The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “This girl was pretty intense. Imagine being better than everyone in the entire world at one thing, and having everyone know it. How fucking satisfying that must be.” She threw the book aside. “You know, I wish you would just go into business with me.”

  Ava was rearranging the library for her own amusement: a turn-of-the-century manual on brain surgery migrated to a shelf she had labeled Hobbies, Jane Austen she put under Finance, and P.G. Wodehouse went next to the Communist Manifesto in Socialism. She laughed. “Me? I would be terrible at starting anything. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m cripplingly shy.”

  “Well, that’s what you would have me for. I’m not scared of anyone.”

  Ava flipped through a book on Euclid and considered filing it under Foreign Languages. “True. Rather, I think people are often scared of you.”

  “And I just feel like I need someone I can trust. You’re my only friend.” She noticed Ava’s skeptical look. “My only real friend. Everyone else is just people.”

  “I already have a job.”

  “Well, maybe we could do something that ties in somehow, like a library-slash-bar or something.”

  “What you’re trying to describe is basically my fantasy. I mean, not the commercial business part you’re talking about, but I’ve always dreamt of hosting a salon. Every nineteenth-century novel has a salon in it, famous artists and beautiful women, drinking tea and talking about books and art and falling in love. But I think you need to be married to a duke or something for that to work,” Ava finished, sadly.

  They were interrupted by the arrival of an older woman muffled in a large fur stole despite the season. “I was almost married to a duke, but he called it off because I once wore slacks to the Sherry Netherland,” she said through the fur.

  “Good Morning, Mrs. Van Doren,” said Ava. A former Argentinean beauty queen who had married into one of New York’s oldest families, Mrs. Van Doren was a source of glamorous fascination to Ava.

  “Hello, Ava. I wanted to see if you wouldn’t mind switching our mahjong to Tuesday afternoons. Mrs. Bellamy has some complications with her driver on Mondays.”

  Ava shrugged. “Sure. I never have anything to do.”

  “You’re very agreeable, but you shouldn’t admit that, dear. Even to a pack of old ladies. Always allow yourself some mystery.” Mrs. Van Doren stopped in the center of the room and waited, expectantly. Ava knew what she wanted but decided to let Stephanie handle it. “This young woman is in my chair,” she said finally, with a look at Stephanie’s bare feet.

  Stephanie immediately slid out of the chair and into her shoes like oil pouring off water. “Of course, I’m so sorry. I was just so caught up in this book. Don’t you just love a library?”

  Settling into the chair, Mrs. Van Doren rearranged her silk blouse with a proprietary air and shifted the glittering eyes of the mink biting its own tail, pulling it up higher around her neck. “I remember her, she was quite the impressive little thing.” She pointed at Stephanie’s book and closed her eyes. “I’m glad we saved her from those godless commies.”

  “Oh I know, dasvidaniya, but what would we do without caviar?”

  A smile fluttered over Mrs. Van Doren’s pale lips. “One of my ex-husbands practically lived for the stuff. A trip to Petrossian and a bottle of champagne and he’d pay any amount on my Saks charge.”

  “Wasn’t Nadia Comaneci Romanian?” Ava asked.

  They ignored her, exchanging bromides about men, which Ava felt just a little wounded not to be able join in, until Mrs. Van Doren tucked her chin against the pointed snout cradling her cheek and promptly fell asleep.

  “I love this place so much,” Stephanie said, and began to wander around the room. She put her book back on the wrong shelf and poked her finger into the mouth of a brass lion roaring on a side table. The tassels of a velvet bellpull hanging from the ceiling brushed her shoulder, and she idly wrapped them around her wrist, tugging a little too hard for Ava’s taste.

  “It doesn’t work anymore,” Ava said.

  “What’s behind here?” Stephanie stopped at a dusty set of double doors and tried a bronze doorknob.

  “A storage closet?” Ava turned back to her books. “Aloysius keeps everything locked up, so who knows? Mummified bodies? Confederate bonds?”

