A Likely Story

Saturday, June 11th

What a week; I never thought I’d get through it alive.

The trauma started on Tuesday, when Vickie called to say we were destined to have dinner together on Friday; all of us. It seems Ginger had tired of my inactivity and had made the Approach Direct, calling Vickie at work, identifying herself as “Tom’s friend,” and saying (according to Vickie), “We’d love to have you and your friend to dinner. Tom has just raved about how much help you’ve been on the book.”

Spasms closed my throat when Vickie reported this, but I did manage to say, “What did you tell her?”

“What could I tell her? I was so startled all I could think to say was how delighted I’d be.”

“Oh, boy.”

“So we set a date for Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“Of course. Tom, it’ll be all right, don’t worry about it.”

“Who’s going to be your friend?”

“I’ll bring Carl along,” she said.

Well. Carl Bindel is Vickie’s secretary, a willowy boy in his late twenties with a sandy bushy moustache, large moist hazel eyes, spectacles with frames the same color as the moustache, and an absolutely terrifying sex life centered around various S-M bars in the West Village. There is absolutely no possible sexual permutation that could wind up with Carl and Vickie in a carnal relationship; it would be practically cross-species. Even Gretchen would take one look at those two and know they didn’t hang out together, so the idea of Vickie passing off Carl as her boyfriend to Ginger would have been laughable if it weren’t so horrifying. “Vickie!” I said. “Carl?”

“He can be very butch when he wants,” she promised. “When his mother comes to New York, for instance. Besides, I already asked and he said yes. He’ll do just fine. He says it’ll be a hoot.”

“Uhh, Vickie,” I said, “maybe you should suggest that he not call anything a hoot during dinner.”

“He’ll do just fine, Tom,” she insisted. “Are we still on for our conference tomorrow?”

“You bet,” I said, but faintly.

The rest of the week, apart from editorial conferences, I spent working on a couple of magazine pieces to pay the rent, trying to get them out of the way before the copy-edited Christmas Book comes back, which will be any day now. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to get Lance out of the way, so I’m still working in the bedroom, which is all right for now, but once The Christmas Book returns this room is going to get awfully crowded.

The problem is, since Lance hasn’t found an apartment yet and we’re going to be out on Fire Island all next month anyway, it’s been agreed he’ll stay here through July He absolutely swears and vows and promises he’ll have made some other arrangement by August first, but in the meantime his interest in both of his searches — a place to live and a new girlfriend — seems to have slackened considerably He’s spending more and more evenings at home, and is now an apparently permanent addition to my weekend jaunts with the kids.

In fact, he joined us for dinner Friday, which did nothing to normalize an already weird occasion. Ginger came home from work early Friday afternoon to start cooking, while I stayed in the bedroom, trying to concentrate on my final draft of the “Major Jewels in History” piece Cosmopolitan had commissioned, and when Lance arrived at five-forty-eight by the digital clock, I abandoned the Hope and the Kohinoor and the rest of them and joined him for a prehurricane drink.

I had not, of course, confided in Lance about my carrying-on with Vickie — there’s just no way to tell a man you’re cheating on his wife — so it was impossible to enlist his aid in the ordeal to come. While Ginger chopped and poured and pounded in the kitchen, Lance and I sat in the living room and chatted of inessentials, and my drink just seemed to vanish; so I had another.

Vickie and her friend had been invited for seven. Believing that whatever wits I had I should keep about me, I stopped after the second drink and just sat in the living room, smiling and nodding and listening to Lance’s incomprehensible shoptalk about CBS executive politics, while inside I felt exactly the way I used to as a child at the dentist’s: I don’t care how awful it is, just so it’s over.

A little after seven, fashionably late, the downstairs bell rang. Going to the intercom in the front hall, I asked who it was, and a voice said, “Vickie and Carl.” I smiled grimly, realizing I didn’t know which of them had answered, and buzzed them in.

Ginger removed her apron, dried her hands and was standing smiling in the living room, all her hundreds of eyes very wide-open and glinting, when the upstairs bell rang and I opened to the happy couple. “Hi, Vickie. Hiya, Carl.” Vickie and I leaned forward to kiss the air beside one another’s cheeks; she smelled like illicit afternoons. Smiling, Carl extended a scrod fillet and I gave it a manly shake and he winced, but happily. “Come on in,” I said, against my urgent desire to scream GO AWAY FOREVER! and shepherded them into the living room for introductions.

Both guests were dressed a bit oddly. Vickie had apparently decided to allay suspicion by appearing as a frump, because she was wearing black pantyhose and a dark paisley-pattern dress that was too tight for her, emphasizing bumps and rolls I’d never noticed before. As for Carl, his tight designer jeans were tucked into his high-heeled cowboy boots, and his canary yellow shirt under a fringed tan suede jacket was graced by a black string tie. His belt buckle, shaped like a large rectangular manhole cover, had a bucking bronco on it.

I introduced everybody to everybody else. The fact that Ginger and Lance had the same last name made Vickie pause a millisecond, but then she sailed onward and I’m sure I was the only one who noticed. She said to Ginger, “Something smells delicious.”

“I hope it’ll be all right. It’s a new recipe from Elizabeth David.”

“Isn’t she fantastic? Can I do anything to help?”

“No, no, I have everything under control. I think.”

Meantime, I was singing my part: “Can I offer anyone a drink?”

