The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “Thanks,” Ava said with a sigh as she pulled the door shut behind them.

  * * *

  At a nearby bar, George nursed a can of Schlitz and regaled them with an exegesis of the Beach Boys’ late oeuvre, the Aristotelian ethos of late-night television, and how an elbow injury ended his love affair with the accordion. By the time he started in on Tolstoy’s sexual perversions, they hired him. Since they weren’t going to be paying a salary, instead Stephanie offered her undivided attention. Leaning forward, chin in hand, she laughed appreciatively, her big blue eyes wide with interest and admiration. George, flushed and blooming under the indulgence of a beautiful, older woman, talked as if he might never get the chance again. He kept looking around the bar with dramatic intent, as if hoping for an unruly patron to subdue, a windmill to storm, an opportunity to prove his fealty. Eventually they also learned that he grew up in Queens, that his parents were dental technicians, and that to drive them crazy he dressed like Oscar Wilde all through high school. He got beat up a lot. His classmates at Hunter didn’t care for him much, so he spent most of his free time in the main branch of the New York Public Library, reading yellowing Hearst newspapers and pretending to be John Jacob Astor. He was visibly, vocally glad to have found what he called “a pair of kindred spirits.”

  After three gin and tonics, Ava started to tune out the rambling monologue and watched him with pride. They had an employee. They had incorporation papers. They had a venue. Was it possible this unlikely thing was really going to happen? She felt transported, like those shots she had seen in movies where the background zooms in from out of focus, suggesting the passage of enormous distance without the main character moving at all, and she now occupied an entirely different sphere of life than she did just a few short weeks ago. It was dizzying and exhilarating, and she giggled into her drink.

  “What?” Stephanie was sucking on the slice of lemon from her glass.

  A worry about money rose in her, a tiny bubble which quickly burst amid her general effervescence. “Nothing.” Ava finished her drink and licked at a drop of condensation that spilled from the lip of her glass and down her hand.

  6

  Stephanie set a date in the first week of September for their grand opening, an act of aspirational folly that Ava argued against in vain. As each day passed, the disorder of the rooms began to give her a stomachache, and she had to keep the doors closed and pretend it wasn’t all she could think about. Aloysius, who popped in every so often to see how the renovations were progressing, was not happy that they had not even begun and muttered as much under his breath. Ava tried to work on her book, but each time she was distracted by thoughts of Stephanie, and now that this sparkling life had been dangled before her, it felt that she would never be able to be happy here again, alone, fruitlessly trying to make Agustin and Anastasia fall in love. Instead she sat sketching out various possible book groups and lecture topics, and writing out her introductions to them.

  In order to ensure that their event would be well attended by “everyone who’s everyone,” Stephanie had doubled down on her promoting. Ava barely saw her, and so was secretly rather relieved one muggy Thursday night when she insisted that Ava accompany her to a party given by a famous literary magazine. They expected it to be filled with just the sort of people that needed to know about an exciting new literary salon and library. When he overheard them discussing it, George had asked to join them with an eagerness whose underlying desperation Ava thought she recognized, and they agreed. She knew what that felt like. She liked George, his oddness, his enthusiasm, his strangely affected accent—notes of Walter Winchell, Jimmy Stewart, William F. Buckley and just a hint of Bugs Bunny. His frame of reference and bemused delight with the Lazarus Club aligned him with Ava, while an obvious, unrequited and unspoken crush on Stephanie kept him sympathetic even to her most callous impulses. So he slid between them, oil on their occasionally choppy waters, a perfect, if sometimes extraneous, employee.

  Stephanie led their way, head high, chin lifted, already projecting the invulnerability she wore to these kinds of events like an expensive accessory, while Ava tried to keep up and George ambled contentedly a step or two behind. Prince Street loomed, dark and silent around them except for a booming that reverberated every time Stephanie stomped across a set of iron basement doors sunk into the sidewalk.

  Their reflections skimmed across the lit windows of a closed store. “This neighborhood creeps me out.” Ava looked up at a window display. “Who decided that mannequins shouldn’t have heads anymore—seems like kind of an essential organ even for a well-dressed lady.”

  Stephanie, losing the thread of an imaginary conversation she had been preparing, shrank from queenly impresario to annoyed teenager. “Ava, some of us are trying to concentrate.”

  “How do you do that?” Ava asked.

  “What?” Stephanie rifled through the bag on her shoulder for a business card, then used it to remove something from her gums.

  “That thing you do.” Ava tried to imitate her friend’s imperious bearing.

  Stephanie threw the card on the pavement. “You’ve got to sell it. Confidence is everything.”

  “Joan of Arc had confidence.”

  “And she was pretty fucking awesome.” This seemed like an elemental difference of perspective, so Ava kept silent. It was a little exciting to be going somewhere on a summer night when the air hung on them, close with possibility, and the breath of a subway grate exhaled the proximity of a million other people’s evenings and hopes for the evening. Ava couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to a party. And every time she started to shrink at the prospect, she remembered the salon, and it buoyed her. This time she had something cool to talk about.

  Other groups of twos and threes coalesced, lightly shining with sweat in the summer twilight. “Are we all going to the same place?” Ava asked.

