Invisible Boy (30 page)

“It made me really happy, that night. I think it was the first time I ever truly felt like I belonged there. Like maybe it
was going to turn out okay.”

She poked me in the thigh with her toe. “Like
what
was going to turn out okay?”

“My life? I don’t know.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “We had the world by the balls and you knew it, even then.”

“
You
did. You were this cool kid, and suddenly out of the blue we had all this crap in common, and after that, everything was
just easy.”

“Bullshit,” she said again.

“Whatever, okay? That’s not what matters right now.”

“And what does?” She sounded so tired, so lost.

“
You
do. Shut your eyes and forget about Southampton and Christoph and Cammy and all the bullshit whirling around your head right
now.”

“I can’t.”

“None of it means shit,” I said. “None of it changes the fact that you, Astrid, fucking well
matter
.”

She shook her head.

“Have I
ever
lied to you?” I asked.

“That I know of?”

“In twelve years, have I ever fucking said even
one thing
to you that contained so much as a single iota of bullshit when it was about something important?”

She didn’t answer.

“I haven’t,” I said. “Ever. So when I say that there’s no fucking way in the universe that Christoph is fucking around on
you, you should believe me, okay?”

“Mad—”

“Shut up. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. And damn close to the smartest. And we’re still the balls, okay?
We are the fucking
balls
.”

I looked up and saw Dean standing in the doorway.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

I followed him out into the hallway. “What’s up?”

“I think we should leave your car here.”

“How ’bout we just
leave
?” I whispered.

“I still have a lot of work to do. Christoph will give us a ride back into the city.”

“I’ll wait. I don’t think I could handle being trapped in a Jeep with the two of them.”

“I still think you should keep the Porsche out here.”

“Maybe you can drive it back out tomorrow morning?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I owe you big-time.”

“You sure as hell do,” he said, grinning as he snaked an arm around my waist and leaned down to kiss me.

“All is forgiven?”

His breath tickled my ear. “If you really want to leave now, Bunny, I can catch a ride with them solo.”

“No way,” I whispered back. “I wouldn’t wish that on a
dog
.”

I drove Dean back into the city myself, long after dark. He went to bed right away but when the phone rang just after midnight,
I was still lying alone on the living room sofa, wide awake in the urban semidark.

I grabbed it up quickly, before it could ring a second time. Everyone else in the apartment was asleep.

“Mad?” Astrid’s voice.

Oh great.

It’s not that I wasn’t concerned about her, it was just hard having the same conversation over and over again. My reassurances
never seemed to stick.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She sounded horrible. “Hey, are you crying?”

“Christoph pushed me down the stairs.”

“Jesus…
what
?”

“At the office,” she said. “In New Jersey.”

“It’s like, midnight. You’re still out there?”

“No. It all happened this afternoon. After you and Dean left.”

“All
what
happened? Are you okay?”

I heard her take a drag off a cigarette, then exhale.

“Astrid? Talk to me here, for fuck’s sake—”

“I called the police.”

“Did he hurt you?” I sat up. “Where are you?”

“They came and I filed a report and everything and now I’m back in the city.”

“
Where
in the city?”

She took another drag. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” I said, but the fact that she had to ask left me feeling uneasy. “Has anything like this happened before?”

“Maddie, should I leave him?” She was whispering now.

“Where
are
you?” I whispered back.

“The apartment. Our apartment.”

“Is Christoph there
with
you?” I asked, a little shocked.

“Of course. But I don’t want him to hear me.” She coughed into the phone.

“Do you want to come spend the night here?”

“It’s all right now. I just have to go to court next week.”

“I can come right now and get you if you want. Really.”

“I’ll call you later,” she said, and hung up on me.

Staring at the dead phone in my hand, I half wanted to call the police and send them racing to her apartment, and half didn’t
believe a word she’d just said.

Dean padded out into the living room rubbing his eyes. “Who was that?”

“Astrid.”

