The Stork Club Page 5
He shrugs his shoulders.
She kicks the door closed with her foot.
Breathing normally again now, he returns to the sports page. And what do you know? There’s an article about his home baseball team – his very own team! It must be an omen. He shows the picture to his son. ‘You see that stadium? I used to go there with my dad when I was a kid.’ He is telling his son that the two of them should go down there one time (at this time of year, too, because that is when Texas is at its best) when Mom comes up to the table and interrupts him, to say that Seb has done a good job on his ‘breakfast for goats’ and now deserves to come into the kitchen for a ‘little treat’.
Why does she have to use those same words? He breaks out into a sweat. When she has taken Seb into the kitchen, when the knot in his stomach loosens, he tells himself, hey, buddy boy, quit while you’re ahead.
Crisis management, he tells himself. It’s what even Ophelia admits he’s best at. He has got to get his hands steady. He goes over to the window, takes a few deep breaths, and what do you know!
There she is. Wonderwoman. Coming out of her apartment across the street. As she turns around to lock her door, he watches with grateful pleasure as her long auburn hair sweeps across her perfect ass. He looks at his watch: 8.52. Right on target. Hey, babe! He tries to will her to look up at him, wills her to develop an urgent need for a family practitioner who will take care of everything for her. He is half done putting her through a mental striptease, half done imagining her lolling on his examination table, begging him, begging him to attend to her every need, when who should appear around the far corner but the Amazon from Number 54321! 54321 blastoff! Because she is wearing that see-through blouse again! He can see her nipples all the way from here! He can see them so well he can almost taste them. He is half-way through sending her a telepathic message to cross the street so he can poke his head out the window and bite them, when: who should appear walking in the opposite direction but the Ultimate Twelve Year Old! With her mother! And they both look like they need it! He imagines himself attending to their every need, both at the same time. He imagines the threesome becoming a foursome and a fivesome. He imagines them lying in adjoining waiting rooms, waiting for their turn, begging for it. For a few blissful seconds, four naked women writhe before his eyes, but then the film in his head goes off – clunk – when Mom appears behind him.
She puts her hand on his shoulder and gives him a proprietorial smile. He tries to look confident, unaffected. ‘Hey, little buddy,’ he says to his son. ‘What’s that chocolate on your face?’ Hey, big buddy, he says to himself, you are in deep, deep shit.
Which is why, when Kiki takes Seb out to you (with his bake-sale cookies, and his freshly pressed T-shirt, and his scrubbed and overloaded lunchbox, and his string of pathetic little pipsqueak questions that no one ever has the time to answer (‘Is it illegal for grown-ups to drink lemonade? Can children smoke in France?’), when Kiki looks up at the window to see Mom watching him, Mom remembering with obvious satisfaction the unthinkable, he decides to beat it.
He asks you, ‘Are you off to Becky’s next?’
As the Ewoks are just rejoining the fight, you can’t hear what he’s saying. You nod out of politeness and are taken aback when he jumps into the car.
From her place at the window, Mom looks surprised, too. She taps on the glass. ‘Tell her I have another breakfast meeting with Mitchell,’ Kiki snaps. Again, he has to shout to make himself heard over the Ewoks. ‘Tell her it’s about those investment possibilities.’ Again, you do as he asks.
Mom nods and closes the window.
‘Do you really?’ you ask Kiki as he pulls away from the kerb. ‘Have a breakfast meeting with Mitchell?’
‘More, or less,’ Kiki says. Then he tells you about the investment group he’s joined. Five neurosurgeons, two radiologists, one podiatrist, and himself. ‘We’ve been looking for up and coming ventures.’
‘Well, this might be the day,’ you say. ‘Because Mitchell is going to be looking for a new partner.’
Have I guessed right? Whatever you said, I’m sure you had no idea what you were giving away.
By now, Kiki has been gone for five minutes. Ophelia is still on the phone to Charlotte.
