The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “Come up,” a familiar voice crackled, and Ava pushed through the creaky iron door, starting the long climb to the sixth floor. Stephanie was waiting for her in a triangle of light that cut sharply into the dim stairwell. “How did the event go? Did we get a lot of people?” She stepped aside to let Ava in.

  Breathless from the stairs, Ava nodded and threw herself down on the large leather sectional that Stephanie had scavenged a few months ago with that strange knack she had for finding sofas. “Here. Happy Birthday.” Stephanie beamed and took the white box from Ava’s hands. She was wearing her glasses, thick Coke-bottle lenses that gave her the earnest, inquisitive look of an adolescent at a science fair, and her hair almost had a wave to it, a natural buoyancy straining against yesterday’s flat-ironing. “What’s all over your face?”

  “Zit cream.”

  “I just saw you yesterday. You didn’t have any zits.”

  “Sunday is my maintenance day.” Stephanie gingerly touched a few of the thick white spots dotting her face. “Hold on, I have to check the fish. I made a salad, too.” She shuffled into the kitchen in thick wool socks.

  Ava kicked off her shoes and pulled a torn cashmere throw around her legs, enjoying the smell of olive oil and dill that infused the apartment with a pleasurable domesticity. An unfolded pile of laundry filled an armchair, and a library book lay spine up next to three tabloids. The room had a cluttered comfortableness, the soft, intimate charm of a discarded bra still warm from another woman’s body; and Ava felt very cozy as the cold of the street seeped from her muscles. “What time are people getting here?”

  “George is coming after he cleans up.”

  “It’s just us? I thought you were having a whole party. What about all your celebrity friends?”

  “Oh god, in this dump?” Stephanie answered from the kitchen. “No, I always go to their apartments. This is just family.”

  Ava contemplated this new, preferable prospect for the evening, staring at a large discolored spot on the ceiling. “Doesn’t that make you feel weird, like a call girl or something?”

  Stephanie came back and handed her an asparagus spear. “No. I mean, I’ll have people over when I have a nicer place.” The slender stalk waved between them, a drop of water cresting from its prickly head onto Ava’s lap. “I have you guys. Come to the kitchen. Let’s make a drink. I bought umbrellas to make tiki martinis. I call them ‘Tiki-tinis.’” Ava allowed Stephanie to pull her to her feet. “I was going to go get stuff to make fancy rum drinks, but then my mom called, and I forgot. All I have is vermouth, so they’re just martinis with pink umbrellas. But if you call them ‘Tiki-tinis,’ it’s more festive.” Stephanie kicked a pair of dirty underwear under the couch as they passed.

  “How bad was your mom this year?” Ava bent down and picked up the underwear, folding it on the arm of the couch. “You’re going to forget those.”

  Stephanie shrugged. “Not that bad. One of her friends gave her a ton of diet food, so she’s sending me like a month’s worth of nutrition bars. Which is pretty cool, actually. Those are expensive.” Ava groaned. “Well, last year she gave me all those sessions at a tanning salon. I mean, yes, it was super convenient, but still, thanks, Mom, for the cancer.” Stephanie pushed her hair out of her face with her elbow, picking at an invisible spot on her chin. “Gin or vodka?”

  “Gin.” Stephanie’s glasses flashed as she shook a silver cocktail shaker. Ava considered trying to explain to her friend how desperately adorable she looked right now. That if she ever let a man see her like this, her romantic problems would be over and whoever was so honored couldn’t possibly help but love her, but Ava knew Stephanie would never believe it. She accepted a drink and tried to drink it in one swallow, but the pink umbrella poked her nose.

  Stephanie watched her, amused. “Slow down, tiger.” She fished out a cocktail onion and dropped it in Ava’s glass. “It’s all I have, although now I suppose it’s a Tiki-Gibson, which is much less catchy. Sit. I’m going to make a hollandaise.”

  “Seriously?” Ava sat on the counter, her feet resting on the opposite cabinets of the tiny kitchen.

