“Baseball,” I said.
“The New York Mets,” Lance said, with some emphasis.
“Oh, base-ball!” Carl did his airy wave again. “Macho ballet,” he said.
Apparently, Vickie and Ginger were hitting it off somewhat better in the kitchen, so that by the time we sat down to our meal at least the women were relaxed. (Joshua and Gretchen had both been farmed out for a few hours, Gretchen dining at a school chum’s house, Joshua downtown with Mary and my kids. He would sleep over, and I would pick the whole crew up — sans Mary — in the morning.) We talked publishing gossip mostly during dinner, that being the one subject that could reach all the way from Carl to Lance, Carl for the evening pretending to be another editor at Craig rather than Vickie’s secretary. (One pretense among so many.) A few times I saw Ginger give Carl a puzzled look, but that was all.
After dinner I went to the kitchen to make more drinks, and all at once Vickie was in the doorway, a devilish grin on her lips and a sparkle in her eyes as she hissed, “A menage à trois?” (I know there are those who claim you can’t hiss a word without an S in it, but that’s nonsense. In human speech, to hiss is to whisper forcefully. Pooh to Newgate Callendar.)
At any rate, I was both startled and alarmed. “No, no,” I whispered. (Not being forceful, it wasn’t a hiss.) “Lance is just between apartments, that’s all. There’s nothing going on.”
“I’ve never done that,” she mused, and gave another wicked smile. “I’d like to be a sandwich!”
“With Carl?”
She raised her eyes to heaven. “He can be the lettuce leaf,” she said, and went away to the living room.
Mercifully, it was an early evening; one postprandial drink and a brief description by Carl of a Bette Midler stage show he’d recently seen (complete with impersonations), and they were off, Carl a cowgirl Ariel and Vickie in her too-tight frowsy dress a lonely Caliban. At least he hadn’t described anything as a hoot.
Later, in bed, Ginger employed the phrase “fag hag.” I blinked big innocent eyes: “What?”
“Well, surely it’s obvious. Carl is gay as a jay.”
“I thought he was a little — ambiguous,” I admitted.
“Ambiguous? I thought he’d go down on the candelabra!”
“Vickie’s never talked about him much,” I said, shrugging it off.
Unsuccessfully. “That’s because she’s probably embarrassed,” Ginger said. “But she’s your typical fag hag; afraid of sex, afraid of adult relationships, so she wears frumpy, unattractive clothes and just hangs out with faggots. Did you see that dress?”
“Yes, I did,” I admitted. I felt I should be defending Vickie somehow, but there was just no way to do it. And wasn’t this, under the circumstances, the best possible view for Ginger to take of Vickie? Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist adding, “I thought you two got along.”
“We did,” Ginger said. “As a woman, I think she’s very sensible. But can you actually believe she’s having an affair with Carl?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Does she dress that way in the office?”
“I don’t know, I suppose so, I never noticed that much. Not come-on, anyway.”
Suddenly Ginger’s eyes were narrowed, and peering at me. “No,” she said.
“No what?”
“Not come-on. Did you like the ratatouille?”
Quelle (as Carl would say) change of subject. I complimented her on dinner for a while, and we never did return to the topic of Vickie, so I didn’t find out what had been going on inside her head for that one tiny instant.
This afternoon — being the day after — I had another brief and equally disquieting talk about Vickie, this one with Lance, in the Central Park Zoo, while the children amused themselves making faces at the monkeys. (The boys always want to look at the snakes, the girls always want to look at the cats, and they always compromise by looking at the monkeys.) “That editor of yours,” Lance said.
“Oh?”
“Is that really her boyfriend?”
“Lance, I have no idea,” I said. “Ginger invited her to dinner, and that’s who she brought.”
“Good-looking woman,” he said, staring at the monkeys, who were making faces at one another. “She doesn’t know how to wear clothes, but that isn’t everything.”
I thought I saw where his thoughts were trending, and I didn’t like it. “She was kind of frumpy,” I said. “Ginger thinks she’s a fag hag.”
But he wasn’t to be deflected that easily. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, nodding, musing, pondering. “There’s a real woman inside there. Maybe she’s on the rebound or something.”
“That’s possible.”
“I don’t suppose you know her home number?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“We’ve already been introduced, last night,” he reminded himself. “I could call her at work.”
“Yes, you could,” I said.
Now what? Lance and Vickie? To solve the Lance problem must I recreate the Christmas Book problem? Is nothing to be simple any more, ever again?
Thursday, June 30th
It’s not that I’m a nervous traveler. It’s just that I’m all packed and ready, and we aren’t leaving until tomorrow.
June has gone by in a blur. All of a sudden The Christmas Book is a major issue in my life again, and I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in an empty office down at Craig, Harry & Bourke, going over the copy-edited manuscript, straightening out worldwide copyright problems with the rights department, arguing with production about the quality of the first trial color pages (we have thirty-two, done in some new process that doesn’t look quite as cheap as it is), and generally behaving like an executive. Also, Vickie and I have managed to perform a few natural and unnatural acts in there, keeping one eye on the door.
Time has suddenly become a major problem. Craig wants books in the stores by the end of October, which in publishing terms is yesterday. What with the urgency involved, plus the unwieldy size and shape of the manuscript itself, plus all the other details to be seen to, it just made more sense for Mohammed (me) to go to the mountain (the ms). Also, having an office full of Lance and a bedroom full of flung pantyhose didn’t help.
Because of the hurry, and because of the size of the book, they didn’t wait for the copy-editing phase to be finished before sending the manuscript off to the typesetter, but sent it on in batches, and the first batch of galleys should by returning any day for me to proofread. In the meantime, just yesterday I finished the Cosmo jewel piece and mailed it to my editor there and have been finishing a piece for Geo; but with this imminent move to Fire Island it just hasn’t been possible to think about the wonderful ancient Mayans of Belize. I’ll finish the piece next week, out there.
Lance has dated Vickie two or three times, but I haven’t been able to get a straight answer from either of them as to precisely what this means. I don’t think they’ve been to bed together, or Lance would certainly have told me. Lance hasn’t mentioned anything about Vickie to Ginger, which I guess is just as well; it’s probably better for Ginger to go on thinking of Vickie as a fag hag.
I am looking forward to comparative peace and quiet; not tomorrow, when we make the big move, but starting the day after. With Vickie here and me out there, editorial conferences will quite naturally be fewer, though The Christmas Book will of course require at least my occasional presence in New York. But even with Mary hanging around the first two weeks, I am anticipating a simpler and more comprehendable existence for the next month.