The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “No, the Hamptons are for the best of the best. The people that have risen and made it—the social and cultural elite.” Then, getting annoyed by Ava’s look of doubt, “High class,” she finally blurted. “They’re high class and no one’s ever going to call me a trailer trash, low-rent, country bumpkin beauty queen ever again.” She flushed a little and then, embarrassed at her outburst, added a little coldly, “You wouldn’t understand because you grew up rich.”

  Anxious not to have Stephanie pursue this line of attack, which Ava had experienced in the past and knew just how mean it quickly became, she changed the subject. “I met a really cool writer the other day,” she began.

  “Later, we need to plan our strategy,” Stephanie cut her off. Mycroft, unpleasantly surprised by the taste of Splenda on his tongue, shook his head and sneezed.

  Ava didn’t press it, but Stephanie’s curtness didn’t bother her as much as it usually did. She drank her coffee with a secret, private happiness that paced under all their agonized planning like a tiger in a cage.

  * * *

  Despite a terror that crept up on her in moments of repose, over the next few days, Ava’s afternoon with Constance resonated like a stone cast into the surface of a lake, and in between all the frantic conspiring with Stephanie, ripples of Ava’s personality began to reassert itself in small ways she found unexpectedly cheering. She found she was daydreaming again, long, elaborate sentences and paragraphs, usually in conversation with Constance, as if her mind, recently aroused from slumber, was seized by an irrepressible prolixity. Ava went out and bought a fern and a secondhand tweed blazer that was only slightly too light for the damp spring weather. It made her feel like Nancy Mitford, and she liked that.

  On the day of their meeting with the lawyer, trying to look professional, Ava and Stephanie had both shown up in navy suits and white shirts, an unintentional coordination that made them look like airline stewardesses. They nervously explained themselves, handing over folders full of press clippings and financial documents and letters of reference from some of their famous members.

  Flipping through, Evan Brookmore, the lawyer, pulled out their 501(c)(3) application. “Did you girls never file this?” he asked somewhat incredulously.

  Stephanie looked at Ava with a barely suppressed rage. “That was your job,” she hissed.

  Ava looked at her feet. “I meant to,” she said quietly.

  “You didn’t ever tell anyone you were a nonprofit, did you?” he asked.

  “No, I was very careful not to.” Stephanie was practically growling. “Which is lucky, since my partner is an idiot.”

  Evan Brookmore let out a low whistle as he closed the folders. “Well, that’s good, at least. The matter of the unpaid rent is pretty straightforward. You say you signed a lease. I wish you had brought it with you so I could see it, but there’s not really any getting around that.”

  “But we put so much of our own money into fixing it up,” Stephanie argued. “They can’t kick us out now and then just get to use all that beautiful wallpaper and stuff that we paid for.”

  “Sure they can,” he said, looking at them curiously. “Have you two never rented an apartment before?”

  “But we were supposed to be a part of the Lazarus Club. We got them all this publicity, and we were doing all this to get new members for them,” Ava said. “We were trying to help them.”

  “I get it and I agree, it’s not very nice of them in spirit, but it’s all perfectly legal. If I were you two, however, I would be much more worried about your close shave with the 501(c)(3). Advertising as a nonprofit and not being one is fraud. You could go to jail.”

  Ava gasped, but Stephanie recrossed her legs, annoyed. “You’re not being very much help here.”

  “I’m sorry, girls. It sounds like a fun project. I love those Master and Commander books myself.” He pushed the folders back toward them and asked Stephanie if she’d like to get dinner later.

  * * *

  Ava and Stephanie left his office and went straight to a bar where they did three shots of vodka to an admiring audience of one sleepy daytime drinker. Walking north in the blinding afternoon sun, Ava was trying unsuccessfully to light the cigarette the bartender had given her because she needed to do something, and this felt suitably destructive. Stephanie was keeping up a steady and voluble stream of curses at the Lazarus Club, the board, the members, the lawyer and everyone she felt wasn’t walking fast enough on the sidewalk in front of them. “Come on.” She stopped in front of a hot-pink storefront, pushing open a door.

