Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  “I wish I were an art student,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “But I’m sure there’s a downside.” She draped herself across my bed and I turned away from the window. “You still want to go to the Gatsby party?”

  She knew perfectly well that I did. “What do I have to do? Sacrifice a kidney?”

  “Nothing that drastic. Brendan McMurchie is going to ask you to go with him.”

  “He is?” I knew who Brendan was—a squash player from Bermuda, tall, sun bleached, with chlorine eyes. The kind of person you notice as they cross the green, whose name comes up when people are gossiping. But I’d never spoken to him.

  “Spence mentioned that Brendan doesn’t have a date, so I asked Spence to ask Brendan to ask you.”

  “You did?” I jumped up and danced around. “Thank you!” I grabbed both her hands and tried to pull her to her feet to dance around with me, but she stayed glued to the bed, so I let her pull me down next to her. “But… does he know who I am?”

  “Of course. Well, I described you to Spence, and he said you sounded fine.”

  “It’s weird that he doesn’t have a date. Isn’t there someone he wants to ask? Someone he likes, or someone he knows?”

  Carmen shrugged. And then I remembered that I had a boyfriend.

  “What about Mark?” I said.

  “What about him?”

  * * *

  A few days later, I was in the post office checking my mailbox when Carmen led Brendan over to me. She introduced him and stepped aside. “Hey,” he said. “You want to go to a party?”

  I said yes, and we agreed that the four of us would drive to Newport together in Spence’s car. I didn’t hear from Brendan again until the night of the big bash, two weeks later, when he and Spence picked us up at Carmen’s dorm in a red BMW.

  The film society was holding a Fassbinder retrospective the same weekend, and Mark wanted me to go with him to see Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I told him I was busy that night. “I’m going to a party,” I said. “The Gatsby party.”

  “Great! I can see Ali another time.”

  “I can’t bring you with me,” I said gently. “I’m going with Brendan McMurchie.”

  His chest caved in, as if I’d knocked the air out of him. “As a date?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, not really.” I knew that Carmen had asked Brendan to ask me. I hoped he had some interest in me, but had no idea if he really did.

  “But he’s a douchebag.”

  I shrugged.

  He spent a minute regaining his composure. Then he said: “If you go to that party with that guy, it’s over. We’re finished.”

  I didn’t quite believe him, but I was willing to risk it. I didn’t really care about Mark, which, I now understood, gave me power over him. I thought I had to harden my heart to get what I wanted, to get anything at all. I became a very mean girl.

  Carmen and I went thrifting in search of sparkly twenties dresses. As we were walking up Thayer Street we spotted Lacey Risch staring through the window of a frozen yogurt shop. Since freshman year she had become anorexic, wasting away to a sallow walking skeleton, her jaw puffy and distended by swollen salivary glands. When she smiled, the skin on her face seemed to crack with the effort.

  “Is she going to Rosecliff?” I asked Carmen.

  “She was invited. She said no.”

  The night before the party Mark came to my apartment to find out if I was still planning to go. I said yes and asked if he wanted me to model my dress for him. He fell on his knees and wrapped his arms around my waist. “Please don’t go. I don’t want to break up with you.”

  I wriggled out of his grip and lost my balance, tumbling onto the bed.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” he said. “You don’t know what you want. You can’t trust your own judgment. You are influenced by your peers. Teenage girls who see that other teenage girls are having babies are more likely to get pregnant themselves. Your opinion about a person can be affected by what kind of coffee you drink!”

  “What?”

  “Hot or iced. In studies, people given iced coffee were more likely to see others as selfish and cold than those given hot.” He began to cry. “There is no free will.”

  I tried to comfort him, but the longer he groveled, the more disgusted I felt. Did Mark really like me this much? If he did, wasn’t it kind of gross of him to show it? I experienced the contempt for him that, I now understood, others had felt for me, back when I was eager to make friends. I cringed at the memory of Lacey Risch and popped-collar Spence snubbing me at parties freshman year. It stung to realize how pathetic I must have seemed to them. I didn’t know Brendan, but secretly—so secretly I was afraid to admit it to myself—I wished that an exciting romance would bloom in Newport and we’d return to Providence at dawn, a Beautiful Couple.

