A Likely Story

Tuesday, April 12th

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 about this Pouilly-Fumé?”

“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 I 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 cold-eyed, 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 — Vickie 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!”

“I am not,” she gritted, low and intense. She wouldn’t look at me; her head was practically in her leather bag now, as she kept searching for a tissue or a handkerchief. “Nothing on Earth makes me madder than to cry in public,” she muttered, grinding her teeth. “Therefore I am not crying now.”

“Okay,” I said.

At her apartment house, I paid and got out with her. “I’ll walk down Columbus,” I said. “I want to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” she said, staggering on the sidewalk. She wasn’t crying any more, but her face was blotchy. “I’m peachy. Destroyed at fucking lunch with a writer. Home a basket case. Go away, you sonofabitch.”

“Vickie,” I said, “I’m not the psychiatrist. I’m not even your mother. Will you be okay?”

“No,” she said. She stared at me. “Which one of us is the bastard? Am I wrong, or are you wrong?”

“I think we’re both right,” I said. “It’s just unfortunate that—”

“Fucking platitudes.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The truth is, I think you’re a self-centered bitch, and I’m in just as much trouble as I was before, and I don’t know if the next asshole’s gonna be even worse or not.”

“Oh, I got a guy for you,” she said, with a nasty little grin. “He edits all our war books.”

“What a shit you are,” I said, but I had to laugh when I said it.

“Come on up, I’ll buy ya a drink,” she said.

“It’s the least you can do-r” I told her.

She had a tiny high-floor apartment in a once-graceful large old building in which the dignified big apartments were long ago chopped into these ant-runs. Books, posters, stereo equipment, and here and there a narrow place to sit. The kitchen was too small for two people; I stood in the doorway while she failed to find bourbon, and we agreed to switch to vodka and grapefruit juice. “It’s a food,” she said. “We won’t get drunk.”

“Very important,” I agreed.

She made the two drinks and turned toward the doorway with one in each hand. I reached out and cupped my hand around the back of her head and drew her close and kissed her lips.

I was appalled at myself while I was doing it. I’m merely astonished now, but I may go on being astonished about that bit of autobiography the rest of my life. I’m not on the prowl for yet another woman, God knows, and I don’t go around throwing heavy-handed passes just because an opportunity appears. I didn’t even like Vickie Douglas. And yet I kissed her.

It wasn’t a long kiss. Neither of us opened our mouths. At the end, I released her, and she stepped back and stared at me. “Now, why in hell,” she said, “did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully, knowing I’d found the one way to make an impossible situation worse. “I just did it. How many drinks are you going to throw in my face?”

“I’m not sure.” She stood there, thinking, holding the glasses. She licked her upper lip, as though the taste would suggest an attitude. “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “maybe what we ought to do is just fuck.”

Oh, my gosh. Mary, Ginger... I can’t handle this, I thought, I’ve got to get out of here, undo this somehow. But it was too late. With horror, I watched her put the glasses down on the counter and turn toward me with an expression of expectant curiosity.

I just couldn’t be that rude.

The Christmas Book, I told myself. Do it for The Christmas Book.

When I left there at quarter to five we’d agreed she would stay on as my editor. We’ll be having another editorial meeting on Thursday.