“It’s like a fucking mad expensive huge bag that Grace Kelly used to cover her pregnancy.”
We were sprawled out on the floor of my dorm room by then, drinking beer, eating doughnuts, and listening to Double Nickels on the Dime, which was just about our favorite album at that time. Fang was leaning back against my roommate’s bed, her hair a lustrous brown-black puddle against the white coverlet. She was a beautiful girl, slender and long-limbed, with an elegant, uneven face and a high-pitched, nasal voice. It was at first hilarious to me to hear such a person curse, as she did, like a sailor.
“What the fuck are you going to say to her when she comes back?” she asked me.
“Not sure,” I said, not wanting to think about it.
“Tell her she’s a jerk-off entitled rich kid with an ass the size of a lampshade.”
“Oh geez, Fang,” I said, rolling my eyes up to heaven.
I still had another week of temp work, which I was glad for, because that would score me another $320 if I was careful not to take more than a fifteen-minute lunch each day. Fang was similarly cash-strapped and, dressed in her one “acceptable” skirt and a sweater that looked like a giant pile of black concertina wire, went down to the gloom-cloud temp hell district to sign up with some agencies. At the end of my workday I found her in my room, sitting on the airshaft windowsill with the family-sized box of Stella D’oros I had bought earlier open beside her. She had taken off her crazy bunchy exasperated-thought-bubble sweater and thrown it on my bed, and she had eaten all the cookies.
“How’d it go?” I asked her.
“Well, at the first place I got a twenty on the typing test. The lady told me my clothing was unusual.” She shrugged. “I told her that her face was unusual, on a human that is. The second place was a little better, but I got a sixteen on the typing test, and the only work they had was in White Plains and involved the cataloguing of phlebotomy samples. The other places were pure crap, like there was an actual sock plugging up a crack in the window in the one, and the other had lots of morbidly obese people in the waiting room, all eating smelly food from what looked to be a big vat—it was gross, and weirdly inexplicable. But. So I went to the library, the Rose Reading Room, and took a nap.”
“It’s nice,” I said, “in there.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking I’m sort of constitutionally incapable of temping.”
“It’s a buck,” I said.
“Right, it’s a buck,” she said. “But I was thinking, if you and I cleaned ourselves up, got like some girly dresses and high heels, we could probably score us some escort service work.”
“Fang!” I shrieked, scandalized.
“No, I’m not saying put out any cooch, I’m just thinking dinner at the Four Seasons and some intelligent conversation, sympathetic cooing noises. Most men only want someone to listen.”
“Bleh, I’m totally going to hurl,” I told her.
By the time the semester started and my other friends came back, Fang had spread the word about Kendra screwing me over for the holidays and Kendra was, to borrow some D.C. parlance, x’ed from our hardcore scene. My sense of hurt and humiliation had lessened by then, and while I was still angry, I almost wished I hadn’t told anyone what had happened. Because they were all for cutting her flat, but I was curious to see her again.
But then Kendra did not appear.
6
I should back up and say that if I’d hated Christmas in the past, after that year I associated such disappointment with it that for a long time I looked down with smirking condescension on anyone sentimental enough to celebrate it. The residue of this would stay with me for years, and when I got the gig at Acme, I was appalled to realize that I was expected to attend the office holiday party.
Poor old Walt actually rubbed his hands together in anticipation while talking about it, which depressed me beyond belief. The party would be within the confines of Acme’s office—Dee-Dee was big on economizing—and there was much debate over whether Team Acme would let us knock off at 3:15, 3:30, 3:45, or 4:00 to begin the festivities. In fact, talk of the holiday party became the major focus of activity in the office in the weeks leading up to it, all work activities be damned.
