The Club

by Jane Heller

  But the most depressing interview of all—the utter nadir, to be honest—was the one I had at MTV. Yes, the music video cable channel. It seems that one of the geniuses over there decided they should have a regular feature teaching America’s young people how to cook. They were calling the show “MTV Cooks” and were looking for a recipe consultant. Since I was known for my somewhat gimmicky cookbooks, the producer got my name and called me. I was thrilled.

  I went to the interview full of hope, bursting with ideas for instilling in the Guns ’n’ Roses generation a deep and abiding appreciation for confit de canard, broccoli rape, and anything with fennel. Unfortunately, the producer of “MTV Cooks” had more low-rent dishes in mind for his young audience—dishes like nachos, English muffin pizzas, and chicken wings fried in beer batter. When I suggested that MTV would be promoting junk food if it went the nachos, pizza, and fried chicken wings route, he laughed and said, “You haven’t been watching your MTV, baby. Junk food is what we’re all about. You think Pearl Jam’s latest video isn’t junk food? I hate to dis you, baby, but we need someone younger for this job, you dig?”

  I dug, all right. Right into a world-class black hole. I had no job, no prospects of a job, and no one to commiserate with. Arlene had gotten a job a month ago and was so busy proving herself to her new employer she didn’t have time to listen to my kvetching. Even Valerio was suddenly too busy for me; he was on the phone to Hunt six times a day, checking on his latest transactions in the commodities market.

  Speaking of Hunt, I left my interview at MTV and went straight to a pay phone to call him at his office, which was only a five-minute walk from Grand Central Station. I was dying for him to take me to lunch at some dark, wildly sophisticated restaurant where I could sit among people who were writing off their meal on their expense account. I wanted to feel like I was a member of the work force again, like I was still part of the action. I felt so isolated since losing my job, so relegated to the suburbs, so excluded, as if I had suddenly been booted out of a club. So when I dialed Hunt’s number and listened to his secretary tell me he had taken the rest of the day off to play golf at his club, I felt even more alone.

  I couldn’t blame Hunt, of course. It was mid-May, and while The Oaks didn’t officially open until Memorial Day weekend, the golfers had been out on the course since April.

  I took the train back to Connecticut. When I got home, I made out my shopping list, hopped in my car, and went grocery shopping. That’s how I got through every day that I didn’t have a job: I went grocery shopping and then came home and cooked Hunt and me a spectacular dinner. I didn’t know what else to do with myself or how else to prove my worthiness. Night after night Hunt would walk in the door and be welcomed by a five-star gourmet meal, a meal most men would be grateful for. Not Hunt. Gourmet meals went right over his head. Not only that, they made him angry. At least, mine did.

  “You’re wasting our money on this stuff,” he said of that evening’s meal, cornish game hens stuffed with basmati rice and shitaki mushrooms. “You know I can’t tell a shitaki mushroom from the fungus that grows in our backyard. And what’s more, I don’t want to.”

  “Not very open-minded of you,” I scowled.

  “Maybe not, Judy, but we can’t afford this kind of dinner every night. Not on only one paycheck.”

  “I’m well aware that I’m not contributing a paycheck,” I said defensively. “That’s why I’m cooking these dinners. They’re my way of contributing.”

  “Judy,” Hunt said in his most tolerant voice, “I don’t want you to cook. I want you to work. I’ve never known you not to work.”

  So that was it. When Hunt fell in love with me, I was a big-shot career woman. Now I was a big-shot career woman without a big-shot career and he was feeling cheated. Well, too bad. I wasn’t going to be made to feel worse about myself than I already did.

  “It’s not as if I’m not trying to get a job,” I said. “I wasn’t the one who was at The Oaks today, playing golf.”

  Hunt smiled. He couldn’t help himself. The word “golf” nearly always made him smile. It was a knee-jerk reaction, a Pavlov’s dogs thing.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “I was interviewing for a job at MTV,” I said.