They have just come to the conclusion that everything, absolutely everything, boils down to economics. Which means that everyone, absolutely everyone, must have a solid economic base. They are going to have to make sure you know this. They arrange to visit you together in the late afternoon.
‘I’ll try to get Becky to come too,’ says Ophelia. Before she does, she glances into the breakfast room to find out why it’s so quiet. Mom explains that Kiki has gone to talk to Mitchell about making an investment.
‘But he can’t do that without consulting me. That’s our money, not just his! The fucking bastard, he’s just trying to block me on the house again!’
‘Foo shouldn’t talk like that about joor husband.’
‘Like hell I won’t.’
Ophelia picks up the phone.
8
Five blocks away, in Becky and Mitchell’s recently deshingled and repainted blue Victorian, eight telephones ring together but remain unanswered. Where is Becky? She must be in the kitchen, on the other side of that powder-blue door that matches the oriental runner carpet in the hallway. While Mitchell… I imagine that, if you went up the front stairs, if you let your eyes follow the powder-blue running silhouettes Becky has painted on the skirting boards … I imagine you would find Mitchell standing on the top landing in his shorts.
He looks tanned and fit but under-rested. His thick brown hair is tousled. His birdlike face shows signs of a headache, he winces with every ring of the phones, but he is wearing the pain the same way he wears everything – stylishly. ‘What the hell,’ he says as he walks back down the corridor. He appears to be looking for something, but it is not on the back of his bedroom door … or on the back of the first bathroom door … or on the back of the second bathroom door … When he finally tracks his bathrobe down in the closet in the baby’s room, he shouts out, ‘God damn it, Becky!’ Look at him as he walks back down the hallway. From the way that he smiles and shakes his head as he starts down the stairs, you would almost think he was back in his ad exec father’s place in Westchester County, drinking his first Sunday morning shot of vodka with his hungover mother on the lawn, watching Becky do some kind of trick-dive into the lima-bean-shaped swimming pool. God damn it, Becky! You spilled my drink! Tit for tat. Tit for tat. Man errs. Woman gets angry, looks cute, and retaliates. This is Mitchell’s mind-set. The moment of truth always comes the morning after.
Leave him on the landing, struggling with the antennae on the portable phone. Go through the powder-blue door to find Becky standing in the middle of the kitchen trying to get Baby Roo comfortable inside the African shawl and having the usual problem with that last knot around her waist.
She is looking far too alert for nine in the morning. Her shoulder-length hennaed brown hair swings back and forth like a sheet of silk. Her severely short bangs make her grey eyes look more feline, and her lips fuller – or is it the scarlet lipstick? She is wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt over purple leggings that make the most of her dancer’s legs – and match the purple in the African shawl, which is not quite like anything you’ve seen before – like everything else in this kitchen. The upside-down plaster feet that serve as shoe racks, the lazy susan flower boxes, the pieces of painted driftwood that serve as doorstops – they are all stridently unique. This is a room invented by a woman who has to prove over and over that she is smart and creative and discerning and sophisticated even though she didn’t go to college.
The phone is still ringing when she finishes with the shawl. She flicks on the intercom. It’s Ophelia. ‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’
‘Not really. I’ll have to call you back.’
‘OK,’ says Ophelia. ‘But in the meantime do me a favour and tell my asshole husband to call me.’
‘You mean he isn’t there?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘He’s supposed to be talking to Mitchell.’
‘Well, maybe he is.’
‘Could you check for me? It’s important.’
‘I can’t,’ says Becky. ‘We’re not communicating.’
‘Oh right.’
‘It would be easier if you just tried him yourself on the other number,’ Becky says.
But Becky is wrong. Mitchell is already on the other line. When Ophelia interrupts this call and asks, ‘Is my asshole husband there?’ he doesn’t miss a beat.
‘Hold on,’ he says, and returns to his first caller.
