“Well, George, shall we pack up?” Ava tapped his shoulder to rouse him. “I say we leave the cleaning for tomorrow. I’m exhausted.” She strolled into the other room, trying to remember where she had put her keys. The beginning of the event felt like a million years ago. She blew out the remaining candles.
He followed, bleary-eyed, rubbing his head. “Indeed, I think I may avail myself of our lovely accommodations for the evening.” He flopped down full-length on the Persian carpet. “Too many ardent spirits.”
“Gross. That thing is so dirty. I saw like three people spill drinks on it.”
“S’okay.” His voice was muffled by the pile of the rug.
“Come on.” Ava grabbed a limp arm. “You can sleep on my floor. It’s better than this.” He allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.
“Casualties of success,” he muttered, draping an arm over her shoulder for balance. “You’re a nice boss.”
“Thanks, George.” Steadying him with a hand on his bony waist, she turned off the lights as they passed.
Downstairs, Castor glanced at George. “I see he enjoyed your party.”
“Yeah.” It was all an undeniable triumph, and yet now, standing unsteadily before Castor’s sober gaze, all Ava could summon about the whole thing was a sneaking feeling of embarrassment.
“Someone left this for you.” He handed her a small cardboard box.
“Thanks.” She examined it with one hand, supporting George with the other, and they moved slowly down the long corridor in a wide, swaying pattern like a roll of ribbon gently unraveling. “Are you humming Wagner?” she asked as they waited for the elevator.
“Bugs Bunny.” He waved his finger in time to the music. “That Tristan overture is too damned hard to whistle.” Her ear was pressed against him, and the vibrations in his chest rattled—not quite in tune, but soothing. When she got him into her room and onto her chair, she took off his shoes and, after a worried glance, unpinned the safety pins holding up his pants hems. By the time she put a large glass of water on the floor next to him, he was already asleep, clutching a velvet throw pillow, his steady breath rustling its tassels.
Ava changed into pajamas and turned on her fan. The roar of its metal blades filled the room, and she climbed into bed with a large bottle of seltzer and her mystery box. Mycroft leapt to her side to investigate, dragging his tail across the sweating plastic bottle and leaving a trail of hair on its label. He chewed tentatively on a corner of the box, purring and rubbing its sharp point against his gums. When she opened it, he pressed his face between the rough edges of the open flaps, rearing back and blinking against the pressure, then reapplying himself until his whiskers bent far back. She gave him a shove and out of the cardboard box removed another box, smaller, wooden and perfectly square. A tiny brass latch held each side to the lid and when she opened them all, and lifted the lid, the side fell open to reveal another wooden square, almost the same size, made up of smaller wooden cubes stacked on top of each other. They started to slide precariously without the support of the walls and Ava carefully set the whole thing down on the floor. Each cube was made of a different kind of wood and together they formed a sepia-hued mosaic, like a Rubik’s Cube made a hundred years ago. She picked up a cube and held it in her hand, amazed at how smooth and slick and satisfyingly tactile each was, then she carefully placed it back in its proper corner. She closed up the box again for the pleasure of working the tiny, intricate golden latches and then let the sides once more splay open revealing this incomprehensible object, orderly, but nonsensical, burnished yet mathematical, hidden but totally exposed.
Ben.
She should call him. She should thank him. Somehow this silent object spoke to her so eloquently, its message of kindred sympathy was so clear, yet so peripheral to the broad gestures of language that it seemed that anything she could try to put into words would confuse or discolor this perfect confession. It was strange, but she had never had a male friend before. After so many years of Catholic school, men seemed to her like phantoms, alien creatures dimly visible from the female planet on which all of her emotions were centered. She felt proud and grateful to be the recipient of such a remarkable thing and a little jealous that he could make something like this exist. She wished she could answer in kind.
