The Stork Club Read online

  I imagine the miniature Big Ben clock in the front hallway of the Mendoza home chiming the quarter hour. It makes a hollow echo: there is no clutter here to absorb the sound. You could be walking into an office. The signs on the doors to either side contribute to this false impression. ‘Dr Christopher Mendoza’ says one. ‘Dr Ophelia Mendoza’ says the other. If you glimpse inside, you’ll see identical heavy oak desks, as well as matching swivel chairs, answering machines, executive toys, and photographs framed in cushioned velvet of the same emaciated four-year-old boy.

  Neither desk contains any sign of work in progress. These are not rooms any sane person would want to sit in. This is partly to do with incongruous ‘human touches’ – the doll’s house, the umbrella stand in the shape of Chiquita banana lady, the collection of blue glass vases, the large oil paintings of autumnal forests and storms at sea in Ophelia’s office, and, in Kiki’s office, the tiger-throw rugs and the trophy heads of endangered species, all of which turn out, on closer inspection, to be fakes.

  In fact, there is only one display in the entire Filbert Street apartment that says anything revealing about our friends Kiki and Ophelia: this is the double frame on the corporate-type sideboard in the breakfast room. The photo on the left is of Kiki with his parents and his sisters and their husbands and children. It was taken in the studio of a chain department store in El Paso. You can tell from the parents’ stiffness that they are manual workers in their Sunday clothes, from the sisters’ frilly blouses, big hairstyles and sleek high-heels that they are the type of upwardly mobile Chicanas who hate ethnic politics and insist on calling themselves Mexican-Americans. Their husbands are all dressed in expensive suits, while Kiki is wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Reeboks. You can tell from his central position in the photograph that he is the family’s great hope, while the emaciated smiling boy in Oshkosh’s on his lap is the trophy he has brought home to bear witness to his progress in homogenized America. (Although the boy, it has to be said, looks a lot less American than his El Paso cousins.)

  The photo on the right is a far more stylish affair. It is of Ophelia on the eve of her ‘Fifteen’ and it bears the embossed gold stamp of a Havana studio that relocated to Miami in 1962. Ophelia, who is seated on a velvet stool, is wearing pearls and a canary evening gown. Her black hair is long and wavy and swept back in the manner of a forties actress to reveal the full charms of her long, slender neck. Her parents stand behind her. The elegant, slightly balding father is holding her hand and gazing at it admiringly. The mother, who has her blonde hair tied tightly back and is wearing a busy floral print that almost overpowers her garish emerald necklace, is smiling directly, and somewhat belligerently, into the camera. She has her hand on Ophelia’s shoulder. It almost seems as if she is trying to press Ophelia down: this serves to heighten the impression these two photographs give in tandem. Humble Kiki is on his way up in the world, while grand Ophelia is on her way down. The breakfast room where they both now sit, compressed into an uneasy equality, has the atmosphere of an elevator stuck between two floors.

  The real Kiki – the one at the breakfast table – is wearing sunglasses. They give him the bland look of a man who is trying to avoid the attention of muggers. The real Ophelia looks shorn and cranky. She is yawning, her short black hair is tousled. She is still wearing her stethoscope. She is shuffling through a pile of real-estate listings and eating a bowl of Alta-Dena yoghurt.

  Son Seb has a bowl of Alta-Dena yoghurt, too, but he’s not eating it, he’s dragging a spoon through it. From time to time he asks a question. What’s an echo? Is a strept culture the same thing as a drug culture? If you fill a bottle of milk and put some berries in it and put it into the freezer, will it taste like ice-cream? Do the missing children on the milk carton know each other? Do robots have brothers? Each time the answer is the same: Maybe, darling, but I’m not sure.

  He asks a more daring question: Can I have a spoon of chocolate syrup? When no one answers, he glances up over the counter that opens into the kitchen. His look is first hopeful, then distressed, because he can’t make eye contact with his grandmother, who is in the kitchen chopping vegetables while humming along to the easy-listening station. He can only see her torso.

