Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  “You played the lead?”

  He shrugged. “The drama club was short on boys.” He leaned close to me and whispered, “What about Esphyr? She’s not very sunny.”

  “She’s more like a black hole.” I spoke into his ear and smelled mint. “She sucks you in and you can’t escape.” We snickered over this together.

  “What are you two laughing at?” Esphyr asked.

  “Astronomy,” Jem replied.

  “Righty-o.” Esphyr shared a glance with Ross, who rolled his eyes. Young people.

  After dinner we toasted Andreas on the occasion of his fortieth birthday. We drank to his health, to his genius, to his beautiful wife. I leaned against Jem, a bit tipsy. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

  “We’re all going to Ross’s after dinner,” Esphyr said. She scribbled the address on a napkin.

  As the party broke up, I wandered to the back of the restaurant and shut myself in the green phone booth. I didn’t intend to make a call. I sat down and waited for Jem to come looking for me. While I waited, I wondered what Carmen was doing that night. I pictured her in Atti’s childhood home, which I imagined as a compact brick house that smelled of mothballs. Borbála was hosting a small buffet, but Carmen sneaked away to find her beloved’s boyhood bedroom.

  A man wanted to use the phone, so I pretended I was talking to someone until he gave up and wandered away. After about ten minutes Jem walked past me on his way to the bathroom. He didn’t think to look inside the phone booth, so I opened the door and grabbed his wrist. He jumped slightly and said, “There you are.”

  I pulled him into the phone booth and sat him on the little stool. I straddled his thighs and shut the door. I pressed my brow to his, and rolled my face down, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. He cupped my ass in his hands and slid me up to his lap. I opened my mouth and kissed him. He let out a small laugh—ha. He licked the center of my forehead, which tingled for the rest of the night like a third eye.

  We made out in the phone booth for a while. When we came up for air, everybody was gone.

  “Let’s go to the party,” he said.

  We walked down to SoHo hand in hand, stopping to kiss at every red light.

  Ross’s loft was high-ceilinged and huge, with large paintings on the walls, a swing at one end, and a trampoline at the other. Several guests were flipping through the record collection, playing DJ. Danger Dick was there, dressed in a gold daredevil jumpsuit with a matching cape. He passed out flyers advertising his next stunt, on the Fourth of July: a boxing match, Dick versus Mayor Koch, with Dick dressed as the Flying Nun and the mayor as Uncle Sam. He swore the mayor was going to show up and fight.

  Jem and Esphyr discussed Ross’s paintings while I listened, wearing Jem’s arm around my shoulders like a fox fur. “This is a series of portraits. He calls this one Grandfather. And this one is George Washington.” The large abstract canvases were covered in leafy shapes in shades of green.

  “They look like plants,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Esphyr said. “Ross is very inspired by Nietzsche. ‘Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and ghost.’ ”

  “ ‘You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm,’ ” Jem said.

  I hadn’t read Nietzsche, and the leafy painting looked nothing like George Washington to me. I decided not to say that out loud.

  Someone turned the lights down and aimed a spot at the disco ball over the trampoline. A girl rode the swing, letting her skirt fly open as she rose into the air. Her underwear was white. “What do you feel like doing?” Jem asked. I said I wanted to jump on the trampoline.

  Stepping onto the trampoline was disorienting, like walking on the moon. Someone put on “Lost in the Supermarket” and Jem and I started bouncing, cautiously. At first our jumps weren’t synchronized and we threw each other’s rhythm off. I kept landing on my butt. Jem took my hands and we synched up so that we floated up together and bounded down together, up and down and up and down while the bouncy music played and lights popped in our eyes. We laughed very hard. Everything looked like it was moving in slow motion but it felt like fast motion and the difference, the disorientation, exhilarated me. This was the golden world. People were pretty superficial in the golden world, but then, maybe they were superficial everywhere. Like my neighbor, Doug, pretending to be earthy and a good father when he was really just an addict.