She took a small ivory card from her desk and, with the one fountain pen that currently had black ink, wrote in the middle of the page in excessive, ornate script, “Thank you.” Looking at the two small words, she felt overwhelmed by their paucity. The frustrations of the entire night seemed to well up around the blank space of the small page, a silence that pressed in on her, dense and impenetrable. She tossed the card aside.
George snored quietly from the chaise, and Ava struggled with a dissatisfaction that she couldn’t articulate but that seemed to reverberate in the creaking of the old walls and floors, groaning around her small body in the rich darkness of the summer night.
PART TWO
13
After the indisputable success of their grand opening, the next few months passed by in a swirl of parties and events, and Ava was amazed at how quickly what had seemed like a total reversal of her previous life could become routine, and even begin to slide into monotony. Every day she was at her desk in the library as before, but a new churning pattern of tasks kept her busy—arranging mailing lists, writing up invitations to events, ordering chair rentals and plastic cup deliveries, a daily race to keep the parties happening. Or else she was navigating the stream of unhappy Lazarus Club members who poured in to complain about whatever the previous week’s festivities had been. Ava’s neighbor, Mrs. Grierson, no longer smiled at her on the landing, and worse, her mahjong group had quietly relocated to the parlor downstairs, and Ava had pointedly not been notified of the shift.
But it had quickly become clear that the clientele of the House of Mirth was interested in parties, and since a few had actually paid membership dues and so many others promised they were going to “officially join” any day, Ava and Stephanie felt obliged to keep giving them what they wanted. So Ava stood in front of querulous old ladies, eyes downcast, apologetically murmuring promises she knew she had no intention of keeping—about keeping the noise and the crowds and the general uproar down.
Their situation with the Lazarus Club was tentative already. At the next board meeting, after they had done their best to answer to a barrage of outrage over their first event—how could they bring that kind of element into the club, what were they thinking, the smoke, the noise, the chaos, it was an absolute betrayal—Ava and Stephanie had been able to hand over a check for three thousand dollars, and the tenor in the room changed fairly dramatically.
“Very good, very good.” Mr. Dearborn had examined the check with a relish that Ava was starting to get confused by—weren’t these people all rich?—and then told them that since their rent had been prorated from the beginning of the summer, they were actually still two months behind, and this would need to be paid as soon as possible in the interest of everyone maintaining civil relations. Luckily they had recently been the subject of a full-page article in the Sunday Styles section of the paper that included a large flattering picture of Aloysius. So again he assured them that he would look out for their interests and not to worry. The further they entered into the workings of the Lazarus Club, the odder and more byzantine it all became. Fortunately, Ava was too busy now to think much about it; there was always a new event to plan, a bathroom to clean, lipstick and heels to put on for the next event on their calendar.
Today, she was looking at the evidence of their latest destruction. Things were definitely getting out of hand. At the reading of the night before, a guest, beautiful, young and very drunk, had decided to try and climb onto the mantel to reach a book on a nearby shelf. When she fell, she landed safely in the arms of the hedge fund trader who had been admiring her from below, but she broke off a chunk of the antique frame
of the mirror over the mantel.
The huge mirror now leaned precipitously away from the remaining corner of its frame, showing Ava a grossly elongated view of the bottom of her legs. She had already tried stacking books against it, but they didn’t seem to be offering any real support, and it was pretty clear when the mirror came down it would just do so, unimpeded by a shower of books. An air of suspended catastrophe permeated the room. While the snow blew high against the windows, and the cold radiators stood silently below, Ava waited for Stephanie to arrive so she could yell at her about the mirror. The incident seemed somehow so representative of the distasteful direction that their literary club had taken.