  “The bigger the crowd, the better we can promote.”

  “Speaking of promotions.” George handed them each a stack of papers from his bag. “I worked out a flyer like you asked.”

  “They look beautiful.” Ava stroked the cover. “The font is perfect. It looks like Abigail Adams scribbled a condolence card.”

  “It’s called ‘Von Stackelberg Fancy,’” George informed her. “I thought you might like it.”

  Stephanie shoved the cards back toward his bag. “We can’t bring those. We aren’t promoting a comedy club on a street corner. It looks totally wrong.”

  “You specifically asked me to make them for tonight.” George sadly closed his cotton satchel.

  “I’m sure I probably didn’t. How are my teeth?” Stephanie flashed her gleaming mouth at Ava. “I’m going for the editor-in-chief. His book on the atom bomb was awesome.”

  George was looking at his feet, and Ava gave him a pat on the arm, aware that consolation from her was only second best. “Why don’t we skip this party and put on pajamas, and you can explain to me how hadron colliders work?” she asked Stephanie. “You used to do that kind of stuff. Sometimes.”

  “We can nerd out after we’re famous. Right now we’ve got work to do.” Stephanie pushed Ava through a set of heavy doors and into a small elevator. Girls in winged eyeliner and glasses carried tote bags, some of which prominently displayed the logo of the magazine, and pressed up against them.

  George looked around delightedly. “This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life. I bet every girl on this elevator reads The Times Literary Supplement. Ladies,” he said, smoothing down his hair, as one smiled back, encouragingly.

  “I bet they don’t.” Ava looked around, comparing herself to all the pretty girls in cardigans, their thin arms and cold eyes, and this feeling of being surrounded by potential versions of herself—young women who liked books and maybe even wanted to be writers, and the impression, even more acute from being pressed up in a small elevator, that there wasn’t enough r
oom for them all, and that the subtle gradations of who would succeed must be sniffed out.

  The customary silence of unacquainted New Yorkers felt particularly hostile. Women so often evoked this feeling in Ava, a yearning to be liked and approved of and the certainty that she would mess it up somehow. Women just seemed to be the only things that mattered, and each seemed to offer the possibility that if they would just accept her, grant her entrance to the unique sphere of their life and confidence, that the aching loneliness always looming around her would vanish forever. In some ways she felt she would always be eight years old, watching the laughter and the intimate whispers of her classmates, arms wrapped around each other, skinned knees swinging entangled, trying desperately to draw closer. But like keen-scented little foxes they always seemed to sniff out some essential difference and shut their ranks against her just as these young women probably would, if given the opportunity.

  Ava wanted to run back to her apartment and renounce this complicated tangle of longing and fear, forever associated with the tight braids and blue polyester jumpers of school uniforms, but the elevator stopped with a jolt. A current of heat spun between the opening doors, and Ava pressed back and found Stephanie’s shoulder. Then she remembered her friend, her beautiful, confident partner, and found refuge in the pressure of this resolute elbow. “I can’t go in there,” she said. More bodies spilled from an open metal door. A young woman blocked their path, commiserating over someone’s success with an equally sweaty young man.

  “Just go.” Stephanie shoved Ava forward and slid under the outstretched arm of a man who was holding a full plastic cup in each hand and another in his mouth. “Thanks.”

  Ava had no choice but to follow, bumping up against warm damp bodies. “So sorry, excuse me.” The more she apologized, the more annoyed people seemed, so she gave up, abandoning herself to the whorls and eddies of the crowd. When she finally landed inside the room, she looked around for help, but even George had melted away, and she was alone.

  For a while, just staying out of people’s way kept her busy with an advance and retreat of politely apologetic murmuring, but that brought her to another corner where, free of jostling elbows, she had nothing to do but stand. She noticed a doe-eyed girl a couple steps away who seemed to be all alone, just staring into a cup of wine. Ava spent a few minutes admiring the slope of her back, a narrow branch bending beneath the weight of its own boredom, and the way the tilt of the wrist holding her cup managed to express such contempt for this party. At last the misery of standing unaccompanied overpowering her fear of bridging the existential gap between human beings, Ava resolved to say hello. But just as she started to move closer, the sylph hooked an arm around the elbow patch of the man next to her, and they glided to another corner of the room.

  Feeling inappropriately rejected, Ava directed herself to the bar. After securing a cup of warm, sour white wine, the obscure dynamics of the crowded bar area deposited her behind the white cloth-covered table where she found herself facing a row of handsome boys. She smiled. They ignored her and drank. Hedged in by the bar, stuck at the approximate distance of people having a conversation, the continued avoidance of one was becoming excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Hi,” she said finally.

  Three dispassionate sets of eyes scrutinized her. She sipped her wine. At last, a blond with a sharp Truman Capote part sighed. “Do you work at Schuster?”

  “No.” Ava spoke from behind the clear plastic lip of her cup.

  “Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else. Publishing?”

  It took her a minute too long to realize he was still asking about her job. “No.”

  “Then you must be a writer.”

  From the way he said this, Ava felt a great pity for all the poor girls who might actually answer yes to this question. “Oh no.”

