A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  “Thanks! I never thought of it as being particularly giant,” she said. “But I’m from Texas, so I’m used to everything being bigger.”

  A tiny rat dog came bounding into the living room, yapping so hard that I worried it might give itself a heart attack. “Bella!” Libby squealed. The dog rocketed into her outstretched arms and promptly began giving her face a tongue bath. “Jillian, meet my angel baby!”

  “Hey, Bella,” I said, holding out my hand to her wet little nose. She gave my fingers a disinterested sniff, let out a fart, and jumped out of Libby’s arms, sprinting back out of the room to do God-knows-what, God-knows-where.

  “Bella, come back!” Libby yelled. “Bella?” She waited a second, then shrugged her shoulders. “She’s very independent.” She indicated a gray couch with fuzzy white throw pillows. “That folds out,” she said. “Or I do have a queen-size bed, if you want to share. But no pressure!” We arrived in her bedroom, decorated in pinks and peaches. The bed in question was a canopy, fit for a princess. An open door led to a walk-in closet, stuffed with bags and shoes, an ode to Consumer Culture.

  The whole place was a strange mishmash, as if decorated by a girly girl who’d been fed a steady diet of TV shows about women taking New York by storm until she’d decided that she was going to live that glamorous life, goddammit! She had a lot of stuff, but I didn’t see any photos of family or friends. The walls remained conspicuously blank. Perhaps she was an alien in a human suit, trying to pass herself off as a modern woman. Or, more likely, she’d just moved in and hadn’t had a chance to frame anything yet.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “Oh gosh,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. “A little over a year? Let’s find you some pajamas.” She pointed to a dresser drawer right as Bella tore back into the room, an old banana peel in her mouth. “Bella! Where did you . . . ?” Bella wiggled, gnawing on the peel, and then ran out of the room again. “Hey, come back here! Sorry, Jillian, just a minute.”

  She disappeared after Bella. I opened the drawer that Libby’d pointed out while I waited for her. In contrast to my pajama repertoire (old T-shirts, boxer shorts), Libby had a plethora of nightgowns, matching shirt-bottom sets in silks and flannels, cute little slips. Not an old T-shirt in sight. I stuck my hand into the mass of fabric. Maybe the old T-shirts were hidden on the bottom. Or maybe it was nightgowns all the way down. I brushed against something harder, colder. A picture frame. I pushed a lacy pink slip aside to find a picture of Libby—a young teenager, her nose slightly bigger than it was now, but undeniably Libby—sitting on a couch next to an older man with a healthy tan who had his arm around her. Her father? Her grandfather? Whoever he was, he looked into the camera stiffly, as if he weren’t quite sure he should be there. Libby’s hopeful smile broke my heart. This was how my father and I posed for pictures, back when we still saw each other. I squinted at the man, who looked familiar.

  Right as Libby reentered the room, I placed him: Roy Pruitt. Miles used to rant about him in the newsroom. A Texas billionaire who believed women belonged in the kitchen, who used his vast oil fortune to elect ultraconservative politicians to do his bidding. All the wealth and maliciousness of the two Koch brothers smushed into one man with very nice teeth. Miles had always been asking his more serious reporters to dig into the latest influence of Pruitt Dark Money. “This monster!” he’d say, pointing to his picture on his computer screen. “He’s one of the top five architects of our current political moment!” If I remembered correctly from some research I’d done after Miles had gone off on a particularly long rant, Roy Pruitt had a few children, boys of the Large Adult Son variety, all jostling to take over his empire one day. So what the hell was Libby doing with him? Beyond a general reverence for wealth, someone who believed the things that Roy Pruitt believed would have nothing in common with the women of Nevertheless.

