Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “I’ve got to tell you,” Poydras says suddenly from his end of the table. “I’m tripping. Took three hits before I got into the cab tonight.” Then he smiles dully like a kid who has just peed his pants.

  “Why would you drop acid before one of my dinner parties?” Chase says to him. “It wrecks the whole experience of eating. The food should stand by itself.”

  “The music,” I say. “Can anyone hear the music from outside?”

  Chase shakes her head. But my ears have always been very acute. I can hear babies crying a block away, couples making love in the next room quiet as church mice, clocks ticking steady as a metronome in the still hours of the morning.

  For the next few minutes we eat without talking, dysfunctional family style. Then Chase notices that Jillian has not touched her food.

  “Jillian,” she says, sounding hurt, “you promised you’d eat something.”

  Jillian tosses back her snifter of whiskey with a dictatorial motion and pulls herself up from the table.

  “Don’t ride me, don’t say another word,” she spits out, a hysterical edge in her voice, and she heads toward the toilet, through Chase’s bedroom at the far end of the loft. A moment later we hear the gasps and coughs of vomiting from behind the thin green curtain that shields the toilet from the world.

  “Jesus,” I say, food gone cold in my mouth, “what’s wrong with her?” I think I know the answer, think it lies in the bloody tracks on her arms concealed by her long sleeves, but am surprised to find that it is something different altogether. Jillian has become an anorexic, and because of this can no longer make a living at the peep shows or in the porn movies. Worst of all, Chase says, the affliction has forced poor Jillian to appeal to her rich parents for help with the rent.

  “An anorexic?” I say. “What happened to the heroin?”

  Chase almost smiles. “That’s old news. She gave up heroin a year ago. Doesn’t do anything except single-malt scotch. Doesn’t even do food. She drinks one of those Vita-Plus cans of vitamin supplements every once in a while, usually mixed with whiskey. It’s like milk, only thicker and nastier.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I say. “You threw a dinner party for an anorexic?”

  Chase shrugs. “I thought I could get her to eat. She said she would try. I was wrong.”

  Fifteen minutes later Jillian emerges from the bedroom and sits down quietly as if nothing has happened. Chase is serving the dessert, saffron ice cream, and Vietnamese coffee sweetened with condensed milk.

  “I just got off the phone with Inge,” Jillian says. “Inge’s coming over for a bite. I figured with all the leftover food …”

  Head down, meek as a servant girl, Chase nods and settles back into her chair at the end of the table.

  Inge is a large German woman in her mid-twenties. A redhead with very pale skin, an uneven, toothy smile and breasts the size of the Matter-horn. She thumps up the stairs, kisses Jillian on the lips, gives a Teutonic nod to the rest of us, throws herself down at the table, and begins to eat with gusto.

  Jillian smiles watching Inge eat. Perhaps Inge eats for the both of them. Withdrawn, Chase sits with her coffee behind a cigarette, two fingers propped against her forehead. Conversation, which has been dismal, stops completely, and we all watch Inge eat. Every now and then she looks up and smiles at us and goes back to eating. Her appetite is enormous. She finishes off a huge plate of chicken and is halfway through the mussels and broccoli when I remember where I have seen her before, and I am just drunk enough to say so.

  “You made a film, right?” I say. “You and Jillian. I saw it at the Paramour. Definitely a fine performance from the both of you.”

  “Ja,” Inge says. “We did one scene together in a fack film. That’s how we met,” and she leans over to kiss Jillian’s sunken cheek.

  Chase glares at me through the smoke of her cigarette, but Jillian does not seem to mind.

  “You didn’t jerk off to us doing it?” Jillian says, and looks me right in the eye.

  “No,” I say, wincing. “Of course not.”

  “I mean I could understand if you jerked off because Inge and I were pretty hot together.”

  “Ja,” Inge says, smiling.

  “Turns out, Inge loves it like that, from behind.” Jillian goes on. “When they turned the camera off, she wanted me to keep doing it. So that night we went to dinner at Florent and I took her home and we tried it without the crew and lights. You’d be surprised how many women like it like that. From behind.”

  “Very good for facking,” Inge agrees.

