Invisible Boy

by Cornelia Read

  She leaned forward toward Christoph, who’d claimed it was his pleasure, as the evening’s host, to ride up front beside our driver.

  “Darling?” She snaked her hand through the little divider window, touching his hair. “Why don’t you bring this marvelous Dean out to New Jersey with you tomorrow? There’s really no point in our leaving for Southampton until Friday morning.”

  Ten o’clock was agreed upon all around, as the cab pulled up in front of our building.

  The four of us climbed out into the sultry evening for a round of doubled air-kisses—that display of affection Dostoyevsky described as the “gesture Russians tend to make when they are really famous.”

  Astrid and I exchanged ours last, and she held on to my shoulders for a moment, whispering, “I do love you, Madissima.”

  She’d let her guard down, just for that instant, and I realized I’d never heard anyone sound so fragile and alone.

  Leaning in, I kissed her cheek for real.

  “Do they ever eat?” asked Dean.

  We were in our kitchen dipping fat broken pretzels into a jar of Nutella.

  “Biennially,” I said. “Tiny little salads, dressing on the side.”

  He examined his pretzel. “So they’re like, what, air ferns?”

  “Or vampires.”

  “Should I wear a suit tomorrow, you think?”

  “God no,” I said. “He’d find it distressingly plebeian.”

  Dean laughed, pushing the Nutella toward me.

  13

  I was at the Catalog early the following Wednesday morning. By nine o’clock there were four of us manning the lines.

  “I started out so excited this morning,” said my fellow order-taker chick Yong Sun, stepping into the phone room.

  “What about?” I said.

  “Well, I was running late, so I caught a taxi to my subway station, and the driver asked if I was Korean.” She took a sip of her coffee.

  “White guy?” asked Karen, who was at the desk next to mine.

  Yong Sun nodded. “I thought, ‘ Finally, one of you people got a clue!’ you know?”

  “I’m so proud, on behalf of my ignorant race,” I said.

  “So I asked him how he could tell,” she continued, “and he shrugs and goes, ‘You smell like garlic.’ ”

  “Fucking white people,” said Yumiko, across from us. “So fucking stupid.”

  We’d had variations of this conversation before, but I still found it morbidly fascinating.

  Yumiko’s parents had come from Japan, Karen’s from China, Yong Sun’s, obviously, from Korea.

  The three of them spent a lot of time ranking on each other’s respective heritage, explaining the hierarchy to me as Japan first, then Korea, then China, in order of current economic supremacy.

  Karen would always snap back in response to that that everyone in the room could kiss her American-born ass, because if it weren’t for China, “ your stupid countries wouldn’t know how to read or write, and we’d all be out of a damn job.”

  I always made a point of thanking her for our employment, not to mention fireworks, dim sum, and pasta while we were at it.

  Yumiko glanced at an old copy of Vogue someone had left on her desk. “So how come rich fucking white people dress like such shit all the time?”

  She was barely five feet tall—a graceful slip of a girl who might have just stepped from the mists of an ukiyo-e woodblock print—but she was equipped with the most superbly atrocious vocabulary I’d ever encountered. Seriously, the chick made me sound like a repressed Mormon.

  “Rich white people dress like shit to show they don’t have to care,” I said.

  Yumiko gave my crap T-shirt and frayed khaki Bermudas a how-the-hell-would- you-know smirk. “Fucking stupid. You’re all, like, a bunch of fucking freaks.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” I said, booting up my computer.

  “I mean,” she continued, “how could anyone even fucking kiss a white guy? They’ve got those eyes, you know? All blue and weird shit. Like they’re fucking dead. It’s disgusting.”

  “More for me, then,” said Karen.

  Yumiko waved this off. “Banana bitch—only yellow on the outside.”

  “So, what, you like Japan better than here?” I asked her.

  “That’s all bullshit, back there,” she said. “They won’t let you do fucking anything, you know? Like, my cousin used a curling iron on her hair once, for school? The teacher stuck her head in a bucket of water in front of the whole class. Said they had to make sure she wasn’t Korean or some shit.”

