The Astral (2 page)

“George,” I said, “my wife has gone completely batshit. She ripped up my poetry notebooks and threw my computer out the window and kicked me out of our apartment.”

“She said you were writing love poems,” said Karina, “and they weren’t to her.”

“They weren’t written to anyone,” I said. “Not anyone real.”

“She seems to think they were written to Marion. She said it was obvious you’ve been in love with her forever. She said, also, that she knew it already, she’s known it for years; the poems just confirmed it.”

“Those were my private notebooks,” I said. “I’ve been falsely accused by someone who trespassed in my personal property. She spied on me. She came to a false conclusion and will not let me explain.”

“She told me she’s through. She doesn’t want to hear your excuses and lies. I can’t believe she’s doing this to you now, after she threw Hector out.”

“And she destroyed my work,” I said. “Completely wrecked it. It’s poetry, Karina. It’s invented. All the women I was writing to are imaginary. None of them is Marion.”

“I believe you,” said Karina. “But she said she’s worried that when the book is published she’ll be publicly shamed.”

“No one is going to publish them, probably.”

“You don’t know that!” said Karina, always my defender.

“This is all just nuts. Oh damn it all to hell.”

“Don’t cry, Dad. I’m sure she’ll come around, she’s just a little crazy right now.”

“I am not crying,” I said. I cried all the time lately.

“I think you should wait a week or two, let her cool off.”

“I hope she hasn’t said anything to Marion,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“They had a long talk yesterday. She went over to Marion’s. She was there for like an hour and a half. Marion told her there’s nothing going on.”

My heart thudded with hope. “And?”

“Mom didn’t buy a word of it. She told me that Marion’s behavior start to finish was completely disingenuous. Marion denied everything and tried to comfort Mom, which of course only pissed her off more.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “I have to go.” I pulled some bills out of my pocket. I was too flummoxed to see how much it was. Karina covered my hand with her own and handed George a twenty.

“Keep the change,” she said to him.

“Thank you very much,” said George. I put on my wool pea jacket and watch cap.

“You take care, Harry,” George called after my receding back.

Karina walked with me along the dark, windy sidewalk. She is as tiny and sparrow boned as Luz, and I am as spindly, tall, and long legged as Ichabod Crane, so she practically had to hold on to my flapping coattails to keep up, but my girl has always been tenacious, like a burr.

“Go home,” I said. “Work on your article. Don’t waste any more time on your crazy old parents.”

“I am going home,” she panted. “I’m heading for my car. I wish Mom would believe you.”

“Well, she won’t.”

“She must have some reason to think such a thing.”

“Don’t get into the middle of this,” I said.

“You won’t come with me? My place is warm and the room is free.”

We stopped to face each other on the corner of Norman Avenue. I bent down, took Karina’s face in both my hands, and kissed her on her icy little nose. “Good luck with the article,” I said. “Let me know when you can visit Hector with me. Leave a message at my hotel, they might give it to me, you never know.”

“You call me,” she said.

Chapter Two

  I
flapped my way through the windy evening, past deserted industrial streets slanting away to my right, low warehouses with the isle of Manhattan glittering off across the river, a baroque concoction of lights and metal, like an enormous, gaudy brooch. Marion lived in a house on Berry Street on the south side of Williamsburg, a building she had bought back when this neighborhood looked like a Wild West pioneer town of low buildings, big sky, and wide, spookily quiet streets. I often expected to see tumbleweeds blowing along while a stranger in black rode into town on his horse. This was back in the eighties; not so long ago, really. Now it was a tapas place here, vintage boutique there, wine bar here, upscale baby clothing emporium there.

And kids everywhere, stylish, artfully coiffed kids, walking around shooting off at the mouth about God knew what. Kids the same age as my own two, but nothing like them at all except they came conceivably from the same species.

Karina didn’t know a bacon-wrapped date from a pig in a blanket; she knew that some people threw useful things away that other people might want. She also knew how to renovate an old house with revamped, recycled, and free materials, condense her political and social concerns into effective talk-radio sound bites, run a meeting of like-minded eco-conservatives, and fret about others’ emotional well-being, but never her own. From the time she could talk, my daughter had been selfless and earnest, outraged by waste and pollution, hell-bent on doing whatever she could to ease the earth’s burdens.

As for Hector, as far as I could tell, he was aware of little else besides the fact that Jesus Christ was supposed to be coming back at some point. He’d been excited about this since his sudden epiphanic conversion at the tail end of his adolescence. After spending several shy, gawky, antisocial years playing video games, avoiding girls, and trying all the drugs available to the average New York City teenager, he emerged from his room at seventeen, a virginal, naïve, wild-eyed believer. Jesus bloomed in his heart, but not, to Luz’s deep disappointment, with the formal, ritualistic trappings of Catholicism. Hector’s faith was fundamental, elemental, intuitive, and bare-bones. Jesus lived in Hector’s heart, and Hector sought to imitate him, to adhere to what he saw as the primary Christian imperatives: faith, chastity, poverty, obedience, sobriety, and humility. The Messiah was going to return, and Hector wanted his soul to be clean and prepared, wanted his mind to be free of any illusions and thoughts that might prevent his recognition of the savior’s return.

