The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  He says, ‘Tell me if you want me to take over.’

  ‘Actually, I find it soothing,’ is what you say back.

  ‘OK!’ he says, putting up his hand as if to fend off a punch. ‘Let me know when you need me!’

  ‘Right,’ you say, in such a way as to indicate that you are not going to lighten up no matter what.

  You turn the vacuum cleaner back on. As your gaze returns to the carpet, your expression softens. Huh. He runs his fingers through the contents of his top drawer. Then, when you turn the vacuum cleaner in the direction of the store room, he quickly shuts the top drawer and opens the middle drawer, which contains a box of matches, a joint, already rolled, and an ashtray – the kind that eats up smoke.

  He glances into the foyer. You are in view again, but your back is turned. He lights the joint, takes a heavy-duty toke all the way in and holds it, slouches down in the chair, and practically French kisses the ashtray so that it can eat up that smoke.

  Next time he is going to remember to stay away from modern offices with windows you can’t open.

  In the meantime, he thinks, just enough time for one more toke, and that’s right, doesn’t everything look that much better with the edges taken of.

  His desk top, for example. What a switch! Up until a few hours ago he’d had this wild and wonderful collection of postcards and clippings under the glass: the memorabilia from other people’s travels in the Third World, offcolour photographs and sexist cartoons. Yes, you were right to send them south. No, the IRS would possibly not take kindly to them. Yes, the magnolias you had bought will alter the auditor’s first impressions. Ditto for the air fresheners. You’ve been super resourceful. He ought to feel grateful.

  And yet… even as he looks at the row of Hefty Bags along the far wall, even as he tells himself that it was always going to come to this and that all things considered he is lucky to have an assistant so determined to clean up his act – an inner voice says it’s not so simple. There are things you can’t understand because you’re a woman, because you became a player too late in the game. There are things you cannot see.

  Now that the initial panic is over, now that he is stoned enough to think laterally, it is all coming back to him. He thinks back to his cowboy days when details didn’t matter, discipline didn’t matter, streamlined schedules didn’t matter, when he and I would sit around whole afternoons just thinking up wild ideas and smoking enough to stay mellow.

  True, we had had our differences, some of them serious, but deep down there had been an understanding. For example, if it been me around when this shit was going down, he could guarantee it that I would have done the following. I would have picked up my briefcase and said, ‘You asshole, don’t expect me to dig you out of this one,’ and he could have related to that. What he could not relate to, what he had to take another heavy-duty toke before he could even begin to tolerate, were your accusing looks and terse constructive suggestions and the horrible thoroughness of this all-night clean-up operation – it is almost as bad, he tells himself as he takes the smoke to the bottom of his lungs, almost as bad as …

  The vacuum cleaner turns off. You poke your head in through the door just as he is getting ready to exhale into the middle drawer. He pushes it shut again, and tries to smile without opening his mouth.

  ‘Everything OK?’ you say.

  He nods, he hopes supportively.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He makes a grunting noise that he hopes is not too gruff.

  ‘When do you think we should dispose of the Hefty Bags?’

  Why is it, he asks himself as he shrugs his shoulders, he hopes pleasantly, that the main point of conversation between men and women in the late twentieth century always ends up being garbage?

  ‘Would it be too much to ask you to do it?’ you now ask.

  No, of course not, except that he can’t hold this smoke in much longer. His lungs are about to explode.

  ‘So I can count on you to do it,’ you say.

  He nods. He wonders if his face is turning purple.

  ‘I’m going out for breakfast. What do you want?’

  Anything, he hopes he is telling her as he frantically waves his arms. Anything you fucking want me to want! This is worse than being married! He is going to pass out! He slouches in his chair, covers his mouth to obscure his face and, he hopes, contain the smoke.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he hears you ask with a note of tenderness in your voice.

  Yes, he thinks, definitely worse than being married. As he begins to cough in earnest, he throws open the middle drawer, dives down, does another French kiss on the ashtray, slams the drawer closed, doubles up to finish his coughing fit and sits up straight.

  ‘I was just looking for my inhaler.’

  ‘I was just looking for my personal tachometer,’ Trey tells Charlotte as he hurries back to his exercise bicycle.

  ‘If you can find anything in that closet,’ says Charlotte, ‘you deserve a prize.’

  Trey assumes a look he hopes is blank as he increases his speed. Charlotte continues to look at the closet. ‘It looks like you just took all the boxes and upended them.’ Which is exactly what he has done. How did she know?

  What she doesn’t seem to know is that a man in the building opposite almost certainly has his binoculars trained on her, that the framed poster over the settee has been shifted during the night, proving that this same man or an associate has inserted a micro-listening device behind the nail in the wall. When she sits down on the windowsill, she doesn’t even check for poison dust. When she pushes the curtains aside, she doesn’t see the handle of his knife.

  All she wants to do is talk about chores and schedules. As if there were no scheme of things larger than a house, no insidious conspiracy, no Satan, no God. What good is it going to do, Charlotte telling him that he has to be in front of the school at 3.15 precisely, if by 3.15 they could all be dead? She doesn’t seem to realize that the people they are up against are not going to listen to him when he pleads childcare commitments. They are not likely to accord him much sympathy when he asks that they not spray him with bullets until he has managed to track down all the ingredients for trail mix.

