“Hello?” Stephanie said again with a quick, mounting impatience.
“It’s Ava.”
“Ava! I found you. Jesus. Do you ever check your email? I had to call your mom. You sound hungover, are you drinking alone again? Sylvia Plath with her head on the oven and whatever?”
“I’ve never read The Bell Jar,” Ava said, annoyed. Stephanie was always getting her inspirations just slightly off. That book in particular was a bête noire; it had swept her high school, and Ava had resented seeing so many of her former tormentors now turned enthusiastically literary and writing poetry. It had felt important to distinguish herself, and so she’d stopped reading books by silly women and priding herself on only reading big, important masterpieces like Moby Dick and War and Peace, a distinctly, self-consciously male pantheon.
“Glad to see you haven’t changed. You know what I mean.”
“I was celebrating. It was my birthday. Thank you for the flowers, by the way.”
“You’re welcome. I still have the company account from that temp job, if you ever need to send flowers. It’s amazing.”
“It’s been years. They haven’t noticed?”
There was a pause. “I don’t do it a lot. Now that I think of it, I must have switched it over to my name at some point, so anyway...happy birthday! I have a million things to tell you. Stop moping around or canning tomatoes or whatever and come have brunch with me.”
“That’s really what you think I do when you’re not here? I don’t even know how to can tomatoes.”
“I bet you do, but we won’t argue about it. Come meet me. A Bloody Mary will fix whatever is making you sound like a dying squirrel. My treat.”
A Bloody Mary, why hadn’t Ava thought of that? That would fix so much. Also, she needed to get away from the stale air of Baker Street that seemed to linger in her apartment. Stephanie would have no theories about Moriarty’s disappearance or Watson’s regimental colors. Today this was a virtue. “No place too loud.”
“I know, I know.”
In the disorientation of the morning, the act of letting Stephanie persuade her to do something felt familiar, and because of that, deeply soothing. They made plans to meet in an hour or so.
Hanging up, Ava decided against making coffee and poured a slug of bourbon into a coffee mug. It felt appropriately hard-boiled, the action of a woman who has fallen from the path of virtue, but her stomach objected and she promptly threw it up. Noticing a trail of dried slime running down her thigh that she was pretty sure hadn’t come from her, she ran to the shower, the exculpatory ritual of young women everywhere who have made unfortunate decisions.
* * *
Later, clean but not cleansed, Ava waited for the elevator. The back half of the Lazarus Club had been built as temporary residences for members, pieds-à-terre maybe, or artists’ studios. Most of the thirty or so tenants had been there since anyone could remember, and the uncertainty as to who got apartments or why or when they might ever leave created a feeling of disembodied permanence that reminded Ava of The Magic Mountain. Also, she heard a lot of coughing. Some of the apartments remained inexplicably vacant; some Ava suspected were occupied though their residents never ventured out. A reclusive woman, Mrs. Grierson, shared her floor and smiled at her ferociously whenever they accidentally met in the hall. Decorative cat statues had proliferated on their landing, very much in the way, but Ava didn’t dare move any of them, suspecting tenants had had heart attacks over less.
The other five floors were equally cluttered with dead plants, stacks of newspapers, novelty doormats, ashtray stands and statuary, reaching an apogee at the floor of Aloysius who used his hallway as an impromptu closet, clothing racks and cardboard boxes rendering it nearly impassable and highly noncompliant with fire codes. A mildewed air of hoarding and missed doses of Thorazine hung over the whole building. Ava found it all very comforting.
The rattling elevator and long narrow corridor turning and twisting under the dining room and ballrooms and offices of the Lazarus Club let out eventually into the grand marble foyer of the main entrance. It created such a sense of psychic distance from the bustle of New York City that all of the questions that had seemed so urgent after college and in Stephanie’s company—who she would become, what she would do, how she would satisfy her dark, restive ambition—seemed to drop away, curling like dust in the cracked wedding cake moldings. Walking into the bright June sunshine, it felt like she hadn’t gone outside in a very long time.
