Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (5 page)

           
ONE of the reasons people are always
more complicated than you expect them to be is that they are always sillier
than you expect them to be. Take holidays, anniversaries, birthdays and special
occasions in general. In the course of any given year, each of us has to
remember and deal appropriately with not only all the great public
occasions—Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, my current meal ticket,
Christmas, and all the rest—but with the proliferating private events as well.
As families separate and reshuffle themselves and regroup in new combinations,
there are more and more birthdays to remember, more and more anniversaries to
acknowledge, more and more special occasions to commemorate.

           
But separation
itself?
Isn’t that going too far? Now I have found out why Mary was so
bad-tempered last week and why she put those two irritating messages on the
answering machine while Ginger and I were away. It was because I was in
Puerto Rico
on February third.

           
February third? What, you wonder, is
February third, that it should have such importance, that it we were Hispanic
we would name a plaza for it? It is the date, last
year, that
I packed two suitcases and a liquor store carton and moved from downtown to
uptown, thus ending my marriage and going public with Ginger. My crime this
year is that I did not acknowledge the first anniversary of that momentous
occasion,
was not even present with Mary to—celebrate?
mourn
?
remember
?
reaffirm
?—and
therefore she got mad.

           
It took her a while to say so; until
today, in fact, when I brought the kids back from their weekend with Daddy. She
had still been cold and rather nasty yesterday morning when I picked them up—rather
like the weather—but today she had changed back to her normal self, which is
both patient and insidious. As the kids went off to their room to unbundle,
Mary said, “Have a cup of coffee, you look cold.”

           
I was, but I said, “I ought to get
back uptown.” “It’s already made,” she said, and because I could see the
irritability had departed (a trend I want to encourage) I said fine, and we sat
together in the kitchen over coffee and Entenmann’s pound cake. We talked about
the kids for a while—it turns out Jennifer doesn’t have to involve herself with
the police any more, after all—and then Mary said, “Why did you choose that
particular time to go to
Puerto Rico
?”

           
“You mean winter?”

           
“I mean that week.”

           
“That was when Ginger could get off
from work,” I said. I hadn’t the slightest idea where the conversation was
going.

           
“No other reason?”

           
“What other reason is there?”

           
“February third?”

           
I looked at her, shaking my head,
waiting for her to go on, while she leaned forward slightly, gazing at me in an
expectant
testing
kind of way. Then she leaned back, relaxing, shaking
her head, saying, “You don’t remember.”

           
“February third.” 1 frowned, casting
my mind back. “Good God, is that when—
Let’s
see, the
third was a Thursday this year, so it would have been Wednesday last—” Then it
came to me. That was the date all right, that was the moment when seven months
of distress and trouble and finagling and sneaking around had finally come to a
head and I had at last broken out of this cocoon, or egg, or whatever it was.

           
It all began the summer before last,
part of which we spent in a rented house on
Fire Island
, where I was one of the few males who
didn’t commute daily or weekly to a job in the city. Mary and I had been
drifting apart—at any rate / had been drifting apart—and either there were more
targets of opportunity among the solitary daytime wives that summer or I was in
a mood to be more aware of them; whatever the reason, I took my opportunities
where I found them, feeling both pleased with myself and guilty, until I
realized Mary knew what was going on and did not ever plan to say a word about
it.

           
That was the finish. Of everything,
ultimately, but initially it was the finish of both the pleasure
and
the
guilt. I think I could have stood anything else from Mary: raging arguments,
brokenhearted pleas, stern admonitions, her own revenge infidelities, you name
it. But to be
humored
, to matter that little, took the starch out of
more than my sails. There was no more catting around that summer, but one
evening when we were alone for dinner—both kids “eating over” with friends, as
the local argot had it—I broke a buzzing long silence by saying, “Mary, this
marriage is over.”

           
She looked at me calmly. “No, it
isn’t, Tom,” she said.

           
“Oh, yes, it is.”

           
“You’re just resisting being a
grown-up,” she said. “You want one more round before the bars close.”

           
One last fling.
The seven year itch.
The last
hurrah.
All that easy dismissal.
“Mary,” I
said, “you are reducing me to Dagwood Bumstead, and
that’s
why this
marriage is over.” But it wasn’t over that moment, or that easily. We continued
to live together, and in the fall I started up with Ginger, who over the summer
had broken up with Lance. (We’d met the Patchetts several years before, and had
become friends.) Maybe in my summertime flings I’d been trying to attract
Mary’s attention, I’m not sure about that, but when I took up with Ginger I
made damn sure there’d be no chance for Mary to do her shrinking head act
again. I was sly, I was slippery, I was plausible, and I was
not found out.
Ginger and I originally got together in October, and by late November we both
knew we could have a long-term thing together if we wanted. But families don’t
break up before Christmas, so we waited.

           
Pre-Christmas shopping is, of
course, the perfect cover for the adulterer. We’re all off on mysterious
errands all the time anyway. But then Christmas itself is a downer, if you know
you’re about to pack up and leave this crowd gathered happily around this tree,
which may be why I stalled and dawdled all the way through January, until
Ginger asked me straight out whether I was going to leave my wife, “because if
you aren’t, you’re going to leave
me.
I won’t play
Back Street
,
Tom.”