  “This place?” Ava asked, throwing away the cigarette she didn’t want. The frozen yogurt shop was very, very bright, and an aggressive smell of fake sugar with a hint of bleach hit her full in the face from the open door. “We’re going to eat ice cream? This feels a little clichéd, don’t you think? Can’t we just find another bar?”

  “It’s not ice cream, and it’s going to make me feel better, so shut up.” Stephanie pointed to a booth, and Ava sat down on the hard plastic.

  “Here.” Stephanie returned and set down two very large cups of frozen yogurt.

  Something about seeing her friend stabbing this mound of frozen calories with a little pink spoon spoke more strongly to Ava of Stephanie’s despair than mere words ever could have. The skipping buzz of Korean pop music playing behind them, the teenagers making out at the next table, everything conspired to drown Ava in an unbearable poignancy, and when she took a bite, the swell of artificial pomegranate melted around her tongue in disconsolate waves. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  Stephanie didn’t answer, eating her yogurt with a frowning concentration. Ava waited, watching antic, animated music videos on a television mounted behind them. Finally, Stephanie threw her spoon down. “We just have to move, that’s all. We pack up and start somewhere else.”

  “Go somewhere else? Where?”

  “I don’t know yet, but it’s clearly our only option.”

  “But our whole club was based on that space.”

  “No, that space was nice, but we’re the heart of the House of Mirth. If we go somewhere else, we just bring the magic with us.”

  “We could never afford someplace as nice as that.”

  “Look, we still have our members. The press loves us. We’re still hot. I can’t believe the Lazarus Club can’t appreciate it.” Stephanie bent her spoon in irritation and half of it flew off with a crack. “But other people will. I’ll just set up some meetings with other private clubs. Someone is going to want us.”

  “I just don’t see how we could manage,” Ava said sadly.

  “I’m sorry, Ava, but the clock is ticking on us. We don’t have time to start over. There’s nothing the world hates more than a middle-aged woman. We’ve got maybe seven years, and if we’re not rich or famous by then, it’s over. I might as well be in Boise smoking Virginia Slims at the back table of a Denny’s waiting for cancer to eat me from the inside out.”

  “Stephanie,” Ava said. “That’s crazy.”

  But Stephanie was already tapping on her phone. “We can do this,” she said, her old energy returning. “We have one last big party. We make it a fund-raiser. We can at least raise enough to hire movers and a month or two of storage. We’ve got this.” Looking up and seeing Ava’s expression, Stephanie continued a little more softly, “Trust me. Haven’t I been taking care of you ever since that first day I saw you in the dining hall? You couldn’t even figure out how to work the cereal bins.”

  “Those were very complicated,” Ava objected. “They had those funny latches.”

  “Right.” Stephanie reached over and gave her a loving pinch. “Don’t lose hope now. This is just a setback. We’re going to make it.”

  “I just can’t see it.” Ava played with the runny pink goo in her cup. Stephanie’s enthusiasm was taking off again, but for once, Ava felt the funny stasis
of watching it swoop past her from a place left far behind.

  * * *

  That night Ava woke up at two in the morning with a pounding headache and a terrible thirst. She tossed and turned for a little while, but the prospects for her future were too terrifying, and every time she tried to think her way through a possible outcome she got more and more anxious until, in desperation, she sat up and turned on the light. Where was she going to live? What was she going to do for money once she wasn’t employed by the Lazarus Club anymore? At their best, the House of Mirth barely kept Stephanie afloat; it would never support the two of them. She was starting to drive herself crazy. A Room of One’s Own was still lying next to her bed, so she picked it up and flipped through, searching for distraction.

