Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (2 page)

           
I really need the money.

           
TWELFTH Night.
Its
another of those ancient counting things from
before they got good at math, like Easter Sunday being the third day after Good
Friday. Twelfth Night is the twelfth night after Christmas, but only if you
count Christmas Eve as night number one.

           
Anyway, Twelfth Night is the eve of
the Epiphany, which celebrates two major religious moments, being the baptism
of Christ and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. (It’s also the date of the
wedding feast at
Cana
, whatever that might mean.) In the old
days, Twelfth Night marked the end of the religious feast of Christmas and a
return to secular concerns, usually kicked off with a carnival. In medieval
England
there was a royal court masque on Twelfth
Night, politically so important that foreign ambassadors would bribe and
intrigue for position at it. The humbler folk celebrated with a carnival
starting with a beanfeast involving a cake with a bean baked in it. Whoever got
the slice of cake with the bean was master of the revels. (As for Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night,
that doesn’t have much to do with anything at all, but
was merely from his Neil Simon phase, one of his comedies in which a male actor
playing a female role was then disguised as a boy, ho hum.)

           
Anyway, Twelfth
Night.
Neither Ginger nor I care about that sort of thing—we threw out
our tree, along with several of its lights and ornaments, during our post-New-
Year’s-Eve-party fight—but Mary of course is a goddam traditionalist all the
way, so not only did she keep her tree until today but insisted I go over this
afternoon to help her and the kids undecorate.

           
Naturally, Ginger was annoyed. “You
don’t see
me
running off to Lance, do you?”

           
“He didn’t ask,” I said. “Besides,
Helena
wouldn’t like it.”

           
“And I don’t like it,” Ginger said,
narrowing her eyes. She looks trampy when she narrows her eyes like that; I
made the mistake of saying so once, so now she narrows her eyes all the way
through parties and as a result spills her drink a lot. Now, narrowing her eyes
without ulterior motive, she said, “What it comes down to is, Mary needs a
fella.”

           
“Amen,” I said.

           
And it’s true, it couldn’t be
more true
. Ginger’s exhusband, Lance, lives now with Helena,
an assistant production manager at Time, Inc., whose ex-husband Barry more or
less lives with the ex-wife of a psychiatrist named Terriman or Telliman or
something. (Don’t worry about these names; these people don’t matter.)

           
Anyway, Ginger and Lance’s kids live
with Ginger and me; Helena and Barry’s kids are with Helena and Lance; the psychiatrist’s
kids are with Barry and whatsername. The psychiatrist contributes support money
and Barry takes up the slack; Barry contributes support money for Helena and
her kids and Lance takes up the slack; Lance contributes support money for
Ginger and the kids here, and I take up the slack. And I contribute support
money for Mary and
my
kids. . . .

           
And there’s the rub. Mary, as Ginger
pointed out, doesn’t have a fella. Her freelance photography work and the
research jobs probably bring in on average a little less than Ginger’s salary,
which is nowhere near enough for the lifestyle we all seem to have acquired. So
while everybody else in the world is supporting two half-households, which adds
up to one household, which is just barely possible, / am supporting one and
one-half households all by myself, I’ve been doing it for eleven months, and
I’m drowning.

           
Which is why
The
Christmas Book
is so important.
It could solve my money problems for
a year, maybe two years; long enough, in any case, for Mary to give up the idea
that I’m coming back.
Long enough for her to find a fella.

           
With Ginger, I live on West End
Avenue near 70th Street; Mary and the kids live downtown, on West 17th Street
between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; a fairly decent neighborhood, very near the
Village and with much the same charm, but at lower rents. Going off now to
disrobe the tree, I wore the sweater Mary’d given me for Christmas, to placate
her. (I’ve already told Ginger it was my kids who gave me the sweater, to
placate
her.)

           
The Christmas decorations on Mary’s
tree seemed more
accurate
, somehow. Does that make any sense?
Christmases come and Christmases go, and over the years some of the old
ornaments break or crumple or disappear, new ones are added, there’s a slow
organic change, a continuous gradual shifting, every year subtly different and
yet always the same, so that when you hear the phrase “Christmas tree” there’s
always one proto-tree that comes into your mind, and the rest are merely
imitation.

           
I had time to brood about this
because I spent an hour looking at the tree before we ever got around to
undressing it. Mary met me at the door with cocoa and the news that the kids
wanted to play Mille Bornes first, because it was alleged to be best with four.
Since I was the one who’d given Jennifer the game for Christmas, and since the
card table and chairs were already set up in the living room, 1 couldn’t very
well say no, so we all traveled several thousand miles together, while from
time to time I looked past Bryan’s head at the tree, thinking how accurate it
was.

           
Jennifer, my firstborn, is eleven, a
savvy, skinny
New
York
kid and an
absolute shark at games. Fortunately she’s also lucky, because she cares
intensely
about whether she wins or loses.
Bryan
, nine
years old, has already differentiated in his mind between sports (which are
important) and games (which don’t matter), so that’s also good. Since Jennifer
needs to win, and
Bryan
doesn’t care but does enjoy playing, they
make a kind of better Lucy and Charlie Brown, without (I hope) the
psychological damage always implicit in “Peanuts.”

