When they finally got Aloysius to come see the room they had discovered, he looked around startled and then his gaze grew distant. “Oh yes, this was the personal studio of one of our most illustrious members, Cornelius Alderdonck.” He picked up a moldy teddy bear and stroked an ear affectionately. “One of the original Alderdonks, the direct male line, not the distaff side,” he said, looking sternly at Ava for some reason. “Such an artistic soul. Did you know his ancestors used to own the Bronx?”
Stephanie sniffed appreciatively. “I just love a pedigree. It makes everything feel so homey. My grandmother always said, if there wasn’t Mayflower somewhere in your family, you just couldn’t be trusted.” Ava noticed Stephanie was wearing pearl earrings she had never seen before. “Tradition was really what we were thinking about, Ava and I, when we were talking about how wonderful it would be to fix this place up and maybe host some select, artistic events here. My good friend Tom was just saying how few really exclusive places there are left in New York City. He’s an editor at Vanity Fair,” she mentioned casually as an aside. “I’m sure he’d love to do a story on us.”
Turning pink around the ears, Aloysius cleared his throat. “They do such charming portraits, that magazine. I’ve always found it strange they never asked me before.”
Stephanie put a sympathetic hand on his arm. “Well, we have to fix that. I’ve got lots of other ideas, different celebrities that might want to get involved, that I’d love to discuss with you. Maybe we can talk over a drink.”
As she led him toward the bar downstairs, he stopped to pick up the jar of shark teeth, a mannequin arm and two dirty corduroy shirts that he pressed to his chest. “You would have to clear it with the board, of course, and the club really doesn’t have any room in the budget for improvement.”
“Oh no, we would handle all that, of course.” Stephanie couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder and winking while Ava followed behind, somewhat dazed, as she often was, by the full deployment of Stephanie’s charm, a sensation that only increased as they drank glass after glass of sherry, and she watched Stephanie and Aloysius howling together in gleeful drunken conspiring.
* * *
After, Ava and Stephanie sat on their new couch, recovering. “What the hell did he mean about wanting in particular to attract new membership among our dusky friends and neighbors?” Stephanie asked. “Dusky?!”
Ava groaned. “I think that’s just how he talks. He always refers to Mrs. Bellamy as ‘la belle Creole,’ and I want to die of embarrassment. I mean, she’s from Milwaukee.” Ava hesitated. “I think he means, well, in like a Nancy Cunard kind of way.”
“I don’t know who that is.” Stephanie scrunched her nose in distaste. “But, if he really wants to drag this club into the twenty-first century, I would be more than happy to help in that regard.”
Ava smiled a little in spite of herself at the thought. “Is this all really going to happen?”
“Yep.” Stephanie stood and pulled out two large black garbage bags. “Let’s clean this place up.”
Ava accepted a bag. “How did you even know he would say yes?” she began and then decided not to press the issue. “I still can’t imagine this will work. I couldn’t even get into the Baker Street Irregulars. How can I start my own club?”
“Those guys are a bunch of losers, and no one wants to be in their dumb club anyway.”
Ava almost started to defend the eminent Holmes scholars, but it was true they hadn’t asked her to join, so she didn’t. She started sorting through a box full of chipped rococo vases.
Volleys of old girlie magazines went thudding into Stephanie’s trash bag. “So we need a name for this thing. I’ve been thinking about it—something old-fashioned.” She looked at Ava to make sure this registered. “Just like you want, but also sexy and fun, I was thinking something like ‘The Scarlet Letters.’”
“That sounds like a cheerleading team.” Ava set down a dusty jar decorated with little gilt monkeys and stared off into space, considering. “Also Hester Prynne is kind of a dismal role model, especially if your aim is sociability.”
“Well, you come up with something.”
Ava thought for what she hoped seemed like the right amount of time and then suggested, very casually, “How about ‘The Little Clan?’ It’s the name of the salon in Proust. He’s kind of brutal about how they’re all just social climbers with pretensions to culture, but it’s still a cool name.”
“Not catchy enough.”
“But it’s like the most famous salon in literature. I’m sure some people would get it.”
“No one but you knows what that is, Ava.” Stephanie didn’t even bother to turn around.
Hurt, Ava decided she had work to do in the library next door. “I thought that was why you wanted me to do this with you—because I know things about books that other people don’t.”
“Don’t be so touchy.” Stephanie, busily sorting garbage, called after her, “You need to trust me on this kind of stuff.”
As Ava began reshelving a stack of books, her silly categories didn’t seem so funny anymore, just embarrassing and kind of pretentious. She could hear Stephanie puttering in the next room, and eventually, Ava gave up on the books and slouched at her desk, morosely refilling some fountain pens. At least she had mahjong on Tuesday, and those ladies thought she was just lovely.