  The song changed to “When the World Was Young,” Peggy Lee’s version. The disco ball splashed dots of light like measles all over us. Jem pulled me close and we slow-bounced, my head nestled against the breast of his flight suit, just below the logo patch he’d made for it: Saturn and its rings and some stars around the letters J-E-M.

  * * *

  In the morning, Jem and I ate leftover Chinese food in bed. He curled a shrimp over one of my nipples to compare the two shades of pink, then nibbled it off me. We put on a Michael Jackson record and danced naked all over the apartment. We took a bath together in the tub. Then he left. For half an hour I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, fixating on a crack in the plaster that zigzagged like a staircase drawn by Dr. Seuss. I listened to the sounds of a weekday morning: the flush of plumbing in the building, footsteps overhead, Gergo humming a tune, a garbage truck down the block, bongos in the park. I imagined telling Carmen about the party and about sleeping with Jem, entertaining her with the story the way she used to like hearing about Ivan. I imagined her laughing, asking to hear more, helping me plot my next move.

  As the time of her return grew closer, though, I grew uneasy. Had I done something bad? Carmen would understand. But as the happy haze of the night lifted, I saw that Carmen probably wouldn’t understand.

  I rose from the bed and mopped up our wet footprints, threw out the empty Chinese food cartons, picked up the sticky tissues off the floor, and put the used rubbers in a bag to throw away somewhere outside. Then I went to the library to figure out how to make myself disappear.

  20 INVISIBILITY SPELL

  At the library on Tenth Street I skimmed through books on witchcraft and voodoo until I found an invisibility spell. I copied it out for anyone who might find it useful.

  YOU WILL NEED:

  7 black beans

  A bottle of good brandy

  A shovel

  Water

  The head of a dead man

  1. Begin on a Wednesday, before sunrise. Place one bean in each orifice in the dead man’s head (eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth).

  2. Trace a pattern or shape—a triangle, a pentagram, anything you like—on the dead man’s forehead.

  3. Bury the head in the ground, faceup, and water it with the good brandy. (Don’t skimp on the brandy; the spirits don’t like the cheap stuff.)

  4. Every morning before dawn, water the head with brandy. Do this for eight days in a row.

  5. On the eighth day, a spirit will appear before you and ask, “What are you doing?” You must reply, “I am watering my plant.”

  6. The spirit will say, “Give me the bottle. I want to water the plant.” You must refuse. No matter how hard the spirit tries to get the bottle from you, you must not let him.

  7. Eventually, the spirit will surrender. You will know you’ve defeated him when he shows you the pattern you traced on the dead man’s forehead.

  8. The next morning, the beans will begin to sprout. Pick the new beans.

  9. Put them in your mouth and look in a mirror. You will see no reflection. You are invisible. To become visible again, spit out the beans.

  10. Warning: Do not swallow the beans, or you will be invisible forever.

  I would have tried this spell if I had access to a dead man’s head.

  At six, the library closed. I forced myself to go home. My stomach hurt.

  The Sex Pistols snarled on the radio in the bedroom. She was back.

  “Carm?”

  “Hey.” She was unpacking, her suitcase open on the bedroom floor.

  “Ho
w was the thing?” I asked.

  “Sad. And crazy. What else could it be.” She lay down across the bed, which was still rumpled. Carmen never made the bed; it would have struck her as weird if I’d made it. “Borbála brought a boom box to the ceremony and played ‘Wild Horses’ while we tossed Atti’s ashes around the field. Then she threw herself on the ground and had a fit—like, kicking and screaming and sobbing. It was horrible.” She wiggled her shoes off and let them drop to the floor. “Tell me everything.”

  “Everything?” My rash-red cheeks blared my guilt to her, surely she could see it.

  “The party.” She sat up and tossed the Post at me, folded to Page Six. There was a picture of me and Jem, captioned “Artist Jem Farrell and Plutonium Fortune-Teller Astrid at Indochine.” My sunglasses reflected the photographer’s flash. “I missed the big party. I want to hear all about it.”

