Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  For some reason she’d never been able to figure out, she had blurted out: “Hey, I might be interested in that—what you’re, what you’re selling.”

  “The Duster?” he said kind of doubtfully. Well, why not? Other than that she didn’t have a license or any money. “It’s kind of a handful, to be honest, but it’s still a nice car. ’Seventy-four. Slam sex.” He had added that she didn’t seem the muscle-car type. Later, researching everything she could find in the library and on the Web about “muscle cars,” she learned he had meant to say “slant six,” which was apparently some wonderful type of engine. It was certainly true that if there was a muscle-car type, she was not it, but it offended her nonetheless to be excluded. Why couldn’t she be a muscle-car girl if she wanted, except for the small matter of not knowing how to drive? As Marlyne always said, maybe she could find a boyfriend to drive her around in it. She could just pick one out and hand him the keys.

  Andrew Gold Duster Elliot told her his number, squinting and jokingly reading it off his own flyer as though he couldn’t remember it.

  “You gonna write it down?” he said.

  “No, I’ll remember.”

  She was reciting it in her head, singing it to herself like Gordon, but as soon as he was gone and she was out of sight in the vacuum she lifted her shirt and wrote it on her stomach. It was an unfamiliar area code. She looked at herself in the mirror, and tried to be objective in considering whether it was possible to see her as attractive from some angle, and was relieved that she didn’t look too too bad. He was just like any other patron, besides not being elderly or smelling like milk. Why had he made her so nervous? she asked her reflection, and Altiverse AK had answered: “Because he looks like A. E. Waite.” And it had a point, he did. The mustache, the sad eyes. Plus a smell that she realized later was sweat and oil (because the Gold Duster still burned oil a bit and you always smelled a little oily after riding in it).

  After that, back at her post at the desk in the Children’s Annex, she calculated the Agrippa Latin gematria value of his name—1234—and thought about his resemblance to A. E. Waite and his Roman numeral I baseball cap. A discreet consultation of the cards in a space cleared out of the center desk drawer revealed the Magician, the King of Pentacles, the Devil, and the Lovers, a card that not only suggested lust but also was “her” card, according to Daisy and the Golden Dawn. She found nothing about him on the Internet. Reverse lookup of his number showed no listing, but the area code was a mobile number from Hammerfield, Illinois. She pictured a field with rows of neatly ranked hammerheads. Just visiting, then? She felt a little disappointed at that possibility, though also slightly relieved, perhaps, because the obsessive maelstrom she was anticipating and half planning for the sake of argument would obviously lead to tears in one way or another.

  Illinois—a little research revealed that that was where the I on his cap most likely came from: the University of Illinois, the Fighting Illini. Illini was the name of an Indian tribe. She was already planning a way to try to work this knowledge into a conversation. “Ah, the Fighting Illini. Part of the Big Ten Conference, of course.” Whatever the Big Ten Conference could be. She’d have to ask the dad about it.

  Maybe Mr. Fighting Illini was selling his car because he was moving back to Illinois, where he most likely attended college. Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Approximately 140 miles from Lake Michigan. By the time she had finished this research, she had already started, she now believed, looking back, to develop a crush on him. But almost more than that, she was loving the research, the calculations, the coming together of elements, and her own slightly strange interest. If she had had anything else to do with her time, if she had not been in the desolate Children’s Annex, the whole thing might not have even happened. But it all made sense when you realized it had been foretold and ordained by the Water Tower Working, and by her own instinctive, uncontrollable reaction to his physical presence. Daisy had gone through a precocious boy-crazy phase at an early age, and Andromeda had faked it well enough to keep up with her, but now, six years later, she was finally getting a sense of what it was not to fake it, and it actually felt kind of wonderful and awful because she hated the idea of being a late bloomer like that.

