A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  God, what would she think of me doing this? Would she be proud? Or would she advise me to run in the other direction and not look back? She’d always told me not to be stupid. But then again, she’d longed for the truth about Nicole to come out.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the scandal first broke, we’d been going through old family photos the way that you do when someone is dying. You try to figure out what is worth saving, try to get all the stories you can from that someone before they’re gone.

  I’d brought the boxes to her bedroom and climbed into the bed next to her. Her limbs were so thin that she looked like an alien, head too big for her body. We laughed over awkward old school pictures, snapshots of me as a red-faced baby in her lap.

  I pulled out a few pictures of her and my father, grinning next to each other in happy times, my mother still oblivious about his affairs. I put them in the trash pile.

  “Maybe you should try to have a relationship with him when I’m gone,” she said. “He’ll be the only family you’ve got left.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Right. He’s a cheating asshole and a compulsive liar.” I left out the part I’d never told her—that once, when I was fifteen and annoyed with my mom, I’d e-mailed to ask if I could spend the summer with him in Chicago. He’d never responded. “I don’t think I need that kind of family.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to make your own. Soon, though, because of your eggs. My doctor said his son just broke up with his girlfriend—”

  “Mom,” I said, then paused as my phone dinged with a text from Miles. He had sent me a New York Post headline about Nicole. My face dropped as I read it, so my mom peered over my shoulder, and we digested the news in silence for a moment.

  “No,” she said, finally. In addition to the T-shirt with Nicole’s face on it, my mother had acquired a Nicole Woo-Martin coffee mug, poster, and votive candle. “Rumors. They’re making it up because they’re afraid of what she’s going to achieve.”

  “Yeah, probably,” I said, and put my phone away. But we looked through the rest of the photos in silence, moving backward in time, past my mother as a little girl, sitting red-faced on the lap of her own mom. The photos turned weathered, black-and-white. My mother’s grandmother appeared in the frame, a tall woman in her forties or fifties with a jaded look on her face.

  “She used to be rich, did you know that?” my mother said, breaking the silence. “My grandmother. She was worth millions, but she was married to an abusive man, and the only way she could get away from him was to completely disappear.” She traced her grandmother’s face with a bony finger. “She moved all the way to Wyoming, got married again out there, only moved back East after her first husband died. He got all the money, all the property. Besides some cash, practically the only thing of value she was able to take with her was this necklace.” She pointed to the necklace she always wore, with the art deco flower, which her mother had passed down to her, and which she’d later give to me so that I could wear it too.

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  “If she’d stayed with him, we wouldn’t have to sell this house to pay off all the medical bills. You could keep it, raise your own family here. Or at least I could leave you something, so that you’d be comfortable. The reason we’re not rich is because my grandmother did what she needed to do, and the system was stacked against her. Wealth isn’t some marker of superiority. It’s a matter of luck and circumstance, and those with power using it to keep everyone else down.”

  My mother looked me in the eyes then. “Nicole understands that. She wants to fix it, and the people with money are desperate not to let her, and that’s why there’s got to be something else going on. Don’t let them take her down.”

  “I’m not really sure what I can do to stop that,” I said.

  “I don’t know, do journalism!” she said, throwing her hands in the air.

  “Okay,” I said, laughing. “I’ll do journalism.”

  “I’m serious. You’re a writer, so write. And after I’m gone, after she puts all this behind her, I want you knocking on doors for her presidential campaign. When you watch her get sworn in as the first female president, you’ll know that wherever I am, I’m happy.”

  It was a small blessing that she’d died only a couple of weeks later, before Nicole’s resignation, still believing that things might turn around.

  * * *

  • • •

  I needed to believe that she’d be proud of me now. And oh God, all I wanted to do was talk to her, to tell her things and hear her thoughts and make her laugh her throaty laugh, but I would never be able to do that again, and instead I was staring down at my screen like an idiot, with tears pricking at my eyes.

  I shook my head. I was not going to have a breakdown over an astrology app. I deleted it and went back to Googling Margot.

  I found an almost overwhelming number of write-ups chronicling her see-and-be-seen event-going, all the way back to when she’d been in high school. How did a teenager have enough confidence to hang out with older celebrities? I guess it helped that Margot had looked like an angel temporarily deigning to grace Earth with her presence. I squinted at one old picture in the New York Post, in which a teenage Margot dangled a cigarette in one hand and slung her arm around a tiny, red-haired girl in a miniskirt whom the Post editors hadn’t deemed important enough to identify. The girl’s spaghetti straps were slipping off her slim shoulders, and she clasped her hands in front of her stomach as if she didn’t know what else to do with them. Her face was partially in shadow but when I looked closer, I saw that it was Caroline. Huh. They’d known each other longer than I’d assumed. Maybe that explained why they’d decided, against all odds, to join forces. In the picture, Caroline’s eyes were locked on Margot like if she studied her hard enough, she could mimic Margot’s ease.

