A Likely Story

Wednesday, January 5th

Twelfth Night. It’s another of those ancient counting things from before they got good at math, like Easter Sunday being the third day after Good Friday. Twelfth Night is the twelfth night after Christmas, but only if you count Christmas Eve as night number one.

Anyway, Twelfth Night is the eve of the Epiphany, which celebrates two major religious moments, being the baptism of Christ and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. (It’s also the date of the wedding feast at Cana, whatever that might mean.) In the old days, Twelfth Night marked the end of the religious feast of Christmas and a return to secular concerns, usually kicked off with a carnival. In medieval England there was a royal court masque on Twelfth Night, politically so important that foreign ambassadors would bribe and intrigue for position at it. The humbler folk celebrated with a carnival starting with a beanfeast involving a cake with a bean baked in it. Whoever got the slice of cake with the bean was master of the revels. (As for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, that doesn’t have much to do with anything at all, but was merely from his Neil Simon phase, one of his comedies in which a male actor playing a female role was then disguised as a boy, ho hum.)

Anyway, Twelfth Night. Neither Ginger nor I care about that sort of thing — we threw out our tree, along with several of its lights and ornaments, during our post-New-Year’s-Eve-party fight — but Mary of course is a goddam traditionalist all the way, so not only did she keep her tree until today but insisted I go over this afternoon to help her and the kids undecorate.

Naturally, Ginger was annoyed. “You don’t see me running off to Lance, do you?”

“He didn’t ask,” I said. “Besides, Helena wouldn’t like it.”

“And I don’t like it,” Ginger said, narrowing her eyes. She looks trampy when she narrows her eyes like that; I made the mistake of saying so once, so now she narrows her eyes all the way through parties and as a result spills her drink a lot. Now, narrowing her eyes without ulterior motive, she said, “What it comes down to is, Mary needs a fella.”

“Amen,” I said.

And it’s true, it couldn’t be more true. Ginger’s ex-husband, Lance, lives now with Helena, an assistant production manager at Time, Inc., whose ex-husband Barry more or less lives with the ex-wife of a psychiatrist named Terriman or Telliman or something. (Don’t worry about these names; these people don’t matter.)

Anyway, Ginger and Lance’s kids live with Ginger and me; Helena and Barry’s kids are with Helena and Lance; the psychiatrist’s kids are with Barry and whatsername. The psychiatrist contributes support money and Barry takes up the slack; Barry contributes support money for Helena and her kids and Lance takes up the slack; Lance contributes support money for Ginger and the kids here, and I take up the slack. And I contribute support money for Mary and my kids...

And there’s the rub. Mary, as Ginger pointed out, doesn’t have a fella. Her freelance photography work and the research jobs probably bring in on average a little less than Ginger’s salary, which is nowhere near enough for the lifestyle we all seem to have acquired. So while everybody else in the world is supporting two half-households, which adds up to one household, which is just barely possible, I am supporting one and one-half households all by myself, I’ve been doing it for eleven months, and I’m drowning.

Which is why The Christmas Book is so important. It could solve my money problems for a year, maybe two years; long enough, in any case, for Mary to give up the idea that I’m coming back. Long enough for her to find a fella.

With Ginger, I live on West End Avenue near 70th Street; Mary and the kids live downtown, on West 17th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; a fairly decent neighborhood, very near the Village and with much the same charm, but at lower rents. Going off now to disrobe the tree, I wore the sweater Mary’d given me for Christmas, to placate her. (I’ve already told Ginger it was my kids who gave me the sweater, to placate her.)

The Christmas decorations on Mary’s tree seemed more accurate, somehow. Does that make any sense? Christmases come and Christmases go, and over the years some of the old ornaments break or crumple or disappear, new ones are added, there’s a slow organic change, a continuous gradual shifting, every year subtly different and yet always the same, so that when you hear the phrase “Christmas tree” there’s always one proto-tree that comes into your mind, and the rest are merely imitation.

I had time to brood about this because I spent an hour looking at the tree before we ever got around to undressing it. Mary met me at the door with cocoa and the news that the kids wanted to play Mille Bornes first, because it was alleged to be best with four. Since I was the one who’d given Jennifer the game for Christmas, and since the card table and chairs were already set up in the living room, I couldn’t very well say no, so we all traveled several thousand miles together, while from time to time I looked past Bryan’s head at the tree, thinking how accurate it was.

Jennifer, my firstborn, is eleven, a savvy, skinny New York kid and an absolute shark at games. Fortunately she’s also lucky, because she cares intensely about whether she wins or loses. Bryan, nine years old, has already differentiated in his mind between sports (which are important) and games (which don’t matter), so that’s also good. Since Jennifer needs to win, and Bryan doesn’t care but does enjoy playing, they make a kind of better Lucy and Charlie Brown, without (I hope) the psychological damage always implicit in “Peanuts.”

Jennifer won twice, then I won. (She’d gone eight hundred fifty miles without using any two-hundreds, a gamble that would have paid off big if I hadn’t scrambled to a graceless any-way-at-all win.) There had been talk about playing only three games, but when Jennifer was defeated on the third she got a set expression around the mouth, shuffled the cards like a pro, and said, “Just one more.”

