Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  “I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

  She did a somersault in the water and splashed up for air. “Yes, I love it!” She lapped at the water and made a face. “But zis Jell-O tastes terrible.”

  “It’s not Jell-O.” I offered her a hand but she slapped it away, laughing. She tried to climb out of the pool herself, but her metal dress, which must have been heavy, clanked. She ducked under water and slipped out of it. It sank to the bottom of the pool. An inflatable duck floated by; she caught it and tried to twist its neck.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked, but she ignored me, engrossed in her battle with the duck. Carmen appeared beside me, with Jem close behind.

  “Why is a naked girl wrestling with a plastic duck?” she asked.

  “That’s Katinka,” Jem said.

  “Is she tripping?” I asked. “She thought the pool was made of Jell-O.”

  “She’s Swiss,” Jem said, as if that explained it.

  “How do you know her?” Carmen asked.

  He shrugged. “From around.”

  Katinka was punching the duck in the head now. “Let’s go to the Gold Lounge,” Carmen said. “She’s freaking me out.”

  We found Zu in the Gold Lounge and settled around her on a couch. “You ran away from me today, Phoebe,” Carmen said, but she didn’t seem mad. Everybody was in a friendly mood. I admired Zu’s earrings, two screaming faces with ruby-red eyes dangling over her collarbone. She’d made them, she said. She’d make some for me if I liked. She talked and talked and I agreed with everything she said and we both chain-smoked until we ran out of cigarettes. When I got up to bum some from Carmen she was shimmying on top of the bar, shaking her blue panties in Jem’s face. She slipped and fell and everyone screamed but Jem caught her. He held her in his arms while she kicked her feet and laughed.

  Zu and I went to find Bix. We did more coke and drank more vodka. We bought Camel Lights from Ruby and sat on the couch to smoke them. I was telling Zu the story of my life. She couldn’t possibly have cared, but I couldn’t stop talking. She’d mentioned her father, an astronomer in Chile, and so I told her about my father, that he’d been a doctor and my mother had been a nurse, which was how they’d met. Before that he’d gone to med school in New York, at Columbia, back in the fifties. He loved to tell stories about his wild friend Danny Washburn: the time they sneaked into Carnegie Hall through a backstage door because they just had to see Billie Holiday. The time Danny dragged him to Snookie’s to hear Dizzy Gillespie play at 2 a.m. the night before an exam. The crowded parties they threw in their apartment, red wine, whiskey, bebop, smoke, poetry, dancing, and lots of talk. Danny flunked out of med school, but he ended up opening a jazz club, which was what he’d always dreamed of doing anyway. That Danny, Dad liked to say. He really knew how to live.

  Dad and Danny were my age then. Danny would have loved Plutonium.

  “I want to be one of those people who knows how to live!” Zu declared.

  “So do I! But you are,” I told her. “You so are.” I dragged on my cigarette.

  “I would like to meet your dad,” Zu said.

  I blew out a long plume of smoke and watched it swirl and shift. I looked for him in the smoke the way you look for shapes in a cloud.

  “I would like to meet your dad,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s in Chile, he’s so far away.”

  * * *

  The club was closing and I couldn’t find Carmen. Zu had left on the back of someone’s motorcycle. The geisha girls had removed the bowling balls from their feet. One girl stood on her head, her kimono falling open. The other geisha smashed raw eggs on the first girl’s crotch and laughed while the yolk drooled down her belly. The first girl scissored her legs. She had a really solid headstand. Nothing knocked her over.

  No Carmen, no Jem. Somehow I knew for sure they had left together. Maybe I really was psychic.

  It was three thirty in the morning. I walked home on salt-dusted streets too frigid and desolate for muggers, hurrying from corner to corner, my bones rattling in the cold. In a vacant lot on the Bowery, three men warmed their hands over a trash barrel fire. “Go home, girl!” they shouted at me. “Get your little ass home!”

