A Likely Story

Thursday, September 29th

Yesterday, Hallmark said no, and today Cosmopolitan said no.

The Hallmark thing was just a stab in the dark anyway, but the Cosmo rejection is annoying. They gave me an assignment to write about the world’s most famous jewels, and I did, and now it turns out some other editor there had already assigned some other writer an article on famous jewel thefts, so his article and my article cover an awful lot of the same territory. I’m not being rejected because I did it wrong, in other words, but because they did it wrong.

This is a thing several magazines do; assign too many articles and overlapping articles and articles they’re not really sure they want, because it doesn’t cost them very much. With Cosmos “no” I got a tiny check, for what is called the kill fee; this means I agree to do the article for twenty-five hundred dollars, but if for any reason they choose not to run it, even if it’s because of their own error, all I get for my work is fifteen per cent. Three hundred seventy-five dollars for twenty-five hundred dollars worth of work.

Theoretically, of course, I could now sell the same piece to some other magazine, but the slicks are all so specific and unique that it’s usually very hard to find a commissioned piece a second home. I suppose I could retype it, not underlining every fourth word, but it would still have the Cosmo girl’s magpie approach, and what other magazine will want (a) a survey of would-famous jewels (b) told in the style of a rapacious ninny? I’ll ask Mary when she gets home, she sometimes has good ideas on things like this.

Yesterday she had a potentially very good idea, in re Happy Happy Happy, the greeting card book. After Annie called to say that Hallmark wasn’t interested and that she would now start making submissions to publishers while continuing to look for a patron among other card companies, Mary and I talked about the situation over coffee, and she suggested I take some of the completed sections, where my research and illustrations are in place, and turn them into magazine articles, maybe for somebody like Family Circle or Woman’s Day or Parade or even Redbook. If we could get a few of them published that way, it would not only make the work start paying for itself but might also help to attract both a book publisher and a greeting card company sponsor. I called Annie with the suggestion this morning, and she’s pondering it. Meantime, I’m going through the material, basting it into a group of potential articles.

Last night, over dinner in a Thai place called Toon’s on Bleecker Street, Ginger suddenly gave me an ultimatum that I’m still wondering what to do about. “If you’re going to live with me, Tom,” she said, “live with me. Several people have told me how sorry they are we split up, and when I say we haven’t split up they inform me, as though they think I’m the dimmest bulb in the world, that you’ve moved back in with Mary.”

“People make mistakes,” I said.

“Don’t you make one,” she said. “Come back uptown, work in your office the way you used to, stop all this ambiguity.”

“Lance is—”

“Stop that! Lance is here every other weekend, that’s all he’s here! All his things are out of your office now, the place is just empty almost all the time, there’s no reason for this!”

“My research material is spread all over the—”

“Pack it up!”

I said, “Ginger, there’s no reason to. Everything’s fine just as it is.”

“Are you living with Mary” she wanted to know, “or are you living with me?”

“You, of course. I’m not sleeping with Mary, if that’s what you want to know.”

“You’re not sleeping very much with me either,” she informed me.

“We’ve both been busy,” I said, because in truth our sex life has slackened somewhat since the end of summer.

“Tom,” she said, “do you know what next Wednesday is?”

Was this a change of subject? It didn’t feel like it, somehow. “No,” I said. “What is it?”

“The fifth of October,” she said sententiously, and sat there looking at me.

The fifth of October. Not her birthday, not anybody’s birthday that I know. Not a holiday. Guy Fawkes is the fifth of November. I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

“Our second anniversary,” she said.

Anniversary? Oh, for God’s sake, it was the first time we went to bed together two years ago! Like Mary remembering the date I left home!

“Our anniversary.” I shook my head, not quite believing it.

She pointed a chopstick at me. “If you haven’t moved completely back into the apartment by next Wednesday,” she announced, “you needn’t come back at all.”

I looked at her. “Is that an ultimatum?”

“I knew there was a word for it,” she said.