Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  “I’ll try anything once.” He folded his long body into the chair and rested his paint-flecked forearms on the table.

  “You’re an artist.”

  “Tell him he’s going to be famous,” Andy said. “Any day now.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Jem Farrell.”

  “I’m bored,” Andy said. “It’s almost midnight. We have to see Danger Dick.”

  “You go ahead,” Jem said. “I’ll find you.”

  Andy faded into the crowd. My cheeks warmed. Jem had let Andy walk away to stay with me.

  “You ever see Danger Dick? He’s doing a big stunt at midnight. We shouldn’t miss it.”

  I’d never heard of Danger Dick. Jem said he was a performance artist whose canvas was danger. He once cocooned himself in Bubble Wrap—lots of it—and threw himself off the roof of a six-story building to see if he’d bounce. (He didn’t bounce, but he survived.) One Halloween he rigged up a kind of jet pack, ran up a ramp, and flew over a huge pile of pumpkins to a landing ramp on the other side. A punk Evel Knievel. On this night, to usher in the New Year, he was going to dangle off the roof of the building in a harness, wearing a suit made of fireworks. At midnight he’d light the suit and the fireworks would go off as he was slowly lowered to the ground, assuming he didn’t blow up or burn to death.

  “It’ll be fun to watch,” Jem said. “What time is it?”

  “What time is it?” I repeated. “That’s what my neighbor kept asking this morning.”

  I told him how Carmen and I had collapsed into bed after a night of carousing when someone pounded on our door.

  “I look through the peephole and there’s this scrawny old lady in a stained housedress and slippers. She’s got wild gray hair and swollen purple feet and she’s hugging an alarm clock like a teddy bear. I opened the door and she said, ‘What time is it?’ ” I tried to imitate the old lady’s croaky voice. “It was after three in the morning, and I told her so. She squinched up her face like this”—I squinched up my face—“like she’d just licked a lemon. Like my answer didn’t make sense. And she said it again, ‘What time is it?’ I thought, Maybe she needs the exact time, so I looked at our kitchen clock and said, ‘It’s three-twenty-two. Okay?’ But she shook her head and said, ‘What time is it?’ ”

  “I used to have a neighbor like that.” Jem tapped his temple.

  “I reached for her clock and said, ‘Would you like me to set it for you?’ but she yanked the clock away and stamped her foot and yelled, ‘What time is it!’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to shut the door in her face. So we had a kind of staring contest, a standoff there in the hallway. It was like we were in a trance.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The rooster crowed. You know that rooster in the park?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know why he crowed. It wasn’t dawn, not yet. Anyway, that kind of broke the spell. She said, ‘Hello. What time is it,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know what time it is. I’m sorry.’ She seemed to accept that. She turned away and started inching up the stairs muttering, ‘What time is it, what time is it.’ ”

  “So that’s your neighbor,” Jem said.

  “One of them.”

  “Every building’s got one of those ladies.”

  Someone yelled, “Ten minutes to midnight!”

  “Hey, Miss Astrid Star Girl,” Jem said. “Are you trying to avoid telling my fortune?”

  “No I’m not. You haven’t asked a question yet.”

  “All right. Let’s ask Andy’s question. Will I be a famous artist?”

  “Shake up the box and we’ll see.”

  Shampoo. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Baby It’s You.

  “You will be famous, and you will have a lot of fun.”

  “Excellent. Now let’s go watch Danger Dick blow himself up.”

  Danger Dick dangled off the roof of the club, suspended in a harness, a helmet on his head and fireworks attached to his body. He waved to the bleating crowd, and the countdown began. Dick nodded at Toby, who stood on the roof brandishing a barbecue lighter. Toby lit a fuse that sprouted from Dick’s butt like a tail. It sizzled and sparked, spreading from fuse to fuse until he was a human sparkler, a ball of fire. We counted down, waiting for him to blow. When he did, it was spectacular. Rockets shot off his body in all directions, whistling and exploding into color. We screamed and ducked and laughed. Toby lowered him to the ground, where two guys in fireproof suits sprayed him with fire extinguishers.

