The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  But the husbands were a problem.

  If I were to sum up their response to my budding friendships with their wives, it would be a massive effort to deny that anything had changed. I remember how, when Mitchell walked through the door, he would try to act like it was like old times when I’d drop by to discuss work. He would make some comment about a difficult tenant or an interesting conversation he had had with a redneck client over lunch. Then he’d make some reference to you, and what you were up to, and when to expect you home – this would be followed by some condescending comment about what a hard worker you were. He would flop in front of the TV, I would keep cutting vegetables for Becky, he would ask Becky what she had been up to, she would tell him, he would say something like, ‘So I guess you guys spent the day together,’ and she would say, ‘Well, just about, although I managed to slip off at one point and fit in a few biker bars.’ He would pretend to find this funny, but I could see it made him nervous.

  Kiki had to be grateful for my assistance, because, with Mom gone, they could not have managed without me. When Ophelia invited me for supper, I was the one to do the cooking, but, while Kiki liked eating the meals I made, he did not enjoy eating them in my presence. At first he tried to pass his discomfort on to me. He would play Superdoctor, ask me if I had ever considered going to a doctor specializing in sports medicine before launching into a fitness programme. He would quote coronary statistics at me and useless facts about pulse rates and high blood pressure, until one day Ophelia just told him to shut up.

  After that he went sullen at the sight of me. As Ophelia and I sat there discussing the issue of the day, he would wander around like a bored teenager looking for a can to kick. This was, however, preferable to Trey, who pretended he just didn’t have any time for me. He rarely came out of his study when supper was on the table. He claimed to be too caught up in his work. He would make Charlotte heat it up for him hours later and then pretend to be following our conversation as he ate. If he spoke it was to ask sophomoric questions about Society and the Establishment. Once he even asked me if it had ever occurred to me that life was like a game of chess.

  I remember Charlotte’s anxious eyes as I paused before answering. I remember that after Trey left us to Return to His Work, she tried to cover for him. ‘What a card he is sometimes,’ she said. ‘It’s like looking at someone without any skin.’ It was clear from her strained smile that she was saying not what she believed but what she wanted to believe and that this was a feat that was becoming more and more difficult.

  I remember occasions when his failure to take down messages or remember grocery items stretched her patience to the limit, and she would say, ‘Men!’ while gazing heavenwards, or, ‘Now I am going to sit down and count to ten.’ I remember also the edge in her voice that day when she and I were getting ready to go off with Becky to look at office furniture, and all Charlotte had to do was get Trey to agree to heat up the supper I had cooked while I was looking after his kids and he was God only knows where. The apologetic way she approached him! The way he dragged his feet! The praise with which she larded her requests! And the way she rolled her eyes for us when his back was turned! ‘God, what a baby he is!’ she said.

  It was the first time any of them had been openly contemptuous of their husbands in front of me. Because I didn’t stop them, they gradually became more comfortable about sharing what they called their little annoyances. I remember, for example, how comfortable Ophelia was about showing her exasperation on that night when Kiki was going nuts trying to find the channel changer that the new maid had misplaced. And how, on the morning the world stopped because Mitchell couldn’t find a pair of matching socks, and Becky went upstairs to help him, she turned to me and said, ‘Count the number of times I have to say darling to him.’

  I had no trouble acting complicit. I agreed with them. These men were babies. The time their wives had to waste in order to humour them! There was no doubt that they were coming to prefer me to these useless hunks. I took comfort in this – their attention being an antidote to your continuing coldness. The time arrived when I began to feel more comfortable in their houses than I did in ours.

  And yet, the more time I spent in their houses, the more apparent it was that there were areas of their lives about which I knew nothing.

  37

  I remember spending an entire evening going through Becky’s kitchen drawers, trying – and failing – to understand the logic behind her classification system. I wondered, for the first time, why she only painted still lifes. Looking at them in chronological order, I saw a worrying progression. I watched the flowers turn into vegetables, the vegetables turn surreal, and gradually take on a grotesque third dimension as they doubled over in stunted growth and finally burst out of their frames. Why?

  Every object withheld a story. What did it say about Charlotte that she had not once in ten years thrown away a shampoo bottle, that she also collected cookie tins, that, for all the evidence of good taste elsewhere in the house, the only object she had on her mantelpiece was a porcelain corncob with a mouse’s head sticking out of it? Why, when there were more than eight wedding pictures hanging on the wall, were they all of Charlotte holding her father’s arm?

  It was, I think, Charlotte’s strange wedding pictures that made me look at Ophelia’s walls. And it was, I think, after a counselling session that I first asked her about a picture of herself as a young girl.

  She told me it was taken on South Beach not long after her family left Havana. They were living in a hotel: her mother never got out of bed. Her father worked double time. Even when they moved out to Southwest Miami, he had kept his poor patients. He had died of undiagnosed hepatitis. Her mother was at the movies when it happened.

  She pointed to a photo of a parrot. ‘And that was Jojo. Another of Mom’s casualties. She’s never forgiven me for it. Although to be fair, I’ve never forgiven her either.’

