All for a Story

by Allison Pittman

  Aimee

  And so went any thought he might have of returning. The amount written on the check would make a hefty down payment on a new automobile or purchase a used one outright. Given the orchestrations of streetcars, cabs, buses, and shoe leather, such a purchase was seeming more and more attractive.

  He wandered into the tiny kitchen, opened a can of soup, dumped it in a copper-bottomed pot, and stacked a small plate with slices of bread and cheese. A ring of blue gas flames leapt to life at the touch of a match and would have the soup bubbly and warm by the time the sky grew completely dark. In the meantime, he bit into a slice of bread, chewing thoughtfully, realizing that Sister Aimee’s letter had nothing to do with closing off a path back to California. That decision was made the minute he sat in a church next to Monica Bisbaine. Or maybe the minute he sat down to corned-beef sandwiches with her after his uncle’s funeral. Either way, at this moment she was integral to any decision he might make. He wanted to stay in Washington because she lived in Washington. He wanted to keep Capitol Chatter alive so she would have a place of employment. A place for her voice. And if that meant a place next to him, all the better.

  The clock on the wall read quarter to six, still office hours in Los Angeles. After lowering the flame underneath his soup, he went into the living room, stuffed the last of the bread slice into his mouth, and tried valiantly to speak around it when the long-distance operator came on the line.

  “Los Angeles,” he choked, then gave the number of his former office.

  “Mr. Moore!” Ida’s voice held all the warmth of the West Coast. He would miss her more than anybody. “How marvelous to hear from you.”

  “Good to hear you as well,” he said, though he was already anxious to sever the final tie. “Ida, I’m calling about that final piece of business you offered to handle for me.”

  “Oh no. I don’t like the sound of that. Final business.”

  He glossed over her statement. “I settled up with my landlord before I left, but my books are still there. Are you still willing to pack them up and ship them to me?”

  “Of course, Mr. Moore,” Ida said, her voice now bustling with business.

  “See if you can send them with a promise of cash on delivery.”

  “Nonsense. I’ll charge the shipping to Mrs. McPherson. It’s the least she can do.”

  That was Ida, always his greatest champion. Another responsibility he would have to assume. He gave her the address and asked her to repeat it back to him, and with a final expression of gratitude, wished her well.

  He returned the phone’s earpiece to its cradle and went back into the kitchen to find his soup nicely thickened and steaming. With a towel wrapped around the pot handle, he poured it into a bowl and moved to the table.

  It was far from the first meal he’d eaten alone, but this evening the empty chair loomed cavernous across from him. He bowed his head in the habit of asking the Lord’s blessing on his food, but the tomato-laced steam carried with it the image of Monica’s face in the light of stained glass. The weight of her head on his shoulder.

  “I think I might love her, Lord,” he said aloud, but he dared not ask for wisdom. Or guidance. Or any direction that might take her away. Instead, he asked that God would bless her meal too. Whatever—and begrudgingly, with whomever—that might be.

  Don’t fall for the slick, dandified cake eater—the unpolished gold of a real man is worth more than the gloss of a lounge lizard.

  ANTI-FLIRT CLUB RULE #8

  SHE SPENT THE NEXT DAY—all day—in bed, cocooned in a flannel gown and quilted robe, snuggled under a thick, voluminous comforter. Only the call of the coffeepot and the subsequent call of the lavatory enticed her out into the chill of her room. Otherwise, she sipped the black beverage and nibbled from a bag of pastries and imagined herself as one of a group of gracious women sharing a house in sunny Italy. At times she let the book fall open against her and stared out the window at the mass of leafless branches grown close against it.

  What if she’d stayed true to her mother’s wishes? Maybe if she’d played the good girl, met all the right boys, and behaved in all the right ways, she’d be married—or at least engaged—to a man who could provide some nice, comfortable life for her to grow old in. But she’d left that path long ago, and despite Max Moore’s attempt to elevate her virtue, the previous day’s visit made it clear she wouldn’t be returning to it anytime soon.