  “Tasteless fool,” said Yong Sun, bouncing the palm of one hand under her own naturally curly tresses, the gesture of Frieda in a Peanuts special.

  “Plus, they think I’m ugly,” said Yumiko.

  “You’re a total babe,” I said. “What are they, crazy?”

  “My eyes are too big, and I have dark skin—my grandfather calls me Indian Girl. You’re supposed to be all squinty and pale and shit. Fuck that.”

  “Well, over here, you’re gorgeous,” I said.

  “Over here I have no tits. They think I look like a fucking twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Trade you,” I said, pointing at my own abundance of boobulage.

  She ignored that. “I go to Victoria’s Secret, they can’t even sell me underpants—both legs fit in one hole. I try on jeans at the Gap, they’re all size zero—like, not even big enough to get a real number. Fucked up.”

  “Whine, whine, whine,” said Karen, smiling. “Just like some stupid FOB.”

  I knew from previous Yumiko-rants that this acronym stood for Fresh Off the Boat.

  Yumiko said, “Shut the fuck up and give me a Marlboro.”

  Karen drew a red-and-white soft-pack from her purse, extracted a smoke, and tossed it onto the carpet.

  Yumiko stuck it behind her ear, filter forward.

  “Pussy chink-ass bitch can’t even throw right,” she said. “No wonder your grandma’s still slopping around rice paddies behind a water buffalo—dog-eating communist motherfuckers.”

  “ Koreans eat dogs,” said Karen.

  “Do not,” said Yong Sun.

  “With garlic,” said Yumiko.

  Yong Sun stood up. “With that attitude, I think it’s your turn to do the credit-card batch.”

  “I did the fucking credit-card batch Friday,” said Yumiko. “It’s your turn.”

  Yong Sun shook her head. “I’m the manager. And I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?” asked Yumiko.

  “Putting more garlic in this damn coffee,” said Yong Sun, walking out the door.

  “Kiss my ass!” Yumiko yelled after her.

  “In your dreams, bitch,” echoed Yong Sun’s voice back up the hall.

  The phone rang, lighting up line two.

  I pounced on it, beating Karen by a nanosecond. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”

  When line three lit up, Karen slapped the button down so fast the phone didn’t have time to chirp, much less ring.

  She smugly flipped off Yumiko, then pointed her still-extended middle finger toward the credit-card terminal.

  Yumiko pursed her lips to make a wet kissy noise, then slapped her unrepentant size-zero butt.

  Cate called around ten, saying we had the all clear from Skwarecki to go back inside Prospect.

  “I’m out of here at noon,” I said. “When are you meeting your Quakers?”

  “One o’clock, so your timing’s perfect.”

  “Cool.”

  “You’re sure you want to do this, Madeline?”

  “Course I’m sure. I’ve been thinking about it all week.”

  “Me too,” she said. “And I’m so glad you’re coming.”

  We said good-bye and I clicked open another line, dialing Dean in New Jersey. He’d started working for Christoph Monday morning, the pair of them commuting back and forth across the George Washington Bridge in Christoph’s Jeep.

  The
secretary put me through to Dean’s extension, and I said, “How’s it goin’, ya goddamn genius?” when he picked up.

  “Decent,” he said. “Nice day out here.”

  I looked out the window at the Catalog’s air shaft. “I wouldn’t know—thanks for the heads-up.”

  “You going back to the cemetery?” he asked.

  “Cate just called. I figured I’d grab a sandwich or something and jump on the subway.”

  “What time’ll you get home?”

  “Way sooner than last week.”

  “Famous last words,” he said.

  “Really and truly. Even if we find anything, Skwarecki’s said she’s coming to us, you know?”

  “Just be careful, Bunny. Get a ride to the subway if you guys stay later than four, all right?”

  “Scout’s honor,” I said. “Pinkie swear.”

  “Hey, you talked to Nutty Buddy?”

  “Astrid? Not since they called to hire you. Why?”

  I heard him exhale. “Probably nothing.”

  Dean had spent enough time with my pals to have pretty decent girly-radar. Plus he had two sisters.

  “What flavor of probably nothing?” I asked.

