Invisible Boy (19 page)

I wanted to bolt from the room, to bury my head in my mother’s lap, or, better yet, to hide behind winter coats and tennis
racquets in a dark, distant closet, arms wrapped tight around my knees.

Cammy came back downstairs in a little black dress, trailing Marlboro ribbon clouds.

At least she’d changed out of the Flintstones footwear.

I pointed at her feet. “Much better.”

She stared into space somewhere past my right shoulder, pupils dilated as hubcaps. “Better than what?”

“The boots,” I said. “They looked like you’d skinned a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Way too Cruella De Vil.”

“De Vil,” said Cammy. “She does shoes?”

She sucked in a drag, cheeks hollow, then French-inhaled.

I shook my head. “Coats.”

Cammy rounded her lips to exhale, wreathing my head in smoke. “Never heard of her.”

“
Quelle surprise.
”

She looked past me to Astrid. “Let’s take that Porsche tonight. I
hate
Jeeps.”

“The Porsche belongs to Maddie,” said Astrid.

Cammy blinked, twice. “Who?”

Astrid hooked a thumb at me.

The nose-plagiarist bitch tapped ashes onto my toe. “How did
you
get a car like that?”

“I shot a man in Reno,” I said, “just to watch him die.”

Cammy blinked again. “You bore me. Tell Christoph we left.”

She let her cigarette fall into the sink. I watched its ember hiss and go black.

D
ean and I had finally found a pizza place after driving around for half an hour.

“God,” I said as we took our seats inside, “that fucking
bitch
.”

Dean glanced around the room. “Given our current geographic coordinates, Bunny, I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

Our waiter glided to a halt well away from the table as though worried that some random observer might presume we were known
to him.

“Have you reached a decision?” he asked.

“We have,” I said.

He appeared to be fighting a rather powerful fluctuation in local gravity. Or just the inexorable magnetism of Caroline Kennedy,
three tables over.

Under normal circumstances I have an abhorrence of taking out my shitty day on waitstaff, having worked too many horrible
restaurant jobs myself over the years. The work is grinding, and thankless, and the kitchen floors are always so goddamn sticky.
But I was so tired of this town and all the people in it, and besides which it was a
pizza
joint, for chrissake.

“Excuse me, sir?” I said.

He crossed his arms. “Yes?”

“Would you prefer to have us shout into the kitchen from here, or shall I just commence hoisting a string of code-flags?”

“My apologies, madam,” he said, inching closer with palpable

reluctance—a mime in a wind tunnel.

Dean fluttered his lashes at me over the top of his menu. “Why don’t you order for both of us?”

“Why don’t I stick a fork in your eye?” I muttered.

He grinned. “Because our waiter neglected to bring cutlery?”

“You are
so
dead,” I said.

“Shall I give you a few more minutes?” asked the waiter.

“No thank you,” I said. “We’d like a large escargot pizza, please. With goat cheese but not the raspberry coulis.”

“Foie gras?” asked the waiter.

I closed my eyes. “Let us
both
pretend that you refrained from uttering such an entirely
de trop
suggestion aloud.”

Chastened, he transcribed the order to his little pad, a task that apparently necessitated the employment of jazz hands.

“What sort of beer do you have?” I asked.

He tapped the wine list beside me with his little gold pen. “We have an extensive
cellar
, madam.”

“And might one hope to stumble across a martini therein?”

He confessed that one might indeed.

“Please bring me two, then,” I said. “Very dry, very cold, small olives.”

“I’m not really a huge martini fan,” said Dean.

“Yeah right,” I said. “Like I’m planning to share.”

Dean’s eyes went wide. “You’re ordering two martinis for yourself?”

“I am,” I said. “Because that stupid whore Cammy stole my fucking Percodan.”

“Madam,” said the waiter, sympathetic at last, “you have my sincerest condolences.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And could you please bring my husband a glass of whatever ridiculous sort of wine a person is expected
to drink with escargot pizza?”

The man bobbed his head and scuttled away.

Dean nudged my foot under the table. “The people… they need a strong
hand
.”

“The Hamptons,” I replied, “they could use a little
napalm
.”

“Look,” I said, as we turned back onto Job’s Lane, toward Chateau Butthead, “are you
sure
you want to work for Christoph?”

“You’re the one who introduced me to the guy, Bunny.”

“Mea fucking culpa,” I said. “I take it back.”

“And besides, what about Nutty Buddy?”

“Nutty Buddy’s affection for me appears to have fallen down through the grate of a neglected storm drain.”

“You’re in kind of a pissy mood,” he said.

“Ya
think
?”

“Is it just getting ditched tonight?” he asked.

“Let’s see… in the past ten days I’ve discovered the bones of a three-year-old kid who was beaten to death, learned that not
only
did my most-despised ‘stepfather’ molest my sister but
also
that my mother finds it socially inconvenient to believe her, and—bonus!—I’m expected to make nice to Mom’s
newest
boyfriend this Monday, over lunch, while you’re in Texas doing errands for my newly
former
friend’s husband. Pinch me, honey, because I just couldn’t
be
more thrilled with my fabulous life!”

“I’m not sure martinis should remain among your cocktails of choice.”

“You want to walk back to Manhattan?”

“Is there some kind of bus?”

“I believe they call it a jitney,” I said.

“Of course. How too-too silly of me.”

