Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (19 page)

           
ON this date in 1920, the Nineteenth
Amendment gave women the vote. On this date in this year, Lance moved out of my
uptown office.

           
Ginger does not like my working at
Mary’s place one little bit, an attitude she kept very quiet about last week,
when I first came down here, but this week she began to agitate. On Monday she
said it was “silly” for me to spend my days downtown when Lance was always at
work all day long anyway and I could work perfectly well at “home,” and I said
I needed an office that was my office twenty-four hours a day, so I could leave
work-in-progress scattered about.

           
On Tuesday she called nine times.
Mary was out most of the day, so I was the one who had to answer the phone each
time, and the calls were never
about
anything, which finally teed me
off. “I am
working
here, Ginger,” I said. “I am not seducing Mary, and I
am not being seduced by Mary, I am working.
Except when I
have to keep answering the damn phone.”
She said, “There’s no
reason
for you to be there.” I said, “The reason is called Lance.”

           
On Wednesday Lance called to say
Ginger was phoning
him
every half hour to ask what progress he was
making in finding a new place to live; so my original intent was at last beginning
to be realized. Lance, with that wistful sound he gets in his voice a lot these
days, said, “I didn’t know there was such urgency, Tom. I thought you were all
right.” I said, “There
was
such urgency, Lance, as I damn well tried to
make clear, but you out-waited me, so now I’m perfectly happy spending my days
at Mary’s place, and Ginger’s beginning to realize it’s
your
fault.”

           
On Thursday, yesterday, at the
breakfast table, Ginger pointed a piece of bacon at Lance and said, “I don’t
want you still here after the first of the month, Lance, I really don’t. This
has gone on long enough.” Lance looked sober and capable, firming his shoulders
as he said, “I’m working on it, Ginger, I definitely am.” And last night he
came home to announce that he had
made
alternate plans, and would be
leaving almost immediately.

           
Which was this
morning.
We took a cab together, Lance and I and many of his cartons and
suitcases. I got out of the cab at
17th Street
and he continued on down to
Greenwich Street
, where he will be—until something else
comes along—sharing an apartment with a co-worker named Bradford, who happens
to be a manic militant faggot. I have met
Bradford
a few times, and I do not envy Lance.

           
Bradford
shaves his head but has grown a thick
drooping western-style moustache, and he lives a life of signals and symbols.
Whenever he’s not at work, he wears a black leather bomber jacket and faded
blue jeans, which is a virtual uniform for Village queens of a specific type.
The bunch of keys dangling from a belt loop and the red bandanna fluttering
from a hip pocket describe to the cognoscenti his sexual preferences, about
which I want to know as little as possible. They would not include Lance, but
even so. Bradford agreed to share his “space” for a while only on condition
that Lance realize he, Bradford, frequently made “friends” in the outer world
who would return with him for fun and frolic; behind the closed door of a
separate bedroom, but even so. Lance has agreed not to remark upon anything
that might emerge from that bedroom of a morning, and not to spread any tales
around the workplace.

           
Ginger must have been leaning on
Lance really
hard
, if life with
Bradford
seems the better alternative.

           
And Ginger isn’t even getting what
she wanted from it, at least not right away. Last night we had a
huge
row over the fact that I have no intention of moving the office back uptown. “I
am in the very middle of assembling
Happy Happy Happy
,” I explained
several times, that being the working title of the greeting card book. “I not
only have things piled up all over that room, taped to the walls, stacked here
and there and everywhere, but each pile and each individual thing is where it
is for a
reason.
I am assembling sample chapters and an outline of the
book, and it would cost me
days
of work to tear that office apart, carry
everything up here, and start all over.”

           
“Then do it,” she said.

           
“No,” I said.

           
She is not speaking to me at the
moment, which means maybe I can get some work done.

           
I hate Dewey Heffernan. He’s not
only an idiot, he’s a nasty idiot.