  “She’s been out here to the office a couple of times—”

  “They are newlyweds. I’m sure the novelty will wear off. No

  offense—”

  “Bunny, I mean she’s driven out here a couple of times a day since Monday. She’s got Christoph’s other Jeep.”

  I had a hard time picturing Astrid voluntarily venturing out to New Jersey pretty much ever, even under heavy sedation.

  “Okay. That is kind of weird,” I said.

  “She seems shaky. Like she could use a friend.”

  “Astrid’s got a bazillion friends.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but how many of them aren’t assholes?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  We were both quiet for a second.

  “Look, Bunny?” said Dean. “There’s something else.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She hasn’t taken off that black jacket she had on the other night. She just wanders around the office with the hood up. In sunglasses.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Just give her a call sometime.”

  “I will.”

  “I should get back to it,” said Dean.

  “Cool. Catch you après-graveyard.”

  “You bet.”

  I was just about to hang up but instead said, “Hey, Dean?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If Astrid does come out there again, try and get her to fucking eat something, okay? Bitch needs a cheeseburger.”

  I put down the phone and Yumiko blew a plume of Marlboro smoke across my desk. “You going back there, after you already found that dead kid?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re going to try and help figure out who it was.”

  “Fucking white people,” she said, stubbing out her smoke in a brimming ashtray. “All of you— crazy.”

  I shrugged.

  So many cities, all mashed into each other on one tiny island.

  On the train to Queens I pondered Dean’s concern for Astrid and started thinking back to what she was like as I’d first known her.

  There was one Sunday night in particular when I was sitting in the Ford Smoker bumming Marlboro Lights off Joan Appelbaum.

  Whenever I’d had cash enough to buy my own, I walked down to the Dobbs Ferry Grand Union and purchased something off-puttingly bizarre like Philip Morris Commanders. These tasted like burnt sneakers marinated in Guinness, but since that meant only the truly desperate cadged them off me, each pack lasted twice as long.

  That no classmate ever begrudged me a cigarette despite this all-too-transparent strategy spoke to a tribal generosity of spirit I’d never once experienced in nine years of public school, go figure. Here sportsmanship counted: humility trumped money, wit meant nothing without courtesy, and our loyalty to one another was both absolute and fierce—no matter what.

  Ford was one of the “new dorms,” an abrupt trio of skinny, cedar-shingled seventies-ski-lodge towers. It was down the hill from my own digs in stately Cushing, whose fin-de-siècle stucco had once also housed my mother.

  At 9:55 P.M. the green vinyl common-room sofas were still packed with Tab-swilling nicotine-junkies attired in standard girls’-boarding-

  school winter leisure wear: Bean duck boots and long underwear

  beneath prim-necked calico-flannel Lanz nighties.

  I, meanwhile—sockless in flat orange espadrilles—sported a duct-tape-repaired down jacket, somebody’s older brother’s madras-plaid pants (sold to me cheap for weed money), and a hideously clashing aloha shirt scored over Christmas break from the St. Vincent de Paul in Salinas.

  “You study for Hindley’s bullshit poetry-thing yet?” asked Joan, spotting me a third cigarette.

  I leaned in toward the flame of her lighter. “I’m waiting on Astrid. Bitch is late getting back from the city.”

  “All-nighter, then.” Joan squinted up at the smoke-wreathed clock.

  “How the hell does Hindley expect us to memorize sixty-nine poems in a single weekend?”

  “More to the point,” said Joan, “why the hell would you wait until the very last possible night to open the damn book?”

  “Because I’m an idiot?”

  She blew a smoke ring. “You’ll fucking ace it anyway. Like always.”

  “Which doesn’t mean tonight won’t utterly suck…. I’d pawn my left ass-cheek for a hit of speed.”

  “That sophomore chick up in Strong has a whole bottle of her mother’s diet shit.”

  “Too broke,” I said. “Story of my life.”

  “Boo fucking hoo,” Joan replied, tapping ash into someone else’s abandoned fuchsia Tab can.

  “Where the hell is Astrid?” I asked, eyeing the clock again.

