The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  I took a toke, handed the joint back to him. He said, ‘OK. So listen. Becky and I are having a serious shouting match about the future of our marriage. And so finally I say I’m leaving. Becky tries a karate chop on me. To protect my balls, I catch her foot. She falls on her ass, but not badly, it looks like, and so I split. I’m backing out of the drive when she pulls herself to the door moaning that she’s injured. So I go back. Right? And of course she’s really OK. Then there’s a ring at the door. It’s Mister Man Next Door. He says, “I heard your wife and she sounded like she was in pain. I thought maybe I could help because I’m a doctor.” And so I say thanks but she’s actually OK. I tell him we were just having an argument. And he says, “Well, then, maybe my wife can help. She’s a psychiatrist.”’

  Mitchell snorted.

  ‘Great place to bring up kids, Huh? And while I’m on the subject – I hope you’re not here on urgent business because, when she locked me up in here, she sounded like she meant business. I’m easy, though. The way I look at it, it’s practice.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky,’ I said. ‘Maybe the Mafia will get to you before the IRS does and you can avoid a long and expensive trial. Or maybe when you tell Kiki where his money’s gone, maybe he’ll kill you.’

  Mitchell chuckled. ‘Hey, it’s good to talk to you again.’ He paused, then added, ‘It’s been great having Laura there, don’t get me wrong. But…’ He let out a deep sob. ‘How did we end up on this porch? Do you realize what day it is in less than an hour?’ He waved his phosphorescent watch at me. ‘It’s my fortieth birthday!

  ‘I’m forty in less than an hour,’ he sobbed. ‘And I have nothing to show for it! And I don’t know why! My ideas were always ace! Maybe if I had spent less time with my kids … but now, God, I’m so close to them how could I live apart from them?’

  At this Becky appeared at the inner door. ‘Would you two stop being so fucking maudlin! Get practical. Start thinking about what we have to do to stay out of jail!’

  Unlocking the outer door, she ran down the stairs. Both Mitchell and I sprang to our feet and followed her to the car. Mitchell tripped and fell as we chased her to the corner. I managed to get into the back seat of the car.

  At first she refused to talk to me. Then, when she got to Julius Kahn and parked, she turned around and said, ‘We have nothing to discuss.’

  ‘It’s over,’ she explained as I climbed into the front seat. ‘So go home. Make it up to Laura. Don’t pause for a second to think about me. For all I know, I’ll have to go to jail as that idiot’s accomplice.’

  ‘No, you won’t. I’ll testify against him for you.’

  ‘Oh, stop sounding so sincere. You of all people. I’m telling you. I have had enough earnest conversations today to last me a lifetime. I’ve had to listen to Ophelia tell me about this wonderful guy she’s going to run off with – and say nothing. I’ve had to listen to Charlotte blame me for the world headlice epidemic. I’ve had to lie to Laura. I’ve had to change around my furniture three fucking times to suit my paranoid crook of a husband, and to top it all off, I think he’s run through every penny. I don’t know what I’m going to do. So I have nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Oh Becky,’ I said. I was so filled with remorse I couldn’t stop myself from putting my arms around her. I could feel her body going lax as she sighed. ‘Oh Mike,’ she sobbed. We had been sitting like that for two or three minutes when suddenly she said, ‘Fuck!’

  I sat up. ‘What?’ Then I saw a man’s form through the fogged-up window. A man’s hand, knocking.

  It was Mitchell. He showed us his arms. ‘Look.’

  Becky rolled down the window.

  ‘Shit. He’s slit his wrists.’

  He got into the car without protest. Becky sat in the back and did what she could to stop the flow of blood while I drove straight to Ophelia and Kiki’s.

  I had forgotten the state of play between me and Ophelia. I was therefore taken aback by her stony expression when she met me at the door, and I was not at all prepared when she said, ‘Could I talk to you in private for a second?’ She stepped out into the hallway, carefully closing the door behind her. Then she whacked me across the face.

  After that she was all business. I was impressed by the cool with which she handled Mitchell, who, even as she was bandaging him, was telling her and Kiki, in a child’s voice, that they were not going to get even a fraction of their investment back.

  ‘Let’s worry about all that some other time,’ Kiki said.

  When Mitchell tried to tell Ophelia that he had slit his wrists because he had found Becky and me necking in the front seat of his car, she just said, ‘Everything’s going to look better when you’ve had some sleep.’

  Eventually I remembered that there were five unattended children at Becky and Mitchell’s, and I drove Becky home. It was the first time I had sat behind the wheel of a car since my accident.

  After I left Becky, I took the long cut home. I remember that when I got there I looked up at our bedroom window from the other side of the street. I remember how tall the building looked, and how narrow our window. I remember stopping to count the lines of light filtering through our Venetian blinds. I remember wondering what kind of nightmare was waiting for me up there. What kinds of questions you would hurl at me, what kinds of answers you had already gotten from Charlotte or Becky or Ophelia or even Kiki or Mitchell. One thing was sure, I told myself – even if I sat down on this kerb until dawn, I would not be able to think up a lie elaborate enough to explain away the events of this evening. My only option was to go upstairs and face you like the man I had once pretended to be.

