Invisible Boy (8 page)

And, as always, every pair of eyes in the suddenly quiet restaurant was drawn to her.

I could tell you that Astrid’s thick, straight curtain of hair had the sheen of french-polished mahogany, that her skin was
heavy cream with a hint of coffee and her dark eyes compelling as a doe’s, that she possessed a heroic brow, a lush mouth,
cheekbones to melt your heart—but it’s all beside the point.

Here’s what people remember about Astrid: She was the single most exquisite human being they’d ever seen.

I don’t mean merely beautiful, I mean that she was quite literally
stunning
, and that I’d watched strangers go pale and stumble in the street on catching sight of her.

It was my friend’s tragedy that she was also brilliant.

Had she been either plain or stupid, she might have had a chance of being happy.

Astrid and spouse stood up as we reached their table. She was wearing a diamond-quilted black velvet jacket with a big hood.
Very Chanel.

She gave me a hug and said, “
Che bella
, Madeline, I thought you’d
never
fucking get here.”

We shook hands all around and took our seats. The freshly minted husband pressed a cocktail menu on me and Dean, then miraculously
caused a waitress to appear with our drinks.

I leaned back in my chair and felt—for the first time in a very long while—that all was right with the world.

A fist-sized cockroach climbed up over the baseboard, proceeding up onto the fuzzy red wallpaper.

“Charming little place,” I said. “You guys come here often?”

C
hristoph actually seemed like a decent guy, and interesting, both of which came as a surprise to me. He was probably twenty
years older than us: slender, with the last of a summer tan warming his face and longish pale brown hair swept back to curl
a bit just behind his ears.

The waitress placed a couple of plates of summer rolls on the table, their thin rice-paper wrapping aglow with the hues of
shrimp and cilantro and chopped peanuts inside, and we were well into our second round of drinks.

“So we are importing these wonderful machines from Europe,” Christoph was saying to Dean, “but it is very difficult to teach
the Americans to use them properly.”

My husband nodded, putting a roll on his plate. The rest of the food just sat there, more set decoration than sustenance.

Astrid, growing bored, laid a hand on her husband’s wrist.

“Darling,” she said, “Maddie’s a
liberal
.”

Christoph looked over at me with a wry smile, eyes crinkling up at the corners. “Really? How astonishing. You seem like such
an
intelligent
woman.”

“Astrid has always considered my political worldview a sad flaw of moral fiber,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever shared a meal with one of you before,” said Christoph. “Are you, in fact, one of these ‘Democrats’?”

“Quite so,” I assured him.

“This is remarkable! You must explain to me what this means. Do you, for instance, run about and plot to blow things up?”

“Mostly the patriarchy,” I said.

He nodded to Dean, grinning. “And you
allow
this?”

My husband shrugged. “These days one finds it necessary to foster the illusion of free will in women.”

Christoph laughed. “You Americans, really—such an
amusing

people.”

“And you Swiss,” I said, “so very…
Swiss
.”

“Cuckoo clocks and chocolate?” he asked.

“I was thinking more of the memorial in this little park in Saanen, near Gstaad—a cannon, with a plaque on it commemorating
an uprising throughout the countryside in the thirteen hundreds protesting the fact that the government in Berne had grown
too liberal.”

“You know Saanen?” Christoph asked, surprised.

“My sister and little brother went to school there,” I said. “Charming village.”

Okay, so I wasn’t above trying to claim a bit of Euro cred as protective coloring. Pagan and Trace had gotten to ski the Alps
daily; I figured I should end up with
something
as a consolation prize.

Christoph turned to Astrid. “Really, my dear, you have the most
remarkable
friends.”

She touched her throat. “Of course.”

He nodded to Dean. “You must come out to New Jersey with me sometime, to see my little company.”

We all shared a cab uptown, Christoph and Dean chatting about scientific stuff while Astrid pressed me to continue on with
them to some new nightclub.

“Sadly, I have work in the morning,” I said.

“You’re
writing
, of course?” asked Astrid. “Forging the uncreated conscience of your race in the smithy of your soul?”

“Actually, at the moment I’m answering phones.”

She shook her head, face stern. “Maddie, for God’s sake, you’re an
artist
. I insist that you stop
indulging
in such distractions.”

I shrugged. “And our landlord insists on the rent.”

“A peasant,” she said.

“
Bien sûr
.”

Astrid gave my knee a consoling pat. “
Courage
, my sweet…
ne désespères pas
.”

She leaned forward toward Christoph, who’d claimed it was his pleasure, as the evening’s host, to ride up front beside our
driver.

“Darling?” She snaked her hand through the little divider window, touching his hair. “Why don’t you bring this marvelous Dean
out to New Jersey with you
tomorrow
? There’s really no point in our leaving for Southampton until Friday morning.”

Ten o’clock was agreed upon all around, as the cab pulled up in front of our building.

The four of us climbed out into the sultry evening for a round of doubled air-kisses—that display of affection Dostoyevsky
described as the “gesture Russians tend to make when they are really famous.”

Astrid and I exchanged ours last, and she held on to my shoulders for a moment, whispering, “I
do
love you, Madissima.”

She’d let her guard down, just for that instant, and I realized I’d never heard anyone sound so fragile and alone.

Leaning in, I kissed her cheek for real.

“Do they
ever
eat?” asked Dean.