  His father, meanwhile, is pretending to read the paper, except that Ophelia knows he can’t be, because he’s wearing his non-prescription sunglasses.

  His eyes are closed – she knows this because, when she waves her hand right in front of him, and then gives him the finger, she gets no reaction. But he’s not asleep, because when the phone rings he startles. It’s the office line. She asks, ‘Why isn’t the service picking this up?’

  ‘Picking what up, hon?’

  ‘This call.’

  ‘What call?’

  ‘Forget it.’ She picks up the phone and says, ‘This is a recorded message. The office is closed until 9 a.m. All patients requiring appointments should call after that time. Patients requiring emergency treatment should …’ Hearing the patient hang up, she finishes the sentence the unofficial way. ‘Should try and see if they can find an emergency room all by their little baby selves.’

  She replaces the receiver. The phone starts ringing again. She picks it up and begins to simulate the same recorded message, except that the patient hangs up after the first sentence. No sooner has she replaced the receiver when it starts to ring again.

  ‘This is ridiculous. I’m just going to turn the sound off. Mom?’ she shouts into the kitchen. ‘Could you turn the sound off?’

  ‘Sure thing!’ says Mom, and she picks up the phone in the kitchen. ‘Oh hello! Hello! Sure thing!’ She pokes her head into the breakfast room.

  ‘It’s for joo,’ she says, even though she’s perfectly capable of saying ‘you’ if she wants to.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ Ophelia tells her.

  And Mom says, ‘No, hon, honest. It really is for joo. It’s Tcharlotte.’

  Ophelia reaches behind her and takes the phone off the wall. ‘Charlotte, was that you just now?’

  Charlotte says yes.

  ‘Why were you using the office number?’

  Before Charlotte can explain, they are interrupted by the click on the line.

  ‘Could you hold?’ Charlotte asks Ophelia.

  ‘Sure,’ says Ophelia. ‘I’ll hold.’

  Ten seconds pass. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. ‘This is fun,’ she says. ‘This is really fun. Don’t you love call-waiting?’

  No reaction from any of the living persons in the room. She puts the receiver in front of her and talks to it as if it were Charlotte in the flesh. ‘Could you get your act together?’ When she puts the receiver back to her ear, Charlotte is on the line again, but only to say she has a suicidal student on her other line and will have to call back.

  Restoring the receiver to its home on the wall, Ophelia says, ‘That was typical.’ No reaction from Kiki. Or her mother, or even her own son, who is staring into his yoghurt bowl like it’s a crystal ball. ‘Kiki. Kiki. Look at me. I’m talking to you.’

  Kiki looks up, his vacant expression emphasized by the sunglasses.

  ‘I can’t believe it. You’re doing it again,’ says Ophelia. ‘It’s like Friday all over again.’

  ‘What happened on Friday?’ he asks.

  ‘The counselling.’

  ‘Oh right.’ He clears his throat. ‘So what did I just do that I did there?’

  ‘Went to sleep on me.’

  ‘But I’m awake!’

  ‘Oh really? You’re awake, are you? Then tell me what I was talking about.’

  A pause. ‘Counselling?’

  ‘Before that.’

  ‘Before that … before that you were … before that you were … oh God, Filly, I don’t know. You took a call from a patient even though you should have let the service handle it. Is that what you want me to say?’

  ‘Actually, it was Charlotte on that line.’

  ‘Well, great. Can I go back to my paper now?’


  ‘Sure. If that’s all you have to say then fine.’

  ‘Christ, Filly. What do you expect me to say?’

  ‘Something slightly more relational. You know, show some interest in the important experiences that make up my life.’

  ‘Oh right. OK then. Tell me, Filly. How is your dear friend Charlotte this morning?’

  ‘A mess. Like she always is.’

  ‘Oh really? I didn’t realize that.’

  ‘What is with you this morning?’

  ‘I’m just tired, is all.’

  ‘You’re tired. What about me? I mean, I was the one who was at the hospital all night. With your patient.’

  ‘She’s not my patient, Filly. She’s our patient.’

  ‘She’s an elderly primigravida.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like that term.’

