The Stork Club Read online

  THE STORK CLUB

  MAUREEN FREELY

  TO MATTHEW, EMMA, KIMBER, RACHEL, AND HELEN

  CONTENTS

  Sometimes

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  And

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  If

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  But

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Therefore

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  Always

  54

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Sometimes

  1

  Sometimes, when I am sitting at my desk and gazing out the window, and watching, as I am at this very moment, a new wave of fog engulf the sky, leaving me with nothing to look at but a suffocating white light, I think I hear a child crying behind a closed door – or you in the bedroom, laughing on the phone.

  And for a moment I think I still have a family. Then the truth comes back with all the stinging surprise of a slap across the face. I remember you are gone and what I did to make you go. And I tell myself this is my penance, to be left for dead in this tomb of an apartment, mocked by my own last wishes and condemned by my will.

  Everywhere I look, I see things the way I always wanted them. The toys are in their baskets, the shoes in pairs, the pens with their caps on, and without toothmarks. There is not a single monster face on the memo pad next to the phone. Even the bookshelves are perfect: no longer will you find the Aeneid standing between Dare to Discipline and 101 Decorating Ideas for Playrooms, or Children: The Challenge wedged in upside-down behind Remembrance of Things Past. Books are arranged first according to subject and then alphabetically, and when I look at them I ache as if it is my own heart I have violated, my own heart I have slashed, cubed and brutally rearranged alphabetically and according to subject along that shelf.

  There is no way to reverse the damage, no way either to breathe life and disorder back into the bulletin board, where messages and reminders obey the symmetry of an obituary page. Where are they now, the five-year-old birthday invitations, the three-year-old babysitting co-op lists, the extinct coupons for extinct toxic-shock-causing tampons, the introductory offers for brain-damage-linked soya formula, the frayed napkins with phone numbers on them but no names? Where are the paper-plate doilies, the warped brown-and-purple watercolours, the cancelled cheques decorated with flowers and stick figures, the castles with eyes for windows and fangs for gates? What grandiose notion compelled me to take them down?

  Did I really think they would improve my life, the things I have tacked up there instead – the cramped little lists of hospital-corner errands to run on Monday, the anal-compulsive bills to pay on Tuesday, the let’s-play-Monopoly telephone messages? Look on my work, ye Mighty, and despair.

  As I sit here in my tomb with nothing to look at but the sky and expensive furniture, and nothing to think about but the colossal wreck that is my life, I ask myself, what is the use of an education? Or rather, why did I learn so little from mine?

  When did I lose you?

  It is thirty-seven days now since I said goodbye to you in that garden, and still I don’t understand what was going on behind those eyes, still I am haunted by the smile you gave me before you turned your back on me, before you returned your attention to the roses. Were you happy that you were still able to hurt me? Laura – can you have any idea what it’s like to watch your own children run into the arms of another man?

  Most of the time I can convince myself that I have salvaged something. But then I’ll wake up and remember what’s beyond my reach, and in another man’s arms, for ever. That was the point I reached yesterday. I didn’t see the point in trying any more. I spent the afternoon playing games with the medicine cabinet, and lying on the couch taunting myself for not having enough courage to walk out on to the balcony and throw myself over. I had gone so far as to work it out mathematically. I knew I could do it in under four seconds, and maybe I would have if your friends hadn’t decided to check up on me – although I certainly was not happy to have them turn up like that. There is nothing more annoying than having to get up in the middle of a suicide fantasy to answer the door.

  The apartment, with its open bottle of Halcyon on the mantelpiece, its garbage bags filled with tax records and old correspondence, and its collection of wine bottles on the kitchen counter, spoke for itself. But they knew better than to allude to the obvious. They pretended it was a social visit. And so I did the same. As we sat at the dining-table sipping our Camparis, I calculated the time-difference, imagined you in your four-poster bed eating breakfast with that man who is pretending to be my children’s father, that man who is pretending to love you more than I do, but then the pain subsided, the vision died, and, when I looked in the direction of the kitchen, I could almost see you smiling at me from the doorway.

  A breeze was coming in from the balcony, playing on the back of my neck and rustling the leaves of the yucca tree.

  ‘It’s warm tonight, isn’t it?’ I remember Charlotte saying.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why I made us Camparis.’

  Ophelia said she didn’t see the connection, and so I explained to her that Camparis reminded me of summer.

  ‘But it is summer,’ she said.

  I had to spell it out. ‘I meant it reminded me of summer in the Aegean.’

  All three of them nodded, even though two of them had never been there. They all knew it was time to change the subject.

  Ophelia pointed at the old map I bought at that store you told me about on my last night in Athens. I had just gotten it back from the framers. ‘That’s new, isn’t it?’

  I said yes, in a manner of speaking.

  And Becky said, ‘What happened to the picture you used to have there?’ I told her that the wall had been bare for years, but she said, ‘Exactly. I mean the picture you had there before it went bare. That statue. What was its name again?’