I could. Drinks were made, Vickie joined Ginger in the kitchen, and we three hearty males sat around the living room listening to our horses eat hay and the lonely cry of a distant old coyote. Lance broke a rather painful silence by saying, to the room at large, “What do you think’s going to happen to the Mets this year?”

“Oh, the Lord knows,” Carl said, waving airy fingers. “With Bliss gone, it’s a whole new ballgame.”

Lance gave him a puzzled look. “Bliss?”

“Anthony Bliss,” Carl said. “The general manager.”

Lance was floundering. “Of the Mets?”

“Of the Met, yes.” Looking to me for confirmation, Carl said, “Anthony Bliss.” Turning back to Lance he said, “Of course, if they replace him with another Beverly Sills, quelle disaster.”

“Opera,” I said, catching up. “The Metropolitan Opera.”

“Well, yes, of course.” Belatedly, Carl too was becoming puzzled. “What else were we talking about?”

“Baseball,” I said.

“The New York Mets,” Lance said, with some emphasis.

“Oh, base-ball!” Carl did his airy wave again. “Macho ballet,” he said.

Apparently, Vickie and Ginger were hitting it off somewhat better in the kitchen, so that by the time we sat down to our meal at least the women were relaxed. (Joshua and Gretchen had both been farmed out for a few hours, Gretchen dining at a school chum’s house, Joshua downtown with Mary and my kids. He would sleep over, and I would pick the whole crew up — sans Mary — in the morning.) We talked publishing gossip mostly during dinner, that being the one subject that could reach all the way from Carl to Lance, Carl for the evening pretending to be another editor at Craig rather than Vickie’s secretary. (One pretense among so many.) A few times I saw Ginger give Carl a puzzled look, but that was all.

After dinner I went to the kitchen to make more drinks, and all at once Vickie was in the doorway, a devilish grin on her lips and a sparkle in her eyes as she hissed, “A menage à trois?” (I know there are those who claim you can’t hiss a word without an S in it, but that’s nonsense. In human speech, to hiss is to whisper forcefully. Pooh to Newgate Callendar.)

At any rate, I was both startled and alarmed. “No, no,” I whispered. (Not being forceful, it wasn’t a hiss.) “Lance is just between apartments, that’s all. There’s nothing going on.”

“I’ve never done that,” she mused, and gave another wicked smile. “I’d like to be a sandwich!”

“With Carl?”

She raised her eyes to heaven. “He can be the lettuce leaf,” she said, and went away to the living room.

Mercifully, it was an early evening; one postprandial drink and a brief description by Carl of a Bette Midler stage show he’d recently seen (complete with impersonations), and they were off, Carl a cowgirl Ariel and Vickie in her too-tight frowsy dress a lonely Caliban. At least he hadn’t described anything as a hoot.

Later, in bed, Ginger employed the phrase “fag hag.” I blinked big innocent eyes: “What?”

“Well, surely it’s obvious. Carl is gay as a jay.”

“I thought he was a little — ambiguous,” I admitted.

“Ambiguous? I thought he’d go down on the candelabra!”

“Vickie’s never talked about him much,” I said, shrugging it off.

Unsuccessfully. “That’s because she’s probably embarrassed,” Ginger said. “But she’s your typical fag hag; afraid of sex, afraid of adult relationships, so she wears frumpy, unattractive clothes and just hangs out with faggots. Did you see that dress?”

“Yes, I did,” I admitted. I felt I should be defending Vickie somehow, but there was just no way to do it. And wasn’t this, under the circumstances, the best possible view for Ginger to take of Vickie? Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist adding, “I thought you two got along.”

“We did,” Ginger said. “As a woman, I think she’s very sensible. But can you actually believe she’s having an affair with Carl?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Does she dress that way in the office?”

“I don’t know, I suppose so, I never noticed that much. Not come-on, anyway.”

Suddenly Ginger’s eyes were narrowed, and peering at me. “No,” she said.

“No what?”

“Not come-on. Did you like the ratatouille?”

Quelle (as Carl would say) change of subject. I complimented her on dinner for a while, and we never did return to the topic of Vickie, so I didn’t find out what had been going on inside her head for that one tiny instant.

This afternoon — being the day after — I had another brief and equally disquieting talk about Vickie, this one with Lance, in the Central Park Zoo, while the children amused themselves making faces at the monkeys. (The boys always want to look at the snakes, the girls always want to look at the cats, and they always compromise by looking at the monkeys.) “That editor of yours,” Lance said.

“Oh?”

“Is that really her boyfriend?”

“Lance, I have no idea,” I said. “Ginger invited her to dinner, and that’s who she brought.”

“Good-looking woman,” he said, staring at the monkeys, who were making faces at one another. “She doesn’t know how to wear clothes, but that isn’t everything.”

I thought I saw where his thoughts were trending, and I didn’t like it. “She was kind of frumpy,” I said. “Ginger thinks she’s a fag hag.”

But he wasn’t to be deflected that easily. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, nodding, musing, pondering. “There’s a real woman inside there. Maybe she’s on the rebound or something.”

“That’s possible.”

“I don’t suppose you know her home number?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“We’ve already been introduced, last night,” he reminded himself. “I could call her at work.”

“Yes, you could,” I said.

Now what? Lance and Vickie? To solve the Lance problem must I recreate the Christmas Book problem? Is nothing to be simple any more, ever again?