  And so I went up. I remember that the entryway was dark when I walked in, and that the laundry basket standing in front of the service elevator was half lit by the light coming in from the kitchen, and half in black shadow. A single lamp was burning in the living-room. Reflected in the window, it hovered in the sky between Coit Tower and the pyramid building. There were books and puzzle pieces strewn across the carpet – even all these years later, I can still remember what colour they were, and what shape, and the haphazard pattern they made without even meaning to. I can look at the same rug, now clean and bare, and imagine those exact same pieces and books strewn across it. I remember that, while I was standing there looking at them, you came up behind me and said, ‘You’re home at last!’

  I could tell from your tone of voice that nothing had happened in my absence to prepare you for the things I was going to have to tell you. That was the hardest part – to see you come out of the darkness into the circle of light, to understand suddenly but too late that it didn’t matter where you had been all those months, and that I ought to have known you would come back, that I ought to have trusted you … That was the hard part – to look past you into the children’s bedroom and know that, even though I couldn’t see them, they were tucked in their beds. To know that this, my home, my refuge, would only continue to exist for as long as I could keep up the pretence that nothing beyond the walls of this apartment existed. That even if I sat down and said nothing, even if I pulled out the phone jacks and barred the doors, even if I went to bed with you now and put my head under the pillow, it was only a matter of time before you found out what I had done. That is why I broke down when I saw you – not because I was trying to play on your sympathies but because I knew what I was about to lose.

  I still don’t understand why I did some of the things I have told you about. I have no idea how much was me, how much the situation. Now that you have read this, maybe you can tell me. And even if you can’t or don’t want to, I hope that you will accept my story as the explanation I owed you, and that, when you have inspected it for faults and congratulated yourself for having gotten out of a bad marriage to a difficult and misguided man, you will go back and read between the lines and see that this man loved you and loves you still, and that there are no longer any conditions attached to this love, and that you can take it and cherish it without cheris
hing me, and use it to heal the things I broke in you, and make yourself whole again.

  Always

  54

  As I write this, the stars are beginning to fade away, and the first light is showing beyond the Financial District. As I watch the hills change from black to grey, I keep thinking how strange it is that the hills you can see from your window are about to do the opposite.

  Has it been a long day in that villa of yours? Is the heat finally lifting? Is the wind pushing the smog back down the hill into Athens? Is the sprinkler on in the impossible fairy-tale rose garden? Is your cook making coffee for your chauffeur in the kitchen while you stand, regretfully, with your back to the window, and survey your perfect doll-house life?

  Are you happy?

  Are you going out this evening? Is there a wedding on at the Hilton? A reception at the Grande Bretagne? Are you looking forward to it, or are you playing for time as you sit at your antique table toying with your expensive French make-up? Now that you have adjusted the strap of your new Dior gown, now that your hair is just so, now that you have found the earrings that go with that necklace, are you beginning to think of wafting down a perfumed corridor to the nursery to say good-night to the children?

  Our children, in a nursery.

  I can’t imagine them in that room you showed me. And I can’t imagine him. There is no room for him in this picture. He has to be out – in his car, at his office, at the home of a friend whose name you don’t care to know. What reason did he give you for staying in town, or didn’t you even listen when he called to tell you? Is that what you always wanted – an invisible man with a bottomless bank account? Were you in touch with him, were you secretly in love with him, all the years we were together?

  Do the children ever ask about me? Did they tell you about our trip? I am sending under separate cover the photos we took on Naxos. There’s one in particular I think you’ll like. It’s of Jesse and Maria standing in the temple, in the marble archway you always used to tell me about, the one going nowhere. I can’t tell you what it did to me to see it there, framed against the sky just as you always described it, and to think that you once stood exactly where the children were standing when I took their picture. And then – to go down and see the rockpools you always talked about, to sit next to them the way you said you used to do whenever you felt upset, to look out and imagine the colour of the water, imagine the walls of the old town through your eyes …

  I’m surprised that after all these years you’ve been in Greece you never found the time to take the children to Naxos yourself. You used to say it would be the first thing you’d show them. Have you drifted so far away that you can’t even remember your old daydreams?

  Did they tell you that I tried to take them to see the Diadoumenos that last morning? We went straight from Piraeus to the archaeological museum, but it was closed. So maybe next time – although it may have been a mistake to take Jesse so close without giving him the chance to see it. If his nightmares come back, you may want to take him down there yourself to reassure him.

  Or is it too late? Laura, could it be possible? Is our child afraid of art?

  When we were having ice-creams in that café next to the steps, I saw him glance up at the museum’s bolted door – and then shudder, just the way he used to do when he was little. It almost killed me to see those old expressions pass over his face. And to see you in Maria, to see her laugh like you, and wrinkle her nose like you, and sit in the same café where you and I once sat and order the same kind of ice-cream and draw the same line across the top of it with her spoon. To be sitting in the shadow of the Parthenon one day, and the next day to travel to the other side of the earth and see the Palace of Fine Arts, and hate it for not being marble, hate it for reminding me of what may be beyond my reach for ever, hate it most of all for what it is: a concrete imitation of a ruin sitting on the edge of a man-made duck pond.