It was almost dismaying how right Stephanie had been: people who spend all of their evenings at fancy parties desperately wanted to think of themselves as people who read. The House of Mirth Literary Society brilliantly accorded them that illusion. But book parties, it turned out, were still parties, and “readings followed by a cocktail reception” felt more and more like cocktail receptions saddled with preliminaries, and Ava was starting to get despondent. People came in ever-increasing numbers. Businessmen in smooth silk ties pushed their midlife bellies against the bar—magnanimous patrons of the arts. Willowy girls who had majored in literature but now worked in PR found the bohemian parties they had moved to New York dreaming of, and chased the rich men, their ambition lit by the glow of artificial bronzer. Young artists complained of being broke in the international accents of Swiss boarding schools, Riviera vacations, and trips home to South American rubber plantations. Stephanie presided over them all. Fellow strivers gratefully hitched themselves to her upward trajectory, while those on top found her continually charming—always so well dressed, so amusing, so clever. It was left to Ava to pour drinks and mop up spills, watching the world she had helped to create from the other side of a growing despair.
She started to go numb from the chill and stomped her feet to warm up until she noticed the mirror trembling and contented herself with briskly rubbing the arms of her coat, shedding vintage rabbit fur as she did. Something was wrong with the heat. She drained the last of the cold tea in her cup and unwound a length of black tulle from her bag. Her plan was to hide the damage as well as she could before any of today’s old ladies saw it. She was engaged in this effort, hanging from the side of the library ladder that didn’t quite reach, when Stephanie finally arrived swaddled to her ears in white cashmere. “What on earth are you doing?”
“It’s the best I can think of,” Ava answered curtly.
“How bad is it? Does it look as bad today as it did last night?” Stephanie moved a swath of fabric aside and groaned. “I can’t ask her to pay for it. Her dad owns most of Times Square. If they hear we’re broke, we’re done for.”
“I don’t understand why we put up with these rich idiots if they aren’t ever going to give us any money.”
“They will. It just takes time. Spare me the lecture, Trotsky. We need to figure this out.”
“That’s a rather ominous comparison.” Ava twisted the dark fabric into a concealing valance. “Why not Lenin, if that’s what you’re accusing me of?”
“Because unlike some of us, you have no stomach for the necessities of running an empire.” Stephanie picked at invisible lint from the sweater that encased her like swan’s down. “I had one of those posters on my wall in college, if you remember.”
There had in fact been a brief moment when Stephanie had been the toast of the student workers collective and had taken to wearing a jaunty cap with a red star that made her look like a French movie star flirting with communism until she did end up dating the very tall, charismatic president of the whole thing, at which point he began to bore her and she moved on to men who didn’t have philosophical objections to buying her expensive dinners. Ava thought wistfully of this uncanny ability Stephanie had to evoke desire in even the most unlikely places. Someone always wanted her, and this state of affairs gave Ava a funny ache, small but raw, and she tried to chase it away by pointlessly stacking more books against the leaning glass.
Stephanie watched her trying to drape fabric over the broken frame. “You know what we have to do,” she said finally.
“Stop inviting the daughters of oligarchs to our parties.”
“There you go again. But seriously, Ben would know how to fix this.”
Ava had one fleeting moment of thinking that Stephanie was joking and then, as so often seemed to happen these days, realized she was perfectly serious. “We didn’t pay him, remember? He hates us.”
“He just had a fit. Artists are temperamental people. I’m sure you could get him to do it.”
It seemed impossible that Stephanie could be so unaware of the sacrifice that the whole incident had exacted on Ava. It wasn’t that long after their opening night that Ben had asked her point-blank to pay him for making the bar. They hadn’t spoken of his gift, but in a shy smile, a quick exchange of understanding glances, they seemed to have agreed that they could leave their declarations of sympathy unspoken, taking their time in the exciting silence of immanent possibility. “Acting like idiots,” had been Stephanie’s annoyed way of putting it.
He brought up the money at the end of another wild evening, while Ava was drunkenly consolidating the dregs of multiple wine bottles to recork and be served again. “I know it’s my fault. I spent too much time on it. I wanted to make it really special.” Ava looked up, noticed him blush, and spilled a little wine. “But I’m kind of down to the wire, and I can’t afford to put it off anymore.” He watched the dark liquid slosh in quick circles around her plastic funnel. “It’s really humiliating to have to ask.”