  “It’s not that hard.” Stephanie, an egg carton in her arms, swung the refrigerator closed with her hip. “It’s very Atkins. Move. I need to get to the stove.”

  Ava complied. Stephanie carefully separated the whites of her eggs, nestling each yolk in the cup of a broken shell before sliding them into a pan. “So it’s silly, but I kind of had this worry that you might not come tonight.”

  Ava watched the hypnotic calm of the process as each yellow puddle oozed past. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Now that you have a boyfriend and stuff. You seem pretty distracted and all. And now is really when we need to be making plans for our future. You know we might not be at the Lazarus Club forever, and I want to make sure we’re looking out for our members and their interests.” Her glasses kept slipping down, and she pushed them up, with a quick glance at Ava. She squeezed a lemon into the pot and handed Ava a whisk. “Don’t let these burn.”

  In her whole life, Ava had never heard anyone refer to “her boyfriend,” and an overpowering satisfaction filled her heart. She hesitated. She had been wanting to ask Stephanie about relationships, about the awkward silences that sprang up between her and Ben whenever they weren’t talking about books or art or movies, or why every time she had slept over at his house she had left with a funny creeping feeling across her skin, a strange knot in her stomach that kept her from ever really being able to lose herself in the moment with him. She wanted reassurance that this was what it was like for everyone, and Stephanie had lots of experience of men, and yet Ava waited. If she gave voice to all the reservations that kept sneaking up on her when he left his sweaty hand in hers too long, or chewed on her nipple sending sharp alerts of discomfort down her shoulders, maybe this lovely dream would shatter. What if Stephanie thought it sounded crazy, or told her that everything was supposed to feel different? What if she lost this hard-won, long-awaited pleasure of feeling that she was just like everybody else? Little bubbles sprang around the edge of the pan, and she swished them away with each turn of the whisk. “Where did you learn to cook anyway?” she asked to change the subject.

  Stephanie leaned deep into the refrigerator. “I don’t remember. I’ve always liked being self-sufficient. But I guess you know all about that now, now that you’re so busy with your own life and all.”

  Millions of little yellow bubbles now rose in the pan, some bursting with a slow yawning gasp, others climbing into a cresting foam. “I’ve barely spent that much time with him,” Ava said. “You don’t have to worry. You would never have to worry about me,” she added softly.

  Stephanie dropped the butter she was cutting and grabbed the pan, removing it from the stove. “Too hot.” She examined the curdled eggs for a minute, swirling the pan through the air before dumping them into the sink. “Okay, let’s try this again. I’ll stir, you cut up that stick of butter.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

  A fresh egg cracked against the side of the pan, and Stephanie, pacified, began the process again, pausing to finish the last of her cocktail. “Well, I never loved you for your practical skills. But don’t forget, we’re partners. Until the end.”

  “But I seem to be bad at everything we do—all these parties and collaborations with Vogue or whatever. At least Ben likes to hear me talk about Zola and the Hapsburgs and stuff. At least, I think he does. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

  “I was first.” Stephanie sniffed indignantly as she set the pot aside. “I’ve been interested in all your boring stories from the beginning. It was always me.” She spoke sternly to the oven door. “You can’t leave, just because of some guy. I need you.”

  Ava reached out and touched her shoulder, amazed as always at the heat on Stephanie’s skin and the way it transferred instantly to the pads of her fing
ertips. “I’m not leaving you.”

  Stephanie shook her off. “That’s right, remember, I would fucking destroy you.” She laughed uneasily. “Set the table while I wash this stuff off my face. I left some flowers in the sink.”

  As she arranged the stiff deli roses in a vase, Ava slipped on the thorns. She sucked the thin trickle of blood from her palm, the taste of iron and salt, and then laid out plates and silverware.

  Eventually, George arrived with an overnight bag and a small package, wrapped in the brightly colored ads for escorts from the back of a free weekly, that he put next to Stephanie’s plate. “It was all I could find on the way here.” He looked at it for a minute. “I didn’t notice just how buxom some of those ladies were.”

