I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  Callie was sitting up, grasping at her throat.

  Her beautiful face was turning purple.

  She was choking.

  Cat climbed onto the chaise and wrapped her arms around the model’s body, trying to force air out of her throat in a Heimlich maneuver, but the girdle beneath Callie’s dress was too tight; it wasn’t possible to exert the needed force through the undergarment. Callie kept choking, her face so desperate and terrified that Cat didn’t give up. She used all her strength, squeezing in sharp hugs, trying to find some leverage, between screaming for help. Callie squirmed, grabbing Cat’s long black hair and tugging on it, trying to communicate. She managed to pull out a fistful before she went back to pawing at her throat, the strands interwoven between her fingers. Cat tried to push Callie over the edge of the chaise, but she wasn’t strong enough and they stayed locked in an upright position.

  After the longest minute of Cat’s life, Callie fell limp.

  “Nononononono,” Cat screamed at the model, leaning her back on the chaise. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking give up.”

  She grabbed the model’s jaw, then shoved her fingers down Callie’s throat and tried to dislodge whatever was in there, screaming the entire time, screaming herself hoarse, trying to open the door with her foot. Cat failed on every count. Nobody came to help. Callie didn’t move. She felt her fingernail break off somewhere in Callie’s esophagus.

  Eventually Cat let go, because nothing helped. She looked at Callie’s face and watched the life disappear from it.

  Callie was dead. A moment later Cat was sitting on the floor calling 911.

  Five minutes later, the model’s body remained on the chaise longue. Her eyes were still open, looking toward the ceiling, and Cat’s hair was still wrapped in her fist. Tears had run down her face as she choked to death, streaking her eye makeup into watercolor ribbons that slashed across her cheeks.

  A blank space hung in the air. Cat supposed it might be the distinction between life and death, between the atmosphere generated by a soul and the mere physical presence of a corpse. Time had slowed to a nothing, though the party raged on around her. Voices from the party mumbled senselessly as the stereo’s bass vibrated the room’s peach silk lampshades.

  Her call to the paramedics had been surprisingly calm. “Hello, my friend has choked and she’s not breathing, and I can’t get it out,” she’d said. “Please come to the penthouse at 150 Central Park West right now. We’re in the library, I think.”

  As she sat on the floor next to the body, Cat reached out and grabbed Callie’s hand. She didn’t know what else to do. Peals of laughter bubbled up through the din. The air smelled like a Christmas tree.

  Five more minutes passed.

  An odd stiffness, a rubbery quality, passed through the girl’s fingers, but Cat didn’t let go.

  Eventually someone barged in. There were flashing lights; the party dissolved; someone made her let go of Callie. The police kept trying to ask her questions. But Cat couldn’t speak. She didn’t have anything to say.

  She found herself sitting on another linen sofa in the apartment’s parlor, facing a paramedic. The world came back into focus.

  “What did you take?” the paramedic was asking. Cat stared over his head at an oil painting of a ship. It had big foamy waves and a yellow sky, like a Turner. It probably is a Turner, she realized.

  “I didn’t take anything,” she said. “I had a glass of wine earlier. But I didn’t take anything.”

  “What did your friend take?”

  “I don’t know. She sniffed something and threw it out on the balcony. I brought her in here to see if she was okay and so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself. I went to the toilet and when I came back, I found her like that. She was grabbing her throat. I tried to stick my fingers down it, to get whatever it was out. I tried to push on her stomach. But I couldn’t do anything. The girdle was too tight, I think. I called 911. She died right in front of me. I couldn’t help…” she said, trailing off.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Lou speaking to a police officer, showing him her ID. She looked around the room for her handbag and found it folded in her lap.

  “We need to give you a blood test,” the paramedic said.

  “Okay,” Cat agreed. “Go ahead.”

  He took a sample from her left arm; rubber tourniquet, needle, cotton ball, bandage.

  Cat felt herself dissociate completely from the scene around her as her mind retreated to a comfortable space far, far away from here, in her mother’s barn. The smell of sweat when you take off a saddle; the way dust comes up from a currycomb. The fur of a foal, matted and wet and new.

  She remembered the time they’d had to euthanize Fielt, their squat Brabants trekpaard—thirteen hands, a runt for his breed but strong—who had broken the lower shin of his left foreleg, the cannon bone, plowing a neighbor’s field. The break grew infected and they had to put him down in his stall a week later. She’d held his face while he died.

  Her mother hadn’t cried at all.

  Cat had been so angry, but Anais had insisted that leaving him to suffer for another moment in pain would be the only thing that could really hurt him, that Cat’s anger was misplaced. Putting him to sleep is a gift we can and must give, Anais had insisted, but Cat had been only eight years old. She hadn’t understood.

  She remembered the heavy strands of his forelock, each one thick as dental floss, and holding the hank of it in her hands. The milky whites of his huge eyes, wild and glassy, and pained, until they were blank, and, finally, the size of the needle they’d used to inject morphine into his haunches. Cat remembered it as the size of a drinking straw.

  She suddenly felt very, very tired.

