The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  But she doesn’t climb out. Instead she starts choking and spluttering. The wetness spreads across his back. She sounds like she’s suffocating. He sits up to give her air. She screams. He stands up. She is gnawing at his shoulder blade between frantic wails. He has to find a way of getting this bottle to her!

  At last he hits on a solution: by standing between the two mirrors in the master bedroom, he is able to (a) locate and (b) fish out the milk bottle and (c) get it into Baby Roo’s little hands. The crying comes to an end. He is able to go downstairs. And even watch the baseball game, which is somewhat amazing to him. Except that he can’t stop worrying about the little bundle on his back. She’s not drinking the milk properly, she’s gulping down the air which promises all sorts of trouble, in addition to which she is, as he knows from the upstairs mirrors, all tangled up in this ridiculous shawl thing by now. How can he pay attention to this baseball game knowing that his daughter could be suffocating?

  He hits on a new idea. If he puts the TV on the far end of the counter, he can sit at this near end, or rather half sit on the stool with the rest of his weight distributed on the counter. And if, at the same time, he can have his shaving mirror propped up on the stove, he can also see over his shoulder, and make sure Baby Roo is alive even when she isn’t kicking. It’s precarious, and uncomfortable, but it’s the best he can do.

  23

  Kiki, meanwhile, is the picture of hard-earned Sunday afternoon indolence. Stretched out on the waterbed, watching the baseball game between his splayed stockinged feet, his eyes half shut … but look at his hand, look at the grip he has on the channel changer. Why does he have the sound turned so high? Why does he not even register a reaction when Mom walks into the room in her baby-pink towel robe?

  She pauses in front of the TV set, blocking his view. ‘Kiki,’ she says, ‘Kiki.’ He won’t say a thing. He won’t even look at her. ‘Oh, forget it,’ she says in her heavily accented English. She goes into the bathroom. Kiki exhales as she turns the lock.

  He takes a swig of his beer.

  ‘How are we doing in there?’ Ophelia calls from the kitchen.

  ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Do you have any more?’

  ‘Sure do,’ she says. She brings him in another plate of nachos. Actually brings it in herself! ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ she comments.

  ‘They’re great. You should cook more often.’

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Does it come with a kitchen?’

  ‘The Tahoe place? Sure. It’s got to.’

  She pinches his nose and makes to turn around.

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘There’s something else.’ He pinches her thigh.

  ‘Stop it!’ she giggles.

  As she saunters down the hallway, he has déjà vu: for a moment she looks exactly like she did the first time he ever saw her, at that bar near the medical tape library in West El Paso. What was it called? Lloyd’s? At that redneck bar, where, when he saw her that first time, playing pool, he had thought she was a biker.

  God, had he been knocked for a loop when he saw her at the tape library the next day! A girl who had a brain and looks and liked to shoot pool? A medical student who doodled and passed notes to friends while listening to lectures on endocrinal medicine?

  A. Long. Time. Ago.

  She has Charlotte in the kitchen with her. Charlotte is in the middle of a long horror story about her male colleagues. Ophelia is leaning over the counter and doodling while she listens. Her nods are heavy and convincing, but then she gives Kiki a glance down the hallway and rolls her eyes.

  He turns down the sound on the TV to catch what Charlotte’s saying.

  ‘So then the third woman applicant came in. A nice, attractive-looking woman, sort of on the young side but with a good CV, and giving out totally the right professional signals. My co-interviewers acted their enlightened best while she was in the room. But the moment she walked out, they started saying things like, Did you get a load of those nipples? And, I could sink my teeth into that ass. I wanted to let them know I was hearing them. So when we had our next applicant, a man, what I did right after he left was say to them, “You know, guys? I bet he could stretch to a good thirteen inches.” That caught them off guard for exactly two seconds, and then one of them turned to the other and said, “Sounds like he has one of those stretchy ones.” They thought I was truly joining in!’

  Ophelia shrugs her shoulders. ‘Maybe they were paying you the ultimate compliment. Maybe the ones to watch out for are the ones who pay lipservice.’

  ‘But that’s so depressing!’ Charlotte picks up a nacho and looks at it as if it has hurt her feelings. ‘Because you see …’

  Her voice is drowned out by the sound of Mom sobbing in the jacuzzi. He turns the TV volume up and so misses Becky’s arrival.

  ‘I’ve just been with Laura,’ Becky announces as she takes off her cardigan.

  ‘How was she?’ Ophelia asks.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Becky says. ‘She sounded positive. But she looked dejected.’

  ‘Did she say why she took him back?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t want to press it,’ Becky says. ‘But there is something I want to tell you.’

  The other two lean forward. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well,’ says Becky. ‘You remember I told you I met Mike’s ex-wife in Nevada City last summer?’

  ‘Oh right, at that party. Her name was Mona?’

  ‘Right. And you remember we really hit it off? Well, she called me up last night because she’s thinking of moving to Santa Rosa. Anyway we got to talking and naturally Mike came up and so I told her the latest.’

  ‘Was she surprised?’

  ‘Not a bit. She said that during the three years they were together he totalled three cars.’ Becky picks up a nacho. ‘She also said that he was the one who turned her into a feminist.’