  “Jillian?” Libby asked as I stood frozen over the picture. She registered what I was looking at, then the expression on my face. “Oh, drat.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just looking for pajamas. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You know who he is.” I nodded. She chewed on her lip, then said, “I’m going to open us up some wine.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “When I was in first grade, I thought my mother was a horse,” Libby said, sitting cross-legged on that extravagant gray couch, holding a glass of cabernet with one hand and picking at a fluffy pillow on her lap with the other, Rat Dog Bella snoring next to her. “That’s what I heard the kids whispering. I thought maybe she was like Princess Fiona from Shrek, you know? One thing by day, another thing by night? It seemed kind of nice, the idea that she could go galloping through a field. I snuck into her room at all hours of the night to check if her feet had turned into hooves. I really liked horses back then.” She took a long sip. “But I’d heard them wrong. They were calling her a whore.”

  She looked up at me then, her neck flushing pink. “She wasn’t a prostitute! Although not that there would’ve been anything wrong with . . . I think we need to support sex workers, I just mean—” She shook her head, gathering herself. “She was his mistress. One of those long-term, open-secret ones. Like, he bought her a house, and he came around to visit a couple of times a month and gave us an allowance. And his wife totally knew but nobody really said anything.”

  “Goddamn, men are pigs,” I said, and she nodded. “Did you all acknowledge that he was your dad? Or was it just like, This is mommy’s friend Mr. Pruitt?”

  “We did the charade for a while,” she said. “Eventually I got old enough that we dropped it, especially when my mom started lobbying him to set me up a trust fund. But he was never my dad in public. Like, he didn’t come to my band concerts.” I couldn’t stop a half laugh from escaping, even though it wasn’t funny, just fucked up and sad to imagine little Libby at a band concert, scanning the crowd for the evil billionaire who’d secretly fathered her. Surprised, she looked at me, and then half laughed too. “I played the tuba! I was good at it!”

  “I’m sure you were! I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, no, it’s okay. It’s weird, that that’s the grievance I still hold on to! Obviously I have other grievances too, like the fact that he’s a bad man! I realized that when I went to college and met people with different views for the first time. After that, I decided that I wanted to use the money I got from him to help the people he was hurting.”

  “Hence Fizzi?” I asked.

  “Yeah, exactly! And I donate to a lot of other causes. That’s how I met Caroline—I went to her gala last year and gave a bunch of money to Women Who Lead.”

  No wonder that she worried she’d only bought her way into the club. A thought struck me. “Does Caroline know? About your dad, I mean.”

  Libby nodded. “I didn’t tell her, but she found out somehow. She asked about it at my interview. Sometimes I think that she and Margot are, like, magicians. Like they can know all your secrets just by looking at you.”

  “God, I hope not,” I said, and she snapped out of some self-reflection, looking at me more closely.

  “Do you have secrets?”

  “Everyone who’s interesting does,” I said lightly. “But I think Margot and Caroline probably just run thorough background checks.”

  “Well, Caroline knew about my family, and she also knew that we don’t speak anymore.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, not since I decided to move to New York. I told them I thought they were closed-minded, doing terrible things to the world, and I needed to get away. They told me not to bother coming back.” She picked at the pillow in her lap harder, pulling off little white fuzzies and brushing them onto the floor. “We spent a lot of my interview on that, actually, about how I couldn’t be part of their lives anymore, and didn’t want to be anyway. It’s funny, at first I thought that I was getting the Nevert
heless invite in spite of where I came from. But now I think it’s because of it. That it’s impressive for Nevertheless to have ‘rescued’ me from the dark side.” She paused. “Maybe rescued is the wrong word. They’ve taken me in when my own father isn’t willing to have me over for Christmas, which probably makes them feel very . . .”

  “Magnanimous?”

