The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  Ava, pressing hard on a screw, hadn’t heard her come in, and almost grabbed the mirror for balance before catching herself and holding on to a nearby shelf. “I didn’t feel right about it. We still owe him so much.”

  “What’s the point of dating a man without any money if he won’t even fix things for you?”

  “I thought you would be proud of me. What about self-sufficiency and being a team?”

  “It looks awful.”

  There was a silence. Ava noticed she and Stephanie were wearing very similar shirts, and she wanted to tell her friend not to copy her style, but then this seemed ridiculous. No one had ever imitated Ava’s odd way of dressing, so she had to wonder, had Stephanie always worn Peter Pan collars and Ava had just never noticed? It seemed essential to draw a distinction by right of previous habit as to who was dressing like whom. She was just about to say something about it when Stephanie yawned. “See if he’ll fix the latch on the bathroom door, too. It keeps slipping. I brought some more books for you to look through, and some mail you should really look at.” She put down a stack of new hardbacks bristling with envelopes.

  Ava decided she would do neither of those things today, although she did not say this as she climbed down from the mantel and went to change into a sweater.

  * * *

  A few evenings later at an event—unemployed starlets reading excerpts of Shakespeare—Ava was trying to wake an unnervingly thin PR girl who had passed out on the main Lazarus stairs, while Mr. Dearborn watched, offering his objections from the step below.

  “I know, I’m sorry, I’m trying to get her out of the way.” Ava again shook a frail, limp arm.

  “Absolute degeneracy. What’s wrong with her anyway? I’ve never seen such goings-on in all my life. This isn’t a bawdy house, for crying out loud.”

  Finally the young woman’s eyes fluttered open. She smiled at Ava and then vomited all over Mr. Dearborn’s feet.

  He turned purple and left before Ava could apologize again. She hoisted the hiccuping young woman up and dragged her back towards the library where she deposited her into Stephanie’s arms with suppressed fury. “Oh, gross.” Stephanie immediately dropped her; the young woman happily curled up and went to sleep again.

  “These people are going to ruin everything.”

  Stephanie looked at her coldly. “This is hardly my fault.” She pointed at the woman on the floor. “And if you’re not happy with our club, why don’t you just invite all of your friends to our events instead?” She turned back to a previous conversation.

  Ava was still smarting later when a tall older man trying to make conversation confessed, “Oh, you know I’ve always meant to read The House of Mirth,” in that funny way that people often seemed to be asking for absolution from her, and she decided she had had enough. She would start a book club. They would read The House of Mirth. Goddamn it.

  The resolution cheered her through the rest of the interminable party. It seemed an obvious choice, a “hook” even Stephanie would not be able to argue with, and through it, Ava hoped to return to that familiar country of big elegant books, a way back to herself through all the confusion of the last seven months. Not to mention she would finally get to sit in this library in her literary club and lead a discussion about a book she cared about. At last.

  When she announced the project to their huge email list, nearly six hundred of Stephanie’s acquaintances, eighty of which were actual paying members, she got a lot of responses from people she had never met saying things like “Fabulous!”

  “Too exciting!”

  “I’ve always wanted to read it.” But following up, not a single person actually wanted to join. Even Stephanie backed out, citing her schedule. Determined, Ava insisted George read it with her. Rodney was also persuaded, and Ava knew she could count on Ben. This was the sort of thing he would be great at. When she asked, he said yes, and they settled on a date for his art lecture, which Ava was a little surprised to realize he had already fully organized.

  * * *

  One last piece of dim sum, “Golden Shrimp Treasure,” sat squat in the round metal canister, empty variations of which covered the slick lacquered table. Ava poked it with a chopstick. It quivered, and its cold, larval shell split, a blob of filling, the shrimp treasure, she supposed, rolling free.

  “I’m pretty sure that must be breaking some rule of Chinese etiquette,” Ben said, flushed from eating too many dumplings.

