The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  Eventually the reading ended, and everyone began moving about with purpose. A tall woman with high cheekbones and sad eyes looked at Ava curiously. A handbag bumped against her head. Ava joined the throng, milling aimlessly. After a moment she realized she was standing next to the coat closet, empty because she had just cleaned it out, and she slipped inside. She couldn’t face Constance after that embarrassment of a reading, and the dark, enclosed space felt forgiving. She sat on the smooth bare floorboards and, feeling the need for a desperate courage to get through the rest of the evening, drank with intent.

  When she emerged, the first thing she saw was Stephanie, nearly naked. She had shed her dress during the evening, and now clad in underwear and a rugby scarf, a rakishly tilted mortarboard on her head, she was swigging champagne, a pinup sprung from the fervid dreams of some university provost. “Amazing, isn’t it?” she called to Ava. “Someone just gave it to me.” She laughed and swung the tassel to the other side of her hat. “We’re graduating to bigger things.”

  Her lack of self-consciousness almost transfigured her into something, if not quite innocent, somehow resplendent, but Ava grabbed her narrow wrist, and dragged her through an appreciative audience into the bathroom. “Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?” Ava asked once they were inside.

  Stephanie pressed her back against the closed door with an elated expression. “I think we’ve outdone ourselves tonight.” She kicked off her shoes, sighing with the relief of feeling her feet flat on the floor. “I think this party is going to make it a cinch to find a donor with a new space. The world loves a rock star.” Then, she added seriously, “He wants to use me on his new album. Can you imagine? Me and Joe Reed.”

  “You can’t sing.”

  “That’s not the point.” She held Ava’s hand for a moment, her drunken smile transfigured by joy. Then, she took a lipstick out of her bra and turned to the mirror. “Whatever. At least I’ll be able to use him for more fund-raising.” The lid of the lipstick case snapped open, abrupt in the tiled room. “I’m always looking out for us. Want some?”

  Ava shook her head. “Tonight was a disaster. You ruined everything.”

  “No, I saved everything,” Stephanie said sternly. “It was you who wanted to ruin everything by planning our last event around some boring old lady.” She looked at Ava in the mirror. “This was supposed to be about us. It’s our event. Our project and all of the sudden you’re acting like all you care about is this woman just because she wrote some books and wants to talk about Proust or something.”

  “It’s not my fault no one ever wants to talk about Proust with me.” Ava stopped. Stephanie was avoiding her eyes, and a slow realization began to dawn on her. “You’re jealous. You sabotaged this whole thing on purpose. You ruined my event for Constance because you’re mad that someone likes me better than you.”

  “I would never,” Stephanie protested, but with less conviction than usual.

  “After all the loyalty I’ve given you, following you around like some subaltern.” Stephanie glanced up, but Ava didn’t feel like stopping to explain. “All these years of it always being about you, and finally I found one person, just one, who thinks I’m cool, too, and you can’t handle it.”

  “Oh my god, Ava, you act like you’re in love with her. Ever since you met her, ‘Constance writes books, Constance is so smart.’ I mean, seriously, can you even hear yourself?”

  “That’s just not true,” Ava objected. “And I’ve spent all my time since I met her running around with you trying to save this hopeless business. For you.” Ava found herself spurred by the injustice of it all. “Practically everything I do is for you. And has been forever. Since I’ve known you.” The years unfurled in Ava’s mind, so many passing moments in the company of Stephanie, prey to the whims and schemes of her imperious friend. Staying up nights to help her write papers in college, following her to New York after graduation, being dragged to parties and events she hated, covering their rent when she needed to, deferring to Stephanie’s wild impracticalities, a series of endless choices made against Ava’s better judgment. Viewed in concert, this proof of her relentless flow of devotion seemed almost absurd. “No wonder my mom hates you and thinks I’m crazy. At this point she probably thinks I’m in love with you.”

