Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

745 3rd Ave.

New York, NY 10017

Dear Jack:

As you recall from our conversation of last week, and your telephone call to me this morning, I have it in mind to do a large glossy gift-book anthology on the subject of Christmas. I would combine already existing literature and artwork on the subject with original material solicited from the most prestigious writers and artists of our day, a list to include such as Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Andy Warhol, Jerzy Kosinski, LeRoy Nieman, Jules Feiffer and Robert Ludlum, among many others. I see my own function as general editor of this anthology, engaged both in selecting the materials from the past and negotiating with the contributors of the present. In my previous work, as you know, I have frequently acted as a compiler and interviewer, experience which will stand me in good stead in re The Christmas Book.

As I mentioned to you last week, I would very strongly want this book to appear this calendar year, early enough for the Christmas season. Because time is relatively short, and because you have expressed some doubt as to whether Craig, Harry & Bourke would be the right publisher for this project, I have made a preliminary discussion with someone from another house. My own feeling, however, is that The Christmas Book would be given its most careful and conscientious presentation with you as its editor, so I hope we can shortly come to a meeting of minds.

Yours,

What a day. My daughter Jennifer got mugged this morning, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Well, no, I don’t mean it that way, I just mean it caused me to postpone my meeting with Hubert Van Driin.

I was just about to leave for that meeting — in fact, I was tying my tie — when the phone rang and it was Mary, sounding more solemn than usual (she’s often serious, seldom solemn), saying, “Tom, could you come over right away?”

“Gee, I’m sorry, Mary,” I said. “I’m just off to a meeting at Federalist Press.”

“Couldn’t you cancel it? I wouldn’t ask, but Jennifer was mugged on her way to school.”

So I canceled, of course. Van Driin took it well, with his normal reaction to the world we live in: “The barbarians are among us, Tom. They came through the gates a long time ago, the liberals just waved the bastards in. Animals. The Duke knew.”

“I’ll call you later,” I said, and left the apartment, and went down to 17th Street, where I found Mary and Jennifer in the kitchen, both bravely not having hysterics.

My kids go to public school because that’s all I can afford. (That Ginger’s kids go to private school, at Lance’s expense, is an unstated bone of contention between Mary and me, never mentioned.) Bryan had sixty cents taken from him at school last year, which technically counts as a mugging though he wasn’t harmed or actually threatened in any way, but this was Jennifer’s first experience of street crime. Both the kids know enough not to offer resistance if you are outweighed, out-meaned or outnumbered; still, an assault for money is a tough experience for any person, and particularly so for an essentially nonviolent kid, as both of mine are.

Upon arrival, I crossed the kitchen to where mother and daughter sat at the table, and went down on one knee beside Jennifer’s chair, resting my hand on her upper arm, saying, “How are you, tiger?”

She tried a smile, but her voice was shaky when she said, “I’m okay now.”

“There was a knife,” Mary said.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, and clasped her arm harder. “You weren’t cut, were you? You weren’t—”

“No, they just...” She shook her head, frowned at her mother as though bewildered by some stray thought, then said, “He just had it in his hand. He didn’t even say anything, he just held the knife up and showed it to me and grinned real mean, and the other one said gimme your money.”

“Two of them? Older boys?”

“Grown-up, kind of,” she said. “Like you see playing basketball.”

“Twenty year olds,” Mary translated.

I could feel Jennifer’s skinny arm trembling, like when you hold a frightened cat. She said, “I just thought, oh, wow, what if I don’t have enough for them? Enough money. I mean, I only had, I...” Her face scrinched up. “Ohh,” she said, on a rising note.

Then at last she dissolved, and I held her very close, and Mary came over to pat us both on the shoulder. I sat on the floor, pulling Jennifer down onto my lap, curling her in against me there, rocking back and forth and holding her while she cried herself out. I said stupid things like, “There, there,” and “It’s all right now,” and, “Okay, okay.” Mary made coffee for herself and me and Earl Grey tea for Jennifer, who doesn’t like coffee, and after a while we got off the floor and sat around the kitchen table instead and drank our stimulants and Jennifer went about reconstructing her public persona as the hip existential city kid. “It was all such a complete drag,” she said. “I had to tell the cops they were black guys, it was like I was making it up, you know? An agent provocatater. And one of the cops was black, so it was really embarrassing.”

I love both my kids, with a mad helpless mute mortifying love that gets more bumble-footed the stronger I feel it or the harder I try to express it. Realizing Jennifer already had too much to bend her mind around at the moment, I mostly kept quiet, so she wouldn’t also have to deal with her father’s inadequacies. “The black cops know,” was all I said at that juncture.

She managed a little grin, a condensed version of her usual mode. “He looked real tough,” she said. “I bet if he caught those guys, he’d beat them up a lot worse than a white cop, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe so,” I said, smiling back.

Mary said, “Jennifer’s staying home from school today, I phoned the school and they know about it. Tom, why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?”

“Let me take you both out to lunch.”

Mary had to drape herself in cameras before we left, which used to annoy me toward the end of our marriage but which I now am becoming indulgent about again, as I had been when first we’d met. Mary, out of East St. Louis, had come to New York originally to be a photographer, having won some awards and sold some pictures at the local or regional level. When I first met her, at a magazine’s Christmas party, she was making a precarious living doing freelance research for everybody and anybody: museums, book illustrators, ad agencies. She would root around in libraries and morgues and find you just the right daguerreotype to go with your pantyhose ad, or the eleven specific paintings ripping off (or “homaging”) such-and-such a Rembrandt, or clear photos of every kind of European tram at the turn of the century, or whatever you want. Meantime, she was taking millions of pictures of her own, submitting them everywhere, looking for an agent, and hoping for the best.

Which never came. We married, we had the kids, she continued the research work to supplement my income, and she went on taking pictures, but very few have been published.

The problem is, she doesn’t have a unique eye. Although she’s always surrounded herself with hung copies of Diane Arbus photos, for instance, she herself has a much softer, more sympathetic view of the world, and could never look through her lens as dispassionately as Arbus. On the other hand, she has too much sophistication and self-awareness to go for “pretty” pictures, calendar art, so her work is stuck somewhere in the middle: too knowing to be sentimental, too gentle to be striking.