by Julia Slavin
The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club
Word spread down East Beach that a woman had cut off her foot in front of the Maidstone Club.
None of the club members budged from their chaises or stepped out from under their candy-striped umbrellas. They assumed that the woman was a day visitor who’d ridden in on the back of a motorcycle or a renter who’d wandered over, burnt and bewildered, from West Beach. But then, to their astonishment, word spread that the woman was Maisie Haselkorn of the Eastport Haselkorns. With that dispatch, the entire East Beach population migrated toward Maidstone, nonchalantly, so as not to appear too impressed.
But the news was wrong. She hadn’t severed her foot. Not yet. Rather, using a penknife, she’d carved a broken line into the skin below the left ankle, like a doctor preparing for surgery, and tied an Hermès scarf around her calf as a tourniquet. The foot was buried under a mosaic of mosquito bites, which Maisie’d rubbed raw with sand and salt water, unable to stop the violent itching. A low wolverine growl came from Maisie’s throat as, teeth bared, nails worn to nubs, she gouged at one bite, her eyes already moving on to the next. Athletic and limber, Maisie raised her foot to her mouth and gnawed off the tops of the bites that lined her soft instep.
“Grammy used to mix vinegar and baking soda,” an August renter offered.
“Scratch off the top of ’em, then pour on a jigger of Rebel Yell,” a day visitor in puka-shell jewelry advised. “Burns like four-alarm chili, but those sons-a-bitches get what they deserve.”
“Leonine amusement,” Pasty Plugh scoffed to Skimpy Pimscott, struggling for a look over the crowd of day visitors and renters with their zinc-covered noses and coconut stench. “August in East has become unbearable.”
“Yes, but poor Maisie,” Skimpy whispered. Pasty stood on tiptoes, then elbowed her way through. When she saw the foot, covered in a mountain range of bloody red bites, she brought her hands to her mouth and gasped.
Club members did not get mosquito bites. The skin and blood of families like the Plughs, the Pimscotts, the Haselkorns, and the Trums didn’t appeal to the local insect life. Instead they fed on the imported flesh of renters like the Newmans, the Nathans, the Fussellis, and the Golds. Or the leather of day visitors like—does it matter? But Maisie Haselkorn, daughter of Electra von Hardweger Haselkorn and the late F. Whitmire “Fuzzy” Haselkorn, was so infused with the bodily fluids of Ben Loeb, the West Beach land developer, that her genetic resistance to bugs had been dulled. And now they swarmed around her, hovered overhead, legions of mosquitoes probing her with their bloodsucking proboscises.
“I knew it would lead to a bad end,” Skimpy told Mim Trum.
“Isn’t there something I can do?” Pasty Plugh asked Maisie, swatting the insects away with her hand.
“Oh, no, Pasty,” Maisie said, scratching and gnawing and slapping. “It’s just that the itching is so … annoying.”
Scraping her foot with the sharp edge of a broken clamshell and oblivious of the crowd, Maisie looked out over the Sound toward Haselkorn Island, a place she’d never been, where, all morning, ferries had delivered land-moving equipment to break ground for the new condominiums, hotels, and restaurants. From here it was only a dollop of green in an aluminum sea.
Ben Loeb slapped a mosquito on his arm and followed Maisie Haselkorn out of Mim Trum’s dinner honoring Lizzy Mann, who’d sung a benefit for children with AIDS at East Town Hall. She’d been just out of his grasp at all the parties that season, but tonight she’d asked him to hold her drink while she showed Chrispo Pimscott how to use the indoor rubberized rock climber. Ben had to jog to keep up with Maisie’s stride.
“Mim’s going to ask Lizzy to sing,” Ben said.
“I don’t like entertainment at parties.” Maisie swung her arms with clenched fists. “And I have no interest in hearing Lizzie Mann sing.”
Ben looked at this graceful woman in the cool moonlight. She was tallish and thin with the skin and nose of good breeding. Hers were the choice chromosomes, encoded with healthy hair, good nails, straight teeth, and athletic ability. She’d been star pentathlete at Grangerville. Her Grangerville yearbook, “The Golden Nut,” captured her personality and athletic prowess in a photograph mid-hurdle with a caption that read, “She throws, she jumps, that winning attitude—MAISIE!”
