Madeleine's Ghost (7 page)

The work train idles in the station inexplicably for the next fifteen minutes. Men in light blue transit uniforms mill about inside the single car. The caboose is a flatbed full of junk, mangled turnstiles, scrap iron. Finally another train pulls in on the upstairs track, and there is the tread of heavy boots on the stairs. Five transit workers, wearing sidearms and showing the brassy glint of extra cartridges from bandoliers, march quickly down onto the platform. They are escorting two nervous men in suits who carry small black suitcases. The doors open, the guards and men step into the yellow light, and in a moment the work train is gone, lurching off into the darkness of the tunnel.

I look over at Rust. He shrugs.

“New York,” he says. “You never know what's going on. Not really. All we know is what they tell us. And they don't tell us much.”

He is right. This city is one vast conspiracy, a riddle whose answer has been cleverly concealed from us. There is something we're not getting, though there are certain clues: Steam rises from the streets; the pavement rumbles; the bedrock beneath our feet is shot through with tunnels and secret passages, arteries leading into the gloom beneath skyscrapers to a secret terminus where the city's own heart is revealed beating and horrible, tended lovingly by transit workers like a queen by worker ants—the ventricles of its machine pump fueled by steam and blood and the dashed hopes of millions.

S
UNDAY.

Chase is having a small dinner party in her loft just east of Carroll Gardens for Jillian. I almost refuse to attend, but Sundays are bad. Long, empty afternoons full of whispers and blank sunlight, followed by remorseless evenings, rearing up like a wall of ice.

It's not the food—Chase is an excellent cook, conversant in several obscure Asian cuisines. It's her friends, a motley collection of hipper-than-thou film professionals, acidheads, disaffected youths in jackboots, witches, Communists, performance artists. Rude bohemians with a passionate antipathy for table manners and the everyday kindnesses that are the grease of bourgeois life.

As dark spreads up from the river, I walk up Tide and catch the F train at Knox to Bergen Street. The neighborhood here is mostly Hispanic now, but there is still a block or two of Italians left, a row of Italian restaurants, and a few safe streets, supposedly patrolled by Mafia henchmen. Chase's loft is at the corner of Smith and Baltic, in an old Episcopal church, St. John the Baptist. The church was converted to lofts ten years ago, when the last Episcopalian in Brooklyn fled or died.

The massive, studded doors on the Baltic Street side are equipped with an iron knocker of medieval proportions. Party lights shine through
the Gothic stained glass window of Chase's loft, and I hear the crash and hammer of an old Sob Sister tape played at top volume.

After a few minutes Jillian comes down to answer the door, a snifter of whiskey in hand. Her blond hair is bleached white tonight and slicked back, and she looks unhealthy and even thinner than she did at our last meeting. She is wearing a long-sleeve knit top that fits like a wet suit. Her ribs stick out like the ribs in a Dürer painting of Christ crucified.

“Shit. It's the bastard,” she says. For a minute it seems she is not going to let me in.

“Jillian, great to see you again,” I say, shifting the bottle of cheap California Chablis and offering my hand.

“Whatever,” she says, and gives a dismissive wave and leaves me behind to shut and bolt the doors. I watch her bony butt wag up the stairs for a moment, and I am forced into a sad reflection upon its former luscious proportions. Another beautiful woman gone to the dogs on heroin and New York City. But this isn't exactly fair. Jillian's appalling new look is really the last stage of a general decline from ingenue through porn star to junkie that began many years ago. I blame everything on rock and roll.

At Brown in the early eighties, Chase and Jillian formed an all-girl thrash band called Sob Sister with an art student from the Rhode Island School of Design. Chase plunked the bass; Jillian picked up lead guitar and sang; the art student banged on things. In those days punk was the common language of the counterculture, and Jillian soon became known for her crude tattoos, dissonant shrieking, and disregard for common decency. During the performance of her infamous signature number, “Fuck Me Blind,” she would strip naked and masturbate onstage with the head of the microphone. The most obscene part was the wet, squelchy sounds that came though the old Vox amplifiers.

For three years Sob Sister played a series of notorious gigs around Providence and in Boston. They were arrested eight times and briefly signed to the alternative Dischord label out of Washington, D.C. When it was all over, Jillian's voice—trained for opera by the finest coaches money could buy—was ruined beyond repair.

A long table composed of sawhorses and discarded doors is nicely laid out in the main loft space upstairs just beneath a Gothic icicle pointing down from the ceiling. I count twelve black octagonal plates, twelve sets of purposely mismatched silverware. An arrangement of black paper flowers floats in a stainless steel bedpan at the center. I pour some wine and walk down the row of seats, admiring the place settings. Each napkin is folded into a different sort of origami bird. Ashtrays stolen from a Japanese hotel in midtown are balanced on the doorknobs.

“Ever ask yourself what's going on with doors in this city?” I call over to Chase. “People just throw them away. You see them everywhere, in Dumpsters, alleys, just lying along the sidewalk. Then you rent an apartment to find every door has been removed, and you've got to hang up sheets for privacy.”

Laboring over a huge wok full of vegetables behind the glass bricks of the kitchen area, Chase ignores me. She has made enough food to feed an army, but so far, besides Jillian and myself, there is only Byron Poydras. He is slumped on the leather couch against the far wall engrossed in a copy of
Gnarl.
Poydras is another bohemian friend of Chase's who does nothing I can put my finger on exactly. I stride across the bare wood expanse to the couch.

“Tell me something, Poydras,” I say. “What do you do with your time?”

He looks up from the comic book, lazy as a cat. “Loiter, mostly,” he says.

“Okay. Where do you loiter?”

An obscure shrug must pass for an answer.