  I waited for an explanation, but instead I got, ‘To think I let her in here to take over my life and try the same trick on me. She ruins everything she touches. If I’d stuck it out on my own maybe I wouldn’t have lost him.’

  Lost whom? I didn’t dare ask her because now she was crying. I did my best to comfort her. It was the first time I had ever touched her like that, but it didn’t seem like I had crossed over a line. It seemed the most natural thing for her to put her head against my chest. What seemed unnatural was the way she jerked it up again when she heard Kiki’s key in the lock.

  I was haunted that night by the story she had half told me. I think it was to find a different and safer way to satisfy my growing curiosity about these women that prompted me to go through Charlotte’s photo albums several days later.

  Here I found another fifties childhood, another sixties adolescence, the same props I had used – a comfort to rediscover them. When Charlotte came home that night, we stayed up until all hours talking about the kind of candy we used to eat, and the songs we had sung, and when exactly adolescence had begun and how.

  She pointed to a photo of herself at thirteen or fourteen. ‘That year I was deeply disappointed in any friend who even contemplated wearing pumps or stockings. And then a year later,’ she flipped the page, ‘here I am with my Mary Quant hairstyle and my miniskirt. What happened? Was it a record or some article in Seventeen or was it hormones?’ She leafed ahead. ‘And then here. Editor of the high school yearbook. My most desperate wish to be a Girl Friday to a foreign correspondent. And then a year later…’ She moved ahead to show me a picture of herself in jeans and a red bandanna. ‘My first mescaline trip. But if you really want to see something amazing, it’s this guy here.’ She got out her high school yearbook, and pointed out a Mr Ultra Straight. ‘He went to Harvard. You may have known him. In fact you may remember this article.’ She took out an old copy of Psychology Today. It had an article about campus sex. There was a spread of a muscular naked long-haired man reclining with a blonde, also naked. ‘Do you recognize him?’ I said I didn’t.
She examined the picture carefully and then said, ‘The woman was me.’

  ‘It was?’ Before I could get a closer look, she slammed the magazine shut. I tried to get it back from her. She wouldn’t let me. It was an embarrassing photo, she said, her stomach stuck out. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s not the stupidest thing I ever did.’ She wouldn’t tell me what that was, and so I ended up asking Becky and Ophelia.

  ‘Oh, she probably means that time she believed that guy in Harvard Square who told her he was a producer. She actually stripped for him for a so-called audition.’

  That’s what Becky said, but Ophelia said, ‘No, actually, what she’s most ashamed of is the topless bar. Or maybe that belly dancing class she took? Did she ever work as one?’ Ophelia asked Becky.

  And Becky said, ‘Yes, of course, she did.’

  I don’t know what shook me more, the information or the deadpan tone in which it was delivered. This motherly figure who was standing next to me boiling chickpeas had actually worked as a bellydancer in a Middle Eastern restaurant? Posed nude for magazines? Served drinks topless? How could she read Sexual Politics at lunchtime and then spend the evening working in a peep show? And how did she dare to allude to this strange past of hers in such a matter of fact voice and within earshot of her children?

  Then there were the weird phone messages always waiting for her on her machine, and her alarming stories about students, some of whom came on to her, one of whom she had once almost made it with. None of this fitted in with my picture of these women, and neither did the underwear I found in the middle of Ophelia’s den not long afterwards.

  It just wasn’t the type of thing I expected Ophelia to choose, but when I looked in her chest of drawers, I found even more elaborate items. Even a G-string! They had nothing in common with the clothes she wore over them. Another indication that I didn’t understand this woman. Another invitation to look further. I tried to fight the urge to look into Becky and Charlotte’s underwear drawers. But I could not control myself. For a day or two, all I did was look through bathrooms, closets and forbidding cabinets, until I got my comeuppance under a copy of My Mother, Myself in Ophelia’s bathroom bookshelf.

  It was a dildo shaped like a grotesque orange penis. It gave me a terrible fright. That night I had a dream? fantasy? that you were using it on me. I woke up in a sweat. But then the idea returned to me. I wanted you to use it on me, really use it on me. Why did I want that? What did it say about me?

  I don’t know if you know what it’s like, to be battling with the ghost of a dildo and have your spouse wake up and act like nothing is happening. I knew I had to talk to someone. But when I was with Becky the next morning, I was at a loss as to how to broach the subject. I asked her first what she thought of those self-help books. She gave the reasonable, middle of the road, effete answer. And so then I asked her if she thought Ophelia was upset about something. And Becky said well of course she’s in counselling and that’s always upsetting. What did she think their problem was? I asked Becky. And Becky said, Well, she’s been cagey about it. Which is her way. But it’s clear they’ve always had problems and it’s hard to tell if he fucks around because of these problems or if whatever he’s done is the source of the problems. I think her main problem is she never had a chance to be young. And so she’s looking into it now. I’m glad it’s not me! Do I want to be young again? Forget it!’

  ‘Sometimes I want to be a woman,’ I now blurted out. She didn’t skip a beat.

