A Likely Story

Tuesday, May 31st

Lance and I are both in the doghouse with Ginger. What happened was, we got drunk. “Stinking drunk,” in Ginger’s felicitous and original phrase.

We have just had a long weekend, yesterday being Memorial Day, and long weekends are hell on separated daddies. You don’t have the kids Saturday and Sunday, you have the kids Saturday and Sunday and Monday. They’ve seen the Central Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, they’ve seen the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island ferry has ceased to enchant. Strolling around quaint neighborhoods like Chinatown and Greenwich Village is something your native New York kid never wants to do. Movies are over in less than two hours, and there you are on the sidewalk, and now what the hell?

To complicate matters, I now seem to have four weekend children instead of the standard two. Lance used to come obediently and take his away on Saturday and return them on Sunday, like everybody else, but now that he’s living in the goddam apartment he no longer has to visit his children, so he doesn’t. Also, the weekend is the best time for his two searches: an apartment, and a woman. It doesn’t seem right to leave Joshua and Gretchen home alone when every other middle-class child in New York is out being entertained by daddy, so I’ve been bringing them along; the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Saturday to see the spring flowers, and the Cloisters on Sunday, because we hadn’t been there for a while.

Yesterday, Monday, the traditional Memorial Day itself, I took the kids to lunch in a Columbus Avenue fern bar and then we walked down to one of the small movie houses near Lincoln Center to see some raunchy R-rated French film the kids wouldn’t be allowed admittance to without the presence of a consenting adult, but when we got there that showing was sold out and there was no other movie in the neighborhood they all wanted to see. My capacity for invention had just reached overload, so we stood around on the sidewalk until Jennifer took pity on me and said, “Let’s go home and play Uno.”(Home has become a strange and slippery word these days, impossible to define except in context; in the circumstances of that moment, by “home” Jennifer meant my place on West End Avenue rather than her place on 17th Street, which everyone else automatically understood.)

So we went home, and Lance was there, wandering around stripped to the waist; which I thought was inappropriate. “I thought you were going apartment-hunting,” I said.

“I’ve been,” he told me. “No luck. I thought you were taking the kids to the movies.”

I explained our misfortune, and went on to the bedroom to change out of my jacket, where I found Ginger, in a thoroughly bad mood for some reason, dressed in her robe and stripping the bed. “If you’re going to change your plans,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me. I intended to get a lot of cleaning done around here today.”

“The movie was sold out.”

Ginger banged open both bedroom windows. “Well, get out of here” she said. “I have to air this place out.”

“It is a little musty,” I agreed.

“Out.”

Back in the living room, Lance apparently was feeling some belated sense of parental responsibility, because, having put a shirt on, he offered to join our little group and — since Ginger was, through various crashing noises deeper in the apartment, making it clear she didn’t want any of us around right now — he even had a suggestion: “Let’s go over to the park and do a little touch football, the Patchetts against the Diskants.”

Everybody thought that was a great idea. Bryan went to help Joshua clamber through his closet until he found his football, which was only slightly soft, and then we six left Ginger to her cleaning and her bad temper as we made our way eastward across 70th Street to Central Park, tossing the football back and forth along the way.

With frequent hilarity and many pauses and breaks and a few sidetrips to snack bars, we played a ridiculous game of touch football until nearly four-thirty. The Diskants won, eighty-four to thirty — we weren’t doing extra points — primarily because every time Lance passed to Gretchen the ball was intercepted by Jennifer, who is very lithe and quick, with long skinny arms and the true competitive spirit. Gretchen began to look a little teary after a while, her underlip receding, so once or twice in our Diskant huddle I suggested to Jennifer she ease off the pressure, let Gretchen catch a pass or two — we did have a comfortable lead, after all — but Jennifer simply couldn’t stop herself. Finally I deliberately threw a bad pass that Gretchen could intercept, and she ran with it for her only touchdown of the afternoon, which was enough to lift her spirits quite a bit.

Back at the apartment, there was a note from Ginger that she’d gone out shopping. I had to take my kids home, Gretchen and Joshua immediately plunked themselves in front of the television set, and Lance volunteered to come along “for the ride,” adding, “In fact, since my team lost, I’ll spring for a cab.”

“You’re on,” I said, and the children cheered.

