Invisible Boy

by Cornelia Read

  “Astrid, listen, it’s Maddie. I just wanted to see how you were doing this morning. Give me a call at work.”

  I was just about to start reciting the Catalog’s 800 number when she picked up, groggy.

  “Hey,” I said. “You all right? I was worried.”

  “Maddie?” she said, coughing. “What the hell time is it?”

  “Early.”

  I heard the rasp of a lighter. “You woke me up.”

  “Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I left for work.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I just need more sleep.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you go, then. Call me later.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  She coughed again and hung up.

  We were slammed that week at work: phone and fax orders already picking up for the holidays, and Betty ran through every hour on the hour to throw things in Editorial while shrieking about how we were all lazy, incompetent pieces of shit.

  At one point she even made Yumiko cry, though of course Yumiko got all tough again a minute later and swore it wasn’t anything That Crazy One-Arm White Bitch had said, it was just that she’d caught some shrapnel when Betty missed her with the stapler, smashing a fresh pot of Sanka with it instead.

  Even so, I left Astrid a message every day on my lunch hour, saying I hoped she was doing okay.

  She didn’t call back.

  Dean saw her a couple of times out at the office with Christoph. He said she seemed fine. That they both did.

  “Want to have dinner with Astrid and Christoph?” asked Dean, when I walked in the door Friday night. “He just called a minute ago.”

  “Is it a command performance?” I walked into our room and tossed my coat across the bed, then sat down at the end of the mattress to take off my boots.

  I didn’t feel up for double-dating, not having heard from Astrid since her midnight phone call about getting pushed down the stairs.

  “More like a bon voyage,” said Dean. “We kicked off early because he’s coming with me to Houston tomorrow. I said we’d let him know when you got home.”

  “They want us to slog uptown?”

  “He suggested Meriken.”

  This was a sushi joint just a few blocks up from us, on Seventh.

  “Sounds okay, actually,” I said, surprised to find this was true. “Especially if the offer includes some beer. What time?”

  “Whenever. He said they’d cab it.”

  I flopped backwards onto the bed, cast thunking against my ribs. The arm inside didn’t ache anymore, but it itched like hell.

  “Will you call him back?” I asked. “I feel the need to lie here stupidly horizontal for a minute before I peel off my work-crap clothes.”

  “Want a beer now? I think there’s a Rolling Rock.”

  “That would be heaven,” I said. “Yea verily.”

  “Did you ever hear anything else about the whole episode with the stairs?” he asked.

  “No. I could ask them both during dinner—be really subtle, you know? Like, ‘Hey, Christoph, have you stopped beating your wife?’ Bet that would go over big.”

  “Promise you won’t and I’ll make it two Rolling Rocks, even if it means a run to the deli.”

  “My lips are sealed,” I said.

  Dinner was going better than expected so far. Astrid wasn’t talking much, but Dean and Christoph were chatting about Switzerland.

  Maybe he was a Nazi but not a wifebeater? At that point I was too exhausted from work to parse through the distinctions.

  And at any rate, Astrid was there voluntarily, with no visible bruising.

  Stockholm syndrome?Or maybe she just made it all up?

  I was the one in a cast, if anybody else in the restaurant was scoping out our table for outward signs of domestic strife, after all—not that that had anything to do with Dean.

  Why was I only the friend for when everything sucked? Where was Cammy when the going got tough? Or Astrid’s mother, for that matter?

  I reached for the sake.

  Our waiter placed tiny oblong plates of sushi and sashimi gently on the white tablecloth, artful arrangements of red toro and pale gold hamachi, hand-rolled seaweed cones brimming with fanned avocado and shreds of crabmeat.

  “Maddie,” said Christoph, “I didn’t know until today when Dean and I were driving home that you two had gone to Switzerland on your wedding trip. How is it that you never mentioned this?”

  Well, maybe because the last couple of times we hung out you were either ditching us or lecturing me about ‘the trouble with’ Jews and black people?

  But he leaned across the table to refill my thimble of sake, seeming truly interested. “What part of the country did you visit, Saanen and Gstaad? You mentioned that your brother and sister had been at school in that area.”

  “The Kennedy School,” I said, a bit ticked at myself for being quite so pleased that he’d remembered. “Pagan was there for eighth grade, Trace for seventh and eighth.”

  “Did they enjoy it?”

  “Very much,” I said. “And I admit to being quite envious. They’re both excellent skiers now.”

  “You wanted to stay at home in California, then?” he asked.

  I drank my sake and he filled it again. “I started at Dobbs the year Pagan went to Saanen, with her godmother’s daughter Arabella.”

  “They’re the same age?” he asked.

  “Pals since they were babies, too. Actually, there’s a favorite story of mine about Arabella. One of the youngest boarders that year was Roger Moore’s son. I think he was five or six—”

  “And they sent him away to boarding school?” asked Dean.

  Astrid started casing the room like she was plotting to bail on us for a cooler table.

  Fuck off, it’s a good story.

  “He and Arabella got put on the T-bar together,” I said. “And you’re supposed to tuck it under your butt, but not actually sit, you know?”