  “Welcome, nineteen eighty-four!” Toby shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen, Danger Dick!” Danger Dick bowed and waved through the smoke wafting off his clothes. He was singed, but not badly.

  It was a new year. Jem kissed me quickly on the lips. He turned and kissed the girl standing behind him. He kissed the guy next to her. He kissed his way back into the club. I went inside to look for Carmen, and when I found her she was kissing Jem.

  “My turn,” I said. Jem stepped away to kiss the bartender, and I kissed Carmen. “Happy New Year.”

  “Happy New Year,” Carmen said. “Everything’s new. A new world!”

  “The golden world!”

  Jem put champagne flutes in our hands. “From now on we’ll do whatever we like and nothing else,” Carmen said.

  “Whatever we like and nothing else!” We clinked glasses and drank.

  I returned to my table and told fortunes for another hour or so. Tatum O’Neal pulled the stubs for Paper Moon, Bad News Bears, and Coal Miner’s Daughter, which made us laugh and laugh. “They should make a film called The Movie Star’s Daughter,” she said. If she asked a question, I forgot what it was.

  When my shift ended I went to the office, but Toby wasn’t there. I finally found him in the rocket ship playhouse, making out with the green-body-paint alien girl. “Oh. Hey,” he said, coming up for air. “Good job.” The green alien girl leaned against him while he reached into his pants pocket and extracted a fat wad of cash. He counted out three hundred dollars, then fifty more. “Here you go. Happy New Year.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to do it again?”

  “Yes!”

  “Fabulous. You can be the house fortune-teller. I can’t pay you, but you can charge by the customer, whatever you want. Five dollars a head sounds about right.”

  “Okay. Great!”

  “See you back here tomorrow night then.” He turned toward the green alien girl, who flicked her eyelashes over his cheek in a butterfly kiss. I was dismissed.

  Carmen and I went to celebrate in the ladies’ room, which had devolved into chaos. A man was lying naked on the velvet couch, posing for photos. Bix was holding court in one of the stalls. He sat on the toilet lid, peering through a pair of blue granny glasses, his doctor’s bag overflowing with pill bottles and cash. Three people were crammed into the next stall, having some kind of noisy sex. I detected the acrid Fourth of July smell of fireworks smoke.

  “Ranger Rick is in that stall,” I said.

  “Danger Dick,” Carmen corrected.

  Bix slipped an amber vial into my hand. “Happy New Year, dollbaby. I take care of my friends.”

  Carmen and I found a stall and shut ourselves inside. We spread out two lines on a compact mirror she carried. The powder burned my sinuses.

  “I think there’s something else in this,” she said. “Something else besides coke.”

  I peed, and then we snorted some more. A trapdoor at the top of my head opened, exposing my brains to the air. I felt light, as if I were walking a foot off the ground.

  We went to the bar for more drinks. I sucked the life out of one cigarette after another. The DJ played Talking Heads and we danced. Everybody was dancing now; nobody was pouting and looking blasé. I had to pee again; back to the bathroom we went.

  All the stalls were full. Under the door of the last one I caught a whiff of a
mmonia and the swollen foot I’d seen a couple of hours earlier. Carmen recognized it and cried out, “Atti!” and pushed against the door. It was locked. She kicked it until it opened. Atti lay crumpled on the floor, nodding. His ashen skin stretched over his bones, and blood seeped from his bloated foot through one of his sneakers.

  “Fuck.” Carmen shook him by the shoulder. He lifted his head, a sliver of yellow eyeball just visible through a slash of lid. “Heyyyy…”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have a girlfriend, you know. She’s funny. I like her because she’s funny.”

  Carmen pressed the bridge of her nose. “God, Atti. Fuck.” Atti smiled and nodded and let his head float back to the floor.

  “Hey—Carmen,” Bix called from two stalls down. “Drugs are whatever, but Toby don’t like ambulances.”

  Carmen looked to me—What should we do?

  “I… I can’t…”

  I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t touch him. He reminded me of something I didn’t want to remember.