  A lot of the write-ups about Margot mentioned her mother, Ann Wilding, who had been a fixture on the New York social scene in her own day. I thought Margot was free-spirited, but compared to Ann, she was practically Victorian. I clicked through pictures of Ann in the late ’80s, gallivanting around the globe. She flashed the cameras a huge smile while on an African safari. She made inappropriate jokes to the queen of England. In Paris, she smoked a cigarette with a clique of thin, chic women. One of them had red hair, Caroline’s eyes. I squinted at the names in the caption. Caroline’s mother.

  The tabloids had detailed Ann’s doomed love affair with a sheikh, which ended after three months because she wasn’t about to give up her life to move to Saudi Arabia (and also because he was married). When she found out that she was pregnant by him, she bucked all expectations and kept the baby, raising Margot by herself. Well, herself, plus the army of nannies and family help and the husbands from her two short-lived marriages after that.

  According to her obituary, Ann had died in a boating accident when Margot was twenty. God, what a tragedy. I stared at the obituary a moment longer, my view of Margot shifting again, until I clicked over to a new article and figured out which man Margot had been talking about during our tarot reading.

  Gus Wright. He was a writer and director of a certain brand of indie movies that received glowing write-ups in the New Yorker. I’d watched twenty minutes of one of his films once and found it to be unbearably pretentious.

  Now, Gus was in his midforties, which meant that when he and Margot had started dating, she’d been in her early twenties, and he’d been in his late thirties. I found a photo that paparazzi had taken of them together, leaving a club in the early hours of the morning. He had overgrown curling hair, like Bob Dylan at the height of his fame, and even though he was lean, she looked . . . small beside him. Frail, her body hidden behind his, her gaze cast down, her legs twiggy in her leather pants.

  He had talked about her in interviews. “Margot is a chaotic and gorgeous creature. And besides that, she’s a great h
elp,” he’d told New York magazine once. “I’ll show her cuts I’m working on, watch to see where she laughs and where she’s confused so I can see how a general audience might respond.” And he’d made a movie toward the end of their relationship in which a complicated, interesting man had an obsessive love affair with a young rich girl who was clearly modeled on Margot (though she was played by someone else, a former child star seeking a legitimate acting career, whose hair was styled exactly like Margot’s at the time). Apparently that character spent a lot of time lounging around half-naked. There was a scene in which her underwear rode up, exposing a hint of pubic hair, that had gotten a lot of play online. I’d heard about this before, but hadn’t realized it was based on an actual woman, a woman whom I now knew. What a strange and violating thing that must be, to have a doppelgänger of you turned into a sex object.

  When a reporter asked Gus three years ago about rumors that he and Margot had broken up, he’d answered, “I’d rather not talk about it except to say that she broke my fucking heart.” He’d made a couple movies since then, although they had both done poorly at the box office and had received mixed reviews.

  Now, even though Gus Wright was on the verge of becoming a has-been, he’d still found another wealthy, wispy woman to date. Maybe “woman” was the wrong term for her. She was twenty-two. Perfectly legal, and perfectly icky. She also looked small beside him in photos.

  I studied the pictures on my computer screen as I ate a turkey burger at a Park Slope café. I’d been doing my research at BitterSweet all morning—making sure that my computer screen faced the wall, just in case anyone was watching me—but I’d relocated for lunch. As I took my final bite, my phone buzzed with a message from Miles. How’s it going, Beckley? Should we get a drink and discuss progress?

  A smile automatically spread over my face. Lots of updates, I wrote back. When and where is good for you?

  He didn’t respond immediately, so after staring unblinking at the screen for a full minute like a moron, I went to the bathroom. The women’s room had three stalls, and a mirror in a shabby-chic frame over the sink. When I came out to wash my hands, a woman was reapplying her lipstick in the mirror. We smiled at each other. She seemed familiar.

  Then, she leaned forward and breathed onto the glass until it fogged up. Slowly she reached out a finger and began to write in the condensation, like I’d done on car windows when I was young. Friday, she wrote, in a looping script. She breathed on the mirror again. Same time. A normal woman might have passed out from the effort to fog up so much glass, but this woman had the lung capacity of a deep-sea whale. I watched, fascinated by her breath support, as she traced more letters: If you’re ready to join. Then she walked out without even glancing at me, the words already fading into the mirror behind her.

  I waited there a moment, trembling. This seemed almost too easy. Also, had this woman been watching me all morning, from BitterSweet to this restaurant, waiting for her chance to catch me alone? Shit, I should have closed my screen when I went to the bathroom. I power walked back into the main part of the café. She was gone.

  When I picked up my phone again, Miles had responded. Tonight? he’d written, and then named one of the bars where we used to drink after work at Quill.

  I hesitated, then wrote, I actually don’t think we should talk about this in public.

  Gotcha. You want to come by my office at the Standard sometime this week?

  Um, YEAH OKAY!! I started to type. What I wouldn’t give to be escorted around those offices, to stare at journalists I’d admired for years as they cracked their knuckles and wrote their stories. But then I paused, thinking of the woman watching me all morning, standing up to slip into the bathroom after me. I started the message over. This sounds crazy, I wrote, but I think they’ve been sending someone to follow me around. So I probably shouldn’t go into that building right now.

