Dean jumped up on the bar and called for attention. “Hey, everybody! Genie, can we turn off the jukebox for a minute?”
Genie, one of the bartenders, turned the music down.
“Thanksarooni. And thanks to all of you who skipped your disco naps to come out and toast our fallen comrade, the great bard of the streets, Attila Pilkvist.”
“To Atti!” someone shouted. Bottles and glasses were raised and clinked.
“If anyone wants to say a few words, come on up.”
“I got something to say.” A large, bald, heavily tattooed biker jumped up on the table, shoving Dean off, to laughs. “Gasper!” someone yelled. “Ga-a-a-as-perrrr!”
Gasper downed a shot of whiskey and pounded on his chest. “The last time I saw Atti, he looked like shite. Fuckin’ rotten. It pissed me off, you want to know the truth. I loved the guy. I said, ‘Fuck you, Atti. You wanna die, go ahead and die. I’m not going to say anything at your fucking funeral, you wanker.’ And old Atti says, ‘When you die I’ll piss on your grave.’ ”
The crowd cheered, raucous and drunk.
“Can ghosts piss? Hell. Atti’s songs were poetry, so I wrote him a poem, and here it is.” Gasper dropped his pants and bent over. Everyone cheered and booed and clapped. Someone shoved Gasper off the table before he had a chance to pull up his pants. There was a scuffle. Genie came out from behind the bar to break it up. Then she turned up the jukebox. “People Who Died” was still playing.
“Jesus, you call that a eulogy?” Jem said.
Carmen said, “I think I’m going to cry.” She was already crying, short, hysterical, hiccuping sobs.
“You’re too wired, girl.” Jem put an arm around her. “Come with me.” He led her into the bathroom. They were gone for a while. I sat down at the bar and looked at the room. Without Carmen, I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been taking care of her; now Jem was taking care of her. The faces and bodies blurred until they were squirming, jiggling shapes, a bunch of bugs crawling over an apple core. Genie gave me a glass of ginger ale. “People Who Died” ended at last, segueing into “Give Me Back My Man.” “I’ll give you fish, I’ll give you candy….” When Carmen and Jem came out of the bathroom, Carmen’s pupils were dilated.
“I wish I could stay,” Jem said, “but I’ve got places to be and people to see. Keep your chin up, baby. Be seein’ ya.” He kissed Carmen on the cheek and rolled out of the bar.
“What did he give you?”
“Vicodin, I think. Or Valium? It started with a V.”
“Let’s take over the jukebox,” I said. Genie gave me a handful of quarters. I fed them into the machine while Carmen picked out Atti’s favorite songs. She played the Clash and the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys and the Pogues. The entire bar sang along to “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” and then “Dirty Old Town.”
Soon after that, the whiskey caught up with Carmen at last. Her neck couldn’t hold up her head. I found our coats trampled under a table. I handed her army jacket to her. “Mitch!” She brushed off some dirt and hugged it. “Poor Mitch.” We put our coats on and walked home.
Doug stopped me on our way up the stairs. “Hey, I was looking for you.” He took Carmen’s other side and helped me steer her into our apartment. I settled her on the bed and led Doug back to the door, bracing myself. I knew what he wanted.
“Could you spare a couple of bucks? I hate to bother you again, but the baby…”
This was the third time he’d asked. I would not have parted with any of my precious savings if it weren’t for the baby. Poor skinny baby, what could I do, let him starve? I reached into my pocket and pulled out a fiver.
“Thanks. I’m supposed to get paid next week. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
“It’s okay.” I shut the door and went to help Carmen get undressed. She was so out of it she didn’t even make a comment about Doug being a ponytailed freeloader.
“Atti was the only person I could count on.” She cried while I tugged off her jeans. “The only person who loved me for my whole real self.” She pulled off her T-shirt and flung it to the floor. I covered her with the blanket and crawled in with her. She was already half asleep. In spite of the tears she looked pretty, like the pastries in De Robertis’s window, glazed white domes with a cherry on top of each.
“Carmen?”
“Hmph.”
“I love you for your whole real self.”
She rubbed her nose, but her eyes stayed closed.