           
Jennifer won twice,
then
I won. (She’d gone eight hundred fifty miles without
using any two-hundreds, a gamble that would have paid off
big
if I
hadn’t scrambled to a graceless any-way-at-all win.) There had been talk about
playing only three games, but when Jennifer was defeated on the third she got a
set expression around the mouth, shuffled the cards like a pro, and said, “Just
one more.”

           
Mary said, “I’m not sure how long
Tom can stay.”

           
“I’ve got time,” I said airily,
though I knew Ginger would already be pacing the floor on
70th Street
. “I’ll be delighted to whup you twice in a
row,” I told Jennifer, which made her grin like Clint Eastwood and hunker down
to
play.
She won, too.

           
After that, we put the table and
chairs away and finally took care of the tree. Removing a rough-edged white
snowball with a pale blue manger scene indented into one side, remembering that
it was one of the few ornaments I’d brought with me from my parents’ home,
making it almost the oldest part of the continuity, the accuracy, I tried to
think how I might gracefully ask to take it with me now, but there seemed to be
no way. Palm it, pocket it? No.

           
By the end of the operation, Mary
and I were alone, it having occurred to the kids that putting ornaments in
boxes was
work
and not
play.
Also, I think they’re both sometimes
uncomfortable around me these days, possibly because I’m uncomfortable around
them. I have this feeling they’re not mature enough to realize how mature
I
am.

           
I put the naked tree in the hall, to
carry down to the street when I left, and returned to the living room to say my
farewells. On hands and knees there Mary picked needles one by one out of the
carpet. “Well,” I said, “1 guess I’m off.”

           
Kneeling, she sat back on her
haunches, her cupped hands in her lap filled with pine needles. “Tom,” she
said, “do you remember Jack Horton?”

           
“Sure,” I said. About my age, skinny
and worried- looking, he lives in the neighborhood; we have mutual friends, we
meet occasionally at parties, we’ve never been close.

           
“Sit down a minute,” she said.

           
Reluctantly, I sat facing her in
“my” chair.

           
“I ran into Jack Horton at Key Food
this afternoon,” Mary said, “and he put his hand on my breast.” She touched her
fingertips to the spot.

           
I was surprised, and said so: “Jack
Horton?
Doesn’t sound like him.*

           
“I know,” she agreed. “It’s because
men know I’m alone now,” she said. “It’s happened
before,
I’ve told you about it.”

           
“Yes, you have.” And she
has,
four or five times in the last couple of months, and
with increasing detail, it seems to me. And always described in the same
manner: not angry or upset or offended or anything, just calmly interested in
this phenomenon that when a woman isn’t already with a man other men come
around and start copping feels.

           
“Of course,” she said, “he
pretended
he was just admiring my dalmatian pin.”

           
That would be a free-form,
black-and-white mosaic pin
Bryan
had
found at some Arab junk jewelry place in the Village and had given Mary for Christmas,
announcing the weird-shaped lumpy thing was a dalmatian, as in the Walt Disney
movie. I said, “Well, maybe that’s what he was doing.”

           
“Oh, no,” she said. “He made sure he
rubbed his knuckles back and forth on my nipple, like this.” She demonstrated,
watching her own knuckles with absorption.

           
Mary’s campaign to get me back does
not, I’m happy to say, include dressing up “sexy.” At this moment she was
barefoot, wearing old jeans and a dark blue high-neck sweater. But we were
married a long while, it wasn’t physical disinterest that broke us up, and I
don’t need suggestive clothing to remind me who’s inside there. Watching her
watch herself rub her nipple, I said, “Uh, like that, huh? What did you say?”

           
Her hand returned to help the other
hand hold pine needles. “Of course, I pretended not to notice,” she said. “It’s
a good thing it wasn’t hard, though, or who knows
what
he would have
thought.”

           
What
I
thought then was
,
He's a fella
.
Mary, maybe he likes you, he’s
decent, why not follow through?
That was what I thought, but not at all
what I could say. “He probably didn’t mean it,” I said. “You should have said
something right then, he probably would have turned red with embarrassment.”

           
“Oh, he meant it,” she said. “It’s
because you’re away.”

           
“Speaking of that,” I said, bright
and casual. “Ginger and I are thinking more seriously about marriage now, so
we’ll both have to get divorces, of course.”

           
“I don’t think Lance would like
that,” Mary said.

           
“Why’s that?”

           
“Because then he’d be free to marry
Helena
, and Lance doesn’t want to marry
Helena
.”

           
It had been a mistake to mention
marriage; all I’d been trying to do was change the subject, plus reinforce the
notion that since she and I were never never never going to get back together,
why didn’t she catch a couple of these passes or go to a few parties and
find
a fella?
But marriage is Mary’s subject, as I should have remembered.

           
Still pretending to talk about
Ginger’s ex, she went on, “Lance is just playing hookey.
Helena
’s an afternoon movie to him, that’s all.”

           
“I have to go now,” I said, and came
home back to Ginger’s reproaches, which I have fled by coming into my office to
“work.”

           
Well, if I’m working, let’s work.
There are a couple of magazine pieces aborning on this desk, and galleys of
The
Films of Jack Oakie
to correct, but my mind is still all caught up in
The
Christmas Book.
Will Jack Rosenfarb take it? There isn’t much time; maybe I
should phone somebody else, make another appointment for next week just in
case.