A Likely Story

Thursday, October 6th

I have finished unpacking my office once again, I am back here in these familiar surroundings, and I’m still recovering from all that happened yesterday.

Yesterday. The famed October fifth, the second anniversary of the coupling of Tom and Ginger, memorialized in the form of an ultimatum from Ginger to Tom, ordering him either to bring his office home or to get out forever.

I had a week to dither over that selection, and so I did, hoping it would go away of its own accord, that Ginger would forget or change her mind or in some other fashion back away from the precipice, but yesterday morning she made it clear her attitude had not and would not change: “Don’t meet me after school tonight, Tom,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll be here,” she said, “unpacking all your research materials. I’ll come straight home from school and we can eat in tonight.”

“Ah,” I said, while a cold hard hairball formed inside my ribcage. “So you still want to make an issue of that, do you?”

“Not at all,” she said. “There’s no issue. Either you’re here or you aren’t.”

I could think of nothing just then to reply, though in the subway heading downtown a bit later I did engage in several impassioned interior monologues whose compelling logic, I lied to myself, would have left Ginger without an argument to her name. (Had I really had that much faith in my killer points, I could always have phoned her at her office once I got to mine — up-till-then mine — but somehow I didn’t feel quite up to it.)

In the morning, I worked on query letters for greeting card articles, but my heart wasn’t in it. I spent most of the time mooning out the window at the airshaft, wondering by what absurd paths I had come to this crossroads. And what further absurd paths might still stretch out ahead.

Mary and I had lunch together, and I told her at last about Ginger’s ultimatum, saying, “She’s jealous of you, you know.”

“That is silly, isn’t it?” she said, smiling a bit wistfully. “It should be the other way around.”

“It isn’t?”

“Oh, of course it is.” Watching her spoon stir soup, she said, “Ginger’s just afraid of losing you. I’ve lost you.”

“Come on, Mary,” I said.

She looked up at me, an inquiring expression on her face. “You really don’t like being wanted, do you? A lot of men would bask in it, having two women want them, but it just makes you nervous.”

“Things that make trouble make me nervous,” I said.

She reached out to put her hand over mine, then apparently thought better of it and removed the hand. “I do miss you,” she said. “I think it’s been harder with you half-here like this. I’ve stopped telling you I want you back—”

“I know.” I resisted the impulse to add, And I’m grateful.

“I didn’t want to be the one to disturb the equilibrium.”

“You can always count on Ginger to disturb the equilibrium.”

She laughed, then said, “The mistake I made, I gave you the idea it was some kind of contest between us. If you stay away you win the contest, but if you come back I win. But it isn’t like that at all, it really isn’t, Tom.”

Actually, it was exactly like that, an idea I’d never quite formulated for myself but which Mary had just very clearly and succinctly put into words. It was a contest; one of the reasons I was staying away was because I didn’t want to lose. I smiled at her, shaking my head, saying, “I think we’re both more mature than that.”

“Do you?” She pondered that, studying her soup. “Maybe so,” she said.

After lunch, bowing to the inevitable, I packed up all my papers and books into two liquor store cartons and a plastic shopping bag that said, “Have a nice day.” Mary had gone out right after we ate, so there were no awkward goodbyes. The typewriter, the two cartons and the shopping bag made a cumbersome burden, but I shlepped them down to the sidewalk, found a cab, traveled uptown, shlepped everything into the building and into the elevator and into the apartment and into the office, made myself a drink, watched the television news, at last unpacked everything, and had just about finished recreating my workspace — thousands of things taped and tacked to the walls, piled on the radiator cover, stacked on the spare chair — when Ginger came in from class. She entered the office, looked around at the familiar mess with a nod and a smile of satisfaction and triumph, and said, “There. That wasn’t so much trouble, was it?”

“Ginger,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

She looked at me, calm and happy, and in her eyes I could see her preparing to let me have my little face-saving statement, whatever it might be. “Yes?”

“I’m leaving you,” I said.

I was astonished to hear me say that, but nowhere near as astonished as Ginger, who stared at me in absolute paralysis, her face melting like Vincent Price’s statues in House of Wax. She didn’t argue, didn’t tell me I must be kidding, didn’t say a word at all. She just stood there while J picked up the phone and dialed. When Mary answered, I said, “Can I come home now?”

Mary laughed; uproarious laughter, her face turned partly away from the phone. I waited through it, grinning sheepishly, while Ginger burned a pure white in the corner of my eye, and at last Mary said, “Yes, Tom, of course. Come on home.”

I hung up, put one of the liquor store cartons on the desk, and started taking things off the wall. And at last Ginger spoke, one word only: “Why?”

“Because,” I said, “when I get down there, Mary won’t smile the way you did just now.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s one of them.”

She watched me for a while as I repacked the cartons, then went away to the kitchen and made banging and crashing noises. Ginger is not famous for taking things calmly, so I packed as rapidly as I could, wanting if possible to be out of there before the storm broke.