           
So that’s when I did it. February
third, the anniversary of which I had been so unfeeling as to forget. Nodding
at Mary, in her kitchen, I said, “That’s when I left.”

           
She offered a sad smile and said, “I
had been hoping it was when you would come back.”

           
“Mary,” I said.

           
She raised her hand to stop me. “I
know, we just keep saying the same things over and over again. I hope you’ll
come back, you hope you won’t.”

           
“I know I won’t.”

           
“I’ll wait,” she said.

           
‘‘I wish you wouldn’t. And there’s
no point remembering that date any more, it doesn’t mean anything.”

           
“I’ll remember it anyway,” she said,
and smiled.

           
WHY do I let Mary sucker me this
way? I just get hell afterwards from Ginger.

           
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. My
attitude toward holidays generally is that they are a terrible interruption in
the life of a freelancer—nobody’s around in any of the offices to answer my
calls—and my attitude toward Valentine’s Day in particular is that it’s on a
par with having a feast day for coronary thrombosis. Don’t people realize the awful
harm done by romance? All those cutesy red valentine hearts should be edged in
black. “Be my valentine,” is an insidious sentence to teach a child. (As with
most general festive occasions, we busy adults have also left this one to be
observed by our children.)

           
The whole thing is a ghastly mistake
anyway. St. Valentine, if there ever was a St. Valentine, had nothing to do
with hearts or romance or Hallmark Cards. Way back

           
when
, there
may actually have been two priests named Valentine, both martyred during the
reign of the emperor Claudius—and he seemed such a nice fellow on television,
too—or the two stories may refer to the same ill-treated priest, or he may just
be a legend after all, like St. Christopher. The point is, his feast day on
February fourteenth has to do with
martyrdom
, not love and sex; or am I
missing something here?

           
Anyway, apparently St. Valentines
remembrance day got mixed up somewhere along the line with a Roman festival
called Lupercalia on February fifteenth, one day later, which was itself pretty
weird. The Luperci were a group of priests who, every February fifteenth, would
start the day by sacrificing some goats and a dog. (There was no particular god
or goddess they were sacrificing to, this was just something they did.) Then they
cut lengths of thong from the skins of the sacrificed goats and ran naked
around the walls of the
Palatine
the
rest of the day, hitting people with the thongs.

           
All of this was more necromancy than
religion, an occult act that was supposed to make a magic ring around the city,
keeping good luck inside and bad luck out. And (this may at last be where the
modern Valentines Day idea got started) being hit by one of those thongs on
that particular day was supposed to cure sterility.

           
(A kind of fresh pork sausage with
ground pignoli nuts, cumin seed, bay leaves and black pepper was eaten that
day, as part of the ritual, and became so identified with Lupercalia that when
the emperor Constantine turned Christian he banned the eating of sausage, which
of course immediately created a whole army of sausage bootleggers, and may
explain why A1 Capone always looked like a sausage.)

           
In any event, Mary phoned yesterday
afternoon to say I should come to dinner because Jennifer had returned from school
distraught that she hadn’t received
enough
Valentine cards and was
therefore humiliated with her peer group.

           
“Enough? What do you mean enough?
How many sexual propositions is a decent eleven-year-old girl supposed to
receive in one day?”

           
“Sex has nothing to do with it, Tom,”
Mary said, “as you very well know. Valentines have to do with popularity and
friendship.”

           
“It’s a holiday in honor of lust,
that’s what it is,” I insisted. “One of the seven deadly sins, commemorated.
And
named after a saint.”

           
“Stop being silly, Tom. Jennifer
needs you.”

           
So I went, of course, and Jennifer
didn’t really need me, of course, it was all simply another part of Mary’s
doomed campaign to recapture me, which I told her over coffee, at the end of
the meal, after the kids had gone into the living room to watch television.
“Jennifer’s fine,” I said accusingly.

           
“Yes,” she said, deliberately
misunderstanding. “You helped a great deal, Tom.”

           
“I didn’t help at all. There was
nothing to help
about.”
“Jennifer always keeps a stiff upper lip when
you’re around,” she told me. “She knows you like it.”

           
It was time—past time—to change the
subject. “Well,” I said, staring wildly around the kitchen in search of subject
matter, “I see the super finally fixed that broken shelf.”

           
“He sent a carpenter,” she said.

           
“A real one?
Good.”

           
“A great big tall man,” she said,
“with tattoos on his arms.”

           
“Ah.”

           
“Emilio must have told him I was
living alone,” she said, Emilio being the super.

           
Why didn’t I see it coming?
Nevertheless, I didn’t. “Oh?” I said. “Why’s that?”

           
“He kept being
very
suggestive.”

           
“Oh, come on, Mary, you’re just
imagining—”

           
“Oh, no, I’m not,” she said. “He
kept looking at my
body,
you know the way I mean? And
then he’d stroke his hammer like this.” Her hand made
an
0 and stroked a nonexistent something, possibly a hammer.

