The Stork Club Read online

  So much of which took place right here in this kitchen. The reminders are everywhere – starting with the very table where she and her children are now eating breakfast. It is, with its blue-and-purple legs, and its little evil eyes inlaid at the corners, the most tell-tale survivor of the Days of the Commune. Although if you take a close look at the rest of the kitchen, you can see other traces: the rust marks on the tiles where the older, larger, circa 1948 stove used to be, and that wall between the kitchen and what used to be Trey’s and his (then) girlfriend’s bedroom (and is now the den). This wall is white but you can see that it, too, was once blue-and-purple.

  And that collection of pinpricks fanning out from a virgin circle in the centre of the same wall – that is the legacy of the famous dartboard that played such an important part in the disintegration of the commune. Thinking about the episode now, Charlotte has a hard time understanding how eight highly educated people could have allowed things to get so crazy – how they could have allowed a man on mescaline – and not just a man, but a political science major, a political science major who had returned from an Alaskan hiking trip saying that mathematics was the Answer – how they could have allowed a man who was probably certifiable even when he wasn’t on mescaline put an apple on Trey’s (then) girlfriend’s head and line it up with the bull’s eye! When, in addition to everything else, he wasn’t even wearing his glasses! Charlotte can only conclude that Trey’s (then) girlfriend must have been doing mescaline herself.

  It is hard to believe that it could have happened here. How to describe the kitchen’s present incarnation in the language of the commune? Looking around her, at the children’s toys and drawings, at the earnest, well-meaning, unheeded and yellowing labels on the cabinets and flowerpots and household appliances, Charlotte decides they would have (snidely) dismissed it as a temple to early education. Except that it isn’t. No, not quite.

  Because it has never been done over, this kitchen. It has been touched up and added on to as necessary. The telephone answering machine is on top of the stereo is on top of the refrigerator. The speakers are on the counter propping up the cookbooks which are obscured from view of the juice squeezer, the Cuisinart, the yoghurt maker and the toaster oven. There are wires everywhere. The drying rack is piled high with upended pots. There is a trolley full of unfiled letters in front of the toy cabinet, which served briefly during the Last Days of the Commune, and without Charlotte’s prior knowledge or consent, as an arms cache, and was, in fact, the main reason why she began to have doubts about her (then) boyfriend, although in the end it was he who abandoned her for that waitress. Or to be fair, ex-waitress. Although to be honest, ultimate airhead. Charlotte doesn’t know how Rick of all people puts up with her, or how, for that matter, he can be content working in a bank. Rick, in a bank! Such an about turn! Charlotte cannot understand how he can pretend a whole section of his life never happened.

  And yet she wonders if he might be on to something. There is, after all, a lot to be said for the complete overhaul. Imagine being able to look at your geranium pots without remembering that they used to be for marijuana plants. To use a breadboard without recalling that it used to be for cutting coke. To go into the attic and not come across letters to her (then) boyfriend from the airhead waitress (long before she was officially an item), plus photographs of Trey and his then girlfriend naked and on acid, not to mention a collection of wax hands (from other, long forgotten acid trips), and a nargileh, and a list of demands from the Simbionese Liberation Army, and, last but not least, a very embarrassing pair of platform shoes that brought to mind Minnie Mouse … How tall would she have been with those on? Charlotte now asks herself. (Talk about a slave of fashion!)

  But there you are. And here she is, for better or for worse, feeding her kids breakfast at the same table where she made her first tabbouleh, read the opening pages of Fear of Flying, designed invitations to her last orgy. No wonder she feels overwhelmed!

  ‘Snap crackle pop SMASH,’ she hears her son saying. ‘Snap crackle pop SMASH …’

  ‘Do you have to do that, darling?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Patten.

