The Astral (18 page)

James knit his boyish brow in an approximation of empathetic concern. “I know you’re in a lot of pain,” he said. “I know this is a terrible time for you, and I apologize for not asking you to have dinner sooner. But the truth is …” He studied the neat parcels of rabbit meat he was excising.

“It’s Marion,” I said. “Right? Lisa thinks I’m involved with her, and she wants nothing to do with me now.”

He widened his eyes at me, which I took as involuntary assent, then he got back to work.

Squinting with outrage, I finished my glass of wine and set the glass carefully on the granite top of the island. “How is it that you actually did have an affair with Marion, yet here you still are in your big nice house, marriage intact, and no one says boo to you about anything? Meanwhile, I didn’t sleep with her, not even close, and here I am, in this ridiculous mix-up. What’s your secret, James?”

“Lisa couldn’t afford to throw me out,” he said, refilling my glass. “And Luz can afford to throw you out.”

We both laughed. It was true. The tension that had been there since I’d arrived dissolved, or maybe I was imagining this. You never knew with James. He was a slippery little bugger. But even so, I relaxed on my stool, which was buffed stainless steel and no doubt the best one could buy at any price, and said, “She can’t afford not to. According to Helen, I’m nothing but dead weight.”

“We’re all dead weight.”

“You’re not, if she can’t afford to throw you out.”

“Only financially. Emotionally, I’m a tire-shaped rock around her neck. That’s all we are, anymore, we husbands, isn’t it?”

I declined to agree with this in the eager manner of self-loathing men everywhere these days. I no longer had the luxury of laughing at my own haplessness. I had lost my sense of humor about it. “Did you hear, I got a full-time job,” I said. “At the Hasidic lumberyard, working in Accounts Payable. I moved back into the Astral.”

“Well, well, well,” said James, who had obviously already been in possession of both these pieces of information. “Are you writing?”

“Barely. Does anyone care? Are you playing music?”

“Obsessively,” said James. “Does anyone care?”

He wheeled around his bristling kitchen in his tightly wrapped apron, all trim and comfy. James reminded me of a contented caged bird who pretended to try to escape, for show, whenever the door was accidentally left open, but always made sure he was caught and put back again.

“Once again, James, I have to ask, financial considerations aside,” I said in a voice reedy with insuppressable feeling. “What do you know that I don’t? How is it that you’re still here? Does this mean I’m guiltier than you are, even though I didn’t do anything wrong?”

He cocked his head at me, blinking, his busy chef’s hands momentarily stilled as he thought.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do,” I went on. “Maybe all that matters is what punishment the world sees fit to give us. Innocent people have been burned at the stake and shot by firing squads. Innocent husbands have been thrown out. And evildoers everywhere live in comfort and ease. Cheating husbands are forgiven.”

“What are you trying to say?” James asked, still watching me.

“Could it be that the crime is irrelevant? How’s your conscience, James?”

“Clear,” he said. “I sleep well at night. I don’t think I’m any better or worse than the average man. Well, probably worse, but so is Lisa. We’re even.”

“Has she ever had an affair?”

“Harry,” he said. “You’re really not sleeping with Marion?”

“If you knew how many times I’ve been asked that. Actually, I should have been asked that more. Actually, I’m tired of saying I’m not.”

“A long time ago,” said James, “a couple of years before my affair with Marion, Lisa fell in love with someone. A woman.” James twinkled his eyes at me; I took this to mean that he found this sexy. I was unable to twinkle my eyes back at him. The idea of Luz with a woman did absolutely nothing for me, probably because I was only half a man at that point. But the idea of Luz with a woman had never done anything for me. Luz would have no sooner slept with a woman than she would have stabbed and boiled and eaten one. Therefore, the two ideas were roughly concomitant in my simple brain.

“Her name was Sherry. Sherry fell in love with Lisa, too. Finally, she demanded that Lisa leave me. Lisa wouldn’t do it. Sherry threatened to tell me, so Lisa had to come to me and confess everything. That was one of the hardest moments of her life, poor girl.”

