Read Online Madeleine's Ghost by Robert Girardi - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œEver 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.
    â€œTell 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.
    â€œOkay. 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 portraysBenito Mussolini as a canny panda bear and Gabriele D’Annunzio and the rest of the blackshirts as malicious raccoons.
    â€œNed,” 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.
    â€œNot again,” she says, a reedy, unhappy sound in her voice. “All this goddamn food.”
    â€œIt’s your lousy friends, Chase,” I call out. “They don’t show up as a matter of style. It’s