  Ava happened to look over, and stopped short at Stephanie’s distinctly unsurprised expression. “Wait a second.” She spoke slowly, considering. “Do you think I’m in love with you?” Stephanie didn’t respond, waiting. “Oh my god.” Ava closed the lid and sat down heavily on the toilet, trying to think through this new information. “You’ve been taking advantage of me all these years because you think I’m in love with you?”

  Someone opened the door, and they both yelled, “Occupied!” The door was quickly shut with apologies.

  “You’re kind of weird sometimes, and you were always really bad with guys,” Stephanie started halfheartedly and then stopped in the face of Ava’s stricken expression. “I don’t know, I just figured. I don’t know what I thought.”

  They were both silent as Ava tried to process what Stephanie seemed to be implying: a friendship that had taken up most of her adult life could have a totally different narrative than the one she knew. Her past, her very memories seemed to dissolve, acquiring a nebulous film of uncertainty. Had she really been so unaware of what had actually been passing between the two of them? Had all those years been a lie? Viewed in this light, a love and faithfulness that Ava had given so freely now appeared ridiculous in the light of Stephanie’s cold self-interest. And it was this loss, the sudden theft of the integrity of her own experience that Ava felt most keenly. Over the course of their friendship, Stephanie had betrayed her in all kinds of little ways, a casual profligacy that Ava barely paid attention to, but this was different. This dissimulation shattered a friendship she had built her life around. This felt unforgivable.

  Stephanie had set her mouth in a frown, but it was starting to wobble, and she chewed on her lip. “What?” she finally exploded. “What’s so wrong if I did think that? Why don’t I deserve to have one person, just one person in this whole dirty stinking world that actually cares about me? That actually thinks I’m more than just some dumb blonde tramp? You were the only one, Ava. The only one in my whole life.” She looked at her feet, her hair slid down and covered her face, and she didn’t push it back. “I needed you.”

  Behind Stephanie’s head, Ava noticed another place where they had messed up the wallpaper. A white crack almost two inches wide ran down the wall, spreading and then narrowing, a slick of plaster cutting across a field of red that brought Ava back to the present. “You never wanted a literary salon. You’ve been taking advantage of me, and now we owe thousands of dollars because you don’t care who you drag down with you.”

  “We don’t,” Stephanie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We don’t owe thousands of dollars. I went back and had dinner with that lawyer and brought a copy of the lease with me. We signed as an LLC. That means we can dissolve the company, and we aren’t liable for its debts.”

  Ava was just about done with Stephanie’s revelations. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was going to surprise you.” Stephanie sadly played with her lipstick. “At the end of the night. I made George get champagne for us and everything.”

  “What about my credit card?”

  “Oh, you still have to pay that. It’s in your name. But we can make that back in two seconds once we reopen.”

  “So I’m still in debt, but you aren’t?”

  “Yeah, but we will pay it off. Once we get our own town house, and start attracting the real money, that debt is going to be nothing.”

  “I’m done.” Ava stood, and walked quickly out of the bathroom. She was half listening for Stephanie to call her back, and when she didn’t, Ava was a little surprised at the relief she felt.

  T
he exasperated person waiting outside spoke irritably. “Could you have taken any longer?” He walked into the bathroom and saw Stephanie motionless in the center of the room. “Goddamn it.”

  The crowd was sparser and drunker. Guests sat on the hardwood floor, laughing and ashing the cigarettes that they shouldn’t have been smoking into plastic cups. An effete young man lay, one leg crossed over the other, pointing at the painting just above him. “It’s the curve of the pudenda that makes it such a devastating indictment.” He tried to sip from a cup without raising his head, and alcohol splashed over his upturned collar, while another young man nodded in grave agreement.

  Ava stepped over them; she was done. She was free of them and their ilk. She was done with Stephanie and the years of affection she had wasted. A heady mix of freedom and sadness, terror and relief poured over her—was this what divorce felt like? Was she really free of this union that she had contorted herself into so many unlikely shapes to accommodate? Could it just be renounced like that, so easily, and would she continue to bear its shape like a tree root that has grown into and around a crack in a sidewalk? Who was she without her best friend?

