When line three lit up, Karen slapped the button down so fast the phone didn’t have time to chirp, much less ring.
She smugly flipped off Yumiko, then pointed her still-extended middle finger toward the credit-card terminal.
Yumiko pursed her lips to make a wet kissy noise, then slapped her unrepentant size-zero butt.
Cate called around ten, saying we had the all clear from Skwarecki to go back inside Prospect.
“I’m out of here at noon,” I said. “When are you meeting your Quakers?”
“One o’clock, so your timing’s perfect.”
“Cool.”
“You’re
sure
you want to do this, Madeline?”
“Course I’m sure. I’ve been thinking about it all week.”
“Me too,” she said. “And I’m so glad you’re coming.”
We said good-bye and I clicked open another line, dialing Dean in New Jersey. He’d started working for Christoph Monday morning,
the pair of them commuting back and forth across the George Washington Bridge in Christoph’s Jeep.
The secretary put me through to Dean’s extension, and I said, “How’s it goin’, ya goddamn genius?” when he picked up.
“Decent,” he said. “Nice day out here.”
I looked out the window at the Catalog’s air shaft. “I wouldn’t know—thanks for the heads-up.”
“You going back to the cemetery?” he asked.
“Cate just called. I figured I’d grab a sandwich or something and jump on the subway.”
“What time’ll you get home?”
“Way sooner than last week.”
“Famous last words,” he said.
“Really and truly. Even if we find anything, Skwarecki’s said she’s coming to us, you know?”
“Just be careful, Bunny. Get a ride to the subway if you guys stay later than four, all right?”
“Scout’s honor,” I said. “Pinkie swear.”
“Hey, you talked to Nutty Buddy?”
“Astrid? Not since they called to hire you. Why?”
I heard him exhale. “Probably nothing.”
Dean had spent enough time with my pals to have pretty decent girly-radar. Plus he had two sisters.
“What flavor of probably nothing?” I asked.
“She’s been out here to the office a couple of times—”
“They
are
newlyweds. I’m sure the novelty will wear off. No
offense—”
“Bunny, I mean she’s driven out here a couple of times a
day
since Monday. She’s got Christoph’s other Jeep.”
I had a hard time picturing Astrid voluntarily venturing out to New Jersey pretty much
ever
, even under heavy sedation.
“Okay. That is kind of weird,” I said.
“She seems shaky. Like she could use a friend.”
“Astrid’s got a
bazillion
friends.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but how many of them aren’t assholes?”
“Good point,” I said.
We were both quiet for a second.
“Look, Bunny?” said Dean. “There’s something else.”
“Tell me.”
“She hasn’t taken off that black jacket she had on the other night. She just wanders around the office with the hood up. In
sunglasses.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Just give her a call sometime.”
“I will.”
“I should get back to it,” said Dean.
“Cool. Catch you après-graveyard.”
“You bet.”
I was just about to hang up but instead said, “Hey, Dean?”
“Yeah?”
“If Astrid does come out there again, try and get her to fucking eat something, okay? Bitch needs a cheeseburger.”
I put down the phone and Yumiko blew a plume of Marlboro smoke across my desk. “You going
back
there, after you already found that dead kid?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re going to try and help figure out who it was.”
“Fucking white people,” she said, stubbing out her smoke in a brimming ashtray. “All of you—
crazy
.”
I shrugged.
So many cities, all mashed into each other on one tiny island.
On the train to Queens I pondered Dean’s concern for Astrid and started thinking back to what she was like as I’d first known
her.
There was one Sunday night in particular when I was sitting in the Ford Smoker bumming Marlboro Lights off Joan Appelbaum.
Whenever I’d had cash enough to buy my own, I walked down to the Dobbs Ferry Grand Union and purchased something off-puttingly
bizarre like Philip Morris Commanders. These tasted like burnt sneakers marinated in Guinness, but since that meant only the
truly desperate cadged them off me, each pack lasted twice as long.
That no classmate ever begrudged me a cigarette despite this all-too-transparent strategy spoke to a tribal generosity of
spirit I’d never once experienced in nine years of public school, go figure. Here sportsmanship counted: humility trumped
money, wit meant nothing without courtesy, and our loyalty to one another was both absolute and fierce—no matter what.
