Reeling a bit, I lunged my way through the apartment and left my office in the office. Mary meanwhile had gone to the kitchen to put the flowers in water in a vase, so I followed her in there and said, “Mary, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “That isn’t important, Tom,” she said. “Thank you for saying it, but that isn’t what matters. People are sorry about things all the time, that’s as easy as breathing. Right now, I can hear myself, I sound stuffy and bloodless and I wish I wasn’t like that, so I’m sorry about it, but it doesn’t help, I’m still that way.”
“No, you’re not. My God, just because you aren’t screaming all the time—”
“But I am.” She glanced at me, then stepped back to consider the flower arrangement in the vase. “You just can’t hear me, that’s all,” she said.
I had to put my arms around her then, and stop talking, and I’m not sure which of us was trembling more. I kissed her mouth and her cheeks, tasting salt, and finally I said, “I am sorry.”
“No,” she said. “That’s the wrong word.”
Arms still around her, I leaned back to see her expression. “It is?”
She smiled at me, and at last I understood it’s all right for Mary to indulge me, because when she does it there’s no contempt in it. “Do you know why I believed you’d come back?” she asked me.
“No, I don’t.”
“Because in all of your explanations and all of your reasons and all of your statements of belief, there was one word you never used when you talked about you and Ginger.”
“I have trouble with that word,” I said.
She smiled again. “You use it sometimes.”
This was to be one of the times. “I love you,” I said.
Friday, October 7th
Is it as though I’ve never been away?
Wednesday night, I wasn’t sure if Mary and I would or should go to bed together, so I dithered about it until she reached up to grab my jaw and shake my head, saying, “Tom, I haven’t had a friend on the side for the last nineteen months. That’s a long time. And don’t say you’re sorry.”
“I didn’t plan to say a word,” I assured her, though some time later I did say, “Thank you,” which made her laugh again. And yesterday morning she was the one who said, “Thank you,” adding, “We’ll have to do that at least three times a day for a good long while to get caught up.”
“I’ll give it my full attention,” I said. “But you aren’t going to be ogled and fondled and propositioned by all those guys out there in the world any more.”
“Of course not. When they look at me, they’ll see you in my eyes.”
“You bet they will.”
Which was the only moment she showed any uncertainty at all. About to get out of bed, she paused to look back over her shoulder, frowning slightly. “Tom,” she said, “you are home to stay, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t put up with it twice,” I said. “And I do love you, Mary, and I don’t want to lose you.”
She smiled, saying, “I wasn’t sure you’d realize that.”
“I’m beginning to catch on. You probably even know what you’d do if it happened again.”
“I’d leave New York,” she said.
I nodded, knowing I’d known that, and feeling scared, because I just might have been dumb enough not to know it. To avoid looking in the abyss, I said, “Do you know where you’d go?”
And that made her laugh, too. “Helena’s been writing me,” she said.
“Helena?”
“Lance’s old girlfriend, the one who went to—”
“Santa Fe!” I said, remembering. “The one who forced Lance back into Ginger’s apartment!” Which started the chain of events, really.
“That’s right. She’s been writing me for months, saying I should take the children out of school and move to Santa Fe.”
“What a bitch!”
“She says I could take wonderful pictures there.”
“All those sunsets,” I said. “Cactus. Pick-up trucks. Golly.”
“She says it’s wonderful in Santa Fe. She says the men there aren’t insecure,” she added, openly laughing at me.
“Oh, sure they are,” I said, but I hunkered down under the covers for a few extra minutes.
If the kids were surprised to see me that early in the morning, they were too hip to show it. (On the other hand, if they weren’t surprised to see me, they’re too hip to think about.) We sat around the kitchen table together, me with my coffee and Mary with a plain yogurt and the kids with Cap’n Crunch and peanut butter and jelly on English muffin and orange juice and a sliced-up banana and coffee with lots of milk (Bryan) and Earl Grey tea (Jennifer). We talked about nothing in particular, and when the kids left for school Jennifer said, “See you tonight,” almost but not quite making it a question. “See you tonight,” I told her.
In the grandness and folly of my round-trip renunciation on Wednesday, I’d forgotten that all work and no play makes Tom a naked man. I’d brought my office home, but all my clothing was still up at Ginger’s place. Therefore, early yesterday afternoon I called her apartment, got my own voice telling me to call where I was calling from (which meant the coast was clear), and then cabbed uptown, let myself in with my keys, and went into the bedroom to see if Ginger had taken the scissors to all my shirts, in traditional scorned-woman style.
No. Nothing of mine in either the bedroom or bathroom had been touched, and I was surprised and somewhat touched to realize Ginger expected me back. She thought we were still dancing the mating dance, that we were still just doing things to keep our interest up, and so she wouldn’t do anything irrevocable. Once she understood that she was dancing alone, that the music had stopped, then she would be really mad.
I packed. I left my keys on the kitchen table, and went away. I would have done something about my voice on the answering machine, but what was there to do? “This is Tom Diskant, I’m not here right now, call me at...” and so on. Well, exactly. Everything in the world was topsy-turvy, and my answering machine message was still accurate.
Tuesday, October 11th
The Christmas Book! At last.
I have held a copy in my hands. It is beside me on the desk as I type, and it is beautiful. All the hassles, all the trouble, the three editors, everything, it was all worth it. The book is big and gorgeous and thoughtful and rich and magnificent. My introduction isn’t as pompous as I’d feared, and the cheap color reproduction process looks great.
Dewey called this morning, about eleven-thirty, to say the books were in. This is a test run, about twenty-five copies or so to make sure everything’s working well (and in fact there are a couple of pages with color problems and a few last-minute corrections and improvements), and then on Thursday they’ll actually start the print run. The test copies were driven to the Craig offices from the printer in Pennsylvania this morning, and when they arrived Dewey phoned and offered to messenger a copy down to me.
It was a changed Dewey. This is the first I’ve spoken with him since that astounding phone call from his putative father, and I guess old F. Ringwald Heffernan must have been on the level after all, because this was a subdued and friendly and accommodating Dewey, obviously doing his best to make amends. “It’s a really terrific book, Tom,” he said, and actually added, “I think you were right that the other thing didn’t really fit in.”
“Thank you, Dewey,” I said, prepared to be magnanimous.