When Ben opened the graffiti-covered metal door, they walked into a large open space where two unshaven young men were bent over a soldering iron. They looked at her without curiosity. “Roommates,” Ben muttered as they walked past into another large dark room where various machines bristled with blades and parts. An easel leaned in the corner. Two drafting tables stood side by side, next to a dusty record player, a pile of scrap metal and a large dead plant. A dachshund ran toward them in abbreviated bounds, only to stop a foot away, snout raised in suspicious inquiry. “Oh, is this Betty?” Ava knelt, glad for something to do, and held out her hand. At the gesture, Betty sprung backward and looked at Ben, vindicated.
“Don’t let it bother you. She’s shy.” He opened a narrow door. “We use this as a studio. I keep meaning to clean it up one of these days.” The skittering of claws on concrete followed them. “After you.”
The room was tiny, only as wide as the length of the double bed, which sat on top of a platform built of drawers, each with a single brass handle in the middle. A desk, a bookshelf, everything was handmade, white and compact, orderly as a ship’s cabin. “Where’s all your stuff?” Ava asked before she could help it.
“Around.” He pointed to a few drawers ingeniously hidden in corners of the room. “I don’t have that much.”
“I couldn’t imagine living without all my things.”
“I’m sure.” Ava didn’t know how to take this, so she looked around again. A book lay open next to the pillow, and she picked it up. “Contemporary art; not your thing,” he said with a note of apology.
“I’m interested,” she objected, but he didn’t pursue the matter. She could understand why, and yet there was something in this idea of her, as accurate as it probably was, a delineation that felt constricting. A single lamp lit the room; its muted glow bouncing off all the white walls evoked a kind of serenity that alienated Ava even as she couldn’t help but admire it. “What about those?” She pointed at a stack of books on his desk. “Tell me about those.” She curled her legs under her skirt.
He didn’t and instead moved to sit next to her, very close, on the edge of the bed. “You’re very beautiful,” he said.
If he was going to go that far, Ava felt obliged to let herself be pulled by the warm current of breath coasting across her collarbones and turned her head. He kissed her again. And again, an inconvenient focus on the awkward and kind of absurd mechanics of his tongue in her mouth kept pulling her out of the moment. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to remember exactly how kissing was supposed to work. How was she supposed to breathe? The line of his teeth felt very hard and kept bumping up against her with an untoward aggression. She tried to ignore the stubble just above his mouth that was hurting her lip. But his head against her cheek smelled of fresh soap, and the hair at his nape bristled under her fingers, and she didn’t want to discourage him when he looked searchingly into her face. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this,” she apologized. “I’ve only ever been with one guy before.” She started to tell him about Jules Delauncy, but he was now kissing her ear and didn’t seem to be listening. His mouth felt cold and wet behind her earlobe, and she had to suppress the impulse to ask him stop.
“Oh, Ava,” he said with an indulgent chuckle, when she finished her story. “You’re too much.”
This was clearly intended as a compliment, so Ava felt her objections to the unpleasant feel of his kisses on her neck were ridiculous, and she attempted the kind of sigh that seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
Soon she was naked, as was he, and the knowledge that things were going to proceed in a fairly predictable order without much being required from her was a relief. He would be busy and not notice if she wasn’t doing all of this correctly.
At some point, Betty woke up and, curious about the rustling, nosed her damp snout against Ava’s ear. Ava was glad for the interruption, thinking this might be a moment where she could reconnect with him from across the aching plain of his desire; maybe they could start talking about books or art or something and she would feel that thrill from earlier in the evening, but Ben removed the dog with a perfunctory shove. He looked into Ava’s eyes, but something made her want to avoid his eager, flushed expression. She turned her head against his shoulder, trying not to notice the cool, embarrassed awareness of the parameters of her body and the places it was being invaded. When it was over, he rubbed her arm in what almost felt like a consolatory way, and this made her pretty sure that she hadn’t done a very good job, but he fell asleep before she could question him further.
