I did not say it looked like a January-sale pillowcase from Macy’s. I told Gretchen it was beautiful, and that I was sure Jennifer would love it, and we all admired it for a while. I was very, very good, and much later in bed Ginger said, “Gretchen knows you don’t like her.”
I said, naturally, “What?”
“If you could see the way you look when you talk to her.”
“That’s ridiculous. I told her how great the picture was.”
“She could tell what you really thought. We all could tell. Gretchen happens to be my daughter, you know.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“And what’s that tone of voice supposed to mean?”
“Ginger, I didn’t come to bed to fight.”
Nevertheless, we fought. I have nothing against Gretchen, but somehow that isn’t enough for Ginger. I’m not sure, on the subject of Gretchen, what would be enough for Ginger. The argument didn’t get anywhere simply because there was nowhere for it to go, but on the other hand it showed no sign of ending, so after a while I got up and sat in the living room and sulked. Ginger didn’t follow me, either to make up or continue the fight, and when I went back to the bedroom — either to make up or continue the fight — she was asleep, so that was that.
Then came yesterday, Jennifer’s birthday. I know as well as Ginger, as well as anybody, that this heavy nuclear family schtick of Mary’s is all a plot to get me back — even though it’s exactly the same way she acted when we were together, which helped to send me away in the first place — but I’ve nevertheless really got to be present for my daughter’s birthday, whether it works in with my ex-wife’s scheming or not. But try to use logic in these things; go ahead.
It was hard to tell whether Ginger’s morning coolness was a carryover from the bedtime argument or a statement of attitude about the current day’s program; whichever it was, I pretended to see nothing wrong, got through the morning with no harsh words from anybody, and at eleven-thirty Joshua and Gretchen and I took the subway downtown for Jennifer’s birthday lunch.
Complicated families lead to complicated arrangements. Ginger’s kids and I arrived at noon for a buffet party lunch to which about a dozen of Jennifer’s female friends had also been invited. At two that crowd left, and Mary and I had the four kids — ours and Ginger’s — for an hour, during which the boys went off to Bryan’s room to play and Mary discussed Gretchen’s painting with her in a very good and supportive way, asking the names of individual flowers, complimenting the kid on so accurately getting the comparative sizes of all the different ones, and telling her she should title the picture “Heavenly Field,” because it’s so much better than real-world fields. Flowers from different parts of the world and flowers that bloom at different seasons all blossom together in this picture: “Like a chorus of flower angels,” Mary said at one point. She didn’t overpraise, but she made her interest so clear that the birthday girl, Jennifer, who had at first been rather obviously indifferent to the present, eventually said she would put it on the wall in her room. Gretchen, naturally, basked in all this attention, grinning from ear to ear and swinging her feet back and forth under her chair, as though it were her birthday.
At three Lance arrived to take his two away for the rest of the weekend, and Mary and Jennifer and Bryan and I settled around the kitchen table to play the boardgame version of Uno — one of my presents to the birthday girl — until five-thirty, when I left to walk down to the Village, meeting Ginger in front of the Waverly, where we saw the six o’clock showing of the movie, followed by dinner in a very pleasant neighborhood restaurant called the Paris Commune, over on Bleecker Street. I frequently feel I’m in a commune myself, with this olio of parents and children all swimming around in the same stew, but Ginger and I were out of the stew for once last night, and it was one of the best evenings in memory: no edginess, no complication, no defensiveness, no guilt.
Then came today. Goddam Mother’s Day! A fake, a palpable fake, nothing real in it at all. Nothing even sentimental, if you look at it with a cold clear eye. It’s the cynical invention of greeting card manufacturers and candy-makers, that’s all it is, a lot of Republican bastards making a dollar off everybody’s guilt trips.
Mother’s Day was started in 1907, an early example of economic pump-priming, one of the desperate ploys to push consumer spending during the Panic of that year (which was the same year, by the way, that immigration into this country was first legally restricted — so much for sentiment). In that same year, proving it was really the moment to work motherhood for all the profit it contained, Maxim Gorky published his proletarian novel, titled with modest simplicity Mother, in which a mother is tricked by the Czar’s secret police into betraying her son, a revolutionary, during the failed 1905 rebellion in Russia. How’s that for shamelessness? (Not on the part of the secret police; on the part of the writer.)
Mother’s Day. They oughta put back the other two syllables.
There was no way, of course, that Mary could let Mothers Day go by without making use of it in this indefatigable campaign of hers; the kids required my presence to help them honor their origin. Sure they did.
As for Ginger, my being dragged away to Mary’s place two days in a row would have made her testy all by itself; the fact that her own kids were away with Lance and there was nobody around to honor her as a mother put her right completely round the bend. Oh, I can’t tell you.
In fact, I won’t tell you. I behaved at least as badly as anybody else. I am in here hiding from everybody, and in my considered opinion mothers shouldn’t be honored, they should be shot on sight.
Thursday, May 19th
Lance is living in my office.
I type that, and even I can’t believe it, but there it is. Lance is living in my office, just down the hall from here. The one place I had in the world where I could close out everybody and everything and just breathe free for a little while, and now Lance is living in it, and I’ve set up my typewriter on this folding table here in the bedroom.
I don’t blame the poor bastard; he doesn’t want this any more than I do or Ginger does. It just happened, that’s all.
What has occurred here, Helena threw him out. Lance swears he wasn’t involved in any hanky-panky with any other woman, that it wasn’t actually him at all, that what Helena had had enough of suddenly was New York City. And perhaps another thing Helena had had enough of was Helena, because her abrupt decision (Lance says it was abrupt, anyway) was to change everything. She took her kids out of school, she told Lance the relationship was through, she sublet the apartment, and she went to Santa Fe.
Santa Fe!
Is this the act of a rational woman? Santa Fe, from East 93rd Street?
Whatever the situation, the point is that Lance lived with Helena in Helena’s apartment (just as I am living with Ginger in Ginger’s apartment), so when Santa Fe called to Helena with its siren call, Lance had to leave. (Although Helena was subletting her apartment, she would not sublet it to Lance because she was ending their relationship.)
Robert Frost said it: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Apparently that’s still true, even under such weird conditions as here maintain. Last Friday evening Lance phoned — I assumed it had to do with his weekend romp with his kiddies — and when Ginger got off the phone and returned to me in the living room she looked a little glazed. “Lance is moving in here for a while,” she said.