  Charlotte Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot may be fictitious characters in a novel, but they clearly showed marriage to be a trap—a long, tedious road leading to nothing but shared emptiness. A life lived alone while chained to another. What possible benefit could there be in that?

  Unless, of course, it meant having somebody lying right next to you. Somebody who’d read the same story, who might have a different opinion, but who would have a brain to talk about it.

  She’d marked her place in the book with the folded copy of Alice Reighly’s rules for the Anti-Flirt Club. All that talk of “the one.” Like a wink and a smile in one direction would build up a wall against the other.

  What a load of crackers. Life wasn’t one long hallway with the right guy waiting at the end of it. More like a maze—something from those great English gardens—with a new guy surprising you around each corner. A few dead ends, maybe, but always another one waiting.

  But the next one, she promised herself, wouldn’t be married. Not that Charlie would have been that much of a prize anyway, but she’d still wasted a lot of time on a man only to hand him back to his wife. No guy was ever a guarantee, but a married one? That was just like walking in circles, chained to a tree. Best to let the Mrs. Charlies of the world wait at home with all the inanity and ennui that drives a woman to rent a villa for the spring. Monica would take her chances facing this spring alone.

  Well, maybe not completely alone, as the view from her window took on new life with the arrival of a gray tabby cat who immediately began scratching at it with his enormous six-toed paws.

  “Paolo!”

  His return was an early sign of spring, and she leapt out of bed to open her window to his demands. He was thin, as he always was this time of year, and felt like nothing but bones as she lifted him over the sill. She cradled him in one arm while shutting the window with the other. The Graysons would never allow her to keep Paolo as a permanent pet, and she scarcely saw herself fit for that kind of responsibility. Like every other man in her life, this one showed up, loved her for a time, and went away. The difference being, of course, that Paolo always came back.

  Monica nuzzled her face in his furry neck and delighted in the resulting purr. “You’re early this year, buddy.”

  She set him on her bed and slipped downstairs to the kitchen, where she found enough milk in the bottom of the bottles waiting by the back door to make a nice little puddle in a saucer. Further rummaging through the icebox produced a hardened wedge of cheese and a fatty piece of ham—nothing that would be missed by the other tenants. She tore the treats into cat-bite-size pieces and mixed them with the milk, carrying the dish upstairs quietly, but quickly, to avoid any confrontation with her housemates. Back in her room, she set the meal on the floor and herself right next to it, urging Paolo to come down from where he’d curled up on the end of her bed.

  “If I had an egg, you’d almost have an omelet.” She scratched behind his ears as he tentatively picked through the morsels. When he’d finished, his eyes half-closed with contented drowsiness, he jumped back onto the bed—this time with considerably more effort—and began to knead the comforter.

  “Poor thing.” She took a paw in her fingers and studied the deformity of having what looked like two paws fused into one. At first she’d thought it to be an accident of birth exclusive to her Paolo, but Mr. Davenport assured her that it was a documented, if rare, condition. Polydactyl, these cats were called. Hence the cat’s name, Paulie, changed over to Paolo in the quest for something more exotic. Not that a twenty-four-toed cat wasn’t exotic in hi
s own right.

  “That’s how I felt yesterday, you know? In that church? Like there was just something wrong with me. Like I didn’t fit. And now tonight? Going to this shindig again . . .”

  She didn’t belong in the Anti-Flirt Club, either. Not outside of the story. And Max’s note above her column still rankled: she didn’t represent the views of Capitol Chatter. Someplace else she didn’t quite fit.

  Monica went nose-to-nose with Paolo, filling her vision with nothing but his green sleepy eyes. “Maybe I should follow you. Go wherever you go when you’re not here. You might have a whole big gang of cats just like you. A clowder, isn’t it?”

  She climbed up into the bed and curled herself around him. Not that she didn’t have her own clowders. Dance clubs and juke joints and dark, smoky bars. Those were her people; there she fit right in. Blended perfectly. At least she used to.

