A Likely Story

Sunday, July 17th

Mary left this afternoon.

Several times in the last two weeks I thought the situation might explode, but it never quite did happen. Ginger once or twice wanted an explosion, and I could see it, and I guess Mary could see it, too, because she very gently and quietly disappeared from view. I made the mistake once of pointing this out to Ginger: “You keep saying Mary’s devious,” I said, “but if she was devious wouldn’t she let you pick a fight with her?”

“What do you mean, pick a fight?”

“You’ve been spoiling for a fight all—”

Well. That was a mistake, which took about a day and a half to rectify.

Otherwise, both women were rather good about it. They went to the beach together — with all the kids — and they talked together civilly enough. There was tacit agreement that Ginger was boss of the kitchen and Mary a guest eating Gingers meals, except that the five days Ginger had to go to work in the city Mary volunteered to make dinner and Ginger accepted the offer. Every evening, if we weren’t all playing a board game or something with the kids, Mary would retire to her guesthouse and read while Ginger and I did whatever we did in the main house.

Fair Harbor on Fire Island is a very communications-biz community, with television people and ad agency people as well as writers and editors and a sprinkling of show folk. I know a few of these people, mostly through business contacts, and one of the guys, a magazine editor named Herm Morgenstern who by summer is a feared and ruthless volleyball player — he finishes most summers absolutely swathed in Ace bandages — said to me on the beach one day, grinning, “Tom, I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“The women.” He shook his head in admiration. “Jeezuz. The wife and the girlfriend, all in the same house. You all bunk in together, do you?” His tongue was somewhat hanging out.

“Hey, no,” I said. “It’s nothing like that at all, Herm. Mary and I are separated, she has her own little guesthouse, there’s nothing going on at all.”

“Sure,” he said, nodding, smirking. “Sure.”

I was reminded of Vickie assuming Ginger and Lance and I had a menage à trois, and I imagine Herm wasn’t the only person in Fair Harbor making the same assumption about Ginger and Mary and me. I suppose other people’s lives always look more exciting; it’s hard to believe that everybody’s as disorganized and screwed-up and ordinary as ourselves.

It’s funny, but the place feels incomplete without Mary prowling around, hung with cameras, looking for not-quite-good-enough photo opportunities. A few empty film containers are still to be seen here and there, little black plastic jars with gray plastic tops, and they remind me of her; Mary’s need to be a successful photographer, Mary’s softness that makes the goal impossible.

Why did all that make her somehow belong here? I don’t know. I only know we’d established a status quo here, the seven of us, against all odds, and now I find myself missing it. Afraid I might make the mistake of letting Ginger see the way I feel, I have come up to the evening-cooled bedroom to work on the second batch of Christmas Book galleys. Last Friday, Vickie, in her final official act before motherhood — if that kid is smart, it’ll leave the womb running — messengered this second portion of the galleys over to Ginger’s office, and Ginger brought them out with her that evening, and I’ve been working on them ever since.

There wasn’t time to correct them all before Mary’s departure today, unfortunately, or she could have taken them with her. Somehow I’ll have to get them back to Craig this week.

I wonder who I’ll address them to?