The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “How do you know all this?”

  Stephanie shrugged. “I had to furnish my apartment somehow. I was at a party and then I figured I better walk up and see if there was anything good out.”

  “You walked up here to go through the garbage?”

  Stephanie smiled. “From Chelsea. At least I walked off four vodka sodas.” Ava sat, and Stephanie slid down and rested her head in her lap. Ava noticed she hadn’t quite walked off the vodka sodas. “It’s obviously a sign that I found a perfect sofa. It’s fate. We’re a great team.” She stretched her arms and stroked her wrists absently. “Even though you always thought I was uneducated.”

  This took Ava by surprise. “No, I didn’t.” But as she spoke, she tried to consider the possibility, an uneasy tangle of resemblance and comparison, envy and disdain, had always dominated their relationship, how they inhabited each of these categories, and perhaps more important, how the world around them judged and sorted the two. Maybe she did like to think of herself as smarter. “Why would it even matter to you? The way you look, you can have anything in the world you want, why even bother?”

  “You’re such an asshole sometimes.” Stephanie reached a hand up and pressed it over Ava’s lips, but affectionately. “You sound like my stepdad who couldn’t understand why I even wanted to go to college. Because really, I’d rather not end up old and ugly, married to a mortgage broker whom I have to fuck even though he’s fat because I’m forty, and no one else will ever love me, okay? This is why it’s important to go into business for yourself,” she explained to Ava.

  Ava felt like there was an argument to be made here, but there was a vehemence to Stephanie’s feelings that she felt bound to respect. She kind of wanted to stroke the silky hair spread across her lap, but didn’t. Stephanie smelled like expensive perfume, like roses laid over smoldering embers, and Ava hoped that if a man ever got close to her again, she would smell as inviting to him as Stephanie did to her right now. Although maybe it was just one of those things about really beautiful women, one imagined they smelled so nice because of the aura that hangs around them and turns even their smallest acts into rare and intriguing mysteries; you had already been seduced. Was she doing exactly what Stephanie had just been complaining about? Ava decided she wasn’t. “You smell good,” she finally said.

  “Thanks, I get free samples at Sephora every week.”

  The warm summer darkness hung around them, and Ava remembered the constant effort of Stephanie’s beauty, and it made her feel tired. She let Stephanie put her head on her shoulder and idly play with the fingers of one hand while they sat in the never quite silence of a New York night.

  Suddenly Stephanie spoke again. “Do you know how many county fair stages I had to cross in a bathing suit to get here? And how many times I had to shake the hand of some small-town Kiwanis club asshole, sweating and simpering and looking at my ass. But it was okay because I knew I was on my way out, to fame and fortune and everything I deserve. ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ You know that’s on Keats’s tombstone?” She hiccuped. “Not fucking going to be on mine. Call a car service to come pick us up. I’m going to take a nap.”

  Ava took the phone, a little surprised that Stephanie knew Keats’s epitaph and she didn’t. “The thing about a tombstone is, it doesn’t have to be true. You can just say whatever. And why a literary club? How come you don’t just want to be a movie star or something?”

  “Because I’m fucking smart and I read books,” she said sharply. Then, her annoyance passing in the easy fluctuations of her drunkenness, Stephanie curled her hands in the hem of Ava’s dress. “You can’t fool me, Ava. You’re ambitious, too. It’s just that you’re a coward, but it’s okay. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know what you would do without me. Ask for a van, but don’t tell them we have a couch. Once they’re here, they’ll have to help us.”

  Ava dialed. She leaned back against the couch and looked into the strip of night sky visible between the projecting cornices of the roofs above them. In the shine of streetlamps, the row of granite buildings flattened like a stage set—two girls making it in the big city. Ava had been so sure she would write big important novels about love and society and the human condition, and she would ascend to that pantheon of stern beards and noble brows of all the authors she admired. But now? Maybe Stephanie was right, and her whole life risked fluttering away like translucent powder blown from an open compact.

