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

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.”
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œI 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.

    Inge is a large German woman in her mid-twenties. A redhead with very pale skin, an uneven, toothy smile and breasts the size of the Matter-horn. She thumps up the stairs, kisses Jillian on the lips, gives a Teutonic nod to the rest of us, throws herself down at the table, and begins to eat with gusto.
    Jillian smiles watching Inge eat. Perhaps Inge eats for the both of them. Withdrawn, Chase sits with her coffee behind a cigarette, two fingers propped against her forehead. Conversation, which has been dismal, stops completely, and we all watch Inge eat. Every now and then she looks up and smiles at us and goes back to eating. Her appetite is enormous. She finishes off a huge plate of chicken and is halfway through the mussels and broccoli when I remember where I have seen her before, and I am just drunk enough to say so.
    â€œYou made a film, right?” I say. “You and Jillian. I saw it at the Paramour. Definitely a fine performance from the both of you.”
    â€œJa,”
Inge says. “We did one scene together in a fack film. That’s how we met,” and she leans over to kiss Jillian’s sunken cheek.
    Chase glares at me through the smoke of her cigarette, but Jillian does not seem to mind.
    â€œYou didn’t jerk off to us doing it?” Jillian says, and looks me right in the eye.
    â€œNo,” I say, wincing. “Of course not.”
    â€œI mean I could understand if you jerked off because Inge and I were pretty hot together.”
    â€œJa,” Inge says, smiling.
    â€œTurns out, Inge loves it like that, from behind.” Jillian goes on. “When they turned the camera off, she wanted me to keep doing it. So that night we went to dinner at Florent and I took her home and we tried it without the crew and lights. You’d be surprised how many women like it like that. From behind.”
    â€œVery good for facking,” Inge agrees.
    â€œFaxing?” I say, perplexed.
    â€œFacking.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFucking, for chrissakes, Ned,” Chase says, annoyed, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray.
    â€œOh.”
    Just then the sound of slow, mournful music reaches us again from down the street. It sounds like a funeral procession in a Mexican village.
    â€œHey, Ned,” Poydras says, his eyes bright and crazy in an instant. “I hear it now. I hear the music!”
    The music gets louder, seems to be advancing up Baltic Street, a melancholy dirge—tuba and trombone, the steady booming of a drum, the decorous clink of triangles. As if on cue, we all get up from the table and go to the windows, Inge still chewing her food.
    It’s midnight, and below an Italian religious procession has just turned the corner. I see a small brass band, a dozen big-haired Italian girls dressed in tight black dresses, a little wobbly on their three-inch heels. Following them, six or seven guidos in big-shouldered suits bear along a plaster statue of the Virgin fifteen feet high on a bier draped in black and hung with cheap silvery trinkets. Struggling painfully along on their knees in the wake of this holy effigy are a few shrunken old