Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  I shook my head.

  “Your friend Carmen has.”

  Maybe I’d set myself up to get hurt on purpose. Unconsciously. I’d hurt Carmen. I deserved to be punished for it.

  “I can always tell,” Bix said. “Something in the eyes.”

  “She didn’t do it for long. And she kicked.”

  “The eyes. You never get it back, the way you used to look.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Honey, I was born on the H train.” His mother had been a junkie. He’d never known his father. His stepfather was a boxer who’d punched Bix’s mother to death.

  “Oh.” I squeezed my eyes shut and shuddered, picturing it.

  “I’m clean now,” he said. “Of junk, I mean—not everything else, obviously. I’m not superhuman. But, you know, you just gotta hope it will last.”

  The bleeding finally stopped. I sat up and pulled the tampon out of my nose. My dress was streaked with blood. There was blood in my hair and on my neck. I rinsed my face and neck and hands and dried them with paper towels. The bathroom was deserted, except for me and Bix.

  “You should maybe take a break for a couple of nights, dollbabe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s Jem tonight?”

  “He had to go to a thing,” I said.

  Bix pressed some bills into my hand. “Take a taxi home. It’s late.”

  I tried to give it back to him. “I’ve got money.” I’d made about thirty dollars that night.

  “Consider it pay for the Devil’s Bell. I been hearing things. Don’t you look at the flyers? There’s a new Amelia every other week.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Take a cab. I’ll feel better.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” I took the money, but I intended to walk home and deposit the bills in my Ivan stash.

  Varick Street was quiet and dark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw subtle movements in the shadows, in doorways, but when I turned to look, nothing. A blast of noise made me jump, ratatatatat! I caught my breath. It came from a few blocks away. Just someone setting off their leftover fireworks… unless it was gunshots. I could never tell the difference.

  As I crossed Houston, a taxi stopped at the light—a Checker crammed with laughing, shouting people. Through the open window I glimpsed a shake of dark red hair—Carmen! The light changed and the cab sped away.

  Was it Carmen? I couldn’t be sure.

  When I stopped for cigs, a scruffy young man blocked my way into the bodega. I tensed. Park people menaced this corner, asking for handouts, and this was definitely a park guy: bearded and dark blond in torn, dirty clothes. A live rooster—the one who lived in the park, I presumed—perched on his shoulder, surveying the street from on high like a god. “Do me a favor,” the guy said. “Buy me a sack of potatoes?”

  I hesitated.

  “Come on, help me? They won’t let me in the store with Fritz.”

  He was dirty and thin, with a chipped front tooth and blue eyes that burned out of a sun-darkened face. A sack of potatoes. What harm could it do?

  “Wait here.” I went inside.

  “Hello, habibi.” Brahim reached for a pack of Camel Lights and set it on the counter. “What else? Some candy?”

  I looked around the small shop. It wasn’t the kind of store that sold produce. A bunch of green bananas, a couple of mealy apples, maybe. Some shriveled limes. Its main business was cigarettes, beer, candy, and soda. “Do you have any potatoes?”

  “Potatoes? Sure.” He pointed to a dusty sack in a milk crate on the floor next to the ice cream freezer. The potatoes were gnarly and small but they looked okay. Not rotten.

  “How much for the whole thing?”

  “Is it for you?”

  “Well—”

  “Is it for that crazy nut with the rooster?” He leaned over the counter. “I see him outside. He’s not allowed in here!”

  I set the potatoes on the counter. “How much?”

  “He steals things! He comes in and takes things, rice and bread. He stuffs them into his jacket! He’s not allowed! No roosters allowed!”

  “Okay, don’t worry. He won’t come in.” I put the pack of Camel Lights next to the potatoes and added a pack of Starburst. “How much?”

  “Two-fifty.”

  I paid exactly two-fifty, thanked Brahim, went outside, and handed over the potatoes. The rooster guy snatched the sack. “Thanks, girl, thanks.” He added something that sounded like, “I’ll pay you back.” Though of course I didn’t expect him to pay me back, or want him to. He trotted off down the street, heading toward the park.

