A Likely Story

Thursday, May 19th

Lance is living in my office.

I type that, and even I can’t believe it, but there it is. Lance is living in my office, just down the hall from here. The one place I had in the world where I could close out everybody and everything and just breathe free for a little while, and now Lance is living in it, and I’ve set up my typewriter on this folding table here in the bedroom.

I don’t blame the poor bastard; he doesn’t want this any more than I do or Ginger does. It just happened, that’s all.

What has occurred here, Helena threw him out. Lance swears he wasn’t involved in any hanky-panky with any other woman, that it wasn’t actually him at all, that what Helena had had enough of suddenly was New York City. And perhaps another thing Helena had had enough of was Helena, because her abrupt decision (Lance says it was abrupt, anyway) was to change everything. She took her kids out of school, she told Lance the relationship was through, she sublet the apartment, and she went to Santa Fe.

Santa Fe!

Is this the act of a rational woman? Santa Fe, from East 93rd Street?

Whatever the situation, the point is that Lance lived with Helena in Helena’s apartment (just as I am living with Ginger in Ginger’s apartment), so when Santa Fe called to Helena with its siren call, Lance had to leave. (Although Helena was subletting her apartment, she would not sublet it to Lance because she was ending their relationship.)

Robert Frost said it: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Apparently that’s still true, even under such weird conditions as here maintain. Last Friday evening Lance phoned — I assumed it had to do with his weekend romp with his kiddies — and when Ginger got off the phone and returned to me in the living room she looked a little glazed. “Lance is moving in here for a while,” she said.

I thought she was kidding. I offered a wide sick smile like Steve Martin seeing a punchline, and Ginger said, “I hope it won’t be for long.”

“Ha ha,” I suggested, but I wasn’t really laughing. (I’d been in my living room chair, with my after-dinner drink, reading Gore Vidal’s piece for The Christmas Book, and this return to the mundane world was a very difficult transition.) “Lance is not moving in here,” I said.

“I’m afraid he is, Tom,” she said, and sat in her chair, and told me about Helena and Santa Fe and the sublet. “The sublet starts the sixteenth,” she finished, “next Monday, so Lance has to be out by then.”

“He has to come here?’

“What am I going to do, Tom?” I could see then that she was at wit’s end. Wringing her hands, she said, “It really isn’t Lance’s fault, I know it isn’t, but it’s awfully awkward.”

“A similar phrase was going through my own brain.”

“It’s such short notice.”

“It sure is.”

“I meant for Lance,” she said. “Helena didn’t say a word to him until Tuesday — to avoid a fight, she said — just before she left.”

“For Santa Fe.”

“Lance spent the last three days trying to find an apartment, but you know what that’s like in this city.”

“It has been done.”

“Not in three days. Not when you had no idea you were going to have to even look for an apartment.”

“Granted,” I said. “I still don’t see...” I gestured encompassingly around our living room. Our living room.

“It’s just for a little while,” she said, “until he can find a place. After all,” she said, going on the attack slightly, “he does still pay part of the rent here.”

If I’d had a beard, I would have muttered into it.

“And don’t forget,” she went on, “we’re going to have Mary living with us for two weeks, out on Fire Island.”

“In a completely separate house,” I said. “And with plenty of advance warning. And I certainly don’t want her there.”

“Well, I don’t want Lance here,” she said, flaring a bit. “It could become very embarrassing. Besides, I think it could be bad for the children, seeing their father all the time.”

“It could be bad for me seeing him all the time,” I said. I smacked my chair arm. “Whose chair is this going to be? And that’s another thing; you and he are still legally married, you know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”

“We’re not going to get into any hassle about conjugal rights, are we?”

“Oh, don’t be absurd!”

“All right, where’s he going to sleep?”

“It’ll have to be in your office, but it’s just for a—”

“My office! I’m working full-time on The Christmas Book, I have material all over—”

“Lance won’t be there except when he’s asleep,” she said, “and you won’t be working in the middle of the night. You never did before.”

“Work habits change.”

“Oh, don’t be silly.”

“You’re moving your husband into this apartment,” I said, “and you’re telling me not to be silly.”

She sighed. She unnarrowed her eyes and bit her lower lip and looked honestly troubled. “I know, Tom,” she said. “This is a terrible situation, nobody’s happy about it, and I blame the whole thing on Helena.”

“In Santa Fe.”

“But what am I going to do?” she asked. “Lance spent three days trying to find some other solution, but there just isn’t any. He wouldn’t have called me if he’d had any other choice, and I wouldn’t have said yes if I’d had any other choice.”

“Move over,” I said. “Let me up there with you on the no-other-choice shelf.”

“It won’t be that bad,” she said.

“Oh, yes, it will. But as you say, there’s nothing else to do.”

“And it’s only for a few days.”

“Sure,” I said, and Ginger came over and sat in my lap and thanked me for being understanding, and we kanoodled a bit.