  My head buzzed with static, and I went a little blind, my eyes strobing light. Thoughts could not form in my brain. Words could not form in my throat. I was flooded with a familiar feeling of being underwater, unable to breathe, unable to reach the surface.

  From far away I heard Bix say, “Long as he’s not with you, he’s not your problem.”

  I tore out of the bathroom, gulping air, leaving Carmen behind to take care of Atti and hating myself, useless coward that I was.

  By the time I got home my head was clearer. I counted my money and thought about how much Carmen and I would need for the next few weeks. I took fifty dollars and locked it in an old briefcase I’d bought to hold my Ivan stash. Only $950 to go.

  12 CAFÉ LETHE

  “How do people get money?” Carmen asked. “It truly is a mystery to me.”

  It was a mystery to me too. Money seemed to flow effortlessly to some people, and to resist others—like us. It was early February, and I had worked steadily at Plutonium for a month, but somehow I had not saved a thousand dollars as quickly as I’d hoped. At five dollars a reading, the most I ever made in a night was $125. Some of that had to go to living expenses like rent, and I kept raiding my Ivan stash to buy dresses (Astrid needed to look good, after all), dinners in restaurants, and coke.

  Carmen squatted in front of a shard of mirror we’d found on the street, peeling away the corner of her eyelid to line the rim. We picked up lots of cool things on the street. I’d rescued a toy accordion, the kind they sold in Chinatown, still in its box, like new. Carmen had found a manual typewriter. “Are you going to start writing again?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I took it because it was there.”

  I watched her from the couch while I fooled around with my toy accordion, pressing keys and squeezing and making noise. The cats hid under the bed at the first squawk.

  “Atti always says, ‘What do you need money for? We’ve got everything we want,’ ” Carmen said. “But all he wants is a leather jacket, cool sneakers, and a lot of dope.”

  Atti had refused to go to the hospital on New Year’s Eve. He refused to go on New Year’s Day. He refused to go the day after that, but finally, on January third, the pain in his foot got so bad he let Carmen take him to St. Vincent’s. He had a kidney infection and severe neurotrophic ulcers on his foot. He was home now, doing a little better, but his foot was bandaged and the streets were snowy and wet and it was hard for him to get around, so Carmen brought him food twice a day. She had just come home from her new waitressing job at Café Lethe and was baking some potatoes to bring over to him for supper.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have time. Come on.”

  I picked out a few notes of “Frère Jacques” on the accordion. I claimed I couldn’t visit Atti because I had to go to work at Plutonium. What if Carmen changed his bandages and I saw his oozing sores? Just the thought of it made me feel panicky. Like I couldn’t breathe. And I didn’t want Carmen to see me weaken or break down. I didn’t want anyone to see that.

  Through the wall came a sudden blast of David Lee Roth wailing “Running with the Devil.” Gergo, the photographer next door, loved his stereo. We could hear everything Gergo did: we heard his feet hit the floor when he got out of bed, we heard him piss in the toilet when he left the bathroom door open (when he closed the bathroom door we heard the squeal of its hinges), we heard him talking on the phone, usually screaming at someone in Greek. I guess he could hear us too, if he listened.

  “I have to keep my mind clear.” I raised my voice so she could hear me over the music. “To see the future. For my clients.” Carmen’s care for Atti was admirable and steadfast. I was ashamed of my weakness, but my fear was stronger.

  Carmen scoffed. “Tomorrow, then.” The next day was Monday, my night off.

  “Okay. Tomorrow.” I’d find some other excuse by then.

  I went to the window. Snow was falling, large flakes lacing the bare trees in the park and sparkling on the curb like crushed glass. Across the street, a junkie hunched by the park fence with his eyes closed, hands kneading the air. He eased himself down to the ground slowly, slowly, inch by inch, a narcotic tai chi routine. Snow frosted his hair and his eyelashes. He didn’t bother to brush it away.

  Carmen joined me at the window. “Looks like laundry soap.”

  “Ivory Snow,” I said. “Ninety-nine point forty-four percent pure.”

  “Pure what? And what is the .56 percent impurity made of—poison?”

  “Isn’t purity one of those absolute things, like death? You’re either dead or not dead.”