  ‘The Diadoumenos,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’ She squinted as if trying to see it beyond the map. ‘Why don’t you put it back up again? It might cheer things up.’

  When I said that I couldn’t, because I had destroyed it years ago, they looked up at me as if they expected me to explain. I told them not even to ask. My voice came out sounding sharper than I had intended. After an uneasy silence, I apologized. ‘I’m not really in the mood for polite conversation.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Charlotte. ‘You just sit here then and relax while we fix dinner.’

  I told them I didn’t need dinner. I lied and said I was going out.

  ‘Too bad then,’ said Becky. ‘You’ll have to cancel. After all, how often is it these days that you can have all three of us at your service?’

  This was too close to the bone for me, but it made them laugh. As I watched them, I asked myself why, when I thought of them, they were always so grim and reprovi
ng, casting shadows that were larger than life.

  When here they were, so small and so cheerful. Their laughter, inappropriate as it was, made the apartment feel lived in. And so I decided not to fight it. As I settled into my armchair, I had occasion to think, yet again, what an oddly matched group they were. If it wasn’t for the fact that they had all had their first children at the same time, they would never have made friends.

  Or was I wrong? As they bustled around the apartment, gathering up the garbage bags and getting supper started in the kitchen, what I noticed most was how different all three of them were from me. And how easily, and mysteriously, they communicated.

  Their conversation was full of jumps I couldn’t account for, gaps I couldn’t fill. They seemed to be talking about a man one of them was involved with. He lived in Chicago, or was it Washington? He was married to a ballbreaker, or was it an airhead? He was longing to get away from her, except that he couldn’t, because of the children? Because he was afraid of change? Because he had a pretty good deal already and didn’t want to make sacrifices? Because, even though he was a nice person, the fact remained he was a man?

  Or was he two men? Or three? It was hard to tell. By the time they joined me in the living-room, they had moved on to subjects that they didn’t mind my overhearing. Charlotte had some damning gossip about her former head of department; Becky claimed that a bank manager had refused to give her a loan because she had failed to use the right male codewords; Ophelia had a new set of atrocity stories about a surgeon at the hospital whom she called, yes, you guessed it, the Missing Chromosome. Apparently he could not bear to operate in the same theatre with any female colleague who happened to be taller than he was. What was wrong with him? they wanted to know. I didn’t want to know, and so I was thousands of miles away when Becky pounced on me.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘What’s going on here?’

  She was standing right over me, so close that all I could see was a pocket on her Chinese brocade jacket.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘I’m talking about the garbage bags.’

  ‘What about them? Maybe I’m spring-cleaning,’ I said.

  And she said, ‘I’m also talking about the substance-abuse.’

  ‘I’ll drink what I want to drink,’ I shouted.

  To which she said, in a low and menacing voice, ‘That doesn’t explain the pills.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to explain the pills,’ I said. ‘And neither do I.’

  For a few moments, we glared at one another. Then she said, ‘Don’t do it, Mike.’

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ I said. I lit up a cigarette just to annoy her.

  Here Ophelia moved in. Doctor Ophelia. Leaning forward, she said, ‘Seriously.’

  ‘I’ll smoke if I want to,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s not the issue we’re concerned with at the moment,’ she said.

  ‘Seriously, Mike, my dear,’ echoed Charlotte. She leaned forward, took hold of my arm and pulled me towards her. ‘Seriously, darling. What’s the point?’

  I’m afraid I broke down here. They gathered around me to hold my hand, pat my back, squeeze my shoulders. I thought I was going to suffocate, but at the same time I couldn’t control myself. It all came out. I asked them, what reason was there for living if I had lost my family?

  And Charlotte said, ‘Listen, Mike. What makes you think you’re different from the rest of us? We’ve all lost our families if that’s how you want to look at it.’ And of course she was right.

  And – equally of course – you could write the script for the ultra-earnest conversation that followed. All the old history got dragged out, complete with their updated statements on what they had learned from our mistakes. Then came the advice.

  I defended myself as best I could, but they knew me too well, and so I was finally forced to agree with them: my life followed a repeating pattern because I had grown up in a dysfunctional family. When they went on to assure me that it was not too late to take charge of my life, all I could think was, God, if only it were.

  They forced a string of promises out of me. I would call them if I was upset. I would call them if I was lonely. I would come out for a movie, a meal, a cup of coffee, a run, a swim, a walk. I would not let this latest setback get me down. There was still hope. In the meantime I had to take steps to cure myself of codependency. They had even brought books to get me started.

  Ophelia’s last move was to take my Halcyon pills and throw them down the Disposall. I was glad when they left.

  I spent a long time on the balcony that night, one of the few this summer without fog. I watched planes come in for landings. I watched others take off and disappear. I watched the cars travel across the Bay Bridge, down Columbus, around Washington Square, up Telegraph Hill, down the Crooked Street. I watched the ferries disappear behind Coit Tower and then emerge on the other side. I watched the lights go on and off in the Pyramid Building. And I thought how smooth it all looked, this passage of ferries and planes and cars. How expected. How graceful and inevitable this changing of lights.