  In the bar, she saw Constance wedged between the broad backs of young men facing other conversations and Ava squeezed in next to her, nodding to the intern to pour her a drink. One of the men frowned before moving away to give her room. “He was having the most amazing conversation,” Constance said, folding a cocktail napkin into a small triangle. “Did you know there is a Bulgarian bar somewhere on the Lower East Side where people dress like forest animals and dance all night? This city never ceases to amaze.”

  “I didn’t.” Ava picked a napkin up from the bar and started fiddling with it, too. “But I never hear about those kinds of things.” The lights around the bar had grown halos, an extra aura of sparkle that was making Ava squint a little.

  “We seem to be in the middle of something not that far off right now.” Constance looked around. “It’s so much more satisfying that this is all happening in the Lazarus Club. I always thought of it as such a pearls and dentures kind of place.”

  “I think they would agree with you. We are currently less than welcome around here—not that I really blame them.” She accepted the drink and took a large sip. “I want to apologize for tonight. I’m so sorry. I wanted it to be different.” Again, Ava was struck by the nebulousness of her expectations when her disappointment felt so acute. Strange that she could be so sure she didn’t have what she wanted, and yet so unclear as to what exactly that might have been. Maybe that was why Stephanie was always so frustrated with her. “My salon is all assholes.”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “But they always seemed so amazing in all those novels.”

  Constance sighed. “I know. I love them, too. But they’re not really for us.”

  Distracted by the inclusion, Ava lost her train of thought. “Us? What is for us?”

  “A million things that have yet to be written. But I don’t want to sound too radical. I like tea lights and velvet curtains and stodgy old men, too.” She waved an arm at the room, indicating the club around them. “But I would take Edith Wharton over Henry James any day.” She spoke with a conspiratorial tone that warmed Ava like a furnace. “As I assume you would too, judging by the name of this thing.”

  On the bar next to her, a tea light guttered its last and sank into a pool of wax. The heady collision of newfound freedom and unconsidered horizons rushed toward her, tremendous, exciting. What if Stephanie was right? Without thinking, Ava surged forward and kissed Constance once, lightly on her lips. As if she had shattered all the previous days and hours of her life, tiny shards of the unthinkable erupted at her wild and wayward daring. Without the hard, large pressure of a masculine jaw, Ava felt like she was falling forward, a descent into softness that yielded at her touch and smelled of gardenia and smoke. Constance neither resisted nor pursued the kiss further, but her lower lip parted just enough for Ava to feel the smooth, wet crest of it, a possible invitation, and Ava pulled back, terrified, but ringing with a tremulous exhilaration. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s one way to make up for a mess of a reading.” Constance smiled.

  “I’m so sorry.” Ava needed to escape, to run from the audacity she had just committed, and pressed backward until the crowd behind her yielded enough to let her slip away. “Excuse me. I’m so sorry.”

  Constance watched her kindly. “No need to apologize, my pretty thing. We’ve all got to start somewhere.”

  * * *

  The library stank of the end of a party. The noise had died to a slurred rumble over which laughter, high and shrill, burst forward and then crept slowly away. Candles flickered out amid the smell of hot wax and smoke. An empty wine bottle rolled in circles around the floor, kicked by unsteady feet. Across the room, Stephanie was tearfully explaining something to an older man, who listened, a hand consolingly brushing the elastic of her underwear.

  George stood near the door, resting an elbow on an empty shelf, humming “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Seeing her, he set down his drink and held out his blazer. “Observe these pockets. For the first time ever, I am so flush, I couldn’t even think where to store this lucre.”

  Ava reached into one of the patch pockets on his hip and withdrew a wad of crumpled bills. “I’m going to take this.” Then, suddenly sentimental, she hugged him. Her arms wrapped around his narrow frame to the elbows. He was as slim as a lizard, all sinew and bones. “You’re the best, George,” she said into his damp shirtfront.

  “Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Square,” he sang.