  Christoph reached for a piece of toro with his chopsticks and nodded, smiling.

  I picked up a piece myself, eschewing left-handed chopsticks for my fingers.

  “Except he’s in kindergarten and she’s tall for twelve,” I continued, “so their ride up was pretty sketchy.”

  Astrid yawned, her plate still empty before her.

  “At the top the kid looks Arabella up and down once, slowly, then says, ‘ Husky bitch,’ and shoots away down the Eggli.”

  Christoph and Dean started laughing.

  Astrid leaned forward, her face contorted with anger as she growled, “Don’t you dare laugh at me.”

  And before anyone could respond to that, she stuck both arms out straight and dragged them across the table, growling with effort as she shoved everything over the edge—our soup bowls and sushi plates, bottles of soy sauce and sake, even the bud-vase centerpiece—all of it smashing against the tiled floor below.

  Then she stood up, panting, a little bit of white showing all the way around her eyes’ dark irises.

  The entire restaurant went dead still, dead quiet.

  “I hate you,” she said, her voice oddly calm.

  She looked at Christoph, then Dean, then me. “I hate all of you.”

  Christoph said, “Darling…”

  She swung a fist at her chair, knocking it over sideways onto the floor. Then she stalked away, her footsteps the only noise in the silenced room.

  No one spoke for several seconds after the street door slammed shut behind her, then dozens of voices swarmed up, buzzing.

  Christoph rose to his feet, oddly graceful. “Please accept my apologies. My wife has not been well, and I must see her home.”

  We said of course, and asked if there was anything we could do to help.

  He shook his head. “Thank you for being such good friends to both of us. It means a great deal to me.”

  Then he turned to placate the approaching headwaiter, wallet in hand.

  Dean pressed his knee against min
e. I watched the last stained

  corner of tablecloth slip down and away, a white flag surrendered to gravity.

  There was soy sauce all over my cast.

  Astrid called me at work.

  No hello, no apology, just launching right in with, “I have to leave him,” the moment I pressed line three.

  “Did you hear me?” she said, blowing smoke across the mouthpiece of her receiver.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?” She took another drag. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “You have to help me, Madeline. You don’t know what it’s been like.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  I heard the click of a lighter. Her next words were mumbled a little, around the fresh cigarette. “He’s having me watched.”

  “Christoph?”

  She exhaled again. I could hear the echo of hard-soled footsteps against parquet. She was pacing.

  “Astrid,” I said, “are you serious?”

  “I swear to you.”

  “Well, I mean, how exactly?”

  “He’s hired people.”

  “What do you mean, people?”

  “In the apartment across the street. With telescopes.”

  Oh, fuck.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “I’m going crazy, aren’t I, Maddie?” she said, her voice soft.

  “Yes.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  The pacing stopped. “How bad?”

  “Um, you sound like my father.”

  “Oh, God. That bad?”

  “I don’t know. Are you worried about the KGB reading your mail?”

  “So I’m pretty much fucked then, aren’t I?”

  She sounded almost relieved.

  “Astrid, I’m so sorry, but I can’t help you with this. We need to get you some pros here, okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What does Christoph say?”

  She started to cry. “He really did push me down the stairs.”

  “Shhhh,” I said. “Don’t worry, I believe you.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You want me to come over?”

  She was quiet now. She stopped sniffling. I just listened to her breathe for a while.

  “I think I’m just going to go lie down right now. I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said, “really. Not entirely lucid, obviously, but I pose no danger to myself and others.”

  I believed her. She sounded saner than she had in a long time. Her old self.

  “Anything you need, call me back, all right? I’m only over on Fifty-seventh. I could, you know, bring you soup or something.”

  “Love you,” she said. “ Ciao, bella.”

  I replaced the receiver in its cradle. “Happy holidays.”

  MANHATTAN

  February 1991

  When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

  —Eleanor Roosevelt

  42

  I slogged up out of the subway stairs into the knife-edge of February on Queens Boulevard. A bitter cold wind barreled straight at me with a Bessie Smith moan, snapping a star of grit into my right eye.

  Blinking didn’t work. I had to pull my gloveless left hand from the warmth of an overcoat pocket to rub it clear.

  I’d be getting the cast off in two more weeks. They’d told me at St. Vincent’s that the pin appeared to be doing the trick, holding the bones together.

  I leaned forward into the blast, squinting at the ground. We hadn’t had any fresh snow in a week. The existing piles shoved to the edges of the boulevard were glazed brownish black with a glittering, filthy crust of ice.

  Wind bulled its way inside my coat, making it balloon out behind me. By the time I reached the courthouse steps I felt like Doctor fucking Zhivago.

  The cheese-grater sculpture out front was whipping around so fast it looked primed for takeoff.

  I stepped into the line to get inside, which was long and slow this time of morning. There must have been twenty people in front of me just waiting to reach the doors. A few standees gripped steaming cups of take-out coffee. Nobody talked much. It was still cold as shit, but at least we had a little protection from the wind.

