Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (23 page)

           
I am still recuperating from
yesterday, Thanksgiving Day.
A true harvest festival, the closest
thing in Puritan America to real hedonism, the one day a year when gluttony is
not only acceptable but required.
(Another of the seven deadly sins
memorialized.)

           
While it is true that the first
Thanksgiving Day was celebrated as a sit-down harvest gala among the early
Pilgrims and some tame neighborhood Indians, the feast did not become a
national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on the
subject. Proclamations kept the holiday alive year by year until 1941, when
Congress made it a permanent addition to the American calendar.

           
Lincoln’s proclamation—Thanksgiving,
not emancipation—was done at the urging of one Sarah Josepha Hale, then editor
of
Godey's Lady's Book
, who was also the author of “Mary Had a Little
Lamb,” among other works, and who, an ardent feminist, persuaded Vassar Female
College, founded in 1861, to delete the word “Female” from its name in 1867. If
she’d stopped to think how many American women down through the decades would
be struggling to cook (without drying them out) twenty-two pound turkeys on the
fourth Thursday of every November, she might well have told
Lincoln
to forget it.

           
It’s been six weeks since I added
anything to this history; not since labor and management got together out there
in
Pennsylvania
to kill my baby. I understand the strike is
still going on, is likely to last a lot longer, and has begun to spread to some
of the company’s southern plants as well. It looks as though both sides are
going to suffer a lot. Good.

           
There is no
Christmas Book
,
but good things did come of it. The money, for instance; the lack of a book
wasn’t my fault,
nor
the contributors’ fault, so we
all got to keep our payments. And then there’s
Highest Previous Score
,
which is our working title for the history of video games. Since my track
record now includes the money I was paid for
The Christmas Book
, Annie
got me a
ttiuch
higher advance for
Highest Previous Score
than
would have happened last year. (Beat my highest previous score, in fact.) Also,
Dewey continues to combine contriteness for past misdeeds with a wonderful
galumphing enthusiasm for this new book, so it may even get good support from
the company when it comes out next September. (It’ll be next year’s Craig,
Harry & Bourke Christmas book, of course.)

           
And video games are really
interesting when you get to know about them, in a way.
Sort
of.
Well, bearable, anyway. (There’s something I wouldn’t tell anybody
but Mary, which is the truth: Video games are even more boring to read about
and write about than to play. But what I am is a professional, and what
Highest
Previous Score
is is what they’ll pay me to write. Listen, it could be Erik
Estrada’s autobiography.)

           
But what made me think about
The
Christmas Book
again is something that came in the mail today, from
Pompano Beach
,
Florida
: a birth announcement. “Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum are pleased to
announce the birth of their daughter, Tiffany Rachel Goldbaum,” etcetera. At
first I couldn’t figure out why Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum, of whom I have
never before heard, wanted to share this glad news with me, but then all at
once the penny dropped and I said out loud, “Vickie!”

           
Has to be.
I counted backward, and from what she told me she should be almost due now, so
she dropped the kid a couple weeks early, which would be very much in
character, she being sort of jumpy and neurotic and impatient. I cannot begin
to picture Harold, but whoever he is he clearly didn’t stand a chance.

           
So; the publishing world’s loss is
Florida
’s gain. I hope she’ll be— Well, not happy,
let’s stay within the range of the possible. I hope she’ll be reasonably
content part of the time.

           
Speaking of happiness, Hubert Van
Driin of Federalist Press has agreed to take
Happy Happy Happy
, for a
shitty amount of money. It’s on the back burner right now, because of
Highest
Previous Score
, but if the deal with Coca-Cola works out this book too
might become a winner. Indirectly, this is also a result of
The Christmas
Book.

           
It all began with the Andy Warhol
contribution, the Coca-Cola tray with Santa Claus on it. I cut out that
middleman by dealing directly with a Coca-Cola PR lady in
Atlanta
. Naturally, she’s one of the people I
informed when the book was murdered, and just last week she phoned to say she
was in town for a few days on Coca-Cola business, and could we talk.

           
So we talked. Her name is Lynn
Mulligan, she’s tall and quite attractive, early thirties, and in truth she was
in
New
York
because she’d talked the company into relocating her to their advertising
liaison office in
New York
. Seems her marriage recently came to an end, so she wants to pick up
the kids and move out of
Atlanta
.
She’ll make the move after Christmas, so what she initially wanted to talk
about was apartments and schools and all the rest of it.

           
But then the subject of
Happy
Happy Happy
came up, and when I described our failure to get Hallmark to
sponsor and subsidize the project, she suddenly said, “We might.”

           
“You might what?”

           
“Be interested in the book. Will it
be published by next fall?”

           
“It could be,” I said.

           
“If Coca-Cola could get some
placement in the book,” she said, “maybe something on the jacket and title
page—”

           
“Lovely,” I said.
“But
why?”

           
“Well, we might take a printing,”
she said, “make it the corporate Christmas present next year. Say twenty,
twenty-five thousand copies.”

           
Hubert Van Driin has been known to
do hardcover printings of specialized nostalgia books of twenty-five
hundred
copies. If I go into his office with one customer’s order for twenty-five
thousand, his gaiters will absolutely
snap.
His bow tie will spin like
an airplane propeller. He’ll have to go home and change his trousers.

           
Lynn
is back in
Atlanta
now, laying the groundwork for the idea,
and I won’t know until after the first of the year, but I am very hopeful. On
the other hand, I am for the moment leaving
Happy
on the back burner, to
concentrate on
Highest Previous Score
; I have seen great expectations
sag before.

           
Whether this Coca-Cola deal works
out or not, my having met
Lynn
at
least proved one thing to me; I’m home for good. If I were on the alert for
another Ginger, by golly, here she is. And she made it clear she wouldn’t hate
it if I made overtures.

