Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

  With frequent hilarity and many pauses and breaks and a few sidetrips to snack bars, we played a ridiculous game of touch football until nearly four-thirty. The Diskants won, eighty-four to thirty—we weren’t doing extra points— primarily because every time Lance passed to Gretchen the ball was intercepted by Jennifer, who is very lithe and quick, with long skinny arms and the true competitive spirit. Gretchen began to look a little teary after a while, her underlip receding, so once or twice in our Diskant huddle I suggested to Jennifer she ease off the pressure, let Gretchen catch a pass or two—we did have a comfortable lead, after all—but Jennifer simply couldn’t stop herself. Finally I deliberately threw a bad pass that Gretchen could intercept, and she ran with it for her only touchdown of the afternoon, which was enough to lift her spirits quite a bit.

  Back at the apartment, there was a note from Ginger that she’d gone out shopping. I had to take my kids home, Gretchen and Joshua immediately plunked themselves in front of the television set, and Lance volunteered to come along “for the ride,” adding, “In fact, since my team lost, I’ll spring for a cab.”

  “You’re on,” I said, and the children cheered.

  The main reason I was pleased to have Lance along was as some protection from Mary, whose topics of conversation are invariably trouble. There’s her career in photography, there’s the subject of my moving back, there’s the childrens’ emotional condition, but the worst of all is sex.

  This is increasing. Is it because she has no other sex life since I left? (More guilt.) Whatever the reason, we’ve reached the point now where every time she sees me she has another sexual encounter to describe, with friend or stranger. She can’t take a subway without some man rubbing an erection against her. She can’t go to a party without at least one male acquaintance subtly sliding his knee between her legs. She can’t make a phone call or a purchase without somebody talking dirty to her.

  I find all this disturbing. Well, naturally I do, because Mary is technically still my wife, after all, and nobody wants his woman—or his former woman—treated basely. But more than that, I don’t want Mary telling me about it. She describes exactly the way it feels to be rubbed against in the subway, and how she knows the guy has had an ejaculation. She can remember every double entendre, every obscene gesture, every excuse this fellow or that fellow makes for touching her breast or her thigh or her behind. She never expresses an opinion about all this, never lets me guess if it frightens or angers or arouses her, but merely describes it all, as though she found it quite interesting and was sure I would, too.

  I don’t. Or, sometimes, I do, but that’s worse. Of course I could go to bed with Mary, I know that, but then what? The whole point is, I’ve left, right? She’s supposed to find a fella, get on with her life, ease my financial burden. We’re separated, apart, it’s over, she isn’t supposed to look at me calmly with her clear blue eyes and tell me all these sex scenes. One way and another, it’s, well, upsetting.

  So that’s why I was glad to have Lance along, which worked fairly well up to a point. That is, at least Mary didn’t tell me about anybody coming in her pocket. She simply offered us coffee, which we both refused, but then she settled down to chat anyway, saying to Lance, “I understand you’ve moved back home.”

  “Well, not exactly,” he said, grinning and looking uncomfortable. “You know about Helena. ...”

  “She went away, didn’t she?”

  “To Santa Fe,” I said. For some reason, the choice of city still offended me.

  “So you had to go home,” Mary finished.

  “I’m looking for a new place,” Lance told her. “Something small. Just a one-bedroom is all I need. If you hear of anything—”

  “I’ll be sure to call,” Mary promised. To me, she said, “Tom, do you want to stay to dinner?”

  She said that every time, ritually, and every time I gave her back the same ritual response: “No, thanks, I’ve got to get back uptown.”

  “With Lance up there,” she said, going beyond ritual, “I thought you might be more comfortable down here.”

  Quickly, Lance said, “I’m going out for dinner. I don’t, uh, I don’t really live there.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He just sort of sleeps there. In the office.”

  “Just until I can find an apartment.”

  “Tom? You don’t have an office? How do you work?” “I’m set up in the bedroom. It’s fine,” I said, annoyed to hear myself protesting too much.