  “Pregnant or not pregnant.”

  “Pure or impure.”

  “Did you know that Marilyn Chambers was the girl on the Ivory Snow box?”

  “Who?”

  “Marilyn Chambers,” Carmen said. “Behind the Green Door.”

  “Did you really see that movie?”

  “Sure. Sarita and I cut school and sneaked into a matinee in Times Square.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Okay, I found the ticket stub in my mother’s purse.”

  “Betsy? Not really?”

  “I kept it in case I ever needed something to blackmail her with. But when the time came, it wasn’t enough.”

  The junkie crouched on the sidewalk, staring at his hands. “Do you know him?” I asked Carmen.

  She squinted through the falling flakes. “I don’t think so.” The apartment warmed with the fragrance of baking potatoes. Carmen went to the oven to check on them. I sat on the couch and picked up Dad’s baseball bat, touching the Scooter’s autograph with my finger. The Yankees were about to start spring training, with opening day still a couple of long months away.

  There was a knock on the door. I got up, bracing myself for the old lady with the clock or for Javier, who lived one floor above us in a cluttered studio with no bathroom—he and the clock lady shared the toilet in the hall. He was a skinny, idle busybody in his sixties who liked to hang out in the vestibule reading the magazines that wouldn’t fit in other people’s mailboxes. Zu and Marie-Claude subscribed to Vogue, Italian Vogue, French Vogue, W, Interview, Details, and Paper. Ten years ago, Javier said, the Times had declared this building, this very building we were living in now, the worst building in New York: broken windows, trash everywhere, junkies lining up to cop. He’d been a junkie himself back then, but he’d kicked it. He showed me his copy of the article, which he kept folded up in his pocket. There, in yellowed newsprint dated April 10, 1974, was a photo of our building with the caption “The worst building in New York City.”

  “And now look at it.” Javier waved Zu’s copy of Details over the grimy stairwell as if it were the Helmsley Palace and he its fairy godmother. “Girls like you live here. Girls like you and girls like them.”

  It wasn’t Javier or the clock lady at the door but Doug, who lived below us with his wife, Kelly A
nn. They’d just had a baby. Doug was an anemic hippie carpenter, and Kelly Ann was an anemic hippie vegan baker. The baby was skinny as a chicken.

  “Hey,” Doug said. “Sorry to bother you.” He sniffed the warm air coming from our stove. “Smells good.”

  “Baked potatoes.”

  He nodded at his feet. “I’ve got a little problem.” He’d been building shelves for some rich dude, he said, one of the yuppies who lived in the Christodora House—everybody hated those Christodora yuppies, except Carmen; she wanted to live there—and the rich dude had left town (“Gone to fucking Thailand, who knows how long”) without paying Doug. He needed to borrow a little money to buy milk for the baby.

  I hesitated. I was trying to save. But the baby… There was something pathetic about their skinny baby, and the way he frowned as he rode through the cold streets strapped to his mother’s back, taking in everything he saw. I worried about him. So I went into the closet, unlocked my briefcase, took ten dollars from my stash, and gave it to Doug.

  “Thanks a lot. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  After he left, Carmen sniffed. “I don’t like his ponytail.”

  “The baby needs milk,” I said. “How could I say no to that?”

  “He smells like patchouli.”

  I thought I heard a noise in the bathroom. A dripping noise.

  “I don’t like her braids either,” Carmen added. Kelly Ann wore her hair in lots of mousy braids all over her head. “They’re phonies.”

  “The baby’s real.”

  She opened the oven door and squeezed a potato with a potholder. “It’s your money.”

  “They’re poor.”

  The potatoes needed a few more minutes. She closed the oven door. “We’re poor.”

  “I don’t feel poor,” I said.

  “You don’t?”

  Uptown I’d felt poor. Downtown, I just needed money. Two different things.

  The dripping came louder and faster. Carmen yanked open the bathroom door. It was raining from the ceiling.

  She grabbed the mop to soak up the water. It rained harder. I got the bucket. Water poured down. We screamed. A stream flowed through the kitchen and into the living room. Carmen threw a roll of paper towels at it.