  “Why do you care? Start without her.”

  “That would be the prudent course of action, but it would require knowing where my copy of the actual fucking anthology was.”

  “You really are an idiot.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “The merit of your hypothesis—as cogent summation of my native character—has long since been firmly established.”

  “Nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  “ Au contraire, my always-thoroughly-prepared-for-class friend,” I said. “Everyone likes a smart-ass; especially when we fail our stupid poetry-bullshit English tests so they get to wag their fingers and say, ‘I told you so.’”

  Joan tilted her head to peer out the window behind me. “Bet that’s her pulling up right now.”

  “Taxi?”

  “Limo,” she said. “Stretch.”

  I blew a smoke ring of my own. “ Definitely Astrid. The Venezuelans all signed in early.”

  Joan dragged a finger through my vaporous O as it wobbled past. “Lucky bitch. How the hell can she afford limos?”

  “Flocks of smitten stockbrokers,” I said, “desperate to have her stay on for just one more vodka-tonic at Doubles, or the Yale Club.”

  No sooner had I spoken than Astrid herself danced through the smoker’s doorway: whip-lean in slender khakis, white tails of her beau-trophy shirt flaring wide with each twirl.

  She was trailing what appeared to be a sable coat along the ash-foul carpet behind her, and high as a ribbon-tailed kite: Ray-Bans still on, Walkman turned up so loud everyone in the room could hear David Byrne’s tinny “ This ain’t no party/ This ain’t no disco” plaint bleeding out from under the headphones.

  “Darlings,” she said, flashing a red box of Dunhills, “who’s got a light?”

  “Whose woods these are I think I know…” read Astrid from her beat-to-shit orange copy of Understanding Poetry.

  “‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’” I said.

  “By?”

  “Frost, duh. Like anything else with trees or winter.”

  I sat cross-legged on her dorm
-room floor holding a Dunhill out the window; she was draped sideways across her bed, now wearing the goddamn fur over ice-blue pajamas.

  A rush of frigid breeze ruffled the Indian-print bedspread nailed to the wall at my elbow, the stereo needle starting over again fresh on the same Beatles album we’d been listening to for the last two hours.

  “Hail to thee, blithe spirit—” she read.

  “ bird thou never wert. Keats.”

  “Shelley.” Astrid flopped over onto her back, making the mattress shiver, then stretched her long legs up the wall beside her, crossing her ankles in the middle of Jim Morrison’s poster-forehead. “Title?”

  “‘Ode on a Piece-of-Shit Something-Something I Can’t Remember Because It’s Four in the Goddamn Morning’?”

  “Actually, it’s ‘Ode to the Roundly Celebrated Demise of His Whiny Iambic Ass,’ ” she said.

  “ Bien sûr. And by the way, nice fucking coat.”

  “Mummie’s.”

  “She’s not going to miss it?”

  Astrid shrugged. “She’s away for three months. And you’re dressed like shit again.”

  “Satire,” I said. “Besides which, I’m out of quarters for laundry.”

  “Madeline, one must make an effort. All that overbred bone structure wasting its sweetness on the desert air.”

  “Thomas Gray,” I said. “‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ And who’m I going to impress on a Sunday night—the security guards?”

  Astrid snapped the book shut, then lolled her head off the end of the bed, looking at me upside down. “Shall we do another line?”

  By that she meant coke, not poetry: Swain-of-the-Hour’s parting gift as he’d tucked her into the limo that evening—two grams, all told, which we’d already put quite a dent in.

  I flicked my cigarette out the window, watching the glow of its orange ember arc high and then plummet, three stories down toward the snow. “That would be lovely, if you can spare it.”

  “Lots more where this came from,” she said, reaching for her hand mirror and razor blade. “So we might as well do all of it.”

  “Your generosity is greatly appreciated, even so.”

  I gave the room an aerosol spritz of Ozium before shutting the window. This was a spray billing itself as air-freshener, but which actually worked by deadening anyone-who-inhaled-it’s sense of smell for several minutes—essential camouflage in the dorm-parent wars since we weren’t allowed cigarettes upstairs.