He was now twenty-seven and showing no signs of outgrowing his anticipation. On the contrary, he had found a whole group of people who shared his feelings, who’d invited him to come and live with them on their farm out on Long Island, where they swanned around all day through the sea grass in white robes, looking at their old-fashioned pocket watches and counting down the hours, or so I imagined; I’d never actually been there.

I climbed the steep steps of Marion’s stoop and rang her doorbell, which resounded on the other side of the thick wooden door. I waited with my back to the door, tapping my foot, looking down deserted, seedy South Eighth Street, far-off sky-high windows winking dully from the projects, plastic bags swimming in midair, windblown cans scuttling along the sidewalk. In the air high above me, the iron girders of the Williamsburg Bridge alternately whined and hummed with tires. The long, fast walk had warmed me, but I felt wracked with hunger and emotional panic. I wanted the door to open quickly, and at the same time, I hoped Marion was far away and not home.

The door opened. I turned to face her. Her long silver-black hair was loose instead of pinned up, and she clutched the collar of a dark red bathrobe to her throat. She looked even paler than usual. I was aging right along with her, of course, but I had been frequently startled, since her husband had died, to see how much older she looked.

“Marion!” I said. “Are you sick?”

“Harry,” she said. “I was wondering when you would turn up. Come on in.”

She shut and locked the door behind me and followed me through the entryway, past the staircase, back to the kitchen. I took off my coat and hung it on the shoulders of a chair and seized my cap in both hands and ripped it from my head in a frenzy. “Karina told me Luz was here yesterday,” I said.

She leaned in the doorway, her hand still clutching the bathrobe at her throat, and nodded, looking at me with skepticism, amusement, sympathy, and irritation. Marion has always had a knack for these dramatic, multilayered expressions.

“Oh hell,” I said. “Are you sick?”

“No,” she said, “I just didn’t bother getting dressed today. I decided to stay in bed reading and drinking tea. It’s cold and windy out; I didn’t have to be anywhere.”

Marion Delahunt and I first met in 1975, the good-bad old days. When I first saw her, she was in the corner of an East Village dive bar with a Leica, photographing transvestites and drag queens. I was sitting on a bar stool sipping a draft beer, gawping and wide-eyed and fresh from the Midwest, soaking up the ambience. It was two in the morning. She started photographing me, which thrilled me, because I had aspirations to some sort of stardom in those days, as do most kids who come to New York. I wondered who she was, this dark-haired, tall, confident girl; maybe she was a professional photographer, maybe she had connections. I offered to buy her a drink. She asked for a Bloody Mary, explaining with high-handed, slightly affected nonchalance that it was a breakfast cocktail, and she had just rolled out of bed. I didn’t know enough yet to see through her carefully manufactured persona; it took me a while to catch on to the fact that she was as young and naïve as I was. It turned out that she was not a professional anything, she was an art-school student working on a long-term project, documenting downtown nightlife. “Yeah, me and every other MFA hopeful,” she said. From then on, Marion brought me along on her homework junkets, to loft parties and clubs and other fascinating scenes. We stood together in the glamorous, drugged, dolled-up crowds, thrilled to be part of it all. We were partners, in cahoots, both pretending we already belonged, both dying to make a name for ourselves here. We were never, manifestly and explicitly, lovers. When it was time to call it a night, we always gave each other a chaste but urbane kiss on the cheek and went off in separate directions, me to the East Village where I lived with two other guys, Marion to Chinatown to her dumpy walk-up studio.

I might as well have been gay, or a eunuch, or a woman as far as she was concerned, and as far as I was concerned, we were the best of pals, and I didn’t want to try to mess with that. And, in the long run, Marion wasn’t the person I was looking for; she was too much like me. I didn’t want a twin, a
semblable
, I wanted a muse, a challenge. Marion was a witness at Luz’s and my wedding in 1980, and we were hers and Ike’s three years later. Hector and Karina were Marion and Ike’s godchildren.

Marion and I had known each other for thirty-five years and had never once kissed on the lips, never even come close.

“What a mess,” I said.

“She seemed totally convinced,” said Marion. “Where the hell did she get that idea?”

“Apparently we were seeing more of each other than usual this year.”

“Well, Ike just died,” she said.

“Another reason she’s suspicious,” I said.

