A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  “It’s stable,” Vy said. “Ready?” They both fixed their eyes on me, cocked their heads, and said nothing, waiting for my response.

  This was a crime. It was also a test. To gauge my devotion, see whether or not they could trust me. Either that or they were setting me up for a fall. I swallowed. “I want to help.”

  “Excellent,” Margot said, smiling, then pulled two pairs of gloves out of her pocket. She handed one to me. “Here, put these on.”

  Vy lifted a long leg up onto a horizontal slat, then pulled herself over the top of the fence in a single movement, like a great stallion leaping a hurdle. Margot climbed after her, delicately. I followed, hoping that I wouldn’t impale myself on a fencepost.

  Somewhere during the time that I was hoisting myself over in my ungainly way, the reality of what we were doing sank in. “What the hell,” I said when my feet touched the ground in the judge’s small, tidy backyard. “Do you even know if he’s home? Or if he has cameras?”

  “Don’t freak,” Vy said.

  “He and his wife are out to dinner,” Margot said. We walked up the steps to the judge’s back door. Vy began picking the lock with a credit card as Margot went on. “Caroline and Libby are eating at the same restaurant to keep an eye on him.” Libby was in on this too? I hadn’t thought of her as serious competition until now. “And if he’s bringing his mistresses around to his home office, I doubt he has cameras.”

  Vy turned the knob, and it swung open. “How do you know how to do that?” I asked.

  Vy just shrugged. “Most locks aren’t that strong. More for appearance than anything. If someone wants to get in, they’ll get in.” She loped inside. Taking a deep breath, I crossed the threshold into the judge’s home.

  I was too nervous to stop and drool over the place. Besides, there wasn’t much to drool over, anyway. It had good bones, but the decorator had clearly just gone to a Crate & Barrel and shouted, Bring me your finest selection of beige! I followed Vy and Margot down a hallway and into a home office, done up to look like a library. There was a filing cabinet in the corner. Vy picked the lock on that too, this time using a paper clip she’d grabbed from a bowl on the desk. Next to the bowl, a bust of some old lawyer or philosopher—very ancient Greek—scowled at me. Margot, meanwhile, sprawled in the desk chair, looking at the pictures and knickknacks on display in a casual, curious manner, as if she’d been invited over to tour a friend’s place.

  They were so calm about it, so practiced. Not how they would be if it were their first time bringing about a person’s destruction. More than ever, as Vy flipped through the file cabinet and Margot read some letters from the judge’s drawer, I became convinced that they’d been involved with Nicole.

  I, meanwhile, wasn’t calm at all. My ears were alert to every creak, every sound. At any moment, the judge could come home. When he did, Margot and Vy would disappear in some puff of smoke, leaving me alone and guilty in his office.

  “Do you need me to do anything?” I asked.

  “Just get a sense of him, his life,” Margot said. “In case it helps your writing.” I looked at the diplomas the judge had displayed prominently on his walls, the framed portraits of himself draped in robes. He wasn’t attractive or unattractive, just bland, the kind of man you’d pass on the street without a second thought. But sometimes the blandest-looking ones were the worst of all.

  “Bank statements,” Vy said, stepping back from the drawer and holding up a sheaf of paper. “There’s a charge at a women’s health clinic for the right amount, around the date that the woman told us it happened.”

  “Perfect,” Margot said. “Jillian, unlock your phone?”

  I did, hesitant, and Vy grabbed it from me, using it to take a picture of the evidence. Margot, meanwhile, held up the letters she’d been reading. “Notes too. From some prominent antichoice advocates, thanking him for coming to dinner and complimenting him on his golf game, making veiled allusions to what they hope he’ll do for them.” She too took pictures with my phone, until her own phone buzzed. “Oh, they’re leaving the restaurant.” She sighed. “I suppose we should go.”

  Quickly, they put everything back in its place, as if we’d never been there at all. Then, right before we were about to leave the office, they exchanged a look. Margot stepped forward and picked up the bust of that scowling lawyer, moving him from the desk to the top of the file cabinet, a tiny act of mischief. “All right, then,” she said, and turned to the door.