  And yet that cleaner of the ninth floor of the Pyramid Building probably didn’t know if she could live another day before the loan shark got to her. And the driver in the middle lane of the Bay Bridge probably had a heart condition, had a pain in his chest, did not know if he could make it as far as the exit for Treasure Island. The car inching its way up Union was being driven by a thief, by an illegal alien, by a fallen rock star on his way to the kind of humiliating gig where people talked through your songs, so what was the point, he was probably thinking, why even get upset that there wasn’t a single fucking parking space in all of North Beach, why not dump the car on a double yellow line (since he wasn’t going to be able to keep up the payments anyway) and split for Yelapa? And all the while he kept on moving at twenty-four miles per hour, while beyond his field of vision another ferry crossed behind Coit Tower on its way to Tiburon, steady, on course, sparkling with lights even though the woman who was probably standing at the rails was thinking of throwing herself into the bay because she had lost, again, and badly, in the futures market, because her last baby had left for college, because she was in love with her best friend’s wife. What should she do? Was it possible, at her age, to break away and start a new life?

  All these problems, all fresh starts, the world didn’t have room for them, because there were only so many roads and bridges and ferry routes, only so many lights. I remembered something you had said once, about the Herculean effort people put into being predictable. It was as true of us as it was of anyone. After all the contortions we had put ourselves through – what had we done? The same thing millions of other people had done, for the same reasons, with the same results. It made you wonder why we had bothered.

  But then I told myself, that wasn’t the whole story. That was when I remembered those other summer evenings I had spent on this balcony, had spent with you. When you were there, right there, in the shadows, when I could tell exactly where you were and what your expression was even though I couldn’t see you. When it was the two of us against the world, when we could still use our imaginations to escape the maze, when we knew how to make each other happy no matter how bad things were, when I could still convince myself, if the stars were bright enough, that I was married to a woman and not a committee.

  When you look back now – don’t you think it was a mistake to give your friends so much power over us?

  2

  Not that either of us had any idea what you were letting yourself in for. In the beginning, I could hardly tell them apart. All the women in that birth class looked the same to me, with their pert seminar smiles, their pastel overalls, their karate slippers and their basketball stomachs, their Barbie-goes-to-college hairstyles and their unconvincing Ken-doll husbands, with their sure-I-used-to-go-on-marches-but-shit-what-did-the-Cambodians-ever-do-for-me-I’ve-got-a-family-to-support-now smiles. If they took on separate identities as the weeks dra
gged on, it was not as Charlotte, Becky and Ophelia, but as Charlotte-and-Trey, Becky-and-Mitchell, Ophelia-and-Kiki.

  Ophelia-and-Kiki who were both-family-practitioners, who were going-to-be-lucky-enough-to-share-the-childcare-fifty-fifty, who were going to have the nursery in the office so that Ophelia could ‘totally’ breast-feed. I remember the importance she gave to the word ‘totally’. I remember laughing with you about it afterwards.

  Just as I remember laughing with you about Becky-and-Mitchell. Becky-and-Mitchell, who were three renovated houses away from the counterculture, and two haircuts away from the middle class. I remember Mitchell leaning forward and saying, ‘How many of you people are planning to confine your children inside the bars of a crib?’

  And I remember that before anyone could answer, Becky had added, ‘The real issue, of course, is the underlying concept of bedtime.’

  ‘Total bedtime,’ I remember saying. Everyone (except you) nodded eagerly. Just as everyone nodded when Charlotte-and-Trey presented their gameplan. I remember Charlotte tossing her famous golden tresses, slapping her husband in the face with them as usual and as usual not noticing, and saying, ‘We’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that my work is more important to my self-esteem than Trey’s work is to his. That’s why we’re going to try him out as primary caretaker.’ And then pausing, wondering why Trey has missed his cue (it was because he was still taking hair out of his mouth), and saying, with an edge to her voice, ‘Isn’t that so, Trey?’

  They all talked about the future as if it were a cabinet they had ordered from a master carpenter. Even I, in my ignorance, knew what a shock they were in for. But I did not want to be there to watch. I had nothing to learn from them, and I didn’t think you did either.

  I thought we were going to do things our way. And didn’t we, for a while? Didn’t I hold your hand for all thirteen hours of labour? Didn’t I draw you your focal point? Didn’t I remind you how to breathe when you forgot? Wasn’t I there telling you what a good job you were doing, when everyone, including the doctor, was shouting at you for not pushing hard enough? Didn’t I burst into tears when I found out it was a boy? Didn’t I make sure they gave you Jesse right away so you could put him on your breast? Didn’t I cry again when I got to hold him myself? Didn’t I take three weeks off work?