The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  I have never felt so safe with a woman as I did with Charlotte during those early months of our involvement. Whatever duplicity or perversity I admitted to, she responded by saying that my behaviour seemed to her to be typical of all men. For example, fidelity. How she wished men took it as seriously as women! But the fact was, they didn’t. What did she stand to gain by evading the facts?

  It got to the point where I thought I could tell her anything, and that is why I told her too much about Ophelia.

  As usual, even though I gave her the story in snatches, it did not take her long to put two and two together.

  That should have been a tip-off.

  40

  You may have a vague memory of Ophelia calling you one morning from the Creative Learning Centre. It was the day of the Valentine party: she had organized it. I was supposed to be helping her. I was late and so she freaked and called you at the office. I don’t know if she alarmed you, but she certainly got everyone at the school worried: when I finally turned up, Lara – or was it Paloma? – went into hysterics because she thought I had risen from the dead.

  Ophelia’s behaviour had been strange all winter. Some days she was friendly, others hostile. Sometimes she acted as if a simple greeting were the prelude to rape, other times she would be calling me up to find out if there was anything good on cable, or if I knew a way of cooking pork to make it taste like chicken.

  Once she asked me to babysit so that she could go to hear a natural childbirth expert. She returned after less than an hour, saying (in an unnaturally breathy voice) that she preferred to listen to me. I remember feeling uncomfortable. I left as soon as it was polite. At the door, she offered me the spare room, bristling just slightly when I turned her down. Then, when I was in her office for the physical for my new life insurance – it was either the following day or soon thereafter – she could hardly bring herself to look at me. I asked her what was wrong. She collapsed into giggles, which ended abruptly when she ran her eyes down my form.

  I had put myself down as a non-smoker. In her opinion, I hadn’t stopped for long enough to qualify as such. We had a disagreement, which ended with my tearing up the form and leaving. When I walked into Charlotte’s house fifteen minutes later, Charlotte had her on the phone.

  ‘No, he’s not trying to take advantage of your friendship,’ Charlotte was saying. ‘Honestly, Ophelia, it’s simply a question of definitions and boundaries.’

  When she got off the phone, she told me that, although I was technically in the right, I had aggravated the situation by acting confrontational with someone I already knew to be unstable. She urged me to go to Ophelia’s and apologize before things got worse.

  Ophelia was in tears when I got there. In a surge of shame, I tried to pat her on the back. She told me to get my ‘mitts’ off her. I told her – before realizing the implications of what I was saying – that it was all very well to call it a question of definitions and boundaries, but the fact was, she was being over-emotional. Her reaction was, ‘You’ve discussed this with Charlotte?’

  I said yes but so what?

  ‘So what?’ Ophelia shrieked. ‘She promised me she wouldn’t tell a soul! And then she goes broadcasting it to everyone in sight! What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with all of you? Isn’t a secret sacred any more?’

  She then made things worse by calling up Charlotte. She was still blasting her when Kiki walked in. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked me. I told him about the life insurance form. ‘She classified you as a smoker? What a bitch!’ Before I could explain to Kiki that it was already too complicated and better left alone, Ophelia had slammed down the phone and Kiki had said to her, ‘Babes, you can’t be so literal about these forms. I mean you have got to remember that these insurance guys are ripping us all off.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk to me in that tone of voice,’ said Ophelia in a disturbing growl.

  ‘I wouldn’t have to, hon, if you didn’t act so ornery.’

  ‘Apologize to me immediately for talking to me in that tone of voice.’

  Kiki turned to me with outstretched arms. ‘Do you see what I have to put up with? It’s never ending. But you know what, babes,’ he said, turning back to his wife, ‘it takes more than that.’

  ‘Apologize to me now,’ said Ophelia. ‘Or I’ll throw this phone at your head.’

  ‘Oh, we’re back to phone throwing, are we?’ Before I knew it, he had grabbed the phone out of her hand, pushed her into their bedroom, and locked the door. She began to kick and pound on it, screaming that she was going to call the police. Turning to me, he said, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the only thing that works.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Come by the office tomorrow morning, I’ll doctor those forms for you.’

  ‘Oh, no you won’t,’ shouted Ophelia through the door.

  ‘Oh, yes I will.’

  ‘Oh, no you won’t. I already sent them in, so there.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he was saying as I let myself out.

  Now I had to go to Charlotte’s. She was still upset about the things Ophelia had said to her on the phone. But she had already given ‘considerable thought’ to the best way of handling the incident. She was going to put off talking to Ophelia again until she felt more collected. She advised me to do the same.

  But then, a few days later, when I saw Ophelia parked in front of the school clutching her steering wheel as if she were about to expire, I had to go over and make sure she was all right. She said yes, but as she was hyperventilating I didn’t believe her. So I asked her to tell me honestly how she was feeling. She said she felt like jamming her head through the windscreen or maybe driving through a wall. ‘But don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll get through it somehow. If not the depression, then the windscreen or the wall.’