  The trip back to her apartment was difficult. The ground tilted under her feet, the gentle rocking of a ship at sea, and she found the act of directing herself in a straight line to require more concentration than usual. In the endless hallway to the elevator, she had to stop a few times, leaning against the wall until the wallpaper, a terrible pattern of black arabesques on a yellow background, stopped spinning. She wouldn’t be sad to see the last of it. If she kept a low profile, it would undoubtedly be a few days before anyone remembered to kick her out of her apartment. Maybe this handful was enough for a month’s storage. She desperately needed a job, but New York was big, full of restaurants and temp agencies. The elevator bell dinged at her floor, and she stumbled a little as she left, knocking over one of her neighbor’s cats. She shrugged as the shattered remains went careening loudly down the garbage chute. One couldn’t take everything to heart.

  She looked around at the piles of boxes in her apartment—no job, no home, no Lazarus Club—the uncertainty of it all, normally so terrifying, felt like a gift, like she had escaped a fate, the true peril of which she hadn’t even realized. She wasn’t tired. The nervous energy that had been bubbling quietly inside her since her moment with Constance rose up again, insistent. She wanted to dance or sing, to set the whole world on fire. This prompted the echo of a thought still rattling around her brain—rags, petrol, matches—and she crossed to her old black phone, not yet packed up, and dialed. When information picked up she asked if there was a hotline for the inspections department of the NYC Landmarks and Historic Buildings Commission. She wrote it down and hung up with a smile. To hell with the Lazarus Club, she thought. Let it blaze for we are done with this education. And she gave Mycroft a kiss on his small pink nose.

  EPILOGUE

  The YWCA residence for girls of slender means was a large, square building from the turn of the century, solidly functional, although not without its charms, among which were pretty little porcelain sinks in each room and certain quaint, old-fashioned rules—no married ladies, no overnight guests, no male visitors above the second floor. But most important, it was cheap. So cheap that by working a temp job and eating all her meals in the residence cafeteria, Ava was able to slowly, with great satisfaction, winnow a bit of her credit card debt each month.

  It wa
s strange living in a world so totally absent of men. Ben, with whom she had resumed a slightly strained friendship, had helped her carry over her boxes. “Looks about right,” he said with a grin, reading the awning. But it had since been weeks. Even Mycroft was gone, boarding with Constance for the moment. Ava found it remarkable the way the young women living here seemed to expand to take up all the extra space. Dancers prowled the hallways, taut and nervous, their thin, hard legs shifting around like cranes about to take off; and actresses hurried to auditions, a contradictory picture in bright, dramatic makeup and casual yoga pants. Older residents carried an air of mystery—why were they still here, in cardigans and orthopedic shoes? Ava delighted in them all. Someone on her hall practiced scales every night, her voice ascending and falling in a weird primeval cry that soothed Ava to sleep in her narrow bed. They were all broke, or they wouldn’t be there, but ambition seemed to float through the dingy hallways like a pheromone, filling the air with the sharp tang of desire.

  Ava glanced through an old New York Post while standing in the residential lounge, trying not to watch her ramen turn with agonizing slowness in the rickety communal microwave. She had worked late and missed dinner again. She was updating the files of a huge investment company, a task that agreeably seemed to expand to suit the hours she needed, and she spent entire days alone and content in the quiet climate-controlled archives surrounded by stacks of yellowing paper.

  But walking home that night through the warm spring evening, the trees exhaling a scent rich with sap and dirt, for the first time in a long while, Ava felt a sort of restless longing for things she couldn’t quite describe. She wanted to get drunk, to eat something delicious, to shake off the rigorous asceticism of her recent life, to giggle something stupid to a receptive ear. Normally she found comfort in the austere virtue of her solitude, but just tonight the gentle breeze called an ambiguous but seductive invitation to her, and she felt melancholy. Even the prospect of her nightly three pages—she had thrown out her old novel and was happily writing a scandalous autobiography of Irene Adler that the Baker Street Irregulars were going to hate—even that hadn’t been enough to console her today.