Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  “I won’t be gone long,” Carmen said. “And hey, you’ll get the bedroom all to yourself.”

  “A real bed,” I said, as if I cared.

  * * *

  Monday, my night off. I could have watched the Yankee game at home by myself, but it was awful quiet in the apartment without Carmen, so I headed out. Maybe somebody I knew was watching the game at Maher’s. I headed over to Second Avenue. When I swung open the door, there sat Bix and Wes, sipping beer, eyes on the TV over the bar.

  “Yanks can’t buy a hit tonight,” Scooter said. “Some days are like that. You ever hear of this thing called karma, White? Sometimes I wonder who Dave Winfield killed in a past life.”

  “Hey, dollbaby, I saved a seat for ya.” Bix patted the barstool next to him.

  “Yanks are down four-two in the third,” Wes said.

  I ordered a Guinness. Winfield stepped up to the plate with one man on and swished it.

  “Damn.” Wes signaled the bartender for another Stella.

  “I hate the Royals,” I said. “Even when they aren’t any good, they’re spoilers.”

  “This year they’re good,” Bix said.

  “What’s been going on at Plutonium, Phoebe?” Wes asked. “Got any dirt for me?”

  “What do you consider dirt?” It was a nightclub; there was sex, there were drugs—that was no secret.

  “Who’s funding that place? Where does Toby get the money to redecorate every month? Some of those sets are pretty elaborate.”

  “Don’t tell him anything, dollbaby, he’ll just get you in trouble.”

  “I don’t know anything about the money,” I said. “All I know is Shan takes the van to discount stores in New Jersey and comes back with cases and cases of candy, plastic leis, shag carpeting, whatever she needs. She buys in bulk.”

  “Mattingly hits a high fly ball, and while it’s in the air, happy birthday to Daphne Lapizana. She turns eighteen today.” My ears perked up—the Scooter was in decent form that night. I reached over the bar for a napkin and a pen to jot the line down for Dad. Then I stopped, remembering that I couldn’t call him up and trade Scooterisms with him anymore. I went ahead and wrote the line down anyway.

  “What are you doing?” Bix leaned over and tried to read my scribbled note.

  “Nothing.”

  “What about you?” Wes asked. “You making money?”

  “Sure,” I said. I had a steady stream of customers most nights, and was earning more money than I had at the bookstore. Enough to live on. It was hard to save, but I’d managed to stash about five hundred dollars in my secret Ivan revenge briefcase.

  “You kidding? She’s a superstar,” Bix said. “That model Bilan comes in every week and heads straight for her table. She’s uncanny.”

  “Really.” Wes turned and studied me with fresh interest.

  “Where’s your roomie tonight?” Bix asked. “She doesn’t like baseball?”

  “She went to a memorial service for Atti. In Massachusetts.”

  “Oh. Man. A little late, isn’t it? When’d he die, two months ago?”

  “Yeah, in March.”

  “When’s she getting back? I want to talk to her about that script she wrote.”

  “She should be back tomorrow.” I was careful to keep my eyes on the game, so as not to give away my surprise. “What about the script?”

  “Tell her if she puts a part in it for me, I’ll see if I can get it to Chris. Who knows, right? Anything could happen.”

  “Sure. I’ll tell her.”

  “Chris writes his own stuff,” Wes said.

  “If he’s not interested, maybe he knows somebody else looking for a good script.”

  “You think it’s good?” I asked.

  “Sure, I mean, a little rough maybe, but it’s funny. What did you think of it?”

  I’d read it secretly, of course—and an unfinished early draft from what I gathered—but I didn’t want Bix and Wes to know that Carmen hadn’t shared it with me. “I think it’s great. Everything Carmen does is great.”

  “Not sure I’d go that far,” Bix said. “But she’s a good kid.”

  The Yanks were having a terrible night. I slid off my stool. “I don’t think I can bear to watch the rest of this game.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Wes sipped his beer. “If they don’t turn it around by the time this beer is gone, I’m leaving too.”