He yawned. “What’d she want?”

“She said Christoph pushed her down the stairs today after we left your office.”

He sat on the sofa at my feet. “On purpose?”

“She told me she called the cops.”

“You talk to him?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Astrid’s okay, though?”

“I guess. I mean, it didn’t sound like she was bleeding to death or anything. She said she’d call me later and hung up on
me.”

“I don’t want to cast aspersions,” said Dean, “but Christoph just doesn’t seem like that kind of guy.”

“I know, but still.”

“Astrid,” he said, shaking his head. “Nutty
Buddy
.”

“No, I can’t
believe
she’d make something like that up. I mean, Jesus, Dean—what the hell should I do?”

“Not much you can do. Besides coming to bed and getting some sleep.”

“You sure?”

“I think it will all blow over by tomorrow.”

Dean stood up and started tugging on my hand.

“Let it go,” he said. “It’s after midnight. Call her in the morning.”

“Okay, just promise you’ll call
me
, from work.”

“I solemnly swear you’ll get the full report on whether or not Christoph’s acting like a mad wifebeater and/or foaming at
the mouth.”

I let him pull me up off the sofa. “First thing?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Listen, I’m sorry I was acting like a bitch today.”

“That’s all right. You’re probably just getting the monthlies.”

I punched him in the arm. “Don’t be a dick.”

“You
love
it,” he whispered. “You know you do.”

I phoned Astrid three times before I left for work the next morning, but no one picked up.

The whole thing seemed unreal after a good night’s sleep. Not just her midnight call, but Taliaferro being so obnoxious, Christoph
going all
sieg heil
, and my parking-lot fight with Dean on top of everything else.

I pulled on my coat, which still took some doing, one-armed, and wondered whether it was worth dialing her number one more
time before I left for work.

Maybe she was just sleeping in.

And why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s not like she has a job she’s got to show up for, right?

All the same, there was a flicker of uneasiness in my belly.

Or maybe she’s dead. And wouldn’t you feel like a creepy bitch for dissing her in your head
then
, Maddie Dare?

I went back into the living room and punched in her phone number one more time.

The machine picked up again, her voice saying, “You’ve reached Astrid and Christoph. Please leave a message.”

“Astrid, listen, it’s Maddie. I just wanted to see how you were doing this morning. Give me a call at work.”

I was just about to start reciting the Catalog’s 800 number when she picked up, groggy.

“Hey,” I said. “You all right? I was worried.”

“Maddie?” she said, coughing. “What the hell time is it?”

“Early.”

I heard the rasp of a lighter. “You woke me up.”

“Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I left for work.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I just need more sleep.”

“Okay. I’ll let you go, then. Call me later.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

She coughed again and hung up.

We were slammed that week at work: phone and fax orders already picking up for the holidays, and Betty ran through every hour
on the hour to throw things in Editorial while shrieking about how we were all lazy, incompetent pieces of shit.

At one point she even made Yumiko cry, though of course Yumiko got all tough again a minute later and swore it wasn’t anything
That Crazy One-Arm White Bitch had said, it was just that she’d caught some shrapnel when Betty missed her with the stapler,
smashing a fresh pot of Sanka with it instead.

Even so, I left Astrid a message every day on my lunch hour, saying I hoped she was doing okay.

She didn’t call back.

Dean saw her a couple of times out at the office with Christoph. He said she seemed fine. That they both did.

“Want to have dinner with Astrid and Christoph?” asked Dean, when I walked in the door Friday night. “He just called a minute
ago.”

“Is it a command performance?” I walked into our room and tossed my coat across the bed, then sat down at the end of the mattress
to take off my boots.

I didn’t feel up for double-dating, not having heard from Astrid since her midnight phone call about getting pushed down the
stairs.

“More like a bon voyage,” said Dean. “We kicked off early because he’s coming with me to Houston tomorrow. I said we’d let
him know when you got home.”

“They want us to slog uptown?”