  Ava realized she had forgotten to get Stephanie a present. “What’s with the bag?”

  Stephanie reappeared. “Georgie.” She gave him a hug, sloshing a little bit of the drink she was carrying onto his shirt. “Here, have a cocktail. He sleeps over when he has class in the morning,” she said to Ava, before sitting down at her plate and picking up her present.

  “My parent’s house is really far away,” he explained.

  “You parents don’t mind?” Ava asked.

  “They think I have an internship at Bear Stearns.” He smiled. “That buys me a lot of freedom.”

  Stephanie ran her fingers along each fold of wrapping. “We wear jammies and watch game shows on cable. George is weirdly good at Wheel of Fortune.”

  “Really?”

  “I played a lot of Hangman with my brother. Family road trips.”

  Ava fiddled with a fork next to her plate. “No, I’m just surprised that you stay over. I never knew you two were so secretive.”

  Stephanie sniffed her present. “Mmm, dusty. You could come over too, but you never want to hang out. You’re always so ready to go home.”

  Ava pressed the tines of the fork into the tablecloth, producing a scattering of little dents. She realized that she had always assumed that George liked her better than Stephanie. This revelation of an intimacy to which she was so peripheral made her suddenly insecure, and very jealous. “I just thought you were always going to parties.”

  “Sometimes we go to parties. Everybody loves George.” Stephanie picked at a piece of Scotch tape with the edge of her nail.

  “It’s really not worth being so careful with that wrapping paper. The hookers won’t mind,” George said, watching her progress.

  “I don’t want to rush.” When the wrapping was finally off and neatly refolded and tucked under her plate, Stephanie held up an elegant used volume. “Amazing. The Sun Also Rises, only my favorite book of all time.”

  “It is?” Ava felt strangely petulant. Stephanie was always pretending to read books, and somehow the reminder that she actually had books that she had read and loved felt like a betrayal. She already had so much else—did she have to take this from Ava, too? And George knew and was complicit, and this hurt, as well. Did either of them need her? “Where did you find this?” Ava resentfully turned the thin, gold-edged pages.

  “Bookstore.” George sniffed hopefully in the direction of the kitchen.

  “George, you’re amazing. I love you both. Best birthday ever. Let’s eat,” Stephanie commanded.

  They feasted on fish, then cake. The hours passed, and Ava tried to stop looking enviously at the book next to Stephanie’s plate. She felt unmoored, disoriented, adrift in a world that felt too inconstant. With a start, she realized she hadn’t read a book in weeks. This fact that had somehow skimmed past her notice in the long busy days of their project now seemed enormous, casting its shadow over everything else. If Ava wasn’t someone who read, who was she? And what was she doing? She drank another cocktail to quell the feeling of panic.

  Stephanie was holding forth. “Being as broke as we are is just the universe inviting us to try harder, to prove that we’re better than everyone else. I’ve always loved Nietzsche.” Stephanie pushed the sagging crown Ava had fashioned for her out of tin foil back up on her forehead, a gesture she had repeated so often static electricity had caused a halo of hair to poke out of the top.

  Ava spit a cocktail onion back into her glass. They were giving her a stomachache. “I thought that was just because you were kind of a Nazi in college.”

  “She’s joking,” Stephanie informed George.

  “He knows,” Ava said, putting her drink down on Stephanie’s book by accident.

  “Knows you’re joking or knows I was a Nazi? Because I wasn’t,” Stephanie clarified a little testily, moving the glass.

  “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” George said to the remains of the salmon.

  “Anyway, we can’t afford not to succeed. If this all falls apart, I’ll end up living in my mom’s basement, getting my boobs done every year, just waiting to die.” She plucked the petals off of a rose, scattering them dramatically over the ruins of German chocolate cake. “Let’s play Scrabble,” she said suddenly. “Ava always gets grumpy because I beat her, but it’s my birthday, so I get to choose.”