Her hair had grown long enough to braid, thick and soft as a paintbrush. I swept it over my cheek as if I could transfer its dark red color to my face. I kissed her breasts. They felt spongy and soft, and her nipples tasted metallic, like frozen yogurt. Her neck smelled like cigarette smoke and beer and Shalimar. She’d nicked a bottle of perfume from her mother.
She pushed me gently away and rolled over. “Mmp. Sleepy.”
I curled up against her and closed my eyes, burying my nose in her Shalimar neck. She was over Atti, I could tell. She’d been over him for a while now. Not over his death, but through with him as a boyfriend. Something was going to happen between her and Jem. Maybe something had already happened.
I pictured Jem in his secret sanctuary, drawing and painting, observing his neighbors, sitting on hot days with the window open, drinking a beer, the bottle sweating on his white T-shirt. I wanted to see that room, the real room. Would I ever get the chance? Maybe Carmen would.
I’d nearly fallen asleep when someone pounded on the door. I waited for whoever it was to go away, but they pounded again. I got up and padded through the kitchen in my bare feet. The floor was cold. Through the peephole I saw her: the old lady, clutching her clock. She smacked the door with her palm. I pulled back sharply as if I’d been hit in the face.
I opened the door.
She quivered in her housedress and slippers. The night air seeped in from outside. It chilled the metal and concrete and tile of our building. The wind had a color, blue-green. I could see it whipping around the stairwell like a cyclone, blowing down the hall, right into the apartment. The old lady’s eyes were wet.
“What time is it.”
“It’s two fifteen.”
“What time is it!”
I said I didn’t know and shut the door and went back to bed. Diego draped his lean furry body over Carmen’s head. I settled my arm in the groove of her waist and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. My mind raced, a dry engine sputtering on toxic fumes. I’ll never do coke again. Next door, Gergo was photographing a girl. I heard his voice telling her to turn this way and that way, I heard her giggles and murmured protests, the snap of the camera. I kissed Carmen’s temple to see if she was awake. She wasn’t. I kissed her again. She didn’t move.
All those people calling Atti a saint, and Gasper showing off his lack of sentimentality. I thought of the fictional Attila and Caledonia, from Carmen’s college stories: by pretending to be tough they only telegraphed their sensitivity.
I rolled onto my back and stared into the darkness until a movie flickered on the bedroom ceiling: Atti walking down Seventh Street leaving purple footprints in his wake. He crossed Avenue B and kept going east, past C, past D, across the river, where the wind lifted him and he started to fly. He flew over Brooklyn, joined by other ghosts, so many ghosts, ghosts crowding pigeons out of the sky, until they reached the ocean and disappeared over the horizon. The sky was a white room over dark water. I searched for my father. I wanted to see him again.
* * *
In the morning I passed Kelly Ann, her stringy hair sticking out from under her cap, the baby bundled up in a sling on her back. I smiled at the baby, pleased to see he’d gotten chubbier. “How are you doing?”
“We’re just fine.” Kelly Ann’s voice was cold.
“How’s Doug?”
She stopped to face me. “He’s supposed to be in rehab.”
“What do you mean?”
“Thanks to you he’s out shooting up somewhere.”
&n
bsp; There was an awkward silence as she glared at me, waiting for me to get out of the way so she could move down the hall and out the door.
That fucker. “He told me the baby needed milk.”
She and the baby squeezed past me. “I’m breastfeeding,” she snapped. The baby faced me now, bouncing on his mother’s back as she walked away, his soft blue hat askew on his head. He lifted his hand, a benediction from a tiny bald pope.
“Guess what,” I called after her. “My roommate’s boyfriend died.”
Kelly Ann didn’t turn, just let the door slam shut behind her.
18 WRECK ROOM
Carmen never stayed over at Jem’s. His apartment was his work space and he fiercely protected the privacy of it. He wouldn’t even tell us the exact address. He spent a lot of time at our place.