  ‘I don’t like someone yawning in my face when I’m the one who’s been up all night either.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake, Filly, go to bed.’

  ‘I can’t. I have that conference.’

  ‘It can’t be as important as your health.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ says Ophelia. ‘It’s only about fertility.’

  ‘Honey …’

  ‘If it were about testosterone, on the other hand, it would be very important. Right? Or golf. Or the ethics of playing squash with neurosurgeons. Or the stockholders’ meeting at Coors. Right?’

  ‘Honey, I really didn’t…’

  From the kitchen, Mom calls out, ‘Calmate muchacha.’

  ‘I’m so sick of this whole thing, I really am.’

  ‘Then keep it to joorself, eh? We have had enough too.

  Here follows a staring match between Ophelia and her mother. Even when it breaks off, no one speaks. While an orchestral version of ‘Feelings’ plays on the easy-listening station, Ophelia tries to calm herself down by telling herself that this hellish living arrangement isn’t for ever.

  On the surface, things look great. As Charlotte says, every working woman needs a wife. Well, that’s what Mom has been all right.

  Just about all the women doctors Ophelia knows have had to cut way back to make time for their kids – go part-time, enter specialties that don’t put you on call every other night. Not so Ophelia. She puts in every bit as much time as Kiki. She has always been able to follow her interests, and look – she has the sex-education programme to show for it, and now the fertility programme. She can go off on conferences, accept speaking engagements … and if she has any doubt as to who made that possible, all she has to do is think about that first year when she tried to go it alone, and the hospital bed where she ended up, and the muscle-bound, bejewelled blonde who bailed her out.

  They would never have gotten through Seb’s early years without her. The thing is, the early years are over now. Seb is in school six hours a day. Time for Mom to think of herself a little, and less about them. Time for Mom to take herself and her blonde wigs into an apartment.

  Time for Ophelia to have a house of her own.

  Ophelia has strong ideas about this soon-to-become-a-reality dream house. They are all negative. Unlike this breakfast room her mother decorated for them without bothering to consult them, Ophelia’s kitchen will not have any cutesy-pie decorative plates with bas-relief kittens on them, or potholders with sentimental poems on them about hearths and helping hands, or dried flowers sticking out of pink and yellow horns of plenty, or china stewardesses, or ashtrays from the Madonna Inn. She wants wood tables and counters. No Formica like here. She wants the radio set – eternally – on the classical station. She wants it to self-destruct if anyone turns it to the easy-listening station. She wants cookbooks, so that they don’t have to eat rice and black beans every day of the year. And she wants blinds instead of these frilly curtains printed with rows of little Bo peeps and curds and whey. She doesn’t care if it’s extra work, because as soon as she has her kitchen done she’s going to get to work on the ground floor, which is where she’s going to put her new, super-efficient, flexitime clinic.

  The guiding principle of this new clinic is, again, a negative one: there will be no room for Kiki in it. This is going to be a clinic staffed entirely by women who have children. Instead of having to accommodate Kiki and his unilateral decisions and his obstructive action with regard to her sex-education programme, his lack of interest in her fertility clinic, his inability to take in any information she gives him about any patient even with regard to drug dosages, his refusal to see the importance of nutrition in a balanced preventative health programme – instead of having to spend all day attending to details he is too busy and important to attend to, only to find that, when they get home, Mom treats him like the breadwinner, and her like some upstart who talks too loud, well there’s no place for any of this junk in her new clinic. She and her hypothetical, like-minded, like-suffering, female colleagues are going to build a routine around their own needs, their own …

  The phone rings.

  ‘It’s for joo.’

  7

  Ophelia goes into the next room to take the call. God, just look at her, Kiki thinks. Forget feminine. This woman hardly even looks human any more, she looks like she’s running on batteries, she looks like she needs oiling, and a new set of ball bearings with a fuse box thrown in. What would that counsellor woman think of Ophelia if she saw her now?

  What he would really like to say to this counsellor is, Look. The problem isn’t that my wife and I don’t communicate enough. The problem is we are communicating all goddamn day.