“More humiliating than what I’m doing right now?” Ava pushed in a cork and started a new bottle with a tipsy attempt at levity. But he didn’t smile. He looked at the floor with a discomfort that made Ava sorry for joking. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “We love it so much. It’s just that we’re so broke.”
Just then, Stephanie wandered in looking for a corkscrew. “One of the owners of the Knicks just proposed to me.” She giggled. “I told him he better buy a platinum patron top tier membership. Which I just made up.” She waited, hand upraised for Ava to strike in celebration, then shrugged and did a little dance.
“I know you guys are, but I paid for all the materials out of pocket.” Ben pressed forward, reluctantly.
“Oh my god, are you guys talking about the bar? Please.” Stephanie picked up the corkscrew and waved it dangerously close to his face with a wobbly assertiveness. “You’ve gotten so much exposure. Everybody loves our bar. You should be paying us.” Then to Ava’s dismay, Stephanie wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, in a mistaken display of consensus.
Ben looked at Ava, and his disgust seemed to confirm an esteem that she had just forfeited. His expression hardened. “I should have known.” Then, despite his anger, unable to resist first wiping up a puddle of spilled wine on the surface of the bar, he threw the soiled paper in the trash and left. Ava hadn’t heard from him since. Sometimes she looked at the little wooden box on her mantel, and its presence there offered some consolation like the stinger of a bee left behind, some piece of Ben embedded in her life, a link to the things she still associated with him—art, poetry, genius, all manner of higher things that Ava wanted in her life but that seemed to be drifting ever farther away in his absence.
“Now, Ava, I know you liked him. This is a perfect way to get you two back together.”
“Stephanie, I’m not like you. Guys don’t just fall all over themselves to do stuff for me. That was like my one chance.” She felt all choked up for a minute and, embarrassed, stopped.
“One chance for what? For a boyfriend? Please.”
“I even told my mom about him and then I had to call her back and say he disappeared, and she made the most disappointed sound I’ve ever heard, and I’ve made her make a lot of disappointed
sounds in my life. She told me I was utterly hopeless. And she’s obviously right.” Ava didn’t mean to sound quite so hurt, but it didn’t seem to matter because it didn’t appear to faze Stephanie in the least. The cavalier way she had become accustomed to brushing off Ava’s concerns—that this whole project wasn’t like a salon, that it wasn’t even about books at all—had become rather second nature.
“All the more reason to patch it up. It will be good for you to have a project. I handle too much of everything these days. It’s bad for you. You’re getting shy again. Come down, I have something to show you. Our article is out.”
Ava secured the tulle with one last tack, bruising her thumb as she did so, and descended the ladder slowly to express her disapproval. Reluctantly, she took the magazine Stephanie was holding toward her. “House of Flirts!” read the headline. Ava had gotten so used to this kind of press she was able to grudgingly admire the pun. She and Stephanie had proved irresistible; reporters could pretend to be writing about culture, then file a shiny pictorial of New York nightlife, and the requests for interviews kept coming. In this latest photo, Ava sat on a pile of books in a borrowed evening gown, champagne glass upraised, propped on one hand like a tipsy odalisque. Stephanie crouched behind her, staring down the camera, chewing on the arm of a pair of glasses without lenses. “Oh dear,” she said.
“You look fabulous,” Stephanie countered angrily.
Ava decided against trying to explain the uncomfortable amalgam of pride and embarrassment the picture evoked in her. While it was a little dismaying to be so stripped of her usual identity, that she could be this beautiful stranger, even if only frozen on the glossy pages of a magazine, fed a hunger that she didn’t really want to acknowledge. In the silence of two dimensions, she and Stephanie looked almost evenly matched, equivalent. She turned away to avoid the dark, self-immolating thrill of it, handing the magazine back.
The Little Clan Page 17