He rigged up a curtain around the tub in our kitchen and took baths there, shaking his wet hair like a golden retriever on the beach. He made breakfast for all three of us, scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and coffee in a French press that he’d bought for us. Some nights he made dinner too: spaghetti with bottled sauce, or eggs again, or pancakes. I sat on the couch—where I was sleeping most nights now—and watched him hula from the stove to the toaster to the table, hips swaying, humming, “Teenage kicks right through the night.”
“Zowie, what a cutie.” Carmen pinched his ass. He wiggled it happily and called me to the table with a cartoonish bow. “Dinner… is… uh-served.”
“For me it’s breakfast,” I said.
“We’re having breakfast for dinner anyway.”
“Night is day and day is night,” Carmen singsonged. “Right is wrong and wrong is right.”
Since I was working at the club till four most nights, and since she had a boyfriend and I didn’t, the bedroom had become hers by default. With three of us the apartment was crowded, but that was better than empty. Also, baseball season had finally begun, and the TV was in the living room, so I could watch the games from my couch bed in the evenings before I went to work.
Carmen seemed incandescently happy—too happy, neon-bright and a little manic. We were doing the same dance, distracting ourselves with nightlife. We went out every night, stayed out as late as we could, and slept as long as possible during the day, to keep any painful thoughts at bay. Carmen took a disco nap after work and then went out with Jem, wherever he wanted to go.
The first time Jem took Carmen to a gallery opening, I tagged along. The show was an installation called Wreck Room. The artist had re-created a rec room from hell, complete with Mylar flames licking the walls, bleeding dolls in torn dresses, a white rat in a cage furnished like an elementary school classroom, and a toy tea table set with maggot-infested Twinkies. A grown man dressed in a Boy Scout uniform furiously punched an inflatable clown while Burl Ives Sings Little White Duck and Other Children’s Favorites played on a Fisher-Price record player. It reminded me of the Swiss dancer I’d seen at Plutonium a few weeks earlier, tripping out of her mind while wrestling with an inflated duck in a pool of what she thought was Jell-O. Maybe the artist had seen that too, and it had inspired this punch-the-clown scene. Or maybe there was simply something in the air that made people want to beat up their toys.
By this time, we’d seen a lot of art like this, exposing the dark side of suburbia. Still, Carmen would never have missed the opening, and neither would I. The art didn’t matter as much as being seen as part of the group. Chris Kertesz, the film director whose indie hit Weird Garden had launched Bix’s movie career, such as it was, occupied a corner in his uniform of black leather jacket, shades, and slicked-back fifties ducktail, sipping a beer and talking to three young women. Bix had told me Chris ordered Brylcreem from England by the case. A girl in a flouncing miniskirt tore herself from Chris’s orbit and attached herself to Jem.
“Hey there, Rita,” Jem said.
“What do you think of the show?” Rita asked. “It’s like the psychic muck of my childhood turned inside out and displayed for everyone to see.”
“I didn’t have this many toys when I was a kid,” Jem said.
Rita laughed. Carmen and I waited for Jem to introduce us to her, but he didn’t. It turned out to be a habit of his.
Carmen stepped forward to pluck Rita’s hand off Jem’s arm, ostensibly so she could shake it. “I’m Carmen. This is Phoebe. Jem, let’s get a beer.”
The four of us went to the bar. Carmen made herself a barrier between Jem and Rita, who eventually drifted away, only to be replaced by other girls throughout the evening. I’d never seen Carmen behave in this possessive way before. Losing Atti had made her greedy. She held everything close, kept it all for herself, as if she couldn’t bear another loss of any kind, no matter how tiny. That night Carmen stuck close to Jem, and I stuck close to Carmen.
Then, as if I’d conjured her myself, the Swiss dancer, Katinka, walked in, wearing the same chain-mail dress she’d worn at the club. “Hi,” I said, eager for someone to talk to. “I thought you left that dress at the bottom of the pool.”
She aimed her snub nose at me. “Do I know you?”
It wasn’t worth the effort to remind her. “I guess not.”
She waved to Jem and moved on to the bar. The overgrown Boy Scout had beaten the air out of the inflatable clown and was stomping on its plastic corpse. Chris Kertesz and his entourage headed for the door. Time to go.
