The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  I opened the Olivetti case and it was like taking the lid off a coffin. Ten-year-old Correctotapes came flying out. They fluttered to the floor. I picked them up and examined them. ‘Friend’ and ‘lymph nodes’ said one. Another said ‘would you please’, and ‘in response’.

  I took the typewriter out of the case. This time it was a postcard that fell out. It floated to the floor.

  It was a postcard of the Diadoumenos.

  Let me try and describe what it was like to be sitting alone in that villa and to find that postcard of the Diadoumenos. It was like walking across that empty room again and bumping into that statue and then standing back to examine the pose, and wondering where the arms would have been on this statue if they hadn’t been chopped off and backing into someone, and turning around, and seeing you.

  Seeing you and remembering how you looked that day, and what you had said: ‘There is an answer. There is only one place where the arms could have been. All you have to do is find the centre of gravity.’

  And watching you put your arms out in the same pose as the Diadoumenos, and saying, ‘See? He was tying a band around his head.’

  And knowing, just like that. Feeling a sting on my cheeks, as if you had slapped me. Losing my balance. And then watching you break the pose and offer me your arms.

  Feeling your hands on my shoulder. Hearing you say, ‘Are you all right?’ And knowing I would always be all right, so long as I could put my arms around you.

  That was when I knew what I’d come back for, and what I’d lost, what your goddamn friends had taken away from me. I began to cry and in my mind I screamed at them. Bitches!

  I had another drink and a few more cigarettes. (By now I was chain-smoking.) When my Bic ran out of lighter fluid, I went inside to look for some matches. I went through the shirts hanging in the wardrobe. Finding nothing, I fished into my tweed jacket, which was hanging at the back. In the inside pocket, I found your passports.

  I opened up the children’s passports, looked at their little faces, cried as I remembered the day the pictures were taken. I opened your passport, looked at your picture. Memories rolled out of me like dead stones down a hill.

  It was some time before I realized that if I had your passports, that meant you did not. That meant…

  I walked out on to the verandah and looked out into the night. No moon. No stars. Just a few strings of lights.

  I stared into the blackness and thought of you as I last saw you, on the other side of that metal detector. Clutching two children, crouching between an overturned stroller and an upside-down carseat. Trying to tell me something. Calling my name. Your face deformed by desperation as you cry, ‘Mike! Don’t go without…’

  Don’t go without…

  I stared into the blackness and then I walked with slow, reluctant steps into the bedroom. I opened the wardrobe. Took out my tweed jacket. Reached into the breast pocket and brought out the tickets. My tickets –

  And your tickets.

  I walked over to the bedside table. There, with the piles of loose Greek and American change, were the keys to 2238 Hyde. My set. And your set. I looked at my watch.

  How many days had passed since I had left you and the children stranded in front of the metal detector? Without passports. Without tickets or boarding passes. Without keys to the apartment. Without a car. Without even a …

  I subjected my tweed jacket to a second search. Well, that’s one thing, I thought. At least she has her chequebook. Then I remembered there wasn’t any money in the joint account. It had all gone into money-market funds, which were in my name only, and into traveller’s cheques, which were not only in my name but in my pocket.

  17

  Never in my life had I tried harder, and with less success, to make a call as I did on my last morning in Molivos. As I sat in that stuffy purgatory of a telephone office, I kept thinking of you crouching in front of that metal detector. I knew it was only in my mind’s eye that you were standing stricken and abandoned, hungry, dishevelled and penniless in the middle of a departure lounge. But if, in real life, you were OK, then who was this harpy I kept getting through to, who kept screaming ‘La Señora no está’ at me and then slamming down the phone?

  In retrospect, yes, right. She was the babysitter. But how was I supposed to know? I had twenty words of Spanish, none of which I had used since my freshman year in college, and I was desperately trying to string them together to ask for some news of my family. And this honking bitch you had hired kept hanging up on me. It made me want to tear the phone out of the wall. Although I assure you. I didn’t.

  I think it was when I tried to reach you from Hellenikon Airport (and got Eluisa) that I first heard the children moaning in the background.