  “Aren’t you curious? If you had a knife or something, I bet I could pick this lock.”

  “How about a hairpin?”

  “That only works in movies, Ava.”

  Ava set a stack of books on a rung of the wooden ladder. She rummaged around her desk. “I have a World War One bayonet I was trying to use as a letter opener.”

  “Let me see.” Stephanie glanced at the weapon. “No. I need a thinner edge.”

  Ava put it back. “Yeah, it was a terrible letter opener. Aloysius probably has the key, but he’s so weird about this kind of thing. I tried to open those glass-fronted bookshelves downstairs once, and it distressed him to the point of tears.”

  “I’ll get it. He loves me.” Stephanie stomped out of the room.

  Ava re-scaled the ladder. Balancing on the top step, she slid Coup D’état: the Technique of Revolution under Sports, right next to Married Love and Health. Eventually Stephanie reappeared with a large bronze key and a frazzled expression. Ava rested an elbow on Tales for Males. “It’s amazing that you can charm even a delicate old bachelor like Aloysius.”

  “Well, I had to hear a bunch of technical details about Pomeranian breeding and then he said I reminded him of a young Doris Duke. I don’t even know who that is.”

  Ava carefully descended the waxed rungs. “A dead socialite.” Stephanie, at the locked door, smiled at this and continued pulling on the stiff key with both hands. “Let me.” Ava knelt down and tried to hear the teeth catching. She had once read that safecrackers could do this kind of thing just by feeling the vibrations with their fingertips. After a few moments, the key slipped in the lock with a loud creaking sound. Ava turned the doorknob, and they stood, struck speechless by the room that opened up before them.

  Weak sunlight filtered into a cavernous space that nearly mirrored the library next door, illuminating the sprawling pile of garbage that filled it: rolled up carpets, a dressmaker’s dummy, huge wads of newspaper, curtain rods, garbage bags sagging against each other in dejected lumps, an egg crate mattress folded and bent under the weight of a tarnished samovar. Dirty windows stretched to the ceiling crossed with dark iron mullions. On the other side, a smaller, connected room was filled with old appliances.

  Stephanie stepped forward and prodded a molting teddy bear. “What the hell is all this stuff?”

  Ava followed cautiously, squatting to examine a mason jar filled with what looked like sharks’ teeth. “I can’t even imagine.” An upended sofa lilted dramatically to one side, supporting a jumble of empty picture frames and a stack of yellowing Penthouse magazines.

  “The people in this club are insane. Don’t they know what New York real estate is worth? Was this somebody’s apartment?”

  “No idea. There are a dozen rubber nipples for baby bottles over here and a glue gun. I don’t even want to know. Maybe it was an art studio? ”

  “Check it out, this wall has bookshelves. Somebody covered them over with carpet.” Stephanie yanked at the filthy shag carpet that had been carefully nailed over the empty bookshelves.

  As she crossed the room, plastic sheeting and garbage bags slid under Ava’s feet. A deflated Mylar balloon coasted past on a spray of dust that swirled into the air. “Maybe it was originally part of the club library?” Ava pulled a corner to help. “But what it looks like now is the apartment of a schizophrenic. I thought the rooms were bad where I live. I hope we don’t find the corpse of the crazy person who used to live here.” With a final tug, the carpet fell to the ground, revealing carved wood bookshelves even more baroque than the ones next door. “Oh my god. Why are
n’t they using these?”

  “Because they are insane.” Stephanie was picking her way toward the deeper shadows at the back of the room. “I think this was a kitchen.” She sneezed and turned the faucet on and off. “This space—it’s fantastic. I wonder if they would let us use it. If we fixed it up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stephanie was laughing. “It’s so perfect. If we do it here, it would solve everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  As she began to pace, Stephanie moved through the gauntlet of junk with surprising grace. “What if, and I’m just thinking things through here, what if we open our own club up here? The Lazarus Club would make us look fancy and established, I mean, come on, this place is amazing, but we could have our own membership and host people here, it’s like a bar-slash-library already.”