           
In the three weeks I’ve been working
downtown, I’ve left a message on the uptown answering machine, giving this
phone number down here and saying this is where I’ll be during working hours.
Everybody
else
wanting to reach me has managed to work out the
intricacies of that message and dial the new number and talk to me—some, by the
way, congratulating me on “seeing through” Ginger and returning at last to
Mary, which leads to a great deal of embarrassment all around—but could Dewey
Heffernan accomplish that great feat? For years I have heard the expression,
“He couldn’t find his ass with both hands,” and thought it hyperbole, but now I
have met someone who couldn’t find his ass with both hands
tied behind him.

           
Around six last night I returned to
the uptown apartment to find a message on the machine from Dewey: “Give me a
call as soon as you can, Tom. You’re being sued.” Well, of course, at that hour
everybody was gone from the Craig, Harry & Bourke offices, so I had a night
to think about that message before I finally managed to reach Dewey at
ten-thirty this morning. “Sued?” I said. “What have you done now, Dewey?”

           
“Gee, Tom,” he said, all innocence
(which I no longer trust), “why act like
that
? Gee whiz, I wasn’t the
one who made all that trouble-”

           
There are statements so outrageous
there’s no response possible at all. Besides, I was more interested in today’s
shit- storm than
yesterday’s
. “Tell me about this
suit,” I said.

           
“We were served yesterday,” he told
me. ‘’They’re going to serve you, too, but I guess they can’t find you. You
sure are tough to track down, Tom.”

           
“Who are ‘they,’ Dewey, and what is
the subject of the lawsuit?”

           
“Wait a minute, I’ve got it here
somewhere,
I’ll
just. . . . Hold on, I’m. ... I know
it’s. ...”

           
There followed a period of sound
effects: rustlings and scuttlings, very like mice in a wall. This was followed
by a brief silence, and then Dewey, sounding a bit out of breath, came back on
the line, saying, “I’ll have to call you back, Tom,” and he hung up.

           
“Wait!” I said, but of course it was
too late.

           
So
I
called
him
back,
and when I got through to him I said, “Since, Dewey, I know you would call me
at the other number and leave a message on the machine, why don’t I tell you
this phone number
here
and save some time?”

           
“I just found it,” he said.

           
“The phone
number?”

           
“His name is—
What
?”

           
“Whose name?”

           
“The man who’s
suing you.
He’s Harold Muddnyfe of
Muscatine
,
Iowa
, and he’s suing on behalf of his wife Maureen.”

           
“And what am I supposed to have done
to Maureen Muddnyfe?”

           
“Stolen her idea
for
The Christmas Book.”

           
“WHAT?”

           
“The suit says it was her idea, and
she was in correspondence with many of the same people you appoached, and you
stole her idea and she wants all royalties plus punitive damages.”

           
“Jesus H. Christ!”

           
“The reason it’s the husband doing
it is because his wife is in an iron lung.”

           
“Oh, I don’t believe this.”

           
“She’s been confined to this iron
lung for the last twelve years, so all she can do is read, so she’s written a
lot of letters to writers over the years, she’s been in correspondence with all
these people, and three years ago she got her idea for a modern book about
Christmas, with things written especially for it by all her favorite writers, the
book to be called
Joy to the
—”

           
“Tacky
. ”

           
“—
World
,
and she wrote to a bunch of writers, and they all told her it was a great
idea.”

           
“Sure they did,” I said. “Of course
they did. The woman’s in an iron lung in Muscatel,
Iowa
—”

           
“
Muscatine
.”

           
“Who’s going to rain on her parade?
Did she ever approach any publishers?”

           
“Yes.”

           
“Who?”

           
Dewey coughed. “Well, us, for one.”

           
“Oh, that’s just—” I said, and the
doorbell rang, the upstairs doorbell. “Don’t go away, Dewey,” I said. “Do not,
under pain of death, go away.” I put the phone down and ran to the front door
and opened it, and standing in the hall was a woebegone man with a big nose and
a tan raincoat and a folded packet of papers. He said, “Thomas Diskant?” “Yes?”

           
“Here,” he said, and gave me the
papers.

           
“Whats this?”

