Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (8 page)

           
ANOTHER expense.
Ginger and I just came back from
Fire Island
,
where we looked at rental houses. The train from Penn Station got us to Bay
Shore in time for the 1:00 ferry over to Fair Harbor on Fire Island, where we
had about an hour and a half to look at houses and to walk in the thin sunlight
on the cold tan beach, hand in hand, smiling foolishly, before taking the 3:10
ferry off again. It was nice to be out there, nice to see the early spring
flowers and smell the salt air with its promise of summer, nice to stop
thinking about Christmas (and that awful woman!) for just a little while.

           
Summer house rentals are outrageous;
they always have been, and they get worse every year. We saw at once that we
wouldn’t be able to afford August, the more expensive month, so we resigned
ourselves to the second-class existence of being July renters. (And even that
can only be afforded if

           
Vickie Douglas and her superiors at
Craig, Harry & Bourke agree on June first that five of my contributors are
sufficiently
today
and famous to activate the next stage of the
contract. With Capote and Galbraith already having been dismissed, who knows
what
names
would impress that awful woman?)

           
One of the complications in our
rental search is that we need a very large house, since we will have all four
kids with us—Ginger’s two and my two—and to be able to afford the full month of
July we have to give accommodation to Mary for two weeks within it.

           
Talk about being between a rock and
a hard place! When Mary first suggested this insane idea, I quite naturally
said no, no, a thousand times no and assumed that was the end of it. But it w
^?
as
not. The discussion took place in
Marys
kitchen, over cups of coffee, a couple of Sundays ago,
after I brought the kids back from their weekend romp with Papa. Jennifer and
Bryan had gone away to the living room to watch
Sixty Minutes
, leaving
me at Marys mercy, and we spent a while looking at contact prints of a series
of pictures she’d done for some goody-goody youth magazine. They showed a young
girl (Jennifer) making a birdhouse; sawing, nailing, painting, etc. In every
photo, Jennifer wore the identical solemn and rigid expression, which seemed to
me wrong. I said, “She doesn’t look like she’s making a birdhouse, she looks
like she’s posing for pictures.”

           
“It’s very hard to break through
that self-consciousness.” Mary sighed, tapping a fingernail on perhaps the
worst of the batch: Jennifer, solemn, looked unemotionally at a hammer she held
perched atop a nail partway stuck into a board. “I don’t want to send these in
if they’re not right,” Mary said. “It’s a new market for
me,
I don’t want to screw it up.”

           
I could only agree with that
sentiment. Mary’s occasional photography sales, and her more frequent research
jobs, were in truth a mere drop in the bucket of my financial responsibilities,
but every drop helps. I said, “Why not
have
Jennifer
build a birdhouse, and take pictures while she’s doing it?”

           
Smiling ruefully, Mary said, “Well,
she’s not very good at it, is the problem. I hate to say such a thing, but she
hammers like a girl.”

           
There are these moments in life,
when reality gets in the way of our best intentions. “Hmm,” I said.

           
“And the pictures come out confused
anyway,” she went on. “I really
have
to do posed shots, because the
whole point is to show other kids how it’s done.”

           
“And inspire them,” I suggested,
“with pictures of a girl who can.”

           
“Yes.” She frowned at the prints.
“Maybe if she held the hammer up in the air, it would be better.”

           
“If she could manage to look at the
nail as though she wanted to hit it,” I said, “that might also help.”

           
“We’d better shoot another series,”
she decided, pushed the contact pages to one side, and looked at me with
deceptive calmness as she said, “Do you know what you’re going to do this
summer?”

           
“We’ll try to rent a house for a
month out on
Fire
Island
,” I said.
“Take all the kids out there.”

           
“Which month?”

           
“I don’t know yet. Depends on rental
prices, what we can find. Ginger can shuffle her vacation schedule around, so
we have some flexibility.”

           
“I’ll want to know pretty soon,” she
said, “so I can make arrangements for the other month and tell you how much
money I’ll need.”

           
I looked at her.
“Money?”

           
“Well,
I’ll
have to take the
children somewhere, too.” Two months of summer rental? “I can’t afford that,
Mary,” I said. (Last year, they’d stayed a month up in
Greene
County
with another separated mommy and her kids,
old friends of ours.)

           
She smiled, shaking her head at me;
clearly, I just didn’t understand the situation. “We’re your family, Tom,” she
said. “You don’t say you can’t afford your family.”

           
“I do say it. Besides, I’ll be
taking Jennifer and Bryan for a month.”

           
“Vacation is two months.”

           
“Mary, that’s all I can handle.”

           
“You expect me, Tom, to stay in the
city the entire summer?”