  I lit a cigarette and continued up First Avenue to Ninth Street. The circus on St. Marks was winding down for the night. I felt a presence behind me, like someone stepping on my shadow. I glanced back. A guy and a girl stumbled drunkenly into a doorway to kiss. I left them behind but the presence stuck to me. Power of suggestion, I figured; Bix’s worry had gotten to me. Nevertheless, the tiny anxious fishhooks started nibbling away.

  I turned onto A, scanning the park. No Dad, no Atti. No… Carmen. Suddenly chilled, I pushed through the street door of my building—the lock was broken—and ran all the way upstairs, my heart racing until I was safely inside. Damn Bix and his scary stories.

  I sat on the living room couch, the windows open to the park, and tried to soothe my speeding heart. I missed crickets. It was summer, and nighttime, and hot, and when I was a child that had always meant crickets. Instead there were moans, and shouts, and alarms, and motors, and sirens, and no Carmen, and no Jem.

  Earlier that afternoon, when we were lounging in bed, Jem had absently rubbed my calf. His fingers went back and forth over a small patch below my knee. “You missed a spot,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Shaving. You missed this spot right here.” He took my hand and put it on the spot so I could feel the one-inch area of bristly hair.

  I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that moment burned with meaning. I should have known.

  It was over.

  22 CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

  It didn’t fall apart all at once, of course.

  He called the next afternoon to apologize and explain. He’d run into Esphyr at Fanelli’s, he said. She finally wanted to talk about representing him, maybe giving him a solo show in the fall, so he couldn’t leave, he didn’t want to offend her, it’s the chance of a lifetime, you understand, right baby? And I did understand, I understood all that but I also understood that he was pulling away. He said he wasn’t, he swore up and down that he wasn’t, but I knew I was right. I told myself not to be upset. I told myself I’d been using him—to meet art world people, to raise my status, to show I could catch a handsome guy that everybody wanted—and now he was using Esphyr. That’s the way it goes. I tried to be cool, to face facts, to shrug and let him go—I tried so hard—but I couldn’t do it. I was hooked on him. It had been a beautiful summer.

  He didn’t make it easy for me. He kept me dangling. Sometimes he met me at Plutonium, and sometimes he didn’t. I couldn’t predict when he would show up. I was afraid to complain for fear he’d feel pressured and pull away from me.

  One night I waited for him at the club until 4:30 a.m., when Toby locked the doors. There was no message on the answering machine when I got home. I tried to sleep but kept arguing with Jem in my head, fantasizing about hurting him, except I had trouble imagining anything I could do that would hurt him.

  The next day I spotted him perched at the counter at Lethe. I went in and took the empty stool beside him.

  “Here she is. Fresh as a daisy like always.”

  I was rumpled from my restless night and surely not fresh-looking. I ordered a coffee from Taffy and waited to see what else he had to say. Not much, it turned out. He folded open the paper he was reading—the sports section of the Daily News, lots of pictures from the Olympics.

  “Jem,” I said.

  “Yes love.”

  “W
hat’s going on?”

  He looked up from the paper. “Nothing. Everything’s the same.” He dipped his head back into the sports section. I stirred milk into my coffee and took a sip.

  “Where are Bix and Wes today?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” He turned another page. “Guess they can’t come here every day.”

  I picked up someone’s discarded Times and stared at a picture of Mary Lou Retton’s triumphant fireplug body. At a table behind me, a man replaced a cup on a saucer with a clink, then cleared his throat. Taffy padded from table to table in her Tretorns. Was the café always this quiet?

  “Jem,” I said softly, “please talk to me. Something’s bothering you, I can feel it.”

  He rattled the newspaper, folding it. “You’re being paranoid.” A hint of annoyance crept into his voice.

  “I’m not imagining this. I’m seeing you less and less.”

  “I’m painting. I’m hoping to score a show this fall, and I’m working hard. Do you want me to feel bad about that?”

  “No.”