He is a long-limbed kid of about twenty-seven, of the lanky, Ichabod Crane southern type. A shock of blond hair hangs permanently in front of his face; the buttons of his cuffs are always undone. They dangle limp as wet rags from his wrists. This drives me crazy. I want to button them up, take a comb to his hair. Instead I slump beside him and read over his shoulder.
Gnarl
is an avant-garde comic book that portrays
Benito Mussolini as a canny panda bear and Gabriele D'Annunzio and the rest of the blackshirts as malicious raccoons.

“Ned,” he says a few pages later, “don't read over my shoulder. It makes me nervous.”

It's hard to imagine Poydras nervous about anything, but I move off to replenish my wine. Unlike most of Chase's friends, Poydras and I are on what passes for cordial terms in Bohemia. He hails from New Orleans and through an odd coincidence knew one of Antoinette's sisters at LSU. Though straight, he is heavily involved in the drag show scene that seems to be a staple of East Village life. I find that many transplanted Louisianans participate in these perverse spectacles, which culminate in the Wigstock Festival in Tompkins Square Park in August—a daylong extravaganza of transvestism, female impersonation, and sexual confusion of the first water. Perhaps it is the heritage of Mardi Gras that leads Louisianans in New York to such excesses. After all, in Carnival krewes for well over a century now, men have dressed like women and women like men to the delight of the drunks and tourists along Esplanade and other thoroughfares of that distant city.

We wait an hour, and no one else has shown up. Chase is too busy making the last preparations to notice, but at ten-thirty everything is ready, and she looks around her nearly empty loft, and her crooked eyes brim with tears.

“Not again,” she says, a reedy, unhappy sound in her voice. “All this goddamn food.”

“It's your lousy friends, Chase,” I call out. “They don't show up as a matter of style. It's not cool to be where you say you're going to be when you say you're going to be there. There's a whole new generation of beatniks out there who think keeping appointments is a sign of latent middle-class tendencies.”

“You are one uppity-fuck bastard.” Jillian waves her snifter of whiskey at me from the other side of the room. For the last hour she's been pacing, jittery, swilling whiskey, and muttering to herself. Now her eyes are red and drunk, a nice contrast with the unhealthy green of her skin. She bounces over and jabs a finger in my face.

“What makes you think you're above the stink?” she says. “Because I've got news for you, you fuck. You've got about as much agenda as the next hopeless bastard. You're choking on it just like the rest of us!”

I am taken aback by this and don't know what to say. For a moment all I can see are her eyes, red and accusing.

“Ha,” she says, and throws up her hands, sloshing whiskey across the wood floor.

But at that moment Chase steps in. “Come on, you two,” she says wearily. “Let's eat.”

The meal tonight is Indonesian with a touch of Thai around the edges. We have a curried shrimp appetizer, lemon grass coconut soup, a cold broccoli and mussel salad, and twice cooked chicken Jakarta. A warm breeze blows on my neck from the stained glass windows tilted out at an angle to Baltic on their heavy pivots. The window closest to me portrays St. John the Baptist in his wild ass's skin in the desert; the other, St. Andrew strapped to his cross, rotating over a slow flame of colored glass. From somewhere outside the mournful sound of a tuba is carried on the wind.

“Listen to that,” I say, gesturing over my shoulder with my fork.

“Listen to what?” Chase says.

“I've got to tell you,” Poydras says suddenly from his end of the table. “I'm tripping. Took three hits before I got into the cab tonight.” Then he smiles dully like a kid who has just peed his pants.

“Why would you drop acid before one of my dinner parties?” Chase says to him. “It wrecks the whole experience of eating. The food should stand by itself.”

“The music,” I say. “Can anyone hear the music from outside?”

Chase shakes her head. But my ears have always been very acute. I can hear babies crying a block away, couples making love in the next room quiet as church mice, clocks ticking steady as a metronome in the still hours of the morning.

For the next few minutes we eat without talking, dysfunctional family style. Then Chase notices that Jillian has not touched her food.

“Jillian,” she says, sounding hurt, “you promised you'd eat something.”

Jillian tosses back her snifter of whiskey with a dictatorial motion and pulls herself up from the table.

“Don't ride me, don't say another word,” she spits out, a hysterical edge in her voice, and she heads toward the toilet, through Chase's bedroom at the far end of the loft. A moment later we hear the gasps and coughs of vomiting from behind the thin green curtain that shields the toilet from the world.

“Jesus,” I say, food gone cold in my mouth, “what's wrong with her?” I think I know the answer, think it lies in the bloody tracks on her arms concealed by her long sleeves, but am surprised to find that it is something different altogether. Jillian has become an anorexic, and because of this can no longer make a living at the peep shows or in the porn movies. Worst of all, Chase says, the affliction has forced poor Jillian to appeal to her rich parents for help with the rent.

“An anorexic?” I say. “What happened to the heroin?”

Chase almost smiles. “That's old news. She gave up heroin a year ago. Doesn't do anything except single-malt scotch. Doesn't even do food. She drinks one of those Vita-Plus cans of vitamin supplements every once in a while, usually mixed with whiskey. It's like milk, only thicker and nastier.”

“Let me get this straight,” I say. “You threw a dinner party for an anorexic?”

Chase shrugs. “I thought I could get her to eat. She said she would try. I was wrong.”

Fifteen minutes later Jillian emerges from the bedroom and sits down quietly as if nothing has happened. Chase is serving the dessert, saffron ice cream, and Vietnamese coffee sweetened with condensed milk.

“I just got off the phone with Inge,” Jillian says. “Inge's coming over for a bite. I figured with all the leftover food …”

Head down, meek as a servant girl, Chase nods and settles back into her chair at the end of the table.