* * *
Having secured tentative approval for their project, next was finding the funding. The board meeting they were slated to attend to argue their case was quickly approaching, and Ava and Stephanie both sensed their chances would be greatly increased if they could prove themselves financially independent. In Ava’s experience, the club members huddled around the free cheese and crackers had a thriftiness inseparable from their Bar Harbor estates and Yale tie clips. The fraying carpets and unchanged light bulbs around the club also spoke to the members’ lack of philanthropic spirit. For someone who subsisted almost entirely on bar nuts and the free hors d’oeuvres of parties she attended, Stephanie seemed miraculously unconcerned about it.
Instead, excited by the challenge, like a hunting dog, snout raised for the scent of blood, she cast off after investors, a campaign of cocktail parties and late boozy lunches among her wide-ranging acquaintance. Hair spray and heels waited in the bottomless bag that was always slung on her shoulder for when she heard the siren call of gathering affluence. Then touching up her makeup, she explained to Ava that, as wearying as these functions could be, she thought she would do better on her own, and why didn’t Ava stay and keep sorting through the trash?
This suited Ava. Stephanie, dotting foundation across her cheeks with a cool concentration or frowning as she smoothed her hair and unbuttoned another shirt button, was sleek, coiled, hypnotizing to watch, and a little frightening. When Stephanie returned, cursing the stinginess of rich people, her manner, supercilious and domineering, carried an unconscious imitation of those she had just left, and Ava was very glad not to have gone with her.
As Ava cleared more and more junk out of the room, it became apparent just how extensive the decrepitude was—the hardwood floors were a mess, half of it covered in sticky linoleum, the walls were stained with mold, light fixtures hung broken. If their plan, as it currently stood—of charging membership dues for people to hang out and drink and attend literary events and readings—had any hope of working, they would need to invest in substantial renovations before they could possibly open. Ava often thought wistfully of the luxury of her parents’ house.
Her mother was always rearranging things. Whenever Ava started to get used to the terrible matching prints her mother adored—flowers and monkeys and vines clambering over each other in frantic stasis—her mother, complaining of “dinginess,” would rip it all out and start again. Then Ava would be subjected to a different room of exploding pink flowers whose aggressive newness and femininity made her feel like a guest, a stain on the meticulously conceived design of the rooms she lived in.
But it would be so nice to be able to call her mother now and ask for help and advice. Initially she had hoped that her mother would be excited about her job at the Lazarus Club—she was, after all, free of Stephanie, always dismissively referred to as “that person,” and it was fancy and full of rich people. But after one visit, her mother had cast a withering eye over the place and summed up Ava’s failure. “You’ll never meet any men here.” The thought of what her mother would think of her one conquest, Jules Delauncy, almost made Ava laugh. But not quite.
* * *
Finally with just two weeks until the board meeting, Stephanie called one morning excited—she had a potential investor on the hook and wanted Ava to meet him, to “seal the deal.” Ava couldn’t imagine she would be of much use in whatever that entailed, but walking farther uptown the next day, it was kind of exciting to be on her way to a meeting; she so rarely needed to go anywhere. She assumed no one would miss her at the Lazarus Club; Aloysius had always had very lax, not to say, confusing expectations about when she was supposed to be at the library. She stopped and bought a Wall Street Journal, a paper she associated with her father as it had blocked Ava’s view of him for almost every breakfast of her life. The technicalities of his business, running a chain of local grocery stores, were unclear to her, and therefore, she assumed, must be important. What a novel sensation to be on this side of the divide, that of things that mattered.
When she arrived, the entrance to the restaurant corroborated her new sense of self-importance. A converted bank, its former name was etched in crisp serifs across a limestone facade rising between giant art deco lanterns. The architecture spoke so strongly of the confidence and bluster of the American Twenties that Ava’s heart fluttered that such places still existed and that she had reasons to enter them.
She clicked through the revolving brass door into a room whose height and proportions dwarfed the leather banquettes and white tablecloths that now filled it. Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling, their brass fixtures casting a discreet glow, a whispered promise of the responsible stewardship of wealth. Doors that now led to wine cellars or kitchens still bore the bright varnish that must have delighted their original occupants, men, she imagined, whose vests stretched tight over bellies and who yelled through bulky intercoms at their unimpressed, gum-chewing stenographers. A hostess led Ava toward a table at the back, where she could see Stephanie already sitting with a slender man in his fifties. As she passed, she couldn’t help but notice many of the other tables also seemed to be occupied by beautiful young women picking at their food while older men appraised each other approvingly from across their separate tables. Electronic music was playing too loudly over the sound system.
Ava tried to pull out the big leather chair with a graceful hello, but it was unexpectedly heavy, and she had to be rescued by a solicitous waiter who pushed her into the table like a child. Stephanie’s companion, Steve Buckley, was a bony man whose hair arched back from a wide yet angular face like the crest of an iguana. He shook her hand, and as his fingers lingered over her wrist, she had a sudden feeling that she might be very bad at whatever it was Stephanie wanted her to do.