The next morning, she watched him get dressed, hoping that to see him standing on one leg getting into his pants or baring the bony ridge of his spine would reassure her of an intimacy that she was already doubting, but he was as self-contained in a pair of silly white briefs as he was fully clothed. Men inhabited their bodies with such dumb ease that looking at a man naked was as unrevealing as looking at him clothed. He caught her eye and smiled, and she saw with a hint of jealousy that his shoulders were relaxed, his smile nonchalant. Her observation didn’t bother him at all, and this bothered her very much.
16
When she got home, Ava was surprised to see Stephanie was there, slouched against her door, picking at the beading embroidered along the neckline of her low-cut gown. “What are you doing here?” Ava fumbled with her keys.
“Where did you sleep last night?” Stephanie asked, rubbing under her eyes, her fingers coming up black with mascara. “Is he going to fix our mirror?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. We have to pay him. Seriously. We have to,” Ava said, opening the door. “I can’t live like this.”
“Sure,” Stephanie sighed, not looking at her. Her shoulders slumped forward, bare under the thin straps of her gown. “Whatever. I just don’t want you to be mad at me anymore.”
This sudden change of course was much more disconcerting than the argument Ava had been expecting. “Wait, what?”
“I just want us to be on the same team again. I feel like we’re always arguing.” A wrongly pulled thread sent a stream of beads from Stephanie’s dress onto the floor with a rattle. “Fuck, this is borrowed.” She crouched on the floor, hunting for her lost beads.
Still confused by this sudden capitulation, Ava stood aside to let Stephanie pass through the door. “Where did you sleep last night?”
“Don’t ask. I just don’t want to be alone right now. Can I stay here?”
Ava followed. “Of course.” Then she remembered why Stephanie was in evening wear. “How was the gala?”
Stephanie stopped fumbling with the clasp of her shoes and looked up, excited. “Guess what? I think I got us a new patron—Howard Steward.”
Ava’s stockings were still damp from the snow, and she hung them over the radiator. “I don’t know who that is.”
“He’s a super famous investor guy. He has like a million companies. I met him tonight. He’s a big philanthropist, and he’s like Caribbean or Spanish or something. I told him we were going to do a bunch of youth literacy programs in Harlem.”
“But we aren’t.”
“We will. As soon as we have more money, I think we should definitely do things like that. At least I’m trying to make us sound good, Ava. What else was I supposed to tell him?” Stephanie said, irritably. She shed her dress and was already crawling into Ava’s bed. “I didn’t make the world we live in. Howard Steward is rich.”
Ava didn’t quite follow, but she decided to let the matter drop. She crawled into bed beside Stephanie and curled up against her back, and a tension she had been carrying all through the previous night melted, sliding through their tangled limbs, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to trust herself to Stephanie’s care. The soft sound of Stephanie’s breathing fell between them, and Ava welcomed it, her bones dissolving in ease and quiet. “Hey,” she whispered. “I think I might fina
lly have a boyfriend.”
“Congratulations.” Stephanie yawned, not bothering to turn around, settling deeper into the warmth of Ava’s bed.
Maybe they would talk more about it tomorrow, Ava decided, and together they drifted into a hungover sleep, reeking of alcohol and men’s embraces, overlaid with the barest hint of rose.
* * *
Over the next few days, it became impossible to ignore a certain chill around the Lazarus Club. The board’s displeasure drifted like a pall down from the upper floors. In the hallways, Ava’s polite greetings had been getting even icier responses. A creeping impermanence hovered around them, like living at court under a sovereign’s displeasure. Ava tried not to take it too hard that her cozy nest had become so prickly and unwelcoming, and concentrated her attentions on the House of Mirth instead.
On a cold Sunday a few weeks later, corduroy blazers and coarse wool sweaters filled the library with the muted color of autumn leaves, over which a reader’s voice billowed, a mellifluous rumble of sharp constants and orotund vowels. Ava and George, in a small rebellion against Stephanie’s overwhelming influence, had allowed the volunteer poets who helped out at events to organize a series of poetry readings. They had gone about it with impressive enthusiasm, convincing all sorts of established poets to participate, and Ava was pleased. This was just what she had imagined her salon would be—young poets, elder statesmen, eager readers, gathered under the glow of her hospitality and a shared love of literature.