Mary said, “I’m not sure how long Tom can stay.”

“I’ve got time,” I said airily, though I knew Ginger would already be pacing the floor on 70th Street. “I’ll be delighted to whup you twice in a row,” I told Jennifer, which made her grin like Clint Eastwood and hunker down to play. She won, too.

After that, we put the table and chairs away and finally took care of the tree. Removing a rough-edged white snowball with a pale blue manger scene indented into one side, remembering that it was one of the few ornaments I’d brought with me from my parents’ home, making it almost the oldest part of the continuity, the accuracy, I tried to think how I might gracefully ask to take it with me now, but there seemed to be no way. Palm it, pocket it? No.

By the end of the operation, Mary and I were alone, it having occurred to the kids that putting ornaments in boxes was work and not play. Also, I think they’re both sometimes uncomfortable around me these days, possibly because I’m uncomfortable around them. I have this feeling they’re not mature enough to realize how mature I am.

I put the naked tree in the hall, to carry down to the street when I left, and returned to the living room to say my farewells. On hands and knees there Mary picked needles one by one out of the carpet. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m off.”

Kneeling, she sat back on her haunches, her cupped hands in her lap filled with pine needles. “Tom,” she said, “do you remember Jack Horton?”

“Sure,” I said. About my age, skinny and worried-looking, he lives in the neighborhood; we have mutual friends, we meet occasionally at parties, we’ve never been close.

“Sit down a minute,” she said.

Reluctantly, I sat facing her in “my” chair.

“I ran into Jack Horton at Key Food this afternoon,” Mary said, “and he put his hand on my breast.” She touched her fingertips to the spot.

I was surprised, and said so: “Jack Horton? Doesn’t sound like him.”

“I know,” she agreed. “It’s because men know I’m alone now,” she said. “It’s happened before, I’ve told you about it.”

“Yes, you have.” And she has, four or five times in the last couple of months, and with increasing detail, it seems to me. And always described in the same manner: not angry or upset or offended or anything, just calmly interested in this phenomenon that when a woman isn’t already with a man other men come around and start copping feels.

“Of course,” she said, “he pretended he was just admiring my dalmatian pin.”

That would be a free-form, black-and-white mosaic pin Bryan had found at some Arab junk jewelry place in the Village and had given Mary for Christmas, announcing the weird-shaped lumpy thing was a dalmatian, as in the Walt Disney movie. I said, “Well, maybe that’s what he was doing.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He made sure he rubbed his knuckles back and forth on my nipple, like this.” She demonstrated, watching her own knuckles with absorption.

Mary’s campaign to get me back does not, I’m happy to say, include dressing up “sexy.” At this moment she was barefoot, wearing old jeans and a dark blue high-neck sweater. But we were married a long while, it wasn’t physical disinterest that broke us up, and I don’t need suggestive clothing to remind me who’s inside there. Watching her watch herself rub her nipple, I said, “Uh, like that, huh? What did you say?”

Her hand returned to help the other hand hold pine needles. “Of course, I pretended not to notice,” she said. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t hard, though, or who knows what he would have thought.”

What I thought then was, He’s a fella. Mary, maybe he likes you, he’s decent, why not follow through? That was what I thought, but not at all what I could say. “He probably didn’t mean it,” I said. “You should have said something right then, he probably would have turned red with embarrassment.”

“Oh, he meant it,” she said. “It’s because you’re away.”

“Speaking of that,” I said, bright and casual. “Ginger and I are thinking more seriously about marriage now, so we’ll both have to get divorces, of course.”

“I don’t think Lance would like that,” Mary said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because then he’d be free to marry Helena, and Lance doesn’t want to marry Helena.”

It had been a mistake to mention marriage; all I’d been trying to do was change the subject, plus reinforce the notion that since she and I were never never never going to get back together, why didn’t she catch a couple of these passes or go to a few parties and find a fella? But marriage is Mary’s subject, as I should have remembered.

Still pretending to talk about Ginger’s ex, she went on, “Lance is just playing hookey. Helena’s an afternoon movie to him, that’s all.”

“I have to go now,” I said, and came home back to Ginger’s reproaches, which I have fled by coming into my office to “work.”

Well, if I’m working, let’s work. There are a couple of magazine pieces aborning on this desk, and galleys of The Films of Jack Oakie to correct, but my mind is still all caught up in The Christmas Book. Will Jack Rosenfarb take it? There isn’t much time; maybe I should phone somebody else, make another appointment for next week just in case.

If I peddle it to somebody else, who should that be? Hubert Van Driin? The editor-publisher for whom I did the Jack Oakie book, Hubert Van Driin is an insane right wing psychopath, and his company, Federalist Press, is much smaller than Craig, Harry & Bourke, but my Christmas idea just might connect with the nostalgia side of him. I could promise a still photo from a Wilderness Family movie; surely those people have done at least one Christmas-in-the-cabin sequence. On the other hand, Hubert is RC, from the Torquemada branch, and he might well get all pop-eyed and incensed at the secular side of Christmas. Hard to know, hard to know.