  I hustled over to Second Avenue, the bars closed and dark, the street deserted. I cut down Fifth to First Avenue. At the light on the corner of Sixth Street I felt a presence behind me, about half a block away. A tall figure moving slowly in my direction. I couldn’t make out much more than that. I speed-walked across First Avenue, against the light, and headed north. The man—I could tell it was a man now—cut across the intersection diagonally, closing in on me. A cab zoomed past him, honking.

  I glanced back quickly. All I saw, in the bright light of First Avenue, was a black knit cap, a dark coat, and a white face.

  I walked faster.

  I turned right on Ninth Street. A third of the way down the block, I checked for him. The man turned the corner, steady and relentless as a shark.

  This was beginning to feel eerily familiar. You did too much coke, I told myself. You’re paranoid. But those thoughts did nothing to comfort me. I might have done too much coke. I might have been paranoid. Nevertheless, the man behind me quickened his pace.

  I started to run, down Ninth Street to A. I ran the half block to my building and burst through the outer door. I patted my pockets for my keys, watching for the man. Found the keys. Fumbled open the door. Ran upstairs. Unlocked my door. Scurried inside the apartment. Locked the door behind me.

  “Carmen?”

  No Carmen. The apartment was dark. The cats stretched and meowed. I went to the window. The man stood across the street, watching our building. I stepped back from the window, glad I hadn’t turned on the light. We stood frozen like that for a few minutes, in a standoff. Then he disappeared into the park, leaving a trail of footprints in the snow, and leaving me to wonder if my past had come looking for me.

  14 JUNKIE HEAVEN

  By 5 a.m. I guessed that Carmen wasn’t coming home. I added fifteen dollars to my Ivan stash and changed into pajamas. The bed was rumpled, the floor carpeted with clothes. I’m a slob, but Carmen was worse. I started picking up dresses and hanging them in the closet, lining up shoes against the wall, folding shirts and pants and putting them in drawers, tossing dirty underwear in the paper grocery bag we used for laundry. She wouldn’t have wanted me to clean up after her but I did it anyway. I pulled open the bottom dresser drawer to put away a scarf and noticed, under Carmen’s blue Fair Isle, a white corner of paper. I lifted the sweater and found a thin stack of pages.

  JUNKIE HEAVEN

  BY CARMEN DIETZ

  SETTING: New York City, the East Village, early 1980s

  CHARACTERS:

  ARI—A handsome junkie musician

  CHARLOTTE—Ari’s girlfriend, a writer

  PENNY—Charlotte’s roommate, a would-be psychic

  NEIL—Ari’s gonzo friend

  Penny?

  I hated the name Penny.

  She’d never mentioned that she was writing a play. I’d thought we kept no secrets from each other. Surely, I thought, she simply forgot to tell me about it, and, full of rectitude, I sat on the floor and read the whole thing. It wasn’t long—she’d only written the first act.

  Ari and Charlotte were a lot like Attila and Caledonia in Carmen’s college stories, funny and attractive and doomed. Neil was based on Dean, and Penny, Charlotte’s comic foil, was involved with a married man named Vlad. Penny was naïve—ditzy, even. Okay, stupid. One scene in particular gnawed at me.

  PENNY: Do you think Vlad loves me?

  CHARLOTTE: You’ve only gone out with him twice.

  PENNY: I know… but he’s so noble. He works for the Red Cross. He helps hurricane victims.

  CHARLOTTE: I know, you told me.

  PENNY: And he’s so glamorous. He’s got that Eastern European accent, like Dracula. Dracula is sexy, don’t you think?

  CHARLOTTE presses her lips together in a struggle to kee
p silent.

  PENNY: Guess where we’re going tonight? The Russian Tea Room.

  CHARLOTTE: For dinner? No one goes to the Russian Tea Room for dinner.

  PENNY: They don’t?

  CHARLOTTE: No, they don’t. Everyone goes there for lunch. Only tourists go to the Russian Tea Room for dinner.

  PENNY: But Vlad isn’t a tourist….

  CHARLOTTE: Tourists and men who don’t want to be seen with their mistresses.

  PENNY blinks, slow to comprehend.