  “And it is only temporary,” Lance said, also protesting too much.

  “Very temporary,” I protested.

  “I’ll be out of there any day now,” Lance protested. Before we became totally absurd, I stood and said, “I’ve really got to get uptown.”

  “Me, too,” Lance said. But then he couldn’t resist adding, “Uh, a different part of uptown.”

  Mary walked us to the apartment door, and as we were leaving she said, “Tom, if you need an office, your room is still here, you know. You could come down and work any time. Until Lance finds an apartment. Just temporarily.” Was she making fun of us? I decided to take it straight. “Thanks for the offer,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  Down on the sidewalk, Lance sighed and looked gloomy and said, “Mary still wants you, you know.”

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  “It’s nice to have somebody want you,” he said. “Whether you want them or not.”

  “Rough out there, huh?”

  “Oh, you don’t know, Tom,” he said, shaking his head. “You just don’t know. And this last weekend, Jesus. The bitches I stand around talking to.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” I said.

  Lance perked up a little at that, so we went over to Sixth Avenue and turned south and entered a bar, where we had a drink and Lance said, “I’m not a teenager any more, Tom, I don’t like these goddam mating rituals. With Helena, I already knew her, I was leaving Ginger anyway, or she was leaving me, she’d already started on the side, you know . . . . ”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “Lance, it’s water under the bridge, doesn’t matter any more, but I absolutely swear you were already out of the house when Ginger and I got together. ”

  “Oh, not you,” he said, shrugging it away. “There were a couple of other guys before.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t known about that.

  “The point is,” he said, “I was never in this goddam undignified position of hunting for a woman. It was all kind of like a square dance, everybody just moved one step over.”

  “Except Mary,” I said bitterly.

  He looked surprised. “That’s right, isn’t it? She never got hooked up with anybody else.”

  We were both silent then a minute, and I knew we were both thinking the same thought: Was Mary the solution to Lance’s problem? Was Lance the solution to my problem?

  No. I realized then for the first time that whenever I thought of Mary at last getting herself a fella, it was a given in my mind that it would be a fella 1 didn’t know. The idea of Lance and Mary— No. “Incest” wasn’t precisely the right word, but it had precisely the right feeling.

  Lance’s thoughts must have meandered to a similar terminus, because eventually he gave a long sigh, finished his drink, and said, “Let’s find a better joint.”

  “You’re right.”

  We crossed 14th Street into the Village, found another bar, and Lance told me about his experiences as a hunter of women: “They’re terrible, Tom, there are a whole lot of truly terrible women out there, and they go to parties, and they smoke, and they have opinions about every goddam thing in the goddam world, and they’re just making me very depressed.”

  We didn’t like the jukebox in that place, so we went on to another, and Lance told me more: “They have that magazine called Self for the single women,” he said, “and believe me, Tom, the name tells it. The reason all those single women are single is not because nobody’s noticed how terrific they are, it’s because they
stink."

  “They do look good.”

  “That’s part of the trouble,” he said. “The one thing they believe in and truly understand is packaging. But you know what’s inside the package?”

  “Nothing,” I guessed.

  But he shook his head. “I’d take that. The way I feel right now, a woman with nothing at all inside her head would be a blessing. No, Tom; what’s inside the package is thoughts about the package"

  In the next bar, Lance told me about women whose lives were centered on jogging, and in the bar after that he told me what happens when you give up on all those self-centered Bloomingdale-wrapped single women and spend some time with a divorced woman instead: All she wants to talk about is her children. “I have children, too,” he said. “Everybody has children, dammit, and my kids are just as neurotic and brilliant as their goddam kids, but I don’t go around talking about it all the time.”

  The next bar was The Lion’s Head, where there was a guy Lance knew and where I phoned Ginger, who sounded very cold and annoyed: “The children and I already ate.”

  “You did? What time is it?”

  “Seven-twenty-three,” she said, which meant she was in the bedroom with the digital clock. And it also meant she and the kids had eaten dinner earlier than usual.

