“What do you mean, pick a fight?”
“You’ve been spoiling for a fight all—”
Well. That was a mistake, which took about a day and a half to rectify.
Otherwise, both women were rather good about it. They went to the beach together — with all the kids — and they talked together civilly enough. There was tacit agreement that Ginger was boss of the kitchen and Mary a guest eating Gingers meals, except that the five days Ginger had to go to work in the city Mary volunteered to make dinner and Ginger accepted the offer. Every evening, if we weren’t all playing a board game or something with the kids, Mary would retire to her guesthouse and read while Ginger and I did whatever we did in the main house.
Fair Harbor on Fire Island is a very communications-biz community, with television people and ad agency people as well as writers and editors and a sprinkling of show folk. I know a few of these people, mostly through business contacts, and one of the guys, a magazine editor named Herm Morgenstern who by summer is a feared and ruthless volleyball player — he finishes most summers absolutely swathed in Ace bandages — said to me on the beach one day, grinning, “Tom, I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“The women.” He shook his head in admiration. “Jeezuz. The wife and the girlfriend, all in the same house. You all bunk in together, do you?” His tongue was somewhat hanging out.
“Hey, no,” I said. “It’s nothing like that at all, Herm. Mary and I are separated, she has her own little guesthouse, there’s nothing going on at all.”
“Sure,” he said, nodding, smirking. “Sure.”
I was reminded of Vickie assuming Ginger and Lance and I had a menage à trois, and I imagine Herm wasn’t the only person in Fair Harbor making the same assumption about Ginger and Mary and me. I suppose other people’s lives always look more exciting; it’s hard to believe that everybody’s as disorganized and screwed-up and ordinary as ourselves.
It’s funny, but the place feels incomplete without Mary prowling around, hung with cameras, looking for not-quite-good-enough photo opportunities. A few empty film containers are still to be seen here and there, little black plastic jars with gray plastic tops, and they remind me of her; Mary’s need to be a successful photographer, Mary’s softness that makes the goal impossible.
Why did all that make her somehow belong here? I don’t know. I only know we’d established a status quo here, the seven of us, against all odds, and now I find myself missing it. Afraid I might make the mistake of letting Ginger see the way I feel, I have come up to the evening-cooled bedroom to work on the second batch of Christmas Book galleys. Last Friday, Vickie, in her final official act before motherhood — if that kid is smart, it’ll leave the womb running — messengered this second portion of the galleys over to Ginger’s office, and Ginger brought them out with her that evening, and I’ve been working on them ever since.
There wasn’t time to correct them all before Mary’s departure today, unfortunately, or she could have taken them with her. Somehow I’ll have to get them back to Craig this week.
I wonder who I’ll address them to?
Tuesday, July 19th
I knew Dewey Heffernan was trouble when he phoned yesterday to introduce himself. “This is Dewey Heffernan,” said a voice so young and eager my first thought was that this at last was Jennifer’s first boyfriend, an advent we’ve all been anticipating with some suspense, and not a little dread. But, no; Jennifer was apparently still prepubescent, because this Dewey Heffernan was to be my new editor.
The publishing world contains more disasters than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Huck.
“I’m really excited about this, Tom,” Dewey Heffernan said, while I stood with the phone in my Fire Island living room in my swimsuit and Earth Day T-shirt and slowly died. “May I call you Tom?”
You may not call me at all, fella. “Sure,” I said.
“And I hope you’ll call me Dewey.”
“I will,” I promised.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “when Miss Douglas told me I was going to take over The Christmas Story I just—”
“The Christmas Book,” I said.
“I’ve loved Christmas since I was a little kid,” he assured me. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me on this job.”
“Mmm,” I said.
Dewey was calling to suggest that he and I meet and have lunch when I came to the city with the corrected galleys. So that’s what happened; this morning, I shook the sand off, put on actual clothing with shoes for the first time in two weeks, gathered up my galleys, and took the 10:15 ferry to catch the 11:07 train to meet Dewey Heffernan at the Tre Mafiosi at one o’clock.
The transition from Fire Island to New York is always traumatic, even without Dewey Heffernan. On Fire Island there are no automobiles, no tall buildings, very little noise. I almost never wear shoes there, and certainly not socks. Unless there’s something somebody wants to watch on television, we never know the exact time, and couldn’t care less. The air is clearer and less humid, and the temperature is usually five to ten degrees cooler than in the city. Last week, Ginger had had to make that awful transition five days in a row (while worrying unnecessarily about me alone out here with Mary), but now Mary was gone (I’d seen no point in describing our nonsexual encounter to Ginger) and Ginger was in full residence, and I was the one who had to leave Eden for Mordor.
And Dewey Heffernan. I arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early, planning to have a drink at the bar while waiting, and he was already there. Now, I had an excuse for being early, since I was tied to railroad and ferry schedules, but for him the restaurant was a mere five minute walk from the office, so his presence so early was a baffling but troubling sign.
So was his presence, if you know what I mean. With Vickie, and earlier with Jack Rosenfarb, I had always lunched at one of the banquettes or alcoved tables around the edges of the room, but this time the maître d’ led me to a tiny table in the middle of the place, at which sat something that might have been Raskolnikov, if it had had any gumption.
This was Dewey Heffernan. When he stood up, as he did at my arrival, smiling and bobbing his head and extending his skinny pale hand to be shaken, he proved to be a long drink of water, probably six-four. He was very thin and bony, and the salesman who’d sold him that sport jacket must have some sense of humor. It was a large yellow thing of giant checks, like what Bob Hope used to wear when playing in Damon Runyon stories, and it made Dewey Heffernan look as though he were wearing a taxicab. Somewhere in there were a white shirt and tan tie, possibly belonging to the driver.
Then there’s the Dewey Heffernan head. A very high and shiny ivory forehead was surrounded by spikes and thistles of rough black horsehair. A scraggly beard and moustache with intermittent white skin in it looked like the symptom of some awful dermatological disorder. Between these two unfortunate examples of hair-growth was a retroussé nose with nostrils that looked out at the world rather than demurely down at his lip, a broad mouth full of big square teeth, and spaniel eyes that blinked and stared and beheld the variety of the world with unflagging wonder. “You must be Tom Diskant!” said this wonder, happy as a fresh-hatched cuckoo, as the maître d’ pulled out my chair.
“If I must, I must,” I said fatalistically, accepted his overly energetic handshake, and took the seat the maître d’ punched into the back of my knees. “Sorry I’m early.” I put the galleys package to one side on the table.