  “This is why we have to look out for each other. No one gives a shit about two pretty girls.” Stephanie returned to her train of thought, her eyes still closed. “We might as well be potted plants.”

  “I’m not pretty enough to be decorative.”

  “All this false modesty is so boring.” Stephanie yawned. “Why did Aloysius hire you? Because you’re so good with Dewey decimal and stuff?” Ava was silent. She knew she had been hired because she and the Lazarus Club were made for each other, useless relics of a vanished time, but there was something so seductive about being grouped together with Stephanie in this way. What a delicious reality that would be, if it were true, that she was as universally desired as her friend. “Fuck ’em,” Stephanie added. “That’s why we have to be in charge. No one thinks of Leona Helmsely as a potted plant.”

  This was impossible to argue with, so instead Ava slowly ran her fingers through Stephanie’s hair, humming a waltz she had learned from an unmarked batch of Victrola records. Stephanie was snoring quietly when the van arrived. The driver was furious, but as Stephanie predicted, he helped them load their couch. He grumbled at them all the way back to the Lazarus Club in a guttural foreign language, but Stephanie, slumped against the armrest, didn’t seem to notice. Ava allowed herself not to care, still enjoying their strange errand like a kid up past bedtime. Gasping and straining, they got the couch up the stairs and into the pile of junk where it looked very much at home.

  4

  When they finally got Aloysius to come see the room they had discovered, he looked around startled and then his gaze grew distant. “Oh yes, this was the personal studio of one of our most illustrious members, Cornelius Alderdonck.” He picked up a moldy teddy bear and stroked an ear affectionately. “One of the original Alderdonks, the direct male line, not the distaff side,” he said, looking sternly at Ava for some reason. “Such an artistic soul. Did you know his ancestors used to own the Bronx?”

  Stephanie sniffed appreciatively. “I just love a pedigree. It makes everything feel so homey. My grandmother always said, if there wasn’t Mayflower somewhere in your family, you just couldn’t be trusted.” Ava noticed Stephanie was wearing pearl earrings she had never seen before. “Tradition was really what we were thinking about, Ava and I, when we were talking about how wonderful it would be to fix this place up and maybe host some select, artistic events here. My good friend Tom was just saying how few really exclusive places there are left in New York City. He’s an editor at Vanity Fair,” she mentioned casually as an aside. “I’m sure he’d love to do a story on us.”

  Turning pink around the ears, Aloysius cleared his throat. “They do such charming portraits, that magazine. I’ve always found it strange they never asked me before.”

  Stephanie put a sympathetic hand on his arm. “Well, we have to fix that. I’ve got lots of other ideas, different celebrities that might want to get involved, that I’d love to discuss with you. Maybe we can talk over a drink.”

  As she led him toward the bar downstairs, he stopped to pick up the jar of shark teeth, a mannequin arm and two dirty corduroy shirts that he pressed to his chest. “You would have to clear it with the board, of course, and the club really doesn’t have any room in the budget for improvement.”

  “Oh no, we would handle all that, of course.” Stephanie couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder and winking while Ava followed behind, somewhat dazed, as she often was, by the full deployment of Stephanie’s charm, a sensation that onl
y increased as they drank glass after glass of sherry, and she watched Stephanie and Aloysius howling together in gleeful drunken conspiring.

  * * *

  After, Ava and Stephanie sat on their new couch, recovering. “What the hell did he mean about wanting in particular to attract new membership among our dusky friends and neighbors?” Stephanie asked. “Dusky?!”

  Ava groaned. “I think that’s just how he talks. He always refers to Mrs. Bellamy as ‘la belle Creole,’ and I want to die of embarrassment. I mean, she’s from Milwaukee.” Ava hesitated. “I think he means, well, in like a Nancy Cunard kind of way.”

  “I don’t know who that is.” Stephanie scrunched her nose in distaste. “But, if he really wants to drag this club into the twenty-first century, I would be more than happy to help in that regard.”

  Ava smiled a little in spite of herself at the thought. “Is this all really going to happen?”