“I’m Ben Loeb. I met you at the Clayborns’ dinner for that artist.”
“Ramsey Angus Hunter. I didn’t like him or his guillotine imagery. And I know who you are, Mr. Loeb.”
“Call me Ben.”
“You built the new strip mall in North East.”
“We prefer ‘convenience center.’ The industry considers Loeb Commons to be architecturally significant.” He thought she’d be impressed.
“I like the older buildings, myself,” Maisie said. “I don’t like all those implied lines and oddly shaped rooms. And I don’t like new architecture that tries to look like old architecture.”
“Why don’t we just stop all building altogether?” He was becoming aroused by this young woman, so fiercely certain of her opinions.
“Yes, why don’t we.”
Ben was getting winded. “Why don’t you have a car like everyone else?”
“I do,” she said. “I told him to leave. And what about you, Mr. Loeb? Where’s your car?”
“I’ll get it in the morning,” Ben said. Maisie looked at him, perplexed. Ben noticed one of her eyes was higher on her face than the other. “I’m spending the night with you.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re after, Mr. Loeb.” Maisie leaned back luxuriously on a pale-chintz fainting couch.
Ben lifted his head from between her thighs. “Please, call me Ben.”
“You want Haselkorn Island,” she said. “But you’re wasting your time with me. I’m an Eastport Haselkorn, not an Island Haselkorn. The Eastport Haselkorns split from the Island Haselkorns in 1650, and the two sides haven’t spoken since. You’ll have to build your hotels and condominiums elsewhere.”
Haselkorn Island. Four square miles of undeveloped land. The island had been part of a royal grant over three hundred years ago. The sight of it made Ben drool like an infant. Word had it the heirless and ancient Lord Cotton Haselkorn of the Island Haselkorns was considering its disposition.
“Make me ambassador of goodwill.” Ben moved Maisie’s knees farther apart with his chin. “It’s time you kissed and made up.”
He was the hairiest man Maisie’d ever seen. When she first saw him undressed, that night after Mim Trum’s party, she childishly squeezed her eyes shut, wishing the hair would go away when she opened them. But now that she knew every inch of him, she loved every hair. She loved the way it was so long in places it curled, how when he walked out of the ocean it matted down slick like a seal, how when he was cold it stood out from his body like quills on a porcupine. The men she’d been accustomed to before Ben—Carlsbad Trum, Rennie Pimscott, Minty Serk, well-born men with smooth, hairless chests and backs—seemed childlike now, underdeveloped. Next to Ben, those hairless attractions seemed pedophilic.
Electra Haselkorn kept a sharp eye on her daughter and the West Beach developer who came as Maisie’s date to all the parties now, suspicious of the intentions of a newcomer. “All that hair, Maisie,” she said, watching Ben jackknife into the Esterhouses’ pool. “It suggests a questionable background.” But seeing the telltale insect bites on Maisie’s ankles, and the bottles of calamine, Bactine, Off!, and other foul-smelling potions Maisie kept hidden in her closets, Electra knew it was too late. The Ben Loeb virus would have to run its course. She knew from her own love affair thirty-two years earlier with Joey Ottominelli, the contractor Luciano Ottominelli’s son, that love, true love, enters the blood like barbiturate, and once you’ve had it you can’t do without. Watching Maisie bend to scratch a welt behind her knee, just as she herself had scratched thirty-two years before, Electra knew Ben Loeb was all through her daughter like an infection.
Denied th
eir petition to enjoin office-furniture king Al Rodman and his wife, Carol, from building an oceanfront temple substantially resembling the Pan Am terminal at Kennedy, Skimpy and Chrispo Pimscott decided to throw the royal couple a Bastille Day party.
On the day of the event, Maisie leaned back dreamily against the Pimscotts’ superior weeping English beech—a majestic pendulous-branched tree for which the office-furniture king had offered $80,000 for the rights to uproot and replant on his own property, an increasingly common practice of the island’s newcomers to transform terra nova to terra antiqua. Chrispo had refused the gruesome tender and would not even entertain sponsoring the arriviste’s membership at Maidstone.
When Maisie opened her eyes, Ben was ducking under the tree’s thick leafy canopy. He took her arm and led her up to the Pimscotts’ roof, where he made love to her as guests arrived below. Maisie planted her feet against two window cornices to brace herself.
