The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  Stephanie read, a slight furrow of concentration between her brows. She sighed, running her fingers gently over the page, and when she finally looked up, a smile lay over her features, elated, serene. When she failed to find this ecstatic reaction mirrored in her friend, her face closed, the shimmering pleasure retreated, and her voice was brisk. “They called us a nightclub again. Why do people keep doing that?”

  “Because stuff like this doesn’t happen in a goddamned library,” Ava said, pointing at the mirror and getting mad again. “And why is it only socialites? How come we still don’t have any young writers, or MFA students or artists or anyone who might actually want to talk to me instead of just people that want to get their pictures taken with you?”

  But Stephanie was lost again to the hypnotic thrall of the pages. “I have to send this to my mom. She’s so proud of me.”

  All at once, Ava deflated. Stephanie’s mom had come to visit three years ago, right after Stephanie’s gallery had been shut down, and she hadn’t even stayed twenty-four hours, complaining that Stephanie’s apartment was dingy and her friends weren’t going anywhere and if she wanted to hang around a bunch of losers, she might as well have stayed in Cedar Rapids. Ava had shared the quiche Stephanie baked for the occasion and then picked Stephanie up off the bathroom floor when she passed out that night, hair damp with vomit and vodka. “Do you want a cup of tea?” she asked.

  Stephanie nodded as Ava placed a kettle on the coils of an old hot plate. “So we’ve got another gala to go to next week. There’ll be some people there that I think might be able to help us with the board if they become members.”

  “No, I’m not going.” Whenever the rich friends, so generally evasive about membership dues, found themselves with empty seats at charity events, they often called Stephanie to bring her entourage of somewhat famous writers and beautiful young women. At first, Ava had gone too, seduced by the chance to spend an evening in the grand cultural spaces of New York—libraries and museums and historic mansions—but invariably it involved a series of older men with sweaty hands taking unseemly pleasure in Stephanie’s company. Also, galas were boring and it took like four hours to be served any food and then it was three sprigs of asparagus and a chicken breast, small recompense for the creepy transactional feeling of the whole evening.

  “It’s outrageous of them to want money from us. Before this, when was the last time the Lazarus Club was mentioned in a magazine? We’re such an asset. They just need to hear it from other fancy old people. All we need is one big philanthropist to back us, and the board will drop the whole thing. I’m sure of it.”

  “We should pay rent. We signed a lease. It’s not their fault all our money goes toward paying you a living wage. What kind of tea do you want?”

  “I swear you are being obtuse on purpose. Roar of Thunder.”

  “These are charging bison on the package—why do you want tea to turn you into a buffalo?”

  “I’m a raging bull. It’s us against the world. I need my strength.”

  “I’m pretty sure this is not the world. This is a very specific and absurd predicament of our own creating.”

  “This from the girl who had spent two years here alone, darning socks. Is that what you want?” Ava looked away. “I’ll take care of the board, and you get our stupid mirror fixed before we get evicted and can’t make any money to pay off your dumb credit card.”

  At the mention of her debt, Ava felt a familiar rise in her throat, but she was learning from experience that she wouldn’t actually throw up. It was just the bilious manifestation of the state of indenture. She swallowed it down and dropped a tea bag of Lady Grey into a delicate lilac cup. The cups steamed, and Ava realized she had forgotten to warm them first. She had been clinging to such traditions lately, as if by enacting the rituals of the great estates, she could inhabit for a moment the security of the ruling class. It didn’t work. She cradled a cup in her hand, grateful for its heat. “We have to pay off that debt. We have to,” she said finally.

  “So let’s not get kicked out.” Stephanie drummed her fingernails against the bar.

  “He looked so disappointed in me.”

  “Here’s a thing about men—the worse he thinks you are, the more awesome he will feel about himself when he forgives you. It actually works out better this way.” Stephanie had been checking her eyebrows in the reflective dome of the kettle but noticed Ava’s expression. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  They carried their tea to the desk and sat opposite each other. Stephanie, her legs crossed on the desk, computer perched on her lap, chewed a clump of hair as she typed. Ava, whose chair had wheels, had been imperceptibly slipping farther and farther away from her typewriter as she wrote letter after letter begging donors for contributions until her chin was practically level with the desk. It made it convenient to rest her forehead against her keyboard after writing some particularly egregious untruth. The radiators boomed every now and then, causing both girls to look toward them hopefully, but no heat was forthcoming.

