is what tends to be
wrong with a lot of things directed at young people; it’s nihilistic for fun.
In a nervous effort to
be knowing
before they know
anything, not to be taken in, a lot of kids throw out the sentiment with the
sentimentality and are left with nothing but surface. Then they try to replace
what they’ve lost by being sentimental about themselves. (None of this is new,
of course; remember “Teen Angel?”)

           
But the caustic harshness still such
a strong element in this tripe is a leftover from the anti-war, pro-drug
sixties, and is nastily inappropriate in
the me
-first
eighties. It is true that some of the contributors to
The Christmas Book
are cynical about Christmas, but
its
an earned
cynicism. Korban may have earned his fifteen hundred dollars, but he hasn’t
earned his attitudes, and I won’t have his work in the book.

           
Which is where the problem comes in,
and why it’s now all
my
fault. It has been a week since Dewey first
lobbed this mortar shell onto my desk and I went running with it to Annie, and
this is the way it has been resolved. Craig will pay Korban his fifteen
hundred, because Craig has no choice in the matter. I refuse to run Korban’s
work—Diirer is back in, where he belongs—so Craig will not pay me my forty per
cent. And whereas the powers at Craig ought to be angry at Dewey for placing
them in a position where they have to throw away fifteen hundred dollars, it
turns out they’re angry at
me
because it’s my
refusal
that makes
the fifteen hundred a waste.

           
To one extent or another,
everybody—even Annie and Ginger—has assumed the same attitude about this as
Dewey; it’s only one page, why make a fuss? Until now, I hadn’t realized that
such a question could even exist. So at the end not only is Dewey not fired,
he’s the wronged one, and
is
still my editor, and
he’s
mad at me for betraying him!

           
I have now turned my back on
The
Christmas Book
, having given it the supreme sacrifice. No, not the thousand
bucks, but the fragile good will that had existed between me and my publisher.
I am keeping Korban’s craftsmanlike slop on my wall amid the greeting cards, to
remind me that the unforeseen is
always
what goes wrong, and I am hoping
that Annie will sell Hallmark, and Hallmark will sell some other publishing
house, and in that publishing house I shall at last find an ally who won’t
quit, get pregnant, or enter second childhood before leaving the first.

           
YESTERDAY was Gretchen’s ninth
birthday, and when I was leaving the office to go uptown Mary handed me a
shopping bag containing two gift-wrapped packages, saying, “Would you give
these to Gretchen with my love?”

           
“Hey, that’s nice,” I said. “You
didn’t have to do that.” “I wanted to.”

           
“Okay. Well, I—”

           
“Tom,” she said. “Could we talk for
a minute?”

           
I looked at her warily. I’ve been
working down here all week now, and so far Mary had not tried to make any
capital out of the situation. She hadn’t pushed domesticity, she hadn’t created
conversations out of the children’s emotional needs, and—best of all—she had
given me no more examples of the world engaging in foreplay with her. Was all
that about to change?

           
Not exactly.
We sat together in the living room, and she astounded me completely by saying,
“I want to talk to you about Gretchen.”

           
“Gretchen!”

           
“She’s a very nice girl,” Mary said.

           
“Sure she is.”

           
“She’s three years younger than
Jennifer, so naturally she isn’t as advanced, but she’s very bright and sweet,
and she has a very good artistic eye.”

           
What on Earth was this about? I
snuck a look at my watch, and was about to say something about not wanting to
be late for the kid’s birthday party, when Mary said, “I don’t think you have
the slightest idea what you’re doing to that child.”

           
“Doing— I’m not doing
anything
to that child.”

           
“You’re rejecting her,” Mary said.

           
“Oh, for Pete’s— In the first
place,” I said, “I’m not rejecting her at all, I was just this minute thinking
I didn’t want to be late for her birthday dinner. And in the second place, I
get all the Gretchen commercials I need from Ginger, so don’t
you
start.”

           
Mary smiled, in that infuriating way
she has. "I didn’t think Ginger would sit by and take it quietly,” she
said.

           
“Take what quietly?” I demanded,
then
hurried on, saying, “There’s nothing to take!”

           
“When you and I separated,” she
said, “you had what seemed to you good reasons.”

           
“They were good reasons.”

           
“Whether they were or not,” she
said, “you never intended to leave the children.”

           
“I didn’t lea— Well, I did, but— Of
course not.”

           
“You’ve been very good with them,
Tom,” she assured me. “You’re around them as much as you can, you care about
them, you let them see you love them and want the best for them.”

           
“Thank you,” I said.

           
“Bryan and Joshua get along
wonderfully well,” she said, “and that makes it easier for you, you can treat
them almost as twins, do things together with both of them, take them to that
baseball game.”

           
“I enjoyed it.”

           
“Of course you did. But with
Jennifer and Gretchen it’s harder. There’s three years between them, they
aren’t natural pals, and of course a girl’s relationship with her father is
more complicated than a boy’s anyway.”

           
“I don’t get the point,” I said.

           
“Sometimes,” she said, “you’re not
sure the children really understand you didn’t mean to leave
them
when
you left
me.
So you try too hard sometimes.”

           
“I know I do. It’s the Divorced
Daddy Syndrome, everybody knows about that.”

           
“One of the ways,” she said, “that
you assure Jennifer you still love her is to assure everybody you don’t love
Gretchen.”

           
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“Lore
Gretchen?
What has that got to do with
anything?”