“Darling, would you like me to take the slate?” Ben offered.
Maisie considered his kind proposal to be on the bottom, then decided it was better to have a scraped back than an exposed backside. Just as Ben had promised, no one looked up—except the driver of one of the catering trucks. And when one of Maisie’s sandals slipped off the roof and hit Lord Cotton Haselkorn’s man Nils on the shoulder as he was rolling the lord’s wheelchair up a makeshift ramp to the Pimscotts’, Nils gently tucked the shoe into the veteran turtle-shaped boxwood by the entrance.
“Maisie, your back,” Electra Haselkorn said, of the slate indentations pressed into her daughter’s skin.
“Those awful new chaises at Maidstone, Mother.”
“I’ll talk to Gerard first thing tomorrow,” Electra said.
“Do that, Mother.” Maisie crossed the room to say hello to Mim Trum. Electra noticed she was missing a shoe.
As the first course was cleared and the main course was served, Ben manipulated Maisie under the table with his foot while carrying on a discussion with Pasty Plugh about the challenge of fishing for fluke.
“I never have any luck fluking,” Pasty said breezily.
“There’s a trick,” Ben said. Maisie pressed down on his big toe.
“A trick?” Pasty puckered her forehead.
“A secret,” Ben said.
“A secret!” Pasty flushed ruby, as though it were her own pants being moved aside by the toes of a hairy land developer. Ben moved in close to Pasty’s ear, his salmon-Wellington breath hot on her neck.
“Let the sinker bounce on the bottom.” His breathy voice sent an electric shock down Pasty’s viscera.
“Isn’t that fascinating.” Pasty’s voice quivered. “Pinky,” she said in a loud whisper to Mr. Plugh, swallowing his fifth Glenlivet at a nearby table. “Pinky,” she called again through closed teeth.
Pinky Plugh, red-faced and spider-veined, had heard his wife the first time and hoped his selective deafness would make her retreat.
“Pinky!” The room went quiet.
“Yes, Pasty,” Pinky said, with resignation, as though Mrs. Plugh’s summons were the last torment he could bear.
“Mr. Stein here says—”
“That’s Loeb, actually,” Ben interrupted.
“Mr. Loeb here says to let the sinker bounce on the bottom.” The room became quiet enough to hear the gentle popping of Ben’s toe joint. And then, one by one, at each table throughout the grand dining room, living room, and side parlor, they began to consider Ben’s fluking technique.
“Let the sinker bounce on the bottom.…”
“The sinker …”
“… bounce on the bottom.”
“Of course!”
“It fools the fluke, you see.”
“We’ll take out the Ebb Tide tomorrow.…”
“… charter the Catch as Catch Cannes tomorrow.…”
Pinky slammed his fist on his table. “Nonsense,” he bellowed. “Pre-posterous!” Again the guests became quiet. Pinky Plugh wasn’t going to listen to the nouveau fishing advice of a West Beacher. Certainly not one whose beard was merely a continuation of his chest hair. “Next you’ll be proselytizing plastic bait and treble hooks. Why not just dredge the Sound?”
Battle lines were drawn throughout the party, with Pinky and Pasty as opposing generals.
“I’ll have you know, young man”—Pinky pointed at Ben—“that I was Fluke Champion, 1962, Newport Beach.”
“Oh, shut up, Pinky,” Pasty said.
As the crowd one by one joined forces with Pinky and bore down on Ben, Lord Cotton Haselkorn, the last of the Island Haselkorns, had his man Nils roll him to Ben’s table. Most East Beachers were too young to remember that Lord Haselkorn was Champion Bottom Fisher for 1926, ’27, and ’32, back when the Sound was filled with flounder, fluke, and sweet sole, long before regulation lengths and Fish & Game wardens.
“I fluked the same way.” Lord Haselkorn smiled toothlessly.
“I know,” Ben said. “I read an interview in the East Ledger.”
“My boy, that was sixty years ago.”
So taken was Lord Haselkorn with Ben that he invited him aboard the Hi C’s for an inshore fishing tour around Haselkorn Island. So impressed would the lord be by Ben’s trolling technique, and engaged by Ben’s stories of birding in Gabon and womanizing among the Yanomami Indians in Brazil, that by the time the sun would drop behind West Beach, Lord Haselkorn would bequeath his island and all of its treasures to Ben Loeb.