  After a while, Ava noticed the absence of keystrokes from Stephanie’s side of the desk. She was picking at her nails. “I really do wish you were coming with me. I always feel so much better when you’re there. That financial journalist always tries to kiss me. And it’s awkward. He smells like VapoRub.”

  Ava shivered. “You should punch him in the face.”

  “No, he might be useful to us at some point.” Stephanie looked up. “Oh, you’re joking.”

  Ava felt bad. “I wasn’t really. Take George as a chaperone.”

  “Rich guys never take him seriously. Not like you. It’s weird, it’s like they get embarrassed or something. It’s that look you get. It makes them way more respectful.” She closed her laptop and began opening their mail.

  Ava plucked at the fur of her coat. Fluff escaped from her fingers, borne away on a passing draft. “There must be some other way to make all this work.”

  “When you figure it out, let me know.”

  “It’s just so gross,” Ava said, but fear of what she would do without Stephanie, now that she had somehow allowed herself to be sunk into thousands of dollars of debt, silenced her objections.

  When things had been going well with Ben, and her mother seemed suddenly disposed to ring her up for bright, chatty conversations about clothes and what hairstyles might suit her better than her helmet of braids, Ava had tried mentioning her debt. Her mother had so much money, after all. And her mother’s voice had immediately taken on that chill, the feeling for Ava of the sun suddenly going behind the clouds, and had asked, “It’s for the project with that girl, isn’t it? When will you ever learn?” and the subject had somehow permanently been put to rest.

  Stephanie made a sudden sound of strangled rage, and Ava looked up. “What?” Stephanie folded the letter she had been reading and jammed it into its envelope; Ava could see the twinning letters of the Lazarus insignia in one corner, and asked again, more urgently, “What do they want now?”

  Stephanie stared straight ahead, a panicked, unfocused expression that looked right through Ava, as if she were about to cry and then, just as Ava, unnerved, asked one more time what was the matter, the color returned to her face like a slide clicking into place, and she blinked, as if Ava had just come into focus from a long way away. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What? What was that? What just happened?”

  “I have to go. I’m meeting a fashion editor for drinks. She might do a shoot here, and I’m going to charge her a ton of money to do it. Have you seen that pair of heels I left here last week?” Stephanie crossed to the filing cabinet, rummaging around the collection of high heels that had for some reason accumulated in the bottom drawer, taking the letter with her.

  “You’re leaving already? What’s going on? What about our nonprofit application?” Ava asked, a catechism to which they paid d
aily, desultory obeisance.

  Stephanie kicked the drawer shut. “That one is your responsibility.” She gave Ava a funny look that Ava couldn’t quite decipher, but suddenly Stephanie seemed very far away. Ava wanted to call her back, to feel her fingertips on her friend’s warm forearm and draw the inevitable, wordless comfort that Stephanie’s skin always seemed to offer. “Do it today,” Stephanie added with a strange emphasis, at once an echo of some great unspoken feeling and a deflection of further inquiry. “And don’t forget you said you would go with Steve Buckley to that party for me tomorrow.”

  Ava had totally forgotten. “No. I don’t want to. I hate that guy.”

  “Someone has to. He saw one of our articles and now wants to get more involved. There’s more money there. If we’re ever going to pay this rent, we can’t not try.” Stephanie paused as she tied the ends of her scarf in the slice of mirror still visible under all the tulle. “I can’t do everything, Ava.”

  Again, a strange shift in tone occurred; an unaccustomed solemnity that coursed in the low tremble to her voice made Ava want to reach out and pull Stephanie to her, and offer comfort. And she felt guilty about not going to Stephanie’s gala. She always felt guilty about something these days. “No. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Stephanie looked at her through the mirror for one long, pregnant moment, her face like a duckling lost in the swelling of her scarf. “Thanks.” Then she hurried away, the letter still clenched in her fist.

