Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (21 page)

           
YESTERDAY Hallmark said no, and
today
Cosmopolitan
said no.

           
The Hallmark thing was just a stab
in the dark anyway, but the
Cosmo
rejection is annoying. They gave me an
assignment to write about the world’s most famous jewels, and I did, and now it
turns out some other editor there had already assigned some other writer an
article on famous jewel
thefts
, so his article and my article cover an
awful lot of the same territory. I’m not being rejected because
I
did it
wrong, in other words, but because
they
did it wrong.

           
This is a thing several magazines
do; assign too many articles and overlapping articles and articles they’re not
really sure they want, because it doesn’t cost them very much. With
Cosmos
“no” I got a tiny check, for what is called the kill fee; this means I agree to
do the article for twenty-five hundred dollars, but if for any reason they
choose not to run it, even if it’s because of their own error, all I get for my
work is fifteen per cent. Three hundred seventy-five dollars for twenty-five
hundred dollars worth of
work .

           
Theoretically, of course, I could
now sell the same piece to some other magazine, but the slicks are all so
specific and unique that it’s usually very hard to find a commissioned piece a
second home. I suppose I could retype it, not underlining every fourth word,
but it would still have the
Cosmo
girl’s magpie approach, and what other
magazine will want (a) a survey of would-famous jewels (b) told in the style of
a rapacious ninny? I’ll ask Mary when she gets
home,
she sometimes has good ideas on things like this.

           
Yesterday she had a potentially
very
good idea, in re
Happy Happy Happy
, the greeting card book. After Annie
called to say that Hallmark wasn’t interested and that she would now start
making submissions to publishers while continuing to look for a patron among
other card companies, Mary and I talked about the situation over coffee, and
she suggested I take some of the completed sections, where my research and
illustrations are in place, and turn them into magazine articles, maybe for
somebody like
Family Circle
or
Woman's Day
or
Parade
or
even
Redbook.
If we could get a few of them published that way, it would
not only make the w
^r
ork start paying for itself but might also help
to attract both a book publisher and a greeting card company sponsor. I called
Annie with the suggestion this morning, and she’s pondering it. Meantime, I’m
going through the material, basting it into a group of potential articles.

           
Last night, over dinner in a Thai
place called Toon’s on
Bleecker Street
, Ginger suddenly gave me an ultimatum that
I’m still wondering what to do about. “If you’re going to live with
me
,
Tom,” she said, “
live
with me. Several people have told me how sorry
they are we split up, and when I say we haven’t split up they inform me, as though
they think I’m the dimmest bulb in the world, that you’ve moved back in with
Mary.”

           
“People make mistakes,” I said.

           
“Don’t
you
make one,” she
said. “Come back uptown, work in your office the way you used to, stop all this
ambiguity.”

           
“Lance is—”

           
“Stop
that! Lance is here
every
other weekend
, that’s all he’s here! All his things are out of your office
now, the place is just empty almost all the time, there’s no
reason
for
this!”

           
“My research material is spread all
over the—”

           
“Pack it up!”

           
I said, “Ginger, there’s no reason
to. Everything’s fine just as it is.”

           
“Are you living with
Mary”
she wanted to know, “or are you living with
me
?”

           
“You, of course.
I’m not
sleeping
with Mary, if that’s what you want to know.”

           
“You’re not sleeping very much with
me either,” she informed me.

           
“We’ve both been busy,” I said,
because in truth our sex life has slackened somewhat since the end of summer.

           
“Tom,” she said, “do you know what
next Wednesday is?”

           
Was this a change of subject? It
didn’t feel like it, somehow. “No,” I said. “What is it?”

           
“The fifth of October,” she said
sententiously, and sat there looking at me.

           
The fifth of October.
Not her birthday, not anybody’s birthday that I know.
Not a
holiday. Guy Fawkes is the fifth of November. I shook my head. “I don’t get
it.”

           
“Our second anniversary,” she said.

           
Anniversary?
Oh, for God’s sake, it was the first time we went to bed together two years
ago! Like Mary remembering the date I left home!

           
“Our anniversary.”
I shook my head, not quite believing it.

           
She pointed a chopstick at me. “If
you haven’t moved
completely
back into the apartment by next Wednesday,”
she announced, “you needn’t come back at all.”

           
I looked at her. “Is that an
ultimatum?”

           
“I knew there was a word for it,”
she said.

           
I have finished unpacking my office
once again, I am back here in these familiar surroundings, and I’m still
recovering from all that happened yesterday.

           
Yesterday.
The famed October fifth, the second anniversary of the coupling of Tom and
Ginger, memorialized in the form of an ultimatum from Ginger to Tom, ordering
him either to bring his office home or to get out forever.

           
I had a week to dither over that
selection, and so I did, hoping it would go away of its own accord, that Ginger
would forget or change her mind or in some other fashion back away from the
precipice, but yesterday morning she made it clear her attitude had not and
would not change: “Don’t meet me after school tonight, Tom,” she said.

