Madeleine's Ghost (5 page)

The Crescent City Grill is Disneyland phony, with fake papier-mâché Mardi Gras heads and pressed rebel flags suspended from the ceiling, the severed bed of a 1959 Ford pickup for the DJ's booth. The bartender is an Irishman from Cork. But it is I who feel like an impostor here in my wrinkled thrift-store button-down and stained tie among all the pressed happy hour yuppies hitting on each other over steaming mugs of Bud Light. They could be anywhere, it doesn't matter. A land of bar codes and spreadsheets and marketing strategies and units of merchandise.

Anywhere is a place I don't belong.

Later, at the intersection of Houston and Mercer, pedestrians seem hushed beneath the strange lavender twilight that blooms above the island, moving in a dream. I stop and look up and can almost feel it touching my face like the secret ray shone upon a man visited by benevolent aliens in a science fiction movie. This light is marvelous, the color of longing and nostalgia, the devil's own melancholy, the color of a woman's lips as you are about to kiss them at midnight beneath the neon of a deserted bar in a city you don't know well.

After a few Abitas at Crescent City, I can't help thinking of New Orleans and Antoinette; though strictly sober, I try to resist the impulse. Once I went and sang under Antoinette's window in the Faubourg Marigny. A tiny trellis balcony opened onto her bedroom. It was after 3
A.M.
, and we had agreed not to see each other that night, but she came out sleepy-eyed in her slip, and leaned lazy and smiling on the railing as I yodeled “San Antonio Rose” in a passable Italian tenor inherited from my father, and Molesworth played straight-faced accompaniment, mandolin propped against his gut.

“ ‘Moon in all your splendor,' ” I sang, “ ‘so lonely my heart. Call back my rose, rose of San Antone.…' ” The sky glowing not lavender but green over New Orleans and Algiers, over the Gulf, over Cuba and the Tortugas swimming on the far horizon, as from the Mississippi in that vanished hour the whistle of a tanker passing like the thin wail of longing.

A small outdoor café has sprung up on the asphalt triangle between Houston and East First, not twenty steps from the yellow mouth of the Second Avenue F.

Colored lights are strung above a dozen tables in a roped-off square; a jazz trio plays against the chain-link fence of the basketball courts. Trucks roar down Houston toward the Gothic crenellation of the Williamsburg Bridge; cabs squeal in and out of traffic. A half dozen winos, filthy and stinking of urine, congregate around the perimeter, bumming cigarettes. It seems an unlikely spot for a café, but most of the tables are full of junkie-skinny East Village types in retro-seventies outfits and platform
shoes. Their bell-bottoms flare from ankles I could encircle with thumb and forefinger.

I decide to stop for a last beer, just for the novel idea of drinking on a traffic island and because it is Friday night. The waiter, an Englishman with the usual mouthful of bad teeth, comes over with a bottle of Fuller's ESB topped with a plastic cup.

“It's all we've got right now,” he says. “Either this or water, and you can't drink water and sit here. You want to hear the music without drinking, you've got to stand outside with them.” He thumbs toward the winos, the sad orange tips of their bummed cigarettes burning in the darkness. I nod, and the waiter sets the beer down and goes away.

The trio is plugged into a yellow extension cord stretched to a tenement building across the street. The lead singer, an overweight young woman with a Greek look to her sharp features, snaps her fingers and starts to breathe the lyrics of “Birdland” into the microphone when a spark flies from somewhere and the sound system goes dead. In a moment the colored lights flicker off, and we are sunk in the fluorescent gloom of the street.

An exhausted sigh goes up from the crowd. The English waiter stands on a chair and waves his hands. “Don't go anywhere, people,” he says. “Just a question of fuses. Happened last night.” Then he jumps down, dodges a cab, and disappears into the dark hallway of the tenement.

I look around in the dimness at my neighbors. To my left, a body-pierced woman with Auschwitz cropped hair smokes a cigarette like a European intellectual, the heel of her hand pressed to her chin. It's not hard to imagine her life. I have a vague picture: the cats, the boyfriend in an avant-garde band, the casual drug use, the vague artistic ambitions, the filth of a fifth-floor walk-up shared with six other young men and women much like herself. But what does she think about? She wears a large crucifix, yet it seems impossible that she believes in God. Does she instead believe in style? That what you look like is a better test of character than what you do?