He is standing in what he hopes will not be the study for very much longer, talking to someone he hopes will soon become an investor in one of the many sidelines he hopes I, his long-suffering partner, won’t ever find out about. This one has to do with a share in a marina cum condo complex.
He has a towel wrapped around his middle, and he is leaning against another sideline, this one really but really on the back burner: a screenplay some ex-plumber cum carpenter friend of his wants him to read and, if you can believe it, market. There are other piles lined up along the wall for other sidelines, but there are no longer any chairs in this office, not even at the table where he had his in and out trays, which is now, mysteriously, the home for his wife’s sewing machine. Material for a child’s dress is lying on the floor over the proofs for his publicity material for the Hunter’s Point conversion. There is a child’s educational programme on the computer screen.
Meanwhile, here he is talking to this potential investor, trying to sound like he’s sitting in an executive suite – a challenge.
Easier, though, than confronting his wife about the chairs. Or anything. How many days has it been since he (quote unquote) condescended to her?
God, he hates that word. Whatever he does, that’s the word she throws back at him. And the irony is, he really does want to help her.
Take this most recent six-day war. All he had wanted to do was get her the backing she needed to start a legitimate children’s art centre.
Or, if we’re going to be totally honest about this: all he had wanted was to get her out of this downward spiral of misdirected philanthropy that had started with her father’s death. This Catholic relief organization she had become involved with – there was nothing wrong with it per se. But why she thought it was a way of working through her guilt – and why she felt any guilt in the first place – was beyond him.
How many times had he told her, it wasn’t her fault her father had died the way he did. It was admirable that she had wanted to reach out to other people with the same problem. But she ought to have known that she would have a hard time dealing with the realities of AIDS counselling when she was already overemotional on account of being pregnant with Baby Roo. Which was not to say she hadn’t acted like a trooper. Few people could have coped with a client who was supposed to die quietly after being taken off a respirator but instead sat up and screamed.
She ought to have taken time off then, at least for the duration of the pregnancy. But no, there was no taming Joan of Arc. Now she had to come to terms not just with her father’s secret life and public death but also the relative stranger on the respirator.
Why this meant she had to throw herself into raising funds for a relief organization that ran an El Salvadoran refugee camp on the Guatemalan border he didn’t quite know: the Catholic imagination was a closed book to him. Why it had to be the San Rafael branch was another mystery he dared not look into for fear of being branded a rockjaw WASP.
Once or twice he had tried to introduce the idea of analysis as a possible option. Had she ever barked at him. He had backed off. And surprise, surprise, she had run herself into the ground. He had hoped this would mean the end of the San Rafael connection, but no, unfortunately not. She had made her mark on these people. San Rafael had started coming to her. Her whole last trimester, the house was knee-deep in priests and nuns. The fact that they didn’t wear clerical habits didn’t make them any more palatable.
He had told himself not to jump to conclusions. They were here to help, not to convert. And so he had put up with these priests with bicycle clips on their pants making supper for him, these nuns with baby voices and hairy legs reading Guatemalan fairy-tales to his children. He was so busy overcompensating for his prejudices that he had actually been shocked when he discovered that they had, indeed, been putting pressure on Becky to ‘renew her faith’.
Fortunately he had kept his mouth (mostly) shut at this juncture, because, as it turned out, the problem took care of itself. When she tried out the neighbourhood church, the priest gave an anti-abortion sermon in which he cited as an example a pregnant woman who had been raped and stabbed in the stomach, but whose assailant could not be prosecuted because the victim, the unborn child, was not officially alive. Becky found this deeply offensive, and said so to the nuns. This led to a series of tearful evenings during which she had battled with her conscience while Mitchell had (mostly) avoided saying what he thought. This was: Get out of the Middle Ages and go work through your feelings about your dad with an analyst.
Then the baby was born, and because it was born on Becky’s father’s birthday, somehow the baby became the replacement for him even though it was a girl and swoosh! the mourning period was over. Suddenly she was her old self again and complaining about the demands San Rafael was making on her, and saying she needed to centre herself. That’s why he had come up with this idea of legitimizing this playgroup she was already doing for peanuts. He had even set up an interview for her at the bank. That was last… Wednesday?