  She put down her chopsticks. “You’re probably right. It feels rude.”

  He had arrived at noon to set up for his event. Once the bottles of wine were laid out, the AV set up to his approval and the empty chairs arranged in rows awaiting a speaker, there were still hours before the event, so they decided to go get dinner. Watching Ben’s meticulous, thorough preparations and the neat list he’d checked off throughout the day had been relaxing, and also made her wonder why exactly she and Stephanie seemed to have such trouble in this regard. But even as she admired his calm efficiency, she found she almost resented his stepping so easily into the space they had laboriously wrung out of chaos.

  Still, it was nice to sit here with him, with his soft, scuffed wool jacket that made him look like a young Romantic, and she wondered if anyone else in the restaurant had noticed them, the curious, envious gaze that she used to turn on others who had somehow become part of that mysterious dyad—the couple. “I’m thinking after The House of Mirth, we should probably read some Henry James, right? I can’t decide if it would be more fun to have the reading group be Victorian Americans or maybe just novels obsessed with money and status, like throw some Trollope in next or something,” Ava said, returning to their previous conversation.

  “Don’t you ever get excited about living people?”

  “No.” She seemed confused. “Do you?”

  “Sure. I mean if you make art, it seems like maybe you might want to be in conversation with other people. You want to be a writer—don’t you want to know what other writers are thinking about and working through these days?”

  This seemed so beside the point that all at once the effort of trying to communicate with another human being consolidated into one intense knot of pressure behind her left eyebrow. She gave up for a minute and felt the hard lacquer slats of her chair dig into her back, watching a plastic cat next to the cash register wave its paw in delirious repetition. “No,” she said. “I want to give voice to all the million shades of experience that I live through every single moment and never get to communicate with anyone. The important stuff, the real thoughts and feelings that no one ever says out loud.” As she spoke, life seemed to well up around her proving her point—the keening murmur of a woman on the radio singing in Chinese, the breeze fluttering the dusty curtain that divided the kitchen from the rest of the room, the tap of someone’s fork against a plate, the current of minutes inexorably passing.

  “Yeah, but no one experiences life alone. We’re communal creatures.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.” Ben sounded a little aggrieved. “I’m sitting right next to you.”

  “Is this just because you don’t want to read my books with me?”

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me. Sometimes I don’t think you listen to me at all.”

  “That’s ridiculous, the other day I listened to you talk about what’s-his-name for like an hour.”

  “Lucian Freud. And it’s because I think you would like him, if you would just trust me a little.”

  “Didn’t sound like it.” Ava wrinkled her nose.

  Ben sighed. A waiter picked up the hard plastic bill tray for the second time in five minutes and put it down again, loudly. “Sorry, maybe I’m nervous about tonight. I’m sure you know that feeling. I’ve got a couple of big-name gallery people coming.”

  “You sound like Stephanie,” she teased.

  Ben did not like the j
oke and frowned, reaching for his wallet.

  “Oh, she’s not that bad,” Ava felt compelled to add in the face of his palpable disapproval. The Gordian knot of disdain and admiration that bound her and Stephanie together seemed impossible to explain to one so clearly used to living in the clean strata of masculine categorizations.

  They left the restaurant. Outside, the night was warm, an early, unseasonable balminess that offered a fake promise of spring and made Ava homesick for the South. A row of ducks in a butcher-shop window hung from twisted necks, glistening in their oily, roasted skin. “We’ve got time, want to walk for a while?” he asked.

  The gutters of Chinatown ran shimmering, iridescent patches of oily water foaming with suds and the smell of bleach. Fish piled on shelves of ice grimaced through tiny jaws or swam despondently in white plastic buckets, and Ava watched them with a detached sympathy. It was fun walking almost in step with a tall handsome man. They were going to her salon where very important art people were gathering to talk about important things. This, from the outside, was pretty much exactly want she had wanted. As they moved through the crowd, she hung back just behind his shoulder, coasting under his forward momentum like a remora on a shark. “What sort of books would you want to read?” Ava asked.