           
“Why not?”

           
“Because you’ll be
here
,” she
said, “unpacking all your research materials. I’ll
come
straight home from school and we can eat in tonight.”

           
“Ah,” I said, while a cold hard
hairbali formed inside my ribcage. “So you still want to make an issue of that,
do you?”

           
“Not at all,” she said. “There’s no
issue. Either you’re here or you aren’t.”

           
I could think of nothing just then
to reply, though in the subway heading downtown a bit later I did engage in
several impassioned interior monologues whose compelling logic, I lied to myself,
would have left Ginger without an argument to her name. (Had I really had that
much faith in my killer points, I could always have phoned her at her office
once I got to mine—up-till-then mine—but somehow I didn’t feel quite up to it.)

           
In the morning, I worked on query
letters for greeting card articles, but my heart wasn’t in it. I spent most of
the time mooning out the window at the airshaft, wondering by what absurd paths
I had come to this crossroads. And what further absurd paths might still stretch
out ahead.

           
Mary and I had lunch together, and I
told her at last about Ginger’s ultimatum, saying, “She’s jealous of you, you
know
. ”

           
“That is silly, isn’t it?” she said,
smiling a bit wistfully. “It should be the other way around.”

           
“It isn’t?”

           
“Oh, of course it is.” Watching her
spoon stir soup, she said, “Ginger’s just
afraid
of losing you. I’ve
lost you.”

           
“Come on, Mary,” I said.

           
She looked up at me, an inquiring
expression on her face. “You really don’t like being wanted, do you? A lot of
men would bask in it, having two women want them, but it just makes you
nervous.”

           
“Things that make trouble make me
nervous,” I said.

           
She reached out to put her hand over
mine, then apparently thought better of it and removed the hand. “I do miss
you,” she said. “I think it’s been harder with you half- here like this. I’ve
stopped telling you I want you back—”

           
“I know.” I resisted the impulse to
add,
And Vm grateful.

           
“I didn’t want to be the one to
disturb the equilibrium.”

           
“You can always count on Ginger to
disturb the equilibrium.”

           
She laughed, then said, “The mistake
I made, I gave you the idea it was some kind of contest between us. If you stay
away you win the contest, but if you come back I win. But it isn’t like that at
all, it really isn’t, Tom.”

           
Actually, it was exactly like that,
an idea I’d never quite formulated for myself but which Mary had just very
clearly and succinctly put into words. It
was
a contest; one of the
reasons I was staying away was because I didn’t want to lose. I smiled at her,
shaking my head, saying, “I think we’re both more mature than that.”

           
“Do you?” She pondered that,
studying her soup. “Maybe so,” she said.

           
After lunch, bowing to the
inevitable, I packed up all my papers and books into two liquor store cartons
and a plastic shopping bag that
said,
“Have a nice
day.” Mary had gone out right after we ate, so there were no awkward goodbyes.
The typewriter, the two cartons and the shopping bag made a cumbersome burden,
but I shlepped them down to the sidewalk, found a cab, traveled uptown,
shlepped everything into the building and into the elevator and into the
apartment and into the office, made myself a drink, watched the television
news, at last unpacked everything, and had just about finished recreating my
workspace— thousands of things taped and tacked to the walls, piled on the
radiator cover, stacked on the spare chair—when Ginger came in from class. She
entered the office, looked around at the familiar mess with a nod and a smile
of satisfaction and triumph, and said, “There. That wasn’t so much trouble, was
it?”

           
“Ginger,” I said. “I have something
to tell you.”

           
She looked at me, calm and happy,
and in her eyes 1 could see her preparing to let me have my.
little
face-saving statement, whatever it might be. “Yes?”

           
“I’m leaving you,” I said.

           
I was astonished to hear me say
that, but nowhere near as astonished as Ginger, who stared at me in absolute
paralysis, her face melting like Vincent Price’s statues in
House of Wax.
She didn’t argue, didn’t tell me I must be kidding, didn’t say a word at all.
She just stood there while J picked up the phone and dialed. When Mary
answered, I said, “Can I come home now?”

           
Mary laughed; uproarious laughter,
her face turned partly away from the phone. I waited through it, grinning sheepishly,
while Ginger burned a pure white in the corner of my eye, and at last Mary
said, “Yes, Tom, of course. Come on home.”

           
I hung up, put one of the liquor
store cartons on the desk, and started taking things off the wall. And at last
Ginger spoke, one word only: “Why?”

           
“Because,” I said, “when I get down
there, Mary won’t smile the way you did just now.”

           
“That’s not a reason.”

           
“It’s one of them.”

           
She watched me for a while as I
repacked the cartons, then went away to the kitchen and made banging and
crashing noises. Ginger is not famous for taking things calmly, so I packed as
rapidly as I could, wanting if possible to be out of there before the storm
broke.