The main reason I was pleased to have Lance along was as some protection from Mary, whose topics of conversation are invariably trouble. There’s her career in photography, there’s the subject of my moving back, there’s the childrens’ emotional condition, but the worst of all is sex.

This is increasing. Is it because she has no other sex life since I left? (More guilt.) Whatever the reason, we’ve reached the point now where every time she sees me she has another sexual encounter to describe, with friend or stranger. She can’t take a subway without some man rubbing an erection against her. She can’t go to a party without at least one male acquaintance subtly sliding his knee between her legs. She can’t make a phone call or a purchase without somebody talking dirty to her.

I find all this disturbing. Well, naturally I do, because Mary is technically still my wife, after all, and nobody wants his woman — or his former woman — treated basely. But more than that, I don’t want Mary telling me about it. She describes exactly the way it feels to be rubbed against in the subway, and how she knows the guy has had an ejaculation. She can remember every double entendre, every obscene gesture, every excuse this fellow or that fellow makes for touching her breast or her thigh or her behind. She never expresses an opinion about all this, never lets me guess if it frightens or angers or arouses her, but merely describes it all, as though she found it quite interesting and was sure I would, too.

I don’t. Or, sometimes, I do, but that’s worse. Of course I could go to bed with Mary, I know that, but then what? The whole point is, I’ve left, right? She’s supposed to find a fella, get on with her life, ease my financial burden. We’re separated, apart, it’s over, she isn’t supposed to look at me calmly with her clear blue eyes and tell me all these sex scenes. One way and another, it’s, well, upsetting.

So that’s why I was glad to have Lance along, which worked fairly well up to a point. That is, at least Mary didn’t tell me about anybody coming in her pocket. She simply offered us coffee, which we both refused, but then she settled down to chat anyway, saying to Lance, “I understand you’ve moved back home.”

“Well, not exactly,” he said, grinning and looking uncomfortable. “You know about Helena...”

“She went away, didn’t she?”

“To Santa Fe,” I said. For some reason, the choice of city still offended me.

“So you had to go home,” Mary finished.

“I’m looking for a new place,” Lance told her. “Something small. Just a one-bedroom is all I need. If you hear of anything—”

“I’ll be sure to call,” Mary promised. To me, she said, “Tom, do you want to stay to dinner?”

She said that every time, ritually, and every time I gave her back the same ritual response: “No, thanks, I’ve got to get back uptown.”

“With Lance up there,” she said, going beyond ritual, “I thought you might be more comfortable down here.”

Quickly, Lance said, “I’m going out for dinner. I don’t, uh, I don’t really live there.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He just sort of sleeps there. In the office.”

“Just until I can find an apartment.”

“Tom? You don’t have an office? How do you work?”

“I’m set up in the bedroom. It’s fine,” I said, annoyed to hear myself protesting too much.

“And it is only temporary,” Lance said, also protesting too much.

“Very temporary,” I protested.

“I’ll be out of there any day now,” Lance protested.

Before we became totally absurd, I stood and said, “I’ve really got to get uptown.”

“Me, too,” Lance said. But then he couldn’t resist adding, “Uh, a different part of uptown.”

Mary walked us to the apartment door, and as we were leaving she said, “Tom, if you need an office, your room is still here, you know. You could come down and work any time. Until Lance finds an apartment. Just temporarily.”

Was she making fun of us? I decided to take it straight. “Thanks for the offer,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

Down on the sidewalk, Lance sighed and looked gloomy and said, “Mary still wants you, you know.”

“Noticed that, did you?”

“It’s nice to have somebody want you,” he said. “Whether you want them or not.”

“Rough out there, huh?”

“Oh, you don’t know, Tom,” he said, shaking his head. “You just don’t know. And this last weekend, Jesus. The bitches I stand around talking to.”

“Let’s have a drink,” I said.

Lance perked up a little at that, so we went over to Sixth Avenue and turned south and entered a bar, where we had a drink and Lance said, “I’m not a teenager any more, Tom, I don’t like these goddam mating rituals. With Helena, I already knew her, I was leaving Ginger anyway, or she was leaving me, she’d already started on the side, you know...”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Lance, it’s water under the bridge, doesn’t matter any more, but I absolutely swear you were already out of the house when Ginger and I got together.”

