After the real-estate lady showed us several formica-and-linoleum chalets — places designed so they can be hosed down after the filthy renters depart — we finally found on Laurel Walk a place peculiarly suited to our peculiar needs. An older house, clapboard outside and homosote within, it has two bedrooms and a bath downstairs and one bedroom with its own tiny bath as a later addition upstairs. Out back, across the wooden deck, is a small guesthouse, complete with its own bath. That’s where we put Mary, and the kids go in the downstairs bedrooms, and Ginger and I will be able to retire to peace and privacy all alone upstairs. My hand trembled slightly as I signed the deposit check, but within the range of options open to me I think I made the right decision.
So why do I feel so nervous?
Tuesday, April 12th
Well. Vickie Douglas. Well. This will bear some thinking about.
Normally I drink very lightly during a business lunch — nothing stronger than wine, and that paced carefully through the meal — but I was so troubled by the very thought of the woman, not to mention her actual presence at table with me, that when the waiter asked us if we’d like to start with something from the bar, I immediately said, “Bourbon and soda.”
(When did waiters start saying, “Would you like to start with something from the bar?” It seems to me that up till a few years ago waiters used to say, “Would you care for a drink before lunch?” Is this some sort of dainty-pinky euphemism, avoiding the dread word drink? One of these days, I am going to answer a waiter, “Yes. I would like a barstool from the bar. You can send it to this address.”)
But not this time. This time I asked for bourbon, and Vickie said, “That sounds good. The same for me.” After the waiter retired, she said, “I could use a drink. I took the long weekend in Florida, and my mother—”
“I noticed the tan,” I said.
“I had to get out of the house. My mother...”
And so on.
We received our drinks and I slurped mine in a kind of heavy paralyzed frenzy, while Vickie slogged through a rerun of the argument she and her mother had most recently had on the subject of why Vickie still.wasn’t married. “I tell her it’s my choice, it’s nothing to do with her, she’s so unenlightened, she wants me to be an earthmother like her, nothing but soup and cabbage and babies, no thought of the great world outside her kitchen, the entire women’s revolution might never have happened, to hear her you could...”
Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God.
The waiter asked if we were ready to order. “I haven’t even looked at the menu,” Vickie said. “Give us a minute. And bring me another drink. Tom?”
“Oh, definitely,” I said.
We looked at the menu. I will not have sole Veronique, I told myself. I didn’t want sweetbreads, I didn’t want the veal Marsala, I don’t believe human beings should eat pork chops at lunchtime, and it’s possible I hate frittata. When the waiter returned with our fresh drinks and his order pad, I said, “I’ll have the sole Veronique.”
“Sweetbreads,” Vickie said, which was her most interesting statement to date. Then the waiter went away and Vickie’s mother re-entered, like Banquo, and joined us at the table.
The waiter brought salads, and Vickie said, “I forgot to order wine. How about this Pouilly-Fumé?”
“Of course, Madame.”
“And another round.”
“Certainly.”
It was partway through that third drink that I put the glass down beside my untasted salad and said, “Vickie. Shut. Up.”
She blinked at me. Her eyes became more then usually owlish. “Tom?”
“Vickie,” I said, “I have had enough. I don’t give a royal fuck about your mother. I figure she’s probably just another self-centered bigmouth like you, and she deserves you just as much as you deserve her. But I don’t deserve either of you.”
I have never in my life seen as astonished an expression as was then on Vickie’s face. The waiter arrived at that moment, bearing food, and as he reached to place her oval plate of sweetbreads before her, Vickie said, “Why, you utter horse’s ass.”
The waiter jerked slightly. Butter sauce slopped. Frowning intently, he placed the plate to cover the stain.
Meanwhile, I was going through some sort of death agony, I was becoming unborn. My stomach had turned into a gnarled old rain forest during an electrical storm, my cheekbones had reached a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and were beginning to melt, and hot smelly suety perspiration was breaking out all over my head and body. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Vickie, I’m terribly sorry.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Yes,” I said. The waiter was coming around the table with my sole Veronique. “Listen, Vickie,” I said. “My girlfriend is jealous of my wife.”
Why I started my explanation/apology at that particular point in my tale of woe I don’t know, but the waiter’s reaction was to take one deliberate pace backward, still holding my plate, and give me a severe look, as though he suspected me of trying deliberately to break his concentration. “Oh, put it down,” I snapped at him — I was snapping in many ways, and in many directions — and he did, and then he went away, and I opened my mouth and unburdened myself to the cold-eyed, hot-eyed Vickie.
I told her everything. My financial problems, my problems with Mary’s refusal to get a fella, the resulting problems with Ginger so that, while our sex life was still terrific, the time spent out of bed was becoming increasingly grim. I told her what The Christmas Book meant in all this, and I told her my fears about what would happen when I lost my editor, and I told her she had done nothing to alleviate those fears and everything to increase them.
During this monologue — Vickie remained silent, unblinking eyes fixed on me — we switched from bourbon to wine and did a very, very small amount of eating; maybe one organ for her and one grape for me. And when at last I ran out of things to say, and sputtered brokenly into a silence dotted with a few last apologies, there was practically no wine left, I had no appetite for food, and Vickie let at least a minute of dead air go by before saying, calmly but coldly, “I do not talk about my mother all the time.”
“You do,” I said.
“You’re paranoid,” she said. “It’s your paranoia. I do not talk about my mother all the time.”
“You do, you do, you do.” Leaning forward over my plate, I said, “Vickie, do you think I have nervous breakdowns during lunch every day?”
She studied me, large dark inscrutable eyes. Would she never blink again?
Yes; a long slow blink. She sighed, and looked away at last across the room. “Maybe I do,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Vickie,” I said. “I know you’re having trouble with her, I don’t mean to be heartless about this, I—”
“But there’s no reason for you to give a shit about my mother,” she said, nodding, not looking at me. “I know.”
“I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that,” I said.
“You already did.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Another sigh. But then she frowned, and did look back at me. She said, “But that has nothing to do with us, with your book.”
“You don’t like my book.”
“That’s absurd,” she said.
I said, “You told me Christmas was too ordinary to think about.”
“I never did!”