On the professional side, what has happened is all to the good. Vickie has now become a tiger in the office as well, pushing The Christmas Book as though the Mafia had ordered her to. She’s agitating with the art and production departments to give us something spectacular for the dust jacket and the general package, she’s hustling the legal department and the rights department for all the necessary papers on both original material and reprints, and although it’s really too early to do so she’s talking it up in sales meetings, assuring everyone that Craig, Harry & Bourke will have a great year just because of The Christmas Book no matter what happens to the rest of the list.
She is also trying to get the company to move right away to the next phase of our step deal, confirming their intent to publish, even though they don’t contractually have to come up with the next chunk of money until June first. But she’s arguing that I’ve already got many more than five famous names (none of my contributors are yesterday any more), and she points out passionately but reasonably that the sooner Craig makes that final commitment to go ahead with the book, the sooner they can start a major sales and promotion campaign.
As for the book itself, it continues to shape up, though in strange ways. For instance, I now have Norman Mailer’s submission, and by God if it isn’t “Christmas on Death Row”! It’s not at all the same as Capote’s, it’s equally terrific, and I don’t know what the hell to do with it. If Vickie and I ever have a quiet moment together, I’ll ask her advice; she is my editor, after all.
Up till now, the religious side of Christmas — and it does have a religious side, mustn’t forget that — had been pretty absent from the new contributions, and I’d been filling it in mostly from older material, but that is at last changing. Joyce Carol Oates’ piece, an interior monologue by the Virgin Mary in the manger, is all rather murky, as though it were menopause rather than childbirth she’d just gone through, but her reflections on the female role in the religious impulse, however ornately expressed, are pretty good.
Somehow I never really expected to hear from Richard Nixon, not even after I got his how-much letter, but here by God is a neatly-typed piece about Nixon meeting with Khrushchev on Christmas Eve and the two of them discussing Christianity. Nixon portrays himself as a kind of super insurance salesman, all honest concern and noble patter, and Khrushchev as gruff but innately honest, with talk of Christmas and religion forcing him into acknowledgment of his peasant past. Nixon himself seems to have no past, which may be what makes him our representative American.
Someone else I thought I’d heard the last of was Mario Puzo, after that snotty letter his person sent me, but just the other day I got his contribution, and its wonderful. He tells about going to midnight Mass with his family as a little kid, and the flavors of Roman Catholicism, of America and of his family’s Italian heritage are blended together into a rich and heartening stew.
On the visual side, LeRoy Nieman’s three Wise Men on a hilltop with a whole hell of a lot of bloodshot sky behind them and several odd rough-hewn patches of white or blue paint placed at random in irrelevant spots is not exactly terrible. I am taking it because (a) he’s a name, and (b) it might get the book some ink in Playboy. I console myself with the thought that if I’d been putting this book together just a few years ago I would have had to make room for Peter Max.
Or would he have said no? Edward Albee has, and so have Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, Sam Shepard and Jasper Johns. I’d been thinking of putting together a follow-up letter for those people I haven’t heard from at all — which is only thirty out of seventy-five, a damn good response — but now I think I don’t need it; I’m getting some heavy hitters here.
I have returned Isaac Asimov’s article about Mrs. Claus’s functions up there in Santa Claus’s workshop at the North Pole. I have also returned Mr. Asimov’s piece about the etymology of the name Santa Claus, with all the other things Saint Nicholas is called around the world. I think the man is trying to drive me crazy.
Sunday, May 8th
Mother’s day!!!!!
I am in here hiding from everybody. As the sun moves to the horizon and our ship sinks slowly in the west, we bid farewell to the friendly huts and rude natives of... of home, I guess.
This weekend began to unravel on Friday, when I stayed so long at Vickie’s place that I had to tear straight home by cab in order to be here by a plausible hour — the story was that I had met with my editor in her office, naturally, not in her bed, and there’s a limit to how late I can return from somebody’s office — and Ginger was already home from her office when I got there. She kissed me hello, then wrinkled up her nose and said, “What’s that smell?”
Oh, my God. What musk, what rutting scent of lust, what steamy reminder of passion still lurked on my flesh? Trying desperately not to look guilty, I said, “Smell? What smell?”
She sniffed. She frowned. She sniffed again. She gave me a very skeptical look. “Soap,” she said.
“Oh!” My mind fishtailed wildly. I smelled my hands, which were trembling. “It must be that damn stuff in the men’s room,” I said. “You know, that pink liquid they give you? I pressed on the thing, and it squirted all over the place. You can still smell it, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were very slightly narrowed, but frown lines of indecision were visible on her brow.
“I’ll go wash it off,” I said, and made it away from those scanning eyes as rapidly (but casually) as I could.
Ginger said no more about it, though during dinner she did say, “We ought to invite this new editor of yours to dinner sometime. I really ought to meet her.”
Everything in life happens because something else happened before it. In this case, soap had led directly to a dinner invitation. Pretending I didn’t see the connection, I said, “That’s a good idea. She’s very important to us, we ought to cultivate her.” Ooh; was that too ambiguous?
Maybe not. Ginger nodded, eyes completely unnarrowed, and said, “Is she married?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Boyfriend, then. Or girlfriend?”
“Gee,” I said. “I have no idea.”
“Who should we have for a third couple?”
We chatted about that. 1 wondered if Ginger’s mind was running as rapidly behind her idle chatter as mine was behind mine. After a while, Gretchen — we eat with the children — changed the subject (my heart warmed to her) by saying, “I did a painting for Jennifer’s birthday.”
The next day — yesterday, now — was to be (has now been) Jennifer’s twelfth birthday. Gretchen continues to be an inextinguishable visual artist, though her Christmas drawings for my book have at last dribbled away to nothing. (I was thinking for a while of sending her to Isaac Asimov.) It was now my job to ask to see this painting and to be supportive, so I did and was.
It was pretty good, actually, within its limitations. Jennifer’s birthday being in May, and that being traditionally and famously the month of flowers, Gretchen had done, on a twelve-by-sixteen sketchpad sheet, a watercolor of a field ablaze with flowers. From across the room it looks almost like a later Jackson Pollock drip painting, but up close it is all these flowers, lovingly copied from books and magazines and calendars, crowded in great colorful profusion over the entire sheet of paper.