  He rose, leaving a dollar on the counter for Taffy. “See you later.” I watched him walk out. He turned and waved, but I sensed it took effort, that he did it out of obligation and regret, not because he couldn’t resist taking a last look at me.

  * * *

  I spent long days alone, listening for the phone, listening for the door, watching baseball, watching the Olympics, playing sad songs on my toy accordion. I stopped going to Café Lethe because it felt empty now that Carmen wasn’t there. I stood at the living room window for hours, studying the foot traffic on Avenue A, looking for people who were as unhappy as I was. I saw lots of them. It didn’t cheer me.

  “Say, dollbaby,” Bix said when I came to work. “You getting any sleep? You look like a dead raccoon.”

  I opened my Ivan stash and counted my money. Eight hundred and seventy-five dollars. When would I have enough? Throwing money in Ivan’s face was the only thing I could think of that might make me feel better.

  Then at the end of August, I saw Jem every night for a week. Maybe it’s over with Esphyr, I thought, afraid to hope but hoping anyway. In the paper I saw a picture of her at a party in the Hamptons. She had a place in Sag Harbor and was staying out there all week. Then, on Sunday night, Jem didn’t show up at the club. Esphyr was back in town.

  Humiliation and anger boiled inside me like baby spiders—hatching, crawling, biting. That night, I saw Carmen in a dream. She hovered over the bed like an angel, naked. “You’re wearing my clothes!” she howled at me. “I saw you. You’ve taken Mitch!”

  “You didn’t come back to get it!” I cried. I had to shield my eyes from the bright light she emitted. “If you want your jacket back, you have to come home and get it.”

  “Why don’t you come home!” she screamed.

  I woke up in a stew of feelings: sadness from my longing for her, stinging from her anger at me, but also, strangely, happy. It was painful not knowing where she was. I couldn’t comfort myself by imagining what she was doing. So I was happy to see her again, even if she was mad at me, even if only in a dream. But was it a dream, or a ghost? How could I tell the difference?

  * * *

  “I’ll bring fish and corn and wine,” Jem said on the phone. “We’ll have one of our Monday night dinners.”

  “Last one of the summer,” I said.

  It was early September, and he’d finally called.

  “I’ll be over around six.” His voice was soothing, placating, and I wanted badly to believe in him. I knew he didn’t love me, but by then it didn’t matter. I needed some contact, whatever he would give me, a fix to get me through another week.

  When he hadn’t arrived by eight, I called his apartment. Stevie Wonder sang on his outgoing message, “Until the day is night and night becomes the day.” I hung up on his machine. He wasn’t coming. And I knew where I could find him.

  I walked through the fading late-summer light to SoHo. There was a new Amelia flyer taped to a lamppost, and my heart seized. From a distance, the fuzzy Xeroxed photo of a sharp-faced girl could have been Carmen. All this time I’d been telling myself that Carmen was fine; she just didn’t want to see me. After she’d appeared in my dream, I’d begun to feel uneasy. Now I realized—I allowed myself to consider—that something might have happened to her. That her silence might not be her choice.

  I hesitated, then summoned the courage to step closer and read the flyer.

  MISSING: CATHY CALABRESI

  AGE 16

  5’ 4”, 115 LBS.

  BROWN HAIR, PALE SKIN, FRECKLES

  SLIGHT SOUTHERN ACCENT

  LAST SEEN ON AUGUST 29 NEAR TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK

  I felt a blast of relief, then guilt. To make up for it, I looked hard at the picture. I wished I had seen this Cathy Calabresi, or any of the Amelias. I wanted to help. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention.

  Fanelli’s neon sign beckoned from the corner of Mercer and Prince. I could see inside the bar through the large plate-glass window. Rowdy artists drank and joked and horsed around, and in the corner, Esphyr and Jem sat with their hands clasped together, deep in conversation. He lifted one of her hands to his lips. She allowed the kiss, then pulled her hand away to reach for her martini.