  When I told Charlotte about that, she decided to classify it as a call for help. At her suggestion, I asked Ophelia out for lunch to, in Charlotte’s words, ‘talk things out’.

  I was alarmed when Ophelia turned up looking like a Cuban. She was as agitated as if we were having a secret assignation. She kept tittering, and saying things like, ‘I guess it’s only right to have the man choose the wine.’ Every time there was a silence, she sighed deeply and looked straight into my eyes. It seemed like a dangerous idea to ask her how she was feeling. I spent the whole lunch struggling to bring the conversation back to neutral topics – only to be chastised by Charlotte afterwards.

  She told me I was overreacting. Ophelia was exhibiting what she liked to call the sunflower syndrome – an irrational movement in the direction of warmth.

  ‘The what?’ Becky said when I told her on the phone that evening. As we laughed over Charlotte’s terminology, I felt another surge of shame for my disloyalty. But I couldn’t help myself. Before long it was not just Charlotte’s terminology Becky and I were laughing at, but a lot of her other little habits, too. ‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ Becky would say, ‘I love her like my own sister. It’s just that she takes things so seriously.’

  I still felt bad. The boundaries of my conscience had receded, but there was enough of it left to make me wonder why I had allowed myself to drift into the conspiratorial mode with Becky. To make things worse, Charlotte seemed to know I was holding something back from her, because as the weeks passed and I spent more and more time joking around with Becky, Charlotte’s sad moments and reproachful smiles multiplied.

  On that day of the children’s Valentine party, Charlotte seemed particularly low, although she would not tell me why, and that was why I had lingered at her house and made myself late for Ophelia.

  You did not know then, but will correctly guess now, that, when you called up Charlotte to tell her that Ophelia was frantically trying to find me, I was lying next to Charlotte in her bed. I remember the calmness of Charlotte’s voice as she talked to you, the frantic gestures with which she tried to communicate the urgent message to me. Which Charlotte was the real Charlotte? Which was the real me?

&nb
sp; And which was the real Becky? The one who met me at the door of the Creative Learning Centre, and said ‘Watch out. Dial-a-mood is totally but totally out of control’? Or the Becky who went up to Ophelia and put her arms around her and said ‘You can calm down now, because we’ll take care of everything, everything is going to be OK’?

  It wasn’t as if I was in a position to condemn anyone for hypocrisy. But the demands were beginning to get to me. There were too many roles to keep track of. There was the person I was when I was alone with Charlotte. The person I was with Charlotte when we were together in public pretending to be just friends. There was the person I was alone with Becky, and the person I was with Becky in public when we were pretending that we didn’t spend our time alone together badmouthing Charlotte and Ophelia. There was the person I had once been with Ophelia when she could trust me as a confidant, and the person I was to her now that she knew I had discussed her with Charlotte. My confusion on this particular day was augmented by the fact that Ophelia had, in her innocence, arranged for each of the thirty-five children in the school to bring Valentines for every other child. We were talking about more than a thousand Valentines. These she now proposed to distribute all by herself. Naturally, the children got impatient. When she tried to keep them at a distance of ten feet, they turned first restive, then disobedient, then uncontrollable – breaking through the human chain Fatso and Becky and I had created to keep them from the bench where Ophelia was stacking up their Valentine bags. It was like the night of the living dead.

  Becky wanted me to go over to her house afterwards and cool off with a joint. But because I had promised Charlotte I would go back right after the party I talked Becky into going over to Charlotte’s with me. The moment we walked in, I knew I had made a mistake.

  Charlotte was still dressed in her Chinese robe. There was a lunch for two on the table. A shooting pain crossed Charlotte’s face when she saw Becky.

  We had brought all the children with us. They were in a state after that exhilarating nightmare of a party. Charlotte was gracious about having to feed nine more mouths than she had expected. Having made cheese and cress sandwiches for all the little ones, she proceeded to divide the adult food into thirds.

  While the children mistreated their sandwiches in the background, Becky filled Charlotte in on Ophelia’s mismanagement of the Valentine party. ‘She was sooo bossy,’ Becky said. ‘I don’t know what’s come over her. She needs to be whipped. Those pouting lips! She reminds me of what’s her name, in that leather movie about the fascists?’ She didn’t catch on that neither Charlotte nor I wanted to discuss Ophelia. Our reticence made her all the more indiscreet.

  Eventually Becky remembered she had an appointment. Charlotte offered to watch the girls.

  ‘And before you go,’ Charlotte said. ‘There’s something of Mitchell’s that I found in Trey’s office that you should probably take back to him. It seems to be mostly records, and I have no idea why it’s here. If and when I find out I’ll certainly tell you. In the meantime, I thought I should get it back to you.’

  Becky seemed puzzled, but she agreed to take it. When she had left, I asked Charlotte what all that was about, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Until I’ve heard Trey’s side of the story. It’s something between me and him. But yes, I found it depressing to think he may have been rifling things from my friends’ houses.’ She paused and then added, ‘I also think she smells a rat.’