  The line crawled onward, slowly up one stair at a time. It took maybe ten minutes to reach the doors, and I was grateful when they finally swung closed behind me.

  It took some concentration not to fall on my ass, since the lobby’s floor was slick with tracked-in snowmelt and little chunks of ice. The line inched toward the metal detector. I thought back to my first time here, when I’d had Skwarecki waving at me in greeting.

  I wasn’t likely to see her today. And even if I did, talking to a homicide cop once your case has reached trial is like running into your favorite teacher from elementary school. There’s so much you still want to tell them but their hearts belong to new children.

  Bost had said I could sit in the back of the courtroom and watch the trial, but not until after I’d testified myself.

  Cate would be up first, then me.

  We’d been told to report by 9:30 A.M., and it was just after nine o’clock now, but trials in Queens were reputed to grind exceedingly slowly.

  Cops here to testify waited in a basement hall a couple floors down from the prosecutors in the building’s courthouse-to-jail connector.

  Skwarecki said she’d often been stuck down there for upwards of twelve hours, and her personal best was seventeen and a half.

  “At least we got restrooms,” she’d said, “unlike those miserable fucks coming out of the cells.”

  “So you guys just have to sit there?” I asked.

  “We bring lawn chairs.”

  “Lawn chairs?”

  “The kind that fold up. Low to the ground is good, in case you get stuck overnight.”

  “You have to be there a lot?”

  “We got up to 2,246 homicides in New York City last year. Any one of mine goes to trial, I’m there. I know that basement like the back of my fucking hand.”

  That’s a lot of dead people, 2,246.

  I’d made it up through the line as far as the X-ray’s conveyor belt and started emptying my pockets into a plastic tub, then took off my new cheapo-drugstore watch and tossed it in. The metal detectors seemed slightly less exacting than the ones they had in airports, since my underwires hadn’t set off any alarms the first few times I’d been here. With any luck I wouldn’t have to get wanded and groped this morning, either.

  I looked across the room at a huge mosaic mural. It was crammed with allegorical figures, but I couldn’t quite follow the intended narrative other than it seemed to have something to do with the figure of Justice.

  I’d have to remember to ask Kyle about it. He’d always been good on the art history stuff back in college. He’d said he’d try to join us by lunch, but couldn’t be in the courtroom observing beforehand. He was due to attend the funeral of a co-worker, instead, that morning.

  The doors behind me swung open again, to let a cold shot of air and few more lucky people inside.

  I turned to look behind me before getting waved through the detector gate, just to check if Cate was anywhere back in the line. I didn’t spot her, but I couldn’t see down the steps once the condensation-fogged doors closed. She’d told me she wanted to be here early, anyway, so I figured she was probably inside.

  I walked through the white security portal and the thing started beeping like crazy.

  I raised my hands and stepped toward the tall dark matron armed with a wand.

  “Feet apart, honey,” she said.

  Being a rather buxom person herself, she gave me a nod and a wink when I confided, “Underwires. New bra.”

  Or maybe the metal in my wrist.

  * * *

  The courtroom was huge compared
to where the grand jury had met.

  I’d spent the entire morning waiting in a stuffy little room with a bunch of other witnesses. Cate and I had chatted for a while until she was called. I’d sat there for another long stretch before we broke for lunch.

  Kyle caught up with us in our now habitual booth, across Queens Boulevard, and then Skwarecki walked in too, which made me happy.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, scootching in after she did.

  “I didn’t get to see anything this morning,” I said. “But I think I might be up after lunch.”

  Cate smiled. “But it went fine. My stuff, anyway. Not that I had anything dramatic to share.”

  “How was the funeral?” I asked, turning to Kyle.

  “ Unbelievable,” he said. “And it went on for fucking hours.”

  “Schmidt’s thing today?” asked Skwarecki. “I went to the wake Sunday. His gumar went meshuggene.”

  Mayor Dinkins might refer to the city as a “Glorious Mosaic,” but the next time I heard the term “melting pot” being dismissed as politically incorrect, I’d cite a Polish cop’s Sicilian-and-Yiddish rundown of the dead German attorney’s mistress having lost her shit during

  the traditionally Irish party thrown to honor his passing.

  I spent another hour sitting around the witness green room before the bailiff called my name, saying it was my turn to take the stand.

  He opened the door and motioned me toward the courtroom.

  I glanced up at the judge as I walked across the floor toward the witness box. He was a stately looking silver-haired African American guy with powerful shoulders under the robes.IN GOD WE TRUST was writ large on the wall above His Honor’s balding head.

  I thought a better sentiment might be “God Help Us All, Every One,” but it’s not like anyone had solicited my opinion.

  I’d been expecting to get sworn in with my hand on a Bible, having watched my fair share of after-school Perry Mason reruns, and wondered if anyone still believed that a few seconds’ manual contact with Holy pebbled-black leatherette could override self-interest in late-twentieth-century New York.

  In the end all I had to do was hold my hand up, which seemed plenty, not least since the judge looked like a sufficiently omnipotent hard-ass that he wouldn’t require divine backup.