  And yet, all that silliness and meanness and delusion led to that spring night in Newport, the highlight of my college years.

  * * *

  Rosecliff shimmered under a three-quarter moon, a white palace, strangely familiar. As Spence’s BMW circled the drive I realized that this was the actual house where The Great Gatsby had been filmed. It wasn’t very original of the host consortium to throw a Gatsby party in the Gatsby house. I was disappointed in their lack of imagination, but too grateful to be there to say that out loud. I half expected Carmen to say it, but she only said, “Zowie.”

  We entered the ballroom to the tinkle of laughter and ice and crystal and music, while high overhead on the cake-frosted ceiling silver clouds floated in a pale painted sky. The shah’s niece greeted Spence and Brendan with kisses, and had warm hellos for me and Carmen. “The ladies’ salon is upstairs. You’ve never seen anything like it. Come on, I’ll take you.” She led us up a curving sweetheart staircase.

  “Save some for us,” Spence called from the foyer. “And come back soon.”

  The ladies’ salon was the size of three normal living rooms put together, with chandeliers, velvet slipper chairs, gilded mirrors, Japanese screens, Persian rugs, and two gigantic bathrooms, one at each end. Girls in flapper gowns lounged and smoked and chatted, or sat at the vanity tables, fluffing their hair.

  Carmen and I followed the shah’s niece—her name was Nava—into one of the bathrooms and shut the door. Carmen produced a vial of coke and we chopped it into lines and snorted it off a silver hand mirror we found on a marble-topped washstand. We rubbed our gums and wiped our noses and checked our lipstick. Nava slipped the vial into her tiny beaded purse.

  I had done coke a couple of times before, at my summer restaurant job in Baltimore. That coke had tasted of talc and witch hazel, but this was different. My blood soaked up the drug like oxygen; my energy felt pure and clean, my head clear. The lavish setting, the costumey clothes, the familiar faces made strange by a new context… all this, fueled by a racing clarity, boosted my confidence.

  Spence and Brendan waited at the foot of the stairs. Carmen slipped them a vial and they disappeared into the billiard room. We wouldn’t see them again that night. Luckily, Carmen had brought a third vial.

  We grabbed flutes of champagne and passed through the ballroom to the lawn, which glowed in the light from the house. The warm May air smelled like honeysuckle and roses. A couple, holding hands, darted behind a tree to kiss.

  “We’re in a movie!” I said. Carmen shushed me. I lowered my voice. “Don’t you feel it? I’ll set the scene: Here we are, students celebrating as the end of our college days draws near, blithely unaware of the pain and trauma that lies ahead of us, the terrible compromises of adulthood….”

  “Me-e-em-ries…” Carmen sang in a bad Barbra Streisand imitation, “…of the way we were…” She gave me a jokey little shove. The heel of my silver shoe caught in the grass and I stumbled, laughing and reaching for her wrist to balance myself or to pull her down with me if I fell. She steadied me.

  A boisterous laugh came from the group mingling by the fountain, so we headed that way. It turned
out to be John-John’s crowd. He’d brought his current girlfriend, a fun-loving California blonde named Kate. His frat buddies and their silk-haired girls surrounded them, protected them, a party within the party. Four years in proximity with him and I hadn’t spoken to him once. But I’d watched him. I’d watched him threading among the tables in the Ratty, his tray piled with broiled haddock and spinach pie, till he settled in a corner crowded with rowdy friends. I’d watched him sunbathe on the porch of his frat, stretched out shirtless on a lawn chair. Asleep at a carrel in the library, lazy curls shading his face. Talking to girls at parties: the pretty, nervous ones and also the ones who weren’t pretty, weren’t nervous, the confident, funny girls, loudmouths who directed plays and edited literary journals, whose lack of beauty gave them strength, permission not to please—which appeared to please him. Or at least amuse him. He had a checked-out air, as if the world pressed on him, too attentive, while all he wanted was not to offend.

  “I dare you to dance with him,” Carmen said. “By the end of the night.”

  “What do I get if I do it?”

  “My eternal respect and admiration.”

  I clinked my flute against hers.

