I wonder what I’ll do next.
Tuesday, May 31st
Lance and I are both in the doghouse with Ginger. What happened was, we got drunk. “Stinking drunk,” in Ginger’s felicitous and original phrase.
We have just had a long weekend, yesterday being Memorial Day, and long weekends are hell on separated daddies. You don’t have the kids Saturday and Sunday, you have the kids Saturday and Sunday and Monday. They’ve seen the Central Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, they’ve seen the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island ferry has ceased to enchant. Strolling around quaint neighborhoods like Chinatown and Greenwich Village is something your native New York kid never wants to do. Movies are over in less than two hours, and there you are on the sidewalk, and now what the hell?
To complicate matters, I now seem to have four weekend children instead of the standard two. Lance used to come obediently and take his away on Saturday and return them on Sunday, like everybody else, but now that he’s living in the goddam apartment he no longer has to visit his children, so he doesn’t. Also, the weekend is the best time for his two searches: an apartment, and a woman. It doesn’t seem right to leave Joshua and Gretchen home alone when every other middle-class child in New York is out being entertained by daddy, so I’ve been bringing them along; the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Saturday to see the spring flowers, and the Cloisters on Sunday, because we hadn’t been there for a while.
Yesterday, Monday, the traditional Memorial Day itself, I took the kids to lunch in a Columbus Avenue fern bar and then we walked down to one of the small movie houses near Lincoln Center to see some raunchy R-rated French film the kids wouldn’t be allowed admittance to without the presence of a consenting adult, but when we got there that showing was sold out and there was no other movie in the neighborhood they all wanted to see. My capacity for invention had just reached overload, so we stood around on the sidewalk until Jennifer took pity on me and said, “Let’s go home and play Uno.”(Home has become a strange and slippery word these days, impossible to define except in context; in the circumstances of that moment, by “home” Jennifer meant my place on West End Avenue rather than her place on 17th Street, which everyone else automatically understood.)
So we went home, and Lance was there, wandering around stripped to the waist; which I thought was inappropriate. “I thought you were going apartment-hunting,” I said.
“I’ve been,” he told me. “No luck. I thought you were taking the kids to the movies.”
I explained our misfortune, and went on to the bedroom to change out of my jacket, where I found Ginger, in a thoroughly bad mood for some reason, dressed in her robe and stripping the bed. “If you’re going to change your plans,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me. I intended to get a lot of cleaning done around here today.”
“The movie was sold out.”
Ginger banged open both bedroom windows. “Well, get out of here” she said. “I have to air this place out.”
“It is a little musty,” I agreed.
“Out.”
Back in the living room, Lance apparently was feeling some belated sense of parental responsibility, because, having put a shirt on, he offered to join our little group and — since Ginger was, through various crashing noises deeper in the apartment, making it clear she didn’t want any of us around right now — he even had a suggestion: “Let’s go over to the park and do a little touch football, the Patchetts against the Diskants.”
Everybody thought that was a great idea. Bryan went to help Joshua clamber through his closet until he found his football, which was only slightly soft, and then we six left Ginger to her cleaning and her bad temper as we made our way eastward across 70th Street to Central Park, tossing the football back and forth along the way.
With frequent hilarity and many pauses and breaks and a few sidetrips to snack bars, we played a ridiculous game of touch football until nearly four-thirty. The Diskants won, eighty-four to thirty — we weren’t doing extra points — primarily because every time Lance passed to Gretchen the ball was intercepted by Jennifer, who is very lithe and quick, with long skinny arms and the true competitive spirit. Gretchen began to look a little teary after a while, her underlip receding, so once or twice in our Diskant huddle I suggested to Jennifer she ease off the pressure, let Gretchen catch a pass or two — we did have a comfortable lead, after all — but Jennifer simply couldn’t stop herself. Finally I deliberately threw a bad pass that Gretchen could intercept, and she ran with it for her only touchdown of the afternoon, which was enough to lift her spirits quite a bit.
Back at the apartment, there was a note from Ginger that she’d gone out shopping. I had to take my kids home, Gretchen and Joshua immediately plunked themselves in front of the television set, and Lance volunteered to come along “for the ride,” adding, “In fact, since my team lost, I’ll spring for a cab.”
“You’re on,” I said, and the children cheered.
The main reason I was pleased to have Lance along was as some protection from Mary, whose topics of conversation are invariably trouble. There’s her career in photography, there’s the subject of my moving back, there’s the childrens’ emotional condition, but the worst of all is sex.
This is increasing. Is it because she has no other sex life since I left? (More guilt.) Whatever the reason, we’ve reached the point now where every time she sees me she has another sexual encounter to describe, with friend or stranger. She can’t take a subway without some man rubbing an erection against her. She can’t go to a party without at least one male acquaintance subtly sliding his knee between her legs. She can’t make a phone call or a purchase without somebody talking dirty to her.
I find all this disturbing. Well, naturally I do, because Mary is technically still my wife, after all, and nobody wants his woman — or his former woman — treated basely. But more than that, I don’t want Mary telling me about it. She describes exactly the way it feels to be rubbed against in the subway, and how she knows the guy has had an ejaculation. She can remember every double entendre, every obscene gesture, every excuse this fellow or that fellow makes for touching her breast or her thigh or her behind. She never expresses an opinion about all this, never lets me guess if it frightens or angers or arouses her, but merely describes it all, as though she found it quite interesting and was sure I would, too.
I don’t. Or, sometimes, I do, but that’s worse. Of course I could go to bed with Mary, I know that, but then what? The whole point is, I’ve left, right? She’s supposed to find a fella, get on with her life, ease my financial burden. We’re separated, apart, it’s over, she isn’t supposed to look at me calmly with her clear blue eyes and tell me all these sex scenes. One way and another, it’s, well, upsetting.
So that’s why I was glad to have Lance along, which worked fairly well up to a point. That is, at least Mary didn’t tell me about anybody coming in her pocket. She simply offered us coffee, which we both refused, but then she settled down to chat anyway, saying to Lance, “I understand you’ve moved back home.”