Invisible Boy Read online

  “Let’s walk it,” said Dean. “We can just get slices.”

  “Cool.” I picked up the finished Jell-O tray and shouldered the freezer open.

  Sue shook her head. “Not enough room in there.”

  “Sure there is,” I said. “Just grab that thing of Bustelo.”

  She snaked an arm past me to pull the yellow coffee can clear. “Still not gonna fit. No fucking way.”

  “Way,” I said. “Five bucks.”

  Sue took my wager with a nod. “Sucker bet.”

  I raised the tray to eye level, then tilted it with care—two inches down toward the right. Syrupy Jell-O flowed toward the lip of each little paper mouthwash-cup, bulging but not spilling over.

  I slid the tray slowly home, its upper left edge shaving a pinstripe of whiskered frost from the freezer ceiling.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Sue.

  “Surface tension,” I replied, closing the freezer door. “Kiss my ass and buy me dinner.”

  I may lack the nautical gene, but don’t ever play me for money.

  The party was roaring by nine o’clock that night. Somebody’d brought a strobe light, and we had a little vintage Funkadelic cued up on the CD player, “Maggot Brain” throbbing out our open windows into the sultry-for-September night. There was a gaggle of people doing bong hits on the fire escape, and dozens more smashed up against each other in the living room, hallway, kitchen, and both bedrooms.

  I’d just made the circuit back from the bathroom and was now stationed next to the front door, cold beer in hand. Not like I had to drive home, but six Jell-O shots was nearing the limit, even for me.

  Sue’s friend Mike buzzed up from the lobby, and I held the door open for him, sticking my head out into the cooler, quieter air of our second-story hallway.

  His blond head soon bobbed up behind the staircase’s horizon, and I watched the rest of his skinny frame bounce into view, a foot at a time, until he’d stepped onto the landing’s chipped and gritty tiny-hexagonal-tile floor.

  “Madeline,” he said, “I think I just got mugged in your vestibule.”

  “Um, Mike? How could you not know?”

  He smiled up at the ceiling fixture. “This guy at work had some great acid. So it’s, like, entirely possible that I just hallucinated the whole thing?”

  “Do you still have your wallet?” I asked.

  He patted his jacket pockets, then checked his jeans, fore and aft.

  “It’s gone,” he said, grinning even wider. “What a relief!”

  “Dude, your pupils are like Frisbees,” I said.

  He pointed at my red plastic cup. “Hey, is that a beer?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “Would you share some with me?”

  “If you come in, you can have one of your very own.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. “I’m so glad I know you.”

  I took his hand and led him gently inside.

  Sue stood in the kitchen doorway, and the music was even louder.

  I leaned toward her, yelling “Mike’s tripping and he just got mugged and I think he needs help finding the keg” about a foot away from her ear.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she yelled back.

  “Keep him away from the Jell-O,” I said, just as the living-room speakers boomed out A Tribe Called Quest chanting “Mr. Dinkins will you please be my May-or?”

  Sue gave me a thumbs-up and propelled Mike toward the living room.

  The buzzer went off again and I didn’t bother trying to identify the persons at the other end of the intercom before pushing the button to let them in.

  If it was the muggers, we could all jump them and get Mike’s wallet back, worst case.

  Luckily, it was instead my college pal Sophia and a friend she’d called about bringing along for the evening.

  Scarlet-lipped Sophia leaned forward to hug me hello, her mass of dark curls tickling my cheek.

  “This is Cate Ludlam!” she yelled near my ear. “The one I told you about! Your cousin!”

  I dragged them both into the kitchen. Cate introduced herself again, holding out her hand to shake. She was a little older and a touch shorter than me, with straight brown hair and eyes that made me think of Edith Piaf.

  “Sophia thinks we might be related,” I exclaimed over some newly blasting B-52s song.

  Cate shrugged her shoulders and smiled, pointing to one ear. The B-52s chanted, “ What’s that on your head? A wig!”

  I closed the kitchen door. We could still feel the thump of the bassline, but at least the overall decibel-age had dropped from “skin-blistering” to a mere “painfully loud.”

