The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  Finally she tossed the thin booklet toward the lid of the toilet. “I think soft dove.”

  Ava caught it as it slid toward the wet floor. “Yeah, I thought so, too. I’m exhausted. What time is it?”

  Stephanie, examining her hair for split ends, looked up. “We can’t go to bed. We aren’t finished.”

  George stood and brushed tile dust off of his jacket. “I have a test tomorrow. I have to head back home.”

  “Fine.” Stephanie waved. “You can go. But Ava—” not getting enough authority sitting in a bathtub, she stood, hands on her hips “—I need to see some commitment from you. If you aren’t willing to do the work, then I don’t know how we’re going to make this happen.”

  She spoke in the easy, casual knowledge that Ava wouldn’t defend herself, but there was something about her rough coveralls, the cement splotches, the hard labor successfully accomplished that gave Ava courage, and she dropped her trowel into a bucket with a clank. “I’ve been here working all day. I’d say I’ve been very committed. It’s you who’s always out at parties.”

  “Let’s not forget who’s really making this thing happen,” Stephanie said coldly.

  Ava frowned silently at the paint swatches. Stephanie twirled up her hair and secured it with a pencil. “Come on, love, let’s do some painting. We open in three weeks.” When he saw Ava’s shocked expression, George murmured his goodbyes and fled the approaching storm.

  “What are you talking about? This place is a mess. It will never be ready in three weeks.” Ava didn’t mean to yell.

  “Buzz, darling. I can’t keep the excitement up forever. People will get bored and move on. We have to open, ready or not.” Stephanie pulled her dress over her head, walking away naked in high heels. “Oh, by the way, we’re going to be a nonprofit. It went over so much better.”

  “You can’t just say that.”

  Stephanie turned, raising her head imperiously, her nakedness a silent roar of animal dominance. Ava didn’t know where to look and blushed, feeling awkward and chubby and embarrassed. She plucked at the handle of the trowel.

  Satisfied, Stephanie went into the next room. “I’m not just saying it. We should be nonprofit. And while we apply for status, we can tell everybody our paperwork is pending,” she called.

  “I think that’s illegal,” Ava sighed.

  “It’s not, because we are going to file. I already looked it up on the internet. We’re creating a social good. We can add some literacy programs or something, too. We will do it tomorrow. Will you stop worrying?” Reappearing barefoot in an old Van Halen T-shirt, Stephanie had shrunk back to less intimidating parameters, but the residual effects lingered and Ava didn’t meet her eyes. “There’s a room that needs to be painted.” Plastic sheeting billowed around her. “By the way,” she said casually, “Steve Buckley came through with some money too, which is great because I really need to start drawing a salary for all this.”

  “Really? How much? I thought he was just giving us books. Do we really want to take money from people like that? He seemed so sketchy.”

  “I knew you would get all worked up. We’re really not in any position to turn down investments. Don’t worry. It’s only another five thousand.”

  Against the rush of fear these numbers aroused, Ava rested her face in her hands. Her fingers were cool against her hot cheeks. She wanted to make Stephanie understand the implicit peril of their situation, but the feeling of traveling in a foreign country and not knowing the language and customs made her doubt her instincts and hesitate. She wanted to leave, but she thought of the silent darkness of her room, just a cat, an old review of books, a cup of Sleepytime tea, and the renunciation felt too great.

  She took the paint can that Stephanie held out to her and crossed to a blank, dirty wall. Her roller swung in wide reassuring arcs. Her worries slowly seeped away as they worked through the night, singing Broadway show tunes to stay awake. The smudged traces of past lives disappeared beneath the growing field of white. When they finished, Stephanie hooked her arm through Ava’s as they admired the pristine expanse. “This is really going to happen,” she whispered, her breath hot against Ava’s ear.

  Ava found she couldn’t speak, but she nodded, and her heart burst into a thousand tiny shards of crystalline possibility.