  I can’t tell you what that did to me.

  Twice (in Fiumicino Airport and then later that same afternoon at Heathrow) I tried to ask to speak to them. She wouldn’t let me.

  Never has a journey half-way across the world seemed longer.

  When I called you from JFK, it was 7 p.m. your time. You were still not home. I could hear a monster movie in the background. Thank God I couldn’t tell which one.

  When I tried to reach you from St Louis, a man answered. ‘¿Bueno?’ he drawled. ‘¿Bueno?’ I was sure I had dialled the wrong number, so I hung up and dialled again. The same man answered. ‘Ricardo, ¿eres tu?’ he asked. I could hear salsa music in the background.

  When I finally staggered through the front door of 2238 Hyde at four o’clock the following afternoon (and again, I’ll spare you the details of my fiasco-ridden passage from coast to coast, suffice it to say that I was bumped off more flights in a day than most people are in a lifetime)… when I finally dragged our bags into the downstairs lobby, I could hear the same music floating down the stairwell.

  I could not quite bring myself to accept that it was coming from our apartment. But the closer the elevator drew to the seventh floor, the more audible it became. It turned out that the apartment door was open. The man on the couch did not notice me walk in.

  Let me describe this man for you. He was young, black-haired, and wearing boxer shorts. He also had earphones on. He was lying on his back with his feet propped on the far armrest and one arm distended above an overflowing ashtray.

  ‘Hey. You!’ I yelled. I got no reaction so I tried again. ‘¡Hola. Usted!’ Again, nothing. I was about to yank him to his feet when I caught sight of Maria.

  Maria was on the balcony.

  That’s right. On the balcony. She was not simply ‘on’ the balcony either. She was on a chair on the balcony. The chair had been pushed right up to the edge of the railing. She was not actually standing on the chair. She was kneeling on it, i.e., she was not in immediate danger. She did, however, have half a plastic Easter egg in her mouth.

  I didn’t lose my cool. I moved swiftly but silently to lock my arms around her. She was glad to see me. Until I took the plastic Easter egg out of her mouth.

  Her screaming stunned me. I staggered inside. It took me a few seconds to remember Jesse. Where was he?

  Clutching Maria close to my chest, even though she was trying to bite me, I raced through the apartment, calling Jesse’s name. He was not in the kitchen or the spare bathroom, or the children’s bedroom.

  The door to our bedroom was closed. I pushed it open with my foot. Peering through the billowing smoke, I caught my first glimpse of Eluisa.

  During the three days I had been communicating, or rather, failing to communicate with this woman on the phone, I had developed a nightmare vision of her. But let me tell you, her actual face was ten thousand times worse.

  She had her hair in curlers and a hairnet wrapped tightly around them. There was an incongruous pink bow on top of the hairnet that made you even more aware of the tautness with which her yellow skin was stretched across her skull. She was wearing a quilted aquamarine dressing gown whose stitching had begun to unravel. She had her feet in that footbath thing my mother gave you for Christmas. She was
smoking a cigarette.

  Correction: cigarillo. Another overflowing ashtray sat beside her, precariously balanced on the cushion next to her. And I don’t need to tell you about that sofa being made of the same highly inflammable material as the furniture in that hotel in Las Vegas. The one that burned to the ground? In which most of the deaths were attributed not to the fire but to the poisonous fumes from burning furniture?

  Teetering on the edge of the armrest was a bowl of peanuts. Yes, you heard me: peanuts. She had knocked it over a few times, too, because there were peanuts all over the carpet. I don’t need to tell you that just one of those peanuts lodged in Maria’s throat could have killed her.

  That was not the worst of it. The worst of it was, she was watching a video. A horror video. Yes, you guessed it. That’s the one. I did not pause to identify it right then, though. I went straight to the TV and turned it off. Eluisa looked at me and screamed.

  I myself kept my cool. ‘¡Estoy el señor en la casa!’ I informed her. This news made her scream even louder. So I said it again. ‘¡ESTOY EL SEÑOR EN LA CASA!’