  I told her everything, almost everything. How Jem had rescued me from the tall man in the cowboy hat, that he’d come looking for her and only brought me as a last resort, about the people I’d met, that Esphyr said “righty-o” even though she wasn’t English, that John-John had stopped in and not remembered me. She listened quietly, trying to hear what I wasn’t saying.

  “I guess Jem will tell me more.” She was meeting him in a few minutes for a drink at 2A. “Want to come?”

  A nerve in my neck twanged. “No, thanks.” I planned to stay in and watch the Yankees.

  * * *

  I hardly focused on the game—I kept expecting Carmen to burst in, furious at me. I sat on the couch and rolled my father’s Scooter bat back and forth over my thighs, thinking it might bring the Yankees luck. When Carmen didn’t appear by midnight, I imagined she was with Jem, and felt stabs of jealousy. I was miserable. I didn’t want them to be together, because that meant neither one of them was with me. I had a problem with no possible happy outcome. And the Yankees lost again.

  I was in the bed, half-asleep, when she finally came home. She crawled in beside me, perfumed with vodka.

  “He didn’t show up,” she whispered. I stirred. “I waited two hours. I called him. Sparky told me where he lives and I went to his place and buzzed his buzzer. He wasn’t there.”

  “Oh.” Relief—even joy—but also uneasiness.

  “I went back to 2A and waited some more. Sparky got me drunk.”

  “Gosh.”

  “He’s never stood me up before.”

  I put one arm over her, carefully, in a half hug. We stayed like that, suspended and still and tense, for a long time, until my arm felt stiff. But I kept it there. I didn’t move.

  Suddenly she pushed my arm away and sat up, a pair of black Ray-Bans in her hand. “Look what I found under the pillow.”

  Whoops. I felt a thump in the pit of my stomach. “He let me borrow them.”

  “How did they get in the bed?”

  “I don’t know. They were probably propped on my head when I went to bed, and I didn’t realize it.” My face went hot. Lying to her made me feel sick. But she lied to me, I told myself. She lies to me all the time.

  She read the truth on my face. She threw the glasses at the wall. “Go sleep on the couch where you belong.”

  “Carmen—”

  “Was he here tonight, hiding from me?”

  “No! He wasn’t here tonight. I swear.”

  Her eyes were bloodshot from drinking and crying. They burned into me. I held my breath.

  “Carmen—he cares about you. I know he does.”

  “I don’t care about his feelings,” she said. “I don’t care about anybody’s stupid feelings.” She turned her face away now. “One night.” She wouldn’t look at me. “I went away for one night.”

  I couldn’t speak. I floated up to the ceiling, as I’d done so many times before, and watched my cowardly, guilty self below me on the bed, helpless.

  “I didn’t believe it until this minute.” Her voice was thin and wire-taut. “But the guilt is leaking out of your pores. I can smell it.”

  I tasted it too, sour and bitter as rotten limes.

  “You know what? You can have him. You can have him, and this apartment, and the cats. Everything. You can have everything. I’m leaving.” She bolted up and paced the room, stuffing clothes into her hard little suitcase.

  “What are you talking about? Don’t leave!” She’d surrendered so easily. That made everything worse.

  Glare from the city outside seeped into the room, so that even with the light off I saw her moving between the closet and the dresser, stooping to pluck things off the floor, scowl at them, and toss them into her suitcase. She balled up a pair of dirty panties and threw them out the window. They were mine, but I didn’t have the strength to stop her, or even utter a weak hey.

  “All I did was go to a party.”

  “Really? Is that all you did?” She picked up a T-shirt, stared at it, and threw it back on the floor. “Are you even trying to be a good person?”

  I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking the night before. My thoughts were all tangled up. “I’m trying to be like you.”

  “Ha. Then you don’t know me very well.” She pulled a sheaf of paper out of her bottom drawer and dropped it into the suitcase.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you were writing a screenplay?”

  She stopped, surprised. Then she threw a pair of tights at my head. “You snooped!”

  “I didn’t snoop. Bix mentioned it.”

  “Stupid Bix.” She swiped the tights and tossed them into her suitcase. “It’s none of your business. I don’t have to tell you everything.”