           
I was on the second carton when she
returned to the doorway and stood there again, watching, a drink in her hand.
After a minute, she said, “I won’t put up with this, you know.”

           
I said nothing, just kept packing.

           
“If you go,” she said, “you don’t
come back. I’m not Mary. I’m nobody’s doormat.”

           
“I was wrong, Ginger,” I said,
packing and packing. “I owe you an apology. I owe everybody an apology. I
wasn’t leaving Mary, after all. I thought I was, but I wasn’t.”

           
“It took you two years to find that
out?”

           
“I’m slow,” I said.

           
“You’re a truly terrible creep,” she
told me.

           
“Probably so,
probably so.”

           
“And what happens to
me
?”

           
“You’re a survivor,” I told her.
“Don’t worry about yourself
. ”

           
“Because
you're
certainly not going to worry about me.”

           
“Gee, I’m not,” I said, rather
surprised at the discovery. I paused in my packing to face her frankly and say,
“Ginger, we both knew this wasn’t permanent. Remember on your birthday, when I
got all weird and asked you to marry me? I’ve never seen anybody look so
horrified in my life.”

           
“You were drunk.”

           
“Of course I was. Fortunately, you
still had your wits about you. We’ve both known,” I said, “that this would end
some day. The only difference is
,
we both thought it
would end when
you
were ready.”

           
“I did know it,” she agreed, nodding
heavily, rather like Medea. “I knew that bitch would get you back some day.” I
masking-taped the top of the second carton, dropped the roll of tape into the
shopping bag, picked up both cartons.

           
“Looks like you were right,” I
said, and carried the cartons away to the front door.

           
When I returned, she hadn’t moved,
was still in the doorway with arms folded and drink at the ready under her
chin. She watched me pick up the typewriter and shopping bag— “Have a
nice
day,” it said—and as I edged past her she narrowed her eyes to teeny tiny slits
and said, “You deserve each other.”

           
“I hope so,” I said.

           
In the cab on the way downtowm,
cartons at both elbow
^r
s, typewriter on lap, shopping bag somewhere
around my ankles, I replayed the conversation in my mind, with emphasis on the
parts that had referred to Mary, beginning with the finish, and the question of
whether I deserved her.
Plus Ginger’s earlier comparison of
herself with Mary and her use of the word “doormat.”

           
It would be stupid, I told myself,
merely to exchange one set of guilts for another. I have behaved badly toward
Mary, and toward a whole lot of other people—Gretchen comes to mind—but Mary
seems willing to forgo the pleasures of resentment and moral superiority for
the less certain but more complex pleasures of the
status quo ante.
If I
am incapable of taking her at face value, if I go downtown prepared only to be
hangdog and ashamed of myself, what’s the point in going? What have I
accomplished? The object of all this thrashing around is to make it possible to
stop
thrashing around.

           
On the other hand, to arrive on
17th Street
whistling and carefree, without any
acknowledgment of what I’ve put Mary through for twenty months, would be
exactly treating her in Ginger’s word, as a doormat. And in fact she wouldn’t
put up with that. I know Mary; I know her limits. What Ginger misreads as
passivity I understand to be selfknowledge and strength. “Uhh, cabby,” I said,
through the bullet holes in the Lucite, “
stop
at a
florist, will you?” The dumb-cluck, little-boy errant husband always comes home
with flowers.

           
Mary laughed when she saw them; they
were in my teeth. The long cone of florist’s paper dangled down my front like
some surrealist necktie while I bit down hard on the bunched paper at the
cone’s base, tasting staple, the meantime carrying everything else. “Let me
help you with that,” she said, took the flowers, turned them right side up, and
closed the door after me as I staggered in.

           
Reeling a bit, I lunged my way
through the apartment and left my office in the office. Mary meanwhile had gone
to the kitchen to put the flowers in water in a vase, so I followed her in
there and said, “Mary, I’m sorry.”

           
She shook her head. “That isn’t
important, Tom,” she said. “Thank you for saying it, but that isn’t what
matters. People are sorry about things all the time, that’s as easy as
breathing. Right now, I can hear myself, I sound stuffy and bloodless and I
wish I wasn’t like that, so I’m sorry about it, but it doesn’t help, I’m still
that way.”

           
“No, you’re not. My God, just
because you aren’t screaming all the time—”

           
“But I am.” She glanced at me, then
stepped back to consider the flower arrangement in the vase. “You just can’t
hear me,
that’s
all,” she said.

           
I had to put my arms around her
then, and stop talking, and I’m not sure which of us was trembling more. I
kissed her mouth and her cheeks, tasting salt, and finally I said, “I
am
sorry.”

           
“No,” she said. “That’s the wrong
word.”

           
Arms still around her, I leaned back
to see her expression. “It is?”