James’s protectiveness of his wife amused me. Under an ostentatious display of neurotically sensitive vulnerability, Lisa was as hard as a railroad bed. James had always seemed perversely aroused by this disparity in his wife’s character; he seemed to enjoy colluding in the idea that she was fragile, even as she pushed him around and manipulated him. Come to think of it, maybe he was the one who wanted to be ass-fucked; maybe that was where Helen got her weird ideas about middle-aged husbands.

But no matter. I wanted something from James, information, not just chitchat. Irrationally, childishly, I felt he owed me.

“What are people saying about Luz and me?” I asked. “Our friends. Like Phil and Suzie. I haven’t seen anyone.”

James went to the refrigerator and pulled some things out. I watched, waiting for him to answer, biding my time, while he chopped mushrooms and shallots and sautéed them in butter, added white wine and some fresh-chopped herbs, stirred, tasted, added black pepper, stirred, added cream, tasted, assembling his sauce with the grotesque levity of a leprechaun in a science lab.

James and Lisa’s adopted daughter, Celeste, wandered in, red faced, wearing pajamas, her blond hair in a tangle. She saw me and ignored me. “Do we have any fresh-squeezed OJ, Dad?”

“In the door compartment in a pitcher.”

“When did you make it?”

“Three hours ago.”

“It’s old!”

“Says my Appalachian orphan,” said James, “rescued from a life in the coal mines by her loving parents.”

“I wouldn’t have worked in a coal mine,” said Celeste. “I would have run away and been a child movie star, but now I can’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Continuing to ignore me, she reached into the fridge, sniffed the juice, poured herself a glassful, left the pitcher on the counter, and wandered out.

James put the juice back into the refrigerator, then went to the stove and tasted his sauce, added a little more cream, tasted it again. Finally he said, “Who am I to judge you, Harry? Who is anyone to judge you?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“The truth is, we all judge you.”

“What do you mean?”

James fetched a package wrapped in butcher’s paper, unwrapped a stack of bacon, and began separating the slices. “We all talk about what happened, we pick it apart and choose sides, we say Luz is insane or Marion is predatory or you’re a fool or you’re a bastard or Luz is a rock of strength or Marion is an innocent bystander in a marital psychodrama.” He wrapped a chunk of raw rabbit in a piece of raw bacon and set it aside. “And you know what? We have no fucking clue, but talking about it is more fun than anything else that’s going on around here.” He smiled at me.

I laughed. It came out sounding a little forced. I was trying not to show how upset I was, how urgently I wanted him to stop treating this like an exercise in social fun. I didn’t want James to sense any weakness in me, which was of course ludicrous. He wasn’t a mean man. He would have understood. But my male pride prohibited a plea for sympathy or pity. “Do you want to know what’s really going on?”

“No!” he said, his lips pursing with adamant emphasis. “That would ruin everything. I love thinking about you two together. Let me at least just keep that bit of excitement.” He wrapped another rabbit chunk in another piece of bacon, and another. “Please just grant me the fantasy of you two together.”

“Marion and I have been lovers since the day we met,” I said in a voice so sarcastic, I didn’t see how he could do anything but laugh. “The night I met her, when we were both twenty-two, and I say this so you picture her at twenty-two, not me, we got drunk and then I took her to the bathroom of the Pyramid Club and lifted up her dress and had her against the sink.”

“Thank you,” James breathed, massaging his little pile of bacon and rabbit, staring hard at it.

I looked at him with unconcealed loathing, but he was concentrating on his cooking and so didn’t see the dangerous glint that must have been in at least one of my eyes. The knives were out of my reach, luckily.

“I’m kidding,” he added without looking up. “Easy there.”

“What the hell are you making?”

“Not sure. Inventing as I go. Improvisational cooking with maximum fat content. I have to say, Harry, I think you’ve become overly obsessed. You went to see Helen and you threatened her. You’ve moved back into the Astral. You think about Luz so much, your brain is short-circuiting. You can’t stop mentally arguing with her about what happened with Marion, or didn’t. But let me tell you something honestly, no one else is thinking about it or talking about it. It happened a while ago. There’s a whole new fresh scandal now.” He paused. “Did you hear about Debra MacDougal?”

“Whatever happened to her? I was just thinking about her.”

“She tried to commit suicide three weeks ago. She caught her husband and her twin brother in bed together.”

“She got married? Who did she marry? Or do I mean whom?”