  * * *

  True to his word, and somewhat to their surprise, Steve Buckley also sent over the books he had promised, and the boxes crowded the room. Ava, excited by the prospect of so many new books, had scoured the empty bookshelves, climbing and clinging precariously to each ledge to clean and polish their many rows until they shone, ready to receive their burden. Unpacking and sorting through the shipment, she worked her way through yet another box of seventies romance novels and celebrity memoirs, and a certain equanimity took hold; these were not the books she had been hoping for, but it was still nice to sit on the floor surrounded by volumes exhaling their musty breath. The piles beside her grew, and Ava relaxed amid the calming presence of so many pages.

  The next box was full of murder mysteries, but lying alone at the bottom with a misleadingly lurid cover was a copy of Ethan Frome. Unwilling to resist the temptation of a good novel, Ava opened to the first page, and had the pleasant feeling of slipping into a familiar country. When a quiet knocking at the open door roused her, she was more than a quarter through, had a crick in her neck and no idea where she was. She looked at the attractive young man standing in the door and for a quick moment completely forgot what century it was, and what were the usual forms of address. “Oh, you” was the salutation that escaped her, but she realized that wasn’t right and looked down again, putting the novel back into the box before remembering she was supposed to be unpacking and taking it out again.

  “I am,” he agreed.

  This was an encouragingly awkward response, but Ava was so preoccupied by her embarrassment, she barely heard him. “Help,” she said softly without meaning to.

  She had most certainly been addressing some higher faculty than this stranger, but he took it as an invitation and entered, casting a friendly eye over the boxes. “A lot of unpacking to do?”

  Being caught in the intimate act of reading made her feel hot and funny, so she rose, and not knowing what else to do, put the book in her hand on the nearest shelf where it stood, alone, the sole occupant of the many empty shelves. Because it looked so silly there all by itself, she picked it up again, but then standing with this book in her hand like a sudden burden she couldn’t figure out how to dispose of, she sat back down and put it on top of a very dog-eared copy of Valley of the Dolls. “Yes. I guess.”

  He unhitched a messenger bag from his shoulder and squatted among the cardboard, the curve of his body strung like a bow among all the squares and corners. “Seems like kind of a fun job.” He pulled out a stack of books and looked at the spines. “I didn’t know Zsa Zsa Gabor wrote an autobiography. Actually I don’t know who that is, but I guess she likes fur.” Ostensibly looking at the cover he held up, Ava was able to examine this apparition more closely; young men didn’t just wander around the Lazarus Club.

  And he looked very young. He had long eyelashes and a delicate pallor to his face, a veil behind which the possibility of a flush seemed to be constantly advancing and retreating. He was wearing work clothes that bore a fine layer of dust and a splotch of paint across his knee. The contrast between the gentle symmetry of his features and the assertive roughness of his clothes almost made him look like a girl who, wanting to pass as a boy, had picked an outfit that was overdone, laughably too masculine. Maybe he was a new maintenance worker? She didn’t recognize him from the regular crew of the Lazarus Club, but then there was a lot that Ava didn’t always notice. She wanted to say something, and so spoke quickly. “Are you on a job?”

  “Just finished one.” He piled a stack of books carefully with a quick dexterity. Ava noticed they were perfectly lined up. �
�But there’s always something else.”

  Had Aloysius sent him? He had been so monumentally unhelpful up to this point, it seemed hard to believe, but this person was forty years too young to be a club member. “So you’re very busy, that must be tiring,” Ava said.

  “I guess, better busy than not. My shithole apartment isn’t going to pay its own rent.”

  Ava thought this was a little forthright, but she could sympathize with the sentiment. “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  He broke down a box with the same fluid economy of gesture that Ava couldn’t help but admire. He was very efficient. “Thanks, I guess?”

  It was getting harder to ignore the very striking fact of his appearance. It wasn’t just the way his bad haircut, standing up just a little in the back, made him look like a civil war recruit posing for an awkward portrait; there was something more compelling and yet familiar as if she had known him from somewhere. He gathered the boxes into a neat stack and stepped gracefully over, looking past her into the next room.