  After a while—when it became clear that she wasn’t going to speak—someone walked her out of the apartment, into the elevator, through the lobby, and helped her get in a cab. She settled in and blankly gave the driver her address. As they pulled away, she caught a glimpse of Callie’s body, zipped into a thick plastic bag, being loaded into the ambulance.

  Two days later Hutton sat on the floor of Callie’s apartment looking through a shoebox of photographs she’d left on the floor. With a flash of his badge and a copy of the death certificate, he’d had no trouble getting the super to let him right in.

  The photograph in his hands showed a lighter-blonde Callie wearing a tattered black Hank Williams T-shirt while she smoked a cigarette in front of Dakin House. An equally youthful version of himself stood behind her, a rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He remembered when she bought the T-shirt in a thrift store out in Williamsburg, on an afternoon they’d spent drinking and shopping after waking up on somebody’s sofa. Whose party had that been? He tried to remember. It must have been something in Bushwick, he thought, maybe McKibbin, back when it was still deemed habitable, before the rat infestation had forced the city to permanently evacuate the building.

  There were so many photos of him, of the two of them together. Every photo forced the same set of recollections: what day of the week it had been, where they had been going. He spent an hour going through the box. She’d loved him. They’d loved each other. He knew that. But it wasn’t enough. They’d never worked out.

  When they’d met she was a naive girl from Ann Arbor who’d never had anything stronger than the so-called 3-2 beer they sold at midwestern gas stations. First it had been mushrooms and pot, then a short spell with cocaine, and then five years ago: heroin. Dope, she always called it, like she was a character in a Tom Robbins novel.

  He didn’t know when she started using, but he remembered the first time he’d seen it. He’d stopped by Callie’s apartment just to see if she’d wanted to fool around, and found her listening to Depeche Mode and painting her fingernails with two of her spacey girlfriends from some bar.

  “Want some dope?” she’d asked—her eyes huge, her voice so cheery, like it was anything else, like she was offering him a cocktail or a cigarette or a frozen m
ini-quiche. Too shocked to express his own horror, he’d just said no thank you, and hung out for a while until it was clear that everyone was so fucked up they wouldn’t notice if he left. He stopped calling her for a while after that, but he could never cut her out completely.

  After a year or two of using she’d gone to rehab. Hutton had asked her to. She’d given in way more easily than he’d expected, happily grabbing her ID and getting in a cab to the airport, docile as a puppy. Later he realized how high she’d been. It took her two tries to get clean, and a long stay at home with her parents, but she eventually did it, a period during which he also left CBS and joined the NYPD. Hutton had paid for the whole thing without ever telling her. She thought her meager insurance, a long-expired hundred-dollar policy from her first modeling agency, had covered it.

  By the time she came back Callie’s problems had—frankly—been too much for him to bear.

  “I want you to be clean for yourself,” he’d said at the time. “I’ll always be here for you.”

  “I am clean for myself,” she’d insisted. But she hadn’t made the changes she needed to make, he realized now. She’d kept the same group of friends, kept partying.

  It was never my job to keep her sober, he reminded himself. It was never my job to tell her how to be. It was never my job to be her only lifeline; he knew all of that, and yet the guilt washed over him in a tidal wave, replacing all the blood in his veins.

  He kept looking through the photographs. They’d been so young, and so beautiful, and so stupid, once upon a time. He could barely believe they’d survived. She didn’t, he suddenly remembered, in that way that you have to forget and remember and forget and remember and forget and remember—when people are very newly dead—that you’ll never ever see them again.

  He’d been the one to call her parents, from the morgue on the Upper West Side the day after she died; a detective there who knew him had recognized Hutton’s name in Callie’s contacts. He’d tried to explain that yes, she’d been at a party, but he didn’t think it was that kind of party. No, he’d had no idea she was using again.

  She’d choked on a piece of gum in the penthouse apartment of 150 Central Park West, at a party for RAGE Fashion Book. The drugs had relaxed her muscles, delaying her gag reflex when the gum she’d been chewing had slid down into her useless, weakened throat. And Catherine Ono—Cat!—had tried to save her, but the coroner found that the girdle Callie had worn to fit into her dress was so tight that Cat’s attempts at the Heimlich maneuver had failed. They’d found one of Cat’s fake fingernails stuck to the gum. But ultimately there was no explanation that could satisfy the exceptional grief of two people who had lost their only child, a person they had made and raised and loved.

  Hutton checked his watch. The movers he’d hired to pack and ship Callie’s things to her family, to spare them the pain of it, would be here in twenty minutes. He wiped his tears, stood up, then looked through every drawer and cabinet trying to find anything she might not have wanted her mother to see; notebooks, videos, photographs, anything. He found a hard drive, another box of photographs—most of them nude—and her laptop, which was password-protected. He put everything in a duffel bag and told himself he’d have the electronics wiped the following week. He searched for the little black notebook she’d carried everywhere, but he couldn’t find it. The notebook must have been in her purse, he thought. The police would have released her belongings with the body. It was probably in a coffin on a plane right now. Her mother might read it, but he’d done his best, he told himself, even if it was too late.