  “That’s so much better,” I said, pulling a fresh tray of Jell-O shots from the freezer and offering them around.

  I said L’chaim and we each tossed one back.

  “What were you asking just now?” asked Cate.

  “Whether the two of you might be cousins,” said Sophia, passing Cate a second little paper cup before taking one herself.

  “One of my middle names is Ludlam,” I explained. “After my great-grandmother.”

  Cate tossed back her second shot. “We’re all related. Only three brothers came over from England with that surname.”

  “But there’s Ludlam and Ludlum. What kind are you?” I asked.

  “L-A-M,” said Cate. “One brother went to New Jersey and changed the spelling—we call his branch Spawn of Obadiah. Long Island ones kept the ‘A.’”

  “Same as you, Maddie?” asked Sophia.

  “Everyone in my family cemetery spells it with ‘A,’” I said. “We probably burned the ‘U’ people as heretics, unless they were willing to convert—then refused to bury them anyway.”

  “Where’s your cemetery?” Cate asked.

  “On Centre Island, in the middle of Oyster Bay.”

  “I’ve heard of that one,” she said.

  “I’d be happy to give you a tour.”

  “I’d love it,” she said. “And I’d be happy to show you mine.”

  “You’ve got one too? Awesome,” I said.

  “In Queens,” said Cate. “It’s called Prospect—the original burial ground for the village of Jamaica, starting in the sixteen hundreds.”

  “Are you guys still buried there?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s been derelict for decades. I only found out about it a year ago.”

  “Were you researching family history?” asked Sophia.

  “No,” said Cate. “Someone abandoned a couple of dogs inside the fence and a neighborhood woman rescued them. She saw the name Ludlam on the chapel by the front gate and started calling up any of us she could find listings for.”

  “What’s it like?” asked Sophia.

  “At that point it was four acres of jungle,” said Cate.

  “What about the chapel?” I asked.

  “Oh, the chapel…” said Cate with a dreamy little smile. “It was a stinking, sorry mess filled with garbage and crack vials, but my God, there’s still something about it…. The little place just hooked me, you know?”

  “The addictive poignance of the small, neglected ruin,” I said. “I know it well.”

  Cate laughed. “I’ve started rounding up volunteers to help with the brush clearing, Wednesday afternoons. Would you like to join us this week?”

  “I’d be honored,” I said, raising my cup. “And I think we should imbibe another shot in celebration of our newfound genealogical commonality.”

  “Hear, hear!” said Cate, taking another paper-clad portion from the tray.

  “To cousins,” added Sophia, lifting her own, “and the lapidary allure of tiny woebegone places.”

  We knocked back our gelatinous cocktails just as the kitchen door flew open and a half-dozen partiers tumbled into the room, demanding Jell-O themselves as the music blared up to an absolutely depilatory volume.

  I looked at Cate and Sophia and shrugged, pointing toward the living room.

  We thre
aded our way down the crowded hallway, slipping sideways and single file between knots of dancing bodies.

  I reached the stereo and eased off on the Velvet Underground’s volume, only to have Lou Reed’s voice overridden by a street-concerto of car alarms.

  Sue was out on the fire escape waving the bong overhead as she conducted a group-stoner cheer of “Die Yuppie Scum! Die Yuppie Scum!”

  Her gestural enthusiasm made her tip backwards and I shoved my way toward the window, arms outstretched as my heartbeat went bossa nova, but luck and the thin iron railing kept her from tumbling to the sidewalk below.

  “Perfect!” yelled Pagan into my ear. “It’s not a party until Sue falls down!”

  3

  Sunday we were all hungover as shit, stumbling out of bed for coffee well after noon. Dean and Sue and Pagan decided they wanted to go Rollerblading after a long, slow brunch at our local diner, the Hollywood. I decided they were crazy and stayed put.

  Some people’s bodies say “Go! Go! Go!” Mine counters with “Fuck it, let’s lie down with a book on the sofa.” And that goes double after a Hollywood bacon-cheeseburger.