  “So go ahead and start writing,” Margot said to me, a hitch in her breath as we half ran back down the hallway, out the back door, and reentered the night air. She stopped moving for a brief moment and smiled at me. “And obviously we won’t tell anyone about this if you don’t.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Okay, which do you think is more evocative?” I asked Raf as we stood in his kitchen chopping onions in the morning light, both of us sniffling from the juice. “‘He has no soul, like a cardboard cutout of a man,’ or ‘He’s pure appetite, like a sentient Hungry Hungry Hippo’?”

  “Hmm,” he said, and paused in his chopping to consider, rolling the words around in his mind. “Hippo.”

  Libby had told me I could stay as long as I wanted (“Seriously, I love company!” she’d insisted). And even tiny rat dog Bella had been growing on me. But it wasn’t a good idea to get too attached. So when Raf had gotten back into town the day before, I’d moved to his couch.

  He had tried to give me the bed, saying that he’d be rattling around in the kitchen early anyway. He was working on a new recipe for his fricasé de pollo. (Of course he was. The glowing New Yorker review of his restaurant had gushed over everything else and then called his fricasé “simple and homey, if not particularly complex.” That had probably been driving Raf nuts.) I’d refused his offer. I wasn’t going to inconvenience him even more than I already was. Besides, it wasn’t like Raf’s old couch was going to ruin a blissful night of slumber—I hadn’t been able to sleep well for weeks now, and my entrance into the world of crime a couple nights ago hadn’t helped. At random flashes, I was back there, standing in the judge’s office, waiting for my consequences.

  Raf had refused my refusal. After a ten-minute standoff during which we’d repeated each other’s names in increasingly firm tones while he carried my bag to the bedroom and I wrestled it back to the living room, he’d finally relented.

  “Ha, I win!” I’d said, parking myself on the couch.

  “Or I do,” he’d replied, his eyes crinkling, and let out his signature Raf cackle, a belly laugh that seemed all the heartier coming from his beanpole frame.

  That morning, I’d woken up early, going through the document photos we’d taken the other night, the notes from the stories that Margot had told me. The more I learned about the judge, the more incensed I became. This wasn’t a Nicole Woo-Martin situation. This man deserved what was coming to him.

  Raf had come out of the bedroom in a T-shirt and old running shorts, rubbing his eyes. “Trade help for help?” I’d asked.

  “Oh. Uh, yeah, sure,” Raf had said. Then he’d made us both some strong cups of coffee and, with him unshaven and my hair unbrushed, we’d gotten to work.

  “I can’t get the flavors quite right,” he’d said, throwing an onion at me. I caught it with one hand. “Hey, look at those reflexes!”

  “That’s it, I’m giving up writing for sports. Don’t try to change my mind.”

  He laughed and we started chopping, our shoulders almost touching thanks to his limited counter space. He cut his entire onion in the time it took me to slice a quarter of mine. We moved on to other ingredients. He handed me some firm, plump tomatoes to dice, then poured oil into a saucepan on the stove. It was all a little thrilling, cooking like this, since my typical mealtime routine had recently consisted of shoving fistfuls of cereal in my mouth, or when I wanted to get really fancy, heating up some frozen Indian food from T
rader Joe’s. Now, as I explained what Margot had told me about the judge (though I left out the part about breaking and entering), Raf sautéed the onions, their pungent smell making my stomach rumble, and simmered the chicken in a sauce.

  He didn’t need my help—if anything, I was slowing him down—but still, he made me feel as if he appreciated it. And I appreciated his help as he listened seriously to the takedowns I’d come up with, letting me know if they were withering or entirely toothless.

  At one point, in the close quarters, we bumped into each other and nearly knocked the saucepan off the stove. Raf caught it just in time. “You know you have a huge, beautiful restaurant kitchen,” I said. “You don’t want to do the recipe testing there?”

  “Nah, I never do. Too much pressure that way. Makes me get in my head, having all those other people around.” He took a spoonful of the sauce out of the pan and handed it to me. “More or less cayenne?”