“This guy she met online. They had only been married a year, maybe even less. Her twin brother,” he repeated, looking at me with earnest significance.

“So that’s your new fantasy,” I said. “Her husband and brother in bed together.”

Immediately his seriousness cracked. “You and Marion were starting to pall a bit.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “Is she still speaking to her twin brother?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She overdosed on Dilaudid. She almost died. She just got out of the hospital.”

“Where did she get enough Dilaudid to overdose on?”

“I wondered the same thing.”

“Which hospital?”

“Why does that matter?”

“I’m just trying to show I can think about something besides my own mess of a life.”

“Bellevue,” he said.

“Did she leave her husband?”

“She kicked him out. So now you’re both single. You should give her a call.”

“I am not single,” I said.

He looked at me again with even more earnest significance than before, something I had not imagined to be possible. “Harry, Luz was just here last week, talking to Lisa, and based on what she said, if I were you, I would move on. Accept that your marriage is over.”

“Is Luz …” My mouth was so dry I had to take a sip of wine to ask the question. “Is she with someone else now?”

“A boyfriend? Luz? Right now she hates our entire sex. She’s bitter, Harry. She hasn’t softened or mellowed toward you or Marion at all. Not one molecule. She’s thermonuclearly angry. Lisa is worried about her.”

“I can just imagine the two of them, chewing on Marion together.”

“Apparently it didn’t help matters, according to Lisa,” said James. “She ended up inadvertently fueling Luz’s fire. She said Luz … she’s bent on vengeance, in a ‘hell hath no fury’ kind of way. She’s as obsessed as you are, come to think of it.”

I laughed, sort of.

“I know,” said James. “It’s tough.”

“No, you don’t know,” I said. My mounting envy of James Lee was something I wanted no part of. Since I had walked into his house, I had been doing my best to laugh at it, disavow it, sidestep it, throw it from me like a stifling cloak. “Try to imagine for one minute that you’ve been sent packing. You’re living in a crappy apartment and Lisa’s not speaking to you. In fact, she hates you.”

“I’d be free,” he said instantly, with raw yearning I didn’t buy for a millisecond. “It’s ironic, isn’t it. Your wife made you go, and you want to go back. Mine won’t release her death grip on me; I would love to be thrown out.”

“You could leave her.”

“Lisa? She would slaughter me in the divorce. She fights dirty.”

“So you always say. With some glee, I have to add. I thought she couldn’t afford to throw you out.”

He ignored this last comment. “No glee when I’m the victim of it. She would take me for everything. Keep the house, kids, money, my underwear, although God knows what she’d do with it.”

“But you’d be free. And you could make enough money for her and you both.”

“That’s what I know how to do,” he said with vague assent, seemingly unaware of the fact that he was contradicting what he’d said earlier. He stirred his sauce, which smelled alchemically inspired. “I make it, she appropriates it. Not very catchy, but tragically accurate.”

“I think you like being controlled by her. Some kind of kinky power thing.” A small bleating noise came from my pants pocket. I fished around in there and pulled out the cell phone Karina had given me. “Hello?”

“Dad, where are you?”

“James and Lisa’s,” I said.

“Stay there, it’s just a few blocks.” She hung up.

“Damn,” I said to James. “No fat rabbit in fancy sauce for me. I forgot, I have a meeting about this cult Hector’s in. And Luz is going to be there. No wonder I put it straight out of my mind. Karina will be here in three minutes.”

“You and Luz in the same room,” said James with a big grin. “Wish I could be a fly … anyway, that’s too bad. I have something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You mean there’s another topic in the universe that isn’t my marriage?”

He laughed. “I want to offer you a job.”

“I have a job.”

“Well, I want to offer you a better job.”

“Doing what?”

“Working for me.”

“Doing what?” I repeated with leery caution. James had once bragged to me how cheaply he got his mostly foreign-born labor. I had no desire to become another one of his underpaid Mexicans.

“Accounts Payable, same as you’re doing at the lumberyard, but for more money.” He named a salary that was considerably more than I made at the lumberyard. “That’s enough for you to get out of the Astral and get a real apartment for yourself.”

“I smell a condition,” I said. “Did Luz put you up to this to get rid of me?”