Ford was one of the “new dorms,” an abrupt trio of skinny, cedar-shingled seventies-ski-lodge towers. It was down the hill
from my own digs in stately Cushing, whose fin-de-siècle stucco had once also housed my mother.
At 9:55
P.M.
the green vinyl common-room sofas were still packed with Tab-swilling nicotine-junkies attired in standard girls’-boarding-
school winter leisure wear: Bean duck boots and long underwear
beneath prim-necked calico-flannel Lanz nighties.
I, meanwhile—sockless in flat orange espadrilles—sported a duct-tape-repaired down jacket, somebody’s older brother’s madras-plaid
pants (sold to me cheap for weed money), and a hideously clashing aloha shirt scored over Christmas break from the St. Vincent
de Paul in Salinas.
“You study for Hindley’s bullshit poetry-thing yet?” asked Joan, spotting me a third cigarette.
I leaned in toward the flame of her lighter. “I’m waiting on Astrid. Bitch is late getting back from the city.”
“All-nighter, then.” Joan squinted up at the smoke-wreathed clock.
“How the hell does Hindley expect us to memorize sixty-nine poems in a single weekend?”
“More to the point,” said Joan, “why the hell would you wait until the very last possible
night
to open the damn book?”
“Because I’m an idiot?”
She blew a smoke ring. “You’ll fucking ace it anyway. Like always.”
“Which doesn’t mean tonight won’t utterly
suck
…. I’d pawn my left ass-cheek for a hit of speed.”
“That sophomore chick up in Strong has a whole bottle of her mother’s diet shit.”
“Too broke,” I said. “Story of my life.”
“Boo fucking hoo,” Joan replied, tapping ash into someone else’s abandoned fuchsia Tab can.
“Where the hell is Astrid?” I asked, eyeing the clock again.
“Why do you care? Start without her.”
“That would be the prudent course of action, but it would require knowing where my copy of the actual fucking anthology was.”
“You really
are
an idiot.”
“Indeed,” I said. “The merit of your hypothesis—as cogent summation of my native character—has long since been firmly established.”
“Nobody likes a smart-ass.”
“
Au contraire
, my always-thoroughly-prepared-for-class friend,” I said. “Everyone likes a smart-ass; especially when we fail our stupid
poetry-bullshit English tests so they get to wag their fingers and say, ‘I told you so.’”
Joan tilted her head to peer out the window behind me. “Bet that’s her pulling up right now.”
“Taxi?”
“Limo,” she said. “Stretch.”
I blew a smoke ring of my own. “
Definitely
Astrid. The Venezuelans all signed in early.”
Joan dragged a finger through my vaporous O as it wobbled past. “Lucky bitch. How the hell can she afford limos?”
“Flocks of smitten stockbrokers,” I said, “desperate to have her stay on for just one more vodka-tonic at Doubles, or the
Yale Club.”
No sooner had I spoken than Astrid herself danced through the smoker’s doorway: whip-lean in slender khakis, white tails of
her beau-trophy shirt flaring wide with each twirl.
She was trailing what appeared to be a sable coat along the ash-foul carpet behind her, and high as a ribbon-tailed kite:
Ray-Bans still on, Walkman turned up so loud everyone in the room could hear David Byrne’s tinny “
This
ain’t no party/
This
ain’t no disco” plaint bleeding out from under the headphones.
“Darlings,”
she said, flashing a red box of Dunhills, “who’s got a light?”
“Whose woods these are I think I know…”
read Astrid from her beat-to-shit orange copy of
Understanding Poetry
.
“‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’” I said.
“By?”
“Frost,
duh
. Like anything else with trees or winter.”
I sat cross-legged on her dorm-room floor holding a Dunhill out the window; she was draped sideways across her bed, now wearing
the goddamn fur over ice-blue pajamas.
A rush of frigid breeze ruffled the Indian-print bedspread nailed to the wall at my elbow, the stereo needle starting over
again fresh on the same Beatles album we’d been listening to for the last two hours.
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit—”
she read.
“
bird thou never wert.
Keats.”
“Shelley.” Astrid flopped over onto her back, making the mattress shiver, then stretched her long legs up the wall beside
her, crossing her ankles in the middle of Jim Morrison’s poster-forehead. “Title?”