  In the ballroom, people had begun to dance. The band played old songs, the kind our parents liked and that we were only beginning to appreciate. “April in Paris.” “Someone to Watch Over Me.” “I Can’t Get Started.” Carmen and I twirled and dipped each other like children at a wedding. We took breaks to eat tiny quiches and crab balls, to refill our champagne flutes, to smoke cigarettes and snort more cocaine, bringing new friends with us to the ladies’ salon each time. The ladies’ salon was now coed, and everyone had dropped the pretense that this was 1922. Sequined headbands had been ripped from itchy heads and tossed to the floor, stockings peeled off, and high-heeled shoes kicked aside. It was 1983, no time to be confined by convention.

  At midnight, Carmen taunted, “You haven’t danced with him yet.” But he hadn’t ventured near the dance floor. I couldn’t drag him there. “Maybe he’ll dance on the lawn,” Carmen said.

  We went outside. John and his friends hadn’t moved from the edge of the fountain, having claimed it as their territory. They were passing around a joint. I was barefoot by this time, my fringed dress split up the side as high as my hip, my body buzzing, my mind accelerating. I climbed up on the marble lip of the fountain and followed its circular path to where John stood, his back to me. He’d taken off his tux jacket—Kate was wearing it—and his tie hung loose at his neck. His broad back narrowed at the waist in a shape that made me think of a saddle. I rested my hands on his shoulders. Startled, he cast his sleepy eyes at me.

  “Give me a piggyback ride,” I said, leaping onto his back. My arms clung to his neck, my legs wrapped around his waist. He laughed, so his friends laughed too, even Kate with her sunshiny hair. We were all high by then on whatever we liked to get high on. Everything blurred and glittered and seemed very funny. John galloped me over the lawn to a wall bordering the cliff. “I’ll toss you over!” he joked, jerking his shoulders as if to throw me off his back. I linked my ankles in front of his belt and he shifted my weight so it settled comfortably on his hips. We paused there, watching the moonlight dapple the water. Someone had once owned this house, I thought, and lived in it, had it all to themselves, the mansion, the fountain, the lawn, the cliff, the ocean, the moon.

  “Seen enough?” he asked. No, never, never enough, but I said, “Yes, take me home please, Secretariat,” and he turned and galloped me back to the fountain, letting me off on its lip, to applause from the gang. He gave me a smile, indulgent but clearly telegraphing, That’s enough now. I got the message. Carmen and I ran back to the house, holding hands and laughing, thirsty for more champagne.

  “That was better than a dance,” Carmen said. “My eternal respect and admiration are yours.”

  The party broke up around two, but Spence and Brendan had left without us. Nava said we could squeeze into the back of her Mercedes, and so we chugged home to campus crammed together with John and Kate and their friends, Carmen on my lap, passing a bottle of champagne and singing “Love My Way.” I had the strange sensation of nostalgia for all this—the night air, the car, everyone in it, especially Carmen—even as it happened. John held Kate in one arm and rested the other over my shoulder in a gesture of comradeship, keeping it there all the way back to Providence. He never asked my name.

  * * *

  Reading period began the next week. When I passed Mark on the green, he wouldn’t speak to me. I was sorry I’d hurt him, but not really, because it had been worth it. I’d glimpsed the golden world, and returning to it was my only goal. Now I knew for sure that it existed, and I could go there, if only I could find the door. I didn’t particularly care about being famous or rich, or even happy. But I needed to know what else was behind that door.

  I ran into John once during finals, in the library. He smiled, nodded, and went on his way, just like before… but the vacancy in his eyes was gone. I hurried to the periodicals reading room, where I knew I’d find Carmen. She lounged in an armchair, feet up on a table, face buried in a copy of Rolling Stone. I squatted beside her chair and spoke softly into her ear. “He saw me. Just now. He saw me, and he knew me.”

  She shut the magazine, marking her place with her thumb. “Now you can die happy.”

  “Maybe we’ll run into him in New York.” I still hoped Carmen and I could get a place together when I moved.

  “Anything could happen.” She reopened the magazine. “That’s what they say.”

