A Likely Story

Wednesday, January 12th

What a day. My daughter Jennifer got mugged this morning, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Well, no, I don’t mean it that way, I just mean it caused me to postpone my meeting with Hubert Van Driin.

I was just about to leave for that meeting — in fact, I was tying my tie — when the phone rang and it was Mary, sounding more solemn than usual (she’s often serious, seldom solemn), saying, “Tom, could you come over right away?”

“Gee, I’m sorry, Mary,” I said. “I’m just off to a meeting at Federalist Press.”

“Couldn’t you cancel it? I wouldn’t ask, but Jennifer was mugged on her way to school.”

So I canceled, of course. Van Driin took it well, with his normal reaction to the world we live in: “The barbarians are among us, Tom. They came through the gates a long time ago, the liberals just waved the bastards in. Animals. The Duke knew.”

“I’ll call you later,” I said, and left the apartment, and went down to 17th Street, where I found Mary and Jennifer in the kitchen, both bravely not having hysterics.

My kids go to public school because that’s all I can afford. (That Ginger’s kids go to private school, at Lance’s expense, is an unstated bone of contention between Mary and me, never mentioned.) Bryan had sixty cents taken from him at school last year, which technically counts as a mugging though he wasn’t harmed or actually threatened in any way, but this was Jennifer’s first experience of street crime. Both the kids know enough not to offer resistance if you are outweighed, out-meaned or outnumbered; still, an assault for money is a tough experience for any person, and particularly so for an essentially nonviolent kid, as both of mine are.

Upon arrival, I crossed the kitchen to where mother and daughter sat at the table, and went down on one knee beside Jennifer’s chair, resting my hand on her upper arm, saying, “How are you, tiger?”

She tried a smile, but her voice was shaky when she said, “I’m okay now.”

“There was a knife,” Mary said.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, and clasped her arm harder. “You weren’t cut, were you? You weren’t—”

“No, they just...” She shook her head, frowned at her mother as though bewildered by some stray thought, then said, “He just had it in his hand. He didn’t even say anything, he just held the knife up and showed it to me and grinned real mean, and the other one said gimme your money.”

“Two of them? Older boys?”

“Grown-up, kind of,” she said. “Like you see playing basketball.”

“Twenty year olds,” Mary translated.

I could feel Jennifer’s skinny arm trembling, like when you hold a frightened cat. She said, “I just thought, oh, wow, what if I don’t have enough for them? Enough money. I mean, I only had, I...” Her face scrinched up. “Ohh,” she said, on a rising note.

Then at last she dissolved, and I held her very close, and Mary came over to pat us both on the shoulder. I sat on the floor, pulling Jennifer down onto my lap, curling her in against me there, rocking back and forth and holding her while she cried herself out. I said stupid things like, “There, there,” and “It’s all right now,” and, “Okay, okay.” Mary made coffee for herself and me and Earl Grey tea for Jennifer, who doesn’t like coffee, and after a while we got off the floor and sat around the kitchen table instead and drank our stimulants and Jennifer went about reconstructing her public persona as the hip existential city kid. “It was all such a complete drag,” she said. “I had to tell the cops they were black guys, it was like I was making it up, you know? An agent provocatater. And one of the cops was black, so it was really embarrassing.”

I love both my kids, with a mad helpless mute mortifying love that gets more bumble-footed the stronger I feel it or the harder I try to express it. Realizing Jennifer already had too much to bend her mind around at the moment, I mostly kept quiet, so she wouldn’t also have to deal with her father’s inadequacies. “The black cops know,” was all I said at that juncture.

She managed a little grin, a condensed version of her usual mode. “He looked real tough,” she said. “I bet if he caught those guys, he’d beat them up a lot worse than a white cop, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe so,” I said, smiling back.

Mary said, “Jennifer’s staying home from school today, I phoned the school and they know about it. Tom, why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?”

“Let me take you both out to lunch.”

Mary had to drape herself in cameras before we left, which used to annoy me toward the end of our marriage but which I now am becoming indulgent about again, as I had been when first we’d met. Mary, out of East St. Louis, had come to New York originally to be a photographer, having won some awards and sold some pictures at the local or regional level. When I first met her, at a magazine’s Christmas party, she was making a precarious living doing freelance research for everybody and anybody: museums, book illustrators, ad agencies. She would root around in libraries and morgues and find you just the right daguerreotype to go with your pantyhose ad, or the eleven specific paintings ripping off (or “homaging”) such-and-such a Rembrandt, or clear photos of every kind of European tram at the turn of the century, or whatever you want. Meantime, she was taking millions of pictures of her own, submitting them everywhere, looking for an agent, and hoping for the best.

Which never came. We married, we had the kids, she continued the research work to supplement my income, and she went on taking pictures, but very few have been published.

The problem is, she doesn’t have a unique eye. Although she’s always surrounded herself with hung copies of Diane Arbus photos, for instance, she herself has a much softer, more sympathetic view of the world, and could never look through her lens as dispassionately as Arbus. On the other hand, she has too much sophistication and self-awareness to go for “pretty” pictures, calendar art, so her work is stuck somewhere in the middle: too knowing to be sentimental, too gentle to be striking.