  Right up till the time she picked up the desk phone, pulled up her shirt to read the number, and dialed, she had been telling herself she wouldn’t really call. Then she just abruptly did it. He answered “Yellow” instead of “Hello,” just like the dad did sometimes. There was a lot of commotion in the background on his end, a TV and other clanking and clattering, so she had a little trouble hearing him. She had to remind him who she was, the girl from the library, and she told him her real name was Andi, not Millie.

  “Me too,” he said. Right, his name was Andrew. He didn’t seem like an Andy. He seemed like an A.E. He didn’t act like he thought she was crazy when she explained the M was because her name added up to a thousand and told him that his name added up to 1234, and in fact he acted as though it were entirely plausible that she really would be in the market for a restored muscle car with a slam sex. “What time do you get off?” He said he could make it back to the library by nine-forty-five to let her try driving it. A test drive. She hadn’t thought of that, that she might really have to drive it. “If you’re really interested,” he added.

  She said yes, but started to regret saying so immediately after hanging up. She was terrified of driving. She almost called back to cancel, but Altiverse AK stayed her hand on the phone, saying something like “Just play it as it lays,” meaning just let it happen, because AAK had no intention of listening to her agonizing over it for the rest of the night, and plus, he did look an awful lot like A. E. Waite.

  So Andromeda was waiting on the steps in front of the dark library, lit only by the path footlights, when he pulled up around ten minutes late. He opened the driver’s door and scooted over, giving her a “come on in” look. It was a clear night, and everything from the shiny hood of the car up to the highest heavens was shimmering and sparkling. As if in a trance, feeling slightly numbed and robotic, she got in and shut the door.

  The engine was running and the car was shuddering. She sat there with her hands on the wheel, nearly paralyzed: what a crazy idea. And what was her plan supposed to be, anyway? She blamed the Water Tower and Thoth Hermes Trismegistus.

  “’Seventy-four with a rebuilt slam sex,” he was saying. “It needs a little work but runs fine and doesn’t burn much oil. You sure you know how to drive?” She had hardly realized they were moving. She didn’t know where she was going. It was a lot more jumpy and powerful than anything she had ever tried to drive. A hypercormorant automobile; “high performance,” that meant. For a long, slow-motion moment she was going along almost smoothly. She managed to get out of the narrow library parking lot just fine. Then the streetlights dazzled her and she panicked and ended the driving session in the traditional manner; that is, by running into a hedge.

  “Christ on a bike,” he said.

  Andromeda let her head hit the steering wheel and began crying silently, and he was actually very nice about comforting her. He was a genuinely kind person. She had expected him to call her a crazy bitch or something, and she wouldn’t have blamed him. Yes. Yes, I am. A crazy, crazy bitch. How was it possible, she thought then, as she was to think quite often as time went on, that he could be so nice to her? The dad would have yelled at her and the mom would have hit her on the head with her keys or something. But he was more interested in her than in the car. He didn’t even investigate to see if there was any damage till they had reached the Old Folks Home parking lot and she noticed him looking discreetly down at the front bumper.

  His arm felt great against her shoulder. She often found herself missing that feeling, wishing she could go back just so she could experience that arm again, despite the circumstances. A strong, comforting arm.

  He said he knew just what she needed, which caused her to giggle in spite of herself and Altiverse AK to say “Oh, do you,
now?” But what he had in mind was a surprise to both of them:

  “A visit to the Old Folks Home. I’ll drive.”

  It took quite some time to get there, mostly because he was avoiding the highway for some reason. Or perhaps the highway didn’t go there directly from Clearview Park. He didn’t seem to know the area terribly well, but once he got on the main road he drove faster and more purposefully.

  Right up to the point where they pulled into the gravel parking area, she had thought they were really going to some kind of charity home for the elderly, though of course it made more sense that he would be taking her to a bar. It was small, almost like a little shack, the only lit-up building in a deserted area of warehouses and empty lots, and there was no sign outside that she could see. If she had been alone she would have been frightened to be there: it looked exactly like the sort of place where you get kidnapped and tortured and raped.

