Invisible Boy Read Online Free

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.

4

    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.
    The Catalog was on the thirteenth floor, straight across from the
Granta
Bitches, with the even-nastier
Review
behind door number three at the end of the hall. We were a triad of money pits loosely conjoined, no doubt the aftermath
     of some literary-cocktail-napkin Venn diagram. It always felt like that old joke about academia, the one about how the infighting
     is so vicious because the stakes are so low.
    Pagan was already back in editorial by the time I walked into the front office. She was the assistant photo editor and had
     gotten me a gig taking phone orders, part-time.
    I’d been staff writer at a weekly paper in Syracuse for three years, but that counted for exactly dick in Manhattan, a revelation
     that gave me more compassion for Upstate New York than I’d ever had while living there with Dean.
    I parked my take-out coffee next to a vacant computer terminal and sat down, back to the window.