           
“You’re in the role of father
there,” she said. “You’re living with her
mother,
you’re the one who’s there all the time.”

           
“Lance is around,” I said bitterly.
“Don’t worry about him, he’s around.”

           
“But that’s only recently. For a
year and a half, you’ve been more Gretchen’s father than Lance, and you’ve been
very cold to her all that time. And it isn’t necessary, Tom. Gretchen’s a nice
little girl, and Jennifer won’t mind if you treat her kindly.”

           
I wanted to defend myself, but was
Mary wrong? Generally, I felt Gretchen was a little pest, a minor annoyance,
something I had to put up with if I was going to live with Ginger. Was that
being unfair? I said, “Mary, I don’t know if you’re right or not. Maybe you
are, but maybe the truth is Gretchen really isn’t very likable. Maybe there’s a
little bit of both there; I want Jennifer to know I prefer her, and one of the
reasons I prefer her is that she’s a nicer kid.”

           
“Think about it,” Mary said.
“'All right?”

           
“Do I have much choice?”

           
Mary laughed, and patted my arm, and
released me then, and on I went to the birthday party; a perfect time and place
to brood about whether I was being fair to the birthday girl. My two kids
weren’t there, only Joshua and Gretchen and four of Gretchen’s friends from
school and Ginger and Lance (of course) and me. And while trying to think about
my relationship with Gretchen—the
existence
of such a thing, never mind
its quality, was still astounding to me—I became aware that I was the outsider
at this party.

           
Hey, wait a minute; I hadn’t known
it was going to be like that. I live here, don’t I? Ginger and I are the basic
family unit here, plus her kids, right? But all of a sudden we’re at Gretchen’s
birthday party, and the guest list includes her father, her mother, her
brother, her friends from school, and some man.

           
Me.

           
This made me resentful and edgy, and
got in the way of my efforts to study Gretchen calmly and dispassionately, to
see if she was a more likable human being than I’d thought. So I came at the
problem from a different direction, observing Gretchen’s friends to see what
they were like, and what my attitude toward them was, and suddenly I realized
they were the
same
as Gretchen! And the way in which they were the same,
of course, was that they were equally immature, squealing and silly and
fluctuating crazily between ridiculous enthusiasm and absurd despair; acting,
in other words, their age.

           
That was a point neither Mary nor I
had considered, the fact that Gretchen is, in this postnuclear family, the
youngest of four children, still going through phases the other kids have
successfully grown out of. It was her babyishness, more than anything
else, that
had made it possible for me to reject her.

           
There; I’ve said it. Reject her.
Mary was right, as I gloomily realized while sitting there as the fifth wheel
at Gretchen’s party, pistachio chocolate-chip ice cream turning to ashes in my
mouth. Gretchen was neither better nor worse than any other kid. I had without
realizing it tried her and found her guilty of two great crimes: of being the
youngest
child,
and of not being mine.

           
Various complaints that Ginger had
made over the months returned to me, concerning my attitude toward Gretchen,
and all at once I saw them in a new light. I
had
dismissed the kid, been
cold to her,
expressed
my impatience around her.

           
Her drawings for
The
Christmas Book.
I now saw—if I was honest, I now could see—that the
idea of a child’s drawing, one original well-done child’s drawing on the
subject of Christmas, would have been an excellent addition to the book,
blending in very well with the theme. What if
Jennifer
were the one with
an artistic bent, what if she had come forward with a contribution for the
book, would I have dismissed the idea out of hand?

           
However, in my defense, I would also
point out that I have not included any of Mary’s photographs.
The Christmas
Book
is a professional piece of work, not an amateur gathering of family
and friends.

           
On the
other
other hand, Mary
never volunteered (being a
grown-up,
and therefore
aware of the ground rules) and Jennifer does not have an artistic vocation, so
with neither of them did the question have to be faced. Gretchen, too young to
understand the difference between my work and her play, offered me an
opportunity to rethink
The Christmas Book
just slightly, and I snubbed
her, which was not only mean, but also unprofessional.

           
The birthday party went on. Amid the
laughter and the giggling and general good cheer, I became gloomier and
gloomier, guiltier and guiltier, more and more depressed. I began to feel like
the strange little creature in the corner of an Edward Gorey drawing; the party
going on, and the dark monster skulking behind the drapes.

           
Later last night I asked Ginger,
“Where are all those Christmas drawings Gretchen did?”

           
She looked at me in some surprise.
“Why?”

           
“I wanted to look at them again.”

           
“She threw them away.”

           
“All of them? Are you sure?”

           
“When you made it clear you didn’t
want them, what else would she do?”

           
“Okay,” I said. I was thinking,
It’s
too late anyway.
I was thinking,
After
the stink I made about Dewey Heffernan and Korban, I’m not sure I have the
nerve to drag in some kid’s drawing at the last second, even if there’s still
time.
I was thinking,
If I ask her to draw another one, I’ll just get
her hopes up, and then something will go wrong (because something always does),
and that’ll be worse.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, but this morning I went
through the boxes of stuff from
The Christmas Book
piled in Lance’s
room—I don’t think of it as my office any more— and then I took a quick look in
Gretchen’s room (she’d gone off to school), and when I came down here to work I
did some more searching, but without finding anything. She really did throw
them all away.

           
I’m glad I let her intercept the
football that time. Of course, the one nice thing I ever did for the kid she
doesn’t know about, and it would be spoiled if she did.

           
Shit.