  5 CHANTERELLE

  In middle school I knew of a girl named Kiki who claimed she’d spent the summer as an Aerosmith groupie. Her mother was a belly dancer. Kiki could do a head slide, that I Dream of Jeannie thing where you move your head from side to side in isolation from the rest of your body. She was a grade ahead of me, and we weren’t friends. She wouldn’t have been friends with me. She smoked clove cigarettes and sipped Coke spiked with Southern Comfort out of a 7-Eleven cup. I practiced aerial cartwheels on the front lawn and translated picture books into French for fun. She lived in a world where fourteen-year-olds were groupies, and I lived in Bubble Wrap.

  When I got to college and read Lolita I finally understood the difference between me and Kiki: she was a nymphet and I was not. I lacked the necessary traits, identified by Nabokov as an “elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm,” and instead was doomed to be one of the dull “wholesome” children Humbert Humbert despised. I am not saying that I wish I’d been a teenage Aerosmith groupie. But in the lives of neglected kids who “grew up too fast,” as my mother liked to say, I saw—until recently—not pain, but glamour. To me, a girl who felt smothered, neglect looked like freedom.

  I spent my first months in New York wondering when something was finally going to happen to me. I wanted something big—good, bad, I didn’t care, as long as it shook me until my head spun. Something to make a good story out of my life—and something big enough to recapture Carmen’s interest. Then I met Ivan. Here at last was my chance at the seedy glamour I’d always yearned for.

  Carmen and I spent hours trying to cobble together a decent outfit for my first dinner date with Ivan. It wasn’t easy, she complained, since I owned nothing but baggy college girl dresses and painter’s pants. Then, at the last minute, he called and canceled—an emergency with a patient, he said—and changed the date to lunch a few days later. I was disappointed—lunch was not as romantic as dinner. “Maybe he’s having second thoughts,” I said.

  “He’s just busy,” Carmen said. In retrospect, that cancellation was the first hint of trouble. Carmen later admitted it had roused her suspicions, but I was so excited and she didn’t want to ruin it for me.

  * * *

  He took me to Chanterelle, in SoHo. I hadn’t been to SoHo yet, hadn’t heard of Chanterelle, but Carmen said it was small and chic and hard to get a reservation. “I’m very jealous. Remember everything you eat and everything he say
s and everyone you see and be prepared to describe it all to me later.” Then she told me how to get to SoHo on the subway.

  SoHo on a weekday: cobblestone streets and unmarked doors, strangely quiet yet humming with the energy of a hidden world. Chanterelle glistened on an isolated corner of Grand Street, minimal and muted except for the chandelier and the huge flower arrangements. I was so excited my skin tingled. Here at last were the people I’d imagined New Yorkers to be: slim, serene, and beautifully dressed in a tossed-off way, even the artists in their paint-stained jeans. At a corner table Laurie Anderson, spiky and dimpled, talked intensely to a man with a motorcycle helmet on the seat beside him. Grace Jones stalked by on her way to the ladies’ room, tossing a red boa over her shoulder. I felt dowdy and suburban in my Indian print dress and Ann Taylor jacket, but Ivan looked me over in a way that suggested he could see through my clothes to the real me. So to speak.

  He ordered white wine and we ate salad and fish while he talked about the two years he’d spent working in Sudan for Doctors Without Borders. He’d had his own driver and a cook, he said, and had become friends with a British aristocrat, a sort of leftover colonialist, who opened a social club for the doctors, with a bar, a tennis court, and a croquet lawn—made mostly of sand and dirt, of course. Jim—the British friend—knew how to get things no one believed they could have, like bourbon, and champagne, and X-ray machines, and Cipro. Once Ivan and Jim were driving back from Khartoum with a Jeep full of supplies and got hijacked by bandits. The bandits lined them up under a tulip tree, ready to shoot them and leave them to the vultures, when Ivan noticed that one of the men had a rash and a badly swollen hand—early symptoms of river blindness. Ivan warned him that he would go blind unless he got swift treatment, and said they happened to have some ivermectin in the Jeep. They didn’t really have ivermectin, but Ivan gave him some antibiotics and some instructions, and the bandits were grateful and, after emptying the Jeep of all the supplies, they let him go.