           
Oh, hell. “Mary,” I said, “what am I
supposed to
do?”

           
“You know what you’re supposed to do.”

           
Well, we wrangled for a while, and
then she said, “Why not take a place for the whole season? Then you and Ginger
could have it half the time, and the children and I could have it the rest.”

           
“I
told
you, I can’t afford
it. I can barely afford the one month.”

           
“Then we’ll divide
that
in
half,” she said. “Two weeks for you and two weeks for me.”

           
“Oh, no.
Oh, no, you don’t.”

           
“I tell you what, Tom,” she said,
with that infuriating smile. “I’ll let you stay out there during my two weeks
if you want.
And Ginger, of course, and the children.”

           
“No,” I said. “No, no, a thousand
times no.”

           
She shrugged, unruffled. “Well,
you’ll have to think of something,” she said.

           
So I spent time thinking about her
ideas. She
knew
I wouldn’t be able to just w^alk away from my goddam
responsibility—why, oh,
why
won’t she get a fella?—so it came down to
one of two choices: Either I come up with the money for Mary to take her own
month in the sun (which I very grudgingly acknowledge she should get, if I’m
getting such a month), or Ginger and I share two weeks of our summer vacation
with her.

           
If I had all the money in the world,
I wouldn’t have any problems, right?
Or, at least not
these
problems.
I tossed and turned and wriggled and squirmed on the end of
that harpoon for several days before first broaching the subject to Ginger, who
stared at me as though I had just dyed my hair green. She said, “Are you
crazy
?”

           
“I can’t
afford
to give her a
month, Ginger. And it’s only two weeks.”

           
“Only!”

           
“Think of her as a kind of built-in
babysitter,” I said. “Freeing us for—”

           
“A mother’s
helper.”
Ginger’s voice dripped with scorn. “In a way,” I said.

           
“No,” Ginger said. “No, no, a
thousand times no.”

           
“That’s what I said when Mary first
suggested it.”

           
“Oh,
that bitch
!”
Ginger said.
“That devious conniving bitch!”

           
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.
What’s so devious? Everything’s right out on the surface. Ginger, you can’t
deny the woman deserves a—”

           
“Deserves!
What about
me?”

           
“We’re having a
month\"
I yelled, getting mad. “She’s getting two lousy weeks!”

           
“And they will be lousy, you can bet
on that!”

           
“Not for us, Ginger,” I said. “I
promise. We can live our own
life,
have nothing to do
with Mary at all.”

           
“Living in the
same house.”

           
“We’ll find the right house,” I
said.
“Something with a separate entrance or something.
Besides, think of it this way. If Mary
sees
us together for a couple of
weeks, sees how wonderfully we get along together—”

           
“Hah.”

           
“So we’ll
get
along, dammit!
Do you have to be so goddam
selfish
all the time? Can’t you see—
”

           
“Selfish! Am I forcing myself onto
somebody else’s—
”

           
It went on like that for a while,
although louder. Ginger threw a book and an ashtray and a copy of
New York
magazine, but not at me. Then she abruptly stormed out of the room,
slammed the bedroom door behind her, and wouldn’t speak to me for two days; so
that’s how I knew I’d won the fight.

           
A new variant on
the Pyrrhic victory.
After arguments and rages and trouble with
twa
women, I have at last achieved a goal I don’t want. Don’t ask me how such
things happen, they just do. I am not looking forward to sharing a house with
Ginger and Mary for two minutes, let alone two weeks, but there it is.

           
After the real-estate lady showed us
several
formica-
and- linoleum chalets—places designed
so they can be hosed down after the filthy renters depart—we finally found on
Laurel Walk a place peculiarly suited to our peculiar needs. An older house,
clapboard outside and homosote within, it
has
two
bedrooms and a bath downstars and one bedroom with its own tiny bath as a later
addition upstairs. Out back, across the wooden deck, is a small guesthouse,
complete with its own bath.
That’s
where we put Mary, and the kids go in
the downstairs bedrooms, and Ginger and I will be able to retire to peace and
privacy all alone upstairs. My hand trembled slightly as I signed the deposit
check, but within the range of options open to me I think I made the right
decision.

           
So why do I feel so nervous?

           
WELL. Vickie Douglas. Well. This
will bear some thinking about.

           
Normally I drink very lightly during
a business lunch—nothing stronger than wine, and that paced carefully through
the meal—but I was so troubled by the very thought of the woman, not to mention
her actual presence at table with me, that when the waiter asked us if we’d
like to start with something from the bar, I immediately said, “Bourbon and
soda.”