  “I’m sorry, Ginger,” I said. “Lance and I just got to talking—”

  “Lance and you! Oh, that’s just too much,” she said, and slammed the receiver down, and I went back to the bar to find that Lance had bought me a drink and was talking with his pal about television rating systems. It made for a change, so I joined in.

  There was a party Lance was supposed to go co a little later, but he said he just couldn’t face it. He thought he’d probably have dinner right there at The Lion’s Head. I said I thought I would, too, since I seemed to be in the doghouse with Ginger. Lance shook his head and said, “That woman’s got a lot of nerve.”

  During dinner, some other people we knew came in, and after dinner we went back to the bar where the group just kept getting larger, and we all kept finding things to laugh about, and then I have a sudden clear memory of the digital clock in the bedroom here reading three-twenty-seven in the dark. That was immediately followed by Ginger ruthlessly awakening me. It was morning, she claimed, and she was in an absolutely rotten mood.

  What a way to start the day. Ginger yelled at Lance and me all through breakfast, accusing us of male bonding. I don’t know exactly where that phrase came from, but I suspect a woman must have made it up, deliberately choosing an expression that sounds painful. Women these days “network,” a wonderfully mushy word that implies both serious business going on and yet a protective safety net below, but men are reduced to “bonding,” something that sounds sticky and sadomasochistic. “Help me find the Krazy Glue, Ethel, I’m goin bondin’ with the boys.”

  Anyway, having helped our hangovers no end, Ginger then stormed off to make her presence felt at work. A little later, Lance slunk away to his own work, and I was frowning at the bed, seriously contemplating a full day of sleep, when Vickie called to suggest an editorial conference. I told her I had a bad cold.

  Fresh clean sheets.

  Saturday, June 11th

  WHAT a week; I never thought I’d get through it alive.

  The trauma started on Tuesday, when Vickie called to say we were destined to have dinner together on Friday; all of us. It seems Ginger had tired of my inactivity and had made the Approach Direct, calling Vickie at work, identifying herself as “Tom’s friend,” and saying (according to Vickie), “We’d love to have you and your friend to dinner. Tom has just raved about how much help you’ve been on the book.” Spasms closed my throat when Vickie reported this, but I did manage to say, “What did you tell her?”

  “What could I tell her? I was so startled all I could think to say was how delighted I’d be.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “So we set a date for Friday.”

  “This Friday?”

  “Of course. Tom, it’ll be all right, don’t worry about it.”

  “Who’s going to be your friend?”

  “I’ll bring Carl along,” she said.

  Well. Carl Bindel is Vickie’s secretary, a willowy boy in his late twenties with a sandy bushy moustache, large moist hazel eyes, spectacles with frames the same color as the moustache, and an absolutely terrifying sex life centered around various S-M bars in the West Village. There is absolutely no possible sexual permutation that could wind up with Carl and Vickie in a carnal relationship; it would be practically cross-species. Even Gretchen would take one look at those two and know they didn’t hang out together, so the idea of Vickie passing off Carl as her boyfriend to Ginger would have been laughable if it weren’t so horrifying. “Vickie!” I said. “Carl?”

  “He can be very butch when he wants,” she promised. “When his mother comes to New York, for instance. Besides, I already asked and he said yes. He’ll do just fine. He says it’ll be a hoot.”

  “Uhh, Vickie,” I said, “maybe you should suggest that he not call anything a hoot during dinner.”

  “He’ll do just fine, Tom,” she insisted. “Are we still on for our conference tomorrow?”

  “You bet,” I said, but faintly.

  The rest of the week, apart from editorial conferences, I spent working on a couple of magazine pieces to pay the rent, trying to get them out of the way before the copy-edited Christmas Book comes back, which will be any day now. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to get Lance out of the way, so I’m still working in the bedroom, which is all right for now, but once The Christmas Book returns this room is going to get awfully crowded.