  She is almost afraid to ask why. Perplexed by the eternal mystery that is the male psyche, she looks away from him and out the (unwashed) plate glass window at the (untended) garden. And asks herself, but what if it isn’t nature after all, but nurture? Had she weaned him wrong? Did she have two bad breasts? Had she perhaps overwhelmed him with erotic attention? There is a book she read recently (in the original French) (in conjunction with this paper she’s about to give – ‘Women and Language: the European Perspective’) about the Jocasta complex, which blamed just about everything on the mother (yet again!), but to be honest she did see bits of herself in the construct. And just to think of Jocasta now upsets her, and that is why she turns away from her own unknowable problems –

  To the crisis at 2238 Hyde.

  Poor Laura, she thinks. It is terrible, just terrible, that you have failed your bar exam. It is essential, absolutely essential, that your overbearing husband not be permitted to use this failure to his advantage.

  You, Laura, will do just about anything to avoid responsibility for your actions – a common syndrome in adult children of alcoholics.

  Charlotte is well read on this subject as she herself is the adult child of alcoholics. Trey is an adult child of alcoholics, too, and this is probably why she was initially attracted to him. Which is sad, although how can she regret any chain of events that resulted in two such adorable children? When she thinks of her friends who put off families and now cannot conceive …

  Although Charlotte thinks that you, Laura, are weak because you had children too early. If you had had a chance to use your law degree productively before you had children, it would have been OK. You would have developed some backbone. But because you went straight out of law school into motherhood, and I went straight out of law school into that practice – and what’s more, the wrong kind of practice for my temperament – of all the people to go into corporate bonds! – our paths diverged. Our relationship went off balance. I, Mike, was unable to understand the problems you, Laura, were facing at home, while you were unable to anticipate or handle my troubles at work. This left me free to overdevelop my worst character traits, one of which was a tendency towards delusions of grandeur.

  This idea that I was born to privileges instead of having to earn them. This anger I felt when things didn’t come my way just because I snapped my fingers. This desire to live like a gentleman – it is all very, very familiar to Charlotte because I bear an uncanny resemblance to this former boyfriend of hers, Rick. Like me, Rick had been the poor boy in a school full of rich kids. They had unbalanced him and given him false values. She thinks that this is my problem too. No money in the family, but growing up abroad in all those consulates and embassies, all those private schools in Italy and Switzerland. All those servants – it had given me a warped idea of my place in the world.

  Then there was my inability to call any one place in the world my home. This was Rick to a T (or, to be more accurate, Rick to a T before the waitress). I was a Drifter. This was why I felt so threatened now that my wife wanted to put down roots. A stronger woman would have anticipated these negative feelings and incorporated them into something constructive, but you had not been able to do this because you had this impossibly idealized view of me as a father figure.

  Hard to believe that anyone could mistake me, Mike, for a father figure. Which is not to say she didn’t like me or find me attractive. After all, she had a soft spot for bad boys. (That was why she was more tolerant of me than, say, Becky or Ophelia.) But! I was so difficult! So hard to control! Always out prowling! … no wonder you, Laura, had not had the chance to grow. You hadn’t had the time!

  All this was stood to change once your law career was back on track. This terrible setback was not the end of the world. Charlotte would be there to make sure you kept sight of your longterm goals. She would be standing on th
e sidelines, supportive, ever tactful, holding back any comments, any advice that didn’t refer back to the principle of equality within difference.

  Which is Charlotte’s working goal. The key word being (for lack of a better term) androgyny. Although that is a long way off. What we have to seek in our everyday lives, she says to herself as she darts about the kitchen adjusting picture frames, is balance. As she is always saying to her students, the future is male and female.

  She looks at the clock. It is twenty to nine: the time you are due to come pick up the children. Thank God you are a few minutes late! She gets out the cookies she was up half the night baking for the school bake-sale, puts them next to the door so she won’t forget them. Then she looks at the nursery-school calendar to see if there is anything she has forgotten. There is! Oh no! Tuesday is T-shirt day! She runs upstairs to retrieve her son’s T-shirt from his chest of drawers. Having established that it’s not there, she runs down to the kitchen again and opens the dryer, only to find the T-shirt is still wet!