  “Faxing?” I say, perplexed.

  “Facking.”

  “What?”

  “Fucking, for chrissakes, Ned,” Chase says, annoyed, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Oh.”

  Just then the sound of slow, mournful music reaches us again from down the street. It sounds like a funeral procession in a Mexican village.

  “Hey, Ned,” Poydras says, his eyes bright and crazy in an instant. “I hear it now. I hear the music!”

  The music gets louder, seems to be advancing up Baltic Street, a melancholy dirge—tuba and trombone, the steady booming of a drum, the decorous clink of triangles. As if on cue, we all get up from the table and go to the windows, Inge still chewing her food.

  It’s midnight, and below an Italian religious procession has just turned the corner. I see a small brass band, a dozen big-haired Italian girls dressed in tight black dresses, a little wobbly on their three-inch heels. Following them, six or seven guidos in big-shouldered suits bear along a plaster statue of the Virgin fifteen feet high on a bier draped in black and hung with cheap silvery trinkets. Struggling painfully along on their knees in the wake of this holy effigy are a few shrunken old Italian ladies bent over their rosaries.

  “Wow,” Poydras says.

  “What is it, a mob funeral?” Chase says. “Look at those bimbos with the hair.”

  “It’s the festival of the Virgin of Palermo,” Jillian says quietly. “It was started by a humble shoemaker in Sicily a few hundred years ago. His children were kidnapped by bandits as part of a vendetta, and he went into the local basilica and prayed to the Virgin Mary that if his children were returned to him safe and sound, he would do the tour of the city on his knees saying the rosary.

  “Well, the children were returned to him, but all chopped to pieces like so much flank steak. So he put their bloody bodies in a wheelbarrow and wheeled them into the basilica during mass the next day, to the shock of the parishioners, and he got on his knees and prayed to the Virgin that they be restored to life. Before the eyes of the whole congregation, the bloody pieces came back together again, and the children hopped out of the wheelbarrow, spry as Pinocchio, smiling and laughing and good as new.”

  “The shit that people will believe,” Chase says.

  Jillian shrugs. “When this was an Italian neighborhood, there used to be thousands of people in the streets following that statue, most of them on their knees. Not anymore. The Ricans don’t care for the Virgin of Palermo. They have their own saints.”

  “How do you know all that?” Poydras says, awed.

  “I read it in the metro section of the Times this morning,” Jillian says.

  As the procession passes just below our windows, I recognize the music. It is an old Italian melody appropriated for a famous aria in an opera by someone or other.

  “Hey, Jillian,” I say, “do you know that tune? It’s from—”

  “Yes, Massenet’s A Girl of the Streets. The Whore’s Apology.’ ” She pulls a chair over from the table, stands on it, and begins to sing in a high, clear soprano that reaches the procession in the street. They look up, startled, and when they see Jillian singing in the light of the church window, a small cheer goes up from their midst. For a few seconds, her voice rises like a prayer, clear as a bell. I watch her face, and seem to see powerful emotions pass there: regret, shame, a longing for purity.

  But I am a sentimenta
list. It is only the effort of the singing. After a moment her voice cracks, and she falters, gasping for breath, and then the procession marches past us and is gone into the night.

  13

  RAIN SWEEPS across Brooklyn tonight. The river smells like a wet dog. Mosquitoes hop and dance across the walls, but I am too tired to go after them. I find myself drowsing over an old rerun of Star Trek, and I fall asleep in the orange Naugahyde chair in front of the television in the living room and have a very vivid dream.

  In the dream I am standing on the upper gallery of a great house overlooking another river, this one brown and moving slowly in the distance. A long drive bordered on either side by live oak leads up to the levee, and farther off, men and women in white clothing work in the fields. The sun is bright overhead and casts the thick black shadows of columns along the polished wood of the gallery. A party of men on horseback assemble where the steps sweep down to the drive. I can hear the breaths and snorts of the horses and the men talking and laughing, and an unpleasant cloud of cigar smoke rises up to me in the stifling air. It is very hot, and my heart is beating so fast. I hold my breath and feel the pounding in my ears.