  Lots of bars had that kind of name, it turned out, and when he told her about it she thought it was a very cute idea, really. The Office. My Brother’s Place. The Civic Center. The Hospital. The joke was, when people ask you where you are or where you’re going or where you’re going to be you say, “I have to stop by the Office,” or “I’m at My Brother’s Place.” Thus, the Old Folks Home.

  “Get it?” he said. And she had gotten it.

  “I don’t have an ID,” she said uncertainly as he let her out of the car, but he waved it away. She kept expecting him to ask her how old she was, but he never did. It was hard to tell how old he was. She had assumed that, like the dad, he was wearing the baseball cap to cover a bald spot or thin patch of his hair, and she hadn’t expected him to take it off. The dad hardly ever took his off, even to sleep. St. Steve did, though, as they entered, and he turned out to have thick, dark hair. In fact, he looked a lot younger with the hat off, rather than the other way around.

  There weren’t very many people inside besides the man at the bar. She would get to know most of them by name, or at least by nickname, over the next few weeks. How many times had she been there in total, by the end? No more than six or seven, if she added it up, though her experience felt so much more extensive. She had only seen St. Steve in person a few more times than that. “Old Folks” was actually not a bad description of the staff and clientele—all were ancient except for St. Steve and a trio of younger people who looked to be in their twenties, who were there sometimes, though not on that first night. Frederick, Sam, and a girl named Amanda, who was either Sam’s or Frederick’s girlfriend. The guys were that kind of hip, offbeat, rock-and-roll-looking guys, the slightly more adult version of the Charles Iskiw type of guy—geek chic, with heavy glasses and just-got-out-of-bed hair and clothes that looked too small—and the girl was always dressed pretty slutty. She usually got so drunk she had to be carried out by the end of the night. They were the only people there who ever played music on the jukebox, which was always loud and obnoxious, and very annoying to Andromeda because she had a hard enough time hearing to begin with.

  No one looked up when they walked in, but people seemed to know St. Steve. The bartender, whom St. Steve called Ned Ned and who looked like a guy who works in a paint store, poured him a beer without asking and handed it to him.

  “And for your daughter?” he said, kind of twinkling.

  Andromeda didn’t know what to ask for. She was completely shocked that she hadn’t been asked for ID. It was a lot easier to drink in a bar than she had expected. The only drink whose name she could think of was a martini, so that was what she said. The first sip of it made her head shudder and caused an electric tingle in her jaw, but it was fine once she got used to that.

  “It tastes like Christmas trees,” she said, when she tasted it, still standing at the bar.

  From then on, Christmas trees was her drink. “And Christmas trees for the young lady,” Ned Ned would say. St. Steve placed a couple of dollars on the bar after he got the change, and Ned Ned tapped them twice with his knuckles before scooping them up and saluting.

  They sat in a booth. They discovered the mishearing game. He listened to her speak, and for some reason, a great deal came pouring out of her, almost as though he had unlocked some combination in her mind. “That’ll be the Christmas trees,” he said when she mentioned it, and maybe that was true. But it was also because he listened to her, neither interrupting constantly like the mom and Daisy and Rosalie, nor paying no real attention like the dad and Bryce. This is the closest I will ever come, she kept saying to herself, to having a conversation with A. E. Waite. By the end of the night, she was floating. She wanted to kiss him, wanted him to touch her; she kept expecting him at least to try, though he never did, not in the bar and not on the drive home, and once again she cursed her aerodynamic figure and her bad hair and skin and irregular features. But just before he dropped her off down the street from her house, she managed to say she wanted to do it again, and he slammed her door and said “Okay” before driving off.

  From her cup of Christmas trees to the copy machine at the International House of Bookcakes, to the tip-knocking at the Old Folks Home, to the Plymouth Gold Duster, and back to the cup again. Oh, you could break the window and crush the glass, shatter it into tiny slivers and put it into your food or drink. That would really do some damage, maybe enough to finish you off, right? That was nineteen….

  “Hey, we’re almost out of ice,” the little mouth in the middle of Bethany’s nice, familiar face was saying.

