I threaded the Porsche down it with care, trying to skirt the worst of the potholes without scraping against the branches on either side.
The house was a stark, thumpingly graceless mid-seventies saltbox pastiche clad in cedar shakes and plopped at the edge of a treeless meadow.
The new dorms all over again.
I turned off the engine just as Christoph appeared in the front doorway, looking genuinely pleased to see us.
Dean unraveled himself from the passenger seat. I reached into the backseat for our bags, setting them down in the driveway to retrieve a gift-offering of wine.
Christoph had come outside, so I stood up with the bottle in my hand to thank him so very much for his most kind invitation, et cetera, while we did the whole kiss-kiss routine.
The only thing I know about wine is that it’s a good idea to proffer all the cash in my pocket to a liquor store’s most asymmetrically coiffed, Off Broadway–ready employee while humbly beseeching him or her to rescue my ignorant Rolling Rock–swilling American ass from potential Continental derision.
Christoph looked at the bottle in my hand and smiled. “How thoughtful of you, dear Maddie. Shall we have a glass once we’ve gotten you settled?”
He picked up our bags, overriding all protest on Dean’s part. “Don’t be silly—you must allow me the pleasure, as your host.”
Christoph switched the bags to his left hand to give Dean a welcoming clap on the shoulder before leading us inside the house.
“I will just show you where you are to be sleeping,” he said. “After which I should no doubt awaken Astrid and Camilla.”
A large market clock in the front hallway gave the time as five minutes past two.
Christoph and Dean started up the stairs.
I dry-swallowed a Percodan and followed them.
25
Camilla had these pills,” said Astrid. “From some photographer in London. We weren’t sure what they were.”
“And you took them anyway,” I said.
“Well, of course,” she said.
She had nicotine-stain circles under her eyes and still looked like a Florentine Catherine Deneuve.
“Were they like, speed, or tranquilizers, or what?” I asked.
“They were blue,” she said. “And we had some champagne, and then we got in the Jeep and drove out here. I don’t remember much after the tunnel.”
Cammy wandered into the front hall wearing very short shorts and a little tiny pink tank top and these stupid-ass knee-high Aspen-hooker cave-girl boots with shaggy blond fur on the outside. The rest of her pillow-creased face looked like haggard shit, but her plastic surgeon’s homage to my nose was perfect.
“Did we go to a Chinese restaurant yesterday?” she asked Astrid, walking past me without a flicker of recognition.
Astrid pulled a crushed soft-pack of Marlboros out of her jeans. “You’re hallucinating.”
Cammy lifted a heavy silver lighter from the sideboard next to us, then took a cigarette from Astrid. They both lit up.
“Wait a minute,” said Astrid, “did we have a scorpion bowl? I seem to remember floating gardenias and long straws.”
Cammy shuffled away into the living room and fell into a chair, the motion tumbling ashes down the front of her shirt. “I can’t stand scorpion bowls.”
“Chrissy, did we come home with gardenias?” asked Astrid.
Christoph shook his head. “You were both sound asleep in the living room when I arrived.”
“And what time was that?” she asked.
“Four o’clock, a little after.”
Astrid turned toward Cammy. “Where’s my coat?”
Cammy squinted. “It’s over here, wadded up.”
Astrid stalked across the room, saying “Aha!” when she picked up a football-sized jumble of rather fine tweed.
She shook it out and put it on. Though it was big on her and now looked like something a wet dog had slept in, the jacket was beautifully cut. I presumed it belonged to Christoph.
Astrid patted herself down, producing a crumpled piece of paper from her vest pocket.
“A receipt?” asked Christoph, amused.
Astrid arrayed herself along the sofa and turned on the nearest side-table lamp. Cammy winced at the light, flicking ashes onto the carpet at her feet.
Astrid smoothed out the piece of paper against her thigh, peered at it, then said, “Jesus Christ!”
“S’matter?” asked Cammy.
“We tipped those Chinese people four hundred and fifty-seven bucks.”
Cammy shrugged.
“On a forty-dollar check,” added Astrid.
Cammy stood and padded into the kitchen, returning with a bottle of mineral water.
I tried willing my stomach acid to get with the program and dissolve the damn Percodan, already.
“With a credit card?” asked Christoph.
“Sweetie,” said Astrid, stroking his arm, “your Amex.”
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might ask them to reduce the charge.”
She lowered her lashes to half-mast. “Darling, won’t you do it? You’re so good at that sort of thing.”
“I’m afraid I have some business to discuss with Dean this afternoon,” her husband replied, smiling but unmoved.
He led my spouse outside onto the living-room terrace.
Cammy yawned and looked at Astrid. “Let’s just go. Get it over with.”
Astrid pulled her sunglasses out of the tweed jacket’s left pocket and put them on.
She and Cammy brushed past me and out the door as though I were the front-hall coat rack or something.
Still holding the stupid bottle of wine in my hand, I watched them climb into the smaller of the two Jeeps outside and speed away.
“Great to be here,” I said. “And always such a pleasure to see both of you.”
Dean and Christoph appeared to be having a great time outside, so I set to work locating a corkscrew, a tray, and three wineglasses.