  “See you around, doll.”

  It was a cool night for May. I headed east on Fourth Street, stopping at my usual bodega for cigarettes. Brahim reached for a pack of Camel Lights as soon as I opened the door. I added a pack of cherry Lifesavers and started for home.

  My head was buzzing. Carmen had finished Junkie Heaven—if that was still the title—and recast it as a screenplay without mentioning anything about it to me. She’d showed it to Bix, hoping he could help her get it produced. Who else knew about it?

  I lit a cigarette and smoked while I walked. I wondered if she’d really found that typewriter on the street, or if she’d bought it secondhand somewhere with a secret plan to use it. Now that I thought about it, she’d always kept things from me—in college, not telling me that she’d stolen Mark from her roommate until it slipped out, after I’d already started seeing him; or later, using me as an alibi with her parents without asking me first. When the truth came out, she usually claimed she hadn’t thought it was important enough to mention. Since Atti’s death, though, something had changed. She wasn’t simply neglecting to mention things; she was withholding them from me. I felt the barrier thickening between us, and it made me angry, though I wasn’t willing to admit that to myself yet.

  At Seventh and A, instead of going straight home, I decided to take a turn around the park. It was a nice night, and I felt a longing to see Dad again. So far I’d seen him only once, and was trying to figure out what I had to do to make him appear. I had a Scooter line to share with him. Maybe that would work.

  I walked slowly along Seventh Street, keeping an eye out for a mismatched plaid suit. A cluster of homeless people camped in the shadow of Samuel Sullivan Cox’s statue. No sign of the rooster that night. Maybe the homeless people cooked him and ate him. The thought stirred a mixture of horror and glee in me.

  At the corner of Seventh and B, I saw a thin young man doing jumping jacks on a bench inside the park. I paused to peer at him through the trees. He wasn’t doing jumping jacks after all; he was waving to me, a large, desperate SOS gesture. I couldn’t see him clearly; he was a shadow, he shimmered.

  It’s Atti, I thought, but then: No, it couldn’t be.

  I sensed movement behind me and whirled around. A tall man in a cowboy hat glided slowly up the street in my direction. He coughed into his fist, a phlegmy sound almost like a laugh. When I turned back to the park, Atti—if it was Atti—had vanished. I tossed my cigarette into the gutter and started quickly up Avenue B. The tall man matched my pace, keeping about a quarter of a block behind me.

  It’s a cowboy hat, not a ski cap, I thought, trying to reassure myself. But I walked faster. Behind me, the man sped up.

  I started running, and felt the tall man running too, as if he could not allow the distance between us to grow more than a quarter of a block. I pumped my legs faster, breathing hard and cursing my pack-a-day habit. He drew closer. I looked back: his hat hid his face. I rounded the corner onto Tenth Street. The man closed in. He had a long stride. He was ten feet away. I glanced back again, not watching where I was going, and crashed into someone.

  “Hey!” Strong hands caught me by the shoulders.

  “Jem!” He was dressed all in silver. He held me protectively, shielding me from the man in the cowboy hat.

  “What the fuck!” Jem barked at him. The man turned and walked fast into the park.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, out of breath.

  “Was that guy following you?”

  I nodded again.

  “Shit.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and wal
ked me toward Avenue A. “Why was he following you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he trying to mug you? I didn’t get that vibe. I’ve never seen a mugger in a cowboy hat before.”

  “I don’t know what he wants.” I opened the door to my building and he accompanied me upstairs to the apartment.

  “Where’s Carmen?”

  “Springfield, Massachusetts.”

  “What?” He lifted his captain’s cap and ruffed his hair. He was all dressed up in a silver flight suit, Chuck Taylors spray-painted silver to match, dark glasses tucked into his breast pocket, large eyes outlined in kohl.

  “She’ll be back tomorrow. Memorial service for Atti.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Spur-of-the-moment thing, I guess.”

  “I just got invited to a party at Indochine, and I wanted to bring a date.”