  “I just wanted to check out the space. See the dimensions.” As she followed the direction of those light eyes—gray, blue, she couldn’t tell—looking into the distance, Ava suddenly placed him. The boyish face, the poorly cropped tawny hair, the gaze fixed on the infinite like that, he looked like Arthur Rimbaud, more precisely, the exact photograph that had hung over her bed ever since high school.

  For someone already defining herself as somewhat reactionary, it was funny that Ava would have fallen so hard for Rimbaud’s wild, revolutionary poetry, and in point of fact, her feelings for the poems themselves were somewhat ambivalent. It was his portrait that she found flipping through an anthology one day, so pretty, so delicate, so young, and the romance of his story that entranced her—to have fled his provincial home and found love, fame, his genius recognized all by the tender age of seventeen. To a lonely sixteen-year-old with her own secret dreams of grandeur, his beautiful face seemed to hold the promise that all was possible, and she used to lay in bed staring at the poster yearning for both his talent and his slim, dirty teenage body. That he was famously homosexual struck her as beside the point. If only he had known Ava, things would have been different. That same poster still hung in her room, but now it served as a rebuke; she was so old, so much time wasted, and so little accomplished.

  And now, incredibly, he seemed to be standing right in front of her, surveying the room with his hands in his pockets and one shoelace that had come untied. “It’s definitely a cool place,” he said.

  She bent over a pile of books using her hair like a screen for the erotic past she was sure was writ in her cheeks. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  “I would normally stay and help. I find these kinds of activities weirdly relaxing.” He indicated the boxes. “But I’ve got to get back. I’m just on a lunch break, really.”

  “Oh, okay, well, try to let me know your schedule if you plan to come by and do some work.”

  He gave her a curious look while he picked up his bag. “Sure. I guess I’m down to help.” He smiled at her in a way that she couldn’t quite decipher, but she also didn’t try very hard because by this point she was kind of hoping he would just leave her to the uncomplicated ease of sitting alone.

  That night, she called Stephanie to tell her about the morning’s unusual apparition.

  Stephanie groaned. “Oh god, you’re both idiots. That was Ben. He’s a brilliant artist. I’d almost talked him into building a bar for us, if you haven’t ruined everything. Why didn’t you just introduce yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I thought he was the new janitor or something.”

  Stephanie sighed. “All right, I guess I’m going to go call him and try to fix this.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.” And then because she felt there was some slight injustice, she added, “He could have let me know why he was there.”

  “Oh my god, he’s like an art star. You’re impossible, I’ve got to go.”

  Ava hung up still vaguely indignant that he hadn’t introduced himself, but also a little gratified that her strange premonition had been correct. He was an artist, a genius even maybe. She wasn’t exactly sure what an art star was, but it sounded impressive, and it was exciting to think she was in charge of a project that drew such people around her. Their plan was working just as she had hoped. She lay back against her pillows and looked up at Rimbaud and smiled at his pretty eyes, that crooked necktie. Why didn’t all men wear tight soft-shouldered coats and white collars, their gaze intent on the infinite and beyond? She reached up and straightened the frame on its nail and then fell back, feet propped against the wall, ankles crossed, and gave herself over to pleasant contemplation.

  8

  As their grand opening raced toward them, Ava, thoroughly caught up in preparations, decided that this premature announcement maybe hadn’t been such a bad idea of Stephanie’s. Money was sliding through their fingers. Stephanie’s salary, now that she had issued herself one, absorbed most of their funds while building supplies and furnishings scavenged from Craigslist took care of the rest with no hope of more until they were up and running and could accept members. While the list of things to be done, fixed and worried about seemed to grow exponentially, the pace and urgency prevented her from thinking too much about technicalities, like the mounting interest on her credit card. Stephanie was spending all of her time fund-raising, if unsuccessfully, but this was another reason Ava didn’t feel she could object now that Stephanie had become their greatest expense; she had long since quit cocktail waitressing. Ava was still receiving her pittance from the Lazarus Club, so they decided she could temporarily forgo her salary as codirector of the House of Mirth with the expectation that someday in the future, she would also be compensated.