  Why can’t Trey ever remember to check the cycle when it’s over? And what was he thinking, anyway? The machine is stuffed – he must have squeezed two loads in here! She takes all the other wet clothes out of the dryer, throws the wet Creative Learning Centre T-shirt back in, puts the machine on high, and then rushes over to the counter where the lunchboxes should be, except that they’re not there. They’re on the floor with the leftovers of yesterday’s lunch still in them.

  Another count against Trey! she tells herself, as she rushes to clean them out. She reads, with passing annoyance, the note her son’s teacher has inserted into his lunchbox. ‘Dear Mommy, Help! I know peanut butter and honey sandwiches are healthy, but can’t I have something else tomorrow? I need variety! Please find enclosed a list of other nutritious foods that have proven popular with my classmates.’ Etc. Etc. It is, of course, in the teacher’s handwriting. God, she hates that school sometimes. If it weren’t such a superlative programme educationally speaking … She goes over to the refrigerator to get the sandwiches Trey is supposed to have made the night before while she was teaching class, and surprise, surprise, they’re not there!

  Now she is getting angry. As she slaps together two peanut butter and honey sandwiches on stale, no, worse, rock-hard, bread, she hears you pulling into the driveway. As she retrieves two box drinks – without their straws, but fuck it – from the refrigerator, she hears you honk the horn. She picks up the first two apples she can get her hands on. As she is washing their bruises, she hears you honk the horn again.

  ‘Kids! Coats!’ she yells. Then she remembers the T-shirt. It’s not dry yet, but so what. She is not going to risk any more demerits. ‘Take this,’ she tells Patten. ‘If you hang it on your hook it’ll dry by lunchtime.’ She pushes both children towards the door at just the same time as you ring the bell.

  ‘Here, take them. Take them,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry for holding you up.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ you say. ‘I’m not in a rush.’

  This is when she notices you’re looking happy. How strange! This can’t mean you don’t care about the bar results any more, can it? This couldn’t mean … she walks down the driveway, phrasing her questions step by step.

  Just as she reaches the car, her son says, ‘Mom! We forgot Hamlet!’

  Oh God! Hamlet! She should have taken him back yesterday, and last night she didn’t even check to see if Trey had remembered to feed him! She goes back inside to find the canary’s cage lying open and on its side in the den. ‘This is the fucking limit. What is with this guy?’

  5

  What is with this guy is that he is a failure. Or is that just what he tells himself? Look at him as he lies on the floor in his long grey box room of an attic office. His long blue eyes are watery slits. His square WASP jaw looks wired shut. His shoulders are hunched; his turned-in toes make him look smaller than he really is – and this has always been his problem. This is the price he has had to pay for growing up in a family that was larger than life.

  Imagine what it must have been like for him when he was a boy, with his B-movie father, his Queen of Santa Barbara stepmother, his sister careening in and out of screen magazines with her succession of legendary car wrecks. Imagine poor Trey, normal leave-it-to-Beaver teenager, arms flapping, braces glistening, as he stands in the driveway, saying, ‘Listen, guys, you just can’t do this. Drunk driving is immoral.’ No wonder he gave up too soon. No wonder he hasn’t seen his father since his sister’s funeral. No wonder also that breaking ties with him was not enough.

  Because even his failures compare unfavourably to the disasters that made his family so famous. They ran through fortunes, staged ugly scenes at White House receptions, used Oscar ceremonies to further vendettas and shot rejecting lovers in the back. While this Trey we see lying on the office floor here – all he ever wanted was to be a regular guy with a house and a stationwagon and a steady job. And he can’t even do that.

  It is a good five years now since he left his beloved desk at the IRS and during this time he has (he counts the mediocre ways) failed as (1) a househusband, (2) an organizer of corporate wilderness expeditions, and (3) a cut-rate accountant. He is too honest, says Charlotte. He is also (permit me to interject) too literal-minded, too inaccurate, and too slow: it is thanks to him that Mitchell and I almost went under in 1983.