  To silence the queasy, confusing feeling Stephanie left behind her, Ava looked around for a task—something tangible and productive to do, a defiant push against the sinking paralysis that she sometimes felt in her friend’s company. She started looking up the different grants available to literary organizations, but she had done this many times before, and as always, everything she found required them to have 501(c)(3) status. She had promised she would do it, so from under a pile of accumulated junk mail, she found their copy of form 1023, “Application for Recognition of Exemption Under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.” She flipped through the thick stack of instructions for form 1023 that she had printed out. Once again, she tried with steadfast heart to answer the questions that seemed so straightforward, but which immediately unfolded into an infinite number of possibilities like a philosophical proof whose foundational principles she hadn’t grasped. She had actually tried to read Spinoza once because he was quoted in a Wodehouse story, and she had felt similarly defeated. At the fourth question, she started drawing little top hats on all of the letter o’s. Then a bunch of ostrich plumes in the margin and then a horse underneath them that was soon pulling a great catafalque across the whole of question six. She sighed and put down her pen. Instead she printed out a bunch of new letters asking for membership dues from Stephanie’s rich friends and then to hide from the twinge of self-reflection, she opened a book of Edwardian detective stories. But other worries and concerns soon pressed upon her mind, and she closed the book without noticing and stayed at her desk, lost in anxious thought.

  14

  Because she didn’t have the courage to refuse when Stephanie showed up the next day with a dress in a dry cleaning bag and lots of helpful suggestions as to the best ways to ask for money, Ava agreed to go to Steve Buckley’s party. Since so little of their project had involved discussing books, Ava had few occasions to feel that she contributed anything useful, and more and more she felt prey to the worry that Stephanie might one day wake up to how unequal their relationship had become and cast her aside. This whole thing wasn’t quite what she had envisioned, but any of her alternatives seemed terrifying. Her house, her job, her best friend, all were now inextricably tied to the fate of the House of Mirth. Also, there were some moments when the two of them were dressed up, shining with youth and sparkly eye shadow, standing arm in arm in front of a crowd of glamorous, fashionable people, that Ava felt a breathless wonder that this all somehow belonged to her.

  So that night, Ava ended up at the rooftop bar of a fancy hotel in the meatpacking district, trying to make small talk while waiters circulated around a pool lit in a rotating kaleidoscope of neon colors, and stars shone in the clear night above. Because Stephanie had lent her clothes, the feeling that she was an impostor, an inevitable disappointment of extra pounds and dark hair, weighed even more so on her already stilted conversation. Luckily, Mr. Buckley proved so talkative, little was required of her. Words poured from him as if he were afraid the lingering notes of each previous sentence might somehow occlude the passage of the next, his intonation building in enthusiasm and urgency until the conversational crescendo subsided without any obvious cause, only to immediately start swelling up again. Ava found this unpredictable torrent of verbiage a little exhausting. He also seemed to require a lot of reassurance, and finally, sick of smiling and nodding after every thought, Ava looked away, vainly pulling up the front of her dress as it dipped and fluttered past her sternum.

  Because of the season, they were enclosed in a glass box. An icy wind blew off the river, banging the awnings of the buildings below, while here, thirty floors above, people lounged on low chairs around a gently lapping pool lit by glimmering lanterns. The women were barely dressed; to be so nearly naked on a rooftop in January seemed just one more manifestation of the magical invulnerability of wealth. The men surveyed the women with self-congratulatory approval. Ava watched a waiter’s fleeting expression of disgust as he mopped the spilled drink of a woman laughing loudly into a cell phone. A man in a sport coat and jeans lit a cigar, and the young woman next to him smiled through the smoke. A hungry-looking teenager in a sparkling dress sang along to a pop song as she squirmed on someone’s lap, tapping an expensive shoe, her feet puppy large at the end of her spindly calves.

  After a while, Steve Buckley stopped jiggling one crossed leg over the other and stood, professing a desire to mingle. Ava shrank from him, sure that this would be the moment when everyone’s displeasure that she was not Stephanie would become too obvious to ignore, but he took her firmly by the elbow. A little shocked at this untoward self-assurance, Ava followed. To each new group of people, he introduced her as “my private librarian,” and she was confronted with a shadowy, sexy fiction that fell over her like a painted flat obscuring the dusty, cluttered backstage of her ungainly self. She found she didn’t actually mind it so much; it seemed to have such an immediate effect on people, everyone lighting up with a flirtatious eager welcome. There was something oddly relieving at being so labeled and therefore not responsible for explaining who she was in any real capacity. Sailing beneath the protection of Mr. Buckley’s money and influence, she was complimented, cooed over, asked about her literary club, her answers hung on. His wealth commanded such a sphere of deference that for the first time she really understood why this mode of life appealed to Stephanie. She felt charming, commanding, safe. Disgracefully expensive bottles of champagne were ordered, and Ava drank immoderately, realizing that all those counts and barons she liked to read about must have felt like this their whole lives. A woman with slanted green eyes and a tragic Romanian lilt to her voice twirled one of Ava’s curls between her fingers. “So beautiful,” she murmured in her ear. “Thick like a horse’s tail.”