  “What?”

  “In my book group. If you were going to be in conversation with the zeitgeist or whatever?”

  “You really want to know?” he asked, surprised. Then his arm slid around her shoulder, and he gave her a squeeze, rambling enthusiastically about that winter’s big important novel he had been wanting to read. “I always wanted to date a writer,” he finished. “A cute girl with pens in her hair and a bigger vocabulary than me.”

  She felt a funny twinge, but it felt so safe here, enveloped in his glow, a kind of radiant confidence that included her in its generous invulnerability. Against the oncoming stream of people, she pressed a little closer to his side, as they walked north hand in hand. After a while, their palms got sweaty, and Ava suspected they were both waiting to see who would let go first. Ben rather sneakily accomplished the break by stopping to pick up a free newspaper, and Ava felt glad for the rush of cool air across her palm. But then, a few blocks later, to her surprise, he reached for her hand again and held it in his loose, relaxed grip as he walked with her all the way to the Lazarus Club.

  * * *

  At the event, Ava’s feeling of security soon fled. The crowd, maybe a hundred people, was a little less shiny than Stephanie’s; there were quite a few pairs of sneakers and paint-splattered windbreakers, but more studied, as if every aspect of their appearance had a well-considered theoretical position. Statement necklaces and asymmetrical hems predominated. A lot of the women’s clothes didn’t have any discernable fastenings, no zippers or buttons, but rather what Ava decided might be called “architectural” draping. In comparison, she felt ten pounds too heavy, as she did at most events, but more specifically, something about her neat skirt and heels also now seemed kind of obvious and pedestrian; everyone here was very forward-looking. She kept seeking out Ben, hovering awkwardly at his elbow, but he was busy greeting people, and finally feeling foolish, she retreated to her usual hideout behind the bar.

  A gruff, handsome man in a thick turtleneck sweater, who reminded Ava of Captain Haddock, gave a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Intersections of Forest and Manhood,” images of his elegant log cabin and handsome Weimaraner. A short Dutch woman with a heavy accent spoke for an hour about the destabilizing construct of the ocean as means of self-invention. A slender young man, cherubic in a backward baseball cap, talked about grass. Ava poured wine, mystified. The audience nodded appreciatively.

  Their conversation, rippling with theory and unfamiliar portmanteaux, was impenetrable, but they all seemed very smart, and as the evening went on, very enthusiastic, especially about Ben. Wherever he moved, admirers circled around him, little eddies that gathered and broke according to his progress through the room. He blushed a lot, and seemed a little sweaty, often looking at the floor with the happily embarrassed mien of someone receiving compliments. His ears were pink, and he listened with earnest attention to each person, before apologetically moving on to the next firm handshake, the next congratulatory pat on the shoulder. Ava didn’t doubt that he could have genuine relationships with so many people, but from a distance, especially if she squinted, his movement through the party didn’t look all that different than Stephanie’s. Ava wondered how the same set of basic gestures when hung on Stephanie’s slender frame could look so frivolous, and so sincere and substantial when enacted by Ben.

  Eventually he ended up at the bar beneath the arm of a beaming man whose bright pink forelock only accentuated the tight, hard lines around his eyes. “Isn’t he just the most?” The man pinched one of Ben’s cheeks hard. “The speakers were perfect, but this space. Too decadent, too gloriously bougie. I love it.”

  “This is Ava, it’s her salon actually.” Ben made introductions.

  His attention shifted to her reluctantly. “Can I have a glass of that, dear?” he pointed at the wine in her hand.

  “I thought you were going to talk about nautical charts or something,” she said to Ben, pouring a glass. “Gentleman scholars and naturalists.”

  Pink forelock accepted the wine. “Whatever is Babycheeks Gertrude Stein here going on about?”

  “Well, I want to have a career.” Ben spoke into his swirling wine. “You always make me feel so defensive,” he apologized.