As she came up out of the subway downtown, and the pedestrians around her became increasingly stylish, the sallow veil of Ava’s hangover turned inward, and she noticed the crooked buttons of her dress. Leaving the house, she had hoped she resembled a Godard heroine, rumpled, debauched, a girl who couldn’t care less. But this impression evaporated as soon as she was on the pavement moving among the busy streams of other people, and she remembered she was a girl who would always be a little off, and who cared too much about everything.
Clothes were so complicated. Her old-fashioned mannerisms, the feel of a long hem against her calves, stepping from a curb in stiff leather shoes, allowed her to embody for a fleeting instant the physical sensation of the ghosts of history that populated her daydreams. This made her feel happy and safe. In the snap of a garter against her thigh, she could be a bright young thing navigating the shiny chaos of the modern city. The brush of a fur collar against her cheek turned her into a courtesan off to an assignation, and she became mysterious, desirable, romantic, filled with the preoccupations of lives more exciting than her own. Slipping in and out of the various characters in her head, her body became a bridge between her imagination and the world she had to walk through. She felt alternately protected and invisible. But then every so often the illusion shifted, like a slide slipping from a projector, and she was left exposed in the world as it was, awkward, eccentric and acutely self-aware. Then the imagined glances of passersby felt like a judgment until just walking down the street became torture. Today her whole skin itched with self-consciousness, and this discomfort spread through her body and the clothes that hung on it, now seemingly very tight and bunchy and ill-chosen.
She checked the address. She should already be at the restaurant, but 65 Rivington Street was a boarded-up tailor shop. Next to that was a tattoo parlor, and next to that was a jewelry store. She walked the length of the block a few more times, then gave up and stood beneath a lamppost, trying to read a “historical landmarks” sign from under its palimpsest of graffiti.
A tall blonde in tight jeans brushed past on a cell phone. Hair disheveled, fitted blazer, nipples just visible under a man’s undershirt, with a large expensive purse and dirty sneakers, she evoked a bedraggled, downtown cool, Patti Smith by way of Brigitte Bardot. Or, Ava thought with some chagrin, a Godard heroine.
Normally Ava would have recognized this combination of carelessness and cultivation—the perfect eyeliner and glossy bounce of her hair somewhat belied the hipster ensemble—but because the last time Ava saw her, Stephanie had been trying to reinvent herself as a gallerist, running an eponymous art space and wearing only expensive natural linen and heavy leather belts, it took Ava a moment before her friend’s familiar outlines materialized from this particular pretty, affected stranger. She tapped the passing shoulder and the stranger turned and smiled, radiant, and the feeling of being suddenly swept into an exclusive, privileged circle while somehow feeling worse about her outfit was instantly familiar: Stephanie.
“Darling.” She casually hung up on whomever she had been speaking to. “You look amazing as always. I love the fucked-up thing you’re doing with your hair.”
Ava felt for her braids. “Thanks.”
Stephanie bent toward her, and her hug was warm and she smelled like rose water. She had always been physically affectionate, and Ava remembered the pleasure of receiving this open, magnanimous embrace, even if the difference in their heights mea
nt she was uncomfortably jammed against Stephanie’s hard breastbone. “I can’t believe it’s been so long. Traveling the world is exhausting. Look—” She pointed at what Ava assumed were supposed to be wrinkles. “But that’s the price of wisdom. You haven’t aged a bit. Your Anne Frank tendencies are so good for your skin.” Ava started to object, but Stephanie disarmed it with a grin and held her chin for further examination. “You look pale, though, but maybe you just need a hair of the dog. I see some things haven’t changed.” She put an arm around Ava’s shoulders, guiding her toward a frosted glass door. “You still need someone to take care of you.”
“Why doesn’t anyone have signs anymore?” Ava asked as they entered the closed tailor shop, which led to an unexpectedly large open space.
Circular light fixtures reflected off of waxed, pale wood, slick and shiny as a skating rink or, Ava thought, maybe a Finnish airport. She waited, shifting her weight and bumping a couple nuzzling next to her in the vestibule, while Stephanie air-kissed the maître d’ and the bartender, still talking to Ava over her shoulder. “New York, it’s such a small town. You’re away for one minute and it’s like you’re a celebrity.” She waved at a group of middle-aged men in hooded sweatshirts whose skateboards were stacked on the banquette next to them, and they responded with an unconvincing show of casualness, one offering a lazy peace sign.