  “Why would they let us do that?”

  Stephanie stopped and looked at Ava in disbelief. “Are you kidding? This place is asphyxiating. Ten years from now, all their members will be dead. You know how desperate Aloysius is for good press. With all my connections, we would be the best thing that happened to this place in the last twenty years. Fifty,” she corrected herself.

  A paint can at Ava’s feet seemed a good place to sit down. It was unsettling to think that she had been working away in the next room for so long, unaware of all this. A mannequin arm left a dusty handprint on her dark wool skirt. The chaos of objects bristling, immobile, incongruous, seemed to whisper a story she couldn’t quite piece together, a diorama of a dead civilization casting a spell. “But you’re talking about starting a business. Don’t you need to know about accounting and stuff? I don’t know anything about running a business.”

  Stephanie swung a broken picture frame around her wrist and then tossed it back onto a pile. “How hard can it be? I’ve been reading about it. You just get incorporated in Delaware for taxes or something.”

  This was not reassuring. Ava leaned forward and wiped the dust from the toes of her low T-strap heels. “Stephanie. You know I could never be in charge of anything. I’m so bad with people.”

  In her hurry to cross the room, Stephanie tripped on a stuffed pheasant and, practically crawling over the piles of junk, came to squat down in front of Ava. She pushed a lock of hair out of Ava’s face and took both of her hands in hers. “I can handle the people. There are so many rich people in New York. Everybody wants in on the cool new thing. This is about you, for you. This whole place—that stuffed bird, and bearskins, and paintings of someone’s dead grandmother, all this Victorian stuff, it’s going to be the next big thing. I can just feel it, and that’s all you. People are going to come here because of you. You can curate the whole thing, we can have books and readings, it could be just like the salon you were talking about. Don’t you want to host a salon and have everyone come and find out what an amazing writer you are?”

  Ava wanted to pull her hands away but just nodded instead, retreating from this dizzying prospect to the safety of the particulars. “But it’s such a mess in here. Wouldn’t that be expensive to fix up?”

  Stephanie stood up so fast, the restive energy always so present and barely contained, now let loose, filled up the room between them, all the empty space at once surging with wild possibility. “Investors are going to be no problem. All those years I’ve spent at every art opening and nightclub and fashion launch—do you think I was just wasting my time? I was waiting for this. My moment. This is when I take it all back.”

  There was a fierceness to Stephanie’s tone that made Ava look away, her gaze traveling over the clutter to the soaring height of the ornate ceiling panels. Still attempting to resist Stephanie’s grandiosity, there was something about the equally outrageous grandeur of the room they were in that made it oddly appropriate. Not just appropriate—inevitable even. If fate were going to grant them a room like this, abandoned right in the middle of Manhattan, it would be irresponsible not to make use of it. “Do you think a bank would give us a loan?” Ava asked.

  “No, they’ll want collateral. I looked into it once. It’s so stupid. If I already had something worth money, why would I be trying to get a loan? Look, don’t get hung up on the details. I promise I will be able to get us funding. Think about the idea, the genius of it. Private clubs are so big right now—like three new ones opened up downtown, but they don’t have a concept. But a literary club, in a place like this—every writer in town is going to join.”

  Ava didn’t want to ask why exactly Stephanie had been trying to borrow money. From her vantage point on the paint can, she was having trouble thinking clearly. Events had escalated so dramatically that practical considerations seemed somehow beside the point in the face of Stephanie’s operatic optimism.

  The idea was absurd of course, but as she turned it over in her mind, Ava couldn’t help a quiet thrill at the sudden prospect of one of her most beloved novels coming to life around her. She decided to read In Search of Lost Time in college because to be the kind of person who had read it gratified her vanity, but once started, she had been overwhelmed. Marcel, the narrator, his nerves and shyness, oversensitive and second-guessing, always wrong about everyone else’s intentions and motivations, had spoken to Ava with an electric spark of recognition. His desperate desire to be a writer and his equal inability to actually write anything felt like someone whispering the irresolvable conflict of her secret heart. And then later as he made his way through the glamorous salons of Paris, it had summed up an entire shorthand for Ava, a descriptor of the life she one day wanted, a writer, surrounded by an admiring and glittering society, and so the book remained with her, more than just a story, a kind of fantastical template for her to recognize and measure her desires and progress against. And here was Stephanie, inflamed and fearless as usual, offering to create that very world around her.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally.