  She lifted her hand to her mouth. ‘Aggghhhh!’

  ‘¿Donde muchacho?’ I demanded.

  Eluisa jumped to her feet. Babbling and gesticulating, she went careening towards the bathroom. I followed her. She pointed at the bath. It was filled to the brim with water. And bubbles. And toys. But not Jesse.

  ‘Hesse! Hesse!’ she called. No answer.

  She tossed her cigarillo into the toilet bowl and began to dredge the bath with her arm.

  ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ I yelled. I practically threw Maria on the floor. I plunged both my arms into the water. I can still remember how cold the water was, and my horrible relief when my arms did not brush against Jesse’s corpse.

  I turned to Eluisa. ‘No está,’ I informed her.

  She scurried out of the bathroom and opened up the walk-in closet. ‘Hesse!’ she shrieked. ‘Hesse!’ Her hairnet was coming off now, her curlers were askew. She gesticulated at a large pile of plastic dry-cleaning bags.

  ‘JESUS CHARIST!’ I yelled.

  But Jesse wasn’t lying suffocated in a plastic dry-cleaning bag. Nor was he spreadeagled on the asphalt driveway seven storeys below our balcony. He was playing Dr Who, in the service elevator.

  That’s right. The service elevator. The service elevator, that is, as far as we can make out, the same make as the service elevator that toddler walked into a few years ago? Only to find it wasn’t there? Remember? It was on the news? The parents were both lawyers? They had a Spanish-speaking babysitter? The child died?

  Even today I still cringe when I look at the service elevator door. I remember my sinking stomach as I listened to the service elevator ascend the shaft, going click-click-click as it passed each floor, bringing Jesse’s voice closer to us; bringing him within hearing range first of Eluisa’s cackle and then my beseeching whisper. As it passed us again on its way down, giving me only the briefest glimpse of my son in his helmet. In his cape. In a fantasy world so impenetrable that he hardly seemed to register I was back when, after what seemed like hours of desperate tapping at the elevator window every time he passed, he came to a stop at our floor, and I opened the door, and the ‘safety’ gates, and tried to take him in my arms.

  Only to have him prod me with his laser sword and shout out, ‘Halt, intruder!’

  ‘¡Gloria a Dios!’ was Eluisa’s reaction. As far I was concerned, that did it. I eighty-sixed her.

  But if I thought I could erase her from our lives as easily as that, I was mistaken. Because the witch had left her poison behind.

  I am referring, of course, to the soup.

  I did not notice it right away. As I darted breathless and frantic around the apartment, emptying baths, picking up peanuts, and setting up safety gates, as I tried to erase all trace of her, I could smell something acrid, something half-way between smoke and steam fill the upper reaches of each room, but I thought I was imagining it. Because if you had to come up with a smell that could convey the full extent of my horror every time I opened up a drawer or looked under a bed, it was that one.

  Here are some of the things I discovered that the children said belonged to Eluisa: six pairs of silver lamé ballet shoes; one pair of filthy stiletto gold lamé sandals; five false eyelashes; one jock strap; a plastic bag full of half-used candles; another plastic bag full of cat food and condensed milk; sixty-four prayer cards, all but one in Spanish; a make-up bag filled with old lipsticks and eleven pairs of nail scissors; and a pile of magazines that had almost all the people’s faces cut out of it. This was the woman you later told me was an Evangelist????

  ‘What do you think?’ Jesse asked me at one point. ‘Was she from outer space?’

  I didn’t know what to tell him – or what to make of his sunny Californian smile. He had the same smile for everything. Halt, intruder, I’m pretending to be Dr Who. That’s why I’m smiling. Oh, hi, Dad. It’s you. Same smile. Same smile again for Eluisa as Dad hounds her and Joe Bolivia out the door. Gosh. That was quick! I thought she was going to be a babysitter for a long time. Well, guess I was wrong! Too bad. She gave us lots of treats. And she was teaching us the numbers in Spanish. Oh well. Maybe one day I’ll see her on Sesame Street. Same smile.

  So, Dad, he says to me as he follows me, smiling, around the apartment. How did you like it on that planet?