I am lost in these heady considerations when I spot a familiar silhouette
at a table against the far rope on the Second Avenue side. Those stooped shoulders and the odd angle of the neck, like a thick tube sticking straight up from the spine. And even from this distance and in the poor light and half turned away, you can see there is something wrong with that face. It is pushed in, uneven, a poorly executed mask. It is Chase.

She is tracing a despondent swirl in the gloom with her cigarette, underlining the words of a conversation I cannot hear. All I can make out of the woman sitting across from her in the shadows is one pale, bony, tattooed arm.

Chase has become extremely depressed of late. She turned thirty in the spring and—as she is fond of pointing out—has already lived four years longer than the poet Keats. When we first met, she had just graduated from Brown and was full of offbeat intelligence, nervous energy, irreverence, and spunk. You never knew what she would say next. The maudlin side was there, but submerged beneath a protective coating of youth. Now it seems the low moments are all she has. Her sole remaining topic of conversation involves how she is still a virgin, how her face has cheated her out of a life in the world.

In truth I have been avoiding Chase lately and have neglected to return the last three or four messages left on my machine. I feel guilty about this, but it is all I can do to keep myself afloat these days. Still, anything is better than drinking alone on Friday night. I step over to her table, Fuller's ESB and plastic cup in hand.

“Hey, Chase …”

She turns and registers my presence with a quick disapproving blink.

“Ned,” she says without enthusiasm.

Her companion is a bone-thin young woman with an exquisitely sculpted face and pale blond hair. It takes me a moment to recognize Jillian Sumner, an old friend of Chase's from Brown. I am shocked. When I last saw Jillian, she was voluptuous and sexy and weighed at least forty pounds more than she does tonight. She looks like she has just gotten
back from six months in a cave in Transylvania, living on bat wings and water.

“Some kind of style thing, Jillian?” I say. “Don't you know cadaver chic is a little passé?”

Jillian sneers up at me. “The bastard's here,” she says, waving her cigarette toward the chair between them. “Sit down, bastard.”

Chase shakes her head. “I'm not speaking to him right now,” she says.

“Fuck that,” Jillian says. “I like to talk to bastards every once in a while. Like to hear the bastard's side of the story.”

I see they are both drunk. Jillian is slurring her words. The table is cluttered with empty bottles of Fuller's. This is pretty potent stuff. Chase tells me they have been drinking since four in the afternoon.

“We were the first customers here,” she says.

Jillian tugs at the seam of my khaki pants and pulls me roughly into the chair. It is an accepted fact among Chase's friends that Jillian and I despise each other. This isn't exactly true. It's more a question of aesthetic differences. Somewhere beneath the layers of bohemian cynicism and dread, I still believe in responsibility, honor, freshly mowed lawns, Manifest Destiny, and the virtues of married life—the old bourgeois song and dance. Jillian believes in nothing.

Her story is sad, typical of a certain kind of fucked-up rich kid: At nineteen she was a Grace Kelly-esque blonde from a wealthy family of
Mayflower
stock. She possessed classic looks, a large trust fund, a beautiful voice, and a bright future in professional opera. I once saw her give a recital from Puccini's
Madama Butterfly
at the Solarium in Providence. It was breathtaking, brought tears to my eyes. But all this promise seemed to rest on a foundation of darkness. Ten years later her trust fund is gone, she shoots heroin enough to be called an addict, works the peep shows along Eighth Avenue, and for smack money does an occasional porn film under the name April Storm.

A while back, for reasons I do not care to examine, I caught the afternoon show of Jillian's last film,
Anal Annie's Ecstasy Girls
at the Paramour on Forty-second Street. In one memorable scene she straps on a
huge flesh-colored dildo, rolls a buxom redhead ass up, and proceeds to impale the squealing young woman with gleeful abandon.