  “MTV? That’s great, Jude,” he said, full of sudden admiration for me.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t get the job,” I snapped. “But I was out there trying, while you were out there trying to hit a stupid little ball into a stupid little cup.”

  “Come on.”

  “Come on, yourself. The minute The Oaks opens for the season, you turn into some dopey, golf-crazed, country club person.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Hunt walked over to me and draped his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s not do this, okay?” he said.

  I nodded halfheartedly. “You’ve got to admit you’re really into that club,” I said.

  “It’s a terrific place. Why shouldn’t I be into it?” he said, pulling his arm off me.

  “Because the people there are numbingly dull, not to mention snobby, small-minded, and completely out of touch with reality.”

  “How would you know?” Hunt said. “You never go to the club.”

  “I don’t have to. I already know that there’s nobody there I would ever want as a friend.”

  “Really? Who would you want as a friend, Judy? Those publishing types you call friends? Those people who dropped you the minute you lost your job at Charlton House? Aside from Arlene and Valerio, your ‘friends’ haven’t been acting very friendly lately.”

  Hunt had a point. “That doesn’t mean the people at The Oaks aren’t a bunch of drips,” I said, remembering my brief contact with them during the weeks they were deciding if we were qualified to join the club.

  We had been proposed for membership by Perry Vail, the head of F&F’s estate planning department and a complete horse’s ass. As his family had belonged to The Oaks for three generations, he knew everything about everybody there. He was a terrible gossip—a “wash woman,” my mother called such men. It was he who had first invited Hunt to play golf at The Oaks. Hunt had come home that afternoon raving about the course; it was love at first hole, let me tell you. The next thing I knew, Dexter “Ducky” Laughton, F&F’s vice president of operations and a member of the club’s Finance Committee, was agreeing to be our co-sponsor. As The Oaks was one of America’s last bastions of WASP wealth and privilege, there was a long waiting list to get in. But Ducky maneuvered Hunt and me to the top of the list, and after two ghastly dinners with the Laughtons and the Vails, we were visited by three members of the Membership Committee. God, what torture. Someone named Duncan Tewksbury, a stooped, sun-spotted man in his late seventies who had greasy gray hair, wore a rumpled, seersucker sport jacket, and looked as if he hadn’t brushed his teeth since the invention of the cotton gin, introduced himself as the chairman of the Board of Governors. Also along to check us out was Pete Barr, a fortyish, steroid-engorged man whose neck was the size of my hips and whose hips were the size of my neck. And then there was Addison Bidwell, who was in his thirties but had not a trace of youthfulness about him. He was thin-lipped and narrow-eyed and had an Alfalfa-esque cowlick, not to mention the tightest sphincter in Belford.

  Hunt had said that they were only going to stay for an hour or so; that the “at-home visit” was just a silly formality; that we were as good as in.

  “What makes you say that?” I’d asked. “The Oaks is a WASP club. The minute they find out I’m Jewish, you’ll be blackballed.”

  “How will they find out?” Hunt had said.

  “Kimberley will tell them,” I said.

  “Kimberley won’t be here when they come,” Hunt pointed out.

  “Yeah, but once you start bringing her to the club, she’ll tell them. She loves to cause trouble for me.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Jude,” said Hunt, ever protective of his daughter. “She’s just going throu
gh a stage.”

  “Yeah, well, the ‘stage’ has lasted as long as I’ve known her,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed how she’s always running to you with bulletins about my shortcomings? She wants everybody to hate me as much as she does.”

  “Kimberley doesn’t hate you, Judy. Deep down, she cares for you very much.”

  “It must be way deep down.”

  “If she showed how much she cared, she’d feel disloyal to her mother.”

  “Look, all I know is that the first time you take her to that club she’ll walk right up to Duncan Tewksbury, the chairman of the Board of Governors, and say, ‘My stepmother’s Jewish. Na-na-na-na-na.’”

  Hunt arched an eyebrow at me. “Kimberley would never do something like that,” he said. “She’ll keep her mouth shut and so will I and everybody at The Oaks will assume you’re Episcopalian.”