  ‘You do know what goes into trail mix,’ she says now. ‘And you do know it has to be delivered to the CLC this afternoon at the very latest, even though, as you ought to know anyway but probably haven’t bothered to put into your diary, the bake-sale itself is not until tomorrow. And you do know also, right? that if you don’t comply the kids will be suspended. Last but not least: I want the children dressed and ready for school when I get back from the pool. You do know what time that means, don’t you?’

  Yes, this he knows. What he does not know is why she casts a smile over her shoulder in the direction of Mr Binoculars. Why she looks so closely at the pile of tapes that have yet to be erased, why, when she backs out of the driveway on her way to the pool, she pauses, looks up at the same sinister window, and displays three fingers.

  She is not going to protect him –

  While at the same moment Kiki tells himself that Ophelia is going to keep pretending he isn’t watching her. Pretending that he’s not wondering why the new underwear, why the new underwear paraded in front of him when she says she doesn’t care if she turns him on any more.

  Every day is new and different with the human chameleon! Kiki wonders, almost affectionately, what her game is this morning, and what has caused her to change her tack since yesterday. He wonders, also, why she has made such an issue about Seb’s lunch. Sure! What the hell! He’s glad to make it! The only reason he didn’t offer is because he didn’t know it was an issue, and in fact, he’s happy to make it every morning if that’s what she wants. Hey – anything but to have to discuss it in counselling!

  He is not feeling too hot this morning. He guesses he drank too much. It’s strange, being able to come and go as he likes, and last night, for example, going out drinking without having to justify it to anyone … just looking at jail
bait made him tired. So much work! His body just wasn’t up to it, and then to have to talk to them … The big mysteries lately are here in this house: why the underwear, why the game about the lunch, why …

  ‘Why not ham for a change?’ he asks his son as he takes out the bread and the mayonnaise.

  His son explains that ham is a forbidden food.

  ‘How about peanut butter and jelly then?’

  His son explains that jelly has too much sugar.

  ‘Cheese?’

  He had it yesterday.

  ‘Just peanut butter. How about that?’

  OK, says his son, but not on bread. It has too many additives.

  ‘I guess I’d better check this apple for pesticide residues,’ he says, meaning it as a joke.

  His son nods and then says, ‘Can I ask you a question, though?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, mijo.’

  ‘Why did you have to talk to Mommy in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I didn’t have to.’

  ‘Why did you then?’

  ‘I told you. I didn’t.’

  ‘But that’s what she told me.’

  ‘Told you when?’

  ‘When she came back.’

  He notices his wife’s back freezing.

  ‘What’s this, Filly?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, I just stepped out for a minute.’

  ‘You didn’t leave the little guy alone, did you?’

  ‘Only for ten minutes, but it just so happened he woke up while I wasn’t there, but don’t worry, it was fine, really.’

  ‘What did you have to go out for?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘But

  ‘I said I’d tell you later, OK?’

  He stares at her back, suddenly aware that he is running out of time and chances.

  46

  The same thought occurs to us all at the same time. To me as I hunt the apartment inch by tell-tale inch for the missing studs. To the children as they watch and misunderstand me. To Mitchell as he recalculates his home office floor plan and finds he is twenty-eight per cent off. To Trey as he hears his wife, his enemy, return from her morning swim.

  To Charlotte, as she packs her briefcase for work, while supervising the children’s hunt for shoes and socks, and discovers that her gradebook is missing.

  To Becky as she herds her daughters into the car and then looks down and sees she is missing one pink sock.

  To Ophelia as she feels her husband’s eyes on her back and so nervously fondles the stud in her left ear and then the stud in …

  The stud in her left ear is missing.

  The next half hour is unbearable. She can’t get a second alone. She tries to take her own car to work so that she can stop off and make a phonecall, but Kiki objects, saying it makes no sense, as they are both going to the office and then off, together, to the counsellor. When she says she needs some space, he says, ‘Why?’ When they get to the office, he continues to trail her –

  Which is unbearable.

  As unbearable as Becky’s drive to school, as bad even as Charlotte’s hunt on her drive to school for a backstreet phone box. She is the first to get through to me. Ophelia is next and Becky last. All three are taken aback by the hostility in my voice when I answer their questions.

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’ … ‘I’m sure I do, yes, but you’re going to have to tell me the colour.’… ‘No, I’m not going to look now. You seem to forget I have two children with temperatures.’

  Imagine what it was like for me on the receiving end. Imagine me sitting on our bed, trying to get Jesse and Maria to take their Tylenol. Imagine them squirming and bursting into tears because it was so painful to swallow, imagine me picking up Maria to console her only to have Jesse ask me why I loved her best. Then imagine the phone ringing. Imagine me picking up the phone to hear Charlotte’s voice and then the call-waiting bleep, changing over to the incoming call, hearing Ophelia’s voice, asking her to hold, going back to Charlotte, telling her to call later, going back to Ophelia, asking her what’s up, and then hearing the call-waiting bleep again and so asking Ophelia to hold again, taking the new incoming call, hearing Becky’s voice, asking her to hold, going back to Ophelia, dealing with Ophelia, going back to Becky, only to have our conversation interrupted by another incoming call, which turned out to be you.