He had taken the morning off so that he could hold the baby during the interview. He was annoyed when she insisted on taking the baby in with her, and livid when she informed him afterwards that the baby had thrown up all over the banker’s desk, because God, this guy was an important contact of his! Didn’t she understand anything about professionalism?
That was what he asked her on the drive home.
And that was when she said it to him: ‘Do you know how condescending that sounds?’
He hadn’t had time to explore this with her, because at about this point the car had started making noises. This was the Peugeot, i.e., her car, which, it emerged, she hadn’t had serviced for 15,000 miles. If it hadn’t been tense in the car already, he might have said something to her about her negligence, but he had decided, oh what the hell, she’s forgetful because Baby Roo is keeping her up all night, and so when they got back to the house he just went ahead and made a service appointment for Monday, only to find out that she was planning to go to San Rafael on Monday. And so he said well in that case he guessed she was going to have to wait until Tuesday, at which point she said that she was a grown woman and would therefore make that decision herself.
He had asked her if she realized that the car could break down at any minute and was she willing to take the consequences, and she had asked him, for the second time that day, if he knew how condescending that sounded.
He was still managing to keep his temper at this stage. Except then, when she asked for help in untying the ridiculous double sheet masquerading as an African shawl that she had Baby Roo swaddled in, and he was rummaging through the kitchen drawers for a skewer to loosen the knot, he came across her new Conran credit card, which she hadn’t even bothered to sign.
He had given her a lecture about how foolish this was, and asked her to sign it, at which point she had said, ‘Absolutely not.’
He had asked her why.
She had said, ‘Because you’re condescending to me.’
He had said, ‘Well, in that case, excuse me, but you don’t even deserve a credit card. I’m going to cut it up.’
And she had said, ‘If you cut it up then I am going to shred your American Express Gold Card.’
And Mitchell had said, ‘You wouldn’
t do that, it’s our meal ticket.’ At which point Becky had grabbed his wallet and taken out all his credit cards and hidden them all over the house.
The whole time he was hunting for them, she kept taunting him, but he was not about to let her know how upset he was. So he pretended it was a big joke, while all the time the tensions inside him were piling up.
What happened finally was that he was going through the books on her bedside table to see if his gold card was hiding in one of them. And he just happened to look at the tide of the one on the top of the pile. It was Christian Faith and Practice.
Christian Faith and Practice??? His physical repulsion to this book was so automatic, and so great, that he had, without thinking, screeched, ugh, cooties! and dropped it on to the floor.
He had apologized immediately, but somehow that gesture had focused her. Her last words had been, ‘You miserable, asshole rockjaw.’ She had said it several times, as if practising intonations: ‘You miserable, asshole rockjaw. You miserable, asshole rockjaw. You miserable, asshole rockjaw.’ She had not spoken to him …
For how many days now? As he stands in his mahogany-free office talking to this potential investor whose name he can’t even remember, his hardsell voice weakens now as he tries not to count. Over and above the sound of his daughters’ high-pitched squealing, over and above the din of his own forced optimism, he listens to his wife click-click-clicking back and forth across the kitchen. The cash register that is his brain goes haywire. Oh my God, he thinks, another new pair of shoes. A hundred dollars if he’s lucky. What was it that his mother used to tell him about Catholics and money sense?
He gauges Becky’s mood from her expensive new footsteps and decides it’s springy which means happy maybe even jubilant. The energy contained in each step brings to mind a vacuum cleaner running amok, a bulldozer on angel dust. Nancy Reagan operating a wrecking ball. If Mitchell ever finds the courage to walk into the kitchen, the kitchen he has incidentally busted his balls for, will he even recognize it, that is the question. Already the office, the bedroom, even the staircase, are disaster areas.