I watched with curiosity as Cissy went around the office hanging armfuls of glitter tinsel on the crooked boughs of misshapen Christmas trees and touching up the boardroom windows with spray-can snow, humming merrily to herself all the while. To understand just how nuts this was, it needs to be stressed that the office was a pigsty of Collyer brothers–like proportions. Lining the walls were battered file cabinets piled with odd assortments of debris that included heaps of dusty files, appendix-like plant cuttings in dirty jam jars, bobble-headed dolls, and, in one very creepy instance, the wrestling trophies of elderly Petey, who turned out to be the single long-term employee of the Acme Corporation and who spent his friendless days spying on and making trouble for everyone else. One tripped over the old space heaters, portafile boxes, and mountains of FedEx supplies left hither and thither all over the floor. Beside my very own workstation was an empty cubicle that had become the repository for any junk people wanted off their desks, and it was packed like some Keystone-Kops-in-a-tiny-car sketch with broken aluminum easels, trade journals, scrawled-over flip pads, piles of scrap paper, and an enormous, half-smashed point-of-purchase display unit for the See It and Say It phrasebook series. All the assorted crap that people had gleefully thrown into this workstation enclosure was literally spilling out onto the common floor, and if I got up from my desk too quickly and turned too sharp a left, I would invariably wipe out on the slick surface of a GSA MarkeTips magazine from 1996 that had slid down from the top of the heap. Imagine, then, Cissy and her chuckling-with-private-holiday-joy self going around this place and “decorating” it.
On the day of the party, I hunkered down, the grouchy curve of my back telling anyone who came by that I had serious work to do. However, Dee-Dee was in high spirits, buzzing around in his intrusive, coked-up way. On his fifth or so buzz by my desk I turned and acknowledged him. I was to come to the party! There’d be free food! Free booze! Free cheesecake! And I’d get to meet his wife, Tootsie. Oh, thanks, I said, keeping my face as neutral as a rapper’s.
Have I mentioned that Acme also had a translation wing?
There were three of them, and they clustered tightly together like a circle of Conestoga wagons. Besides an acid-casualty former Peace Corps guy who specialized in Modern Standard Arabic and a polyglot Bolivian woman with a French given name and the quiet manners of a diplomat, there was a third person, a young man. He had a lavishly ironic way of talking, and I initially took him to be Japanese, given the nature of his groovy styling—skinny hipster jeans, brightly colored Converse All Stars, gigantic Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses, zip hoodies with cryptic sayings in nouveau Blackletter script on them. Once I learned his name was Qi-Shi, I realized he must be Chinese, which turned out to be correct; he was in fact from Hong Kong. Qi-Shi was not quiet by any means, and on one of the first days I was there stayed after hours to write an erotic love poem in French to one of his boyfriends, calling out naughty words over his workstation divider to Françoise by way of checking his work. His manner of being loud was at least immensely literate, and yet at first I was so rattled by the whole Acme scene it didn’t much rise over the general cacophony.
Anyway, somehow I got dragged into the party, which began with an incoherent cokehead speech from Dee-Dee, during which the dispatch girls furtively slapped and pinched one another while guzzling Dixie cups of room-temperature Freixenet. Then it was time to race over to the buffet table. I hadn’t planned on eating anything—it was hard not to think of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds—but I put some grub on a plate and sat back down. I realized I had no idea what to say to anyone beyond offering mutual condolences that we were all stuck working there, and so sat staring wanly down at a broccoli floret. That was when Qi-Shi turned his head my way and gave me a sweet little wink.
Later, as
the booze continued to flow, everyone settled into random groups throughout the office. I found myself standing in a small circle of people, Qi-Shi, Françoise, and a nervous young IT guy named Jacob among them, who, although somewhat loosened up by booze, were having a carefully coded conversation that appeared to be about what a cheapskate Dee-Dee was, what a creep Petey was, and what a witch Cissy was, but one could not be entirely sure. Qi-Shi told a story about the holiday party the year before, which was held in a bar, a bar that switched from open to cash after each employee used up her or his two-unit allotment of well-only drink tickets, and how in spite of this he had gotten so drunk that he threw up in a urinal. Then Dee-Dee popped out from nowhere and strode among his troops, apoplectically hollering, Cheesecake! Time for cheesecake! We got a cheesecake! Free cheesecake! Frances, Qi-Shi, cheesecake—get in! Once he had passed, Qi-Shi drained his glass and said, “Well, kids, I guess it’s time to eat our bonus.”
At this point I was able to slip away and return to my proposal. After all, I was being paid by the hour. And I was counting down those hours until I could finally finish the thing and be free.
