Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

There are these moments in life, when reality gets in the way of our best intentions. “Hmm,” I said.

“And the pictures come out confused anyway,” she went on. “I really have to do posed shots, because the whole point is to show other kids how it’s done.”

“And inspire them,” I suggested, “with pictures of a girl who can.”

“Yes.” She frowned at the prints. “Maybe if she held the hammer up in the air, it would be better.”

“If she could manage to look at the nail as though she wanted to hit it,” I said, “that might also help.”

“We’d better shoot another series,” she decided, pushed the contact pages to one side, and looked at me with deceptive calmness as she said, “Do you know what you’re going to do this summer?”

“We’ll try to rent a house for a month out on Fire Island,” I said. “Take all the kids out there.”

“Which month?”

“I don’t know yet. Depends on rental prices, what we can find. Ginger can shuffle her vacation schedule around, so we have some flexibility.”

“I’ll want to know pretty soon,” she said, “so I can make arrangements for the other month and tell you how much money I’ll need.”

I looked at her. “Money?”

“Well, I’ll have to take the children somewhere, too.”

Two months of summer rental? “I can’t afford that, Mary,” I said. (Last year, they’d stayed a month up in Greene County with another separated mommy and her kids, old friends of ours.)

She smiled, shaking her head at me; clearly, I just didn’t understand the situation. “We’re your family, Tom,” she said. “You don’t say you can’t afford your family.”

“I do say it. Besides, I’ll be taking Jennifer and Bryan for a month.”

“Vacation is two months.”

“Mary, that’s all I can handle.”

“You expect me, Tom, to stay in the city the entire summer?”

Oh, hell. “Mary,” I said, “what am I supposed to do?”

“You know what you’re supposed to do.”

Well, we wrangled for a while, and then she said, “Why not take a place for the whole season? Then you and Ginger could have it half the time, and the children and I could have it the rest.”

“I told you, I can’t afford it. I can barely afford the one month.”

“Then we’ll divide that in half,” she said. “Two weeks for you and two weeks for me.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no, you don’t.”

“I tell you what, Tom,” she said, with that infuriating smile. “I’ll let you stay out there during my two weeks if you want. And Ginger, of course, and the children.”

“No,” I said. “No, no, a thousand times no.”

She shrugged, unruffled. “Well, you’ll have to think of something,” she said.

So I spent time thinking about her ideas. She knew I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from my goddam responsibility — why, oh, why won’t she get a fella? — so it came down to one of two choices: Either I come up with the money for Mary to take her own month in the sun (which I very grudgingly acknowledge she should get, if I’m getting such a month), or Ginger and I share two weeks of our summer vacation with her.

If I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t have any problems, right? Or, at least not these problems. I tossed and turned and wriggled and squirmed on the end of that harpoon for several days before first broaching the subject to Ginger, who stared at me as though I had just dyed my hair green. She said, “Are you crazy ?”

“I can’t afford to give her a month, Ginger. And it’s only two weeks.”

“Only!”

“Think of her as a kind of built-in babysitter,” I said. “Freeing us for—”

“A mother’s helper.” Ginger’s voice dripped with scorn.

“In a way,” I said.

“No,” Ginger said. “No, no, a thousand times no.”

“That’s what I said when Mary first suggested it.”

“Oh, that bitch!” Ginger said. “That devious conniving bitch!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s so devious? Everything’s right out on the surface. Ginger, you can’t deny the woman deserves a—”

“Deserves! What about me?”

“We’re having a month!” I yelled, getting mad. “She’s getting two lousy weeks!”

“And they will be lousy, you can bet on that!”

“Not for us, Ginger,” I said. “I promise. We can live our own life, have nothing to do with Mary at all.”

“Living in the same house.”

“We’ll find the right house,” I said. “Something with a separate entrance or something. Besides, think of it this way. If Mary sees us together for a couple of weeks, sees how wonderfully we get along together—”

“Hah.”

“So we’ll get along, dammit! Do you have to be so goddam selfish all the time? Can’t you see—”

“Selfish! Am I forcing myself onto somebody else’s—”

It went on like that for a while, although louder. Ginger threw a book and an ashtray and a copy of New York magazine, but not at me. Then she abruptly stormed out of the room, slammed the bedroom door behind her, and wouldn’t speak to me for two days; so that’s how I knew I’d won the fight.

A new variant on the Pyrrhic victory. After arguments and rages and trouble with two women, I have at last achieved a goal I don’t want. Don’t ask me how such things happen, they just do. I am not looking forward to sharing a house with Ginger and Mary for two minutes, let alone two weeks, but there it is.

After the real-estate lady showed us several formica-and-linoleum chalets — places designed so they can be hosed down after the filthy renters depart — we finally found on Laurel Walk a place peculiarly suited to our peculiar needs. An older house, clapboard outside and homosote within, it has two bedrooms and a bath downstairs and one bedroom with its own tiny bath as a later addition upstairs. Out back, across the wooden deck, is a small guesthouse, complete with its own bath. That’s where we put Mary, and the kids go in the downstairs bedrooms, and Ginger and I will be able to retire to peace and privacy all alone upstairs. My hand trembled slightly as I signed the deposit check, but within the range of options open to me I think I made the right decision.

So why do I feel so nervous?

Well. Vickie Douglas. Well. This will bear some thinking about.

Normally I drink very lightly during a business lunch — nothing stronger than wine, and that paced carefully through the meal — but I was so troubled by the very thought of the woman, not to mention her actual presence at table with me, that when the waiter asked us if we’d like to start with something from the bar, I immediately said, “Bourbon and soda.”

(When did waiters start saying, “Would you like to start with something from the bar?” It seems to me that up till a few years ago waiters used to say, “Would you care for a drink before lunch?” Is this some sort of dainty-pinky euphemism, avoiding the dread word drink ? One of these days, I am going to answer a waiter, “Yes. I would like a barstool from the bar. You can send it to this address.”)

But not this time. This time I asked for bourbon, and Vickie said, “That sounds good. The same for me.” After the waiter retired, she said, “I could use a drink. I took the long weekend in Florida, and my mother—”

“I noticed the tan,” I said.

“I had to get out of the house. My mother...”

And so on.

We received our drinks and I slurped mine in a kind of heavy paralyzed frenzy, while Vickie slogged through a rerun of the argument she and her mother had most recently had on the subject of why Vickie still.wasn’t married. “I tell her it’s my choice, it’s nothing to do with her, she’s so unenlightened, she wants me to be an earthmother like her, nothing but soup and cabbage and babies, no thought of the great world outside her kitchen, the entire women’s revolution might never have happened, to hear her you could...”