  “Yep.” Stephanie stood and pulled out two large black garbage bags. “Let’s clean this place up.”

  Ava accepted a bag. “How did you even know he would say yes?” she began and then decided not to press the issue. “I still can’t imagine this will work. I couldn’t even get into the Baker Street Irregulars. How can I start my own club?”

  “Those guys are a bunch of losers, and no one wants to be in their dumb club anyway.”

  Ava almost started to defend the eminent Holmes scholars, but it was true they hadn’t asked her to join, so she didn’t. She started sorting through a box full of chipped rococo vases.

  Volleys of old girlie magazines went thudding into Stephanie’s trash bag. “So we need a name for this thing. I’ve been thinking about it—something old-fashioned.” She looked at Ava to make sure this registered. “Just like you want, but also sexy and fun, I was thinking something like ‘The Scarlet Letters.’”

  “That sounds like a cheerleading team.” Ava set down a dusty jar decorated with little gilt monkeys and stared off into space, considering. “Also Hester Prynne is kind of a dismal role model, especially if your aim is sociability.”

  “Well, you come up with something.”

  Ava thought for what she hoped seemed like the right amount of time and then suggested, very casually, “How about ‘The Little Clan?’ It’s the name of the salon in Proust. He’s kind of brutal about how they’re all just social climbers with pretensions to culture, but it’s still a cool name.”

  “Not catchy enough.”

  “But it’s like the most famous salon in literature. I’m sure some people would get it.”

  “No one but you knows what that is, Ava.” Stephanie didn’t even bother to turn around.

  Hurt, Ava decided she had work to do in the library next door. “I thought that was why you wanted me to do this with you—because I know things about books that other people don’t.”

  “Don’t be so touchy.” Stephanie, busily sorting garbage, called after her, “You need to trust me on this kind of stuff.”

  As Ava began reshelving a stack of books, her silly categories didn’t seem so funny anymore, just embarrassing and kind of pretentious. She could hear Stephanie puttering in the next room, and eventually, Ava gave up on the books and slouched at her desk, morosely refilling some fountain pens. At least she had mahjong on Tuesday, and those ladies thought she was just lovely.

  * * *

  Having secured tentative approval for their project, next was finding the funding. The board meeting they were slated to attend to argue their case was quickly approaching, and Ava and Stephanie both sensed their chances would be greatly increased if they could prove themselves financially independent. In Ava’s experience, the club members huddled around the free cheese and crackers had a thriftiness inseparable from their Bar Harbor estates and Yale tie clips. The fraying carpets and unchanged light bulbs around the club also spoke to the members’ lack of philanthropic spirit. For someone who subsisted almost entirely on bar nuts and the free hors d’oeuvres of parties she attended, Stephanie seemed miraculously unconcerned about it.

  Instead, excited by the challenge, like a hunting dog, snout raised for the scent of blood, she cast off after investors, a campaign of cocktail parties and late boozy lunches among her wide-ranging acquaintance. Hair spray and heels waited in the bottomless bag that was always slung on her shoulder for when she heard the siren call of gathering affluence. Then touching up her makeup, she explained to Ava that, as wearying as these functions could be, she thought she would do better on her own, and why didn’t Ava stay and keep sorting through the trash?

  This suited Ava. Stephanie, dotting foundation across her cheeks with a cool concentration or frowning as she smoothed her hair and unbuttoned another shirt button, was sleek, coiled, hypnotizing to watch, and a little frightening. When Stephanie returned, cursing the stinginess of rich people, her manner, supercilious and domineering, carried an unconscious imitation of those she had just left, and Ava was very glad not to have gone with her.

  As Ava cleared more and more junk out of the room, it became apparent just how extensive the decrepitude was—the hardwood floors were a mess, half of it covered in sticky linoleum, the walls were stained with mold, light fixtures hung broken. If their plan, as it currently stood—of charging membership dues for people to hang out and drink and attend literary events and readings—had any hope of working, they would need to invest in substantial renovations before they could possibly open. Ava often thought wistfully of the luxury of her parents’ house.