  The three little dots that meant he was typing appeared, then disappeared. I got ready to suggest that we rent one of those by-the-hour meeting rooms. Then, his three dots reappeared again and blossomed into a message: Okay, how about I come to your place?

  THIRTEEN

  Miles came over after work. “Damn, Beckley, this is inconvenient,” he said when I opened the door. “I thought you said you lived in Brooklyn.”

  “You snob. Bay Ridge is Brooklyn.”

  “Is it?”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t all afford to live on the Lower East Side.”

  “Offer me a beer or something and I’ll forgive you.” He grinned, but there was something shaky in his bonhomie. Nerves in his eyes at being in my living room, even for professional reasons. Maybe especially for professional reasons. He joked with me like he was acting the part of a friendly coworker who had nothing at stake, but he wasn’t going to be nominated for an Oscar anytime soon.

  I ducked into the kitchen and grabbed us each an IPA. That would help. When I came back and handed one to him, he took a long sip, then looked around the room, at the flowered curtains and the well-worn armchair. “This is where you grew up, huh? It’s nice. Comfortable, in that lived-in, loving-family way.”

  “Thanks,” I said. My mom’s design skills were never going to win any kind of award, but she’d done the best with what she had, making the two of us a home.

  “My only complaint is that there don’t seem to be any embarrassing baby photos?”

  “There are. I just buried them deep in the basement.” I took a calming sip of my beer. Then we sat on opposing ends of the couch, as far apart as possible.

  He took another long swig from his can. “So fill me in.”

  I launched into the summary of what I’d experienced so far. I didn’t embellish (I had no need for bullshit this time), and he watched me with his eyes growing increasingly wider, occasionally shaking his head in disbelief, or scorn at their elitism, or admiration at their inventiveness.

  “What about Nicole Woo-Martin?” he asked at one point.

  “I haven’t gotten anything solid on that yet, just a few veiled comments. They’re not going to talk about it with a nonmember, but that in itself says something.”

  “And I tried getting in touch with her staffer,” Miles said. “But that seems to be a dead end—he’s not responding.”

  I didn’t tell Miles everything. I glossed over the specifics of the tarot reading, leaving out the talk about Margot’s sex life and her strange comment of how she made men sorry. When I described the woman following me into the bathroom this morning, he blinked.

  “Wait, this is insane. They’re actually following you?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t just make that up for attention. I would’ve loved to come to the office.”

  “Ah, I thought . . .” He shook his head.

  “What did you think?” I asked, and we looked at each other, not saying anything for a moment. He swallowed.

  Then, a key turned in the door and the yuppie couple who’d bought the place—Sara and Rob—barged in, all sunshine and rainbows and privilege.

  “Jillian, hi!” Sara trilled. “Hope we’re not bothering!”

  “We sent a text, but you didn’t respond,” Rob said.

  They introduced themselves to Miles, before Sara continued, holding up a measuring tape, “We just wanted to come take another look at the downstairs.”

  “You did, you mean,” Rob said to Sara, putting his arm around her. He rolled his eyes at us affectionately. “She’s so excited to get started on this renovation. It’s all she talks about.”

  “Stop, you’re the exact same way!” She gazed into his eyes, swoony, practically ready to mount him right then and there so they could christen their new home.

  “Sure, yeah,” I said as pleasantly as I could manage, hoping they weren’t getting too antsy. I did not have the bandwidth to think about moving right now. “We can get out of your way.” I tur
ned to Miles. “So I guess we should go to my, um, upstairs.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then to Sara and Rob, “Have fun.”

  As I led him up the stairs, he whispered, “Well, they are annoyingly chipper.”

  I forced a laugh. Up here, we had two choices. My mother’s room or mine. I wasn’t about to take him into my mother’s—that space still somehow belonged to her, even though I’d emptied out everything but the closet—so I opened my own door. I hadn’t bothered to tidy up, maybe because I didn’t think he’d be coming upstairs, or maybe because I hadn’t wanted to be tempted to invite him in. A self-discipline measure, like wearing dirty underwear to meet up with an ex you know you shouldn’t fall back into bed with. Stacks of notebooks and magazines tilted precariously on various surfaces. I tended to shed like a dog, and strands of my hair wound along the floor. The room was close quarters, the perfect size for a kid, not so much for a grown-up woman. Still, when I’d moved back home, I’d exchanged my old twin for a full-size bed (currently unmade), and had managed to shove in a small, wobbly desk and rolling chair too.

  I fantasized about someday having a Desk with a capital D, some mahogany behemoth that would transmit creativity to me as soon as I placed my hands on its polished surface. Sitting at that desk, words would race out of my brain and onto the page like track and field stars. I didn’t believe any of the woo-woo, witchy stuff that some of the Nevertheless women seemed so into, but I reserved the right to make one exception: a certain kind of magic when it came to writing. There had been moments in my life when it didn’t feel like I was doing the work at all. My fingers were enchanted, moving of their own accord, and I was channeling something larger than myself, grabbing that larger thing from some hazy ether and pulling it to the Earth, where other people could touch it, and be touched by it.