  Tempting as it may have been to doze the afternoon away, she picked up her book, tucked her feet under the accommodating cat, and escaped to spring.

  The meeting was held in the same basement space, and even though it was her second time to attend, she approached with apprehension. A group of girls gathered at the top of the stairs leading to the basement. What they were saying in their huddled whispers wasn’t clear, but the hushed outrage couldn’t be ignored. Sure enough, one of the girls had a folded copy of Capitol Chatter, and Monica walked down the steps to the sound of her own words, surprised at how sinister they sounded.

  The atmosphere downstairs, too, was subdued—a far cry from the previous meeting. She went directly to the row of coats along the back wall and stood, her forehead buried in her sleeve.

  “So you’ve read it.” She knew it was Emma Sue not so much because she recognized the voice but because it came from so far above her. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  Monica looked up.

  “It’s just so mean-spirited. Makes Alice out to be an Elizabeth Cady Stanton trying to stamp out the modern girl.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad.”

  “It certainly is. Just hateful. And worse—” she looked around and lowered her voice—“it was written by one of us.”

  “You don’t know that. The whole city knows about this group. I learned about it from the newspaper.”

  “This wasn’t someone who knows about the group; it’s someone who knows the group. And Alice is just sick about it.”

  Monica busied herself taking off her coat and smoothing it over the hook before asking Emma Sue if there were any doughnuts like last time.

  “Yes,” she said, “and coffee.”

  “Good,” Monica said, “but I might have to skip the coffee. I’ve been drinking it all day. Explains why I’m so jumpy.”

  In fact, she skipped the doughnuts, too, though she offered no explanation for that. How could she explain that her throat was so swollen with truth and guilt, she’d never be able to choke down a single bite? Instead, she headed for the back row of chairs and took a seat on the aisle, in case she needed a quick getaway.

  As Alice Reighly took her place, the women followed suit, and once all had taken their seats, it was obvious this crowd was considerably smaller than that of the previous meeting. A tiny flicker of pride rose up through the quagmire of guilt. Women had read her column; they had changed their allegiance because of her words. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and she worked to keep her face straight. Wouldn’t do to be the only grin in the crowd of so many grumpy Grundies.

  “Good evening, ladies,” Alice said to the hushed room. “I do not think it is an exaggeration to say we have been dealt a traitorous blow. I have never been a regular reader of—” she paused to make a show of reading a folded issue of Capitol Chatter—“this piece known as Monkey Business. And I can rest assured that I have hardly been missing an opportunity to better my mind through substantive journalistic effort.”

  Soft laughter rippled through the room, Monica’s included, though her derisive snort was meant to defend her from the girls. Most of them wouldn’t know substantive journalism from a lovelorn romance.

  “To quote this ‘little Monkey,’” Alice continued, “we are nothing more than a bunch of women ready to ‘crawl back into the last century.’ I look at you lovely young ladies and cannot see anything further from the truth. You are all beautiful and modern, every bit as stylish as this writer claims to be.”

  Monica squirmed. Claims to be?

  Emma Sue nudged her and whispered, “Don’t worry. I think you’re very stylish.”

  “Thank you,” Monica said, not thinking to return the compliment.

  “Nobody wants to turn back the clock of womanhood less than I do. I relish our freedom, but I also see the responsibilities we have to each other. Our days as chattel are over, if only the rogue on the street would remember that fact.”

  Cheers erupted, with Monica’s polite applause in their midst.

  “Do not fall prey to the hatred of men—or monkeys—who wish you to remain powerless. Just as alcohol robs you of your judgment, so does flirting rob you of your self-respect. I strongly suspect that is something this authoress lacks.”

  Monica sat stock-still as Alice’s words fell around her, striking her like embers flung from fire. She dared not close her eyes, lest she open them to find the basement meeting room transformed into a cathedral with the Virgin Mary in all her fresco glory lining the walls. So she fixed her gaze directly on the diminutive woman behind the podium and burned.