  Ten pages in, she was furious; why hadn’t anyone made her read this before? This book was explaining the very essential dilemma of her life, her difficulty finding her voice as a writer in crisp, clear, delightful prose. She read eagerly, feverishly, a new sense of outrage blossoming within her, and when she finally paused, she looked up at all the other volumes crowding her shelves with a feeling of betrayal. All those books, all those wonderful, brilliant male writers that she loved so much, had tricked her, contorting her mind and impressions into an insubstantial echo of theirs and then leaving her to struggle with this deficiency out in the cold. This book had called her into a strange new shift in perspective, and as she saw herself from a great distance, all her old-fashioned ways and manners now seemed a little sad, a hollow imitation of a way of being in the world that had excluded her. A feeing of loneliness sprang up within in her, deeper and wider and more fearsome than anything she had ever felt.

  She was startled when Mycroft yowled next to his bowl, paws pressed together in the bend of his tail, and got up to feed him, glad for the interruption. It wasn’t until the first pebbles of the new, cheaper food she had to buy now hit the porcelain of his dish that he erupted in another quick, outraged yowl, little teeth flashing in protest. Ava almost dropped the box. “Jesus, Mycroft. I’m sorry. Okay?” In the refrigerator, she found a container of just-expired cottage cheese and set that next to his bowl.

  Watching him push the empty plastic container around with his nose, this strange new enthusiasm returned, and she felt she needed to keep moving in order to dissipate its pleasantly uncomfortable urgency. There was a sense of things happening, shifting, and she wanted to be ready. Looking around, the clutter of her apartment and its fine layer of dust felt intolerable. What if she really was going to have to move soon? For a minute this thought didn’t seem so terrible, and she began sorting through the elegantly arranged piles of things that covered every surface. After a while she caught herself humming a little.

  Did she really need two separate lithographs of Napoleon’s march on Moscow? Maybe it was time to get rid of the Edison wax cylinders that she had no way of playing. A single smashed creature, once part of a fur stole, whose glass eyes had fallen out, went into the trash as well as any vintage hats that didn’t fit, of which there were a surprising number. She was considering a bunch of ukulele sheet music—what if she did learn to play someday?—but then she threw the whole stack of music down the shoot in the hallway and began sorting through a box of chipped tintypes of confederate soldiers.

  The shearing off and reshuffling of her possessions calmed her and when she crawled back into bed as dawn was breaking, it was with a sense of accomplishment. She opened Three Guineas, curious to see what else this woman had to say, her words like the quiet, intimate whisper of Ava’s secret unacknowledged self. She was startled and then transfixed to read a furious, feminist screed, a rejection of men and the institutions they created. This was not for Ava. This was not her style at all, and yet she turned another page:

  Therefore the guinea should be earmarked “Rags. Petrol. Matches.” And this note should be attached to it. “Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, ‘Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this “education!”’”

  Ava had to put the book down. “The daughters of educated men” was a strange construction—what about everyone else?—but this call to destruction reverberated in her anger and frustrations of the day, and she was lost for a moment in wild imaginings: Stephanie and she, in orgiastic revel, their bodies warmed by a raging conflagration. Then, feeling a little silly, she turned over, pulling her covers around her ears, and lay in the sheltering warmth of her bed for a very long time without falling asleep.

  She called Stephanie the next day, excited to tell her about Virginia Woolf and all her new, thrilling ideas.

  “Yeah, no shit. We all read that in college, Ava. And whatever, she’s kind of a snooty bitch.”

  Hurt, Ava didn’t pursue the conversation. “Okay, but we’ve agreed, right? We can have Constance Berger read for this last event?”

  “Fine, Ava,” Stephanie groaned. “Could you please just stop going on about this woman like she’s the greatest thing you’ve ever met? I have a million other things to worry about.”

  “Have I been?” Ava asked, but Stephanie had already hung up.