In the bar, George was piling scones too high on a chipped blue-and-white platter, while Ava dried teacups. She handed him another plate, and he accepted it reluctantly. “You have no sense of architectural adventure.”
“Not with my homemade pastries. I watched five hours of Daniel Deronda on PBS to make that many scones. Did you know that book was about beautiful Jews? Somehow I had no idea.”
“Our sex appeal is generally underrepresented in Victorian novels,” he agreed. “I was writing a paper on Thucydides.”
She refilled a marmalade pot. “I keep forgetting that you have a bunch of other obligations. How many classes are you taking this semester?”
“Six.”
“Six? George, how? You’re here all the time.”
He smoothed out the wrinkled stripes of his tie. “It’s a lot more fun than ‘Intro to Calculus.’ Also at school, unlike here, the girls are impervious to my charms.” Clapping began in the other room and with it, the rustle of movement, listeners slowly shifting out of absorbed immobility. “Here they come.”
Ava turned on the kettle. People began filtering into the bar, scanning the food with a show of indifference, while Ava smiled at them with the most open expression she could conjure, pouring hot water into porcelain cups. Sometimes, it looked as though one of them were about to start a conversation, and she felt a surge of anticipation, but then nothing seemed to happen. A young man in a flat cap stared at the shimmering peacock painted on the wall and met her searching eyes by accident. “Did you enjoy the reading?” She handed him a cup of tea.
“What is this place?” he asked.
Eagerly, Ava launched into an explanation that somehow got kind of jumbled by the end. “So it’s just perfect for people who like poetry. We plan on having many more of these readings.”
“It looks expensive,” he apologized and slid backward into the crowd before she could argue with him.
An older woman in a sweater vest rifled through a basket of tea bags, and Ava wanted to talk to her, but the professorial bearing that drew Ava to her also made her feel shy. She checked the clock. Stephanie had been calling all day with instructions—where to pick up the cake, when to come over, wanting to know whether twenty-six was the beginning of middle age. Each year, Ava got excessively withdrawn on her birthday, insisting that no one make a big deal and then hid, brokenhearted, all day because no one cared, and this was making her more irritable with Stephanie today than she meant to be.
She poured herself a cup of tea and ventured from behind the bar. The tweedy crowd looked exactly right. Overhearing a woman with Ana May Wong bangs and horn-rimmed glasses admiring the chandelier, Ava braved herself to butt in. “Thanks, I helped mount it up there myself. It’s crazy how heavy a twenty-foot chandelier is.” The woman blinked, and Ava tried to volunteer further friendly information. “It was surprisingly cheap. I guess not a lot of New Yorkers want Versailles-sized lighting fixtures.”
“Not a lot of New Yorkers have the room.” The woman turned back to her companions, leaving Ava embarrassed, aware that she had transgressed but with no idea how to fix it.
She sat on the arm of a sofa for a while trying to look approachable while poetry fans stepped carefully around her, retreating into clumps of previous acquaintances. Maybe she shouldn’t have worn red lipstick. The bright smears on her cup seemed proof of her lack of seriousness. She wanted to go home and eat pea soup for dinner, savoring the sensation of creamy ham-flavored satiety on a dark, lonely Sunday evening. Maybe wash her hair. Maybe wash her cat. Why after all these months was she still so bad at this?
A young man with a dusting of freckles and a paperback rolled in the patch pocket of his coat bumped into Ava. “I’m sorry.” She nodded to accept his apology, but he didn’t keep walking. “I love hearing Patterson read. It’s like a bear gargling with marbles.”
Ava laughed and then, as she realized he was going to continue the conversation, stood up so eagerly tea sloshed all over the saucer under her cup. “That glass he had on the lectern was full of vodka by his request, so maybe that has something to do with it.”
