As for tomorrow, the simplest and almost the least expensive method for transporting all these people and luggage turns out to be a rented station wagon, with driver. He is due to arrive at 17th Street tomorrow morning at ten, to pick up Mary and Bryan and Jennifer and all their goods and chattels, then come uptown to get me, plus Joshua and Gretchen and this pile of baggage, which includes my typewriter and a liquor store carton filled with work necessities, such as pencils and a thesaurus. Also a carton full of sandwiches and apples and tomato juice and vodka. If the traffic on Long Island treats us decently, we’ll make the 1:00 ferry and have a picnic lunch in the rented house, and Ginger will leave work early and be on the 5:00 ferry. (She surprised me by very graciously accepting Mary’s offer to make dinner for everybody tomorrow night.) The weather is expected to be sunny and mild.
I can’t help wondering what will go wrong.
LATER
Good God. Vickie just called. The galleys for the first quarter of the book, exclusive of artwork, will arrive at Craig from the typesetter in Pennsylvania some time tomorrow afternoon. Vickie has volunteered — there was simply no way I could say no — to bring them out to Fire Island on Saturday.
I am to go over the galleys, according to this plan, while Vickie sunbathes the weekend away. On the afternoon of Monday, the Fourth of July, she will carry the corrected galleys back to New York; mission accomplished. I did explain that we were already pretty crowded out there, but she said that was okay, she didn’t mind, she’d bring a sleeping bag and just bunk on the living room floor.
This is insane. Where do you go to enlist in the Foreign Legion? I am going to be in that small rented house over the Fourth of July weekend with Mary and Ginger and VICKIE! What kind of Independence Day do you call that?
Sunday, July 3rd
And it isn’t even over.
I was seated on the back deck a little while ago, reading the Sunday Times Magazine, and then I looked around at the three other people also on the deck, also reading sections of the Times, and I found myself thinking: I have been to bed with all three of these women.
The thought did not make me feel like a harem master or anything particularly macho. In fact, all I felt at that moment was vaguely scared. Three women in bikinis in the sunshine, reading Travel and Arts and Leisure and The Week in Review. If they were suddenly to rise and turn on me, they could tear me to shreds. Sitting there, looking at them, thinking about it, I could find no very good reason why they wouldn’t rise and turn on me. Dropping the Magazine — I hadn’t found the rift between the French Newer Left and the Roman Catholic Church all that fascinating anyway — I rose and announced in a loud confident voice that I really ought to do some more work on the galleys of The Christmas Book. Then I fled away up here to Ginger’s and my bedroom, where I have made a fairly useful desk out of a closet door lying across plastic milk crates stacked two high. We don’t particularly need a door on the closet up here anyway. (The knobs are at the back.)
One thing we hadn’t foreseen in April, when we rented the place, was that in the summer this upstairs room would be an absolute oven in the daytime. I may have to buy a fan, if I’m going to do much work up here. In the meantime, baking here in the heat is still better than sitting down there among my women.
From time to time I glance out the window at them, still all sprawled there, legs stretched out on the webbed chaise longues, sunglasses on faces, strategic bits of colored cloth interrupting the flow of flesh. A smell of rancid cocoanut rises from the suntan oil that makes that flesh so prettily gleam. From time to time they turn a page or exchange sections of the paper. Periodically Vickie rolls over onto her stomach, to sun her back, but is never comfortable that way and soon rolls back again. The only good thing I can say about the scene is that at least they aren’t talking to one another.
Am I a misogynist? Am I one of those men who claim to love women but who secretly hate and fear them? Am I guilt-ridden? Do I feel I deserve to be torn limb from limb by a shock of bikini-clad avengers?
Uhh, actually, no. Everything would be fine, perfectly normal, if it weren’t for the addition of Vickie. No matter how trapped I am, no matter how justified in the whole Vickie thing, Ginger would be very upset if she found out about it. When Ginger was The Other Woman, it was a very straightforward role; I was falling out of that previous nest, and she was passing by underneath. But now Ginger is simultaneously The Other Woman and The Wronged Woman, and debased in both roles.
As for Mary, the one thing that has kept our relationship relatively smooth has been her belief that I have tried to be honorable. Failed sometimes, but at least tried. One of the reasons she wants me back is that she thinks I’m a decent guy. If she found out about Vickie, it would remove the dignity from the ending of our marriage; I would have proved myself unworthy to have left her.
Whereas, if Vickie were to discover her main attraction for me was bookish rather than bawdy, she’d lead the posse.
My women.
Monday, July 4th
I’m a nervous wreck.
Of course Vickie would demand sex while she was here. She gave me several high-signs yesterday, once the heat in the bedroom had driven me back downstairs, but with two other adults and four children about the place all day Sunday it just wasn’t possible. And I’d assumed it would go on being impossible.
But then came today. The beach is seven houses and a dune from here, and after breakfast everybody went there, leaving me to finish my work on the galleys before the bedroom becomes too hot to stand, and so Vickie could take them back to the city with her this afternoon. Suddenly, a little before eleven, here came Vickie skipping into the bedroom, smiling her lascivious smile and untying her strings. “Oh, no!” I said, but, “We’ve got time,” she assured me, giggling.
We did, too, but only just. She had barely managed to reassemble herself and be in the kitchen making a big quart bottle of packaged lemonade when Ginger arrived. “Oh, dear,” I heard Vickie say. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“Mmm,” said Gingers voice. “How’s Tom going?”
“Sore as a bear,” Vickie told her. “I guess those galleys are driving him crazy. I called up to him, but he just growled.”
So Ginger didn’t come upstairs to inspect the site of the skirmish, and soon both women went back to the beach with the bottle of iced lemonade and a handful of plastic cups, and I went to take my second shower of the day.
But not my last. At lunchtime everybody descended, including me carrying the finished galleys in their big sloppy envelope, and we sat around the table on the deck, under the big beach umbrella, making cold cut sandwiches and drinking white wine spritzers. (The children stuck to lemonade.)
After lunch, Vickie went off to Jennifer and Gretchen’s room to change, while Mary and the kids went back to the beach, Mary wearing a bikini and two cameras, with a third camera in the canvas bag she carried, down among the suntan oils and paperback books and crumpled tissues. Then Ginger and I walked Vickie to the dock, where she and the galleys took the three-ten ferry and life became slightly more plausible.
Walking back to the house, Ginger gave me an updated assessment of Vickie, making several negative observations with which I wholeheartedly agreed. Then she said, “How do you feel, surrounded by all these women?”