  Beyond the diminishing reflections of their translucent enclosure, New York City glistened like a present offered just for her. How smart of them to drink in the sky like this, she thought, as her glass was replenished again unasked, like gods on Olympus. A few bottles later, a girl, six feet in heels with the soft, ripe face of a child model, brought Ava to the bathroom, giggling and whispering racist jokes of the former Soviet republics that Ava didn’t understand. But this girl was beautiful, and to be the recipient of this passing affection almost seemed to raise Ava up, to include her in the sisterhood of striking beauty, and Ava responded eagerly, hungrily. Her arms grasped at the tiny waist and the friendship of a passing hour. The bathroom had plum-colored walls and a black glass chandelier, and the beautiful
nymph offered her cocaine. Ava almost refused, but as the girl, whose name Ava hadn’t caught, bent toward her, rummaging in a small silver bag propped against her thigh, the temptation to slide into this identity, one for which she was already dressed, proved overpowering. She didn’t want to break the gossamer intimacy that bound the two of them, just two extravagantly beautiful women living the life that attends beauty. She had done cocaine once in college to feel closer to Sherlock Holmes but, as she inhaled, she realized that whatever she had done before was so inferior to what she was now consuming, it barely merited the same name.

  The evening became more impressionistic after that, scenes of glimmering lucidity alternating with stretches of patchy darkness. She ended up in the pool at some point, in her cocktail dress, cavorting with other scantily clad young women like Rhine maidens keening for gold. One of them nibbled her ear while another, laughing, swam a lazy backstroke around them. Ava was overtaken by a blissful immediacy, and she floated in a succession of quickly passing moments where nothing had any consequences. Her past fell away, her boring previous life immaterial to this sparkling now, while the future consisted only of finding the glass of champagne she kept misplacing. She accepted offered cigarettes, delighting in the smoke, a substance as ephemeral as she felt, as if she had smoked her whole life. Everything was glorious.

  At some point, she found herself in an animated conversation with Steve Buckley, urgently agreeing with everything he said, while his hands played against the silk dress that clung to her body like a wet tissue. The dark corner they had found almost demanded confidences, and she was absorbed in his recitation of a tragic childhood when he surprised her by wrapping his arms around her neck and leaning close over her ear, asking for a blow job.

  At first, she wasn’t sure she had even heard him correctly, but then, looking into his slightly unfocused but intent eyes, she realized that she had, and for some reason she felt flattered. An evening’s worth of fawning and blandishments had worn down her critical faculties; if his wealth and status could be as admired as they seemed to be at this party, surely that must make him admirable himself, she figured. The champagne, the cocaine, the effervescent buoyancy of her evening all seemed a gift from this man, an act of generosity in bringing her with him into these giddy heights where pools floated thirty stories in the air and the winter wind couldn’t touch you. It even struck her as affecting that among all the models and starlets, he had chosen her, and this seemed the final validation of the person she had started to become in the bathroom so many hours ago. She was glamorous, beautiful, triumphant; she owed it all to him. A blow job seemed the least she could do. Her knees hit the slick marble harder than she would have liked, and the thought that she would have bruises tomorrow was the first glimmer of her capacity to think about the future returning, but it was quickly swallowed by the darkness around her. She undid his pants and noticed with a disdainful twinge that he was wearing silk boxers, her disapproval of his fashion choices another indication of her critical faculties trying to surface. He wasn’t erect, but as he was still looking down at her expectantly, she took him into her mouth. Then, as the cocaine in her system fought a valiant stand against a quickly approaching sobriety, she wondered what on earth she was supposed to do with this flaccid penis. She started to giggle. Giggling and the subsequent bouncing of unresponsive flesh against her tongue made the situation even more ridiculous, and she could feel that she was careening down a slope of amusement from which she wouldn’t be able to recover. Steve Buckley didn’t give her very long to try and removed himself with disgust. “Fuck the both of you,” he said, walking away from her increasingly uncontrollable laughter.