  He imagines himself drawing the curtains, flicking the remote control, and taking the counsellor through a video demonstration of a typical day. Try this one for size, he imagines telling her:

  9 a.m. Film of Kiki backing the car out of the garage. Filly is sitting in the passenger seat. She says something like, I really think we should walk.

  He says something noncommittal, like, Maybe tomorrow. Then, all the way to the office, he has to listen to a blow by blow account of last night’s birth management. He does not give his opinion as any criticism would be construed as the S word.

  9.10. As he struggles with the office lock: I really think we should consider changing the lock. Weren’t you going to call someone on Friday? Why not?

  As she looks over the appointment book: That’s strange. Why is Mrs Hernandez coming in? Why does Mrs Caliban have a double appointment? And oh, I see you have Mrs Howard today too. Listen, if she tries to get any tranquillizers out of you …

  9.20. After they have both taken their first patients. He is working up the courage to tell a Mrs Karl that her unborn child might have spina bifida, when the door flies open. Could I speak to you alone?

  He steps out. What is it?

  I have a bad feeling about that baby.

  But I thought you said everything went A-OK.

  Maybe I should have insisted on an episiotomy.

  But I thought you were against episiotomies.

  YOU aren’t, though.

  So?

  So, I sense your disapproval.

  What is there to disapprove of, Filly? Look, when I do my rounds, I’ll check and see. OK?

  Sob. Thanks.

  10.05. As he is about to leave. He knocks on the door of Examination Room A. Just a minute.

  I have to run. Can I call you from the car?

  No. I want to speak to you in person.

  He steps into Examination Room A. Filly has a Mrs Let-her-go-nameless in stirrups. He exits quickly, waits outside.

  I can’t believe the way you think you can just barge in on me without asking.

  10.10. He heads for the hospital, where he spends twenty minutes on his own patients, twice that time with Mrs Dodd, who had no episiotomy but is about to have a nervous breakdown, with Mrs de Groot, who is in a coma in intensive care.

  12.00. Stops off and gets two sandwiches on his way back to the office.

  12.20. You can’t seem to buy a sandwich that doesn’t contain at least three ca
rcinogens.

  Eat it anyway, bitch. (He thinks but doesn’t say.)

  They sit together in his office. She keeps putting her Tab on his desk, leaving unsightly wet marks. She talks at length about the fertility programme. His mind wanders.

  So. What do you think?

  Think about what, hon?

  Why don’t you ever listen to me any more?

  No comment.

  We’re supposed to be running this programme together. But you really don’t care about it one iota. Cracked voice. If you would just come out and say it, I could accept it. But you continually say you WILL refer your patients. You continually say you WILL come to the seminars and conferences and read the books. But then do you?

  Oh Filly, stop exaggerating things.

  I can’t help it. I’m so tired.

  Why don’t you go home, then.

  No. Going home would be unprofessional.

  1.10. When they are back with their patients again: Could you come out here a.s.a.p.?

  He steps out. What is it this time?

  Why didn’t you tell me about Mrs de Groot?

  What was there to tell about her?

  She’s dead. She’s dead and I didn’t get a chance to alert her family. I let her down. Shuddering sobs.

  You can’t take everything so personally, Filly.

  She’s not a thing, for God’s sake. She’s a person. Why are all men so COLD about these things? Why don’t they CARE?

  1.25. Finally convinces Filly to go home.

  1.30. – 5.30. Breaks his back seeing his patients and her patients.

  6.00. Arrives home aching all over. Finds Filly watching TV. God. Could I use a Coors.

  Well, don’t expect ME to get it for you. Don’t expect ME to wait on the Master of the Universe hand and foot. Don’t expect ME to …

  A shadow falls across her face. The film in his head cuts off. To be replaced by the real Ophelia, standing with a telephone in her hand in the next room. Asking him, ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

  What if she knows?

  His sunglasses are about to slide off his face. He takes them off, wipes his nose with a Kleenex. ‘Are you trying to eavesdrop on me?’ she asks.