  “Yes, magnanimous!” Alarm crossed her face. “Sorry, I don’t want to sound ungrateful! I’m so grateful. I admire everyone in the club so much! It’s just, all my life, I’ve never been able to tell if people like me or hate me for me. I thought starting over in New York would change that, but . . .” She finished her glass of wine, then wiped her mouth and hiccupped. “Well, at least most of the members don’t know about it. You won’t tell, will you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, and she gave my hand a squeeze, then let it linger in mine. Now I understood why getting past that secret door mattered so much to her. They wouldn’t let people in there just to be magnanimous. And we all needed to belong somewhere. “I really am sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So you and your mom don’t talk anymore either?”

  “Nope. She believes what he believes. Besides, I don’t really know how to respect her. The major activity of her adult life has been ruining someone else’s marriage.”

  “Maybe she really, truly loves him. You can’t always help it. I mean, I’ve fallen a little bit in love with a married man, despite my better judgment.”

  Libby gasped. “Raf is married?”

  Dammit. Again, I needed to get better at remembering that he was supposed to be my boyfriend. “Oh no, sorry, I mean it happened a while ago. Should’ve spoken more clearly,” I lied. “What I’m trying to say is that I think everyone makes mistakes. And sometimes you go down careless, selfish paths because you want to fill up that stupid gaping hole inside of you—”

  “Mm,” Libby said seriously. “Your vagina.”

  “I was thinking a more metaphorical hole, but sure, that too.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t mean to presume anything about your relationship with her. I guess I just feel like . . .” I hadn’t said this out loud to anyone before. My voice caught. I swallowed. “Like now that I’ve lost my mother, I’d give anything for a chance to talk to her again.”

  “Oh, Jillian,” Libby said, and stroked my hair. “It’s so hard to lose your family.”

  I didn’t sleep on the foldout couch that night. I slept in the bed beside her. Like lovers, or like friends.

  TWENTY

  A couple of mornings later, I sat in my mother’s bedroom, boxing up the remaining things of hers to give to charity as the contractor banged around downstairs. Already, sawdust hung heavy in the air of the house. I wanted to take all her clothes with me but that wasn’t practical, particularly since I didn’t even really know where I was going. I held a sweater of hers to my face, searching for a hint of her smell in it. Nothing.

  My phone rang, an unfamiliar number with a New York City area code. “Hello?”

  “Libby mentioned that you’re looking for an apartment,” the voice said. Of course Margot wouldn’t announce herself on the phone. She didn’t need to. That serene, rich voice couldn’t belong to anyone else. I had a perverse impulse to ask Sorry, who is this? just to see how she’d react, but I swallowed it.

  “Libby’s apparently very concerned about me,” I said. “But I’ll be fine. It’s the New York real estate market. That’s only, what, the seventh circle of hell?”

  “Caroline has a great broker,” Margot said. “When she was buying an apartment, she talked about this man so much that I half expected her to leave her husband and run off with him instead.” She paused. “Not actually, of course. Caroline would sooner run into traffic than get divorced. And Caroline would never run into traffic. Too messy. Want me to connect you?”

  “That’s really kind,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “I can text her right now—”

  “I . . .” I hesitated. “I think my budget might be somewhat lower than what Caroline’s broker is used to.”

  “Ah, I see,” Margot said. She exhaled like she was blowing out smoke. But Margot didn’t smoke, did she? I could picture her with an occasional cigarette, if she were really drunk. Now, though, a joint seemed more likely. Margot, on the other end of the phone, reclining on her bed in a silky robe, holding a joint delicately between her fingertips, blowing tendrils of smoke up at the ceiling. Meanwhile, I paced around, wearing a ratty T-shirt I’d gotten for free from participating in a college dodgeball tournament ten years ago. “In that case,” Margot went on, “I may have something else for you. Just give me a couple of days.”

  “You really don’t have to—”

  “I know I don’t have to,” she said, with an easy laugh. “But you’re in the club now. We take care of each other. Besides, it’s Libra Season.” I had no idea what she meant by that, but I made a knowing noise anyway. She exhaled again. “By the way, I was reading some of your old articles from Quill. They’re cutting, aren’t they? You know how to destroy your target.”