  A number of other friends – Charlotte’s friends, he himself doesn’t have any – used him, too, and took similar beatings with the taxman. All Trey’s major clients are gone now. The only ones who still use him are the ones who never pay. As he lies on his study floor, listening to his wife crash about the kitchen, yelling, ‘What is with this guy?’ he asks himself how long he has before she serves his balls with nachos and turns him back into a househusband.

  He looks at the far wall – at the photo of the kitten he had when he was a freshman in college, at that kitten’s induction notice, at the dunning letter the kitten once received from The New York Times. He looks at his first baseball glove and his lucky frisbee hanging like mistletoe over the door. He looks at the poster from Citizen Kane on the near wall (‘Everybody’s Talking About It! It’s Terrific!’) and then he looks at his three-thousand-dollar computer.

  He has to get out of here! He picks up his shoes. Heart pounding, he creeps down the back stairs.

  He does it so quietly he can hear the mail dropping through the letter box. He pauses, shoes in hand. And then he thinks: Oh my God! What if the VISA bill arrived today? He has got to get to it before she does. He rushes for the door, but when he rounds the corner she is already standing there, taking the VISA bill out of its envelope.

  He backs into the kitchen. She follows him, never taking her eyes off the bill. From time to time her eyebrows lift. Then she looks up and says, ‘Sit down, Trey. It’s time we had a talk.’

  ‘I’m sure I can explain,’ he warbles.

  ‘Then do. Tell me why I can’t even trust you with a canary.’

  A canary? What canary? Then he sees Hamlet lying on the windowsill. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry. I didn’t…’

  ‘You can bury it with the kids this evening, but first I want you to get a new one. Take the carcass along to the store. If you can get an identical bird, the school need never know. In the meantime, tell me about this new piece of bodybuilding equipment I see you bought. Two hundred and nine dollars?’

  She proceeds to question him, in the same tone of voice, about the eighty-five-dollar Tower Records charge, the hundred-and-eleven-dollar LL Bean charge, the hundred-and-forty-eight-dollar home ski apparatus. With every pointed question, she gains in stature. The unspoken reproaches linger in the air and metamorphose. Why didn’t you check the clothes in the dryer becomes, Why is your dick so small. Why didn’t you give me the phone message becomes, Why can’t you make me come. Next time if you don’t clean out the lunchboxes I’m going to make you buy new ones out of your account becomes, Next time I see my friends I’m going to tell them you want to fuck you
r mother. Another wave of hysteria overtakes him. I didn’t do it! Honest!

  He goes into ultra defence mode. No answer using two words if one will do. Deny everything. Lie. And if that doesn’t work, deflect.

  ‘By the way …’ A lame effort, even he realizes.

  ‘Yes?’ Charlotte says in her teacher voice.

  ‘Yeah, did, um.’ He still doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Then, in a flash, he remembers The Crisis. ‘Did, um, Laura …’

  ‘Oh God, how could I forget? What time is it?’ Charlotte jumps to her feet. ‘Which of these clocks is correct, do you happen to know?’

  Charlotte picks up the phone, half dials Becky’s number, and then pauses. ‘Or does she go to Ophelia’s next on Tuesdays? I can’t remember. Let me check.’

  As she goes over to the bulletin board, she mutters, ‘This car-pool is so goddamn complicated. It’s getting to the point where we need to hire a traffic controller.’ She doesn’t seem to realize she is talking to the wall.

  She picks up the phone, dials what she thinks is Ophelia’s number, then realizes she has dialled Becky’s number by mistake. Starts all over again, dials what she thinks is Ophelia’s number, and gets the answering machine at a Japanese restaurant. Slams down the phone. Reaches out for the phone book, but it’s not there.

  Neither is Trey. Typical. She looks up at the ceiling, taps her foot and counts to ten and then dials information. Then remembers that Ophelia’s number is unlisted. Pours herself a cup of coffee, sits down, tries to concentrate. How can she forget a number she has been dialling three times a day for five years? She turns on the stereo for inspiration.

  6

  While she sits there, giving another run through to Blue Train –

  And while you make your way down Van Ness, with four children in the back seat all mouthing the words to ‘The Ewoks Join the Fight’ –