“Hello, darling, this is Steve Buckley, who I’ve been telling you about. VC extraordinaire, visionary, the sort of man who really appreciates the future.”
Ava didn’t know what any of this meant, so she just smiled and nodded and accepted an enormous menu from the waiter. A tiny shake of the head from Stephanie confused her until she tentatively handed it back.
“The tartar.” Steve Buckley indicated all of them with his finger. “And a goddamned vodka soda.”
“He’s part owner,” Stephanie whispered loud enough to provoke a satisfied grunt. “And this is Ava, the brains behind our project. She has read absolutely everything.” Ava thought she detected Steve Buckley’s pale face start to collapse into boredom. “Tell him,” Stephanie commanded.
Doubtful but deferring to Stephanie’s experience, she complied. “It’s true, I probably spend more time with books than with people.” Her self-deprecating laugh was not contagious. Alarmed that he seemed about to yawn in her face, she tried again. “Are you a big reader?”
“I read big ideas.” He paused to check one of two phones on the table in front of him. The subject of books momentarily put to rest made him happier, and he expressed his satisfaction by squeezing Stephanie’s shoulder. “Isn’t she fucking amazing?” he asked Ava.
“She’s a delightful person,” Ava said defensively.
“He’s just trying to flatter me. Did you know Steve has been collaborating with Hermès? His media company is getting artists to design scarves for them which they are then going to install in certain luxury hotel rooms, as part of a special...” She started to trail off, unsure. “Anyway, he really understands the importance of literature and art to building a premier, first-class experience.”
“A hobby, you could say.” He smiled into his vodka soda.
“Please, supporting the arts is just the sort of hobby that makes for a better world. It’s not as if you’re playing golf, or something.”
This struck Ava as a daring gambit, as he seemed very much like someone who might play golf, and she waited anxiously.
But Steve laughed. “I love this woman.” And he and Stephanie exchanged a look of mutual appreciation. As the conversation rolled forward, Ava admired what she started to realize was a concerted strategy—by the subtle disparagement of certain people and activities, Stephanie was carving a complimentary portrait of Steve Buckley, cultured, discerning, different, and he eagerly received this vision of himself, that mysterious way that Stephanie had of making someone feel special. By the time the food arrived, she had spun a web that held them all aligned, a milieu she implied that was at once young, cool, entrepreneurial and, most important, rich.
“We will want some society people, of course, but it’s important that things not get too ‘Park Avenue’ stuffy,” Stephanie was saying. “Anyway, that’s Ava’s department. She’s the Southern deb.”
For the first time, Ava seemed to register in Steve’s eyes, and he turned to her with a new visible interest. “Old money, huh?”
This so summed up the driving frustration of her mother’s life that Ava almost laughed as she chased a slimy wad of tuna tartare around her plate with a fancy potato chip. She wasn’t. Her grandfather had made his money with a chain of grocery stores which he later left to his son, and realizing he would never be more than his neighbors’ Jewish shopkeeper, he bought up acres of recently drained swamp and built the suburb where Ava grew up, whose wide treeless streets and big brick houses aped the mansions uptown that wouldn’t grant him entrance. This was why Ava, his only granddaughter, had been sent to the city’s most expensive Catholic school; he was bankrolling another attempt to break his family into the exclusive social world of the goyim. It hadn’t worked.
Instead, she had been presented in the ballroom of the Petite Lac Country Club, just off the strip malls of Route 90, forty minutes outside of New Orleans and a universe away. There, squeezed into a bridal gown and forced to curtsey deep into shag carpet while a Casio keyboard mournfully chirped Tales from the Vienna Woods. It was just as good as the other balls, her mother insisted, hanging her debutante portrait over the dining room sideboard and Ava had to look into her own eyes, sparkling with blue shadow and blank as a taxidermy deer, every time they sat down to eat.
Stephanie’s smile hardened, starting to show little wolf teeth, so Ava took a large gulp of the champagne that had appeared on the table. It was too early in the day and tasted like sour pineapples. “Something like that” was the best response she could manage.
Stephanie smoothed her hair with the back of her hand. “Really, Steve, who doesn’t want to hang out with a pair of sexy librarians, and also be a founding member of what is going to be next year’s hottest club?” Embarrassed, Ava tried to put down her glass and knocked it onto a plate of untouched flatbread. Stephanie calmly handed her a napkin. “But let’s talk specifics. We’re looking for supporters at the five-, ten-and fifteen-thousand-dollar beneficiary levels.”
Startled by Stephanie’s daring, Ava almost started to cough, but managed to suppress it, carefully mopping up her spilled champagne.