           
“No,” I said.
“While
hammering
nails!
He couldn’t.”

           
“He had a big tool belt, you know,”
she told me, “slung low around his hips like in westerns.”

           
“Gun belts.”

           
“That’s right. The hammer was in a
loop on the side, hanging down, and he kept turning sideways and holding the
hammer out so it looked like it was between his legs, and then he’d look at my
body and stroke the hammer like this.” And she did that movement again.

           
The worst of it was her calmness. If
she’d been upset, or frightened, or outraged, or even turned on by it all, I
could have handled the problem—dealt with the problem, I mean—calmly and
reassuringly, from my more experienced masculine perspective. But
she
was the calm one, which left me ... I don’t know' where it left me. Despite
myself
, knowing it could only get w^orse, I said, “Did he,
uh . . . He didn’t
say
anything, did he? It was probably just an
unconscious gesture.”

           
“I offered him some coffee,” she
said, “and he asked me if I had any jelly.”

           
“Jelly?”

           
“I looked in the refrigerator, right
there, and he w^as over here, and I bent dowm to look in the low'er shelves,
and wdien I looked back he w
^r
as
staring
at me, and doing this
with the hammer.”

           
“Don’t
do
that!”

           
“Well, I told him I had raspberry
jelly, and strawberry jelly, you know, w
^r
hat the kids like, and he
said, ‘Don’t you have any other kind of jelly?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and he said,
‘I sure do like jelly, I like to lick it all up,’ and then he did this again.”

           
“I have to go now,” I said, and came
back to my own valentine, who had been having a telephonic fight with Lance
about money. It was moot for a while as to whether Ginger would now transfer
the fight to
me,
as being another sonofabitch male, or would become very
warm and loving and sexy with me, as revenge against her husband; fortunately,
the latter impulse won.

           
As for
The Christmas Book
,
that continues apace. I have actually received three submissions, one of which
I unfortunately had to reject:

           
Dear John Irving,

           
'The Stars Wink,’ your short-short
story about a bear whose eyes are put out by feminists on Christmas Eve, is
certainly a powerful piece of writing, right up there with the rest of your
work, and I for one would be proud indeed to publish it under any circumstance
at all. Unfortunately,
/
don’t always have final say on these matters,
and the feeling at Craig, Harry & Bourke was that the date of Christmas Eve
in the story was merely happenstantial (apparently typed in later once or
twice, in fact), that the story had very little to say about Christmas
qua
Christmas,
and that all in all the tale was rather more depressing than we prefer for the
contents of
The Christmas Book.
Your suggestion that Tomi Ungerer
illustrate your story would be an excellent one were we to publish the story,
except that we already have approached Mr. Ungerer to do something rather
different and more Yulesque.

           
Otherwise, Isaac Asimov’s piece
about the aerodynamic qualities of Santa’s sleigh, and Andy Rooney’s piece
about how there weren’t all these different sized batteries when he was a
child, were both slight but puckish, and I was pleased to take them. That is,
Ive sent them on to Jack Rosenfarb for approval and payment, and have no doubt
he’ll accept them.

           
“How much?” letters have now been
received from Russell Baker, William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, Carl Sagan
and Kurt Vonnegut, and have been answered. And
this
came from Mario
Puzo’s secretary:

           
“Mr. Puzo has asked me to tell you
that he is tired of people trying to capitalize on his alleged relationship
with the Mafia. He has not the slightest interest in writing about the Mafias
view of Christmas, nor if he did have such an interest would he be willing to
share his thoughts with you. ”

           
Well, I just sent sent him the regular
form letter, didn’t I? I never
mentioned
the Mafia! Enraged, I sat at my
typewriter and wrote:

           
Dear Mr. Puzo:

           
Thank you for your prompt response
to my query letter concerning The Christmas Book. If you have nothing at the
moment about the Mafia vis-a-vis Christmas, perhaps you'd like to give us a few
words on Christmas in Las Vegas (though we do have a shot at Carol Doda on that
topic), or maybe even a thinkpiece on the Christmas presents exchanged by
Superman and Lois Lane. Or it could be you have in the trunk something about
Easter or the Fourth of July that could be adapted.
Looking
forward to your response.

           
Well, I didn’t send that letter, of
course; Puzo’s name would be damn useful in the book. A bit later, calmer, I
wrote a letter apologizing for having created the misunder-

           
standing and assuring Mr. Puzo I had
no thought of confining his creativity in re Christmas to any specific area;
anything
at all about Christmas, honest (except blind bears, I didn’t add).

           
And just to make life complete,
today I got Scott Merediths dead-bone collection again! It seems Arthur C.
Clarke is a client of his. “Oh, was that you?” said a female voice there when I
phoned them to re-send their messenger.

           
I have now sent the solicitation
letter to five more writers—Pauline Kael, John Leonard, Sam Shepard, John Simon
and Calvin Trillin—and five more artists—Jasper Johns, David Levine, Roy
Lichtenstein, Saul Steinberg and Tomi Ungerer.
I back-dated
the Ungerer letter.