  “Oh.” I sat on the couch and pulled the blanket around me. I was shaking.

  “You scared?” Jem sat beside me. Julio rubbed against his leg. Jem picked him up and held him in his lap. We both petted him.

  “That’s the fourth time someone’s followed me, that I know of.”

  “The same guy?”

  “I’m not sure.” Julio jumped onto the back of the couch and tried to chew on my hair.

  “You shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

  “You don’t think I’m safe here?”

  “Sure you are. But you’re shaking.” He rested a hand on mine, to still the trembling. “You feel okay to go out?”

  “I feel better now.”

  “Want to go to a party?”

  I nodded coolly, hiding my pleasure at being invited.

  “All right. Go change.”

  I asked myself what Carmen would do in my place. She’d go to the party. Besides, it served her right for leaving me here alone.

  I slipped into the bedroom to find something to wear—something silvery, to match Jem’s suit.

  * * *

  It was Andreas Fischer’s birthday. His wife, Chiara, and his dealer, Leo Castelli, had reserved the whole restaurant to celebrate. We paused at the door while a hostess checked the guest list for Jem Farrell plus one. Flashbulbs strobed the room. I suddenly felt like hiding. I plucked the dark glasses off Jem’s nose and put them on.

  “Afraid your fans will recognize you?” he teased.

  The hostess ushered us into a room decorated to evoke colonial Vietnam—wicker furniture, palm fronds, and waitresses in cheongsams slit to the hip drifting by with trays of ice-cold martinis and spring rolls crisp with mint. We squeezed past famous artists, musicians, actors, and models to get to the bar. People noticed Jem, then turned to me, and I could see the question in their eyes: Why is he with her? Even with my asymmetrical platinum Japanese haircut, my metallic blue minidress, and Jem’s sunglasses, I was outdazzled by him. His height elevated him above the crowd—he was one of the few men in the room taller than the models—but it was more than that: his cowboy grace, his lion’s mane of brown hair, his jokey, slangy talk. At the bar, a photographer from the Post snapped our picture and asked us our names. I told him my name was Astrid.

  Esphyr Collins, in her gold neck cuff and a jangle of bracelets, took Jem’s hands in hers, and then, after he introduced me, grasped both of mine. “He is completely and utterly brilliant, isn’t he?” she said to me. “Jem, we must say hello to Ross this minute. Off we go, righty-o.” She led us to a man in his fifties, one of her stars, holding court in a round booth.

  Somehow, inevitably, we got separated. Jem ricocheted around the room between people he knew and people who wanted to meet him. I viewed the party from above, trying to figure it out, looking for patterns in a dream world where everyone knew something I didn’t. The revelers swirled through the restaurant, blown this way and that by forces they were unaware of, ensnared in spirals and dead-ends they couldn’t swim out of. Jem caught my eye from across the room and waved me over, but at that moment I didn’t have the energy to push through all the people between me and him, only to stand there wondering what to say.

  Behind me and to my left, a man said, “It’s called Expanding Universe. First you see my hand drawing little black dots on a white balloon. Then you see me slowly blowing the balloon up.”

  I turned my head to catch a glimpse of him. He was wearing round red glasses. The man with him had shaved off his eyebrows and drawn thick circumflexes in their place with what looked like black marker.

  “So… what’s it about?” the circumflex man asked. “I mean, what would you say it’s about?”

  “It’s about space. It’s literally about space, like outer space, but it’s also about space as a concept. The balloon is the universe. As it expands it changes the space around it.”

  “So you’re asking a question about a surface.”

  The man in the red glasses hesitated before replying, “Exactly.”

  A buzz spread through the crowd as John Kennedy slid past me, towing a young actress by the hand. He found Andreas and Chiara Fischer, kissed them on both cheeks, and introduced his date. I could tell by the way he chatted with them that he was apologizing; he’d stopped in to say hello on his way somewhere else. The young actress pulled away, heading to the back of the restaurant, past a green phone booth, to the bathroom. John said goodbye to Andreas and Chiara and paused at the bar to wait for his date. He took the stool next to mine, shining his vacant smile on me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello.” He asked the bartender for a glass of water.