  A slow grin spread over Stephanie’s face. “Just you wait.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Ava’s phone rang, shattering the quiet of the small studio. The bell still echoing in her head did not prevent her from being startled when the ring burst into the room again. She knew the futility of resisting the only person who would call her at two in the morning and threw back the covers, groping her way to the phone. “Hello?”

  “You really need to get a cell phone.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.” Ava cradled the receiver in her ear, picked up the heavy body of the phone with her other hand, and began to drag its long cord to the bed. “I’m here, aren’t I?” She pushed Mycroft out of the warm hollow of the mattress that she had recently vacated. Annoyed, he slithered to her pillow and respooled himself. “What do you want?” Ava realized she was still hoping for the token apology that should have started this conversation.

  “I need you to get in a cab and meet me on Eighty-Third and West End Avenue.”

  “No.” Ava paused. “What for?”

  “I found the most amazing couch.”

  “What?”

  “When we take over that room, we’re going to need more seating. I’m thinking ahead.”

  “Stephanie, they’re not going to let us take over the room. Stop thinking they will.”

  “They will,” she insisted. “And this couch is amazing, and free. It’s dark leather and has those button things.”

  “You mean tufted?”

  “Yes, and it’s just here on Eighty-Third Street, and I need you to help me move it before somebody else takes it. Just get in a cab.”

  “No.” Then as Stephanie waited, silently, confidently, Ava couldn’t help but picture the couch. She had always wanted a chesterfield. It really was the kind of thing every library needed, and if you were, somehow, going to have a literary club, it was exactly what you would want everyone to be sitting on, with the lights turned down low, brandy glasses warming in cupped palms, a murmu
red conversation about Thomas Hardy. She had lots she had always wanted to say about Thomas Hardy. “Oh, all right. But only because it’s tufted.”

  Ava threw an old cotton dress over her nightgown. The thought of adding more junk to that crazy room was ridiculous. This was Stephanie getting ahead of herself as usual. Still, it was kind of exciting to get into a taxi in the middle of the night. She felt untethered, vaguely disreputable; like Mata Hari. What if she told the driver to go to Grand Central, took the first train out and just vanished? She saw a European hotel room, a new life, her one dress hung over a chair until she rose in the morning and slipped it over her head, the silk of her nightgown still nestling against her skin like a slip.

  A warm breeze swept through the open window as the cab sped up a deserted avenue. The lit windows of skyscrapers looked like so many squares of an advent calendar, each holding their radiant secrets behind drawn shades. Apartment buildings glittered, a web of discrete worlds all held together in the muted glow of the city night. The car took a sharp left, and she slid across the slippery seat, enjoying her bare legs, awkward and glamorous, the kind of legs that flung around the back seats of rushing taxis at midnight. A pharmacy sign flew by, and the lit torches of subway poles guarded empty corners. When she arrived, she gave the driver a twenty for a ten-dollar fare and told him to keep the change. Her dress fluttered around her knees, and she slammed the door with brio; she was that kind of girl.

  She didn’t realize that she hadn’t actually believed Stephanie until she saw her sitting in a proprietary crouch in the center of a large brown leather sofa, waving excitedly. “How did you find this?”

  Stephanie crossed one leg of a shimmery black cocktail suit over the other and draped her arm over the back. The proximity of a fire hydrant made Ava feel like she was in a Buñuel movie, polished and urbane and not making any sense. “Wednesday is garbage day on the Upper West Side, and that’s where all the good stuff is. The East Side gets picked over too fast. I think all the doormen must sideline as furniture dealers or something.”