A Likely Story

Monday, July 4th

I’m a nervous wreck.

Of course Vickie would demand sex while she was here. She gave me several high-signs yesterday, once the heat in the bedroom had driven me back downstairs, but with two other adults and four children about the place all day Sunday it just wasn’t possible. And I’d assumed it would go on being impossible.

But then came today. The beach is seven houses and a dune from here, and after breakfast everybody went there, leaving me to finish my work on the galleys before the bedroom becomes too hot to stand, and so Vickie could take them back to the city with her this afternoon. Suddenly, a little before eleven, here came Vickie skipping into the bedroom, smiling her lascivious smile and untying her strings. “Oh, no!” I said, but, “We’ve got time,” she assured me, giggling.

We did, too, but only just. She had barely managed to reassemble herself and be in the kitchen making a big quart bottle of packaged lemonade when Ginger arrived. “Oh, dear,” I heard Vickie say. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“Mmm,” said Gingers voice. “How’s Tom going?”

“Sore as a bear,” Vickie told her. “I guess those galleys are driving him crazy. I called up to him, but he just growled.”

So Ginger didn’t come upstairs to inspect the site of the skirmish, and soon both women went back to the beach with the bottle of iced lemonade and a handful of plastic cups, and I went to take my second shower of the day.

But not my last. At lunchtime everybody descended, including me carrying the finished galleys in their big sloppy envelope, and we sat around the table on the deck, under the big beach umbrella, making cold cut sandwiches and drinking white wine spritzers. (The children stuck to lemonade.)

After lunch, Vickie went off to Jennifer and Gretchen’s room to change, while Mary and the kids went back to the beach, Mary wearing a bikini and two cameras, with a third camera in the canvas bag she carried, down among the suntan oils and paperback books and crumpled tissues. Then Ginger and I walked Vickie to the dock, where she and the galleys took the three-ten ferry and life became slightly more plausible.

Walking back to the house, Ginger gave me an updated assessment of Vickie, making several negative observations with which I wholeheartedly agreed. Then she said, “How do you feel, surrounded by all these women?”

“Like an Oriental potentate,” I said.

She considered that, as though it had been a real answer, then said, “Really?”

“Not really. For one thing, I don’t have my pick of the harem.”

“You’re damn right you don’t.” Then she linked her arm with mine and gazed around at the day and said, “It’s beautiful out here.”

“It sure is.”

“I hate having to go back to work.”

“It’s only one week,” I pointed out. Ginger had had to pull some strings and request special favors to get most of July off, and at that she couldn’t wangle the entire month. Next week, from the eleventh till the fifteenth, she’ll have to commute, getting up every morning to take the 7:15 ferry — locally known as the “Death Boat” — then returning on the 6:05; the “Daddy Boat,” though not in this case.

“I don’t like leaving you here alone,” she said.

“I won’t be alone. I’ll have the kids. And Mary.”

“That’s what I don’t like about it.”

“Oh, come on, Ginger,” I said. “Don’t try to tell me you’re jealous of Mary.”

“She wants you back.”

“Granted.”

“She’ll work her wiles on you when I’m gone.”

“Mary doesn’t have any wiles,” I said.

She laughed, and disengaged her arm from mine. I said, “Don’t get mad for no reason.”

Brooding, she said, “Sometimes I’d like to know what a man thinks about.”

“Sex.”

She nodded. “Good idea.”

So it was back up to the bedroom we went. It must have been way over ninety in there by then, but did that stop us? Unfortunately not.

So there I was, engaged in perfectly legitimate intercourse with my mistress, while my wife was up at the beach and my girlfriend was off on the 3:10, when all of a sudden a perfectly awful noise threw the both of us off-stride and then some. It sounded like a cat fight, it sounded like mongooses mating, it sounded like a beached whale, it sounded like the death-cry of an elk, it sounded like... I don’t know what it sounded like.

But, looking out the window, I found out what it was. It was Bryan, blowing into the clarinet he’d been given last Christmas. I’ve been paying for lessons, of course, and Mary had told me he was being fairly diligent with his practice, but since I don’t actually live with the kid I’d never heard these terrible sounds before, so naturally I screamed out the window, “Bryan! For God’s sake!”

He stopped squawking, looked up at me, and smiled happily. “That’s Jingle Bells,” he said.

“The hell it is! Take that thing off into the sand dunes somewhere if you’re going to play it! Take it to Atlantique!”

Behind me, Ginger was saying, “Don’t discourage him, Tom, let him play.”

“Play!” I yelled at her. “You call that play?”

“I don’t get to practice anywhere,” Bryan complained on my other flank. “How am I going to grow up to be Artie Shaw?”

Where did he ever hear of Artie Shaw? And why on Earth would he want to grow up to be him? “Take — that — away, I yelled, pointing toward Europe.

So he moped off, clarinet at half-mast, body doing a whole great exaggerated number on how mournful he felt. Clarinet! That’s what Christmas is!

Meantime, Ginger was nagging, saying, “That’s no way to act toward a child who’s taking an interest in something.”

“Under this window?”

“You could have spoken to him gently and reasonably.”

“I didn’t feel gentle and reasonable.”

“You certainly didn’t.”

So much for sex; we spent the time instead arguing about me mistreating my children. Well, it made a change from our argument about me mistreating her children.