  It was two hours before the exercise fanatics came home, but I wasn’t tired enough to nap. Sunday afternoon has always struck me as a horrible stretch of time to spend solo. If you made it into crayons they’d all turn out burnt sienna.

  I picked up the phone to see if I could find Astrid, another

  boarding-school pal. We were the kind of friends who got in touch once a year or so but always seemed to resume the conversation midsentence.

  My own social pretensions were of the shopworn poor-relation May-flower variety, but there wasn’t even a phrase in American to suitably describe Astrid.

  You had BCBG in French: bon chic, bon genre, but that’s rather like “classy” in English. Parisians of Astrid’s own ilk would’ve preferred comme il faut, though I figured “living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine” more accurately described her life amongst that rarefied tribe of brittle-whippet polyglots who traveled by Concorde and gave me the bends.

  She was a British/Florentine beauty who hadn’t lived anywhere longer than three months since we’d graduated, back in ’81—just kept doing this jagged über-Euro party-girl circuit of London and LA and Palm Beach and the Upper East Side.

  It was pointless trying to keep an up-to-date address or phone number for her on hand. I relied on directory-information operators to tell me whether our orbits had aligned whenever I was in New York.

  This time I’d put it off for a couple of months, what with moving, looking for work, and stowing my furniture and old Porsche in a friend-of-Mom’s barn on Long Island. You know: life. All the grown-up crap I so royally sucked at.

  I dialed 411, gritting my teeth in anticipation of having to spell Astrid’s surname for the operator. It was Niro-de-Barile, shortened by Dean to “Nutty Buddy” in the very first phone message he’d written down for me the week he and I moved in together back in Syracuse.

  Today’s operator indeed had a listing for her—in the East Fifties, no surprise.

  I dialed, expecting to get her machine, and was surprised by her live actual “Hello.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Madissima, how the hell are you?”

  “Decent,” I said. “And at long last actually living in the city, thank God. You?”

  “I’ve been meaning to phone you, in fact, but couldn’t remember what they call that last godforsaken town you were living in, after Syracuse—”

  “Pittsfield.”

  “The aptly named. How could one have forgotten?”

  “With great pleasure and appalling haste,” I said. “What’s your news?”

  “Darling, it appears I’ve gotten married.”

  “Good God.”

  I heard her blow a stream of cigarette smoke against her phone’s mouthpiece. “Last Saturday, actually. Decided I was overdue.”

  “Who’s the lucky winner?”

  “Well, Antonini was out of town, so I stuck a pin in my address book and landed on Christoph.”

  “Was that the polo guy or the one with a Bugatti?”

  “The Swiss one.”

  “There was a Swiss one?”

  “I brought him up for drinks the summer you were all crammed into that place on Park and Eighty-ninth? He said he’d never seen a filthier bathroom?”

  “I thought you were mad for Prentice that year.”

  “ Fuck me, I’d have had to live in Boston. Anathema.”

  “I’m rather fond of Switzerland,” I said. “Hot cheese. Subtitles in three languages. Not much for foreplay, if memory serves, but excellent value overall. Congratulations to him, and best wishes to you.”

  “We had great fun. Chartered a plane to Southampton.”

  “My least favorite place on earth, but whatever.”

  “And how is Dean?” she asked.

  “Fine, thank you. Looking for work.”

  “He’s an inventor or something?”

  “Or something,” I said.

  “I told Mummie you’d married a cabinetmaker.”

  I laughed. “How’d she take it?”

  “Oh, she was quite, quite pleased for you. She said, ‘How marvelous, just like David Linley.’ ”

  I cracked up.

  “Don’t laugh, Madeline,” said Astrid. “One has to break these things to Mummie gently. She’s not accustomed to reality.”

  “Oh, please. I mean, admit it, the image of me married to anyone even slightly resembling the offspring of Princess Margaret is pretty fucking funny.”

  I heard the click of Astrid’s lighter as she lit a fresh Marlboro.

  “Oh, and of course Camilla was asking after you,” she continued.