But now the crowd was closing in on Ben. “Save the fluke!”
“Save the Sound!”
“If those West Beach developers have their way,” Matilda Serk shouted, “they’ll landfill the entire Sound for more condominiums and hotels!”
Then came a climaxing groan from Maisie—not a feminine sigh of ecstasy but the sorrowful moan of a woman who knows she’s not needed anymore, desired anymore, knows she will never be made love to this way again. It is a cry that cannot be mistaken for anything other than the death song of a woman who knows the end of the greatest love affair of her life. The shouting in the rooms died to a drone that seemed to mirror Maisie’s cry. It was a cry that Pasty Plugh knew so well that she clasped her throat with her hands and felt she would choke from the lump gathering there. The Countess Loretta Mach, in white tulle and the Mach jewels, recognized that cry from the night she gave up Robért, her Corsican lover, for this life of parties, pools, Fabergé, and furniture. Mim Trum covered her face and wept for Tony Donatucci, and Skimpy called out for Shecky Moskowitz.
“So it’s a date?” Lord Haselkorn held out a gnarled hand.
“It’s a date,” Ben said, and slipped his busy toe and foot back into his Top-Sider.
Carlsbad Trum, crow-faced and cadaverous, drove a ball so far off the links at Maidstone he’d been wandering the beach a half hour. Searching here and there, using his hand as a visor, resting his driver on his shoulder, he spotted the ball rolling to and fro at the water’s edge. “Worse than I feared,” he said. “Talk about hitting into the rough.” Carlsbad noticed Maisie as he bent to pick up his ball, which the tide took out of reach. “Hello, Maisie, cutting off your foot, I see.”
Maisie was sawing through her slender talus with a penknife from Cartier. The crowd had long since dispersed: the renters, tired of waiting for her to finish the job, went back to their cottages; the day visitors rode back to wherever they came from; the club members rushed home to scratch the Eastport Haselkorns off their guest lists.
Carlsbad peered over Maisie’s athletic shoulders, rocked up onto his toes, and tried to look down her thin cotton top. Then, seeing that Maisie was not in a talkative mood, he scooped up his ball as the tide brought it in and trudged back over the sand to the links.
It was late in the day when Maisie balanced herself like a gymnast and flipped her left leg into the ocean. “Why stop at the foot?” she’d said, slicing into the deep fascia of her tan thigh. The leg skipped across the surface and tumbled into a beach break. The Pimscotts’ golden, Pal, small-brai
ned but fiercely loyal, did what any champion retriever would do. He sprang from the hole he’d been digging all afternoon and dove into the surf to fetch.
“Oh, Pal,” Maisie said, disgusted, as the immaculate pedigree dropped the leg and jumped deliriously in anticipation of his next fetch, “you overbred idiot.” Pal chased his tail and shook his long wet fur.
Remember all your strength from pentathlon, Maisie thought. On her remaining leg, she hopped around in a circle; faster and faster, pirouetting, swinging the leg by the toes, she flung it to the sea. Way beyond the break the leg flew, end over end, foot over thigh. Even the idiot dog, Pal, knew it was outside his range. And now Maisie, free of itching at last, fell in the sand, craned her neck back, and looked into the mango sun that was sinking upside down behind Maidstone. “That’s better,” she sighed, wiggling her fresh stump. “That’s much better.”
Covered
My mother said that as a boy I was never without my old blanket: I slept with it, ate with it, and dragged it along behind me like an animal on a leash.
That was our last coherent conversation. Soon after, she became anxious and confused, at times mistaking me for my dead father and then not recognizing me at all. One of those nights I came home from the hospital and climbed the back steps to the attic. I hadn’t been up there since I’d moved home to care for my parents. Under a wardrobe rack filled with dresses, a fox stole, and my mother’s wedding gown, I found the box marked STEVEN’S STUFF.
The packing tape fought me all the way, the old glue stringy, like gauze being pulled off a wound. Inside were my baseball trophies, a handprint of a seven-year-old boy set in plaster unevenly painted green, my President’s Fitness Award, a folder of report cards. And there at the bottom was my blanket, used as padding for lopsided pottery and my great ceramic opus: a clay animal chess set, felines and canines with smashed faces and broken tails.