  ‘She’s pretty way out there, too, you said.’

  ‘Basically, whatever she does, she’s an extremist. Like she feeds her kid nothing but bananas.’

  ‘Oh no, not another one.’

  ‘But she’s a really good artist,’ Becky adds. ‘She says that the reason they split up was that he resented her work. He told her everything she had ever done was crap. He was real down on himself then, and she thinks that he took it out on her.’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s a pattern,’ says Ophelia.

  Becky says, ‘Is there any evidence he’s learned?’

  ‘Do they ever?’ Charlotte says.

  Before anyone can think of an answer, Mom pushes open the door and stalks through to the breakfast room. She settles herself down with her manicure equipment. She says something to Ophelia in Spanish.

  24

  Here follows an argument between Mom and Ophelia. The Spanish is too fast for Charlotte to follow, but she gathers that Mom is angry because Kiki and Ophelia are not taking her with them to Tahoe. Which is unreasonable on Mom’s part, Charlotte thinks – except then Ophelia loses a hundred points by writing out a prescription and pinning it to the bulletin board: ‘Mom. Go to hell twice daily.’

  After which Ophelia blithely suggests a walk to the park. Charlotte follows her friends downstairs, but her conscience does not let her go a step further. She tells them she has left her jacket in the utility room. Which is technically true. But already as she heads up the back stairs to the apartment, she is telling herself that this is her chance to nip back into the kitchen and remove the offending prescription before it does any harm.

  It is while she is in the breakfast room that she hears Mom sobbing an incomprehensible lament. Then she hears Kiki say in loud, emphatic English, ‘Then how about this? What happened between us does not constitute a …’

  The end of his sentence is muffled by a crash. Looking over his shoulder, Charlotte sees Mom running down the corridor with her robe flapping open.

  Did this constitute conscious prurience on Charlotte’s part or was it involuntary voyeurism? An hour later, as she sits with her family e
ating chickpea soup and chickpea salad, she is still asking herself this question, still terribly upset by the memory of this proud, sixty-year-old woman crying like a girl, and of the spectacle …

  Is she going to admit that her first thought was not about Mom’s feelings but her body? That this first thought was: Ugh, is that how I’m going to look in twenty years?

  What did that say about the sincerity of her humanism?

  She wonders if Mom saw her, if Kiki heard her, what he’ll do if he did hear her. Should she talk to him?

  She runs through the various options that are open to her: all are farcical, all betray at least two people.

  She gives up, tries to return her attention to the neat kitchen, the meek children, the ingratiating husband, the nice though monotonous meal.

  What happened here while she was gone?

  What is Trey trying to put over on her? That he’s been in a business slump. Oh really? she says, barely able to keep the contempt out of her voice, and why is that? Because certain clients who ought to have known better were lies and cheats. How unfortunate, she says, and then she has to listen to him talk about his big insight about the source of his passivity, and his new resolve, and this big push he’s going to make to put things right … does he honestly think that after this many years she is going to take him seriously?

  ‘Oh Trey,’ she blurts out. ‘You’re never going to get it right, are you?’

  He stops talking. She blunders on. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t believe in these new initiatives any more. Not a single one of them has ever happened.’

  Except that … she looks at him sitting there, wounded and uncomprehending, and thinks: Well, at least … the means well … he tries … he’s not… he’s not playing Russian roulette with her emotions … he would never … no, he wouldn’t because …

  He’s decent. And the best she can hope for.

  25

  I imagine Charlotte walking to the window and looking across Polk Gulch to Russian Hill, and wondering how we were. Would she have been surprised at the ambitious meal I had cooked? Would she have laughed or cried at the impassioned plea I made to you over dessert?

  I remember you sitting with your back to the window. Fingers of fogs were sweeping across the sky, now erasing Coit Tower, now restoring it, now pouring down Columbus to strangle the high-rises, now rolling under the Bay Bridge, while on your face moods came and went just as suddenly. You didn’t know what to make of my ardent promise to devote the rest of my life to acting out of character.

  I remember your muted objections to my plan: But are you sure you really want this? You’ve never wanted to babysit long enough for me to even go to an exercise class, how are you going to look after them full-time? How strange I must have looked as I so desperately overacted my sincerity.

  I am not sure, looking back, that I actually convinced you. But I do remember it didn’t take long to get you to give in – so you must have believed at least some of the things I told you about Eluisa.

  Do you remember how happy we all were after you gave in? How we did the dishes together, and the baths together, and how, instead of watching television, we sat all four of us on the couch going through the pictures and postcards I had brought back with me from Greece? Do you remember when I told the children the story behind the Diadoumenos?

  I remember: looking into their eyes, which were as blank and faraway as the eyes of the Apollo, and thinking (hah!) that all I had to do to teach them to look at the world the way I did was to feed them my memories, imprint them with my ideas of truth and beauty, beauty and truth.

