A Likely Story

Friday, August 26th

On this date in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote. On this date in this year, Lance moved out of my uptown office.

Ginger does not like my working at Mary’s place one little bit, an attitude she kept very quiet about last week, when I first came down here, but this week she began to agitate. On Monday she said it was “silly” for me to spend my days downtown when Lance was always at work all day long anyway and I could work perfectly well at “home,” and I said I needed an office that was my office twenty-four hours a day, so I could leave work-in-progress scattered about.

On Tuesday she called nine times. Mary was out most of the day, so I was the one who had to answer the phone each time, and the calls were never about anything, which finally teed me off. “I am working here, Ginger,” I said. “I am not seducing Mary, and I am not being seduced by Mary, I am working. Except when I have to keep answering the damn phone.” She said, “There’s no reason for you to be there.” I said, “The reason is called Lance.”

On Wednesday Lance called to say Ginger was phoning him every half hour to ask what progress he was making in finding a new place to live; so my original intent was at last beginning to be realized. Lance, with that wistful sound he gets in his voice a lot these days, said, “I didn’t know there was such urgency, Tom. I thought you were all right.” I said, “There was such urgency, Lance, as I damn well tried to make clear, but you out-waited me, so now I’m perfectly happy spending my days at Mary’s place, and Ginger’s beginning to realize it’s your fault.”

On Thursday, yesterday, at the breakfast table, Ginger pointed a piece of bacon at Lance and said, “I don’t want you still here after the first of the month, Lance, I really don’t. This has gone on long enough.” Lance looked sober and capable, firming his shoulders as he said, “I’m working on it, Ginger, I definitely am.” And last night he came home to announce that he had made alternate plans, and would be leaving almost immediately.

Which was this morning. We took a cab together, Lance and I and many of his cartons and suitcases. I got out of the cab at 17th Street and he continued on down to Greenwich Street, where he will be — until something else comes along — sharing an apartment with a co-worker named Bradford, who happens to be a manic militant faggot. I have met Bradford a few times, and I do not envy Lance.

Bradford shaves his head but has grown a thick drooping western-style moustache, and he lives a life of signals and symbols. Whenever he’s not at work, he wears a black leather bomber jacket and faded blue jeans, which is a virtual uniform for Village queens of a specific type. The bunch of keys dangling from a belt loop and the red bandanna fluttering from a hip pocket describe to the cognoscenti his sexual preferences, about which I want to know as little as possible. They would not include Lance, but even so. Bradford agreed to share his “space” for a while only on condition that Lance realize he, Bradford, frequently made “friends” in the outer world who would return with him for fun and frolic; behind the closed door of a separate bedroom, but even so. Lance has agreed not to remark upon anything that might emerge from that bedroom of a morning, and not to spread any tales around the workplace.

Ginger must have been leaning on Lance really hard, if life with Bradford seems the better alternative.

And Ginger isn’t even getting what she wanted from it, at least not right away. Last night we had a huge row over the fact that I have no intention of moving the office back uptown. “I am in the very middle of assembling Happy Happy Happy,” I explained several times, that being the working title of the greeting card book. “I not only have things piled up all over that room, taped to the walls, stacked here and there and everywhere, but each pile and each individual thing is where it is for a reason. I am assembling sample chapters and an outline of the book, and it would cost me days of work to tear that office apart, carry everything up here, and start all over.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“No,” I said.

She is not speaking to me at the moment, which means maybe I can get some work done.