  I’d known all along he’d fallen for Esphyr; of course I had. But he kept denying it, saying that nothing had changed between us, that he was busy working, and until this moment I hadn’t realized how fervently I’d clung to that tiny shred of doubt. Now all doubt was gone. I felt a strange, sudden need to cough, as if I had to unblock an air passage. I stood on the sidewalk outside Fanelli’s window coughing helplessly. Jem caught sight of me and frowned. I felt ridiculous, my body seizing, my face crumpled, eyes tearing, my throat hacking out some speck of dust, a tiny thing caught inside me, tickling and torturing me, that wouldn’t come out. I didn’t want him and Esphyr to see me like that, so I ran away.

  * * *

  A few hours later, he banged on the door. “Phoebe! Open up.”

  I let him in.

  “Are you spying on me now? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You were supposed to come over,” I said. “You were going to make dinner.”

  “I said I might come over. I said maybe.” He started pacing, lighting matches and tossing them, aflame, on the floor, one after another, to fizzle out just before landing. The cats hid under the bed, afraid of his boots. “What do you want from me?”

  I couldn’t say. I knew I should act as if I didn’t care. I wished I didn’t care.

  “You don’t know what you want. That’s your trouble.”

  “That’s not true.” I did know what I wanted. I wanted what Carmen had. I wanted to be her. I wanted her to come back.

  “You girls don’t get it. This has nothing to do with you. You can be with different people, and it means different things. Esphyr can help me. If I spend time with her, it doesn’t take anything away from you.”

  “Except the time.”

  “What?”

  I wanted to stop my tongue, but I couldn’t resist pointing out the hole in his argument. “It takes away from the time you spend with me.”

  He ran out of matches and tossed the matchbook on the floor. “Look, you’re not my first priority, okay? No one is. My work comes first.”

  “What did you come here for then?”

  “You have my Ray-Bans. I need them back.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I haven’t seen them. Get out.”

  He went into the bedroom and started kicking through the clothes on the floor.

  “What are you doing? Get out!”

  He found the sunglasses in a drawer and waved them at me. I ripped them out of his hand. He punched the wall. His fist made a hole in the plaster.

  I stared at the hole in alarm. I’d never seen him so angry, and it tripped something angry in me too. “GET OUT!”

  He grabbed me from behind. I struggled and kicked, but that only made him tighten his
grip, and part of me wanted to stay in his arms. He licked my neck. “Don’t lick me! Kiss me!” I said, but he licked me again. He tossed me onto the bed and tore off my panties. I wrapped my legs around his waist and lifted my hips to meet his. He put his head between my thighs and gave my pussy one lick, then lifted his head and grinned, lips shiny. We fucked quickly. I came very hard. I hated myself. I hated the whole ugly, beautiful thing.

  He sat back on his knees and looked at me without affection or dislike—just neutral, expressionless. Then he reached for the glasses and slid them on.

  “You punched your fist through the wall. I didn’t know people actually did that.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  After he left, the cats slinked out from under the bed. Julio hid behind the door and ambushed Diego when he trotted by, grabbing him by the neck with his teeth. Diego froze, a gazelle to Julio’s lion, then escaped Julio’s jaws and fled to the living room. They hissed and scratched. I didn’t try to stop them. They were only following their instincts.

  23 ASTRID SEES ALL

  A couple of days later, I woke up with a headache and a painful itch between my legs. I got up to pee. It hurt. It smelled bad. There was clumpy yellow stuff coming out of me. I started to cry.

  I tried to think of someone to call, someone who would know what this was and what to do about it. But who did I know? Zu? Too embarrassing. Bix? Ha.

  Who else? Who else?

  I went to the clinic on Second Avenue. The doctor diagnosed trichomoniasis and gave me a prescription for Flagyl. He warned me not to take even one sip of alcohol while on the medicine or I’d get violently ill. He added that I should let any recent partners know that they should be treated too. Men often showed no symptoms. They spread suffering without suffering themselves.

  I secretly exulted in an excuse to call Jem. VD was gross, but it was something we shared. Something he’d given me. Something we’d have to face together.

  I dialed his number. He didn’t answer. He had changed the Stevie Wonder song on his machine from “As” to “Ordinary Pain.” I hung up on it.