  I thought it was funny at the time—the idea of my trying to “pass” as a Gentile. I mean, what did I care? Hunt wanted to join the club so badly that hiding my heritage was the least I could do for him. But then the three Membership Committee members showed up at our house for their “at-home visit,” and after determining that I had not gone to Farmington with someone named Bootsie Mills, nor had I served on the Belford Historical Society with someone named Flossy Mills, nor was I related even in the most distant way to jolly old Hayley Mills, they forced me to answer questions like: “Do you play croquet? Do you sail? Do you ride?”

  Do I ride, give me a break. I could no more picture myself sitting atop a horse than I could picture myself spending two minutes with the members of The Oaks.

  The men asked me nothing about my career. They were so behind the times when it came to women that when I mentioned the feminist book Backlash, they probably thought I was talking about a kink in Hunt’s golf swing.

  After the at-home visit, a letter went out to the club’s 300 members stating that Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Dean Price III had applied for membership and inviting the members to come forward with any blemishes in our background. None of them did, so we were asked to come to the club for a meeting with all fifteen members of the Membership Committee. Two weeks after that, we were notified by mail that we’d been accepted into The Oaks.

  “We are delighted to inform you,” the letter read, “that the Membership Committee has recommended you for membership in The Oaks. Welcome! Enclosed is our 1995 Directory, which explains our Membership Classifications, lists forthcoming Social Functions and sets forth our House Rules. Also enclosed is an invoice for the first installment of your initiation fee. Annual dues must be paid in full. Please remit both at your earliest convenience. On behalf of the Board of Governors of The Oaks, I wish you a healthy and happy membership. If I can be of any further service to you, I hope you will let me know. I look forward to seeing both of you at the club. Sincerely, Lloyd Wright, Secretary. The Oaks.”

  “We made it!” Hunt had exclaimed when he read the letter. “This is gonna do big things for us, Jude. Big things!”

  As it turned out, the only big thing it did for us was to give us something else to fight about. Hunt spent all his free time at The Oaks. I spent all my free time avoiding the place. Not a good way to promote intimacy and closeness.

  “People ask me if my wife is sick,” he’d reported one Friday night, after he had taken the day off from work to play eighteen holes with Perry, Ducky, and a client. “They’re trying to figure out why you’re never there.”

  “Tell them I have a job,” I’d said sweetly. “Remind them that twentieth-century women often have jobs.”

  “Not on weekends,” Hunt had countered. “Surely you could show up on a Saturday or Sunday and try to make friends with the wives.”

  “Oh, Hunt,” I’d sighed. “What could I possibly have in common with those women? Even the ones who work are throwbacks to the fifties. Their idea of women’s liberation is going a whole day without wearing control-top pantyhose.”

  Hunt had laughed in spite of himself. But he wasn’t laughing now that I had no career to throw up to him. Now he was angry.

  “All you do is make fun of the club,” he was saying as I shoveled what was left of our cornish hens dinner down the garbage disposal. “I joined The Oaks because I wanted to make business contacts, so I could go further in my career, so I could build a better life—for us.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But have you made these terrific business contacts?”

  “You’re damn right I have.”

  “Name one.”

  He thought for a second. “Clark Haverford. He’s a cardiologist. He’s given me a lot of money to invest.”

  “Okay. Name two.”

  He thought for another second. “Nelson Phipps. He’s the CEO of Texoil, Judy. The CEO, for Christ’s sake!”

  I was impressed. “This Nelson Phipps is a client of yours now?”

  “Not exactly. But I’m getting close. I’ve seen him on the golf course a couple of times. In the Men’s Grill too. He remembers my name now. Before you know it, I’ll be reeling him in.”

  I looked at Hunt. When had his quest to become a partner at F&F become so calculated, so desperate? Did he sense that time was running out for him there? That if he didn’t make partner in the next year or so, he’d be mired in Middle Management Hell for the rest of his working life?

  And what about me? I was getting pretty desperate myself. If I didn’t get a job soon, I didn’t know what I’d do.

