Part I 1 Kendrick Löwenstein. I''d heard her name for almost a whole semester before I ever saw her. I was taking a philosophy class, a terrible class actually, with a student-hating, prehistoric professor who never gave lectures or "unpacked" anything but instead read aloud to us for the entire hour, as if we''d gathered there for a bedtime story. To eat up some time before turning to his disintegrating notebook and intoning his notes on Epictetus--notes unchanged, was the word on the street, since the time of the ''68 student protests, when a few subversive asides crept in, among them an oblique reference to the world actually having ended in 1908 due to the Tunguska Meteor Event--he would call the roll. There were certain people who never showed up, and on these he would hang, repeating their names over and over again, a dull needle stuck in a bad groove. Kendrick Löwenstein, he would read. Getting no response, he would repeat: Kendrick Löwenstein. He''d look up, squinting his eyes under caterpillar eyebrows.
Kendrick Löwenstein! he would demand, warning her that she risked giving offense and commanding her to appear. Kendrick Löwenstein? he would say finally, wistfully, lingering over the name as if he were a lover and she the one who got away. I remember very clearly the first time I finally saw her. It was about four in the morning, just after bar time, and I was trucking up Broadway with my motorcycle jacket stuffed with packs of Marlboros and a six of $2.99 Knickerbocker beer under my arm. I''m not even sure where I was going. Probably I''d been hanging out with Trina, Audrey, and Fang-Hua and I''d volunteered to do the beer-and-cigarette run, or I''d been at a bar and I was out looking to prolong the mischief, but who can remember so many years down the line? Anyway, right there on the corner of Broadway and 116th was this girl. And she looked so dramatic, so absurdly exaggerated, that I almost laughed out loud.
It was freezing cold, but the top of her coat was pulled down, swathed around her freakishly pale, almost alien-white shoulders, and held closed over her breastbone with one long-fingered hand. Worn like this it took on the aspect of an opera cape, or some last shred of grandeur clung to, literally, by deposed royalty. With her other hand she held by the corner an enormous clutch purse, which was covered in some kind of ancient linsey-woolsey needlepoint fabric and which sagged with (I''d learn only later) masses and masses of stolen dexies. I remember thinking she had a kind of arrogant, indolent lower lip, and I got the feeling she had just left some louche company. She was like a tragic heroine, worse for the wear--glamorous, haggard, in extremis--and she was made up like a silent movie star. Except that she had electric-blue hair. There was something to this. The thing of it was, she was a mess, standing there with her lips parted, smudge-lidded and surprised at herself, with her sulky and offended face.
But I knew from experience how much discipline it took to have blue hair. Green hair, we all knew, was easy. It was what you got when you tried to dye your hair blue. You''d bleach and bleach your brains out, but it was never enough, so your hair would go a crazy straw yellow. Then you''d slather on the Manic Panic blue dye and get . green hair. You had to have real patience, real technique, to have blue hair. And so, looking at this girl standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway at 4:12 a.
m. on a cold winter night in the late 1980s, I thought, Here''s a girl who, all evidence to the contrary, has a backup plan. "Got a light?" was the first thing she said to me. Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand. I lit her cigarette for her--it was almost the same blue as her hair, with a long gold filter, a Nat Sherman Fantasia, I would learn--and when it was clear she was going nowhere, I put down the six-pack, took out my own cigarettes, and lit one. It felt wrong to leave her standing there on the corner. I was still holding the lighter when she took it out of my hand.
"Cool," she said, turning it over and over and looking at it. "Why''d you paint it black?" "They made them like that during World War Two. To save the brass. And you could light up in the trenches and the metal wouldn''t reflect the light." She flicked it open, lit the flame, snapped it shut. "Can I have it?" she said. I laughed. "Um, no?" I said.
"Oh, come on, can''t I have it?" she said. She was holding it up in front of her face, clicking it open, flicking the flame, snapping it shut again and again. I realized with this that she was a rich kid. Because middle-class people, let alone working-class, don''t go around expecting stuff for free. I grabbed the lighter back on the last snap. "It was my dad''s," I said, putting it in my pocket. "Your dad was in World War Two?" she said. I said yeah.
