Invisible Boy (18 page)

“If it gets really bad this weekend we can come back here for a late second-anniversary celebration.”

“Fuck it,” I said, “let’s bail now. I bet they wouldn’t even miss us.”

“Can’t,” he said. “Christoph and I still have some technical shit to go over before Houston.”

I sighed. Dean had been raised on a farm Upstate. Trust me, you do
not
want to get between a Methodist and his work ethic.

It had taken me three years to talk him into leaving his hometown. The fact that he was now pushing
me
to spend a weekend in the nether-belly of my own geographical heritage was a bit off-putting.

“We should go visit your parents,” I said. “It’s been months since they’ve seen you.”

Dean laughed. “Good
God
, Bunny, they don’t even have Sze-

chuan.”

“Pinko,” I said as the traffic finally melted away before us.

Dean laughed harder.

I shifted up into fifth and floored it.

I hadn’t told him about Teddy and Mrs. Underhill, nor had he asked.

We wrestled with Christoph’s directions, making several U-turns before finally stumbling upon a hedge-constricted dirt lane
with a name that bore some passing resemblance to the actual word we’d been told to look out for.

I threaded the Porsche down it with care, trying to skirt the worst of the potholes without scraping against the branches
on either side.

The house was a stark, thumpingly graceless mid-seventies saltbox pastiche clad in cedar shakes and plopped at the edge of
a treeless meadow.

The new dorms all over again.

I turned off the engine just as Christoph appeared in the front doorway, looking genuinely pleased to see us.

Dean unraveled himself from the passenger seat. I reached into the backseat for our bags, setting them down in the driveway
to retrieve a gift-offering of wine.

Christoph had come outside, so I stood up with the bottle in my hand to thank him so very much for his most kind invitation,
et cetera, while we did the whole kiss-kiss routine.

The only thing I know about wine is that it’s a good idea to proffer all the cash in my pocket to a liquor store’s most asymmetrically
coiffed, Off Broadway–ready employee while humbly beseeching him or her to rescue my ignorant Rolling Rock–swilling American
ass from potential Continental derision.

Christoph looked at the bottle in my hand and smiled. “How thoughtful of you, dear Maddie. Shall we have a glass once we’ve
gotten you settled?”

He picked up our bags, overriding all protest on Dean’s part. “Don’t be silly—you must allow me the pleasure, as your host.”

Christoph switched the bags to his left hand to give Dean a welcoming clap on the shoulder before leading us inside the house.

“I will just show you where you are to be sleeping,” he said. “After which I should no doubt awaken Astrid and Camilla.”

A large market clock in the front hallway gave the time as five minutes past two.

Christoph and Dean started up the stairs.

I dry-swallowed a Percodan and followed them.

C
amilla had these pills,” said Astrid. “From some photographer in London. We weren’t sure what they were.”

“And you took them anyway,” I said.

“Well, of course,” she said.

She had nicotine-stain circles under her eyes and
still
looked like a Florentine Catherine Deneuve.

“Were they like, speed, or tranquilizers, or what?” I asked.

“They were blue,” she said. “And we had some champagne, and then we got in the Jeep and drove out here. I don’t remember much
after the tunnel.”

Cammy wandered into the front hall wearing very short shorts and a little tiny pink tank top and these stupid-ass knee-high
Aspen-hooker cave-girl boots with shaggy blond fur on the outside. The rest of her pillow-creased face looked like haggard
shit, but her plastic surgeon’s homage to my nose was perfect.

“Did we go to a Chinese restaurant yesterday?” she asked Astrid, walking past me without a flicker of recognition.

Astrid pulled a crushed soft-pack of Marlboros out of her jeans. “You’re hallucinating.”

Cammy lifted a heavy silver lighter from the sideboard next to us, then took a cigarette from Astrid. They both lit up.

“Wait a minute,” said Astrid, “did we have a scorpion bowl? I seem to remember floating gardenias and long straws.”

Cammy shuffled away into the living room and fell into a chair, the motion tumbling ashes down the front of her shirt. “I
can’t
stand
scorpion bowls.”

“Chrissy, did we come home with gardenias?” asked Astrid.

Christoph shook his head. “You were both sound asleep in the living room when I arrived.”

“And what time was that?” she asked.

“Four o’clock, a little after.”

Astrid turned toward Cammy. “Where’s my coat?”

Cammy squinted. “It’s over here, wadded up.”

Astrid stalked across the room, saying “Aha!” when she picked up a football-sized jumble of rather fine tweed.

She shook it out and put it on. Though it was big on her and now looked like something a wet dog had slept in, the jacket
was beautifully cut. I presumed it belonged to Christoph.

Astrid patted herself down, producing a crumpled piece of paper from her vest pocket.

“A receipt?” asked Christoph, amused.

Astrid arrayed herself along the sofa and turned on the nearest side-table lamp. Cammy winced at the light, flicking ashes
onto the carpet at her feet.

Astrid smoothed out the piece of paper against her thigh, peered at it, then said, “Jesus
Christ
!”

“S’matter?” asked Cammy.

“We tipped those Chinese people four hundred and fifty-seven
bucks
.”

Cammy shrugged.

“On a forty-dollar
check
,” added Astrid.

Cammy stood and padded into the kitchen, returning with a bottle of mineral water.

I tried willing my stomach acid to get with the program and dissolve the damn Percodan, already.

“With a credit card?” asked Christoph.

“Sweetie,” said Astrid, stroking his arm, “your Amex.”

He cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might ask them to reduce the charge.”

She lowered her lashes to half-mast. “Darling, won’t
you
do it? You’re so good at that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I have some business to discuss with Dean this afternoon,” her husband replied, smiling but unmoved.