I opened the bottle, put two glasses on the tray and filled them halfway, celebrating my accomplishment by consuming a generously medicinal allotment of Côtes-du-Who-the-Fuck-Cares from glass number three.
“Trenchant,” I decreed, “yet surprisingly perky-nippled.”
I poured myself a refill, plopped it on the tray, and headed outside.
* * *
“Of course,” Christoph was saying, “I suppose we must allow for the fact that these Americans whom one finds working in factories, and so on, they are not very well educated.”
“One might find it impolitic to insist on that point, however,” said Dean. “Particularly while in the field attempting to convince them that one’s product has technical merit.”
“Even so,” said Christoph, “the people… they need a strong hand.”
I polished off my second glass of wine.
Christoph turned to me. “Your husband, Maddie, he is really very smart about these things.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite.”
I tried to sound nonchalant about it when what I really wanted to do was grab him by the shoulders and insist that my husband was the smartest, most principled, hardest-working man he was ever likely to meet, much less employ—that Dean could build a house or a train car from scratch, had fixed my old VW Rabbit’s dead engine with a Swiss Army knife and a Bic lighter when we got stranded in the rain the night of our second date, and that he was, moreover, equally at home discussing Goethe, the psychological function of shamans in rural Nepal, and the continuing impact of FDR’s agricultural policy.
Instead I bit my tongue, trying to look intrigued with their discussion of biological oxygen demand and Teutonic lab protocols until enough time had passed that I could courteously excuse myself.
I rattled around inside the house, desperate for something to read. The only printed matter in the entire place was the previous July’s Town & Country, which I took upstairs to our guest room.
In the old days I�
�d usually found a couple of people I knew in this publication, albeit vaguely: friends of my grandparents, or names that were familiar from my parents’ tales of boarding school and deb parties back in the fifties. Now it might just as well have been the society gazette of Madagascar, or Pluto. Who the fuck were these people? And how the hell could they afford all the crap in these advertisements?
I didn’t want to be them; I didn’t even covet their stuff. I just couldn’t compute the vertiginous gulf between these Jaguar and Bulgari and Harry Winston ads and my own continuing struggle to chip in on communal baba ghanoush delivery from Fourteenth Street.
My mother still danced on the verge of magazine world whenever the spirit moved her, but I lived in terror that the middle class’s lowest rungs had long since been yanked up and away from her children: a rope ladder dangled from the basket of some hot-air balloon, above our reach, now gliding seaward.
How would the generations after me turn out if I couldn’t scratch my way to safety in this one? Would my failure spawn another Teddy Underhill, or, worse yet, his mother?
Seven bucks an hour and my pompous ancestry felt like precious little armor against the abyss of either contingency.
But was money any protection when you got right down to it?
Of course not. Just look at the fucking Hamptons, not to mention the abundance of dangerous psychos still extant amongst my wealthier relatives.
It was another two hours before Astrid and her Sancho-Panzer returned from shaking down the Chinese restaurant, by which point I was standing at the kitchen counter poking the armful of meadow flowers I’d gathered into the neck of an empty milk bottle, stem by stem.
It had been either that or lighting the house copy of Town & Country on fire so I could stomp its ashes into the driveway gravel, shrieking with boredom.
All the Percodan in America could not sweeten this little weekend. And besides which, we’d run out of wine.
I’d turned on the kitchen lights, the sky long since tipped violet by burgeoning dusk, but Astrid still wore her sunglasses.
“Madeline Dare with a talent for the arrangement of flowers,” she said. “Not something I’d ever have imagined.”
“How’d it go with rescinding your tip?”
“They would not listen to reason,” she said.
“Gee,” I replied. “Bummer.”
She twined a stem of Queen Anne’s lace through her fingers. “I shouldn’t have said anything in front of Chrissy. He hates it when I borrow his credit card.”
“Actually, he seemed okay with it,” I said.
She yawned, ignoring that. “I must go get changed.”
“You look fine. The sunglasses are a tad over the top, but other than that—”
“For a dinner party.”
“Here?”
“A friend’s place, up the road.”
“Well that’s lucky,” I said. “You’re down to cocktail onions and Grey Poupon.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The real season is over, of course, but I’m sure you and Dean can still find someplace to eat in town.”
I stared at her, struck dumb as a cow.
“It would’ve been so awkward to have you tag along,” she said. “They’re not the sort of people you’d fit in with.”
I wondered whether my old friend could’ve hurt me more had she just smashed my head through the kitchen wall, for sport.
The answer was a big fat no.
Her eyebrows rose from behind the dark glasses. “Oh, for God’s sake… you’re not going to cry, are you?”
Not for a second, if it fucking kills me.
“Maddie, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Jesus, Astrid.” I looked away from her, crossing my arms. “I haven’t been ditched since, like, fifth grade.”
“The hostess was already upset because we’re bringing Camilla.”
I wanted to bolt from the room, to bury my head in my mother’s lap, or, better yet, to hide behind winter coats and tennis racquets in a dark, distant closet, arms wrapped tight around my knees.
