However, in my defense, I would also point out that I have not included any of Mary’s photographs. The Christmas Book is a professional piece of work, not an amateur gathering of family and friends.
On the other other hand, Mary never volunteered (being a grown-up, and therefore aware of the ground rules) and Jennifer does not have an artistic vocation, so with neither of them did the question have to be faced. Gretchen, too young to understand the difference between my work and her play, offered me an opportunity to rethink The Christmas Book just slightly, and I snubbed her, which was not only mean, but also unprofessional.
The birthday party went on. Amid the laughter and the giggling and general good cheer, I became gloomier and gloomier, guiltier and guiltier, more and more depressed. I began to feel like the strange little creature in the corner of an Edward Gorey drawing; the party going on, and the dark monster skulking behind the drapes.
Later last night I asked Ginger, “Where are all those Christmas drawings Gretchen did?”
She looked at me in some surprise. “Why?”
“I wanted to look at them again.”
“She threw them away.”
“All of them? Are you sure?”
“When you made it clear you didn’t want them, what else would she do?”
“Okay,” I said. I was thinking, It’s too late anyway. I was thinking, After the stink I made about Dewey Heffernan and Korban, I’m not sure I have the nerve to drag in some kid’s drawing at the last second, even if there’s still time. I was thinking, If I ask her to draw another one, I’ll just get her hopes up, and then something will go wrong (because something always does), and that’ll be worse. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, but this morning I went through the boxes of stuff from The Christmas Book piled in Lance’s room — I don’t think of it as my office any more — and then I took a quick look in Gretchen’s room (she’d gone off to school), and when I came down here to work I did some more searching, but without finding anything. She really did throw them all away.
I’m glad I let her intercept the football that time. Of course, the one nice thing I ever did for the kid she doesn’t know about, and it would be spoiled if she did.
Shit.
Friday, August 26th
On this date in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote. On this date in this year, Lance moved out of my uptown office.
Ginger does not like my working at Mary’s place one little bit, an attitude she kept very quiet about last week, when I first came down here, but this week she began to agitate. On Monday she said it was “silly” for me to spend my days downtown when Lance was always at work all day long anyway and I could work perfectly well at “home,” and I said I needed an office that was my office twenty-four hours a day, so I could leave work-in-progress scattered about.
On Tuesday she called nine times. Mary was out most of the day, so I was the one who had to answer the phone each time, and the calls were never about anything, which finally teed me off. “I am working here, Ginger,” I said. “I am not seducing Mary, and I am not being seduced by Mary, I am working. Except when I have to keep answering the damn phone.” She said, “There’s no reason for you to be there.” I said, “The reason is called Lance.”
On Wednesday Lance called to say Ginger was phoning him every half hour to ask what progress he was making in finding a new place to live; so my original intent was at last beginning to be realized. Lance, with that wistful sound he gets in his voice a lot these days, said, “I didn’t know there was such urgency, Tom. I thought you were all right.” I said, “There was such urgency, Lance, as I damn well tried to make clear, but you out-waited me, so now I’m perfectly happy spending my days at Mary’s place, and Ginger’s beginning to realize it’s your fault.”
On Thursday, yesterday, at the breakfast table, Ginger pointed a piece of bacon at Lance and said, “I don’t want you still here after the first of the month, Lance, I really don’t. This has gone on long enough.” Lance looked sober and capable, firming his shoulders as he said, “I’m working on it, Ginger, I definitely am.” And last night he came home to announce that he had made alternate plans, and would be leaving almost immediately.
Which was this morning. We took a cab together, Lance and I and many of his cartons and suitcases. I got out of the cab at 17th Street and he continued on down to Greenwich Street, where he will be — until something else comes along — sharing an apartment with a co-worker named Bradford, who happens to be a manic militant faggot. I have met Bradford a few times, and I do not envy Lance.
Bradford shaves his head but has grown a thick drooping western-style moustache, and he lives a life of signals and symbols. Whenever he’s not at work, he wears a black leather bomber jacket and faded blue jeans, which is a virtual uniform for Village queens of a specific type. The bunch of keys dangling from a belt loop and the red bandanna fluttering from a hip pocket describe to the cognoscenti his sexual preferences, about which I want to know as little as possible. They would not include Lance, but even so. Bradford agreed to share his “space” for a while only on condition that Lance realize he, Bradford, frequently made “friends” in the outer world who would return with him for fun and frolic; behind the closed door of a separate bedroom, but even so. Lance has agreed not to remark upon anything that might emerge from that bedroom of a morning, and not to spread any tales around the workplace.
Ginger must have been leaning on Lance really hard, if life with Bradford seems the better alternative.
And Ginger isn’t even getting what she wanted from it, at least not right away. Last night we had a huge row over the fact that I have no intention of moving the office back uptown. “I am in the very middle of assembling Happy Happy Happy,” I explained several times, that being the working title of the greeting card book. “I not only have things piled up all over that room, taped to the walls, stacked here and there and everywhere, but each pile and each individual thing is where it is for a reason. I am assembling sample chapters and an outline of the book, and it would cost me days of work to tear that office apart, carry everything up here, and start all over.”
“Then do it,” she said.
“No,” I said.
She is not speaking to me at the moment, which means maybe I can get some work done.
Friday, September 2nd
I hate Dewey Heffernan. He’s not only an idiot, he’s a nasty idiot.
In the three weeks I’ve been working downtown, I’ve left a message on the uptown answering machine, giving this phone number down here and saying this is where I’ll be during working hours. Everybody else wanting to reach me has managed to work out the intricacies of that message and dial the new number and talk to me — some, by the way, congratulating me on “seeing through” Ginger and returning at last to Mary, which leads to a great deal of embarrassment all around — but could Dewey Heffernan accomplish that great feat? For years I have heard the expression, “He couldn’t find his ass with both hands,” and thought it hyperbole, but now I have met someone who couldn’t find his ass with both hands tied behind him.
Around six last night I returned to the uptown apartment to find a message on the machine from Dewey: “Give me a call as soon as you can, Tom. You’re being sued.” Well, of course, at that hour everybody was gone from the Craig, Harry & Bourke offices, so I had a night to think about that message before I finally managed to reach Dewey at ten-thirty this morning. “Sued?” I said. “What have you done now, Dewey?”