A Likely Story

Monday, August 15th

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

It feels strange to be back in this room again, working at this table. Strange and a little scary; I’m not sure I know what it means.

All I know is what happened. Yesterday, Lance brought the kids back from Marin County, happy and bouncing and full of stories about redwood trees and the Pacific Ocean and the strange-looking males of San Francisco. Unfortunately, Lance also brought himself back, and in the middle of the afternoon it became obvious he intended to stay. I said, “Lance, what about the other arrangements you were making?”

“They didn’t pan out,” he said. “But I’ve still got some possibilities.”

So as soon as I could I cornered Ginger in the bedroom and said, “Ginger, this has got to stop.”

“Well, I didn’t invite him back,” she said. She seemed irritated with both of us.

“He can’t take over my office again,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Well, then, tell him so. You tell him.”

“I’ll be delighted,” I said, but when I turned toward the door she cried, “Tom!”

I looked back at her: “What?”

“We can’t do that! It is his place, too, he still pays rent, he—”

“So do I pay rent! In fact, I live here. Does Lance live here?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, are we just putting Lance up until he finds a new apartment, or has he moved back in?”

“He has not moved back in!” This was the most appalling idea she’d heard since my proposal of marriage.

“It sure looks like he has,” I said. “And the worst of it is, he’s moved into my office.”

“It can’t be much longer, Tom,” she said, switching gears, deciding to try to placate me.

“It’s already been too long. You know, I could always go work downtown.”

“You mean, at Craig? At Annie’s?”

“No. The room I used to use as an office is—”

“You mean at Mary’s?”

“She told me a while ago, if I ever needed an office, the one I used to have is—”

“That bitch!”

“Mary isn’t pushing me out of places to work, Ginger,” I said. “If Lance moves into that office tonight, I’ll start using my old office tomorrow.”

“Go right ahead, then,” she said. “I think it’s ridiculous to make such a fuss, but if that’s what you want to do...”

“That’s what I want to do,” I said, although of course it wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was force Ginger to kick Lance out, figuring she would certainly do so if the alternative was that I’d be spending every day with Mary.

But somehow it didn’t work out. I moved firmly forward, ostentatiously packing up my typewriter and a carton of notes and reference books, and Ginger didn’t say a word on the subject. I phoned Mary to ask if the offer was still good, and she said yes, and I said I’d be down this morning, and Ginger stood firm. Lance moved into my office last night, and my office moved out this morning. I left a different message on the answering machine up there, directing callers to reach me down here, and brought everything I needed down in a cab.

Like the room uptown, this one is simply the smallest bedroom in the apartment, similarly with a view of an airshaft. The few times I’d looked in the doorway here over the last year or so my old table and chair and wastebasket were still in place, but the room had become increasingly filled with stored cartons or mounds of off-season or outgrown clothing. Mary has always had a small portable inconvenient darkroom in our bathroom (how nice it has been to start the days without those acrid smells or that cumbersome boxy machinery in the way), and would hang her prints to dry on a cord stretched over the tub, but a few months ago a clothesline appeared in my ex-office, extending from a nail over the door to a nail over the window, and from it has dangled a gallery of her game attempts at art or commerce or at least legibility: winos asleep in doorways, close-ups of snowy fire escapes, a tiny girl studying a mosquito bite.

But this morning the clothesline was gone, and so were the cartons and the clothing. The room was bare and clean, exactly as I’d left it eighteen months ago. Mary had gone out to the Picture Collection at the Mid-Manhattan Library on a research job, and had left a note: “Won’t be back till late. Help yourself in the kitchen.”

I have helped myself in the kitchen. I have wandered around the apartment, looking into the kids’ rooms and into Mary’s room while memories have stirred, and I have felt increasingly uneasy. For some reason, the troubles we had, the bad times, the abrasions ‘when we were throwing each other off like heavy colds after taking an antibiotic, all those moments and feelings have faded away like invisible ink. Even the chemical stink bleeding into the bedroom through the closed bathroom door no longer irritates. All I can find here now, out of the past, is our sporadic happiness.

I’m beginning to believe Thomas Wolfe had it wrong: it isn’t that you can’t go home again, it’s that you shouldn’t.