We were in our kitchen dipping fat broken pretzels into a jar of Nutella.

“Biennially,” I said. “Tiny little salads, dressing on the side.”

He examined his pretzel. “So they’re like, what,
air
ferns?”

“Or vampires.”

“Should I wear a suit tomorrow, you think?”

“God no,” I said. “He’d find it distressingly plebeian.”

Dean laughed, pushing the Nutella toward me.

I
was at the Catalog early the following Wednesday morning. By nine o’clock there were four of us manning the lines.

“I started out
so
excited this morning,” said my fellow order-taker chick Yong Sun, stepping into the phone room.

“What about?” I said.

“Well, I was running late, so I caught a taxi to my subway station, and the driver asked if I was Korean.” She took a sip
of her coffee.

“White guy?” asked Karen, who was at the desk next to mine.

Yong Sun nodded. “I thought, ‘
Finally
, one of you people got a clue!’ you know?”

“I’m so proud, on behalf of my ignorant race,” I said.

“So I asked him how he could tell,” she continued, “and he shrugs and goes, ‘You smell like garlic.’ ”

“Fucking white people,” said Yumiko, across from us. “So fucking stupid.”

We’d had variations of this conversation before, but I still found it morbidly fascinating.

Yumiko’s parents had come from Japan, Karen’s from China, Yong Sun’s, obviously, from Korea.

The three of them spent a lot of time ranking on each other’s respective heritage, explaining the hierarchy to me as Japan
first, then Korea, then China, in order of current economic supremacy.

Karen would always snap back in response to that that everyone in the room could kiss her American-born ass, because if it
weren’t for China, “
your
stupid countries wouldn’t know how to read or write, and we’d all be out of a damn job.”

I always made a point of thanking her for our employment, not to mention fireworks, dim sum, and pasta while we were at it.

Yumiko glanced at an old copy of
Vogue
someone had left on her desk. “So how come rich fucking white people dress like such shit all the time?”

She was barely five feet tall—a graceful slip of a girl who might have just stepped from the mists of an ukiyo-e woodblock
print—but she was equipped with the most superbly atrocious vocabulary I’d ever encountered. Seriously, the chick made
me
sound like a repressed Mormon.

“Rich white people dress like shit to show they don’t have to care,” I said.

Yumiko gave my crap T-shirt and frayed khaki Bermudas a how-the-hell-would-
you
-know smirk. “Fucking stupid. You’re all, like, a bunch of fucking
freaks
.”

“I’ve always thought so,” I said, booting up my computer.

“I mean,” she continued, “how could anyone even fucking
kiss
a white guy? They’ve got those
eyes
, you know? All
blue
and weird shit. Like they’re fucking
dead
. It’s disgusting.”

“More for me, then,” said Karen.

Yumiko waved this off. “Banana bitch—only yellow on the outside.”

“So, what, you like Japan better than here?” I asked her.

“That’s all bullshit, back there,” she said. “They won’t let you do fucking anything, you know? Like, my cousin used a curling
iron on her hair once, for school? The teacher stuck her head in a bucket of water in front of the whole class. Said they
had to make sure she wasn’t
Korean
or some shit.”

“Tasteless fool,” said Yong Sun, bouncing the palm of one hand under her own naturally curly tresses, the gesture of Frieda
in a
Peanuts
special.

“Plus, they think I’m ugly,” said Yumiko.

“You’re a total babe,” I said. “What are they, crazy?”

“My eyes are too big, and I have dark skin—my grandfather calls me Indian Girl. You’re supposed to be all squinty and pale
and shit.
Fuck
that.”

“Well, over here, you’re
gorgeous
,” I said.

“Over here I have no tits. They think I look like a fucking twelve-year-old boy.”

“Trade you,” I said, pointing at my own abundance of boobulage.

She ignored that. “I go to Victoria’s Secret, they can’t even sell me underpants—both legs fit in one hole. I try on jeans
at the Gap, they’re all size zero—like, not even big enough to get a real
number
. Fucked up.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” said Karen, smiling. “Just like some stupid FOB.”

I knew from previous Yumiko-rants that this acronym stood for Fresh Off the Boat.

Yumiko said, “Shut the fuck up and give me a Marlboro.”

Karen drew a red-and-white soft-pack from her purse, extracted a smoke, and tossed it onto the carpet.

Yumiko stuck it behind her ear, filter forward.

“Pussy chink-ass bitch can’t even
throw
right,” she said. “No wonder your grandma’s still slopping around rice paddies behind a water buffalo—dog-eating communist
motherfuckers.”

“
Koreans
eat dogs,” said Karen.

“Do
not
,” said Yong Sun.

“With
garlic
,” said Yumiko.

Yong Sun stood up. “With that attitude, I think it’s
your
turn to do the credit-card batch.”

“I did the fucking credit-card batch
Friday
,” said Yumiko. “It’s your turn.”

Yong Sun shook her head. “I’m the manager. And I’m busy.”

“Doing
what
?” asked Yumiko.

“Putting more garlic in this damn coffee,” said Yong Sun, walking out the door.

“Kiss my ass!” Yumiko yelled after her.

“In your dreams, bitch,” echoed Yong Sun’s voice back up the hall.

The phone rang, lighting up line two.

I pounced on it, beating Karen by a nanosecond. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”