“Didn’t you work here for a little while?” Ava asked. Stephanie’s rapid succession of postcollege jobs had been hard to keep track of, bartending or hosting things, events at nightclubs or fancy clothing stores, all which had vaguely to do with art or fashion, and all seemed to be paid for by sneaker or alcohol or bottled water companies. The main thread was that it all occurred in the twenty or so blocks that bound the Lower East Side, and all seemed to be attended by the same people. Ava had gone once and been so embarrassed and ill at ease that she spilled her wine on an important someone’s limited-edition white sneaker and got removed from the event. It had been very traumatizing.
There had been a strange feeling in the air when Stephanie convinced Ava to move to New York with her just two years after the events of September 11. Ava had been expecting to find a solemn city—but like the Rostovs returning to Moscow in War and Peace, they had found a city churning with money instead. Determined that Ava was going to be a famous writer, Stephanie had urged her into a job as a fact checker at a magazine, acquired with surprising ease, while Stephanie herself seemed to float on an endless stream of capital, paid for being young and beautiful and knowing the right people. Her gallery had only lasted a few months before she got into some kind of disagreement with her landlord. Her artists also had some issues about work maybe having been left in a damp storage closet by Stephanie’s assistant or someone, a long convoluted story of betrayal that Ava had listened to sympathetically, without really grasping the particulars.
At their table, Stephanie ordered a warm water with lemon from someone who wasn’t their waiter and leaned back rolling a large ring around her middle finger. “Tell me everything.”
Ava was still just a little hurt that Stephanie could reappear so casually. Of course Ava had had no intention of moving home after graduation, to be back in her mother’s orbit of luncheons and charity clubs and blind dates with eligible young men who would hate her, but moving to New York, and with Stephanie, for whom her mom had a stubborn and irrepressible aversion, had made her parents abruptly cut her off financially. It hadn’t mattered, being poor with Stephanie had been strangely painless, an adventure almost, to siphon from the city all that it had to offer two young, pretty, hungry girls, but still, Ava felt she at least was owed some kind of apology for then being so abruptly abandoned. “I’m not the one who’s been all over the place. Maybe you should begin.”
“Oh my god, you just won’t even believe the couple of years I’ve had.”
Ava couldn’t help interrupting, “I told you that place was a scam. I still don’t understand what made you think that was a good idea.”
“Well, I was broke, if you remember,” Stephanie started. “After I was cheated so terribly by that slimy landlord,”
“We were both broke, but I had a job. You could have just gotten a stupid job like everybody else and stayed here instead of handing yourself over to human traffickers.”
“They weren’t human traffickers.” Stephanie dismissed the idea, annoyed. “They were way too disorganized for that. I was practically running the place before I decided it was a waste of my time. So I have ambition,” she said, twisting her ring, “I think wanting more out of life is something to be proud of. Why are we having this fight again? It’s like you’re not even happy to see me. I thought about you all the time while I was gone.”
“Why didn’t you answer more of my letters then?” Ava reached for her water glass to try and distract from the inadvertently high pitch of her voice. She didn’t quite want Stephanie to know the raw, miserable extent that she had missed her. She studied her menu. Everything was written in a sparse, serif-free, lowercase font that made her think the portions were going to be too small.
“I was busy. I was trying to make a career.”
Ava couldn’t help a small snort. “Leaving like that was totally insane.”
“Okay, it was a little unconventional.” Stephanie rubbed her forehead and pushed her hair back so that her bangs stood up for a moment, pale golden feathers that fell slowly in a gentle cascade. “It was so bad,” she laughed. “You don’t even want to know. Although, weirdly I almost made the inaugural cover of Vogue Ukraine. But then it folded. I did date this Russian guy for a second. He had his own plane. That was cool.”
“What did you do all this time? What did you do for money?”
