I thought she was kidding. I offered a wide sick smile like Steve Martin seeing a punchline, and Ginger said, “I hope it won’t be for long.”
“Ha ha,” I suggested, but I wasn’t really laughing. (I’d been in my living room chair, with my after-dinner drink, reading Gore Vidal’s piece for The Christmas Book, and this return to the mundane world was a very difficult transition.) “Lance is not moving in here,” I said.
“I’m afraid he is, Tom,” she said, and sat in her chair, and told me about Helena and Santa Fe and the sublet. “The sublet starts the sixteenth,” she finished, “next Monday, so Lance has to be out by then.”
“He has to come here?’
“What am I going to do, Tom?” I could see then that she was at wit’s end. Wringing her hands, she said, “It really isn’t Lance’s fault, I know it isn’t, but it’s awfully awkward.”
“A similar phrase was going through my own brain.”
“It’s such short notice.”
“It sure is.”
“I meant for Lance,” she said. “Helena didn’t say a word to him until Tuesday — to avoid a fight, she said — just before she left.”
“For Santa Fe.”
“Lance spent the last three days trying to find an apartment, but you know what that’s like in this city.”
“It has been done.”
“Not in three days. Not when you had no idea you were going to have to even look for an apartment.”
“Granted,” I said. “I still don’t see...” I gestured encompassingly around our living room. Our living room.
“It’s just for a little while,” she said, “until he can find a place. After all,” she said, going on the attack slightly, “he does still pay part of the rent here.”
If I’d had a beard, I would have muttered into it.
“And don’t forget,” she went on, “we’re going to have Mary living with us for two weeks, out on Fire Island.”
“In a completely separate house,” I said. “And with plenty of advance warning. And I certainly don’t want her there.”
“Well, I don’t want Lance here,” she said, flaring a bit. “It could become very embarrassing. Besides, I think it could be bad for the children, seeing their father all the time.”
“It could be bad for me seeing him all the time,” I said. I smacked my chair arm. “Whose chair is this going to be? And that’s another thing; you and he are still legally married, you know.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”
“We’re not going to get into any hassle about conjugal rights, are we?”
“Oh, don’t be absurd!”
“All right, where’s he going to sleep?”
“It’ll have to be in your office, but it’s just for a—”
“My office! I’m working full-time on The Christmas Book, I have material all over—”
“Lance won’t be there except when he’s asleep,” she said, “and you won’t be working in the middle of the night. You never did before.”
“Work habits change.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
“You’re moving your husband into this apartment,” I said, “and you’re telling me not to be silly.”
She sighed. She unnarrowed her eyes and bit her lower lip and looked honestly troubled. “I know, Tom,” she said. “This is a terrible situation, nobody’s happy about it, and I blame the whole thing on Helena.”
“In Santa Fe.”
“But what am I going to do?” she asked. “Lance spent three days trying to find some other solution, but there just isn’t any. He wouldn’t have called me if he’d had any other choice, and I wouldn’t have said yes if I’d had any other choice.”
“Move over,” I said. “Let me up there with you on the no-other-choice shelf.”
“It won’t be that bad,” she said.
“Oh, yes, it will. But as you say, there’s nothing else to do.”
“And it’s only for a few days.”
“Sure,” I said, and Ginger came over and sat in my lap and thanked me for being understanding, and we kanoodled a bit.
So the next day, Saturday, Lance arrived to pick up his kids for the weekend, and when he brought them back on Sunday he stayed. Many suitcases and liquor store cartons filled up my office, the sofabed in there stood open, and Lance fell ravenously on the vodka when it was offered. He was looking pretty damn hangdog, and although I was goddam annoyed at the situation, I couldn’t find it in my heart to be sore at Lance, so here we are with Lance living in what is, after all, his apartment. But at least he’s had the grace to sit on the sofa and not my chair the few times he’s been in the living room.
In truth, the idea of it is much worse than the actuality. Lance works in a midtown office — he’s some sort of department head of a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS that does blue-sky demographic research — and he’s been arranging his dinners out in the world somewhere, so essentially we only see him for half an hour or so in the morning (he uses the kids’ bathroom) and maybe a while in the evening. The arrangement is now four days old, and has been less awkward than one might have expected. Nevertheless, he is there, in my office.
And The Christmas Book, boxes and boxes of correspondence, tear sheets, Xeroxes, manuscripts, photos, tagged books, all of this compost that’s supposed eventually to grow a mighty volume, has been laboriously moved from its proper home around my desk into this bedroom, where Ginger drapes her pantyhose over it. It’s hard to take your life’s work seriously when it’s seen through a lot of double-layer crotches.
Despite it all, however, the book is coming along, with more and more terrific input from my celebs. The Gore Vidal piece I was reading when Lance broke over my bow was a weirdly effective and chilling item, half essay and half story, on the idea that what Christ brought to the world was not life but death. Pre-Christianity, if I understand what he’s saying, was an innocent and happy pagan time because, although death existed, nobody cared much about its implications; instead, all living creatures devoted their attention to life. When Christ arrived, He brought with Him an obsession with death and what happens thereafter that darkened the world from His day till this. Makes a nice counterpoint to things like Garfield and the Coca-Cola tray.
Carl Sagan has sent me a hot-air balloon defining the star the Wise Men followed; sure, why not? And Stephen King came through with a cute twist-ending story about a little boy who sees future events in the shiny ornaments on the Christmas tree. Joan Didion, talking out of the side of her immobile mouth, sent along a cheery description of Christmas Eve on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, and I think John Leonard’s piece is about a marriage breaking up on Christmas morning. I think so.
On the visual side, Jules Feiffer sent along a nice strip of his dancer in her black leotard, plus a Santa Claus hat, doing a dance to Peace On Earth; she’s dubious, but hopeful.
I’m not sure the Jill Krementz photo of the sidewalk Santas all gathered in a room to receive their instructions is exactly right for the book; somehow it’s more reportage than what I’m looking for. I’m still thinking about that one. (I showed it to Mary, who can be very judgmental about successful photographers’ work, and she regarded it with utter disdain. “Where’s the truth in it?” she wanted to know. Her girl-builds-birdhouse series was rejected by that youth magazine, and rejection always makes her start talking about truth and esthetics and artistic purpose. Nevertheless, this time she may be right.)