  21

  Now that the knell had sounded, there was a certain relief to a doom that was settled rather than living in uncertainty. The House of Mirth and their future had splintered into an array of possible, implausible alternatives. Ava was done at the Lazarus Club, that was certain—fired as their librarian and consequently dismissed from her apartment, as well. She and Stephanie were going to try and keep having events at different locations to retain their members while they raised money and scouted a new space. Through all of the upheaval, satisfaction at having insisted at last on an event of her choosing, the reading for Constance, acted as a prophylactic, insulating Ava against the despondency of owing almost ten thousand dollars to the Lazarus Club and her credit card company combined. They were going all out on their last night because as Stephanie said, “Fuck them, what are they going to do, evict us?” Ava received two weeks of severance pay, which under the circumstances, she considered rather chivalrous.

  It fell to Ava and George to pack up the remains of their enterprise. To secure as much of their stuff from possible impoundment by the Lazarus Club, they had been sneaking things out at night, ferrying the boxes in taxis to Stephanie’s apartment. Stephanie had been missing, engaged on a mysterious project about which she kept sending them cryptic but encouraging text messages. Ava, floating in a constant, buzzing cloud of anxiety, was also slowly packing up her apartment, but since she hadn’t decided where to go, she was sort of hoping that once Stephanie was gone, she might be able to linger, unnoticed in the quiet for an extra week or two before they threw her out. Being busy kept her from succumbing to the panic that welled up when she considered her future, and she concentrated on planning their event, a single-mindedness in the face of disaster that she had learned from watching Stephanie, and which she now acknowledged was pretty effective.

  Balancing a stack of books in one hand, Ava leaned toward George and almost managed to pass them to him. Instead, they fell with a clatter on a pile of already packed boxes.

  “Take care.” He picked one up. “I don’t know that we could replace An Illustrated Guide to the Holy Land or Sex and Sex Worship. Although I believe you should take Hunting in Zambia. I feel it belongs with you.” He handed her the volume.

  She held it to her chest in a wave of nostalgia. “Maybe I will. It’s a Lazarus Club volume, though, not one of ours.”

  “You’ve earned it. I bet they wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Not you, too. Stephanie’s been joking that we deserve to steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Let’s keep some honor
in all this.” But she put the book aside. She climbed another shelf, noticing, now that they were almost empty, just how poor a job of staining and finishing they had done. “How did this get up here?” She tossed down a brassiere.

  “This place has seen all varieties of high jinks.” Packing tape roared out of the dispenser, and George pushed a closed box aside with his foot. “I won’t say I’ll be sorry to see the last of that freight elevator, though. The things I have managed to unload into this building.” He started taping another box. “Speaking of, did we take the peacock?”

  She nodded guiltily. “We’ve been very grateful for your resourcefulness, George.”

  “I know. I’ve been promoted. I’m now your director of members and operations.”

  “So you’re sticking around?” She tried to jump down from the shelves as gently as she could, landing with a loud thump of Chuck Taylors on hardwood.

  “I might as well. Careful. Wouldn’t it be funny if, after all of this, the liability insurance we never bought went to your medical bills?”

  Ava stayed in a crouch, drumming her fingers on the floor. Wearing sneakers and jeans with wide cuffs made her feel uniquely spry, a little like a five-year-old. “Still, you’re young and free. Isn’t there something else you would like to do that actually pays?”

  George crossed his arms over his chest. “Since I was a kid I was always fascinated by all those great New York gadabouts, Styron and Wilson and Vidal and Kazin all crashing through each other’s cocktail parties: a suit and tie, a fifth of scotch, and a head full of big ideas; it seemed to me the very pinnacle of living. Somehow in this moribund day and age you two managed to make that happen again. It was a gift, really. So yeah, I’ll stick around.” He shrugged. “I’ve got the rest of my life to be an orthodontist or a certified accountant.”

  He bent down for the next box, the hair sneaking out from under his cap curling like soft little feathers, and from the slipping of his waistband it looked like he had put his underwear on inside out, and Ava felt such a rush of sympathetic understanding that she found she had to wait a minute before she said anything. “You know, George. You might have been the best part of all this.”