  CHARLOTTE: Penny, wake up! Don’t you see that he’s using you?

  PENNY: He’s not! He’s not using me! He loves me.

  CHARLOTTE shakes her head ruefully.

  Obviously she was exaggerating. I’d never said anything about Dracula being sexy, and I never would. I told myself it was only fiction. But it stung. I pictured her imagining Penny, then thinking of me and asking herself, What’s something stupid that Phoebe would say?

  And then I wondered: What other secrets did she keep from me?

  I put the play back in the drawer. Then I asked my shoebox oracle if I should tell Carmen that I’d read it. I shook the box self-consciously, as if Carmen were watching, as if I were the ridiculous Penny. I plucked out one ticket stub: The Other Side of Midnight. It was the first R-rated movie I’d ever seen, when I was sixteen, about a beautiful French woman who ruthlessly uses men to get what she wants. My friend Winnie’s older sister took us to see it. My parents would not have approved.

  I meditated on the title of the movie, and its message, and the circumstances under which I’d seen it.

  Layers of secrets. If the play was Carmen’s secret, then knowing about it would be mine.

  Outside, someone screamed. I ran to the window. Another screech… but it was only the rooster.

  The night grayed into morning. It was snowing again, snow blurring the branches of the trees, snow slowly erasing the footprints of the tall man who had followed me home.

  Now, through the veil of snow, a smaller man appeared at the edge of the park, just inside the fence. I focused until his outline sharpened: narrow eyes and bent nose, a plaid tie and plaid sport coat that didn’t match.

  Dad.

  He was alive.

  I knew it. He hadn’t died.

  He gripped the iron stakes of the fence, shaking them like the bars of a jail cell, as if he wanted to leave but couldn’t. He waved to me. He saw me in the window and beckoned, Come in, come in, come in….

  My feet had magnets in them; they tugged toward the iron fence. Climb up on the windowsill, my feet said. And step out. That’s the fastest way to the park…

  I tugged open the window. Cold air washed over me. I lifted my bare foot and rested it on the sill. Diego jumped up and rubbed against my shin. I caught him before he could tumble out.

  Dad waved again, his figure fading and transparent. Where were his glasses? Where was his stethoscope?

  When Laurel and I had croup, or a cold, he used to press his stethoscope to our small backs, murmuring, “Take a deep breath… again… again….”

  This wasn’t him. More like an afterimage of him.

  A ghost does not need glasses.

  A stethoscope is useless in the land of no breath and no heartbeat.

  I pushed the window closed.

  The rooster crowed again. The snow stopped. The clouds burned away and the sun bloomed in the east, far beyond the park. I looked for Dad once more, but he vanished in the light.

  15 INTERNATIONAL WITH MONUMENT

  I woke up at noon to find Carmen asleep on the couch, two hours late for work. “Shit.” She jumped to her feet and started pawing through the dresser in search of her jeans. “Will you call the café and tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes?”

  While she dressed I hunted for the phone. We were always leaving it inside boxes or cabinets and could never find it when we needed it.

  “Jem and I tried to find you before we left,” she called from the bedroom.

  “I looked all over for you.”

  “We went to Florent for onion soup. Have you been there?” Assuming correctly that I had not been there, she explained that Florent was an all-night French diner on a greasy cobblestone block in the meatpacking district, deserted except for some meat warehouses and hookers from the West Side piers. “It was crowded, and Jem knew everybody. A guy came in with an accordion and the whole restaurant sang ‘Auprès de Ma Blonde.’ ”

  “ ‘Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,’ ” I sang. I wanted to go to Florent. “Here’s the phone.” I’d found it inside an empty planter.

  “Forget it.” Carmen emerged from the bedroom buttoning Mitch over a thick Irish sweater. “If you start dialing now I’ll be at Lethe in time to answer the call myself. I’ll save an onion bagel for you.”

  She hurried out. The day was clear and peppermint bright. The snow in the park had been trodden to mud, and it was hard to picture a ghost among the freaks playing bongos. Maybe I’d dreamed it.

