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

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.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œHa,” 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.
    â€œListen to that,” I say, gesturing over my shoulder with my fork.
    â€œListen to what?” Chase says.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œWhy 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.”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œJillian,” 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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œJesus,” 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.
    â€œAn 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.