  Soon the men move off, the hooves of their horses sounding hollow in the dust, halters jingling. I am glad when they are gone, because I am waiting for someone else to come. I wait for an hour, hiding in the hot shadows under the eaves, and there is such a dreadful anticipation that I feel faint and dizzy, and the heat is awful.

  At last I spy a lone figure on horseback coming along the road. He rides up to the house, and I step out from the shadows and put my hand on the railing, and it is here that I see my hand is white and delicate with elaborate rings on the two middle fingers, one a ruby of antique cut surrounded by diamonds that glitter smartly in the sunlight. It is a woman’s hand. Then there is the sound of the man mounting the stairs and his voice calling my name, and my heart is wild with it, absolutely wild because it seems I have been waiting so long for him, so long.…

  At this point I wake up to the television playing the national anthem, and my neck and shoulders are wet with sweat. There is a small rustling noise behind me, but I do not turn around, afraid of what I will find there. I stay in the orange chair, immobile and stiff, until the rustling noise stops. Then I get up very carefully, still without turning around, and get into bed and pull the sheets over my head, and I do not turn off the lights in the living room or the television, which pops and hisses out there till morning.

  14

  TIDE STREET is a long, dark canyon. Two working streetlights flicker a dull purple in the gloom. The rest are out. Coming home from work late, I hug the dark bricks of the warehouses, take a left along the cobbles, turn down Tyler to avoid the bums and wild dogs that live off the week-old pita pockets in the Dumpster of the Damascus Bakery, and walk the narrow alley between the parked bread trucks, silent and black as hulks.

  There is a thing that grips your heart at this point, not fear exactly, but the certainty that you will not make it, that tonight will be the night, a few faceless thugs, a bullet with your name on it—and now, as I step out of the shadows, my heart drops: I make out a figure, maybe two, halfway down, moving toward me in the shadows between the trucks.

  I freeze. Then I hear a familiar growling sound, and the shapes become more distinct. To my great relief it is the Scared Guy with Dogs. This was Molesworth’s appellation for a perennially frightened neighbor whose real name is Geoff Pulaski. He is a tall, skinny man in his late thirties, always dressed in black leather no matter the season, with a startling shock of prematurely gray hair that stands up from the top of his head and a white, uneasy face straight out of a woodcut by Edvard Munch.

  Geoff reins in the animals as we come abreast and peers at me in the dark. The dogs growl and claw the paving stones, tugging at their chains to get at my throat. They are Alsatian mastiffs bigger than rottweilers and more deadly, bred for bear hunting in eighteenth-century France. For reasons of his own, Geoff named them Manny, Moe, and Jack after the Pep Boys of automotive retailing fame. There are many such animals in the neighborhood. Big Savoyards and Russian wolfhounds and even a few Great Danes, all kept for protection by nervous bohemians with barely enough money to feed themselves, let alone animals that eat their weight in ground meat every two days.

  Rather than walk the rest of the way home alone, I decide to accompany Geoff to the dog run in Brooklyn Heights. We will skirt the neighborhood and arrive back on Portsmouth near the apartment. He understands implicitly. Unfortunately it is not possible to walk in silence. We must converse to keep up the illusion that we are friends, not just scared rats banded together for safety’s sake. As we turn back up Tide Street to the warehouses, Manny, Moe, and Jack sniffing the sour, bready wind, I ask politely about his job. Geoff is an assistant producer for a news magazine show aimed at gay teens on the Aramco Group Cable Network in Manhattan. His job is fine. He asks about my job. My job is fine.

  Then the conversation turns as it always does to the only real subject we have in common, the neighborhood and the safest routes in and out. Everyone has a theory, backed up by intuition or hard experience or hearsay. There are two ways in: the F train at Knox, then down Tyler to Tide, or the A into Brooklyn Heights and along the rutted streets down to Portsmouth. Geoff supports the school that avoids the F train at Knox, which is the closest subway stop, a ten-minute walk through deserted streets. In his view, hooligans from the projects ride the train and prey on passengers getting off at Knox in the shadows under the Manhattan Bridge. But the A, he says, another seven minutes farther off by foot, is not subject to this sort of hooligan traffic.