“‘Ode on a Piece-of-Shit Something-Something I Can’t Remember Because It’s Four in the Goddamn Morning’?”
“Actually, it’s ‘Ode
to
the Roundly Celebrated Demise of His Whiny Iambic Ass,’ ” she said.
“
Bien sûr
. And by the way, nice fucking coat.”
“Mummie’s.”
“She’s not going to miss it?”
Astrid shrugged. “She’s away for three months. And you’re dressed like shit again.”
“Satire,” I said. “Besides which, I’m out of quarters for laundry.”
“Madeline, one must make an
effort
. All that overbred bone structure wasting its sweetness on the desert air.”
“Thomas Gray,” I said. “‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ And who’m I going to impress on a Sunday night—the security
guards?”
Astrid snapped the book shut, then lolled her head off the end of the bed, looking at me upside down. “Shall we do another
line?”
By that she meant coke, not poetry: Swain-of-the-Hour’s parting gift as he’d tucked her into the limo that evening—two grams,
all told, which we’d already put quite a dent in.
I flicked my cigarette out the window, watching the glow of its orange ember arc high and then plummet, three stories down
toward the snow. “That would be lovely, if you can spare it.”
“Lots more where this came from,” she said, reaching for her hand mirror and razor blade. “So we might as well do
all
of it.”
“Your generosity is greatly appreciated, even so.”
I gave the room an aerosol spritz of Ozium before shutting the window. This was a spray billing itself as air-freshener, but
which actually worked by deadening anyone-who-inhaled-it’s sense of smell for several minutes—essential camouflage in the
dorm-parent wars since we weren’t allowed cigarettes upstairs.
You’d find a blue-and-white can of it atop the brown school-issued bureau of every partier on campus, alongside her requisite
bottle of Visine.
Astrid laid out two fat lines on the mirror and handed it to me along with a rolled-up twenty.
I snorted them up, then put the mirror on the floor and pinched each nostril shut in turn, inhaling sharply to get it all
down.
“Thank you for that,” I said, licking my finger to swipe the last granules off the mirror, rubbing the slick of white into
my gums.
“Straight-arrow Maddie Dare giving herself a freeze,” said Astrid. “Who’d believe it?”
“Fuck off.”
For the most part I didn’t indulge. My own bureau-top was
Ozium-free, my closet filled with nothing but dirty clothes. I valued my scholarship far too much to mess around, profoundly
grateful to have escaped my then-stepfather Pierce’s needling daily assholery.
Besides which, both my parents were stoners, so bong hits had never felt like much in the way of rebellion.
Coke, I reasoned, was different. It wasn’t like there was ever a ton of it on offer, and it was so easy to hide, so hard to
detect once ingested. No harm, no foul.
Who’d believe it, indeed?
Not the dorm parents, nor even the Disciplinary Committee. Lucky me.
I gave Astrid the mirror back, then opened
Understanding Poetry
at a random page while she laid out a fresh brace of lines for herself.
Maybe we’d bonded because she had even less of a home to count on than I did, and effectively the same lack of cash. My parents
actually didn’t have any, and hers just kept spending it all trying to look like they had even more. As such, we’d learned
early to elicit the kindness of strangers.
“
Here is Belladonna,
” I intoned, “
the Lady of the Rocks/The lady of
situations
.”
She did one line, muttered “Byron,” and snorted up the next.
“Try harder, Veruca.”
Astrid rolled off the bed and walked over to her stereo. “If I have to listen to one more
second
of fucking ‘Norwegian Wood’ I’m going to shoot myself. Read me another couplet.”
“What are you putting on?”
“Vivaldi.”
“What the hell’s Vivaldi?”
“Your people have no
culture
, Madeline. If ever there were a race whose conscience remains woefully uncreated—”
“I am
highly
conversant in the greatest hits of Puccini,” I said.
“Mozart… Beethoven… And by the way, eat me raw.”
She dropped the needle onto
The Four Seasons
, Side A, then opened the window and lit a Dunhill.
“Not bad,” I said when the first violin started in, soaring above the string-section pack. “Got a good beat—you can dance
to it.”
“Read me another couplet, ungrateful bitch. That last one was a lousy hint.”