Cammy came back downstairs in a little black dress, trailing Marlboro ribbon clouds.
At least she’d changed out of the Flintstones footwear.
I pointed at her feet. “Much better.”
She stared into space somewhere past my right shoulder, pupils dilated as hubcaps. “Better than what?”
“The boots,” I said. “They looked like you’d skinned a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Way too Cruella De Vil.”
“De Vil,” said Cammy. “She does shoes?”
She sucked in a drag, cheeks hollow, then French-inhaled.
I shook my head. “Coats.”
Cammy rounded her lips to exhale, wreathing my head in smoke. “Never heard of her.”
“ Quelle surprise.”
She looked past me to Astrid. “Let’s take that Porsche tonight. I hate Jeeps.”
“The Porsche belongs to Maddie,” said Astrid.
Cammy blinked, twice. “Who?”
Astrid hooked a thumb at me.
The nose-plagiarist bitch tapped ashes onto my toe. “How did you get a car like that?”
“I shot a man in Reno,” I said, “just to watch him die.”
Cammy blinked again. “You bore me. Tell Christoph we left.”
She let her cigarette fall into the sink. I watched its ember hiss and go black.
26
Dean and I had finally found a pizza place after driving around for half an hour.
“God,” I said as we took our seats inside, “that fucking bitch.”
Dean glanced around the room. “Given our current geographic coordinates, Bunny, I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”
Our waiter glided to a halt well away from the table as though worried that some random observer might presume we were known to him.
“Have you reached a decision?” he asked.
“We have,” I said.
He appeared to be fighting a rather powerful fluctuation in local gravity. Or just the inexorable magnetism of Caroline Kennedy, three tables over.
Under normal circumstances I have an abhorrence of taking out my shitty day on waitstaff, having worked too many horrible restaurant jobs myself over the years. The work is grinding, and thankless, and the kitchen floors are always so goddamn sticky. But I was so tired of this town and all the people in it, and besides which it was a pizza joint, for chrissake.
“Excuse me, sir?” I said.
He crossed his arms. “Yes?”
“Would you prefer to have us shout into the kitchen from here, or shall I just commence hoisting a string of code-flags?”
“My apologies, madam,” he said, inching closer with palpable
reluctance—a mime in a wind tunnel.
Dean fluttered his lashes at me over the top of his menu. “Why don’t you order for both of us?”
“Why don’t I stick a fork in your eye?” I muttered.
He grinned. “Because our waiter neglected to bring cutlery?”
“You are so dead,” I said.
“Shall I give you a few more minutes?” asked the waiter.
“No thank you,” I said. “We’d like a large escargot pizza, please. With goat cheese but not the raspberry coulis.”
“Foie gras?” asked the waiter.
I closed my eyes. “Let us both pretend that you refrained from uttering such an entirely de trop suggestion aloud.”
Chastened, he transcribed the order to his little pad, a task that apparently necessitated the employment of jazz hands.
“What sort of beer do you have?” I asked.
He tapped the wine list beside me with his little gold pen. “We have an extensive cellar, madam.”
“And might one hope to stumble across a martini therein?”
He confessed that one might indeed.
“Please bring me two, then,” I said. “Very dry, very cold, small olives.”
“I’m not really a huge mart
ini fan,” said Dean.
“Yeah right,” I said. “Like I’m planning to share.”
Dean’s eyes went wide. “You’re ordering two martinis for yourself?”
“I am,” I said. “Because that stupid whore Cammy stole my fucking Percodan.”
“Madam,” said the waiter, sympathetic at last, “you have my sincerest condolences.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And could you please bring my husband a glass of whatever ridiculous sort of wine a person is expected to drink with escargot pizza?”
The man bobbed his head and scuttled away.
Dean nudged my foot under the table. “The people… they need a strong hand.”
“The Hamptons,” I replied, “they could use a little napalm.”
“Look,” I said, as we turned back onto Job’s Lane, toward Chateau Butthead, “are you sure you want to work for Christoph?”
“You’re the one who introduced me to the guy, Bunny.”
“Mea fucking culpa,” I said. “I take it back.”
“And besides, what about Nutty Buddy?”
“Nutty Buddy’s affection for me appears to have fallen down through the grate of a neglected storm drain.”
“You’re in kind of a pissy mood,” he said.
“Ya think?”
“Is it just getting ditched tonight?” he asked.
“Let’s see… in the past ten days I’ve discovered the bones of a three-year-old kid who was beaten to death, learned that not only did my most-despised ‘stepfather’ molest my sister but also that my mother finds it socially inconvenient to believe her, and—bonus!—I’m expected to make nice to Mom’s newest boyfriend this Monday, over lunch, while you’re in Texas doing errands for my newly former friend’s husband. Pinch me, honey, because I just couldn’t be more thrilled with my fabulous life!”
“I’m not sure martinis should remain among your cocktails of choice.”
“You want to walk back to Manhattan?”
“Is there some kind of bus?”
“I believe they call it a jitney,” I said.
“Of course. How too-too silly of me.”
Dean moved his hand to my knee. I put mine on top of it.
Invisible Boy Page 13