“You helped put this on? It’s pretty great. What an amazing place to hear poetry. Are you a poet then? Pound or Carson?”
Trying to decipher this gnomic question, Ava made a guess. “Carson?”
It was clearly the wrong answer, and rocking back on his heels with a marked relish, this young man seemed about to explain her mistake, when Ava felt something in her crumple. These were the conversations she was looking for, and yet in the face of his cheerful assurance and her mistake, a fear welled up within her, overpowering and irrepressible. She was not in high school anymore, she reminded herself. This smiling young man was not going to superglue her backpack shut or throw her gym clothes in the cafeteria dumpster because she said the wrong thing or failed some kind of mysterious test. Real life didn’t work like that. This was her event. She belonged here. It was only conversation, not some resolution on her worth as a human being. Yet, she just couldn’t tamp down the fear. It kept rising up until the ringing in her ears drowned out whatever he was saying, and she watched his lips moving, cursing the fact that Stephanie wasn’t here to save her. Why had she decided to throw an event by herself? This was madness, foolhardiness; she excused herself, moving quickly away from his confused expression, and back to the safety of the bar. “Wait, I’m sorry, what’s your name?” she heard him call behind her.
“I’m so bad at this,” she said to George, refilling the kettle at the leaking sink to quiet her racing heart. “How does Stephanie do it? How do you do it? Surely you had a hard time in high school.”
“I am possessed of a burly older brother, so nothing too disastrous. And anyway, none of that matters now.” Ava felt there was a slight in this, and she watched silently while George cleared a few cups, tossing the used tea bags in a soppy arc into the sink. She had assumed anyone she got along with must have been tortured in elementary school. Wasn’t that the glue that bound all worthwhile people? “Speaking of disasters, has Stephanie mentioned anything to you lately, of, I don’t know, maybe catastrophic import?”
The dense squares hit the steel sides with a splat and slid slowly toward the drain. “No, what do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he answered, suddenly evasive, and when his phone rang, he answered it quickly. He held it toward her. “Speaking of.”
“Again?” Ava took it tentatively, hoping
Stephanie was not going to scold her anymore. “Yes?”
“I just wanted to remind you that Le Sucre closes at six, and it’s all the way over on the West Side. The event’s almost over. Leave George in charge. Please? I’m making salmon. It’s good for your skin. I miss you. Come over.” Ava gave George back his phone with a sigh. She wasn’t able to refuse.
When she finally left, dirty teacups were piled as high as the deep walls of the sink. George was leaning on the bar, drawing shapes through little puddles of spilled tea, while a man in a loosened tie offered him a job as a personal assistant.
It was a cold night, and Ava walked south enjoying the hard black midwinter sky. Wind gusted down the desolate stretch of avenue, and she ducked into the small shelter of a bus stop. Snow lined the street in drifts, a rough terrain over which the wheels of cruising taxis crackled and snapped.
An old man joined her at the bus stop, his face sunk into his scarf, and the shared interiority of strangers insulating against the sharp air made her feel even more blissfully alone. When the bus finally came, Ava took a seat by the window, watching the shadowy outline of her fluorescent-lit reflection, occasionally pressing a cold hand against her cold cheek, happy on the hard blue seat. She wished the bakery were even farther away.
She arrived just as it was closing, but after knocking on the glass and some quick pleading, she continued her pilgrimage downtown, feeling slightly more cheerful to be carrying a large white box tied with ribbons. Stephanie lived on a small side street in the financial district, a narrow alley of Chinese restaurants and delis that served the grand old banks and investment houses of the surrounding area’s daylight hours. On a Sunday evening, it was deserted. The flickering yellow sign of a boarded-up dry cleaner shone on a row of overflowing dumpsters awaiting the end-of-the-week pickup. The metal gate of an Asian massage parlor rattled suddenly, and nimble shadows darted from underneath, careening down the street like dark, earthbound birds. Ava hurriedly pressed the graffiti-covered buzzer at Stephanie’s address.
The Little Clan Page 21
