The Bette Davis Club

by Jane Lotter

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. The ride? Smoking? Mixing martinis in the back of a truck?

  My rear hurt from all the bouncing, I’d barely seen Finn, and I was beginning to wonder why I’d come. I answered her question as best I could. “Madness?” I said.

  “No, darling,” she said, slightly amused. “The truck. Don’t les Anglais have a word for it?”

  “Oh. It’s a lorry.”

  “Is it? I always thought it was a lolly.”

  “A lolly’s like a Popsicle,” I said. The truck lurched. I grabbed again at the side of it. “Lolly also means money, the same way Americans say dough.”

  “Merci,” she said. “I’m glad we cleared that up. I have a feeling, Margo, you and I may be good at explaining things to each other.”

  I smiled. I liked Dottie. She was two or three years older than my half sister, Charlotte, but not at all like her. She offered me a cigarette, and I took it.

  I had pictured the Meadowlands as a kind of paradise. Sounds that way, doesn’t it? Meadowlands. Sounds like you’re going on a picnic with Alice and the White Rabbit. I imagined dairy cows. I imagined little lambs springing through the greenery.

  But when we got there, it was nothing like that. The part of it that I saw, at any rate, was a mess—a rubbish heap in the middle of a swamp, so jumbled it was impossible to tell where the garbage ended and the marshlands began. And all around was the sickly sweet smell of wet earth, rubbish, and rot.

  The truck came to a halt. Dottie pulled a strainer from out of that same black case and began pouring martinis into tin mugs.

  “Forgive the glassware,” she said, handing me a mug. “Olive?”

  Finn and the other two men came round to the back of the truck. Dottie gave each of them a gin-filled mug. Apparently, this was breakfast in the world of architectural salvage.

  After the men finished their drinks, they conferred among themselves. Then Finn declared, “We’re going to have a look around.”

  Before I could even register what was happening, the three males struck out across the landfill. “You girls stay with the truck, would you?” Finn called back.

  Oh, this was too much! Watching Finn tramp off, I felt a complete fool. There was no way this could be considered a first date. How could I have deceived myself into thinking this was a date?

  I gulped down my martini.

  Angrily, with no purpose in mind, I clambered out of the truck—and fell face-first into a puddle of ooze and muck.

  Dottie gazed at me from the truck. “We’re supposed to search for artifacts, Margo,” she said. “Not mate with them.”

  I was wearing my best blue jeans, a white blouse, and under my jeans, knee-length leather boots. The entire front of me was covered in mud. I scrambled to stand up, and my boot scraped against something hard. I looked by my feet and saw a large sparkling pinkish stone, buried in rubbish and sludge. Dottie saw it too.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “It’s what we came for, dearheart!” Her eyes were big. “It’s Pennsylvania Station! Part of it, anyway. That granite is unmistakable. Cost a lot of lolly in its day.”

  Finn and the other two men were already some ways off. We could see them walking along, jabbing with sticks at the mud and garbage.

  “Oh, this is rich!” Dottie said. “Little boys hunting for buried treasure. Won’t they be surprised when they see what the womenfolk have found?”

  She pulled on a pair of work gloves, then lifted two shovels from the truck bed and handed one to me. “Let’s uncover this ourselves,” she said. “Seulement nous—just us.”

  An hour later, we had exposed a large slab of rose granite. It appeared to be the ornamented top portion of a Roman-style column. It weighed, I’m sure, over two hundred pounds and was the size of a coffee table.

  “Regarde,” Dottie said, gesturing at the granite. “Look what we’ve done. Few activities are more gratifying than digging up the past.”

  I was dirty as a coal miner. Dottie had done her fair share of excavating but had somehow managed to stay considerably cleaner. She again reached into that black case of hers and produced a towel and a bottle of water. She offered these to me so I could attempt to wash up, but my efforts were futile. I remained filthy. Then Dottie pulled out a couple of sandwiches.

  We sat in the back of the truck, eating lunch and admiring the hunk of granite on the ground next to us. After a while, the men returned.