“What’s happening now?” I asked. Clearly there was some kind of after-party, and everyone seemed to know about it except for me.
“Oh, I’m not sure,” Carmen said. “Anyway, don’t you have to go to the club?”
“I can get there whenever I want.”
Jem pulled a card out of his pocket: an invitation to dinner at Around the Clock, hosted by the gallery and addressed to Jem and guest.
“Come with us,” Carmen said. “They can squeeze in one more.” As she said this, she took one step toward Jem, as if she were now putting a barrier up against me. I remembered the lesson I’d learned in college: don’t show that you want anything.
“Thanks, but you’re right, I’ve got to go to work. Bilan will be waiting for me.”
Fortune-telling was my only source of income, and I had developed a following as a sort of house shrink. Bilan, the model, came nearly every Thursday night just to see me, often bringing her friends. She had wonderful, dramatic problems: her best friend stole her boyfriend, her boyfriend stole her jewelry, her bodyguard was in love with her, a photographer wanted to leave his wife for her, she was vying with another model for a perfume ad. The movie ticket oracle never failed to suggest that more drama was on the way.
“Astrid, darling, I must know: Mick promised to take me to Cannes with him this year, but Basia says he promised to take her too! Is he just trying to get me in bed with him?”
“You haven’t slept with him yet?”
“No, darling, no! I’ve been keeping him at elbow’s length. I don’t want to be another one of his castaways.”
“Let’s see what the oracle says.”
Tess. Seven Beauties. American Gigolo.
Bilan clucked her tongue. “Oh, no no no no no. You don’t have to say a word, darling. The oracle knows what sort of man Mick is.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s pretty clear,” I said.
“No trip to Cannes for me.”
“Unless you go with someone else.”
“Ooh! Like who?”
I asked the oracle, and, bizarrely, pulled out (completely at random, I swear) three Chris Kertesz movies: Punk Kid, Jersey Smokes, and Weird Garden.
“Do you know Chris Kertesz?” I asked Bilan.
“The director? I haven’t met him.”
“Do you know what he looks like?”
“He’s the one with the hair?” She mimed slicking her hair back with her hands.
I nodded. “When he comes in, introduce yourself. He’s your ticket to Cannes.”
Bilan slipped a fifty-dollar bill into my hand, then patted it. “Astrid, this is wh
y I adore you.”
Jem and Carmen arrived around two with a group from the gallery dinner. They stopped by my table to say hello. “We’re getting out of here, it’s too crowded,” Carmen said. “Jem wants to see if anyone’s at Limelight. You wanna come?”
I gestured at the long line of customers waiting for me. “I’ll see you at home later.”
“Make lots of money,” Carmen said. “Lots of fuck-you-Ivan money.”
I did make a lot that night, and shared a taxi home with Bix. Upstairs, the lights were out and the bedroom door was closed. I went to bed on the couch, with Julio and Diego curled up at my feet. The clock on the kitchen wall glowed in the dark, and I found myself staring at the glow for a long time, trying not to think about what was happening on the other side of the bedroom door. To distract myself, I imagined Bilan, resplendent in yellow silk and yellow diamonds, swanning down the red carpet at Cannes on Mick Jagger’s arm. “I want to thank the darling Astrid for everything,” Bilan said to the cameras trailing her. “Just everything.” But Bilan kept turning into Carmen and Mick kept turning into Jem, so in the end I was forced to try naming all fifty states in alphabetical order. I made it to Nevada before I fell asleep.
19 EXPANDING UNIVERSE
In May, Atti’s mother invited Carmen to a memorial service in Springfield, Massachusetts, his hometown. I came home from work and found Carmen reading over the invitation, chewing on her lip.
“You forgot all about him, didn’t you?” I said, trying to sound light and joking and not mean.
“No I didn’t, fuck you.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I feel like I should. They’re going to spread his ashes over a field or something. I never saw the house he grew up in. It’s my last chance.” She’d take the bus up there and be gone overnight, she said.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Road trip.”
“I don’t think Borbála would like it.”
“Borbála.” I snorted. I’d forgotten that was Atti’s mother’s name.
Astrid Sees All Page 14
