Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  Bix gave me a gentle shove out of the stall.

  “I can’t help anyone.” I stumbled out to the lounge and asked for a vodka and soda. I took it back to my booth, drew the curtain, and said, “We’re closed.”

  On the table, the crystal ball rebuked me, cloudy as my brain. I plucked an ice cube from my glass and gazed into it, but it melted in my fingers.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I opened the curtain. The guy with the platinum dreads was still waiting, chewing on a Twizzler. The dreads were short and sprouted gracefully from his head like pineapple leaves. “Will you see me now?”

  I let him in and closed the curtain around us. His name was Bob, he said. Bob-o-Phonic Bob. He was a DJ who worked at the club a few nights a week; I’d seen his silver dreads bopping up and down in the booth while he spun soul records. He was around twenty, with a boyish face and sad eyes, wearing a mod suit with a skinny tie.

  “Shake the magic box.” I put the shoebox in his hands. “Do you have a question?”

  He tightened his lips. He had a question, but he wasn’t ready to ask it yet. “Okay,” I said. “Maybe the box will ask a question for you.” I reached in and pulled out a stub. The Turning Point.

  “Oh my God,” Bob said. “That’s one of my favorite movies.”

  “I know. Anne Bancroft. Shirley MacLaine. Ballet. Baryshnikov! It’s got everything.”

  “I can’t believe you chose that movie. You’re amazing.”

  “There are no coincidences. What is your question?”

  He picked up the movie ticket and turned it over. “I think I’m sick. I’m afraid to go to the doctor.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m tired. I wake up at night sweating, even when the room is cold. I’ve lost weight….”

  “You should go to the clinic.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know, but I’m not a doctor. I don’t know anything about this.”

  “Can you just tell me…” He licked his lips, swallowed. “Should I be afraid?”

  “Should you…?” Yes, I thought. We should all be afraid. But I couldn’t say that. People said they wanted to know the future, but I’d learned over the months that my true job was to reassure. “I don’t know. Please, Bob, you have to go to a doctor. You know that clinic on Second Avenue? I just went there myself.”

  “Please—look in the crystal ball or whatever you do. Do you see a sign of doom?”

  “Doom?”

  “Don’t you feel it all around us? This sense of doom? Bad things keep happening, not just to me…”

  I did feel it.

  “It’s everywhere I look. Drops of blood on the sidewalk. A dead pigeon on my front stoop. Did you hear that the police found a cooler in a dump near the East River, full of bones? One of my friends is in the hospital, and another one is wasting away….”

  I didn’t want to hear this. I tapped the movie stub. “The Turning Point! Maybe this is it. Maybe from now on things will start to get better.”

  “Or worse.”

  I pulled out a second stub. The Hunger. He groaned.

  “That means nothing. David Bowie’s in it! What could be bad?”

  “It’s about vampires. And blood.”

  “Wait! You get three.”

  Ciao! Manhattan. Goddammit.

  “You have to go to the doctor,” I said.

  “And if I go, what will they say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Come on. Look.”

  I rubbed the crystal ball, just to make him happy. “The doctor will tell you.”

  “You’re not trying.” He stood up, clenching his fists. I think he wanted to punch me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know anything. I’ve lost my powers.”

  He tore open the curtain and stalked away. Aviva B. poked her head in. “Am I next?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  She sat down across from me but did not reach for the shoebox. She’d attached a blue velvet hat to her head, perilously tilted, and lined her eyes in midnight blue to match. “I know who you are.”

  “Everyone knows who I am. I’m Astrid the Star Girl.”

  “I said, I know who you are, Phoebe Hayes.”

  The note of menace in her voice made my stomach twist. It wasn’t hard to find out what my real name was. But why would she care?

  “Okay, so?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Aviva B.”

  “Guess what the B stands for.”

  “What?”

  “The B. In Aviva B.”

  The cocaine thrill in my blood soured. I picked up my cup of vodka and tilted it at my mouth. Nothing left but ice cubes. I crunched on them.

  “Can you guess?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It stands for Bergen.”

  Some part of me had already, secretly, known that.

  “Do you know anyone named Bergen?”

  “One person. One person I used to know.”

  “He’s my father.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what she wanted me to do with this information. It was unnerving to think Ivan had a daughter nearly my age, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that I knew, I saw the resemblance: the way she trained her stony eyes on me, expecting obedience.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  She looked startled. “He doesn’t care about you. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”

  I realized how my question had sounded and regretted it. I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that I cared about him either.

  “I owe him something, that’s all. I want to repay him so I never have to think about him again.”

  Now she looked wary. “Repay him? Repay him what?”

  None of her business. “How do you know about me, anyway? Did he tell you?”

  “Ha. I don’t speak to him anymore. I found the pictures in my mother’s room—the pictures and the detective’s report. Pictures of you with him. Kissing him. Getting into taxis. And everything about you. Everything.”

  A detective. The thought made me queasy. “Tell your mother she can call off the detective now. She has nothing to worry about from me.”

  “She called him off months ago, when you left town. She thought you were gone for good. But I found you. You sneaked back, trying to hide under a false name—”

  “If you know everything, then you know I owe your father some money. Just tell me where I can find him, and I’ll be out of your lives forever.”