  “If you ask me, Judy, I think you should quit dumping on The Oaks and the people who belong there and give the place a try,” said Hunt. “The season starts the weekend after next. Your birthday weekend.”

  My birthday. God, in two weeks I’d be forty. How was that for a kick in the teeth?

  “Spend the weekend of my fortieth birthday at The Oaks?” I scowled. “Talk about a double negative.”

  For some reason that remark seemed to infuriate Hunt.

  “Has it occurred to you that maybe you should get your ass over to that club and make some business contacts of your own? You’re the one without a job, babe. Maybe you should get over there and find one.”

  He stormed out of the kitchen without even waiting to see what super-duper concoction I’d whipped up for dessert.

  I opened the refrigerator, reached in for the Tiramisu, and placed the bowl on the kitchen counter. I had an urge to stick my head in it, to drown myself in lady fingers and chocolate shavings and marscarpone cheese. What a way to go, huh? I wondered if Jack Kevorkian had thought of it.

  Instead of killing myself, though, I decided I would take Hunt’s advice and spend some time at The Oaks over Memorial Day weekend. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was too hard on the place. Maybe I’d make some great contacts there and land the job of my life. Yeah, sure.

  Chapter Four

  I turned forty the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. I was now a middle-aged person, a person for whom the next stop was senior citizenship—if I was lucky.

  I had always assumed that by the time I was forty, I’d have Found Myself. But there I was, still struggling with my place in the cosmos, still wondering who I was and why I didn’t have a job and why I was married to a man who had begun treating me like an old golf shoe.

  Oh, I don’t mean to suggest that Hunt ignored me. He took me to the Belford Inn for my birthday dinner. The Belford Inn was one of those quaint New England hostelries where everywhere you looked there was pewter this and copper that and fish bowls full of potpourri. And the waitresses! God, they were so maternal they practically sat you on their laps and fed you.

  “Here. For you,” Hunt said as he handed me a small gift box. We had just sat down at our table and ordered a bottle of champagne.

  I held the box next to my ear and shook it. “Hmm.” I smiled. “It’s smaller than a bread box but bigger than a container of dental floss.”

  Hunt laughed. “Open it,” he said. “I think you’ll like them.”

  “Them?” I said, arching an eyebrow.

&n
bsp; I tore off the wrapping and beamed when I saw Tiffany’s famous blue box. I lifted off the top: inside was a little black jewelry case. “Oh, Hunt,” I said. “This is so nice of you.”

  I felt a pang of guilt. Here I had been so down on Hunt, so critical of his unsympathetic attitude toward me. Now look. The man had gone out and bought me a pair of earrings from Tiffany. At least, I assumed they were earrings.

  I opened the jewelry case. Yup, they were earrings all right. Eighteen karat gold hoop earrings. Classic, simple, elegant. Totally my taste. They were so totally my taste that I already owned them: Hunt had given me the very same earrings for my thirty-fifth birthday.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked when he saw my face fall. “Don’t you like them?”

  “Oh, I like them,” I said dully. “In fact, I almost wore them tonight.”

  “What do you mean you almost—” He stopped. “Oh, Judy. I can’t believe I did this.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. It was an honest mistake on Hunt’s part. I mean, it wasn’t as if I wore the earrings every day. It was understandable that he’d forgotten that I had them or even that he had been the one who’d given them to me. I’d given him the same Ralph Lauren shirt twice, hadn’t I? But still. A woman likes to feel her husband cares enough to remember the jewelry he’s given her, especially if he’s the sort of husband who doesn’t buy her jewelry very often.

  “Please forgive me,” he said, taking my hand. “It’s just that I—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to act mature, like the forty-year-old I had just become. “I know how busy you’ve been, what with golf season starting and all.”

  “That’s no excuse,” he scolded himself. “First thing Monday morning I’m going back to Tiffany and returning these.” He slipped the jewelry case into his jacket pocket. “I’m going to pick out something else, something you don’t already have.”