Later, for our Christmas, Fitz and I baked a tray of manicotti, opened a bottle of wine from the motherland, and watched the snow fall on the rooftops of the slumbering East Village. Like myself, Fitz came from a big family, but we’d learned over the years that to see any of them on either side en masse for the holidays meant, invariably, tears by dinnertime. And so our favorite thing to do was to block out the noisy world and spend Christmas by ourselves. Although it still strikes me, come the holidays, how quiet our life has become.
*
At any rate, back in college, after the second semester started, Kendra stayed AWOL. She didn’t call, and after a while my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself at her suite, knocking on the door. An annoyed upperclassman wearing pajamas decorated with little drawings of sushi answered and told me she hadn’t seen Kendra since before Christmas. She also told me that Kendra had stiffed her for the phone bill, so if I saw her, tell her she had to cough up $400 posthaste, all right? It was obvious the girl didn’t like Kendra one bit or, by extension, any smart-assed little freshman who might be her friend. I left the building.
Of course I could call down to Eleventh Street, but there was no way I was going to do that.
I was taking the maximum course load that semester, eighteen credits, and working my job at Burgess-Carpenter, and soon enough I had little time to think about Kendra. Trina, Audrey, Fang, and I hung out together as we had before, but the initial elation of living large in New York City had somewhat passed. There was work to do. And so instead of going down to the East Village for fun, we stayed uptown, around campus, seeing films at Zooprax or going for midnight burgers at Tom’s. At any rate, life “went on.”
Zooprax, the Barnard film society, was a wonderful thing, and over the years I’d be exposed to untold riches through its film series: Jean Vigo, Maya Deren, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Chantal Ackerman, wonderful old Hollywood movies like Dinner at Eight and Grand Hotel or corny musical comedies like One Touch of Venus. I’d see Blood of a Poet, Scorpio Rising, Entr’acte, À Nous la Liberté, and so many other great things there, and all of this for, as I remember it, a single buck.
Except for horror movies or something strictly avant-garde, it generally took endless persuading to get Fang to go to the movies, and Trina was also somewhat less inclined, but Audrey and I went all the time. Not only did Audrey love movies like I did, but she was a procrastinator par excellence, and really any excuse or errand at all, no matter how outwardly boring, would put her right off her schoolwork. You could say, I need to go down to the Economy Foam and Futon Center to buy some industrial soundproofing material and she would say, Cool, I will help you pick it out. But somehow this particular Tuesday night I couldn’t even get Audrey to come out, and so I found myself at Zooprax alone, watching Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door. Not a lot of other people were there, and it was only when the lights came up that I realized someone was sitting directly behind me. Whoever this jerk was, they began kicking my chair. I turned around: it was Kendra.
“Hi, honey!” she said.
I was set on getting right out of there.
Instead, she plunked herself down beside me. She had with her an enormous satchel, some sort of European GI-issue thing, bulging and overstuffed, and an overnight case covered in floral decoupage. She wore a shaggy blue pile coat, huge Cossack boots, scarves of clashing patterns wrapped around both her neck and her wrists, and a kind of futuristic bonnet, square like a box, fastened beneath her chin. She looked like a stylish bag lady, or Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven fresh from her cold-water flat in Paris. Actually, what she looked like was just plain crazy.
“What is up with you?” I said.
“ ‘The calla lilies are in bloom again,’ ” she said.
“Seriously, Kendra?”
I went to get past her, but she caught me by the arm.
“Look, I need you, and I knew if I called you’d give me shit. I saw the Zooprax flyer and I knew you’d be here. Chess, I have so much to tell you. France was a fucking ruse. To get me into rehab. Can you believe it? There was no trip to Burgundy. They all ganged up on me. Bertrand, fucking Clarice. My fucking dad. Cornelia. Even Jerry. I couldn’t believe it. Fucking two months in motherfucking New Hampshire, making potholders and watching the snow fall. So I ran away,” she said.
“You ran away from rehab?” I said. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
Well, Jesus. They had reassigned her dorm room by then, she told me, and she had no place to go. She couldn’t possibly go to Eleventh Street—she was bound to kill Clarice, or burn the goddamn house down. So it was natural enough for me to say why didn’t she just stay with me for a while? She protested, but I insisted it’d be fine. Jackie was remarkably generous when it came to people crashing, and there was even an air mattress we could borrow.