  The problem is, since Lance hasn’t found an apartment yet and we’re going to be out on Fire Island all next month anyway, it’s been agreed he’ll stay here through July He absolutely swears and vows and promises he’ll have made some other arrangement by August first, but in the meantime his interest in both of his searches—a place to live and a new girlfriend—seems to have slackened considerably He’s spending more and more evenings at home, and is now an apparently permanent addition to my weekend jaunts with the kids.

  In fact, he joined us for dinner Friday, which did nothing to normalize an already weird occasion. Ginger came home from work early Friday afternoon to start cooking, while I stayed in the bedroom, trying to concentrate on my final draft of the “Major Jewels in History” piece Cosmopolitan had commissioned, and when Lance arrived at five-forty- eight by the digital clock, I abandoned the Hope and the Kohinoor and the rest of them and joined him for a prehurricane drink.

  I had not, of course, confided in Lance about my carrying-on with Vickie—there’s just no way to tell a man you’re cheating on his wife—so it was impossible to enlist his aid in the ordeal to come. While Ginger chopped and poured and pounded in the kitchen, Lance and I sat in the living room and chatted of inessentials, and my drink just seemed to vanish; so I had another.

  Vickie and her friend had been invited for seven. Believing that whatever wits I had I should keep about me, I stopped after the second drink and just sat in the living room, smiling and nodding and listening to Lance’s incomprehensible shoptalk about CBS executive politics, while inside I felt exactly the way I used to as a child at the dentist’s: I don’t care how awful it is, just so it’s over.

  A little after seven, fashionably late, the downstairs bell rang. Going to the intercom in the front hall, I asked who it was, and a voice said, “Vickie and Carl.” I smiled grimly, realizing I didn’t know which of them had answered, and buzzed them in.

  Ginger removed her apron, dried her hands and was standing smiling in the living room, all her hundreds of eyes very wide-open and glinting, when the upstairs bell rang and I opened to the happy couple. “Hi, Vickie. Hiya, Carl.” Vickie and I leaned forward to kiss the air beside one another’s cheeks; she smelled like illicit afternoons. Smiling, Carl extended a scrod fillet and I gave it a manly shake and he winced, but happily. “Come on i
n,” I said, against my urgent desire to scream GO AWAY FOREVER!, and shepherded them into the living room for introductions.

  Both guests were dressed a bit oddly. Vickie had apparently decided to allay suspicion by appearing as a frump, because she was wearing black pantyhose and a dark paisley-pattern dress that was too tight for her, emphasizing bumps and rolls I’d never noticed before. As for Carl, his tight designer jeans were tucked into his high-heeled cowboy boots, and his canary yellow shirt under a fringed tan suede jacket was graced by a black string tie. His belt buckle, shaped like a large rectangular manhole cover, had a bucking bronco on it.

  I introduced everybody to everybody else. The fact that Ginger and Lance had the same last name made Vickie pause a millisecond, but then she sailed onward and I’m sure I was the only one who noticed. She said to Ginger, “Something smells delicious.”

  “I hope it’ll be all right. It’s a new recipe from Elizabeth David.”

  “Isn’t she fantastic? Can I do anything to help?”

  “No, no, I have everything under control. I think."

  Meantime, I was singing my part: “Can I offer anyone a drink?”

  I could. Drinks were made, Vickie joined Ginger in the kitchen, and we three hearty males sat around the living room listening to our horses eat hay and the lonely cry of a distant old coyote. Lance broke a rather painful silence by saying, to the room at large, “What do you think’s going to happen to the Mets this year?”

  “Oh, the Lord knows,” Carl said, waving airy fingers. “With Bliss gone, it’s a whole new ballgame.”

  Lance gave him a puzzled look. “Bliss?”

  “Anthony Bliss,” Carl said. “The general manager.”

  Lance was floundering. “Of the Mets?”

  “Of the Met, yes.” Looking to me for confirmation, Carl said, “Anthony Bliss.” Turning back to Lance he said, “Of course, if they replace him with another Beverly Sills, quelle disaster. ”