  “Then why are you at this party?”

  She marveled that he could be so assured, inhabiting this space with such a casual presumption of ownership while she was called to defend her existence. “I’m starting a literary club, a place for writers, where people can go to talk about books.” An undeniable feeling welled up as she said this—pride, excitement, she wasn’t quite sure but something made her sip her wine with a slightly higher tilt of her head, a feeling that in the joust of conversation, for once, finally, she was armed.

  “Why would I have to go someplace special for that?”

  “So you could meet other people who like to talk about books.” This seemed so obvious, Ava couldn’t help the note of condescension that crept in to her voice.

  “I already know lots of people like that. Watch.” He turned to the man next to him, a pencil moustache tremulously bisecting a juvenile face. “Dan Blachovsky’s latest?”

  “Genius.”

  “Elizabeth What’s-Her-Name.”

  “Domestic, middlebrow.”

  “Joshua Goldfarb.”

  “Hilarious.” They looked expectantly at Ava.

  “Um, I don’t know those authors.”

  “Sounds like a great club.”

  They were right, of course. She wasn’t doing a very good job, and tried a different sally. “It’s going to be like the salon in Proust.”

  They all rolled their eyes at her, maybe one of them groaned, “Oh, please.”

  This wasn’t her intention. What was she doing wrong? Ava tried again. “Or other classics, I guess, you know, get people together to discuss great works of literature.”

  “Sounds pretty dull, don’t you think, Josh? I’d rather talk about bad books like yours.”

  Pencil Moustache shrugged. “No, no, I’m not great literature, after all. I’m sure her club will be awesome and not at all pretentious.” He stopped and looked closer at her and then a light of recognition flashing in his eyes, his smile warmed just a hair. “Wait a second, I know you. Didn’t you used to work at the New Yorker? I used to see you in the elevator with a weird umbrella.”

  It had been a parasol. “No, that must have been somebody else.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was you. I kept trying to ask you about it, but you were always staring at the floor.”

  Mentally erasing the moustache, she recognized him too, an editorial assistant, vegan, who asserted his prestige over mere fact checkers by “accidentally” removing her turkey sandwiches from the break room refrigerator. “Yeah, that was me.”

  He chuckled. “This all makes a lot of sense now. I always wondered what your deal was. Do you want another wine? I’m going to get one.”

  As he spoke, a faint glimmer of remembrance stirred—had he invited her to a party once? He had. She had been so flustered by the invitation, she had agreed to go and then, overcome with shyness, hadn’t shown up. How mortifying. Did he remember? He must, and he must be thinking how despicably rude she was. “No, thank you.” Now terribly embarrassed, she had to get away and sort of waved awkwardly. “It was nice to see you again.” And ran for the protection of the long and winding bathroom line before he could respond.

  Recovering, Ava wandered around some more. She didn’t want to risk going back to the bar, and so found herself next to a table on which copies of the magazine were displayed. She picked one up and began flipping through it. On the other side of the table, two dark-skinned men in bright bow ties were doing the same. One had a small repetitive cough that Ava decided was an indicator of social unease, and she wanted to introduce herself in solidarity, but just as she had resolved to do it, they were joined by a larger group with much laughter and backslapping, and Ava had to assume she had been mistaken. Everyone had friends here except her. Now alone at the issue display, she felt even more conspicuous, and put her copy down and left. For a while, she followed random blond heads through the crowd, hoping that each might be Stephanie, but none of them were, and she was a little surprised that there could be so many unusually tall blondes circulating through this party. A bank of windows
offered a temporary respite. She perched on the ledge, scanning the crowd every few minutes as though she were waiting for someone, but the ledge was at capacity, and the couple next to her were fighting loudly about Oxford commas. As they descended into personal slurs, Ava decided to pee again.

  As she got in the bathroom line once more, Stephanie popped up at her elbow. “Hey, how’s it going? After you go, come with me, I want you to meet some people.”

  “I’m ready now. I’ve been in this line three times already. Don’t ask.”

  “Have you talked to anyone?”

  “I met a few young novelists.”

  “See, I said you could do it.” Ava accepted the congratulations with some shame. “I’ve found the really important editors, come on.” There was a glow in Stephanie’s eyes.

  At the rear of the room, a group of men a decade or two older than the rest of the guests clustered together. It was less crowded here, airier. Success encircled and isolated them from the rest of the party like a cool breeze, an invisible moat across which sweaty aspirants cast longing glances. Stephanie sailed into the breach, pulling Ava along, and introduced herself to a man just going gray, in a wilted blazer. An annoyed ripple at Stephanie’s audacity started behind them and made the back of Ava’s neck feel even hotter.

  Stephanie, with a disregard for preliminaries that Ava was starting to understand was widely accepted, started in bragging about their club. Accustomed to letting Stephanie take the lead in these situations, Ava looked down at the floor, admiring the distinguished editor’s shoes. Burnished leather oozed over the soles as if any original stiffness had long been worn away, Ava presumed, along the halls of Harvard. They were the kind of shoes that could stand behind a lectern or rest, crossed, on the guardrails of a jetty as the sun set over Nantucket with the same composure that was now pointed at Stephanie.