  Well, there was a time I wanted to be a man. Then I found out what it was like and decided no way.’

  She went on to tell me about a brief and distant lesbian affair. She told me not to tell Mitchell, who didn’t ‘know all the details’.

  ‘Sometimes I feel so passive,’ I said to her.

  Unfazed, she told me it came with the job of looking after children. ‘Not that I regret it,’ she said. She reminded me that Erik Fromm had said that having children was the ultimate sign of maturity. That made me feel better, but the next day when I was back at her house, I couldn’t help wanting to take another look at The Art of Loving.

  Although it was highlighted in strange places, it seemed like the most natural thing to lie on Becky’s bed and read it. That was where she found me. ‘God!’ she said as she kicked off her shoes. ‘It’s just like being back in Cambridge.’

  I had, of course, forgotten she had ever lived in Cambridge. Now all the references flew out at once. The house she had shared with Mitchell. The house she had lived in unofficially with the previous boyfriend. We must have known each other, even sat next to one another at Tommy’s Lunch. We established that neither of us had ever seen The King of Hearts. ‘But how about this for a blast from the past?’ she said, fishing into a box and coming out with an old and familiar album.

  It was the most natural thing in the world to be lying together on her bed listening to We’re All Bozos on This Bus’.

  But when Mitchell walked in, he did not seem to think so. Not that he could put his feelings into words. He, too, pretended it was just like the old days in Cambridge. ‘Except that my shoes won’t be as smelly,’ he said as he took them off. He flopped on to the bed with a stupid grin on his face. I resented the proprietorial way he set about massaging Becky’s feet.

  I don’t know, looking back, whether it was his attitude to me that changed that day or mine to him. All I know is that I bitterly resented his presence in his own house from that day on.

  Even his shaving equipment was offensive to me.

  I suppose that is why I started paying more attention to his so-called home office. What was this screenplay on the floor? Who was this Bruno who left weird messages on the machine? What were these final-warning letters from out-of-state banks I had never heard of? Since when did he have shares in a condo complex in Portland? I can see now how Becky might have been annoyed at my questions. But the more cursory her responses, the more alarmed I became.

  The big bells went off one afternoon in the Caffé Roma when we were talking about her trust fund. She told me that it was very important for her to have control over it, and that one of the things she respected Mitchell for was that he had never touched it except when they were buying the house.

  ‘You’re joking, of course,’ I could not help saying.

  ‘No, I’m serious,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’ve guaranteed loans and stuff like that, but nothing more.’

  ‘Becky! that’s a lie and you know it,’ I said.

  ‘No, honestly, this is an area where we don’t have problems. I have sole control over my money.’

  When we got back to her house, she showed me a document to prove this to me. It was the one Mitchell had gotten her to sign in August. I explained what this made her liable for. She told me I must be mistaken. I advised her to talk to Mitchell about it. After she did, the first thing Mitchell did was get on the phone to me.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ were his first hysterical words. ‘Do you want to bring the whole house down or what?’ He admitted that yes, he was, at least technically speaking, pulling one over on Becky, but that he had been breaking his balls to straighten things out, and although the situation was delicate right now, in a matter of weeks he would be on safe ground, and I had to realize his intentions were serious because hadn’t he kept up his payments to me? Hadn’t he been a good employer to my wife? ‘Just give me two weeks, or to be on the safe side till Easter. Then you can tell her anything you want.’

  I hope you can understand now why his words compelled me to ask you what was going on at the office. The fact that you refused to tell me made it that much harder for me to play along with Becky when she called me the next day to tell me that according to Mitchell I had misread the tell-tale document. ‘Don’t you think you should take a brush-up course on the law before you look for a new job? Mitchell thought it might be advisible.’

  I’m sure you can understand now how difficult that was to swallow.

  It was at this point that I began to
see who really ran the show in this and the other houses, and the lies these men were willing to tell, and the people they were willing to put into danger.

  My suspicions were only reinforced by the scene I witnessed at Ophelia’s.

  I had been babysitting. Ophelia had been at the hospital, Kiki had been due home hours earlier. I was standing at the window watching out for him when both of their cars pulled up to the kerb. They both got out of their cars to discuss something. Their conference ended with Kiki kicking a garbage can and getting into his car and driving off.

  When Ophelia came in, I asked her what was wrong.

  She said that if she told me I would probably not believe her. I promised that I would believe her.

  She said it was too horrible to even talk about. I said maybe it was important for her to talk about it.

  She said no, that if she told me I would never be able to use Kiki as my doctor again. ‘But how am I going to go on living, with these wounds he’s inflicted on me refusing to heal!’ She started to cry. ‘What he did to me is the worst thing any man could do to a woman. The all time worst!’

  Her wailing scared me. There was, I can say this even in retrospect, nothing sexual in the way I undressed her to get her into the shower. After I got her into bed, I told her she was worth a lot more than she thought she was. If Kiki was making her that miserable, she should kick him out.

  Before I left, I made her promise to call me first thing in the morning.