  What did you say? Who told me you were on another planet?

  Mom, of course.

  Still smiling: Won’t you ever give us peanuts, Dad? Not even a teeny weeny one if I stop eating with my mouth open? Not even after I’m six? Look, Dad, you missed one. No, three more peanuts over there. Look. Ono, dos, tres. Can you count to three in Spanish? Still smiling. Why not?

  Didn’t your mother teach you how to say manzana and plátano? She didn’t? That’s awesome.

  It’s so easy, though. Look, Dad, here. I’m closing the door. That’s cerrada. Repeat after me. Cerrada. Now I’m opening it up again. That’s abierta. That’s good, Dad. Now you know four words you can share Eluisa. Oh yes, you do. You know plátano, manzana, abierta and cerrada. You don’t think she’s coming back? It doesn’t matter. You can say it to the new one. All babysitters speak Spanish.

  Same smile. Do you still have all that money inside your head? Mom said all that money went to your head. I didn’t?? You don’t? Oh good. Same smile.

  Fathers came and went. Mothers metamorphosed and went up in smoke. Spanish-speaking babysitters, came, ate peanuts, ran unattended baths, and split so fast they didn’t even bother to change out of their disgusting bathrobes. Sisters howled. About everything. It was all in a normal day. I kept looking at Jesse, at his bright white Californian smile and his large phosphorescent-blue videoscreen eyes and thought: Where is the infant I held in the delivery room? What had we done to our perfect child?

  Nothing phased him. Nothing was real. ‘Oh, I know that cry,’ he said when Maria bit my arm and screamed. ‘She wants her bottle.’

  Bottle? I thought. I thought we had gotten rid of bottles years ago.

  ‘Oh, I know that cry. She is probably angry because you threw away those God cards. She liked to play with them. Eluisa used to read them to her, but you didn’t mind, did you Maria?

  ‘Oh, I know that cry. She’s hungry, the poor thing. She wants to eat.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out until your mother comes home,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, we don’t have to go out,’ Jesse said. ‘We can have some of Eluisa’s caldo.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Can’t you smell it?’

  The soup was in our biggest Le Creuset pot. You know, the one you never saw again, because I threw it away.

  It was bubbling away on the back burner.

  It was grotesque.

  It had whole, unscraped carrots sticking up out of it like icebergs, and the fat bubbling on the surface was two inches thick. It had a greenish tint to it. Not from parsley but from mould. But that was not the worst of it. It was full of bon
es. Jagged chicken bones that looked like strands of meat until they stabbed you in the throat.

  This was what our children had been ‘living’ on? ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Jesse. ‘But I cannot let you or any other human being eat that poison.’

  ‘Eluisa made us poison for caldo?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He looked impressed.

  I said, ‘Let’s see if we can find something else.’

  We were looking through the stinking nightmare of the refrigerator when Jesse had an idea.

  ‘Something better,’ he informed me. ‘Something delicious. Something so delicious when you see it you’ll be happy Eluisa’s one of the people in your neighbourhood.

  ‘The nice thing about Eluisa,’ he continued, ‘is that she brings us special treats to make us happy.’ He went into the foyer and came back with a carrier bag that I had somehow missed. He reached in and brought out a mason jar stuffed with chocolate éclairs.

  Yes, you heard me right. I said chocolate éclairs. After all your ranting and raving about nutrition and health foods, you had left your children in the care of someone who fed them chocolate éclairs. And they weren’t even fresh. The cream was yellow. Naturally I couldn’t let the children eat them. Naturally the children were upset. Especially Maria.

  It was Jesse who thought of a way to calm her down.

  ‘I think we could cheer her up with a very special treat.’ He smiled at me. ‘Watch this,’ he said.

  He took Maria’s hand. ‘Maria?’ he said, mimicking the falsetto of a condescending adult. ‘Would you like me to give you something very special? Something … pink?’ Maria sniffed. ‘Something nice and round and pink that tastes like candy?’ She bared her teeth. ‘OK, then. I’ll get you some. But only if you’re quiet. Hear?’