  The next time Ben came by, they sheepishly introduced themselves. “I just figured Stephanie would show up at some point and take over. I didn’t ask because I guess she makes me kind of nervous.” He unfurled a technical drawing across Ava’s desk. “Did you ever notice that she kind of prowls back and forth while she’s talking to you?”

  “No, but she probably acts a little differently with me.” She remarked the ambivalent raise of his eyebrows. “No? Anyway, I was the real idiot. I thought maybe you were here to fix the mold spots on our wall.”

  “I still could.”

  “Stephanie said you were an art star.” The euphonious phrase slid from her lips with some envy, how wonderful to already have merited such a designation.

  “Glorified craftsman.” His laugh faded before it really started, and he chewed his lower lip. “For an art star, I sure have to make a lot of custom furniture to pay the bills.”

  Poverty seemed perfectly in line with her ideas of nineteenth-century bohemian poets, but she admired this humility. “I’m sorry to take up more of your time,” she said.

  “Oh, this?” He pointed at the drawings. “No, this is fun.”

  It looked like a very complicated endeavor to be merely fun. “I thought you might have been a Lazarus member,” Ava lied.

  “Do I look rich?” he asked, incredulous, but Ava thought, maybe just a little pleased. She shook her head thinking how Stephanie had recently mentioned that it would be absurd for Ben to expect to be paid, they clearly couldn’t afford it and how it was fine because his work would get a lot of exposure among very influential people and it would probably bring him lots of new jobs. In fact, he would probably end up so well compensated for the whole thing, he should really be paying them for the opportunity.

  “You’re really going to make this for us?” she asked, looking at the elevations laid out before her, amazed that all these lines and numbers would somehow leap from two dimensions to three.

  He laid a measuring tape on a corner of the drawing that kept trying to curl up. “I shouldn’t. I’ve got like six other jobs I should be working on, eight if I don’t want to live on salami san
dwiches all month, but I don’t know, the idea of contributing to a good cause makes me feel like a human again, the illusion of free will.”

  Ava played with the curled edge, flicking the corner between her fingertips. “Hopefully this project will make us all feel human.”

  He removed the paper from her fingers. “You look human to me.” He erased something with the back of a shiny metal pencil that looked very official, possibly German.

  This seemed very complimentary, and Ava savored it. “So how do you know Stephanie?”

  “I don’t. She cornered me at a friend’s opening. We didn’t discuss it, but my guess is she thinks I’m an idiot that will work for free. I get the impression she gets a lot of free stuff from dudes.”

  Ava came down to earth rather quickly and coughed. Ben glanced up while she pulled at the edges of her sleeves and then decided to go make them a cup of tea.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, sunlight eased through the broad, open windows of what they now called “the great room” and brought with it the summer sounds of children playing. In the distance, a jackhammer rattled like a swarm of bees, a buzzing undercurrent to a lovely afternoon, unexpectedly temperate for the end of August. The room bore no relation to the chaos of a few months ago. Bookshelves, freshly varnished, held their new collection: the least embarrassing of Mr. Buckley’s bequest, a few volumes pulled from the original library next door, and every book Ava or Stephanie owned, all strategically arranged to show off the more decorative covers and disguise any sparseness in numbers. Other walls gleamed in new paint. In the unforgiving light of day, the gouges they had created refinishing the floors streaked across the room like gently rippling waves, but at night those floors shone like old money.

  Ava sat vigorously rubbing wood stain onto the front of an L-shaped bar in the process of being built into a corner. Ben, in what he admitted was part of a greater self-defeating tendency, had spent way too many days making them a huge, unnecessarily beautiful object. Each time a shortcut presented itself, a means of making the process quicker and therefore more cost efficient, Ava watched him struggle and then make the more aesthetically satisfying choice. By now he had put in so many hours, the original quick favor he had been doing them had acquired its own trajectory, and Ava respectfully tried to stay out of its way.