“He suggested Meriken.”

This was a sushi joint just a few blocks up from us, on Seventh.

“Sounds okay, actually,” I said, surprised to find this was true. “Especially if the offer includes some beer. What time?”

“Whenever. He said they’d cab it.”

I flopped backwards onto the bed, cast thunking against my ribs. The arm inside didn’t ache anymore, but it itched like hell.

“Will
you
call him back?” I asked. “I feel the need to lie here stupidly horizontal for a minute before I peel off my work-crap clothes.”

“Want a beer now? I think there’s a Rolling Rock.”

“That would be heaven,” I said. “Yea verily.”

“Did you ever hear anything else about the whole episode with the stairs?” he asked.

“No. I could ask them both during dinner—be really subtle, you know? Like, ‘Hey, Christoph, have you stopped beating your
wife?’ Bet that would go over big.”

“Promise you won’t and I’ll make it
two
Rolling Rocks, even if it means a run to the deli.”

“My lips are sealed,” I said.

Dinner was going better than expected so far. Astrid wasn’t talking much, but Dean and Christoph were chatting about Switzerland.

Maybe he was a Nazi but not a wifebeater? At that point I was too exhausted from work to parse through the distinctions.

And at any rate, Astrid was there voluntarily, with no visible bruising.

Stockholm syndrome?Or maybe she just made it all up?

I was the one in a cast, if anybody else in the restaurant was scoping out our table for outward signs of domestic strife,
after all—not that that had anything to do with Dean.

Why was I only the friend for when everything sucked? Where was Cammy when the going got tough? Or Astrid’s mother, for that
matter?

I reached for the sake.

Our waiter placed tiny oblong plates of sushi and sashimi gently on the white tablecloth, artful arrangements of red
toro
and pale gold
hamachi
, hand-rolled seaweed cones brimming with fanned avocado and shreds of crabmeat.

“Maddie,” said Christoph, “I didn’t know until today when Dean and I were driving home that you two had gone to Switzerland
on your wedding trip. How is it that you never mentioned this?”

Well, maybe because the last couple of times we hung out you were either ditching us or lecturing me about ‘the trouble with’
Jews and black people?

But he leaned across the table to refill my thimble of sake, seeming truly interested. “What part of the country did you visit,
Saanen and Gstaad? You mentioned that your brother and sister had been at school in that area.”

“The Kennedy School,” I said, a bit ticked at myself for being quite so pleased that he’d remembered. “Pagan was there for
eighth grade, Trace for seventh and eighth.”

“Did they enjoy it?”

“Very much,” I said. “And I admit to being quite envious. They’re both excellent skiers now.”

“You wanted to stay at home in California, then?” he asked.

I drank my sake and he filled it again. “I started at Dobbs the year Pagan went to Saanen, with her godmother’s daughter Arabella.”

“They’re the same age?” he asked.

“Pals since they were babies, too. Actually, there’s a favorite story of mine about Arabella. One of the youngest boarders
that year was Roger Moore’s son. I think he was five or six—”

“And they sent him away to
boarding
school?” asked Dean.

Astrid started casing the room like she was plotting to bail on us for a cooler table.

Fuck off, it’s a good story.

“He and Arabella got put on the T-bar together,” I said. “And you’re supposed to tuck it under your butt, but not actually
sit
, you know?”

Christoph reached for a piece of
toro
with his chopsticks and nodded, smiling.

I picked up a piece myself, eschewing left-handed chopsticks for my fingers.

“Except he’s in kindergarten and she’s tall for twelve,” I continued, “so their ride up was pretty sketchy.”

Astrid yawned, her plate still empty before her.

“At the top the kid looks Arabella up and down once,
slowly
, then says, ‘
Husky
bitch,’ and shoots away down the Eggli.”

Christoph and Dean started laughing.

Astrid leaned forward, her face contorted with anger as she growled, “Don’t you
dare
laugh at me.”