  “It’s only that I have no competitive spirit. I just don’t get it. I know so many more words than you,” Ava protested.

  “You lack strategy, my dear.” Stephanie tapped her forehead. “Strategic thinking.”

  “All right, fine.”

  “I’ll get the board.” George stood and stretched, brushing a few crumbs from his tie. “I know where it is.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Ava called after him, finishing her third, or perhaps fourth, martini.

  When he returned, they settled into the game and a silence of strenuous concentration. The evening wore on to the small clacking of square tiles on Stephanie’s Deluxe Special Folio Edition board. George beat both of them handily. Ava came in last, as usual, but found that this evening, for some reason, she was more upset about it. She left soon after and walked all of the long way back to her apartment, weaving slightly, glad for the chill, and the wind and the comfort of the deserted street.

  17

  The next morning, Ava lay looking at the stack of books next to her bed. Her nightstand was piled with new releases, books by authors Stephanie wanted to court for events, and Ava realized this was a great part of what lay behind her recent ambivalence—reading to facilitate Stephanie’s ambition was as disheartening as wearing someone else’s clothes. In the past, her habits had been directed by an almost unconscious process that had led her from book to book, an intuitive train of interest from one author or time period to the next, and a great part of the pleasure she took in reading was this sensation of building the scaffolding of her intellectual sense of the world in so many literary increments. But the process seemed to have stalled. Thinking of it now, she remembered she had occasionally, somewhat guiltily, abandoned Stephanie’s list of suggestions, and had tried to go back to the books she liked—a couple of minor Balzacs she had been meaning to read for a while—but still she ended up putting them down, as though she had lost some essential connection to the process. Her beloved novels and, by extension, her whole worldview had begun to seem irrelevant, pointless, something that she kept talking to Ben about in the way that one might refer too often to someone who has died in order to affirm their continued importance.

  Ben called to cancel again. He had been promising to repair their mirror, and each time he was swept away into a paying job, and Ava felt the delicacy of her situation, how unreasonable it would be for her to complain. She still hadn’t given him any money, and inexplicably, he hadn’t brought it up again after that first date, but it hung between all their interactions, a reproachful presence that haunted Ava like the ghost of Jacob Marley.

  Ava, somewhat reluctantly, accepted his invitation to a movie later that week. He kept taking her to see films, gritty, arty things that she mostly hated. “Isn’t Cassavetes great?” he had asked excitedly as they left the theater the la
st time. “I really wanted you to see that one with me, the dialogue is incredible.”

  “I couldn’t really hear anyone. The seventies were so ugly. Why even make movies if you’re not going to have nice costumes?” She’d offered him what was left of her popcorn, but he shook his head and kept noticeably quiet for most of the walk back to her place. She’d walked beside him, chomping her popcorn, and thought of what an oddly mercurial person he so often seemed to be.

  She hung up the phone and then in a burst of resoluteness, decided she didn’t want to wait on Ben anymore. The sight of that mirror bound in its doleful tulle was making her too sad. That library, that one little corner of the club, had been her comfort and her refuge, and she was not going to sit around any longer while it buckled under their callous attentions. Also, she was glad for the excuse to turn away from her bookshelf.

  At the hardware store, the clerk seemed willfully confused by her explanation of what she was trying to accomplish, and kept trying to sell her a variety of ornamental mirrors instead. Eventually she was able to buy a few metal brackets and, later that afternoon, managed with varying success to drill them into the wall, somewhat securing the mirror. The black metal arm looked awful cutting across the glass, and the mirror was not flush against the wall and wobbled a little, but it no longer strained forward at such a terrifying angle. The frame was still missing a corner of gilt cherubs and garlands, but at least there was no longer any danger. Ava kind of even liked the change; it now looked like a mirror that had seen some hard times, and she could identify with the impression of having lost a bit of shine over the last few months.

  When Stephanie arrived visibly hungover, she was not pleased. “That looks horrible. Why hasn’t Ben fixed it?”