  ‘Who? Becky?’

  Another pained look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Becky. Your wife.’ It was the first time she had ever referred to you as my wife and I found this shift ominous.

  I asked her why she thought you smelled a rat.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It may just have been projected guilt, but the truth is, when she called up looking for you this morning, I resented her tone of voice.’ She tossed me an anguished look. ‘What has she done to me that I haven’t cancelled out a thousand times over every time I touch your body?’

  She was talking almost loud enough for the children to hear. I gestured at her to lower her voice. She apologized. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me. I seem to be losing my self-control.’

  That sounded ominous, too. But as I did not want her to know I thought that sounded ominous, I tried to muster a smile. It wasn’t good enough.

  Throwing me a pained smile, she said, ‘You find the prospect of my losing control ominous, don’t you?’

  I must have cringed because she held out her hand and squeezed my hand. I did not like her doing this in front of the children, but I knew that, if I objected, I would lay myself open either to another hand squeeze or a long, gentle, inescapable interrogation about the source of my embarrassment. It would end, I now told myself, with an unconditional pardon which would make me glad to get away from her but also unbearably guilty, and it was to avoid all that that I made a point of not withdrawing my hand when she squeezed it – but instead allowed it to hang there limply inside hers.

  Even that wasn’t good enough. Because now she said, with a harsh note in her voice, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not that out of control. I am aware of the limits! Although,’ and here she looked regretfully at our linked hands. ‘This is probably no way to act in front of the children.’

  She withdrew her hand and made a big deal about trying not to sigh. As she began to clear the table, she said, ‘I can tell you prefer things at this distance at the moment which is fair enough.’

  At this point an argument flared up amongst the boys. Because I dealt with it effectively, I laid myself open to regretful praise, which was a lead-in to some free association on her part about role models, Trey’s shortcomings in this area, the mystery that was his mind, not to mention his libido, and how sometimes she wondered if they were even living in the same house; how, for example, he hadn’t even commented on the condom wrapper I had accidentally left behind me a few days earlier that he had actually stepped on when getting out of bed this morning, ‘And what does that tell you about our relationship?’

  I found that worse than ominous.

  ‘Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not even considering changing the boundaries between you and me. It’s just that … sometimes I feel like killing him.’

  I must have looked terrified, because now she apologized. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the subterfuge is taking its toll. So many suppressed needs. So much suppressed hostility. Not to mention the unexpected casualties.’ She looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘I blame myself for Ophelia.’

  I told her it was hardly her fault.

  ‘Now I’ve lost her sympathy, I can’t help her.’

  ‘It works both ways,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose you’re right. I always ask for too little. It’s my pattern, isn’t it?’

  Another dangerous subject. Scared that it might be a lead-in to a request for me to give her what, in all fairness, I owed her, I desperately wanted to distract her with a safer topic. But equally, I didn’t want her to know I wanted to change the subject. So I said nothing. This turned out to be a bad tactic, because the next thing she said was, ‘Sometimes I think I give myself no ground to stand on because I am so busy considering the other person’s side of the story. Where does that leave me?’

  I decided not to risk a comment.

  ‘For God’s sake, relax! I’m not going to bite your head off.’

  ‘I didn’t say a thing,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you thought it. You men! I just don’t know about you sometimes. All you think about is power, power, power. Control, control, control. Who has more? Who has less? And you know? The very people you have stripped of power, and I mean the gender I happen to belong to, are the ones you see as omnipotent. But it’s all in the mind, OK? I’m not powerful. I am as easy as hell to manipulate, and you know it. I don’t even control my own kitchen!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I jumped to my feet and grabbed some plates. ‘I should have been helping you.’ Pushi
ng me back down into my chair, she said, ‘Sit down, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. I’m out of sorts. I probably shouldn’t be talking to you when I’m in this mood. You don’t deserve it’

  ‘But…’ I protested.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop feeling so inadequate!’

  I felt as if I had been X-rayed.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can tell you need some breathing space.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine,’ I gasped.

  ‘Or is it something else you need? How about if I put the kids in front of the video and then we can, you know, go upstairs and relax.’

  ‘RELAX?’ I could not help but shout. ‘With the children in the house?’

  ‘Oh, we would hear them coming. It’s no big deal but I certainly could manage to … but if you don’t want to, don’t let me …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘No, it’s too risky – even though,’ I tried to smile, ‘there is nothing I’d rather be doing.’

  I could tell she didn’t believe me. I felt myself shrinking under her sad, serene gaze. ‘Well, maybe part of you does, anyway,’ she said.

  ‘What could I do to make you happier?’ I asked.

  ‘Go talk to Ophelia and find out what’s wrong. Then come back here and let me know.’

  I almost knocked over a chair in my eagerness to get out. An excuse to leave!

  ‘Or you know what? Instead of coming right back – maybe you should take Becky to that movie you were talking about. You probably need a night off. I’m the first to admit I’m not very good company at the moment.’