           
(When did waiters start saying,
“Would you like to start with something from the bar?” It seems to me that up
till a few years ago waiters used to say, “Would you care for a drink before
lunch?” Is this some sort of dainty-pinky euphemism, avoiding the dread word
drink
?
One of these days, I am going to answer a waiter, “Yes. I would like a barstool
from the bar. You can send it to this address.”)

           
But not this time.
This time I asked for bourbon, and Vickie said, “That sounds good.
The same for me.”
After the waiter retired, she said, “I
could use a drink. I took the long weekend in
Florida
, and my mother—”

           
“I noticed the tan,” I said.

           
“I had to get out of the house.
My mother ...” And so on.

           
We received our drinks and I slurped
mine in a kind of heavy paralyzed frenzy, while Vickie slogged through a rerun
of the argument she and her mother had most recently had on the subject of why
Vickie still .
wasn’t
married. “I tell her it’s
my
choice,
it’s nothing to do with her, she’s so unenlightened, she wants me
to be an earthmother like her, nothing but soup and cabbage and babies, no
thought
of the great world outside her kitchen, the entire women’s revolution might
never have happened, to hear her you could ...”

           
Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God.

           
The waiter asked if we were ready to
order. “I haven’t even
looked
at the menu,” Vickie said. “Give us a
minute. And bring me another drink. Tom?”

           
“Oh, definitely,” I said.

           
We looked at the menu. I will
not
have sole
Veronique,
I told myself. I didn’t want sweetbreads, I didn’t
want the veal
Marsala
, I don’t believe human beings should eat
pork chops at lunchtime, and it’s possible I hate frittata. When the waiter
returned with our fresh drinks and his order pad, I said, “I’ll have the sole
Veronique
.”

           
“Sweetbreads,” Vickie said, which
was her most interesting statement to date
. Then the waiter
went away and Vickie’s mother re-entered, like Banquo, and joined us at the
table.

           
The waiter brought salads, and
Vickie said, “I forgot to order wine.
How
^r
about
this Pouilly-Fume?”

           
“Of course,
Madame.”

           
“And another
round.”

           
“Certainly.”

           
It was partway through that third
drink that I put the glass down beside my untasted salad and said, “Vickie.
Shut. Up.”

           
She blinked at me. Her eyes became more
then usually owlish. “Tom?”

           
“Vickie,” I said, “I have had
enough. I don’t give a royal fuck about your mother. I figure she’s probably
just another self-centered bigmouth like you, and she deserves you just as much
as you deserve her. But / don’t deserve either of you.”

           
I have never in my life seen as
astonished an expression as was then on Vickie’s face. The waiter arrived at
that moment, bearing food, and as he reached to place her oval plate of
sweetbreads before her, Vickie said, “Why, you utter horse’s ass.”

           
The waiter jerked slightly. Butter
sauce slopped. Frowning intently, he placed the plate to cover the stain.

           
Meanwhile, I was going through some
sort of death agony, I was becoming unborn. My stomach had turned into a
gnarled old rain forest during an electrical storm, my cheekbones had reached a
thousand degrees Fahrenheit and were beginning to melt, and hot smelly suety
perspiration was breaking out all over my head and body. “Oh, my God,” I said.
“Vickie, I’m terribly sorry.”

           
“Have you lost your
mind
?”

           
“Yes,” I said. The waiter was coming
around the table with my sole
Veronique.
“Listen, Vickie,” I said. “My
girlfriend is jealous of my wife.”

           
Why I started my explanation/apology
at that particular point in my tale of woe I don’t know, but the waiter’s
reaction was to take one deliberate pace backward, still holding my plate, and
give me a severe look, as though he suspected me of trying deliberately to
break his concentration. “Oh, put it down,” I snapped at him—I was snapping in
many ways, and in many directions—and he did, and then he went away, and I
opened my mouth and unburdened myself to the coldeyed, hot-eyed Vickie.

           
I told her everything. My financial
problems, my problems with Mary’s refusal to get a fella, the resulting
problems with Ginger so that, while our sex life was still terrific, the time
spent out of bed was becoming increasingly grim. I told her what
The
Christmas Book
meant in all this, and I told her my fears about what would
happen when I lost my editor, and I told her she had done nothing to alleviate
those fears and everything to increase them.

           
During this monologue—rVickie
remained silent, unblinking eyes fixed on me—we switched from bourbon to wine
and did a very, very small amount of eating; maybe one organ for her and one
grape for me. And when at last I ran out of things to say, and sputtered
brokenly into a silence dotted with a few last apologies, there was practically
no wine left, I had no appetite for food, and Vickie let at least a minute of
dead air go by before saying, calmly but coldly, “I do not talk about my mother
all the time.”