  That stung. “You used to tell me everything,” I said. “I thought you did.”

  “I never did.” She clapped her suitcase shut. “And neither did you.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She walked to the door, suitcase swinging.

  “Please tell me where you are going.”

  She slammed the door.

  I ran to the living room window and stuck my head out. A few seconds later she appeared on the sidewalk. “Carmen!”

  She didn’t look up. She hustled down A, turned west onto Ninth Street, and was gone.

  Back in the bedroom I blinked at the ceiling, the crazy-staircase crack in the plaster having grown a few steps. Julio and Diego curled up beside me. I rubbed Julio between the eyes, and he purred. Diego flapped his tail. I was weak, morally weak. But weakness begets weakness. I felt helpless to fight it. Jem’s Nietzsche quote echoed in my mind: Much within you is still worm.

  Somewhere out in the world a siren keened. Every siren is a reminder that something bad is happening somewhere, to someone. You may be okay for now, but someday the siren will come for you.

  When I was six, my aunt Eilie gave me and Laurel a record called Darby O’Gill and the Little People, the soundtrack to a Disney movie Mom wouldn’t let us see because it was too scary. Darby O’Gill was an Irishman who caught a leprechaun, which entitled him to three wishes. Side one of the record was all jigs and fiddles and pots of gold—nothing scary about that. But the story darkened on side two, when Darby’s beloved daughter, Katie, died, and the banshee appeared.

  The banshee was an Irish demon, part witch and part ghost, whose shrieking summoned the Death Coach, driven by a headless coachman, which ferried the living to the Land of the Dead. Once the Death Coach had been summoned to the Land of the Living, it couldn’t leave empty. It had to carry a body back to the underworld; the headless coachman didn’t care whose. If the coach had been called for your daughter, you could volunteer to take her place. Then you would die but she could live. That’s what Darby O’Gill did. He took Katie’s place in the coach, and she lived. Then, somehow, he tricked the leprechaun so that he lived, too. But that part wasn’t very convincing.

  Side two was so scary Laurel and I rarely played it. But once in a while, on a dark afternoon, we found ourselves listening to it over and over. “It’s the wail of the banshee! The same as I heard the night that Kat
ie’s mother was taken.” It gave me nightmares, and Mom threatened to throw the record out. We wouldn’t let her, even though we didn’t particularly like it.

  After all these years, the banshee still kept me from sleeping. There was danger out there. I tried to drown out the sirens by turning on the radio and listening to a sports talk show. All the callers agreed that the Yankees needed better pitching and that George Steinbrenner was a moron. I drifted in and out of an unrefreshing sleep.

  At around three I got up to pee. On my way back to bed, kicking through the clothes strewn all over the floor, I stubbed my toe on Edie: An American Biography, one of Carmen’s favorite books. She’d read it three times. My eye fell on an army-green jacket. I picked it up. Mitch.

  She’d left without Mitch.

  She’d never leave Mitch behind. It meant more to her than ever since Atti had died.

  She’ll be back, I thought. And if she didn’t come back, I’d find her. I would find her and make things right.

  * * *

  In the morning, earlier than usual, I went to Café Lethe. Bix and Wes were sitting at the counter with Page Six open in front of them, analyzing the party pictures. There we were again: Jem in his silver jumpsuit, me in his dark glasses, Andy’s profile visible in the background. Bix said I should raise my rates to ten dollars a reading, now that I was famous.

  Working behind the counter was a girl I’d never seen before—very young, about eighteen, with a small hoop in her nose. When I asked for Carmen, Bix said she hadn’t shown up for work. She didn’t call in sick or anything. This girl with the nose ring—her name was Taffy—happened to walk in looking for a job and Nick, the manager, hired her on the spot. No one knew where Carmen was.

  “What happened, you have a fight?” Bix said.

  “Kind of.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll come back.”

  I lit a cigarette and asked Taffy for a cup of coffee. She rummaged around behind the counter until she found the mugs. Then she stared at the empty coffeepot.