  I rolled the flavor around in my mouth. “I’m hesitant to mess with near perfection. But . . . a little more.”

  He shook in some spice and added a handful of fresh herbs. We each took a taste at the same time, closing our eyes, savoring it. Then we turned to each other, almost laughing with how good it was. “Holy shit, Raf. I think my taste buds had a full-on orgasm.”

  “Welcome to Flavortown!” he said.

  I squinted at him. “Are you doing Guy Fieri?”

  “I’m doing Guy Fieri.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah, I’m not going to do that again.”

  We laughed and dished ourselves up heaping platefuls of chicken stew, then leaned against his counter, feasting on five-star dining in our pajamas at nine in the morning.

  “Thanks for your help with the article,” I said once I’d regained my ability to make words, instead of just noises of contentment. “I’m feeling jazzed about it.”

  “I’m jazzed to read it. Thanks for your help with the cooking.”

  “Oh, psh, I barely did anything.”

  “No, really.”

  “You probably try out new recipes with all your fake girlfriends,” I teased.

  “I’ve never tried out new recipes with any girlfriend.” He stared at his fork, twiddling it in his fingers. “Or with anyone, really.”

  I suddenly became aware that I was not wearing a bra. Shoving the final bite of my food into my mouth, I chewed quickly and put my plate in the dishwasher. “Well, I’m honored. Now I guess I should actually write this thing instead of just talking about it, huh?”

  It probably wasn’t a good idea to stay with Raf too long either. I’d finish the article that day, I told myself, and then I’d rededicate myself to the apartment hunt with a vengeance.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I went to a coffee shop and wrote like a fiend. A poisonous side of me poured out, but it was righteous poison. How freeing it felt to be vicious in the name of justice. This man had wormed his way into power by virtue of nothing but his membership in the old boys’ club and now he was using that ill-deserved power to ruin the lives of people who’d worked harder than he ever had. He needed to be destroyed. I barely lifted my fingers from the keyboard the entire time, my coffee growing cold beside me as I crafted something that could work as either an article or a very in-depth Twitter thread. I wrote my concluding sentence. Only then did I feel how desperately I needed to pee. When I stood up to do so, my hip hurt from hours of sitting in the same position.

  Stephen King says that, after finishing a draft of a novel, you should put it in a drawer for six weeks before coming back to reread so that you can see it clearly. I left what I had written on my computer for the time it took me to go to the bathroom (roughly three minutes), then read it over and decided I was fucking in love with it.

  I texted Margot. Hey, I finished writing that thing. I added an exclamation point, then a biceps curl emoji, then deleted them both. “Just send the stupid text,” I muttered under my breath, and did so.

  Ten seconds later, my phone rang. “You’re quick,” Margot said. “Can you bring your computer and meet me in an hour?”

  “Sure. Yeah, absolutely. At the clubhouse?”

  “No, just us,” she said, and gave me an apartment address on the Upper West Side instead. Funny that she lived there. That neighborhood seemed much more Caroline than Margot. It was too normal, too full of Juice Generations and The Gap. Unless . . .

  “We’re not breaking and entering again, are we?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and laughed.

  A few subway transfers and one elevator ride later, I knocked on a door. Margot answered with a glass of red wine in her hand, her feet bare, wearing no makeup except for a slash of bright scarlet lipstick. I hadn’t imagined Margot to be messy, per se, but I had thought her place would be cluttered, full of love letters and half-finished bottles of perfume. Like a Parisian garret, except huge and expensive. Instead, this living room was tastefully furnished, with everything put away in its place and what looked like Real Art framed on the walls. Through a large window, the trees of Central Park swayed, their leaves starting to turn orange and gold.

  “Please, go ahead, sit,” she said, pointing to a brown leather armchair, so I did. I expected her to sit on one of the multiple other chair or couch options, but instead, she sprawled on the rug, lying on her stomach and cupping her head in her hands, her dress fanning out on the ground around her. I was starting to think that Margot was allergic to sitting up straight like everyone else. “All right. Read it to me,” she said, staring up into my eyes.