One can only hope that Jillian's Pilgrim forefathers are mercifully shielded from any knowledge of such doings in the granite heaven which they have attained for their devotion to godliness. Had they only known what fate awaited their progeny on these green shores when they set buckled shoe to Plymouth Rock in 1620, they would have sunk the
Mayflower
with all hands in Massachusetts Bay in horror.

“We were just talking about you, bastard,” she says now, turning away from me to light another cigarette, though the one she's got is still burning in the ashtray. In profile she still looks more like Grace Kelly than it is possible for anyone to look, and my heart sighs.

“What were you saying?” I ask, though I don't really want to know.

“We were saying how I've called you six fucking times in the last two weeks,” Chase says, “and you haven't called back once.”

“I didn't get any messages,” I lie.

“Bullshit,” Chase says.

“Really, the answering machine's been messing up,” I say. This at least is true; it has been invaded by a ghost.

“It was for the bastard's own goddamned good, that's what gets me,” Jillian says to Chase. “Not only is he a bastard he is a selfish bastard.”

“I'll leave you two drunks alone,” I say, and am about to go back to my table when Chase puts a dry hand on my arm.

“Someone is trying to contact you from the Other Side,” she says. Her eyes are dark and serious. The back of my neck goes cold. I haven't told Chase a word about the haunting, mostly because for years I have been scoffing at her belief in ghosts and other spiritual ridiculousness. Just then a half-ton pickup truck full of used wire coat hangers jounces over a pothole along Houston, and a few of the rusty metal things bounce clattering to the sidewalk. This gives me a moment to compose myself.

“What other side?” I manage. “You mean, New Jersey?”

“That's right, be a bastard about it, bastard,” Jillian says, and she lurches up from the table. “I'm going to get some cigarettes.”

“But you've already got cigarettes,” Chase says, pointing to the butts burning in the ashtray.

“Whatever,” Jillian says, and steps over the rope barrier and stumbles off into the night.

When Jillian is gone, Chase turns her dark eyes to me again. Her misshapen face looks like a skull in the yellow light of the street.

“I've been having these dreams,” she says. “Very vivid, very clear. Someone wants to talk to you. I had six dreams and called you each time. Finally, in the last dream, I just wrote down your phone number and gave it to this hand sticking out of a cloud. A woman's hand with a lot of rings. Get any weird calls lately?”

I hang on to the edge of the table to keep myself from shaking. “Just my bill collectors,” I say through my teeth. “College loans. They're getting pretty aggressive.”

“And she said something about you and her cousin. I couldn't quite get it. That's all I can tell you right now.”

“Chase, can we talk about something else?”

At last the lights go back on, and the English waiter returns, and the music starts up again. We wait for Jillian to come back, but after two hours there is no sign of her; she has probably gone off to score some heroin. Then I am drunk and Chase is drunker, and we go over to Stella's on Second Avenue and then to the Telephone Bar and end up at Blue and Gold in one of the booths near the pool table. The balls crack across the worn felt, and ? and the Mysterians' “96 Tears” jangles from the jukebox, and on the walls in the faded hunting mural from the fifties the man in the hunting jacket is never any closer to bagging his bird, and Chase leans into me and tells me again that she can't stand her life.

“I mean it,” she says. “I'm getting to the point where I want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and put an end to the whole miserable business.” Then she asks me to kiss her, but I can't because her lips are all crooked, not really lips at all, but something the plastic surgeons made out of skin from her ass.

“It's O.K.,” Chase says when I hang my head. “I don't blame you. Fuck it! In any case, we're all fucked, headed for something weird and
terrible. That's another thing I got from my dreams. You and me and Jillian …” but in another instant the light in her eyes fades, and she passes out openmouthed against the back of the booth.

In the cab, on the way back to Brooklyn, the Haitian driver races downtown, swearing to himself, running red lights, and blasting Vou-Dou music from the radio—they all hate taking fares across the bridges—but soon we are up Canal, and there is that familiar rumbling of tires on metal grating, and we are high above the river, New York spread out and dressed in false spangles and flickering lights on all sides, as pristine in the moonlight as St. Augustine's vision of the City of God. And for a single moment, despite Chase's dire predictions, it seems to me that the odds might be with us, it seems our lives might work out all right in the end.