(What Ginger fought with the cabdriver about was Puerto Rico, he being an emigrant from there.)
That the rotten weather made the whole question of the kids’ return academic merely gave the fight added virulence. We would be lucky to get ourselves home on Sunday night, never mind the kids. Since I had been the one pressing the point of view that a brief overnight transition for the two of us between traveling and children would be a good idea, I was accused in the taxi of gloating over the storm, and off we went.
Well, it all calmed down en route, though it did threaten to blow up all over again when two of the messages awaiting us on the telephone answering machine at home were from Mary, and both about her kids. That is, our kids. Bryan having been given a clarinet for Christmas — don’t ask me why kids want this or that, I’ll never fathom it — (a used clarinet from a pawnshop on Third Avenue), it now seemed a potentially good idea to give him clarinet lessons, so one of Mary’s calls was about the thirty-five-dollar-a-month lessons available through the school. The other message was about the police wanting Jennifer to make a statement about her mugging, and did I think it was a good idea for the kid to involve herself in all that any further.
Ginger’s nostrils were flaring by that point, and she’d narrowed her eyes so much she looked like a leftover alien from Star Wars. We could have had round two of the day if the calls hadn’t annoyed me just as much as they did her. Mary had known I was in Puerto Rico, she knew when I was coming back, and dropping those two “innocent” messages on the machine was just another way to turn the knife of pseudo-domesticity. I expressed that opinion aloud, Ginger’s eyes and nose returned to their accustomed shapes, and we went to bed to have the kind of sex that makes it all worthwhile, as outside the storm raged unabated.
None of the other answering machine messages had been of much import, but when I finally got to the mail this morning there were seven responses to my solicitation for The Christmas Book, and I don’t know if I’m encouraged or not.
Two of the letters, from Diana Trilling and Andy Rooney, merely asked, in one way or another, how much I was offering to pay. In fact, Andy Rooney’s letter, in toto, said, “Dear Mr. Diskant, How much? Yours, Andrew A. Rooney.” Now, that’s what I call a few words from Andy Rooney!
But it wasn’t the shortest letter. That came from Joan Rivers, and it went:
January 25
Dear Thomas J. Diskant:
What?
The longest response came from a literary agent named Scott Meredith, and for quite a while I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was a box, a big manuscript box about twice the normal depth, absolutely crammed full with manuscripts of short stories and articles and poetry. Some of the pieces seemed fairly recent, others were on yellowed dogeared paper with various stains, but all of them, by golly, were on the subject of Christmas.
A letter from Scott Meredith had come with this armada of failed hopes, and in it Meredith explained that he was Norman Mailer’s agent, that Mailer might be interested in doing a small piece for The Christmas Book if the price were right, and in the meantime these other works by “outstanding writers, clients of mine” were probably right down my alley.
No. Definitely not.
The remaining three responses were also loony, each in its own way. Stephen King wrote a long enthusiastic sloppy letter saying The Christmas Book was a wonderful idea and he’d love to do something for it if he could think of something, and in the meantime he had these suggestions of other absolutely wonderful things I ought to put in the book, like “Death On Christmas Eve” by Stanley Ellin and “Christmas Party” by Rex Stout, and on and on.
From Jimmy Carter I got permission to do the book, I think. I’m not sure what his letter was, some sort of proclamation about the good and worthy work I was undertaking, but I began to believe he failed to understand the thrust of my original letter. (Or whoever actually answered it did.) And from Charles Schulz I got, in triplicate, a contract I was to sign which made it clear that I would not participate in any subsidiary rights to anything by him or about him or any character created by him that might appear in The Christmas Book or its promotion or advertising. Sheesh!
So. I dropped lines to Trilling and Rooney saying I would pay “in the neighborhood of” a thousand dollars for a thousand words. I sent a note to King thanking him for all his suggestions and adding that what I was really looking forward to was his own original contribution to The Christmas Book. I wrote Carter that I hoped he could see his way toward contributing some personal thoughts on the subject of Christmas, and I penned a missive to Rivers saying that since she had dealt with motherhood twice, in her movie Rabbit Test and her book Having A Baby Can Be A Scream, maybe she had a stray thought or two about Christmas as well, and would she be willing to share it? I phoned the Scott Meredith Agency to request a messenger to come pick up these huddled masses they’d sent me, and included in the package a note describing my thousand dollar neighborhood, for Mailer’s consideration. Schulz’s contract I sent to Jack Rosenfarb, with a note saying, “You’ll probably know what to do with this.”
Next, feeling virtuous from all my activity, I phoned Mary, who worked very hard at being a downer; not like her, but I think she was annoyed both by winter and by my having been away from it for a week. She said things like, “Bryan needs to see more of you,” and, “I think Jennifer feels the lack of a father particularly at this time, after the mugging,” and so on. I handled it well for a while, and then I didn’t handle it well at all, and then I hung up.
While in Puerto Rico I’d thought of some more famous people I should hit on, so after the emotional upset of the Mary call I soothed myself by sending the writer’s letter to ten more possibles: Arthur C. Clarke, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, John Kenneth Galbraith, Garrison Keillor, Henry Kissinger, Jonathan Schell, Mickey Spillane, William Styron and Paul Theroux. Plus the illustrator’s letter to these five: Roddy McDowall, Helmut Newton, Francesco Scavullo, Gahan Wilson and Jamie Wyeth.
Lance just called. Gretchen and Joshua have arrived at his place from school, and he wants me to come get them. The storm continues, that’s why; if the weather were decent, he’d cab them across town himself. Selfish bastard.
Sunday, February 13th
One of the reasons people are always more complicated than you expect them to be is that they are always sillier than you expect them to be. Take holidays, anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions in general. In the course of any given year, each of us has to remember and deal appropriately with not only all the great public occasions — Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, my current meal ticket, Christmas, and all the rest — but with the proliferating private events as well. As families separate and reshuffle themselves and regroup in new combinations, there are more and more birthdays to remember, more and more anniversaries to acknowledge, more and more special occasions to commemorate.
But separation itself? Isn’t that going too far? Now I have found out why Mary was so bad-tempered last week and why she put those two irritating messages on the answering machine while Ginger and I were away. It was because I was in Puerto Rico on February third.