           
“You do,” I said.

           
“You’re paranoid,” she said. “It’s
your paranoia. I do not talk about my mother all the time.”

           
“You do, you do,
you
do.” Leaning forward over my plate, I said, “Vickie, do you think I have
nervous breakdowns during lunch
every
day?”

           
She studied me, large dark
inscrutable eyes. Would she never blink again?

           
Yes; a long slow blink. She sighed,
and looked away at last across the room. “Maybe I do,” she said.

           
“I’m sorry, Vickie,” I said. “I know
you’re having trouble with her, I don’t mean to be heartless about this, I—“

           
“But there’s no reason for you to
give a shit about my mother,” she said, nodding, not looking at me. “I know.”

           
“I wouldn’t phrase it quite like
that,” I said.

           
“You already did.”

           
“Oh. Sorry.”

           
Another sigh.
But then she frowned, and did look back at me. She said, “But that has nothing
to do with
us,
with your book.”

           
“You don’t like my book.”

           
“That’s absurd,” she said.

           
I said, “You told me Christmas was
too ordinary to think about.”

           
“I never did!”

           
“Two weeks ago, at lunch, that table
over there. You said Truman Capote and John Kenneth Galbraith were yesterday. ”

           
“I did? What did I mean?” Now she
was blinking a
lot.

           
“I think you meant you were bored,”
I said.

           
“It’s my mother,” she said, nodding
owlishly. “I think about her, and
everything
looks rotten. Do you know,
last Saturday in
Fort
Lauderdale
, my
mother had the ner—”

           
“Vickie,” I said. “
Please
.”

           
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I do talk
about her all the time.” She reached out and knocked over her wine glass. “Shit
again,” she said. “You want coffee?”

           
“No,” I said.

           
“You want another drink?”

           
“Yes, but I better not. I’m feeling
what I already had.”

           
“So am I. Let’s get out of here.”
With her other forearm resting in the salad, she waved exuberantly for the
waiter.

           
While she was going through the
credit card routine, she said, “I don’t blame you, Tom. When I get back to the
office I’ll talk to
Wilson
, he can assign you another editor.”

           
“Find me an orphan,” I suggested,
trying for levity.

           
“Mm,” she said, nodding morosely.
“What a lovely sound that word has.”

           
We bought our coats back from the
checkroom and went out to Park Avenue, where the cool damp spring air made us
both totter; I was feeling my drinks more and more.

           
Pawing in her huge leather bag for
some reason, weaving back and forth on the sidewalk, Vickie said, “Shit.
I’m
not going back to the office. I’m going home and feel sorry for myself. ”

           
“Me, too.”

           
“I’ll talk to
Wilson
tomorrow.”

           
“Good. No hard feelings?”

           
“Since when, you
prick?”
She glared at me, but then something in my expression made her
laugh. She said, “Of course there’s hard feelings, but we’re grown-ups, we’ll
get over it.”

           
“My wife is to me what your mother
is to you,” I said.

           
“I will not stand here while you get
even with me by talking about your
wife”
she said. “I am going to get a
cab.” She lunged toward the curb.

           
I lunged after her, afraid she would
either fall or get run over, and it would be my fault. I said, “Wait a minute.
Where do you live?”

           
“West 86th.”

           
There was an empty cab a block away;
I semaphored it. “I’m on 70th,” I said. “We can share, if it’s okay with you.”

           
“Sure. I’m liberal.”

           
We got in the cab and I told the
driver, “Two stops.” Then, because I was feeling guilty and chivalrous, I said,
“West 86th Street first,” even though my place would have been closer.

           
The cabby took us up Park, and we
sat back on the lumpy seat with the stingy legroom, and I said, “I’m sorry, Vickie,
I really am.”

           
“Maybe I should go back into
analysis,” she said.

           
“You used to?”

           
“Two and a half years.
Money I could have spent on clothing, thrown away trying to become
a good daughter.”
She glared at me, speaking through clenched teeth.
“Not once did that sonofabitch tell me, to be a good daughter you have to have
a good mother!”

           
“Well, you found out,” I said.

           
“It doesn’t help,” she said, and
glared out the window instead.

           
Being in close contact with a crazy
person becomes physically painful. Your shoulders bunch up as you wait for
what’s going to happen next. I sat there, warm in my coat, uncomfortable,
waiting for this sequence to be over, and thought about my next editor.
Hambleton Cudlipp the Third.

           
On our way through the park she
started to cry, little smeerpy sounds and tiny acid tears squeezing out of her
eyes. Head averted, she poked and pawed through all the crap and horseshit in
her bag. I said, “You’re crying!”