  I sat at the kitchen table and wrote my mother a postcard.

  Dear Mom,

  I saw Dad’s ghost last night! He looked pretty good. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. He waved to me. He didn’t speak, but if he had I’m sure he would have told me to say hi to you.

  Ha-ha. No. I crossed it out. Too bad, because the picture on that postcard was an innocuous photo of the Chrysler Building, and now I couldn’t use it. The only other postcard I had showed Billie Holiday, head tilted back, mouth open, eyes closed. I assumed she was singing, but it looked like she was crying out in pain. I’d bought it at Gem Spa on St. Marks. It was one of the few cards there that didn’t show punks or neighborhood landmarks, which might have given away my location.

  Dear Mom,

  Just a note to let you know that I’m doing well. I’m safe. I’m healthy. I have a job. I have a place to live. I would tell you where I am but I’m afraid you’ll try to come and get me or something and honestly I’m fine and I DON’T NEED ANY HELP. I’m actually doing REALLY GREAT, and I don’t want you to worry because THERE’S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Okay? I’ll write to you again soon. Say hi to Laurel for me.

  Love, P

  P.S. If you’d just stop worrying, we could be a lot closer.

  Billie Holiday was from Baltimore, and Dad had loved her music. Thinking about it now, I remembered that Mom disapproved of her, because she was an addict, which set a bad example. So maybe it wasn’t such a great choice.

  The next day I rode the subway up to the main Manhattan post office in midtown so the postmark wouldn’t give my location away. Downtown people joked that they got nosebleeds when they crossed north of Fourteenth Street. I didn’t get a nosebleed at the post office (all my nosebleeds happened below Fourteenth), but I felt light-headed, as if the air were thinner up on Thirty-Second Street. I didn’t feel like myself again until I got back downtown.

  * * *

  On my way to Café Lethe I saw a new “Missing” flyer posted outside Ray’s Candy. This girl, Darlene Abidin, was seventeen and had last been seen three days earlier, walking home from Stuyvesant High School. In the photo she held a terrier; she and the dog were wearing matching red bows. A girl came out of Ray’s and I found myself checking to see if it was Darlene Abidin, but of course it wasn’t. Still, I kept scanning girls’ faces as I walked down the street.

  I turned up Seventh and stopped in at International With Monument. The gallery was famous for its lively openings, parties spilling onto the sidewalk and into the street. Most people never made it inside to see the art.

  The front window announced the title of the show in black sans serif letters: FROM THE GUT: NEW WORK. It was a group show, very mixed: streaky photos, noisy videos playing on a monitor in the corner, neo-expressionist paintings in loud, screaming colors—a blast of anger. Jem’s oil paintings stood out for their muted stillness; no neon yellows or blood reds, but browns and blacks and beiges, grays, whites, and brick reds.

  First and First was an urb
an landscape: a graffiti-covered handball court surrounded by a chain-link fence, a block of brick tenements in the background. Papi was a portrait of a young man on a fire escape bouncing a chubby baby in his lap. My favorite: a view through a window, from the outside, into a tenement bedroom: bed neatly made, books piled on a nightstand, sharpened pencils in a Café Bustelo can, a spray of bodega daisies wilting in a jelly glass. In the painting, a miniature copy of Papi hung over the bed. This picture was called Secret Sanctuary. Around the window frame Jem had neatly printed tiny words: - Chronicler - of the LES - Since 1981. If you looked closely, you could read the titles on the spines of the books: The Night Sky. Baseball Stats 1940–1980. Cooking on a Hot Plate. Wild Cats of Africa. The Big Sleep.

  Jem himself was at Lethe when I got there, leaning over the counter talking to Carmen, who had crouched down to sweep shards of glass into a dustpan.

  “I broke a glass,” Bix explained. “While making a dramatic point.” He waved an arm across the counter in slow motion to demonstrate how a glass might become the casualty of such a gesture.

  Carmen rose to empty the dustpan. I took the stool next to Jem. “I saw your paintings,” I said. “I like them.”

  “Thanks. When are you going to see them, Carmen?”