  It almost killed me, Laura, to say goodbye to them just as we were beginning to be comfortable with one another. To see them stand there on the front steps blowing kisses and then turning away and running into the arms of another man.

  Do they miss me? Did they even know what to make of me? That look they both have in the picture I took of them in front of the Parthenon, with the Parthenon slanting so unnaturally into the hot white light behind them – are they squinting because of the sun or are they puzzled about this man who keeps telling them he is their father? Those ravaged eyes …

  I hope they weren’t upset that I snapped at them for not smiling when I was taking their picture in front of the Acropolis. I was feeling tense, because I knew how few hours I had left with them, because I could feel my father’s pitying eyes boring into my back as he watched me repeating his mistakes. I am not complaining. I was happy we could have that trip together, three generations. I’m glad he’s there in Athens to keep up regular contact with them.

  Laura, I know I fucked you over. I know I am an asshole, but the children were the centre of my life, and seeing them a week at a time twice a year is just not enough. Never being able to have them here in San Francisco makes it even harder. Wouldn’t you let them come here some time if I accompanied them both ways on the plane? Don’t you think this is something you and I should be deciding instead of Stavros? Don’t you know how it destroys me to see another man play father to my children? Don’t you see, now that you have read this, that one of the reasons we ended up like this was because I put the children first?

  I saw their old playmates today. It was Lara’s birthday. I didn’t want to go to the party, but Becky insisted. Imagine what it did to me to see those children, those same children still together, but not to see ours …

  The entire Stork Club (except for you, that is) had turned up for the occasion. I don’t know how long it had been since I’d last seen the men. Mitchell came down from Petaluma, which is where he has been living ever since he got out of the clinker. His new girlfriend runs a mail-order clothing business out of a converted chicken farm up there. She grossed seventeen million last year – she wears the pants, all right, but to tell you the truth, he looks relieved. He’s running a bookstore cum bar and managing an exercise studio next door that recoups the bcb’s losses. The girlfriend – she’s no bimbo – does the books.

  Trey has filled out a little, and seems content. He still has a hint of that old crazy look in his eyes, but you wouldn’t see it unless you had known him in the old days. He has a nine to five accountant’s job in the Financial District and lives in Redwood City, in a tract house, I hear, with a woman who works in the same office and who, I hear, looks so much like him she could be his sister – he didn’t bring her.

  I don’t know if anyone told you what happened to Kiki and Ophelia. I’m sure you heard that they kept the joint practice going even after the divorce. After what Mitchell did with their money, they didn’t really have much choice. For a while it was looking like they might be getting back together. Then Ophelia went to Cuba for a month and, while she was there, Kiki linked up with the first woman he met in front of Seb’s school. By the time Ophelia got back, this woman already had her voice on the answering machine. This did wonders for Ophelia’s ego. For a while, she was talking about moving to the country, but today she said she had gone off the idea. She and the new wife (who is an RN) spent most of the party discussing a fertility clinic they want to set up even though Kiki insists it’s not financially viable.

  Becky – as you may know – has just bought that studio that used to belong to that jazz dancer who died of AIDS. This is for profit to pay for her other projects, while she waits for them to break even. She leads a fragmented life – there is a boyfriend she keeps way, way in the background. He lives on the East Coast; they meet once a month. She spent half the party talking to him on the phone. She has two formerly delinquent and now evolving teenagers living with her, and spends a good deal of time with a cluster of Russian refugee families whose daughters do babysitting for her. Those Central American priests
are back in the picture, as well as a half-brother … it looks chaotic to me but it seems to work.

  The big surprise is Charlotte. I don’t know how much you hear, but in case you didn’t – after she got rid of Trey she went into a fury of ideologically correct but unbearable selfishness. This resulted in her head of department firing her. She is suing him for unfair dismissal. The case is pending. Meanwhile, she is pursuing what she calls her outside interests. First she set herself up as a cartoonist – but not a funny one. Then she had a brief and embarrassing phase as a mime. We were all worried when she set herself up as a folk singer, but, to our surprise, she’s not as bad as we expected. She had a big success in Nevada City a week or two ago – and turned up at Becky’s with another folk singer she met while she was up there. It’s not clear what their relationship is: he’s presentable, but I don’t know how far I’d trust him.

  She also brought Mona. Mona says she recognized me right off, but of course she was expecting to see me. It took me an hour or more to figure out why she was giving me those curious looks. Do you remember how slight she used to be? How lightfooted? Not any more: she is sunburnt and muscular and her hair is hennaed. She has a three-year-old boy whose name is Conor – she knows who the father is but she can’t remember his name.

  I liked the boy. He reminds me a lot of Jesse at that age. It’s strange to see the child of a woman you used to be married to. I had to keep reminding myself that, if we had stayed married, this child standing in front of me would not exist. I invited them both back to the apartment after the party. For the first time in four years, a child actually played with the toys in the baskets. ‘You’ve kept all your kids’ old things?’ Mona asked. She thoughtfully did not add, Even though they have long since outgrown them. I explained to her that I wanted to keep something in the apartment that was familiar to them, so that when they come back they’ll think of it as home.