           
But I did not, and I won’t. I
remember now why Mary and I got together in the first place, and it was because
we belonged together. I’d allowed myself to forget that over the years. With
Mary the only steadfastness in this constantly shifting and ridiculous life, it
became easier and easier not to notice her.

           
Or, that is, not to notice any but
the bad parts, the little annoyances and irritations that every one of us
distributes like a squid’s surrounding cloud of ink. Mary’s dogged
determination to become a first-class photographer, for instance, when she just
simply was not graced with that gift. She doesn’t
do
anything about
being a first-class photographer, just gets up every morning as the same old
bush-league picture-taker and takes some more bush-league pictures, in the calm
hope (not expectation, merely hope) that some magic transformation would have
taken place in her eye and mind since yesterday.

           
In fact, her very calm, her bulldog
staying power that looks so suspiciously like passivity but somehow is not, can
become annoying. The smell of chemicals in the bathroom, there’s another.
The fact that she usually knows more about me than I do.
All
of that ink gradually filled the foreground, obscuring the large and more important
truths. And so, self-bewitched, forgetting I already had the Blue Rose, out I
went in quest of it. That’s not a mistake I’ll make twice. (Apart from anything
else, Jennifer and Bryan would
hate
Santa Fe
.) ,

           
I have just been assembling a
bicycle. Do I look like somebody who ought to be assembling a bicycle?
Particularly with instructions translated from the Korean into some distant
relative of English: “And the other hexagonal nut, interchange is made from the
chrome bar through.”

           
Well, I’m through, and I’ve been to
the bar. The Christmas tree has been trimmed, the presents assembled and
assembled (if you see what I mean), Mary and I have drunk champagne and have
made long lingering love on the living room sofa, and now she has gone to bed
and I have roamed the house, restless, at last coming into the office to stand
a while and hold
The Christmas Book
in my hand.
One of
the very few copies.
What a nice book it is.

           
One unpleasant surprise was that the
death of the book was not the death of the lawsuit. That, Morris assures me,
will continue into the indefinite future. The Muddnyfes want my advance, plus
punitive damages. Morris says it’s probably four or five years before I’ll have
to think about the suit again, but I bet the memory of it will cross my mind
from time to time in the days to come.

           
Gingers boy Joshua is still best
pals with
Bryan
, and was here for a while this afternoon,
so now I have an update on the Patchett family. Gretchen has won some sort of
interborough grade school art contest, the prizes including an easel and
various art materials, and is apparently in seventh heaven. Lance, who is in
New York
for the holidays, has announced he’s moving
to
Los Angeles
after the first of the year, so I guess the
women in
Washington
didn’t pan out after all. And Ginger is now
palling around with a United Nations diplomat from Nigeria; the fellow’s wife
and kids are in Lagos, and therefore less likely to be a distraction.

           
One of the necessary components in
the recipe of life appears to be regret. We regret those things we cannot fix.
Bit by bit I am fixing the harm I did to Mary and Jennifer and Bryan. I don’t
believe I left anything to fix with either Ginger or Vickie, but one thing I do
continue to regret: I will never be able to make it up to Gretchen.

           
If I had slipped one of her drawings
into
The Christmas Book
, I could have wangled a second copy of the test
run from the repentant Dewey, and now Gretchen could have that; an unpublished
book with her drawing and her name in it. Because what does unpublication mean
to a kid? She’d get a charge out of the book, no matter what.

           
Well, so do
I
,
really. From time to time I pick it up and browse in it, which is exactly what
you’re supposed to do with a Christmas book anyway. And the other day I looked
again, for the first time in months, at my introduction, and all of a sudden I
realized what, all unconsciously, I had been doing. (Most of the things I do
are unconscious, I’m afraid.)

           
There is a tidal pull in great
simple ideas, nowhere more evident than in the great simple idea of Christmas.

           
It begins as a mere birthday, in
deceptively plain circumstances, but at once the event resonates, becomes more
and larger than
itself
, becomes in fact something
other than itself. Because Christmas is not after all the birthday of God; that
is surely Easter, when Christ does what only a God can do of His own volition:
He rises from the dead. Christmas is something simpler than that, clearer, more
understandable and less disputable: Christmas is the birth of the family.

           
It is this that gives Christmas its
particular role in our
lives,
and that makes it at the
same time both so banal and so compelling, why we sometimes wish to avoid it
but never can. Other public days remember love, or labor, or freedom, or some
moment of history, but the basic Christmas image is that mundane trinity: the
father, the mother, and the Child whose existence brings the family into being.

           
Christmas reminds us we are not
alone. We are not unrelated atoms, jouncing and ricocheting amid aliens, but
are a part of something.
which
holds and sustains us.
As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December's
bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who
are worth this aggravation, and people to whom
we
are worth the same.
Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring,
woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.

           
A year ago I presented Jack
Rosenfarb with a book project, and I thought I was doing it so I could stay
away from my family; get the money to make continued absence

           
possible
,
break Mary’s determination to wait. And look at the project I came up with.
Here in the book we have Puzo and Galbraith and Beattie and King and McDowall
and I don’t know who all, hitting the same subject time after time; the family,
and its interconnection. Without noticing, I spent half a year trying to put a
fire out by pouring kerosene on it. .

           
I wish I had some vision other than
hindsight, but I guess that will have to do. I am home, I appear to be happy,
and all my problems are small ones: a million dollar lawsuit, a tenuous
handhold on the lower rung of an imbecile industry, and the growing suspicion
that I am that dullest of all creatures, a family man.

           
Oh, well, what the hell.
Merry Christmas, everybody.