  Lou Lucas had spent the last thirty-six hours in a state of complete exhilaration, communing fully with her computer as she wrote with a fury she’d never known possible. At 5:00 p.m. on Saturday she was still in her office while Molly and Rose scoured wire services, catalogs, agents’ records, and photographers’ archives. Lou was nearly done with the text for the November issue, which would be closing the next week; all that was left was to present the whole thing to Paula and Margot.

  After Callie had overdosed in her apartment on Thursday night, Lou momentarily considered jumping off the terrace. Watching the coroner examine the girl’s body—that stupid, thoughtless girl dying in Lou’s own office—all she could think was, They’ll never make me staff.

  There is no way RAGE will be able to run the shoot I worked so hard to produce, Lou had realized, shaking with fear as she watched the police invade her beautiful penthouse. It would be repellent to run the photos after Callie’s accidental death, purely and openly exploitative; she wasn’t, frankly, well-known enough for her “final photo shoot” to be seen as a celebrity story, and so, November would tank. Come December Lou’s contract wouldn’t be renewed, and she would have officially failed. She nearly threw up right then and there but swallowed the bile back down, holding herself together long enough to instruct the caterers and servants to clean up.

  She’d paced nervously in front of the office, watching the officers like a hawk. When they found a small black notebook behind the chaise, she’d claimed it immediately, for no reason other than wanting them out of her apartment as soon as possible. “It’s mine!” she’d snapped. “This is my office. So are you done now?” They’d rolled their eyes and stayed put for another hour.

  When it finally looked as though everyone, including the police, the domestic laborers, and the last phonily sympathetic gossip hounds, had finally gone, Lou had poured straight vodka into a tumbler, walked out onto the terrace, and opened the barbecue drawer where she kept her secret spare pack of Sobranies, fat, gold-tipped cigarettes packaged in a heavy rectangular box.

  She smoked half of one and finished her vodka before she remembered the little black notebook she’d claimed as her own. She refilled her drink and examined it.

  The notebook, Callie’s diary, covered the last three or four years of her life, and it was surprisingly well-written, chronicling her professional successes and failures, her weight fluctuations, her feelings about her body, and her ongoing, on-again, off-again relationship with a policeman named Mark. It turned out Callie had been the woman in the Valentino campaign that had been plastered all over the city for the past six months, that she had a Raven contract, that there were more videos that would come out from Jonathan Sprain. This woman was an absolute volcano of content.

  Lou found herself out on the terrace with the bottle for the next hour, smoking and drinking and reading the entire diary in one greedy gulp. When she was done, she picked up the phone and called Margot.

  “I think I can resolve this whole fucking thing,” Lou sputtered as soon as Margot picked up. “I think I’ve got it. We don’t need to trash the photos. There’s a story. We can keep them.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Margot had responded, sounding almost bored. But Lou managed to convince her. “This is a story about feminism,” she insisted. “This is a story about a woman betrayed. This is a story about a woman doing everything she can for the attention of one man who could care less, a woman whose career was, sadly, about to take off. There’s oceans of content around her. We’re just the first to break it.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” Margot replied. “Do you want to be on staff at RAGE permanently?”

  “Absolutely,” Lou replied earnestly. “That’s the only thing I want.”

  “Then I’d appreciate it if you could explore this, in five thousand words, by Monday morning. It needs to be compelling.”

  “I’m on it,” she’d said to Margot. “You can count on me.”

  So Lou had spent the last two days in her office, fueled by a half-dozen bottles of cold press from the old Coke machine and some Adderall that she stole from Cat’s desk drawer, composing a glorious and elaborate obituary for Callie Court, weaving the strands of Callie’s love affair with Detective Mark Hutton as if it had been her own. Who was to say that Callie hadn’t told these things to Lou herself? No one would ever know the difference, and Cooper’s lawyers would surely be satisfied with the di
ary as her unnamed source.

  Cat wouldn’t be happy about the article, seeing as how it ended with her breaking a fingernail off in the girl’s throat—a fact that hadn’t yet made it out of the police department—but that woman had long ago sacrificed her right to a personal life, Lou thought, done it the second she agreed to put her personal photos of Hillary Whitney in RAGE after her “friend” had died so horribly; done it the very first time she put on a dress and stepped in front of a camera on RAGE’s behalf, eager for the attention. In fact, she’d done it the second she posted her first image on Photogram for the whole world to see. Yes: Cat has done it all to herself, Lou thought. What difference will one more issue make?

  For the impoverished working women of the world—working their little fingers to death in some sweaty country in the East—whose incomes are protected by feminists at RAGE, feminists like me, she told herself as she typed, it will make a huge difference. It will all be worth it.

  Part III

  October

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cat stared at herself in the mirror of the cramped restroom on the plane that was flying them all to Paris. She rubbed her hand back and forth over the top of her head, relishing the soft bend of the remaining stubble. The clean whites of her scalp matched the wan tone of her pallid cheeks. Two weeks ago, the morning after Callie died, she’d cut off all her hair in her bathroom at home, shearing it half an inch from the skull before informing Paula and Margot via email that she wouldn’t be making any more appearances until Paris, but that she’d be in the office if they needed anything.