Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (9 page)

           
“I am not,” she gritted, low and
intense. She wouldn’t look at me; her head was practically in her leather bag
now, as she kept searching for a tissue or a handkerchief. “Nothing on Earth
makes me madder than to cry in public,” she muttered, grinding her teeth.
“Therefore
I am not crying
now
.
”

           
“Okay,” I said.

           
At her apartment house, I paid and
got out with her. “I’ll walk down
Columbus
,” I
said. “I want to be sure you’re all right.”

           
“I’m fine,” she said, staggering on
the sidewalk. She wasn’t crying any more, but her face was blotchy. “I’m
peachy.
Destroyed
at fucking lunch with a writer.
Home a basket case. Go away, you sonofabitch.”

           
“Vickie,” I said, “I’m not the
psychiatrist. I’m not even your mother. Will you be okay?”

           
“No,” she said. She stared at me.
“Which one of us is the bastard? Am I wrong, or are you wrong?”

           
“I think we’re both right,” I said.
“It’s just unfortunate that—”

           
“Fucking
platitudes.”

           
“You’re right,” I said. “The truth
is, I think you’re a self-centered bitch, and I’m in just as much trouble as I
was before, and I don’t know if the next asshole’s gonna be even worse or not.”

           
“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 w
^r
as 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.

           
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.

           
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.