He led my spouse outside onto the living-room terrace.

Cammy yawned and looked at Astrid. “Let’s just go. Get it over with.”

Astrid pulled her sunglasses out of the tweed jacket’s left pocket and put them on.

She and Cammy brushed past me and out the door as though I were the front-hall coat rack or something.

Still holding the stupid bottle of wine in my hand, I watched them climb into the smaller of the two Jeeps outside and speed
away.

“Great to be here,” I said. “And always such a pleasure to see both of
you
.”

Dean and Christoph appeared to be having a great time outside, so I set to work locating a corkscrew, a tray, and three wineglasses.

I opened the bottle, put two glasses on the tray and filled them halfway, celebrating my accomplishment by consuming a generously
medicinal allotment of Côtes-du-Who-the-Fuck-Cares from glass number three.

“Trenchant,” I decreed, “yet surprisingly perky-nippled.”

I poured myself a refill, plopped it on the tray, and headed outside.

*   *   *   

“Of course,” Christoph was saying, “I suppose we must allow for the fact that these Americans whom one finds working in factories,
and so on, they are not very well educated.”

“One might find it impolitic to insist on that point, however,” said Dean. “Particularly while in the field attempting to
convince them that one’s product has technical merit.”

“Even so,” said Christoph, “the people… they need a strong hand.”

I polished off my second glass of wine.

Christoph turned to me. “Your husband, Maddie, he is
really
very smart about these things.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite.”

I tried to sound nonchalant about it when what I really wanted to do was grab him by the shoulders and insist that my husband
was the smartest, most principled, hardest-working man he was ever likely to meet, much less employ—that Dean could build
a house or a train car from scratch, had fixed my old VW Rabbit’s dead engine with a Swiss Army knife and a Bic lighter when
we got stranded in the rain the night of our second date, and that he was, moreover, equally at home discussing Goethe, the
psychological function of shamans in rural Nepal, and the continuing impact of FDR’s agricultural policy.

Instead I bit my tongue, trying to look intrigued with their discussion of biological oxygen demand and Teutonic lab protocols
until enough time had passed that I could courteously excuse myself.

I rattled around inside the house, desperate for something to read. The only printed matter in the entire place was the previous
July’s
Town & Country
, which I took upstairs to our guest room.

In the old days I’d usually found a couple of people I knew in this publication, albeit vaguely: friends of my grandparents,
or names that were familiar from my parents’ tales of boarding school and deb parties back in the fifties. Now it might just
as well have been the society gazette of Madagascar, or Pluto. Who the fuck were these people? And how the hell could they
afford all the crap in these advertisements?

I didn’t want to be them; I didn’t even covet their stuff. I just couldn’t compute the vertiginous gulf between these Jaguar
and Bulgari and Harry Winston ads and my own continuing struggle to chip in on communal baba ghanoush delivery from Fourteenth
Street.

My mother still danced on the verge of magazine world whenever the spirit moved her, but I lived in terror that the middle
class’s lowest rungs had long since been yanked up and away from her children: a rope ladder dangled from the basket of some
hot-air balloon, above our reach, now gliding seaward.

How would the generations after me turn out if I couldn’t scratch my way to safety in this one? Would my failure spawn another
Teddy Underhill, or, worse yet, his mother?

Seven bucks an hour and my pompous ancestry felt like precious little armor against the abyss of either contingency.

But was money any protection when you got right down to it?

Of course not. Just look at the fucking Hamptons, not to mention the abundance of dangerous psychos still extant amongst my
wealthier relatives.

It was another two hours before Astrid and her Sancho-Panzer returned from shaking down the Chinese restaurant, by which point
I was standing at the kitchen counter poking the armful of meadow flowers I’d gathered into the neck of an empty milk bottle,
stem by stem.

It had been either that or lighting the house copy of
Town & Country
on fire so I could stomp its ashes into the driveway gravel, shrieking with boredom.

All the Percodan in America could not sweeten this little weekend. And besides which, we’d run out of wine.

I’d turned on the kitchen lights, the sky long since tipped violet by burgeoning dusk, but Astrid still wore her sunglasses.

“Madeline Dare with a talent for the arrangement of
flowers
,” she said. “Not something I’d ever have imagined.”

“How’d it go with rescinding your tip?”

“They would
not
listen to reason,” she said.

“Gee,” I replied. “Bummer.”

She twined a stem of Queen Anne’s lace through her fingers. “I shouldn’t have said anything in front of Chrissy. He hates
it when I borrow his credit card.”

“Actually, he seemed okay with it,” I said.

She yawned, ignoring that. “I must go get changed.”

“You look fine. The sunglasses are a tad over the top, but other than that—”

“For a
dinner
party.”

“Here?”

“A friend’s place, up the road.”

“Well that’s lucky,” I said. “You’re down to cocktail onions and Grey Poupon.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “The
real
season is over, of course, but I’m sure you and Dean can still find someplace to eat in town.”

I stared at her, struck dumb as a cow.

“It would’ve been so awkward to have you tag along,” she said. “They’re not the sort of people you’d fit
in
with.”

I wondered whether my old friend could’ve hurt me more had she just smashed my head through the kitchen wall, for sport.

The answer was a big fat no.

Her eyebrows rose from behind the dark glasses. “Oh, for God’s sake… you’re not going to
cry
, are you?”

Not for a second, if it fucking kills me.

“Maddie, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Jesus, Astrid.” I looked away from her, crossing my arms. “I haven’t been ditched since, like, fifth grade.”

“The hostess was
already
upset because we’re bringing Camilla.”