Dean moved his hand to my knee. I put mine on top of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Astrid really hurt your feelings, didn’t she?”

“
So
much.”

“Bunny, how can you take someone like that seriously? And you know the dinner party would have been excruciating. Chock-full
of vapid Cammy-trash.”

“If you’d known Astrid, back at Dobbs, she was just… damn. I don’t even know how to explain it.”

He squeezed my knee. “You outgrew each other.”

“Dean,” I said, “did you ever have a friend who made you believe there was not a shred of doubt you were going to accomplish
something, like, I don’t know… splendid, or even heroic?”

“Every time I dropped acid.”

“Okay, look,” I said. “Whatever kind of shit happened in my life? Astrid always remembered who I was
meant
to be. And I remembered the same for her. It wasn’t that she had my back, or we’d exchange Hallmark cards every cheesy holiday.
It was just, like, I had
someone
out in the world who’d keep a little ember of my mojo safely banked in the ashes.”

“Until tonight,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

This would have been an optimum moment for my husband to look me square in the eye and proclaim, “Fear not, Bunny, for
I
cherish the eternal flame of your inner Batman.”

Not least because I had exactly that kind of deep and abiding faith in
him
.

Instead he gave my knee a final pat and said, “Teen-angst romanticism. You can’t expect that kind of thing to last.”

He was a guy, after all. And also a grown-up, unlike his wife.

We drove on in silence until I turned into the narrow lane with the hedges.

It was nine o’clock. The house was dark, and both Jeeps were still gone.

I turned off my car and pulled the key from its ignition.

You’re twenty-seven years old, Madeline. Maybe it’s time to stop clapping for Tinkerbell.

D
ean pled exhaustion and wandered up to bed. I kicked off my shoes in the living room and did a back layout onto the sofa.
It was only nine-fifteen, but I didn’t see any point in turning on the lights. It wasn’t like there was a single book in the
house, or even a television.

I couldn’t stomach the idea of
Town & Country
again, but was getting just about desperate enough to check the upstairs bathrooms for shampoo bottles so I’d at least have
marketing copy to read off their backs:
Are you Limp and Unmanageable? Lather, rinse, repeat.

The martinis were wearing off. I followed Dean upstairs and crawled into bed beside him, but he was already asleep.

“What,” I asked, “no hot monkey love?”

He snored a little and turned over onto his side.

I tried burrowing under the covers and closing my eyes, but after a few minutes it became patently obvious that the sandman
wasn’t coming by anytime soon.

There are few things more lonely than lying awake in the darkness thirsting after the contented sleep of the person beside
you.

I got up again, walking softly downstairs to the kitchen for a lukewarm glass of tap water, then another—talismans against
waking up to Astrid and Cammy with a hangover. The morning promised to suck plentifully enough.

There was a bit of light from the numbered face of a phone on the kitchen wall. I dialed our apartment in the hope of conversational
redemption, hanging up just before the machine kicked in on the seventh ring.

Mom was beyond reach in Connecticut or something, on her way down from Maine. I wasn’t feeling ready to talk to her, anyway,
and couldn’t think of a number for anyone else likely to be home in the city on a Saturday night.

It was ten o’clock now. I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out my wallet, then cracked the icebox door
open so I had enough light to read the number off Skwarecki’s business card.

I dialed 7-1-8 and then a string of numbers, getting patched through to her extension.

It rang once. I sat on the floor, Indian-style.

“Homicide. Skwarecki.”

I could hear the rumble of voices in the background, the clatter of a typewriter.

“Hey, it’s Madeline. This a bad time?”

“It’s slow. Mostly just me and the boys getting warmed up—swing a few bats around, knock the mud out of our cleats.”

“Cool,” I said.

“You’re sounding bummed.”

“Bored. I don’t know.”

“Where you at?”

“Suffolk County. I got dragged out for the Asshole Telethon.”

She laughed. “That an annual thing?”

“Year-round, I think.”

“Sucks to be you, huh?”

“Could be worse,” I said. “Could be dying in a famine, flies crawling over my eyelids.”

“Yo! Get a load of Little Miss Perky Sparkles.”

“Sorry. I totally didn’t mean to call you up and go Eeyore on your ass.”

“Not like you dialed 1-800-Sunnybrook-Fucking-Farm over here. This could well be the most uplifting chat I’ll have tonight.
You aren’t dead,
and
you’re not calling about someone who is. Hey, win-win.”

“That doesn’t freak you out every time you pick up the phone at work?”

“Beats typing reports,” she said.

“So how’d you end up in Homicide, anyway?”

“Fate, maybe,” she said. “The eeny-meeny-miny-mo of the universe or some shit.”

“What’re you, from California now, Skwarecki?”

“Yeah, right—‘Have a nice day’? I don’t fucking think so.”

“So how’d it happen, then?” I asked.

“Me in Homicide? Babe, I’m telling you,
fate
. No question.”

“And?” I said. “Once upon a time—”

“In a galaxy way the hell far, far away…”

I could hear the creak of her chair as she leaned back. “It was my first day on the job, right? I’m fresh out of the academy,
nineteen sixty-seven, and they send me to Bed-Stuy, for chrissake. I’m twenty years old, in stockings and this dumpy little
skirt, and they give me a purse with a holster in it and a fucking ‘Police Matron’ hat that makes me look like I’m working
for Pan Am or some shit, right?”