“Well, not exactly,” he said, grinning and looking uncomfortable. “You know about Helena...”
“She went away, didn’t she?”
“To Santa Fe,” I said. For some reason, the choice of city still offended me.
“So you had to go home,” Mary finished.
“I’m looking for a new place,” Lance told her. “Something small. Just a one-bedroom is all I need. If you hear of anything—”
“I’ll be sure to call,” Mary promised. To me, she said, “Tom, do you want to stay to dinner?”
She said that every time, ritually, and every time I gave her back the same ritual response: “No, thanks, I’ve got to get back uptown.”
“With Lance up there,” she said, going beyond ritual, “I thought you might be more comfortable down here.”
Quickly, Lance said, “I’m going out for dinner. I don’t, uh, I don’t really live there.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He just sort of sleeps there. In the office.”
“Just until I can find an apartment.”
“Tom? You don’t have an office? How do you work?”
“I’m set up in the bedroom. It’s fine,” I said, annoyed to hear myself protesting too much.
“And it is only temporary,” Lance said, also protesting too much.
“Very temporary,” I protested.
“I’ll be out of there any day now,” Lance protested.
Before we became totally absurd, I stood and said, “I’ve really got to get uptown.”
“Me, too,” Lance said. But then he couldn’t resist adding, “Uh, a different part of uptown.”
Mary walked us to the apartment door, and as we were leaving she said, “Tom, if you need an office, your room is still here, you know. You could come down and work any time. Until Lance finds an apartment. Just temporarily.”
Was she making fun of us? I decided to take it straight. “Thanks for the offer,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
Down on the sidewalk, Lance sighed and looked gloomy and said, “Mary still wants you, you know.”
“Noticed that, did you?”
“It’s nice to have somebody want you,” he said. “Whether you want them or not.”
“Rough out there, huh?”
“Oh, you don’t know, Tom,” he said, shaking his head. “You just don’t know. And this last weekend, Jesus. The bitches I stand around talking to.”
“Let’s have a drink,” I said.
Lance perked up a little at that, so we went over to Sixth Avenue and turned south and entered a bar, where we had a drink and Lance said, “I’m not a teenager any more, Tom, I don’t like these goddam mating rituals. With Helena, I already knew her, I was leaving Ginger anyway, or she was leaving me, she’d already started on the side, you know...”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Lance, it’s water under the bridge, doesn’t matter any more, but I absolutely swear you were already out of the house when Ginger and I got together.”
“Oh, not you,” he said, shrugging it away. “There were a couple of other guys before.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t known about that.
“The point is,” he said, “I was never in this goddam undignified position of hunting for a woman. It was all kind of like a square dance, everybody just moved one step over.”
“Except Mary,” I said bitterly.
He looked surprised. “That’s right, isn’t it? She never got hooked up with anybody else.”
We were both silent then a minute, and I knew we were both thinking the same thought: Was Mary the solution to Lance’s problem? Was Lance the solution to my problem?
No. I realized then for the first time that whenever I thought of Mary at last getting herself a fella, it was a given in my mind that it would be a fella I didn’t know. The idea of Lance and Mary— No. “Incest” wasn’t precisely the right word, but it had precisely the right feeling.
Lance’s thoughts must have meandered to a similar terminus, because eventually he gave a long sigh, finished his drink, and said, “Let’s find a better joint.”
“You’re right.”
We crossed 14th Street into the Village, found another bar, and Lance told me about his experiences as a hunter of women: “They’re terrible, Tom, there are a whole lot of truly terrible women out there, and they go to parties, and they smoke, and they have opinions about every goddam thing in the goddam world, and they’re just making me very depressed.”
We didn’t like the jukebox in that place, so we went on to another, and Lance told me more: “They have that magazine called Self for the single women,” he said, “and believe me, Tom, the name tells it. The reason all those single women are single is not because nobody’s noticed how terrific they are, it’s because they stink.”
“They do look good.”
“That’s part of the trouble,” he said. “The one thing they believe in and truly understand is packaging. But you know what’s inside the package?”
“Nothing,” I guessed.
But he shook his head. “I’d take that. The way I feel right now, a woman with nothing at all inside her head would be a blessing. No, Tom; what’s inside the package is thoughts about the package.”
In the next bar, Lance told me about women whose lives were centered on jogging, and in the bar after that he told me what happens when you give up on all those self-centered Bloomingdale-wrapped single women and spend some time with a divorced woman instead: All she wants to talk about is her children. “I have children, too,” he said. “Everybody has children, dammit, and my kids are just as neurotic and brilliant as their goddam kids, but I don’t go around talking about it all the time.”
The next bar was The Lion’s Head, where there was a guy Lance knew and where I phoned Ginger, who sounded very cold and annoyed: “The children and I already ate.”
“You did? What time is it?”
“Seven-twenty-three,” she said, which meant she was in the bedroom with the digital clock. And it also meant she and the kids had eaten dinner earlier than usual.
“I’m sorry, Ginger,” I said. “Lance and I just got to talking—”
“Lance and you! Oh, that’s just too much,” she said, and slammed the receiver down, and I went back to the bar to find that Lance had bought me a drink and was talking with his pal about television rating systems. It made for a change, so I joined in.
There was a party Lance was supposed to go co a little later, but he said he just couldn’t face it. He thought he’d probably have dinner right there at The Lion’s Head. I said I thought I would, too, since I seemed to be in the doghouse with Ginger. Lance shook his head and said, “That woman’s got a lot of nerve.”
During dinner, some other people we knew came in, and after dinner we went back to the bar where the group just kept getting larger, and we all kept finding things to laugh about, and then I have a sudden clear memory of the digital clock in the bedroom here reading three-twenty-seven in the dark. That was immediately followed by Ginger ruthlessly awakening me. It was morning, she claimed, and she was in an absolutely rotten mood.
What a way to start the day. Ginger yelled at Lance and me all through breakfast, accusing us of male bonding. I don’t know exactly where that phrase came from, but I suspect a woman must have made it up, deliberately choosing an expression that sounds painful. Women these days “network,” a wonderfully mushy word that implies both serious business going on and yet a protective safety net below, but men are reduced to “bonding,” something that sounds sticky and sadomasochistic. “Help me find the Krazy Glue, Ethel, I’m goin bondin’ with the boys.”