Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

So we talked. Her name is Lynn Mulligan, she’s tall and quite attractive, early thirties, and in truth she was in New York because she’d talked the company into relocating her to their advertising liaison office in New York. Seems her marriage recently came to an end, so she wants to pick up the kids and move out of Atlanta. She’ll make the move after Christmas, so what she initially wanted to talk about was apartments and schools and all the rest of it.

But then the subject of Happy Happy Happy came up, and when I described our failure to get Hallmark to sponsor and subsidize the project, she suddenly said, “We might.”

“You might what?”

“Be interested in the book. Will it be published by next fall?”

“It could be,” I said.

“If Coca-Cola could get some placement in the book,” she said, “maybe something on the jacket and title page—”

“Lovely,” I said. “But why?”

“Well, we might take a printing,” she said, “make it the corporate Christmas present next year. Say twenty, twenty-five thousand copies.”

Hubert Van Driin has been known to do hardcover printings of specialized nostalgia books of twenty-five hundred copies. If I go into his office with one customer’s order for twenty-five thousand, his gaiters will absolutely snap. His bow tie will spin like an airplane propeller. He’ll have to go home and change his trousers.

Lynn is back in Atlanta now, laying the groundwork for the idea, and I won’t know until after the first of the year, but I am very hopeful. On the other hand, I am for the moment leaving Happy on the back burner, to concentrate on Highest Previous Score ; I have seen great expectations sag before.

Whether this Coca-Cola deal works out or not, my having met Lynn at least proved one thing to me; I’m home for good. If I were on the alert for another Ginger, by golly, here she is. And she made it clear she wouldn’t hate it if I made overtures.

But I did not, and I won’t. I remember now why Mary and I got together in the first place, and it was because we belonged together. I’d allowed myself to forget that over the years. With Mary the only steadfastness in this constantly shifting and ridiculous life, it became easier and easier not to notice her.

Or, that is, not to notice any but the bad parts, the little annoyances and irritations that every one of us distributes like a squid’s surrounding cloud of ink. Mary’s dogged determination to become a first-class photographer, for instance, when she just simply was not graced with that gift. She doesn’t do anything about being a first-class photographer, just gets up every morning as the same old bush-league picture-taker and takes some more bush-league pictures, in the calm hope (not expectation, merely hope) that some magic transformation would have taken place in her eye and mind since yesterday.

In fact, her very calm, her bulldog staying power that looks so suspiciously like passivity but somehow is not, can become annoying. The smell of chemicals in the bathroom, there’s another. The fact that she usually knows more about me than I do. All of that ink gradually filled the foreground, obscuring the large and more important truths. And so, self-bewitched, forgetting I already had the Blue Rose, out I went in quest of it. That’s not a mistake I’ll make twice. (Apart from anything else, Jennifer and Bryan would hate Santa Fe.)

I have just been assembling a bicycle. Do I look like somebody who ought to be assembling a bicycle? Particularly with instructions translated from the Korean into some distant relative of English: “And the other hexagonal nut, interchange is made from the chrome bar through.”

Well, I’m through, and I’ve been to the bar. The Christmas tree has been trimmed, the presents assembled and assembled (if you see what I mean), Mary and I have drunk champagne and have made long lingering love on the living room sofa, and now she has gone to bed and I have roamed the house, restless, at last coming into the office to stand a while and hold The Christmas Book in my hand. One of the very few copies. What a nice book it is.

One unpleasant surprise was that the death of the book was not the death of the lawsuit. That, Morris assures me, will continue into the indefinite future. The Muddnyfes want my advance, plus punitive damages. Morris says it’s probably four or five years before I’ll have to think about the suit again, but I bet the memory of it will cross my mind from time to time in the days to come.

Gingers boy Joshua is still best pals with Bryan, and was here for a while this afternoon, so now I have an update on the Patchett family. Gretchen has won some sort of interborough grade school art contest, the prizes including an easel and various art materials, and is apparently in seventh heaven. Lance, who is in New York for the holidays, has announced he’s moving to Los Angeles after the first of the year, so I guess the women in Washington didn’t pan out after all. And Ginger is now palling around with a United Nations diplomat from Nigeria; the fellow’s wife and kids are in Lagos, and therefore less likely to be a distraction.

One of the necessary components in the recipe of life appears to be regret. We regret those things we cannot fix. Bit by bit I am fixing the harm I did to Mary and Jennifer and Bryan. I don’t believe I left anything to fix with either Ginger or Vickie, but one thing I do continue to regret: I will never be able to make it up to Gretchen.

If I had slipped one of her drawings into The Christmas Book , I could have wangled a second copy of the test run from the repentant Dewey, and now Gretchen could have that; an unpublished book with her drawing and her name in it. Because what does unpublication mean to a kid? She’d get a charge out of the book, no matter what.

Well, so do I, really. From time to time I pick it up and browse in it, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do with a Christmas book anyway. And the other day I looked again, for the first time in months, at my introduction, and all of a sudden I realized what, all unconsciously, I had been doing. (Most of the things I do are unconscious, I’m afraid.)

There is a tidal pull in great simple ideas, nowhere more evident than in the great simple idea of Christmas. It begins as a mere birthday, in deceptively plain circumstances, but at once the event resonates, becomes more and larger than itself, becomes in fact something other than itself. Because Christmas is not after all the birthday of God; that is surely Easter, when Christ does what only a God can do of His own volition: He rises from the dead. Christmas is something simpler than that, clearer, more understandable and less disputable: Christmas is the birth of the family.

It is this that gives Christmas its particular role in our lives, and that makes it at the same time both so banal and so compelling, why we sometimes wish to avoid it but never can. Other public days remember love, or labor, or freedom, or some moment of history, but the basic Christmas image is that mundane trinity: the father, the mother, and the Child whose existence brings the family into being.

Christmas reminds us we are not alone. We are not unrelated atoms, jouncing and ricocheting amid aliens, but are a part of something. which holds and sustains us. As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December’s bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same. Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.