I was on the second carton when she returned to the doorway and stood there again, watching, a drink in her hand. After a minute, she said, “I won’t put up with this, you know.”

I said nothing, just kept packing.

“If you go,” she said, “you don’t come back. I’m not Mary. I’m nobody’s doormat.”

“I was wrong, Ginger,” I said, packing and packing. “I owe you an apology. I owe everybody an apology. I wasn’t leaving Mary, after all. I thought I was, but I wasn’t.”

“It took you two years to find that out?”

“I’m slow,” I said.

“You’re a truly terrible creep,” she told me.

“Probably so, probably so.”

“And what happens to me?”

“You’re a survivor,” I told her. “Don’t worry about yourself.”

“Because you’re certainly not going to worry about me.”

“Gee, I’m not,” I said, rather surprised at the discovery. I paused in my packing to face her frankly and say, “Ginger, we both knew this wasn’t permanent. Remember on your birthday, when I got all weird and asked you to marry me? I’ve never seen anybody look so horrified in my life.”

“You were drunk.”

“Of course I was. Fortunately, you still had your wits about you. We’ve both known,” I said, “that this would end some day. The only difference is, we both thought it would end when you were ready.”

“I did know it,” she agreed, nodding heavily, rather like Medea. “I knew that bitch would get you back some day.”

I masking-taped the top of the second carton, dropped the roll of tape into the shopping bag, picked up both cartons. “Looks like you were right,” I said, and carried the cartons away to the front door.

When I returned, she hadn’t moved, was still in the doorway with arms folded and drink at the ready under her chin. She watched me pick up the typewriter and shopping bag — “Have a nice day,” it said — and as I edged past her she narrowed her eyes to teeny tiny slits and said, “You deserve each other.”

“I hope so,” I said.

In the cab on the way downtown, cartons at both elbows, typewriter on lap, shopping bag somewhere around my ankles, I replayed the conversation in my mind, with emphasis on the parts that had referred to Mary, beginning with the finish, and the question of whether I deserved her. Plus Ginger’s earlier comparison of herself with Mary and her use of the word “doormat.”

It would be stupid, I told myself, merely to exchange one set of guilts for another. I have behaved badly toward Mary, and toward a whole lot of other people — Gretchen comes to mind — but Mary seems willing to forgo the pleasures of resentment and moral superiority for the less certain but more complex pleasures of the status quo ante. If I am incapable of taking her at face value, if I go downtown prepared only to be hangdog and ashamed of myself, what’s the point in going? What have I accomplished? The object of all this thrashing around is to make it possible to stop thrashing around.

On the other hand, to arrive on 17th Street whistling and carefree, without any acknowledgment of what I’ve put Mary through for twenty months, would be exactly treating her in Ginger’s word, as a doormat. And in fact she wouldn’t put up with that. I know Mary; I know her limits. What Ginger misreads as passivity I understand to be self-knowledge and strength. “Uhh, cabby,” I said, through the bullet holes in the Lucite, “stop at a florist, will you?” The dumb-cluck, little-boy errant husband always comes home with flowers.

Mary laughed when she saw them; they were in my teeth. The long cone of florist’s paper dangled down my front like some surrealist necktie while I bit down hard on the bunched paper at the cone’s base, tasting staple, the meantime carrying everything else. “Let me help you with that,” she said, took the flowers, turned them right side up, and closed the door after me as I staggered in.

Reeling a bit, I lunged my way through the apartment and left my office in the office. Mary meanwhile had gone to the kitchen to put the flowers in water in a vase, so I followed her in there and said, “Mary, I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t important, Tom,” she said. “Thank you for saying it, but that isn’t what matters. People are sorry about things all the time, that’s as easy as breathing. Right now, I can hear myself, I sound stuffy and bloodless and I wish I wasn’t like that, so I’m sorry about it, but it doesn’t help, I’m still that way.”

“No, you’re not. My God, just because you aren’t screaming all the time—”

“But I am.” She glanced at me, then stepped back to consider the flower arrangement in the vase. “You just can’t hear me, that’s all,” she said.

I had to put my arms around her then, and stop talking, and I’m not sure which of us was trembling more. I kissed her mouth and her cheeks, tasting salt, and finally I said, “I am sorry.”

“No,” she said. “That’s the wrong word.”

Arms still around her, I leaned back to see her expression. “It is?”

She smiled at me, and at last I understood it’s all right for Mary to indulge me, because when she does it there’s no contempt in it. “Do you know why I believed you’d come back?” she asked me.

“No, I don’t.”

“Because in all of your explanations and all of your reasons and all of your statements of belief, there was one word you never used when you talked about you and Ginger.”

“I have trouble with that word,” I said.

She smiled again. “You use it sometimes.”

This was to be one of the times. “I love you,” I said.