“Oh, not you,” he said, shrugging it away. “There were a couple of other guys before.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t known about that.

“The point is,” he said, “I was never in this goddam undignified position of hunting for a woman. It was all kind of like a square dance, everybody just moved one step over.”

“Except Mary,” I said bitterly.

He looked surprised. “That’s right, isn’t it? She never got hooked up with anybody else.”

We were both silent then a minute, and I knew we were both thinking the same thought: Was Mary the solution to Lance’s problem? Was Lance the solution to my problem?

No. I realized then for the first time that whenever I thought of Mary at last getting herself a fella, it was a given in my mind that it would be a fella I didn’t know. The idea of Lance and Mary— No. “Incest” wasn’t precisely the right word, but it had precisely the right feeling.

Lance’s thoughts must have meandered to a similar terminus, because eventually he gave a long sigh, finished his drink, and said, “Let’s find a better joint.”

“You’re right.”

We crossed 14th Street into the Village, found another bar, and Lance told me about his experiences as a hunter of women: “They’re terrible, Tom, there are a whole lot of truly terrible women out there, and they go to parties, and they smoke, and they have opinions about every goddam thing in the goddam world, and they’re just making me very depressed.”

We didn’t like the jukebox in that place, so we went on to another, and Lance told me more: “They have that magazine called Self for the single women,” he said, “and believe me, Tom, the name tells it. The reason all those single women are single is not because nobody’s noticed how terrific they are, it’s because they stink.”

“They do look good.”

“That’s part of the trouble,” he said. “The one thing they believe in and truly understand is packaging. But you know what’s inside the package?”

“Nothing,” I guessed.

But he shook his head. “I’d take that. The way I feel right now, a woman with nothing at all inside her head would be a blessing. No, Tom; what’s inside the package is thoughts about the package.”

In the next bar, Lance told me about women whose lives were centered on jogging, and in the bar after that he told me what happens when you give up on all those self-centered Bloomingdale-wrapped single women and spend some time with a divorced woman instead: All she wants to talk about is her children. “I have children, too,” he said. “Everybody has children, dammit, and my kids are just as neurotic and brilliant as their goddam kids, but I don’t go around talking about it all the time.”

The next bar was The Lion’s Head, where there was a guy Lance knew and where I phoned Ginger, who sounded very cold and annoyed: “The children and I already ate.”

“You did? What time is it?”

“Seven-twenty-three,” she said, which meant she was in the bedroom with the digital clock. And it also meant she and the kids had eaten dinner earlier than usual.

“I’m sorry, Ginger,” I said. “Lance and I just got to talking—”

“Lance and you! Oh, that’s just too much,” she said, and slammed the receiver down, and I went back to the bar to find that Lance had bought me a drink and was talking with his pal about television rating systems. It made for a change, so I joined in.

There was a party Lance was supposed to go co a little later, but he said he just couldn’t face it. He thought he’d probably have dinner right there at The Lion’s Head. I said I thought I would, too, since I seemed to be in the doghouse with Ginger. Lance shook his head and said, “That woman’s got a lot of nerve.”

During dinner, some other people we knew came in, and after dinner we went back to the bar where the group just kept getting larger, and we all kept finding things to laugh about, and then I have a sudden clear memory of the digital clock in the bedroom here reading three-twenty-seven in the dark. That was immediately followed by Ginger ruthlessly awakening me. It was morning, she claimed, and she was in an absolutely rotten mood.

What a way to start the day. Ginger yelled at Lance and me all through breakfast, accusing us of male bonding. I don’t know exactly where that phrase came from, but I suspect a woman must have made it up, deliberately choosing an expression that sounds painful. Women these days “network,” a wonderfully mushy word that implies both serious business going on and yet a protective safety net below, but men are reduced to “bonding,” something that sounds sticky and sadomasochistic. “Help me find the Krazy Glue, Ethel, I’m goin bondin’ with the boys.”

Anyway, having helped our hangovers no end, Ginger then stormed off to make her presence felt at work. A little later, Lance slunk away to his own work, and I was frowning at the bed, seriously contemplating a full day of sleep, when Vickie called to suggest an editorial conference. I told her I had a bad cold.

Fresh clean sheets.