  The things I said to them that night! I went on and on about Apollo’s missing arms. I said things like, It’s not important where the arms were in the beginning, or what became of them when they fell off. What’s important is to complete the statue with your imagination. That was what the imagination was there for, I told them: to complete the broken statue and make it whole again, to see the past inside the present, to look at a half-built house, a half-lived life and see what it could become. I recited ‘Kubla Khan’ at them. I told them about the daffodil and the nightingale and the urn and Ozymandias. To complete the lunacy, I even dredged up that Rilke book and read them the sonnet about the torso of Apollo – in German! And said to them, Listen to the sound of the words before I tell you what they mean: ‘Du muss dein Leben andern.’ To a three year old and a four and a half year old! How I expected them to understand immanence I do not know.

  That night I dreamed we were all in Molivos, or rather we were all just outside Molivos, on our way to the beach. But every time we rounded a bend in the Eftalou road, the season would change, or the time of day. Buildings would spring up out of nowhere – hotels, monasteries, department stores, tavernas – the children would run into them and disappear and when we found them they would be different ages from before. There was a marble archway we wanted to get to that kept receding like a rainbow, always a headland away. And as we ran from cove to cove to catch it, we were suddenly not in Greece any more but in San Francisco. Suddenly I was alone inside a sea of luggage. I dragged them up the hill to our apartment house, I dragged them up the stairs, kicked open our door … and there you were, making supper. There the children were at our dining-table.

  I looked out the window. There, instead of Telegraph Hill, was Molivos. And there, in the place of Fisherman’s Wharf, was Eftalou. There was the Parthenon on Treasure Island. Mingling with the flock of sailboats on the bay were red and blue caiques casting their nets. There were monasteries and terraced olive groves in the hills above Berkeley and Oakland.

  Molivos faded, Telegraph Hill reappeared and then faded itself to make way again for Molivos. One moment the Parthenon radiated so much light you would think the sun was rising behind it, other times you could see through it to the barracks of the naval base. One moment the water was battleship-grey; the next it was as blue as the Aegean. But even when the bay had nothing on it but a flock of white sailboats, I could almost see the blue and red caiques hiding behind them, just as I could see the olive groves and monasteries hiding behind the blank windows of the modern houses perched on the hills above Berkeley and Oakland.

  I turned around to call you to the window. When you came up to me, at first I didn’t know you. You looked as if someone had erased ten years of memories from your face. But then, as I stood there watching you, the years and the memories came back. Your face grew older again. Except that now, when I looked into your real face, I could see your other younger face hiding behind it.

  I could even see it after I woke up. While I watched you sleeping next to me, I told myself how wrong I had been to think I would recover anything in Molivos.

  But

  26

  The past was always with us. I had to learn to trust what I could not see. This is what I told myself as I kissed you goodbye after breakfast the next morning. I had to let you go, even though it felt like dropping you into darkness. I couldn’t begin to imagine you in an office with Mitchell.

  I managed to keep my spirits unnaturally levitated during the morning, but after lunch I made the mistake of taking the children to the Palace of Fine Arts. It was here it hit me that something was wrong, that somehow I had messed things up, that I had had a shot but failed, that we ought to have been in Greece.

  I tried to fight it. I tried to put myself back into the afternoon. I tried to enjoy watching the children get so much pleasure out of feeding stale bread to the ducks, tried to see the Palace of Fine Arts for what it was – a concrete imitation of a ruin sitting on the edge of a man-made duck pond – instead of what it ought to be. I tried not to fault the columns for their fake orange tinge, tried not to compare it to the sparkling white of weatherbeaten marble, tried not to think of the Aegean when I looked at the dull green linoleum floor of a pond, tried not to think of the gliding caiques I could be looking at instead of these predatory geese. I tried to accept the bed of grass instead of longing for a stark and rocky mountain slope, and a b
right-blue Aegean, and a smooth white marble ruin and everything else that made Greece what it was for me, and this place what it was not and never would be.

  I told myself that one day it would be this I’d miss, the luxury of an afternoon with two children who adored me and who thought I was as happy as they were to be feeding stale bread to the ducks. But the bad taste remained.

  Not that I had much time to sulk. It was not an easy summer, after all. I couldn’t drive, remember. I was in constant pain. I had trouble breathing, and, until I threw it into the bay, I had that neck brace. I was up to my eyeballs in medical bills, and cryptic computer printouts from our fucking useless insurance company. Do you remember how much I ended up having to pay out of my own pocket? We might as well have had no coverage at all.

  And then there were the – excuse me for saying so – fucking useless counselling sessions, not to mention the driver’s ed course they were forcing me to attend, not to mention the legal complications and the visits to expensive and condescending robots who gave few indications of having once looked almost human when we were at Hastings together.

  And the children – I know I tried to protect you, but didn’t you ever stop and ask yourself what had come over them in my absence? You would never have known how many thousands of hours we had spent reading books to them – or that they had ever set eyes on an educational toy. All they wanted to do was slouch in front of the TV on the sofa watching cartoons with their fingers in their noses.

  They refused to touch anything I cooked them. They kept asking for chocolate éclairs. When I explained why they couldn’t have any, they would burst into tears. The nights were the worst. I have never heard such shrieking.

  God only knows what was upsetting Maria. All I had to go on were the questions she asked. Why did I have a penis? Why didn’t she? I was never able to give her a satisfactory answer.