  “No luck,” Finn called. He was walking toward us. “Utter defeat.” He came round to the other side of the truck and stopped and stared at the relic we had uncovered.

  “Margo found it,” Dottie said.

  “Did you?” His eyes took in how dirty I was. “And it looks like you put up quite a fight to get it.” He bent down and ran his hands over the stone. “It’s splendid!”

  I didn’t say anything. For the first time that day, Finn was paying attention to me, and I was flattered. But I was also frustrated and unhappy, disappointed at how the morning had gone.

  Finn looked from the granite to me, studying my face. “You’re as silent as this capital,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Random thoughts.”

  He smiled. “Those are my favorite kind.”

  “Then you should meet my uncle Otto,” Dottie said. “Those are the only thoughts he ever has.”

  The men loaded the granite into the truck, and we headed back to Manhattan. We dropped Dottie at her flat in the Village. After that, Finn drove to my street, East Ninth, and parked. Alec and Sam waited in the truck while Finn helped me climb out from the back and onto the sidewalk.

  We had just begun walking in the direction of my apartment building when Finn halted. Without a word, he touched my arm and maneuvered himself round to my other side, the side closest to the street. I looked at him.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “My grandfather taught me when a man and woman are out together, the man walks next to the gutter. That tradition probably goes back a hundred years—you know, protecting females from the mud and horses. I must be the last man in New York who still does it. I suppose it’s stupid.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.” It was adorable, and it made me like him all the more.

  We came to my building. Finn held the street door for me. I stepped inside the vestibule and turned to say good-bye.

  Finn was half leaning on the outer door. His eyes were shining. “Would you like to have coffee sometime?” he said.

  I couldn’t read him. Was this the offer of a date? Was he asking me out?

  “You mean,” I said, “the two of us? Or would other people be there?”

  He laughed. “I thought we two. But bring a friend if you’d like.”

  “No, no,” I said, feeling my heart quicken and my face turn red. “The two of us would be fine.”

  One afternoon a few days later, we met at a café in Greenwich Village. Finn got there before me. When I entered the place and went over to him, he stood and smiled. He took my jacket, held my chair. I sat down. A waitress took our order.

  Finn was an excellent conversationalist. He was brilliant and funny and warm, and that day he talked about everything from Shakespeare to politics to old movies. He told me stories about the history of Manhattan. He quoted poetry. But he was also not a boor; he never monopolized the conversation. He asked me questions about my friends, my life. How was it I had come to live in New York?

  I told him the story of my childhood. When I did that, Finn’s face showed such sympathy, I thought I might cry. For the first time in years, someone saw me. I felt whole.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s a long time for you to be so much on your own. So isolated. It’s not easy being an outsider.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.” I looked at my hands.

  Finn leaned forward. “But now you’re in charge of your life,” he said encouragingly. “What will you do? Do you intend to go on modeling?”

  I said I
didn’t know.

  “You should go back to school,” Finn said. He spread his arms, as though embracing the whole wide world on my behalf. “Get your degree. You’re bright. You could study history—or architecture!”

  We visited for over two hours. When finally we stood to say good-bye, Finn hesitated. Once again, I thought he was going to ask me out. But all he said was, “I haven’t enjoyed myself this much, just sitting and talking with someone, in quite a while. Shall we get together like this again? Soon?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”

  “So would I.” He put a hand to his chest. “Ab imo pectore,” he said in Latin. Meaning, “From the bottom of my heart.”

  And so began our association. Before long, Finn and I were meeting at that same café three, sometimes four, times a week. Our relationship, our friendship—whatever you want to call it—was this endless string of coffee dates.

  I never did go to college, couldn’t afford it. But knowing Finn was, in itself, an education. He was a fascinating, remarkable man. Because of the things I learned from him, the books he recommended, the lectures he insisted I attend, my world grew larger. He was my friend, but also my tutor.