It used to bother me that she couldn’t go anywhere without the cameras, because I knew she was just kidding herself and wasting her time, but now that we’re apart she’s no longer my problem, and I can see photography as merely Mary’s hobby. (If Mary herself ever heard me use the word “hobby” in that context, she would take a gun and shoot me. No fooling.)

So, with pauses for Mary to take pictures of interesting gutter-rubbish and amusing company names on truck sides, we walked down into the Village and had cheeseburgers in a joint where we could watch the trucks thunder down Seventh Avenue and I could have a bloody Mary. My Mary had coffee, and Jennifer had iced tea. The waitress stared at her, stared at January outside the window, and said, “Iced tea?”

“The cheeseburger’s hot,” Jennifer pointed out. “And my father’s bloody Mary is cold.”

By the time lunch was over and we’d walked back up to 17th Street Jennifer had sufficiently rewritten history in her own mind as to believe she’d never actually lost her cool through the whole experience. That belief was by now the most important part of it for her, much more important than the lost dollar-eighty or the capturing of the punks that did it. When, as we turned off Seventh Avenue, she said, “I figured, just so they didn’t panic, I was probably okay,” I knew the healing process was well under way. What a terrific kid; tough and hip, like her old man.

Mary invited me upstairs, but I said I had things to do. Jennifer said, “Thanks for coming down.”

“Hey,” I said, “what’s a father for? Don’t answer that.” We kissed, and she said, “You’re okay.”

“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

Mary kissed my cheek and looked deeply in my eyes and I came back uptown where Jack Rosenfarb’s voice greeted me on the answering machine, saying, “Tom, please call me. Got your letter, thought I had an exclusive on this. Give me a ring as soon as you can.” The unsettled sound in his voice was music to my ears.

So I gave him a ring and he said, “Tom, you’re not putting me in a bid situation, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said. There is nothing I would love more than to have two heavyweight publishers bidding for my idea, but since I can’t figure out how to arrange such a scenario I might as well claim the high moral principle: “I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“Well, what’s with this ‘preliminary discussion’?” He sounded actually aggrieved. “At lunch, you said I was the only one you were talking to.”

“That’s true,” I said. “It was true last week, but you really didn’t sound that enthusiastic, Jack, not at lunch and not on the phone Monday. You know, talking about my track record and all that. And the time factor is—”

“Tom, I was enthusiastic! But I had to be sure the company would back me up. Tom, you don’t know what an editor has to go through, they second-guess my judgment all the time, I could wind up with egg on my face, trouble with— Well. You don’t want to know my problems,” he said accurately.

“Jack,” I said, “I’m sorry if you feel I’ve behaved in an underhanded way or anything like that. The instant I spoke to another—”

“You told me about it, I know that, I know that. Just between you and me, who are you talking to?”

If I were to answer Hubert Van Driin, Jack might merely laugh and hang up, so I said, “I probably shouldn’t say, Jack. I haven’t told him your name either, but I’ve been just as upfront with—”

“I know you, Tom,” he said hurriedly, “you don’t have to tell me all that, you’re an honorable fellow, I know that. All right. You want this thing to move fast, I don’t blame you for that, so the instant I got your letter I took it to Wilson, and he took it to Bourke, and assuming we can work out the money, we’re interested.”

“Interested?”

“We want to do the book!”

That was so terrific I just blurted out the first thing that came into my mind: “That’s terrific!”

“Yeah,” he said, a bit sourly. They hate to be rushed, editors, they’re cowlike in several ways, including being my source of milk. Anyway, he said, “All we have to do is come to a meeting of minds about the money.”

“I’ll call Annie,” I said, “and have her call you.”

“Good. But one thing, about this other house you were talking to. Tom, I have to tell you, we won’t get into a bidding war, and that’s flat.”

Oh, yes, you would, I thought, if I only knew how to set one up. “Don’t worry, Jack,” I told him. “As of this minute, they’re out.”

We exchanged one or two ritual coins of mutual esteem, and then I phoned Annie, who was in the office and taking calls. “Did you phone me?” she demanded, her ancient voice querulous and short-tempered.

“I’m phoning you now,” I said.

“In the last day or two. And not leave any message.”

“Me, Annie? I know how you feel about that.”

“Somebody’s been— Well, never mind. What can I do for you, Tom?”

I was glad it was one of her good days; on the bad days she calls me Tim. Succinctly I described my book idea, my negotiations with Jack, and the current situation. She listened, with occasional grunts, then said, “I don’t get it. What kinda book is this?”

I told her again. She said, “Everybody’s idle thoughts about Christmas.”

“Every famous body’s idle thoughts about Christmas.”

“If you give me one of those books next Yuletide,” she said, “I’ll fling it in your face.”

“Annie, you inspire me.”

“As I understand the situation,” she said, “you have now placed me in the position of agenting for the entire western literary world, all at once.”

“Don’t forget the artists.”

“And the artists. I’ll call Jack Rosenfarb and find out if he’s really fallen for this one.”

“Thank you, Annie.”

“You’ll hear from me,” she said vaguely, and hung up.

So the only question left is, what idea am I going to peddle to Hubert Van Driin?