  In truth it’s all a crapshoot. Your fate will find you when it wants to find you, on A or F or along any of these dark streets. Still, we find theories comforting; it gives us the illusion of control.

  “You know Ang Dong, right?” Geoff says. “Lives two doors down from you. He’s a Korean artist, makes sculptures out of coffee grinds.”

  I nod, though I have never heard of this person.

  “Ang was like you, he thought the F was O.K. It’s a well-traveled train, right? Always crowded. Wrong. They don’t call it the death train for nothing. He got careless, came home on the F after dark last week, and they got him. You know how they are about mugging Koreans. But they got him anyway.”

  It is a widely accepted yet untested fact among us that the hooligans don’t like mugging Koreans because unlike white people, who have more money than guts, Koreans are often well versed in the martial arts and are known to put up a good fight. I don’t believe this, but still, I am shaken.

  “Maybe it was dark. Maybe they couldn’t see he was Korean,” I say.

  “Oh, no. They knew it all right. They got him anyway. Reached out, crooked him with an elbow around the throat, and he was out cold. It’s getting worse. You heard about the Irish, of course. Hell, they live in your building.…”

  This puts us in a gloomy silence. It is true. Reports of muggings have increased lately. Gerry and Ian, the illegal Irish poet-bricklayers who live in the basement, were both mugged in two separate incidents last month. They got Gerry just off the F and Ian not a block from the apartment. In that uncertain hour when afternoon turns to dusk, two kids from the projects came at him out of the alley off Tide with a Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifle. They found only ten dollars in Ian’s pockets and gave him a good crack with the butt of the gun for their trouble.

  Now Geoff and I come beneath the great arch of the Manhattan Bridge, its closed walkways hung with orange construction netting. Once you could cross here to Canal Street in Chinatown, just as you can cross on the Brooklyn Bridge from the Heights to the financial district. The old pedestrian walkways of the Manhattan Bridge hang over the river on a level lower than the main span, and there are disused observation bays on either side of the towers, semicircular terraces set in days past with iron benches and lit by elaborate gas lamps. I have seen old photographs. There is still a terraced park off Jay Street
leading to the approaches, but the park is closed off behind barbwire and heaped with rubble, and the wooden boards of the walkway vanish halfway across, high above the choppy waters of the East River.

  Before we reach Pearl, one of Geoff’s mastiffs stops short of the curb, lets out a low whine, and in a moment the three of them erupt into a cacophony of barking—a vicious noise that resounds against the abutments of the bridge. Geoff can barely restrain the monsters. Sweat breaks on his brow; he rolls his eyes at the darkness, the very caricature of fear.

  Just then two emaciated black women emerge from the jumble of cable and vandalized machinery beneath the arch twenty yards to the right. They circle toward us warily and stop just out of range of the dogs.

  “Oh, my God,” Geoff whispers to me. “What if they’ve got guns?” It is truly an absurd thought. The women are skin and bones and weak as children. One wears a pair of jeans torn below the knee and a dirty T-shirt that proclaims “Virginia is for Lovers.” The other wears a sort of quilted housecoat and carries a plastic garbage bag. With an eye on the dogs, this one dumps the garbage bag across the cobbles. I see some men’s clothes, a belt, a pair of blackened running shoes.

  “Wanna buy a shirt,” the one in the shorts says. “Got a nice shirt here for y’all.” She picks an indistinguishable rag out of the mess.

  “Absolutely not!” Geoff seems genuinely offended, as if no one ever asks him for money in New York.

  “Those doggies bite?” the other one says in a high, frightened voice.

  The woman in shorts kneels and rummages through the pile of clothes to find a yellow striped button-down, once a quality shirt but now stained and ragged. “Come on, mistah, how about this? Two dollars. Can’t spare two dollar, from where y’at?”

  I recognize her accent immediately. It’s the Ninth Ward. “Are you from New Orleans?”

  She looks up from the pile of clothes, suspicious. “Who wants to know?”

  Geoff sighs, irritated, and maneuvers the dogs around the pair onto the cobbles.