  She hesitated. She didn’t trust me, but she was a gossip at heart and couldn’t help herself.

  “My mother kicked him out, so he rejoined the MSF. He’s in Ethiopia, with the famine.”

  Hiding in Ethiopia, pretending he cared about humanity. I was annoyed.

  “Are you talking about the abortion money?” Aviva asked. She really did know everything. “The flowers with the envelope of cash inside? That didn’t come from him.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “My mother sent it. It was the detective’s idea.”

  I absorbed this information slowly. Ivan had not sent the money. So I could never throw it back in his face. He hadn’t even been that decent.

  “I’m glad you told me this.” I plucked the ten hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and set them on the table. “Give this to your mother for me, please.”

  Aviva stared at the money. She folded the bills and put them in her tiny purse.

  “Or you can keep it for yourself,” I said. “I’ll never know the difference. Next time you go out, you can buy the drinks for a change.”

  When she stood, her fists were clenched like Bob-o-Phonic Bob’s. I had, again, the strong feeling she wanted to punch me. “I no longer have a father. Because of you.”

  “Only me?” Because I understood, now, that there must have been others. Pro
bably many others.

  She flexed her hands open, then re-clenched them. No, not only me. “You did your part.”

  “You have a father. You just don’t want him.”

  26 THE MOON AND THURMAN MUNSON

  Wes was watching the TV over the bar: Yanks versus Boston at Fenway. Bix sat beside him with a whiskey. They didn’t notice that I’d come in. I took a breath and focused on the Scooter.

  “Look at that, White: the wind keeps changing direction. I tell ya, it blows Yankee fly balls back into the stadium, but it blows Red Sox hits right out of the park. Strike one to Piniella. Somebody told me the Red Sox control the elements up here. The wind, the rain, everything. I didn’t believe them until today.

  “Son of a gun, look at this! Piniella whacks one! And it goes… foul. Foul ball. How do you like that. The wind again!”

  The Yankees’ season was basically over. They weren’t going to make the playoffs. Neither were the Orioles. Some years were like that. The Scooter accepted it. Dad and I accepted it. Games were won and lost. Players were streaky, hot one day and slumping the next. The wind blew for you or against you, but there was always next spring. In the meantime, baseball and its superstitions, its omens and good luck charms, would get you through. That was the idea, anyway.

  I tapped Wes on the shoulder and took the empty stool next to him. He smiled and ordered me a beer. “I heard you got fired.”

  I glared at Bix. He shrugged and said, “It’s no secret, dollbaby.”

  “I wasn’t fired, exactly.” But I might as well have been. After my run-in with Aviva B., I’d decided to leave the club early. It had been a bad night. Shan had stopped me on my way out and said Toby wanted to see me. I went to his office and he told me he was getting rid of my fortune-telling table. It took up space in the ladies’ lounge, and interest had dropped off. The concept was great for a while, he said, but everything gets stale eventually; that was why they redid the club in a new theme every month. He wanted to put a photo booth in its place. People loved those. He was sure I understood. I was welcome at the club any time, of course, for a drink or whatever.

  I suspected Aviva had gotten to him, but it didn’t really matter. Nightclub fortune-telling is not the kind of gig that lasts forever.

  The next day I finished my tryout column for Wes. I’d lost my only source of income, and Mrs. Lisiewicz had been nagging me for the rent, which I’d skimped on in my rush to pay back Ivan. The Underground was my last hope.

  In the late afternoon I dropped off the column at Wes’s office. He said he would read it and get back to me soon. On my way home, I kicked an empty beer can into the gutter and stopped to look at the latest Amelia flyer, a blurry photo of a young woman with a ski-lift nose, her hair in a severe dancer’s bun.

  MISSING: KATINKA GELFORS

  AGE 20

  5’ 5”, 103 LBS.…

  Taffy missing, now Katinka, and all the other girls too. And where was Carmen? That gnawing feeling returned, the tiny fishhooks eating away at me. The world had always been dangerous, but now I let it scare me.

  The evening sky was tart, the sapphire-lemon color of a sno-cone. I entered the park near the statue of Samuel Sullivan Cox and strolled the winding paths, looking for signs of Carmen. I paused at the General Slocum memorial. They were Earth’s purest children, young and fair. I thought about Doug and his baby. Doug had moved out. It was just Kelly Ann and the baby now. The rooster pecked at a pool of rainwater in the bowl of the fountain, then squawked and fluttered away.

  “You know the rooster that lives in the park?” I said to Bix, taking a sip of beer, cool and fizzy and pleasantly sour.

  “The park is a jungle these days,” Bix said. “All overgrown, people living in there like wild animals. I used to go there to score. Now I won’t walk through it. I always go around.”

  I glanced at the game. Bill Buckner was at the plate, one out, nobody on.

  “So… you read my sample?” I asked Wes.

  “I liked it.” Wes had a kind smile, which he bestowed on me now. Somehow I knew that kindness was a bad sign. “I’m just not sure my readers will care about a girl they’ve never heard of who claims to predict the future with movie ticket stubs—I mean, when they can’t see you in person, the whole act and everything.”