  I loved meeting Finn for coffee. I enjoyed his intelligence, his wit, his fine voice. I loved just looking at him, for God’s sake. But he didn’t ask me out. Not on a proper date, anyway. Not to dinner or the theater or the movies.

  Of course, I knew why that was. No one had to tell me. It was because I was too young for him. Not just in years, though that was part of it, but I was also wide-eyed and inexperienced. I wasn’t as brainy as Finn or as well educated. I was pretty enough, but I wasn’t worldly the way, say, Dottie was worldly. I had little knowledge of grown-up living. And despite my English accent, no one who got to know me would ever think I was cosmopolitan.

  Even though Finn was kind to me, even though he always picked up the check, held my chair, complimented my appearance, I knew he’d be embarrassed to be seen with me. Embarrassed to present me, a naïve young girl, to his older, more sophisticated friends.

  One evening, I was out with a girlfriend and Finn passed us in the street, walking with a friend of his own. Finn nodded hello, but that was all. He didn’t stop to introduce his companion or to ask how I was. And I knew without a doubt it was because my friend and I looked so juvenile.

  Occasionally, Finn and I would skip coffee. We’d go for a walk in the park or visit a museum or gallery. But most of the time, we met at our same small café in the Village. And actually, I was the one who drank coffee. Finn always ordered tea. Then one day, I realized three things that shocked me down to my knee-length leather boots:

  I was living for those coffee dates.

  I looked forward to each one as if it were a holiday.

  I was falling in love with Finn Coyle.

  Okay, yes, I enjoyed learning about architecture, history, philosophy. I would have liked talking about those subjects with anyone. It was around this time that Dottie opened her first shop, and I started spending time with her, becoming close friends. In her company, I absorbed a smattering of knowledge about Art Deco.

  But Finn was like no one else. He could be funny, teasing, informative all at once. I was discovering that smart, engaged dialogue with a man is extremely erotic. Cleverness is an aphrodisiac.

  Which is why I found myself wanting to learn more about Finn, about him as a person. For instance, I wondered why he always wore a particular ring. It was a gold band set with a blue sapphire.

  “My ring?” Finn said. We were sitting at our usual table at the café. Finn twisted the ring round his finger. “It was my grandfather’s.”

  “But you wear it on the third finger of your left hand,” I said. For some reason, I jumped on that piece of evidence. “Like a wedding ring.”

  Even as I said the words “wedding ring,” a terrible thought came to me: Finn was married. That was why he wore the ring. That was why he didn’t ask me out. He wore the truth on his hand, and I was too blind to see it! He’d been stringing me along for months, and all this time he was a married man.

  “In America,” I persisted, “that finger is usually reserved for a wedding band.”

  “Is it?” He gave a wry laugh. “I don’t suppose I pay much attention to things like that.”

  Pay attention to what? To what things did he not pay attention? I panicked. I asked him point-blank if he was married.

  He stiffened. “I assure you, I am not. Although I came close once when I was young . . .” He shook his head, and let the subject drop.

  I wondered about the woman Finn had nearly married when he was young. Was he still in love with her?

  It became increasingly apparent that Finn enjoyed talking, but—unlike most people—he did not enjoy talking about himself.

  One afternoon, in a roundabout way, I tried speaking with Dottie about Finn. We were in her shop, the first she’d ever had. I was helping her unpack a crate of French antiques. She was only half listening to my story of a man I was seeing. A man I couldn’t quite figure out. I didn’t tell her it was Finn.

  Dottie reached into the crate and plucked out a bronze statuette of a male nude. “Hello, sailor,” she said. “New in town?”

  I felt lost, helpless. Dottie was busy and distracted. Did she have nothing to say to me, no advice?

  She brushed off some packing material that clung to the statuette. “So this gentleman you’re seeing is an enigma?” she finally said. “Un mystère? Of course, when we don’t know someone, we tend to make up stories about them. Stories that may or may not prove accurate.”

  At last she’d said something that rang true with me, though I could not have told you why. “I suppose when you think about it, everyone’s life is a mystery,” she said. “Because every human being is mysterious.”

