“Amen,” I said.
And it’s true, it couldn’t be more true. Ginger’s ex-husband, Lance, lives now with Helena, an assistant production manager at Time, Inc., whose ex-husband Barry more or less lives with the ex-wife of a psychiatrist named Terriman or Telliman or something. (Don’t worry about these names; these people don’t matter.)
Anyway, Ginger and Lance’s kids live with Ginger and me; Helena and Barry’s kids are with Helena and Lance; the psychiatrist’s kids are with Barry and whatsername. The psychiatrist contributes support money and Barry takes up the slack; Barry contributes support money for Helena and her kids and Lance takes up the slack; Lance contributes support money for Ginger and the kids here, and I take up the slack. And I contribute support money for Mary and my kids...
And there’s the rub. Mary, as Ginger pointed out, doesn’t have a fella. Her freelance photography work and the research jobs probably bring in on average a little less than Ginger’s salary, which is nowhere near enough for the lifestyle we all seem to have acquired. So while everybody else in the world is supporting two half-households, which adds up to one household, which is just barely possible, I am supporting one and one-half households all by myself, I’ve been doing it for eleven months, and I’m drowning.
Which is why The Christmas Book is so important. It could solve my money problems for a year, maybe two years; long enough, in any case, for Mary to give up the idea that I’m coming back. Long enough for her to find a fella.
With Ginger, I live on West End Avenue near 70th Street; Mary and the kids live downtown, on West 17th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; a fairly decent neighborhood, very near the Village and with much the same charm, but at lower rents. Going off now to disrobe the tree, I wore the sweater Mary’d given me for Christmas, to placate her. (I’ve already told Ginger it was my kids who gave me the sweater, to placate her.)
The Christmas decorations on Mary’s tree seemed more accurate, somehow. Does that make any sense? Christmases come and Christmases go, and over the years some of the old ornaments break or crumple or disappear, new ones are added, there’s a slow organic change, a continuous gradual shifting, every year subtly different and yet always the same, so that when you hear the phrase “Christmas tree” there’s always one proto-tree that comes into your mind, and the rest are merely imitation.
I had time to brood about this because I spent an hour looking at the tree before we ever got around to undressing it. Mary met me at the door with cocoa and the news that the kids wanted to play Mille Bornes first, because it was alleged to be best with four. Since I was the one who’d given Jennifer the game for Christmas, and since the card table and chairs were already set up in the living room, I couldn’t very well say no, so we all traveled several thousand miles together, while from time to time I looked past Bryan’s head at the tree, thinking how accurate it was.
Jennifer, my firstborn, is eleven, a savvy, skinny New York kid and an absolute shark at games. Fortunately she’s also lucky, because she cares intensely about whether she wins or loses. Bryan, nine years old, has already differentiated in his mind between sports (which are important) and games (which don’t matter), so that’s also good. Since Jennifer needs to win, and Bryan doesn’t care but does enjoy playing, they make a kind of better Lucy and Charlie Brown, without (I hope) the psychological damage always implicit in “Peanuts.”
Jennifer won twice, then I won. (She’d gone eight hundred fifty miles without using any two-hundreds, a gamble that would have paid off big if I hadn’t scrambled to a graceless any-way-at-all win.) There had been talk about playing only three games, but when Jennifer was defeated on the third she got a set expression around the mouth, shuffled the cards like a pro, and said, “Just one more.”
Mary said, “I’m not sure how long Tom can stay.”
“I’ve got time,” I said airily, though I knew Ginger would already be pacing the floor on 70th Street. “I’ll be delighted to whup you twice in a row,” I told Jennifer, which made her grin like Clint Eastwood and hunker down to play. She won, too.
After that, we put the table and chairs away and finally took care of the tree. Removing a rough-edged white snowball with a pale blue manger scene indented into one side, remembering that it was one of the few ornaments I’d brought with me from my parents’ home, making it almost the oldest part of the continuity, the accuracy, I tried to think how I might gracefully ask to take it with me now, but there seemed to be no way. Palm it, pocket it? No.
By the end of the operation, Mary and I were alone, it having occurred to the kids that putting ornaments in boxes was work and not play. Also, I think they’re both sometimes uncomfortable around me these days, possibly because I’m uncomfortable around them. I have this feeling they’re not mature enough to realize how mature I am.
I put the naked tree in the hall, to carry down to the street when I left, and returned to the living room to say my farewells. On hands and knees there Mary picked needles one by one out of the carpet. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m off.”
Kneeling, she sat back on her haunches, her cupped hands in her lap filled with pine needles. “Tom,” she said, “do you remember Jack Horton?”
“Sure,” I said. About my age, skinny and worried-looking, he lives in the neighborhood; we have mutual friends, we meet occasionally at parties, we’ve never been close.
“Sit down a minute,” she said.
Reluctantly, I sat facing her in “my” chair.
“I ran into Jack Horton at Key Food this afternoon,” Mary said, “and he put his hand on my breast.” She touched her fingertips to the spot.
I was surprised, and said so: “Jack Horton? Doesn’t sound like him.”
“I know,” she agreed. “It’s because men know I’m alone now,” she said. “It’s happened before, I’ve told you about it.”
“Yes, you have.” And she has, four or five times in the last couple of months, and with increasing detail, it seems to me. And always described in the same manner: not angry or upset or offended or anything, just calmly interested in this phenomenon that when a woman isn’t already with a man other men come around and start copping feels.
“Of course,” she said, “he pretended he was just admiring my dalmatian pin.”
That would be a free-form, black-and-white mosaic pin Bryan had found at some Arab junk jewelry place in the Village and had given Mary for Christmas, announcing the weird-shaped lumpy thing was a dalmatian, as in the Walt Disney movie. I said, “Well, maybe that’s what he was doing.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “He made sure he rubbed his knuckles back and forth on my nipple, like this.” She demonstrated, watching her own knuckles with absorption.
Mary’s campaign to get me back does not, I’m happy to say, include dressing up “sexy.” At this moment she was barefoot, wearing old jeans and a dark blue high-neck sweater. But we were married a long while, it wasn’t physical disinterest that broke us up, and I don’t need suggestive clothing to remind me who’s inside there. Watching her watch herself rub her nipple, I said, “Uh, like that, huh? What did you say?”
Her hand returned to help the other hand hold pine needles. “Of course, I pretended not to notice,” she said. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t hard, though, or who knows what he would have thought.”