  I’d known the bitch as Cammy at Sarah Lawrence, and had made the mistake of introducing her to Astrid.

  “And how is darling Chlamydia?” I asked, not caring at all.

  “Blonde,” said Astrid. “Very, very blonde.”

  “I saw that. Some party shot in Town and Country, if memory serves—which just goes to show what an appallingly nouveau-riche rag it’s become. And she’s stolen my nose.”

  “Be generous. Her birth-schnozz was hideous.”

  “ My nostrils disporting themselves at B-list Eurotrash galas attached to that odious Nescafé-society cow? She should at least rivet a small plaque to her upper lip crediting the original.”

  “And Camilla’s always so lovely about you,” she said, laughing with a touch of smoker’s wheeze.

  I snorted into the phone.

  Astrid was undaunted. “She absolutely adores you. Why, just the other day she turned to me and said, ‘Isn’t it terribly, terribly sad about Madeline? She might have been such fun if she weren’t poor.’”

  I sighed. “Festering bitch. Tell her she owes me nose royalties.”

  “I’ll have Christoph give your husband a job instead—how’s that? He’s got a little company. Out in New Jersey.”

  “Kiss my shapely ass.”

  Astrid laughed. “Well, for God’s sake let’s at least introduce them. I mean, who’d ever have believed you and I would be married, and simultaneously? We must have drinks—quickly, before one of us fucks it up.”

  “I demand absinthe.”

  “Perfect. Wednesday night.”

  “You gladden my tiny black heart,” I said.

  “Pitter-clank, pitter-clank.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ciao, bellissima,” she purred, hanging up.

  4

  Wednesday started out Capra and ended Polanski.

  I booked out from beneath the ornate gateway arch of our building’s front courtyard, then turned east on Sixteenth toward the subway station in Union Square—ten minutes late, as usual.

  My housemates had beaten me out the door despite having taken showers, which, in my semiconscious state—what with the bathroom plumbing running through the wall right next to my head—I’d considered a needling passive-aggressive d
isplay of moral superiority.

  I’d just kept hitting the snooze bar and having those short-story dreams between rounds of cruel clock-radio beeps.

  Most mornings I played “Rhapsody in Blue” on my beat-to-shit Walkman, gentling the commute uptown with those opening bars of solo-Deco clarinet. Today required a mix-tape of slick/vapid eighties cocaine-frenzy anthems: Chaka Khan, Bronski Beat, and “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.” Aural Jay McInerney.

  A light mist tumbled between the buildings as I walked, white on white, warmed at the edges by bowfront Edith-Wharton brownstones between Sixth and Fifth. The air was still cool this early, but I could feel the day’s impending sweaty oppression tapping its foot in the wings.

  It certainly wasn’t chilly enough to mask the street-stench of vomit and garbage and festering piss. I’d been back here long enough to have once again made mouth breathing my default style of respiration.

  I smiled at the sight of my all-time favorite bumper sticker, posted in the Trotskyite bookstore’s window:U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!

  I walked faster, slipping through schools of people that grew thicker and thicker as we neared the subway—commuter fish trying to reach the turnstiles so we could spawn and die.

  I kept my knees loose on the ride uptown, riding the car’s totally fucked suspension like a surfer chick, until we squealed to a halt at Fifty-ninth Street. I bolted out the doors before they were halfway open, first to snake through the exit gate’s gnashing teeth—a cotton gin for people.

  The Catalog was on the thirteenth floor, straight across from the Granta Bitches, with the even-nastier Review behind door number three at the end of the hall. We were a triad of money pits loosely conjoined, no doubt the aftermath of some literary-cocktail-napkin Venn diagram. It always felt like that old joke about academia, the one about how the infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low.

  Pagan was already back in editorial by the time I walked into the front office. She was the assistant photo editor and had gotten me a gig taking phone orders, part-time.

  I’d been staff writer at a weekly paper in Syracuse for three years, but that counted for exactly dick in Manhattan, a revelation that gave me more compassion for Upstate New York than I’d ever had while living there with Dean.