So the next day, Saturday, Lance arrived to pick up his kids for the weekend, and when he brought them back on Sunday he stayed. Many suitcases and liquor store cartons filled up my office, the sofabed in there stood open, and Lance fell ravenously on the vodka when it was offered. He was looking pretty damn hangdog, and although I was goddam annoyed at the situation, I couldn’t find it in my heart to be sore at Lance, so here we are with Lance living in what is, after all, his apartment. But at least he’s had the grace to sit on the sofa and not my chair the few times he’s been in the living room.

In truth, the idea of it is much worse than the actuality. Lance works in a midtown office — he’s some sort of department head of a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS that does blue-sky demographic research — and he’s been arranging his dinners out in the world somewhere, so essentially we only see him for half an hour or so in the morning (he uses the kids’ bathroom) and maybe a while in the evening. The arrangement is now four days old, and has been less awkward than one might have expected. Nevertheless, he is there, in my office.

And The Christmas Book, boxes and boxes of correspondence, tear sheets, Xeroxes, manuscripts, photos, tagged books, all of this compost that’s supposed eventually to grow a mighty volume, has been laboriously moved from its proper home around my desk into this bedroom, where Ginger drapes her pantyhose over it. It’s hard to take your life’s work seriously when it’s seen through a lot of double-layer crotches.

Despite it all, however, the book is coming along, with more and more terrific input from my celebs. The Gore Vidal piece I was reading when Lance broke over my bow was a weirdly effective and chilling item, half essay and half story, on the idea that what Christ brought to the world was not life but death. Pre-Christianity, if I understand what he’s saying, was an innocent and happy pagan time because, although death existed, nobody cared much about its implications; instead, all living creatures devoted their attention to life. When Christ arrived, He brought with Him an obsession with death and what happens thereafter that darkened the world from His day till this. Makes a nice counterpoint to things like Garfield and the Coca-Cola tray.

Carl Sagan has sent me a hot-air balloon defining the star the Wise Men followed; sure, why not? And Stephen King came through with a cute twist-ending story about a little boy who sees future events in the shiny ornaments on the Christmas tree. Joan Didion, talking out of the side of her immobile mouth, sent along a cheery description of Christmas Eve on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, and I think John Leonard’s piece is about a marriage breaking up on Christmas morning. I think so.

On the visual side, Jules Feiffer sent along a nice strip of his dancer in her black leotard, plus a Santa Claus hat, doing a dance to Peace On Earth; she’s dubious, but hopeful.

I’m not sure the Jill Krementz photo of the sidewalk Santas all gathered in a room to receive their instructions is exactly right for the book; somehow it’s more reportage than what I’m looking for. I’m still thinking about that one. (I showed it to Mary, who can be very judgmental about successful photographers’ work, and she regarded it with utter disdain. “Where’s the truth in it?” she wanted to know. Her girl-builds-birdhouse series was rejected by that youth magazine, and rejection always makes her start talking about truth and esthetics and artistic purpose. Nevertheless, this time she may be right.)

The envelopes from Isaac Asimov I’m sending back unopened.

And now I have a letter from an agent named Henry Morrison, telling me his client, Robert Ludlum, had intended to do a Christmas short-short story for the book, but by the time he’d set the scene and introduced the characters he had twenty-five thousand words on paper, so it looks like it’ll be his next novel instead — The Yuletide Log, perhaps — and therefore I shouldn’t count on a submission from Ludlum. Less baroque refusals have been received from James Michener, William Styron and Pauline Kael, but with the depth on the bench I already have I’m no longer troubled by anybody saying no.

In fact, if it weren’t for Lance in the house, I wouldn’t have any troubles at all. (Apart from Mary, of course, weaving and unweaving Laertes’ winding sheet down there on West 17th Street, but that’s something else.) The best news in a long long time is that good old Vickie managed the near-impossible: She got Craig, Harry & Bourke to make a commitment and come up with the second payment almost a month ahead of time! More than a week ago, while I was still recovering from Mother’s Day, Vickie called to say she’d gotten Wilson to agree to the early pick-up. Our delight was such that she left work early and we had an immediate editorial conference to celebrate.

Things continue very well on the Vickie front. In fact, if the advent of Lance can be said to have a silver lining, it is that it has given Ginger enough to think about so she’s less likely to notice any little inadvertent clues I may have on or about my person; like soap, for instance.

But how much longer can this go on? The situation is extremely fraught, I mean very very densely fraught.

It is still very possible that this whole thing will blow up in my face, and I’ll lose everything: thrown out by Ginger, no more editorial conferences, and The Christmas Book at the mercy of an editor who hates me.

In the meantime, before disaster comes — if disaster is to come — Vickie and I are averaging three conferences a week. She likes variety, Vickie does, drama, sweat, agony, fireworks, sequential explosions. And then I come home to Ginger, who expects to be treated like the girl I left my wife for. It takes it out of you. I mean it.