Invisible Boy (3 page)

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

“But there’s Lud
lam
and Lud
lum
. 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 threaded 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!”

S
unday 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.

W
ednesday 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 display 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.