  “No, I don’t,” Ava countered, rather stupidly she realized.

  But he was already being pulled back toward the other room. “Come, Ben,” his friend said. “We have other important people you must be introduced to.”

  Ben looked at her regretfully over his shoulder as they merged back into the crowd. She heard excited greetings and a high giggle. All of a sudden Ava remembered Stephanie’s words of so long ago. Was Ben an “art star,” and what would that mean exactly? She had become so used to thinking of him as a paragon of artistic rectitude that it was hard to now see him engaged in what was very clearly self-promotion. If this was the sort of thing he was interested in, why was he dating her? More somberly, the thought struck her, was this perhaps the reason why he was dating her? Luckily, a row of empty cups and impatient expressions pulled her back to the present and away from her confused thoughts. She opened another bottle of wine, feeling the strain in her wrist as she yanked the cork free.

  * * *

  Later as Ava waited, still hoping Ben would come back at some point and talk to her, an older woman walked into the bar with a distracted air. She was petite and thin, perched on very high heels from which she surveyed the room, balanced delicately like a bird on a twig. Dark hair fell to her shoulders lit by two streaks of silver, and the bow of an enormous aquiline nose sailed forth from her face. She looked like a raven or a vampire, Ava thought approvingly. She seemed to part the crowd around her like a knife slicing through cake.

  Noticing Ava’s attention, she waved a voluminous cashmere sleeve, a gesture that both sought to end Ava’s examination and yet excuse it, as if she were accustomed to the admiration her appearance evoked but disinclined to prolong it, and she wobbled over.

  A little awed by this new guest, Ava offered her wine, wishing it wasn’t in a plastic cup, the paltriness of the offering even more embarrassing after it was declined.

  “No, thank you. I was having a drink with a friend downstairs, and we heard the ruckus. The bartender told me there was a writers’ club up here, so I decided I had to see for myself. Although this building usually gives me quite the heebie-jeebies. Don’t you feel like you’re about to wander into ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or something?”

  “I always thought of the ‘House of Usher.’” Ava had to smile.

  The smile was returned. “It does seem like it’s about to come crashing down. Wouldn’t be the worst thing. You know that
nutty president has gotten them into one lawsuit after another. From what I’ve heard, they’ve been bankrupt for years.”

  While this revelation had more than a glimmer of the truth about it, Ava wasn’t ready to relinquish the aura of staid grandeur she had always associated with the club. “It’s a beautiful building, though.”

  “It is. Those robber barons did well for themselves. So what exactly is it you’re doing up here? Apparently it’s giving all the old ladies, of which my friend is one, the fits. And you, my dear, seem about forty years too young for this place, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Ava explained their concept as well as she could. At this point she barely knew what they were doing anymore. She may have said something or other about Proust.

  “And you’re in charge of this whole thing?” The stranger looked impressed. “I’m a writer myself. It’s been a while since anyone has done something eccentric like this in New York. The city’s been dead since everyone got rich.”

  “I am in charge,” Ava said proudly. For what might have been the first time, she realized.

  Introductions were made. Constance Berger was a writer, an essayist mostly, who, in her own words, now wrote for all the fancy publications she used to make fun of when she was a young troublemaker. “So I get it, loving all the fantastic old institutions like this but wanting to rough them up a little from the inside. You’re a woman after my own heart, I suspect,” she added with a smile.

  “I’m not that exciting,” Ava demurred. Constance Berger was hard to look away from. To Ava, who had spent so many years bemoaning her own prominent features, there was something magnificent about the unapologetically Semitic cast of her face.

  Ava kept expecting her to leave at any moment, and was trying to prepare herself for the disappointment of it, but Constance Berger seemed disinclined to end the conversation, and lingered. As Ava rather more intently pressed hospitality upon her, she accepted the wine. “You picked a great name for a thing like this,” she said. “That’s such an underrated book.”