  She placed the nude on the counter and patted its behind.

  Then one night, around ten, the phone rang at my flat. It was Finn. He was at the corner, calling from a phone booth, wondering if he might come up. The tenement I lived in was ancient, built in the 1880s. There was a lock on the street door, but no way to buzz in visitors. I practically slid down the wobbly wood and metal bannister to meet Finn at the entrance to my building. But when I found him there, I got a surprise.

  Finn was drunk.

  “I have been out with friends,” he said, in that overly formal tone drunks use when they’re trying to appear sober. “And I was walking by and said to myself, Isn’t this where Margo lives? Young Margo of the smiling face and the offers of a cup of English tea. And so I called you on the pay telephone, and now, as you can see, here I am.”

  He bowed. “And if I have disrupted your evening in any way, if I have chosen an inconvenient time to visit, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Which, as I learned long ago from the nuns at St. Verbian’s, means roughly, “My fault to the max.”

  Finn had not been to my apartment house since that day, months earlier, when we all drove out to the Meadowlands. Even then, he’d seen only the exterior of the building. He’d never been inside. But many times during our many coffee dates, I assured him he could drop by any time. In fact, I encouraged him to do so. More than once, I’d pressed my phone number on him and reminded him of my street address. But now that he was here, I couldn’t believe it. Finn Coyle, drunk or sober, come to see me?

  I was thrilled. I was flattered. I was bewildered.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said. He was rather unsteady from the drink. “But I’m on the fifth floor, and there’s no elevator. Do you think you can make it?”

  At the top of the stairs, Finn caught his breath. I swung wide the door to my flat. I wish I could tell you that my place, the first I’d ever had of my own, was tastefully decorated. But it was not. It was gaudy with cheap travel posters, shiny green plants in pots, oversize East Indian pillows.

  Finn walked in and looked around. Seeing the place through his eyes, I was appalled at how schoolgirlish it was. I’d never been to Finn’
s loft in Tribeca, but somehow I knew it wouldn’t have a beanbag chair. I shepherded him from room to room on what I called the Grand Tour: the tenement-style kitchen (with the lift-up metal countertop and well-worn bathtub underneath), the living room, and then back through the kitchen to the water closet, and over to the tiny bedroom with no window, just an air shaft.

  It was in the cramped and crummy bedroom that something extraordinary happened. Something I’d long dreamed of, but which at the time seemed to come out of nowhere. Finn kissed me.

  It wasn’t like the kiss on the cheek he’d given me that first night we met at Tommy’s birthday party. No, this was the real thing, smack on the lips. As kisses go, it was impulsive, even clumsy.

  And then, just like that, we made love. It was not, I admit, terribly satisfying, but I wasn’t worried. That could get better, I knew. Afterward, we lay in bed and Finn kissed the top of my head and whispered that he was sorry. I assumed he meant because he’d been drinking.

  He stayed the night, and I cuddled up to him. He was clean and warm and smelled lovely, if a bit boozy. Before I fell asleep, I thought, This is it, Margo. This is the beginning of being with Finn. This is the happiest night of your young life.

  In the morning, we went for breakfast. Later, when we parted, Finn kissed me, told me he’d had a splendid time, wanted to see me again soon. He’d call.

  But he didn’t. Not for three whole weeks.

  Then one Saturday, around noon, the phone rang. It was Finn. He spoke as if nothing had ever happened between us. He went on about his shop, the latest show at the Met, and had I read the new biography of Stanford White. Finally, he asked if I were free and could I meet him right then, that day. For coffee.

  By this point, I was sure I was going mad. Nevertheless, I agreed to come.

  It was mid-December. It had been raining for days, but that morning the clouds broke and the sun came out. The air was crisp and cold. I threw on my long wool coat and favorite scarf and walked the fifteen blocks to the café. All the way there, I considered what I would say to Finn, how I would tell him that after today I didn’t want to see him again. Ever.