Steve looked bored again and checked his phones. Without looking up, he asked where Stephanie had been going out lately. All the old places were so dead.
“Exactly my point. Clubs are dead—but a home for cross-cultural collaborations, where successful men like yourself can really relax and know you’ll be surrounded by people who are your intellectual peers, that’s the real goal. Who hasn’t been inspired by literature? We all know that smart is the new sexy.” Stephanie continued to describe their project, pitching and persuading, cajoling and teasing, while Ava watched, just astounded by the audacity of the whole thing.
When it was over, they declined his offer of a ride home—his driver had been idling outside the whole time—and walked together into the congested bustle of Madison Avenue.
Traffic bellowed, and a bus shot a plume of exhaust at them. Ava felt like they had been inside for hours, and this busy sidewalk was too noisy, too bright, but Stephanie was triumphant. “That was fantastic. He totally loved us. Guys like that just need a little cultivating. I have a good feeling about this.”
A lamppost seemed a good spot to stop and rest while the world spun. “I can’t believe you thought anyone would give us thousands of dollars. I thought you were going to ask him for a hundred or something.”
“You can’t start small, it just makes everyone suspicious.” Looking into her mirrored sunglasses, Stephanie reapplied lipstick. “Trust me. Anyway, he said he would give us some books.”
“It’s him I don’t trust. He looks like he could just chew you up and spit you out. You’ll waste all your charm and beauty and hustle, and he’ll move on and you’ll end up alone in a garret, proud and thirty and dead. Didn’t you read The House of Mirth? That’s how these stories end.”
“Oh my god, that’s perfect. I love it.” The cap of the lipstick clacked into place, a flash of sliver in the afternoon sun.
“What do you mean?”
“As a name. Beyoncé just started a fashion line called House of Deréon. But also like the House of Windsor, but also kind of sounds like Shakespeare. I love it.”
“You’re definitely not getting the point. That title is a quote from the Bible about fools.”
Stephanie ignored her. “Mirth is such a classy word. And it shows that our club will be smart and fun and not stuffy.”
Ava shook her head. “No. You need to just read the book, please. Edith Wharton.”
“Of course I will. I thought you didn’t read books by women.”
“It was assigned in high school,” Ava lied. “It’s pretty good. I just usually like serious books.”
“You’re a woman who wants to write a serious book.”
“Mine is going to be different. Not some book about pretty, rich young women going to parties and trying to get married. It’s going to be about art and literature and stuff.”
Stephanie had rather pointedly stopped listening to her. “So how excited are you to get an entire library?”
Ava couldn’t help but smile. While not committing any cash, Steve Buckley had recently purchased a large estate that had come with a library, and they were welcome to take all the books off his hands. “I wonder what’s in it?”
They walked slowly downtown, passing a water bottle between them and arguing about what their fantasy library would contain. Stephanie wanted first editions of all Thomas Pynchon’s novels, Ava, all of Balzac’s human comedy. Eventually they agreed that provided they didn’t have to read each other’s choices, they would have a spectacular collection.
* * *
This lunch seemed to launch them in some way; the invisible currents that flowed through the city seemed to pick them up, carrying them along like a ship under sail. For Ava, this crazy idea was slowly shedding the timbre of the delusional. The more they talked about it, the more it took shape, emerging from idle fantasy into something external, something real—something that now had a name. For someone so accustomed to living in her own head, this transformation had something magical about it, and she credited Stephanie for this unexpected, thrilling act of alchemy.
Now that someone actually pledged to donate something to their improbable scheme, a course had been started, and they couldn’t turn back. This inexorability energized Stephanie, launching her through a cavalcade of cocktail parties and business dinners. Ava was surprised that she could have found quite so many rich friends, but as it was described to her, each acquaintance brought out four more possibilities, and Stephanie hunted each of them down, relentless in her acquisitions, until she had a new soul mate every week: the recent divorcée who wanted a friend to shop with, the tech millionaire who wanted to go to the cool new clubs, the attenuated playboy looking to relive his youth. All this activity hadn’t actually provided any resources yet, but it suddenly seemed that dozens of people knew of their club and its imminent opening.
And while Ava sat through some of these meetings feeling like the conversations were happening in a language she wasn’t familiar with, there had been bright moments: the nightclub impresario who loved Victor Hugo, the fashion photographer who had heard of Wilkie Collins. There had even been one wonderful lunch with the head of a major publishing company. It was unclear how he had been swept up in Stephanie’s otherwise rather downtown net, but Ava had spent a glorious hour impressing this leonine gentleman, who inclined his large snowy head toward her and spoke to them indulgently of young people, and the life of the mind, and Gertrude Stein. After, noticing the cloud of self-regard Ava was floating in, Stephanie brought her down rather abruptly. “He just wants to fuck you,” she said irritably, extending her arm for a cab they couldn’t afford.