  “I’ll get it,” said Rosalie. Then, without missing a beat, she held up the ice bucket and shook it. “Andromeda?”

  Andromeda had seen that one coming. But, rude as it was, she welcomed a chance to take a break from the chaos of chatter and music and video-game sound effects.

  Andromeda Klein poured more martini into her Winnie-the-Pooh cup and picked up the ice bucket, with an ironic curtsey that no one noticed. She was heading for the stairs when it struck her: if each of these people was to check out the limit of fifteen books from the library, that would be well over a hundred books that could be removed from the list and saved from the “Friends” of the Library’s Sylvester Mouse Book Purge.

  She paused and turned around and asked: “Do any of you have library cards?”

  They, the ones who heard her, looked at Andromeda like she was insane. Even Charles on the video chat screen could be heard to chuckle through the tinny laptop speakers.

  No, of course none of them had library cards. Why would they? Anyway, organizing this crew into a Save the Library movement would be beyond her motivational skills.

  “My mom’s going to be back in a couple of hours,” said Rosalie in response, by which she meant “Get a move on, you nondriving no-ass butter-sucking fish,” or something along those lines. “Don’t die.”

  Andromeda half smiled sarcastically back at her and got a move on, heading through the door at the far end of the basement room and stomping, though with little sincere anger, up the stairs. She heard some scuffling and giggling, but it was only when she walked into the kitchen that she realized they had locked the door behind her. It was just how it had happened before, the last time Rosalie had so insistently invited her to Afternoon Tea. That time, she had locked her out of the house, and there was Jesus Truck, leaning against the side of his namesake—that is, the truck-waiting for her to arrive so that he could sweep her off her feet and drive her to some love nest of the Lord.

  “Andromeda, right?” Jesus Truck had said.

  It wasn’t Jesus Truck this time, but there was a guy in the kitchen leaning against the counter, a slightly rock-and-roll-looking guy kind of like Sam and Frederick from the Old Folks Home and the ones in Rosalie’s (and, seemingly, everyone’s) boyfriend’s band. There were different categories of this kind of guy, but she didn’t know enough to differentiate. It was like they took a bunch of awful-looking elements and put them together, declared it to be cool, and somehow, it ended up being cool according to whoever decided these things. In one way she liked the ragamu
ffin Oliver Twist look of it and in another she did not, and the like and dislike were just about evenly matched, depending slightly, perhaps, on how tall the guy was. The categories eluded her. There were hipster and punk and hesher and math rock and noise and various other things ending in core. There was emo, and she knew emo was bad, she was sure of that. No one ever said “emo” and meant something positive by it, though she was not at all clear on whatever else it might mean, except that they wore girls’ jeans, maybe.

  Emo or not, this one had the girls’ jeans, all right. Also heavy black glasses, longish scruffy hair artfully arranged and product-ed to look like it had just been slept on, smallish earlobe plugs, sneakers, a jacket with a racing stripe that was two sizes too small for him, and an actual necktie with a T-shirt underneath. He also had a skateboard and a huge number of keys hanging from a chain. He really seemed to have patterned himself after the Frederick and Sam type of guy, or they were all patterned after the same original, but Sam and Frederick had seemed more natural, more genuine. This guy, whom she had already nicknamed in her mind Girls’ Jeans, looked like he was wearing a costume. “You’re all wearing costumes,” said Alt AK, which was true, but it didn’t make Girls’ Jeans’s costume look any less costume like.

  He was almost as skinny as Andromeda, which appealed to her no more than her own appearance seemed to appeal to anyone else; in fact, being small and wispy seemed a greater handicap for a boy. No mandals, at least, though the girls’ jeans were nearly as bad as that. But what made it clear that the scenario was another clumsy matchmaking attempt was that he was extremely short, shorter than Andromeda, and maybe even as short as Amy the Wicker girl. He was small and spidery. Nothing they would consider for themselves, in other words.