  Her mother was always rearranging things. Whenever Ava started to get used to the terrible matching prints her mother adored—flowers and monkeys and vines clambering over each other in frantic stasis—her mother, complaining of “dinginess,” would rip it all out and start again. Then Ava would be subjected to a different room of exploding pink flowers whose aggressive newness and femininity made her feel like a guest, a stain on the meticulously conceived design of the rooms she lived in.

  But it would be so nice to be able to call her mother now and ask for help and advice. Initially she had hoped that her mother would be excited about her job at the Lazarus Club—she was, after all, free of Stephanie, always dismissively referred to as “that person,” and it was fancy and full of rich people. But after one visit, her mother had cast a withering eye over the place and summed up Ava’s failure. “You’ll never meet any men here.” The thought of what her mother would think of her one conquest, Jules Delauncy, almost made Ava laugh. But not quite.

  * * *

  Finally with just two weeks until the board meeting, Stephanie called one morning excited—she had a potential investor on the hook and wanted Ava to meet him, to “seal the deal.” Ava couldn’t imagine she would be of much use in whatever that entailed, but walking farther uptown the next day, it was kind of exciting to be on her way to a meeting; she so rarely needed to go anywhere. She assumed no one would miss her at the Lazarus Club; Aloysius had always had very lax, not to say, confusing expectations about when she was supposed to be at the library. She stopped and bought a Wall Street Journal, a paper she associated with her father as it had blocked Ava’s view of him for almost every breakfast of her life. The technicalities of his business, running a chain of local grocery stores, were unclear to her, and therefore, she assumed, must be important. What a novel sensation to be on this side of the divide, that of things that mattered.

  When she arrived, the entrance to the restaurant corroborated her new sense of self-importance. A converted bank, its former name was etched in crisp serifs across a limestone facade rising between giant art deco lanterns. The architecture spoke so strongly of the confidence and bluster of the American Twenties that Ava’s heart fluttered that such places still existed and that she had reasons to enter them.

  She clicked through the revolving brass door into a room whose height and proportions dwarfed the leather banquettes and white tablecloths that now filled it.
Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling, their brass fixtures casting a discreet glow, a whispered promise of the responsible stewardship of wealth. Doors that now led to wine cellars or kitchens still bore the bright varnish that must have delighted their original occupants, men, she imagined, whose vests stretched tight over bellies and who yelled through bulky intercoms at their unimpressed, gum-chewing stenographers. A hostess led Ava toward a table at the back, where she could see Stephanie already sitting with a slender man in his fifties. As she passed, she couldn’t help but notice many of the other tables also seemed to be occupied by beautiful young women picking at their food while older men appraised each other approvingly from across their separate tables. Electronic music was playing too loudly over the sound system.

  Ava tried to pull out the big leather chair with a graceful hello, but it was unexpectedly heavy, and she had to be rescued by a solicitous waiter who pushed her into the table like a child. Stephanie’s companion, Steve Buckley, was a bony man whose hair arched back from a wide yet angular face like the crest of an iguana. He shook her hand, and as his fingers lingered over her wrist, she had a sudden feeling that she might be very bad at whatever it was Stephanie wanted her to do.

  “Hello, darling, this is Steve Buckley, who I’ve been telling you about. VC extraordinaire, visionary, the sort of man who really appreciates the future.”

  Ava didn’t know what any of this meant, so she just smiled and nodded and accepted an enormous menu from the waiter. A tiny shake of the head from Stephanie confused her until she tentatively handed it back.

  “The tartar.” Steve Buckley indicated all of them with his finger. “And a goddamned vodka soda.”

  “He’s part owner,” Stephanie whispered loud enough to provoke a satisfied grunt. “And this is Ava, the brains behind our project. She has read absolutely everything.” Ava thought she detected Steve Buckley’s pale face start to collapse into boredom. “Tell him,” Stephanie commanded.