           
“You have been served in a civil
suit,” the man said, and walked away.

           
Son of a bitch! Slamming the door, I
ran back to the phone to find that Dewey—astonishingly enough—had not gone
away. “I’ve just been served,” I said, fumbling to open the packet and talk on
the phone at the same time.

           
“I knew they’d probably find you,”
Dewey said, with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction.

           
I said, “Is there correspondence
between Craig and this Mudsill woman?”

           
“Muddnyfe.”

           
“Yes, here it is,” I said, reading
the indictment against me.
“Muddnyfe.
She has
correspondence from Craig?”

           
“Yes. I’ve got a copy of the carbon.
It just says thank you for your letter, it’s an interesting idea,
if
you do the book we’ll be happy to consider it.”

           
The standard
brush-off.
“What’s the date?”

           
“Well,
it’s
two and a half years ago.”

           
“So it’s prior to me and she can
prove access. This is terrific. Who signed the letter?”

           
“Well, it’s kind of unreadable,”
Dewey said. “Nobody seems to know who it is, and the initials on the lower left
are all smudged.”

           
“Is there a job title under the
unreadable signature?”

           
“Associate editor.”

           
A slush-pile
reader.
A recent college graduate, or maybe somebody’s
wife or boyfriend, long out of that job.
There’s nobody to say what
happened to Maureen Muddnyfe’s query letter once it arrived at the Craig, Harry
& Bourke offices, no one to swear that it wasn’t shown to me (already a
Craig author, leave us not forget), no one to state that he or she was the only
person connected with Craig, Harry & Bourke who read or saw or had any
knowledge of that letter. “I think, Dewey,” I said, “I think I ought to call my
lawyer.”

           
“Listen, Tom? Can I ask a
question?”

           
“Sure.”

           
“Did you?”

           
“Did I what?”

           
“Get the idea from this letter.”

           
“Someday, Dewey,” I said, “I shall
unscrew your head and bowl with it.” I hung up on his flabbergasted silence—
gee whiz, what was old Tom mad at
now
?—and phoned my attorney, Morris
Morrison, who had taken today off because it was the start of the Labor Day
weekend.

           
Labor Day.
Another
damn holiday.
This one was dreamed up by the
Knights of Labor, a kind of nineteenth century American Wobblies, a secret society
founded in 1869 and dedicated to organizing all workers, skilled and unskilled,
clerical and professional, and even including small businessmen, into one huge
union. By 1880 they’d come out of the closet and had started attracting a lot
of membership; almost a million by 1886. However, they were a little too
radical for their
time,
and believed rather too
enthusiastically in confrontational strikes. Also, the AFL and other craft
unions were coming along and didn’t want to give up their autonomy to be in
this huge amorphous organization. The result was, by 1890 the Knights had been
unhorsed, never to return, and by now they’re just about completely forgotten.

           
Except for Labor
Day.
It was their invention. They chose the date, the first Monday in
September, and on that date in 1882, 1883 and 1884 they paraded in New York,
demanding a holiday for the workingman (as though the goddam workingman doesn’t
have enough holidays as it is; but you know what they meant). Every other labor
organization joined the effort, and in 1887
Oregon
became the first state to make the first
Monday in September a holiday devoted to big-L Labor.
New York
and
New Jersey
and
Colorado
(with all those miners to pacify) soon
followed, and in 1894 (after the Knights were already kaput) Congress made the
affair national. So the Knights of Labor finally accomplished, after heroic
effort, just one thing: a day off.

           
Well, but it’s a lot more than one
day off by now, isn’t it? It’s a
looooonnnnng
weekend, with people
taking off Friday and probably Tuesday^ as well.

           
Oh, my God, I just looked at the
calendar, and Rosh Hashanah starts next Thursday!
And then
Yom Kippur after that.
Next Wednesday is the only day in the foreseeable
future when I will be able, if I am very very lucky, to talk with my attorney.

           
If Dewey had only
phoned me
here
yesterday. . . .

           
If Dewey. Is there any point in a
sentence that starts, “If Dewey. . . .”?