Finally she relented. We walked down Broadway together, I with her big rucksack over my shoulder, Kendra holding her absurd overnight case and taking dainty, sylphlike steps. I was so outraged by what her family had done that I didn’t even think to be angry with her.
Kendra produced one of those big $9.99 bottles of Alexis vodka out of her knapsack, and we stayed up in the suite kitchen for many hours that night, smoking, drinking, and talking. We were chasing a trail of meaning, and feeling that we were getting closer to it the more we drank. There was a profound sadness in Kendra, a kind of precocious exhaustion, and there was something like that in me too, which manifested itself in my need for final proof and “answers.” I walked around angry at my dead father, angry at the failure of his life, angry at the way he took out that failure on his children…Thinking on it now, a lot of my behavior back then was about throwing my grievances out at the world, while the real issue was with someone who was dead. But you cannot get a hearing with a pile of dust. Kendra’s anger at her mother was different. It was about having her soul crushed. She was supposed to be a ballet dancer, did she ever tell me that? She was the best in the room at the School of American Ballet. Mr. B. himself had loved her. Loved her. But this could only be a source of sorrow now. Once Kendra dropped out she ceased to exist for Clarice. Poof, you are invisible—you have disappointed me once and for all. Kendra could never just be who she was, she could never compete with such a towering ego, such a narcissist. She was always walking in the shadow of Clarice, who was the smart one, the slim one, the beautiful one who was powerful, a star, and who was always reminding her of this. Kendra was an ugly duckling beside her, fat, inept, wrong. At this Kendra raked a hand through her hair, which she had dyed a deep and glossless black, as if to mirror her mood. And if she was hooked on painkillers and amphetamines, guess where she’d learned that?
Had I been more sober, I would have found some holes in what she was telling me, especial
ly when she talked about things that had gone down with Clarice over the holidays that didn’t fit in with the rehab story. But.
We were still sitting up in the kitchen as the sun rose. We crashed for a few hours, and then I had to get my butt to Latin class. Kendra woke up with me long enough to tell me she was broke, and since I still had some of the money I’d earned over winter break—I’d spent about two-thirds of it, mostly on schoolbooks—I gave it to her. I told her I’d steal us some sandwiches from the dining hall for lunch and be back around one. I left feeling furious at Kendra’s bitch of a mother, Clarice, my heart suffused with the noble feeling that I was helping a much-wronged, innocent fugitive.
When I got back, holding my stack of turkey sandwiches wrapped in paper napkins, the first thing I saw was a note on my door. And I knew she was gone.
Sorry, Chess, had to go…thanks for being my friend.
It was signed with a drawing of a unicorn winking, and the whole thing was as banal as it was uninformative. I stood there, the note in my hand, with a blank, dry feeling of sucker abandonment in my body.
That night one of my suitemates, a senior named Ainslie, called all of us into the kitchen.
She was a decent enough person, this Ainslie. Self-involved in that Barnard way familiar to many of us, but no kind of complainer. She was visibly upset. Her shower kit, she told us, which she’d happened to leave on the drying rack in the suite bathroom, had disappeared. Now, she knew none of us had taken it, but maybe it had been moved accidentally…? Thing was, inside it were all her prescription drugs.
I put my hands over my face, then sat there smacking my head, over and over again.
7
It is kind of astonishing, the many ways in which a person can disappoint you.
I felt miserable about what had happened, and it was my responsibility because I’d brought Kendra over, but I just did not believe in ratting on people. You just do not rat on a person. Ainslie, bless her, took the time to hear me out—picture a poised, plump girl with a sweater that matches her lipstick, haircut by Bergdorf’s and tiny Fendi-shod foot impatiently tapping—but told me that if I didn’t call Clarice Marr and put things to rights, she’d have to take “other steps,” and go to the Barnard powers that be. Which would mean putting Kendra’s ass publicly on the line and perhaps—Fendi foot tinily tapping—getting that ass expelled. And so I found myself calling down to Eleventh Street, my heart in my mouth.
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