  I blinked, not sure if I’d heard her right. “Now? Out loud?”

  “In your head, but think it strongly in my direction,” she said, then smiled. “Or we could do out loud, if you prefer.”

  I cleared my throat. “Um, okay,” I said, my hands shaking a bit with nerves. I needed Margot to like this for what it could do to my standing in the club. But also, this was the first whole thing I’d written since my mother had died, and maybe I needed to prove that grief hadn’t permanently altered my abilities. Maybe too I wanted to show myself that Margot could respect me for something real, not just my made-up relationship and my bullshit novel. I took a deep breath and began.

  “‘Attention, women: Despicable men hide in plain sight. You pass them every day without a second thought. But if you’ve ever felt an unexplained shiver of revulsion, an involuntary clenching in your uterus, maybe you’ve just entered the orbit of the Honorable Craig Melton.’” I paused and looked at Margot. She was listening thoughtfully, toying with a strand of her hair. “Are you sure . . . Do you want me to keep going?”

  “Please,” she said, and so I did, reminding myself to breathe as I began to catalog the list of the judge’s faults. When I got to the Hungry Hungry Hippo line, Margot tittered. My shoulders loosened infinitesimally. I stood up and began to pace back and forth, balancing my laptop in my hands as I read more and more. When I described how this sack of shit who viewed the world as his own personal abortion buffet was more than happy to be taken on expensive golfing trips by pro-life lobbyists, Margot sat up from her sprawl, her eyes dancing with amusement and with something else. Maybe I was flattering myself, but I could have sworn it was excitement.

  “‘But,’” I continued, “‘how could the honorable judge possibly keep a promise to remain fair and impartial when he can’t even keep a promise to pull out?’” At that, Margot full-on cackled.

  I went on for a few more adrenaline-filled minutes, reading more details, more ways in which I’d ripped Judge Melton to shreds, until I finally came to the end and caught my breath, flushing. “So, uh, that’s what I’ve got,” I said. She bit her lip and I waited for her to say something. Pockets of sweat had collected in my armpits.

  “You are vicious,” she said.

  “Well, when it’s warranted.”

  Silence stretched between us for a moment. I clear
ed my throat again and sat back down in the chair. Then she broke into a smile. “It’s perfect.”

  I exhaled. “Yeah? Good!”

  She unfolded herself, rising to her feet, and pulled a flash drive out of the pocket of her dress. “May I?” she asked as she perched on the arm of my chair and then, without waiting for an answer, reached across me and inserted it into my computer. I breathed a quick sigh of relief that I’d renamed all the files where I kept my Nevertheless notes, as she moved the draft of my article over to her drive, humming something to herself. The way she was leaning over me, her head practically touched mine, her dark hair in my face, strands of it glinting gold. I didn’t actively try and smell it—I didn’t want to be some weirdo, smelling her hair!—but it was right in my face.

  Anyway, her hair smelled like jasmine.

  She righted herself and pocketed the drive again. Then she stood up and moved her arm through the air to indicate the living room, the magnificent view of dusk falling outside the window. “I forgot to ask you, what do you think?”

  “I mean, it’s gorgeous,” I said. “It’s funny, though, it’s not what I imagined your place would look like.”

  “Probably because it’s not my place,” she said. “It’s yours.”

  “You’re very funny. And very cruel,” I said. She just raised an eyebrow, a smile curling on her lips, and I blinked, my heart starting to pound. “No. What? Shut up. I can’t . . . I can’t afford this.”

  “There’s nothing to afford. It’s my aunt’s pied-à-terre. But she’s in a mood where she only wants to be in the Italian countryside. City life clouds her chakras. She doesn’t want to sell, though, just in case something interesting comes to Broadway, or her Italian lover dumps her. So it’s just sitting here empty most of the time.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “I spoke to her about it, and she actually thought it would be nice to have someone around, to get a little life in the place. It would be like you were doing her a favor, keeping an eye on everything. Think of it as indefinite house-sitting.”