“This and that.” Stephanie spoke vaguely, suddenly intent on her menu. “Some journalism and stuff. I started a newspaper in Lodz—expats are really into that kind of stuff—but it didn’t really work out. A lot of bartending. For a while I was serving drinks in this crazy hundred-year-old spa—Czech people really like to get drunk in slippery marble rooms—but I got some kind of mineral poisoning and had to quit. I got paid for a while just to hang out in the lobby of this fancy hotel. I don’t know, stuff.” She put down her menu and insisted a busboy take their order despite his objections.
These sorts of things were always happening to Stephanie, and as Ava listened, she felt a returning wonder and a kind of admiration at the relentless flow of life that her friend got to sample. Nothing ever happened to Ava. Except, it seemed, during those times when she hooked herself to Stephanie’s momentum and swung out behind her, pulled into the thrilling, confusing, sometimes disastrous stream of experience, something she seemed incapable of doing on her own, and for which she was grateful. “Why didn’t you just come home? I was here.”
The bread that she was not eating sent little showers of crumbs onto the shiny table, which Stephanie then pushed into neat little rows with the side of her pinky. “I guess I kept waiting for something awesome to happen, so I could have something to tell everyone when I got back, but then it just got kind of lonely and boring. And I got pneumonia. That sucked.” She brushed the crumbs off the table. “My mom was so psyched to say her daughter was finally a model and in Europe, too. It was like all those years of spending our rent money on Weight Watchers and teeth bleaching had finally paid off. I just couldn’t take that away from her.” She shook her head, an unconscious bristling that often arose after mention of her mother, a trait she and Ava shared, and pointed dramatically at Ava. “Let’s talk about you. Did you write your book? When I was in Budapest, I kept telling people I was writing a nineteenth-century epic because I missed you.”
The abrupt transition from Stephanie’s tale of adventure to the blank of her own life took Ava by surprise. “Stephanie.” She shook her head against a wave of embarrassment. The lines of her vision became too sharp, and a surge of adrenaline reared up, but with nowhere to go it just rose up to her
ears and hung there, insistent, ringing. “I’ve never told anyone but you about my book.”
“Yeah, but that’s your weird issue. Everyone I met was super impressed. I think this one poet guy only went out with me because he thought I was a novelist. You waste a lot of opportunities.” Stephanie watched her closely. “Still not going well? Don’t worry. You’re a crazy genius, you’ll do it.” She patted Ava’s arm.
“Can we talk about something else?” Ava blinked, waiting for the world to shrink back to its normal perspective and volume. Stephanie’s ardent faith had been a mystery since the early days of their friendship. They had been in an English class together, but after it ended, to Ava’s astonishment, Stephanie had sought her out, finding her in the halls or the cafeteria, dragging Ava around arm in arm, as if Ava’s shadow somehow made her own radiance shine more brightly. Ava had been dazed, but grateful for the attention and even years later never really got over a fundamental confusion that the homecoming queen in all her blond glory, chose to curl up in Ava’s narrow dorm room, eating cookie dough and trying to quench a seemingly endless curiosity about all things “fancy and intellectual.”
“I’ve just been thinking a lot about literary stuff these days. You’re really the only one I can talk to about that kind of thing, so few people seem to genuinely love books the way that you and I do. I should have never tried modeling. I can’t live a life that is so unintellectual.” Stephanie pushed the bread basket toward Ava. “I’m off carbs.” She unfurled her napkin. “But more on that later. What about your job? The magazine?”
Ava buttered a roll emphatically. “Never again.” After Stephanie left, she had only lasted a few more months at her prestigious publication. It was full of handsome, condescending young men who let her know that of all the innumerable books she had read, somehow none were really the right ones, not like Carver, or Franzen or Foster Wallace. Without Stephanie’s reassurance and encouragement, she found she believed them. Also, one particular senior editor was always cornering her in the break room to regale her with vaguely ribald stories of the magazine’s early days, standing so close she could smell the coffee on his breath, and suddenly everything had just reminded her too much of high school, so when she found the job at the Lazarus Club it had felt like salvation.
The Little Clan Page 3