A Likely Story

Tuesday, February 15th

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 Al 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 worse, 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 was over here, and I bent down to look in the lower shelves, and when I looked back he was 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, what 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:

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, I’ve 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:

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:

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 misunderstanding 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 Meredith’s 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.