  I tensed, even as a small part of me thrilled to her compliment, to the fact that I’d caught her attention. Maybe something I’d written had made her laugh, or maybe she’d stopped and lingered over a particular turn of phrase. But a much larger part of me heard the alarm bells starting to ring. “Thanks, I guess so. I don’t do that anymore though. Gotta save all that cutting criticism for my fictional creations, you know?”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  Shit. The alarm bells blared louder now. A fire drill, or time to start running? “I . . .”

  “Because that district judge that Iris brought up at the Concerns Circle, the one who will be hearing the reproductive rights case soon, we’ve heard some stories about him over the past couple days.” My breathing slowed as she kept talking. “Lining his pockets in exchange for favorable rulings, things like that. Some journalists might be starting to look into it, but that kind of reporting takes time, and the case is coming up fast. We couldn’t help imagining how much an anonymous takedown—a well-written, incisive Twitter thread, for example—could fan the flames. Make some trouble for this piece of shit.”

  Was this how things had started with Nicole Woo-Martin, a casual phone call, the hitch of Margot’s breath on the other end of the line? “Are you asking me to write a hit piece?” I asked.

  Again, that easy laugh. “No, of course not. I was just thinking that if you were itching to stretch a muscle that you haven’t used in a little while, you might be interested in hearing some of the stories too. You might have some opinions on them. And stretching is healthy. But maybe I was mistaken—”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t love the idea of ruining someone’s life for Nevertheless’s agenda. But from what Libby had overheard, I had until shortly after Caroline’s gala to prove I was worthy of the back room, where they’d probably devised this plan in the first place. “I’m very opinionated.”

  “Excellent. Come meet me and Vy tonight at eight, and we’ll fill you in.” She listed an intersection in Brooklyn Heights as the meeting place. “And maybe don’t wear anything too flashy.”

  I looked down at myself. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” I said, then paused. “Wait, why?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and hung up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When I arrived at the corner, on a residential street full of lovely brownstones, I stood there for a moment, at a loss. Had I been stood up? Then, Vy and Margot materialized out of the darkness. Vy wore a men’s knit hat pulled down over her pale hair, gloves on her hands, even though it wasn’t that cold.

  “Jillian, hi,” Margot said. Vy gave a curt nod.

  “Hey,” I said. “Pretty street.”

  “Mm, isn’t it?” Margot replied. “Let’s take a little walk.” Weird way t
o do an information exchange, but hey, there were worse places to wander than this manicured neighborhood.

  She turned and began to stroll down the block of impressive houses as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Vy and I flanked her. “So we found one of the judge’s mistresses,” Margot said, staring straight ahead. “A recent one. And as we suspected, she told us that he pressured her into an abortion.”

  “What a scumbag,” I said.

  “Ah, but he paid for it, like a true gentleman,” Margot said in a dry tone as she turned down a narrow alley, lined by tall wooden fences shielding backyards from view. (Backyards, in New York City! We were in the lap of luxury now.) The glow from the streetlights didn’t reach in here. Vy walked slightly ahead of us, examining the fence slats, as Margot kept talking. “We’ll just need to find the check receipt from that procedure, though the mistress suspected that he might have a few other shady payments hidden away in his file cabinet, so let’s keep an eye out for those while we’re at it.”

  “I’m sorry, while we’re at what?”

  Vy stopped and tapped lightly on the fence in front of her. “This is the one.”

  “Oh,” Margot said, looking me in the eye. “His mistress told us he keeps his records in his home office.” She indicated the brownstone, looming up from behind the fence. “He brought her here once. Wanted to fuck her on his desk. She walked us through the layout. We thought if you were going to write the article, you might like to help with the research.”

  “So, breaking and entering?” I asked, my mouth dry. “Are you joking?”

  “If you’d rather not help out, feel free to go,” Margot said. Vy grabbed the top of the fence, which came to her eye level. She shook it, checking its sturdiness.