  “As most of you know, Monkey is the nom de plume chosen to protect the identity of this writer. She could very well be sitting among us this evening, as she was most certainly in attendance at a previous meeting. But I urge you not to seek her out, as I shall not. Let her stay and learn and grow. Nothing extinguishes the behavior of a flirt like being ignored. And I shall speak of this no more.”

  She made a show of folding the paper and dropping it into a rubbish bin clearly set on the stage for that purpose and lifted her voice to declare that they would now discuss more fruitful things.

  Next to the fuming Monica, Emma Sue sat with her long, thin arms folded across her chest, openly expressing the anger that seethed beneath Monica’s skin.

  “Some nerve,” Emma Sue hissed. “I’ll bet she’s ugly.”

  “Sshh.” Monica feigned interest in the speech while the guilt she’d felt as she walked in twisted into something more akin to shame. Alice regaled the audience with the account of the handsome photographer, calling him a grand test of their principles.

  “Not to mention that brother of yours,” Emma Sue whispered.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Monica said. “Mention him, that is.” Or even think about him, for that matter. Otherwise, it was just a matter of time before all the secrets were out.

  Whatever Alice Reighly said for the rest of her speech was drowned out by a rushing sound in Monica’s ears. She smiled when the others laughed, nodded along with the woman in front of her, and even unclenched her fists to participate in a smattering of applause. All the while, a single phrase hid in the crevices of her mind, whispering a haunting refrain.

  They hate me.

  As far as she knew, she’d never been hated before.

  On the first day they met, Max had commented that she was the girl everybody loved but nobody knew. Now she was living the opposite truth. And here she’d never cared much about being loved or hated. She wrote what she wanted to, regardless of the consequences. She lapped up the praise and let the criticisms roll off her back, always distanced from it all by the force of anonymity.

  She studied Alice Reighly. Meek, homely, soft-spoken Alice Reighly, able to stand under her own power, speaking her mind, championing her vision. She spoke her words. She lived her words in a way Monica never could—free of fear. Noble. This was not a woman suffering from a lack of self-respect.

  Of everything, that assessment took root in her very soul.

  What would that feel like? To stand up in the middle of this sea of women and
say, “It was me! I wrote it! Lighten up, ladies, it’s a joke!” Or maybe she should confront Alice privately, apologize for the snide tone if not the thesis. Perhaps Emma Sue beside her could be an experimental confidante; she could practice her confession in the guise of friendship.

  Max would be pleased. He’d distanced himself and all of Capitol Chatter from her words—no reason she couldn’t distance herself, too.

  “Monkey’s not real,” she’d say with a shrug. “Just a figment of my imagination. Sometimes she talks too much. I’ll keep her on a shorter leash next time.”

  Next time.

  She was expected to turn in another column after the weekend, a continuation of her experimental study, and here she sat, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but regret for most of what she’d written so far. Maybe not regret so much as chagrin, like seeing her words in a new light that banished her wit into shadow. Then it came clear. If Monica could not make amends at the risk of exposing Monkey, Monkey would just have to apologize for herself.

  Eyes closed, she tried to recall what Alice had said at the beginning of her speech. That she wanted the authoress to stay and learn and grow. She crossed her fingers and repeated the phrase three times.

  Stay and learn and grow.

  No reason next week’s column couldn’t open with a mea culpa.

  Once the meeting ended with great enthusiasm for the upcoming Anti-Flirting Week, Monica managed to squirm away, avoiding interaction with the other girls. She suppressed the paranoid assumption that they were avoiding her as she slipped into her coat and out the door before she could fall victim to any of their disgruntled barbs.

  Outside, she had the street to herself, and there the first tear sprang cold upon her cheek. She bit her lip, hoping to distract herself and stem those that would follow, but soon they were flowing faster than she could wipe them away. She doubled her pace to distance herself from any of the girls who might have followed.

  “Monica?”

  No! No! She quickened her pace yet again and turned a blind corner, not to get away from him but to lead him away from them.