  “You don’t remember me, do you.”

  He hesitated.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I was a different person then.”

  “Prep school?” he said. “Or college.”

  “College.”

  He nodded and took a sip of water. His date returned from the bathroom. “Nice seeing you,” he said to me, and they went on their way. I leaned toward the person next to me and said, “He gave me a piggyback ride once.” It turned out to be Lou Reed, who laughed. He thought I was joking.

  A waiter announced that dinner was about to be served. I found Jem and we took our places in the round booth with Ross and Esphyr. A woman in a pink kimono sat on Ross’s other side. She made a knot of her hair, then grabbed a pair of chopsticks and stabbed them through the knot.

  “I want to explore what looking feels like,” the pink-kimono woman said. “I use patterns to create optical pain.”

  “It works, too,” Ross said.

  “Pay no attention to Ross, darling,” Esphyr said. “Your work is completely and utterly brilliant.”

  We ate coconut shrimp and fish wrapped in banana leaves and drank white Burgundy. Esphyr wanted to know how I’d learned to tell fortunes, and if anyone had ever complained that my predictions hadn’t come true. I explained how I used movie ticket stubs instead of tarot cards. “I’ve seen all the movies that I use, so I have a lot of images to draw on. Sometimes the words in the title are enough.” No one had complained yet, but then, I only charged five dollars.

  “We do live as if life is a movie, or an opera, don’t we,” Esphyr said. “Especially artists. But how do you connect those images to the person asking the question? You don’t usually know the person well, do you?”

  “I’m training myself to notice things about people—the things that they try to hide or aren’t aware of. I can usually find some clue in what they’re wearing or how they present themselves.”

  “Like what?” Esphyr angled herself toward me, daring me to read her secrets.

  “Well, like I’ve noticed that people who wear a lot of expensive jewelry feel unloved. They want everyone to think that they’re well-loved, that someone somewhere is showering them with jewels. And people who make a fuss about how important they are are insecure.”

  “But don’t they get defensive when you point these things out?”

  “No, they’re usually amazed. They think I can read their minds or s
omething. They’re not really hiding their insecurity or their need for love—they’re broadcasting it, hoping someone will notice.”

  A waiter interrupted to take orders for coffee, and Esphyr was drawn into conversation with Ross.

  “But what about the people who aren’t broadcasting their problems?” Jem asked me. “The ones who are really hiding their true selves? How do you read them?”

  I tried to think of a way to explain it. “It has to do with light,” I said. “Light can reveal things, but it also hides things.”

  “It can blind you.”

  “Yes. But also… you know how things can seem more real at night? You’re alone with your thoughts and dreams and fears; it’s quiet, no daytime chores to distract you. In the dark, everything seems clear. Mysteries are suddenly solved, the answers seem obvious, even if you can’t quite articulate them… but that clarity disappears in the morning. It’s as if daylight draws a veil over it.”

  I reached for a cigarette. Jem took one too. He lit them both, first mine, then his.

  “I think some people shine their personalities at us to blind us to their true selves, the mysteries they don’t want us to see,” I said. “Like, the stars and planets and galaxies are always around us, but we can only see them at night, because sunlight makes them invisible. When I’m telling fortunes, I look for those dark moments when the truth peeks out. They’re clues.”

  “What about me? What do you see?”

  “I’m not saying I’m good at this yet.”

  “Don’t be a weasel, Astrid.”

  “Okay.” I tugged on the collar of his jumpsuit. “You’re wearing all silver—even your shoes! Like you’re trying to deflect any deep observation.”

  He laughed. “But look at you, hiding behind sunglasses.”

  “I need them to shield my eyes from your glare.”

  “ ‘Stars hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires…’ I can’t remember the rest.”

  “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “It’s from Macbeth.” Jem looked embarrassed, and I thought, He’s hiding how smart he is. “High school play.”