  You may remember that I shouted at you and accused you of leaving me stranded. Perhaps now you can – without actually forgiving me – understand why.

  It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized I was acting insane.

  What had you been doing? You had been doing your job. What had I been doing? Fucking your three best friends and then, surprise! blaming it on you.

  I don’t know if I would go so far as to call this an insight. Rather, it was a case of holding together in my mind several facts that I had been going to great lengths to keep apart. Even this small step in the direction of honesty was too much for me. The facts repelled each other like magnets. That is why I sounded so strange when you called back. In case you can’t remember this call in detail – it took me two or three minutes to identify your voice.

  After I put the phone down again, I actually had to repeat to myself all the things you had said to me so that I wouldn’t forget them. You were sorry. You had agreed that you had been asking a lot of me. You felt guilty about neglecting the children. You could see that I needed some time off. You offered to be back by noon so that you could give me the afternoon off. Which left me … how much time to find the studs?

  I went to the kitchen. Staring into the garbage at the remains of the home pregnancy test, I told myself I had to stop.

  Stop fucking Charlotte. Stop fucking Ophelia. Stop fucking Becky. But how? It is an indication of my state of mind that I really had to apply myself to come up with the obvious answer: I had to tell them I was stopping. That I couldn’t take the strain any more, either physical or mental.

  How would they take it, though? This was my next thought. I ran through the three scenarios, the three hurt and howling faces receiving the news. After which they … went where? Confided in whom? Discovered what? Sent whom to tell me what for? It did not take me long to figure out that it might not be wise to tell any of them point blank that it was over. Better to tell them I was exhausted and so wanted to put everything on hold while I took a break.

  While I took a break and thought things over. While I went away for two weeks with my family and tried to get some perspective on things. Could I get them to buy that? Yes, I could.

  The next question was, when? When was I going to tell them I needed a break? And in what order?

  I thought this over while I tied up the garbage bag. Again, it took me superhuman effort to arrive at the obvious answer. Face to face, in order of appearance, and as soon as possible.

  Which was why, when Charlotte called up again, I asked her if she was free for lunch.

  This, of course, is when the real trouble began. Because I had a standing lunch date with Ophelia. I might have remembered this if I had had a moment to think peacefully, while Charlotte checked her diary, but unfortunately I got an incoming call while Charlotte was away from the phone. This second call was from Becky. Who was upset. Who wanted to know why I was angry at her. ‘Something has happened to you since I left you,’ she said. ‘I have a sixth sense for this kind of thing, and so you might as well tell me.’

  ‘Listen. I can’t talk now,’ I said. ‘I have someone on the other line. Listen, are you home this afternoon? I’ll come by and talk to you then.’

  ‘Who are you talking to now?’ she asked.

  I lied without even thinking. ‘To my wife, of course! OK?’ I shouted. ‘Are you satisfied?’

  ‘OK,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘I think we should stop this conversation until both of us are calmer and I don’t have Laura on hold. Don’t you think?’

  No answer.

  ‘OK?’ I as
ked again.

  I got her to say OK back and then I went back to the original call. Confused by my own lie, I expected it to be you and so was thrown to hear Charlotte. When she said, ‘So listen. I have a student on the other line so I’ll see you later,’ I had no recollection of our having made a definitive date.

  All I could think, after I hung up the phone, was. Becky. What, exactly, had I done to upset her? I decided to call her to find out. I was relieved when I heard her say how glad she was to hear my voice.

  ‘I’m just so stretched today. Do you know what Mitchell is making me do? He is making me rearrange the whole house because of this auditor panic. And even though this is hardly a real problem compared to the others, I’m telling you, it’s really getting to me. I mean, it’s touching on something deep inside me, some childhood memory I’ve repressed, something that happened maybe when my father …’

  This time it was her call-waiting that interrupted our conversation. We both agreed, bitterly but laughing, that it was impossible to continue with these interruptions. ‘Let me call you back,’ she said. I said fine, and while I sit there on the bed watching Jesse and Maria watching the children’s programmes, I imagine …

  Becky, standing in the middle of a suddenly unfamiliar kitchen, taking the other call, which is from Mitchell.

  ‘Are they there yet?’ he asks.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Oh good. That means you can check some things out for me.’ ‘Like what?’

  ‘Basically the wastepaper baskets.’

  ‘Listen Mitchell, the IRS doesn’t go through wastepaper baskets.’

  ‘Actually, they do. And we can’t be too careful.’

  ‘OK, I’ll go through them.’

  ‘Thanks, hon. And … Becky? When the person gets there, I mean it, be careful. Let her do the talking.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Becky says.

  She hangs up. She goes through the house. Which reminds her more than ever this morning of a stage set. Because nothing is where it used to be. Every time she goes into a room, she still expects one thing, and is shocked, even though she is the one who ended up doing most of the arranging last night, to find another.