"My dad''s way old too," she said. "How old''s your dad?" "He''s dead," I said. "I wish my dad were dead," she said. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, threw her head back, and exhaled. She tilted her head down and looked at me fiercely. "Actually, I wish my fucking mother were dead. I could chuck her down a well." She was .
theatrical. But there was also something strangely languid about her, distracted. She threw me off. I would later learn that her parted-lip, surprised look was what her face settled into at rest. I would go on to wonder if this might have had something to do with her having done lots of drugs since the age of eleven. She took her hand from her coat and one side slipped down her shoulder, revealing a thin dress, cut ''40s style, rhinestone clips pulling its neckline square. With her heavy-lidded, rounded eyes, her pouting mouth and long neck, she reminded me of a Pontormo Madonna. But without any calm, without any quiet.
"Aren''t you fucking freezing?" is what I said to her. She smiled. "Don''t you know," she said to me, "that crazy people don''t feel the cold?" She made no move to pull her coat back up again. She seemed rooted to the spot, smoking her blue cigarette there on the corner by the Chock Full o''Nuts with its perpetually sweating windows. I really was freezing and I had to pee, but I couldn''t leave her there. "You just hanging around out here?" I said to her. "Yeah, whatever," she said. Then she sang a line from "I''m Waiting for My Man.
" It seemed like a weirdly public place to be meeting a drug dealer. Then I wondered if she meant something else and she was actually, what, a prostitute? But you really didn''t see a lot of punk-rock prostitutes on the Upper West Side in the 1980s. "You live here?" I gestured down 116th Street. "Sort of," she said. "Do you?" "Yeah," I said, and pointed. Then I abruptly retracted my hand, because the building I''d pointed to was a dorm. She cocked an amused eyebrow at me. "You go to Barnard?" she asked.
I cleared my throat, feeling deeply uncool. "Yeah," I admitted. She rolled her eyes in a complete 360-degree lunatic circle. "So do I," she said. And with this, our pretensions that we were as bad as all that melted into air. "I''m Chess," I said, putting out my hand. "My name is Frances--Francesca Varani, actually. But everyone calls me Chess.
" "Kendra," she said, "Kendra Löwenstein." "Damn, girl--you''re Kendrick Löwenstein?" I said. "You better get that shit to class!" * I should probably back up a moment and talk about what got me thinking of her. It was another cold winter, some twenty years later, when I got a piece of news that sent me right back to Kendra and her family. It was a pretty dire time jobwise, and I''d just stumbled into a new gig as a bid writer in a loony little office in the Garment District. The whole sick crew there sort of bears some words, as does where my head was at just about then, age thirty-nine and feeling blindsided by how quickly time was passing. The Acme Corporation, as it was called, was a "language services" company that specialized in plucking consecutive interpreters out of the ether and dropping them into grim situations such as family court appearances, determinations of Medicaid fraud, and deportation hearings. As far as I could tell, though, no one in the Acme office did a lick of work.
There was a sales guy, Walter, a friendly, mildly defeated fellow who dealt in uncontrollable sighs and who spent most of his days eating sad, crunchy snacks behind the privacy of his workstation divider. There was the team that dispatched the interpreters: a creepy manager (male) and four young and good-looking women, all with long and lustrous hair, as if they''d been hired because they fulfilled a type. The three who did any kind of actual work were constantly quivering with disgust or terror, while the fourth, Nikki, an elaborately lazy yet hot-tempered twentysomething from Staten Island, had the worst trash mouth I''d ever encountered at a job. She had near-screaming conversations with the lecher of a dispatch manager where she''d yell across the office, You answer the fuckin'' phone--my nails are wet! I could not believe I had to work in this place. This is no mere flimsy figure of speech: I just could not believe I had to work there. I kept waiting for Allen Funt to pop down through the acoustic.