  “But… the column was your idea. You asked me to write it.”

  “I know. But that was when you were the house fortune-teller at Plutonium. Without that club connection, your name alone isn’t enough of a draw.”

  “I’ll get work at another club,” I said. “I’ll tell fortunes at Danceteria, or Limelight.”

  “I know you will. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

  To hide my disappointment, I concentrated on the game. Buckner drove a bullet of a line drive toward first. Mattingly dove for it and made a miraculous double play to end the inning.

  “How do you like that! If Don Mattingly isn’t the American League MVP, nothing’s kosher in China.”

  I memorized the line to add to my Scooter notes when I got home.

  Wes left a ten-dollar bill on the bar and slid off his stool. “I’d better get going. See you two around.” He glanced up at the TV one last time before walking out.

  Bix took off his fedora and clapped it onto my head. “Are you going to leave me too?”

  “I’ll never leave you.”

  “Good. Let’s get drunk.” He ordered two Irish whiskeys. We clinked glasses.

  “Cheers.”

  “I heard what Aviva B. said to you the other night, dollbaby. Some of it, I mean. I don’t know exactly what she was talking about, but her body language was fierce.”

  “Yeah.” His hat was making my forehead sweat. I took it off and gave it back to him.

  “But so, if you’re broke or whatever, why not go home and lie low for a while? You got a family someplace, anybody can see that.”

  “You can? How do you see it?”

  “It’s all over your face. Why do you think I call you dollbaby?”

  I felt so tired, for a moment I actually considered going home. I would crawl into my bed and sleep for days…. But that was a fantasy. My mother would not simply let me sleep. She would be driven to find out what was wrong with me, and she would keep me with her until she’d fixed it.

  Seventh-inning stretch: the camera panned up to the sky where a big round moon glowed over Fenway.

  “Ah, White, look at that moon. Beautiful, beautiful full moon. You know, it might sound corny, but to me it’s some kind of a, like an omen. Remember the night after Thurman died? About five years ago. We held a memorial service in Yankee Stadium. There was a moon that night just like this one. A big full moon.”

  I remembered. The summer before I left home for college, the last year of the seventies. Watching with Dad while the Scooter said a prayer for his dead friend, “just something to keep you from going bananas.”

  I knew what would happen if I went home in this condition, thin and coke-addled and broke, after running away and not telling anyone where I was for nearly a year… or I thought I knew. It would be just like the last time, after the funeral. Maybe worse. I thought of my mother as a jailer lying in wait, setting a trap for me. Now I see that I’d set my own trap; she only wanted to help free me. But if you approach a wild animal who’s caught in a trap—even to free them—they’ll snarl and try to bite your hand off.

  “I can’t go back home. Can we just watch the game?”

  Scooter spoke: “Both the moon and Thurman Munson, ascending up into heaven. I can’t get it out of my mind. I just saw that full moon, and it reminded me of Thurman. And that’s it.”

  Suddenly my head was swimming. I stepped off the stool and planted my feet, gripping the bar. I felt the Earth turning under me. Nothing was keeping me from being sucked into the void but gravity—which hadn’t failed me yet, but who was to say it never would?

  “I have to go.”

  “Hey—are you okay?”

  I swallowed, nauseated. “
I’m okay. But… you know… when you’re underwater?”

  “Say what?”

  I couldn’t speak, but this was what I was thinking: I’d been living underwater, in an undersea world with its own language and myths, which was great and everything, except that all this time I’d been holding my breath. You know when you’re swimming along the bottom of a pool or the ocean and suddenly you can’t hold your breath any longer? So you swim for the surface, frantically kicking, but it’s a long way off. Maybe you left someone behind who tries to grab you by the ankle and pull you back down. You kick him away and shoot for the surface. When you finally break through… relief. You can breathe again. You fill your lungs with salt air. You can look through the mirror of the water at the undersea world you left. You can see it all clearly, the myths the sea people live by, and marvel at how long you are able to hold your breath.

  I couldn’t articulate this then. Bix said, “Dollbaby, you’re talking jibber-jabber.”

  I stumbled outside. Overhead, the same full moon that the Scooter had admired gazed sternly down on me. The moon reminded him of the dead. It reminded me of my father. And that was it.

  27 WHAT HAPPENED AT THE FUNERAL

  My father’s funeral was held on a bright, blinding December day at the cathedral, even though he wasn’t Catholic—he wasn’t really anything—but Mom is, and, as she said, you have to have a funeral somewhere. The church was packed. Mom and Laurel and I sat in the front row in our black clothes with our stunned faces. Mom and Laurel wept and wept, but I didn’t cry. Everyone said how well I was holding up. Being strong for your mother, they said.

  I wasn’t being strong. It didn’t feel real.

  That’s why I didn’t cry.

  I wasn’t awake. I was dreaming that I was awake.

  At the end of the service, the pallbearers lifted the casket. It floated down the aisle of the cathedral through a haze of incense, stiff as a board, light as a feather…

  After that, my memory gets spotty.

  I rode in a long black limousine with Mom and Laurel.

  The cemetery grass was surprisingly green for December.