“She’s threatened by me now, after all these years? Look at me, I can’t even get out of bed and get dressed, let alone conduct an affair!” She laughed. “Although of course the two are not mutually exclusive.”

“Can I have a drink?”

She handed me the whiskey bottle and a glass. I was evidently the only person who drank Marion’s whiskey, or else the current bottle was always coincidentally at the exact same level as the last time I’d come. She kept a bottle of Bowmore on the counter for me; it was one of my favorites, very good but not overpriced.

“Sit down,” she said. She poured herself a glass of red wine and joined me at the kitchen table. Marion had a crackpot’s kitchen: the walls were jammed with bright, grotesque little paintings, most of them her own, most of them portraits; she was not really a painter, but she liked to do it as a hobby. A red 1950s Chambers gas stove sat between the doorway to the mudroom and the back window, which was steamed up from the huge, hissing beast of a radiator underneath it. The refrigerator was tarted up to look like a cartoon woman’s upper body with a big red mouth, full boobs, a beauty mark, and a curl of auburn hair pasted to her forehead. Marion hated countertop appliances and had almost none; she made coffee in a battered old aluminum drip pot and toast in the broiler. On the black-and-green linoleum floor sprawled a squinting, disreputable tabby cat whose basketball of a stomach was probably bigger than the rest of him put together. He had the personality of a prosperous burgher: suspicious, xenophobic, and expansive when drunk. This was old Blancmange, nicknamed Mange, at least by me.

“I told Luz to see a therapist,” said Marion.

“What did she say?”

“She took it in. I hope she’ll do it. She told me she can’t sleep, she’s having a nervous breakdown, this betrayal is more than she can take, and so on.”

“I haven’t betrayed her.”

“Not with me, you haven’t.” She looked shrewdly at me. “And I haven’t betrayed her at all, ever.”

I glared at the old cat Mange. They were ganging up on me, these harpies. “Marion, this time I’m innocent. That was twelve years ago, and this is now.”

It was true: twelve years before, I had sneaked off a few times to the apartment of an acolyte of mine during the long, glorious, ill-advised, tawdry summer when I taught a poetry workshop at the Right Bank, back when there was a Right Bank, a bohemian-type bar on the river under the Williamsburg Bridge. I turned forty-five that summer, and therefore it was the prime time for such behavior. Samantha Green was a lost, needy, thirty-year-old sylph of a would-be poet. Our several furtive couplings were intensely erotic for me, pornographic and thrilling. I could do things with her that Luz had no interest in. Samantha was eager and willing to let me act out my adolescent sexual daydreams on her. I fucked her from behind at her kitchen sink, in the shower, on the living room couch. As I sneaked out of her building and walked back to the Astral through the hot, familiar streets, I felt guilty, light-headed, and terrific.

Of course Luz found out, because Samantha called her up and told her, out of spite, after I ended it with her. Then there was hell to pay, hell that was in my opinion far, far out of proportion to my crime, but in the interests of preserving my marriage, I took it all. Luz threw things and screeched and excoriated me and interrogated me and demanded the emotional equivalent of a pound of flesh, but it all finally simmered down except for those rare times when Luz’s path crossed Samantha’s somewhere in the neighborhood, and then she’d come home hissing and spitting and I would have to straighten her out and soothe her all over again. “Yes, I love only you. No, Samantha didn’t mean a thing to me. Yes, I swear on everyone’s mother’s dead body, you are my love, my wife, my muse, my heart, the light of my life, my Luz.” Often it would be a day or two before she could see straight again. And I always heaped presents and flowers on her, especially on Valentine’s Day. The things a guilty husband has to do; it was one peccadillo in thirty years, but ever since then, I might as well have slapped a scarlet P on my forehead—for Philanderer, alas, not Pimpernel.

That whole long-ago rotten tamale and its horrible fallout had been bad enough, but this time, it was much, much worse. And I hadn’t even had the intense pleasure of an illicit affair. And I couldn’t soothe her, because I had nothing to apologize for. I knew that Luz simply wanted me to confirm her suspicions so the two of us could engage in another lengthy round of psychodramatic, Catholic wrangling—interrogation, purging, groveling, punishment, more groveling, more punishment, which then would lead, finally, to hard-won atonement, eventual (grudging and provisional) forgiveness—so of course my recent claim of innocence had only maddened her more. My denials got neither of us anywhere. A guilty confession would have saved us, but I could not lie. So out I was thrown on my ass, and all my new work was shredded. I wasn’t sure which was worse, my fate or that of my book. Actually, my book had it worse. I was still here and would probably survive; my book was dead.

“She told me you haven’t been yourself lately,” said Marion, but she said it mildly, as a question.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means she thinks there’s something going on with you, but she doesn’t know what.”

“You live with someone for thirty years, raise kids side by side, sleep on the next pillow every night, break the same bread at the same table. And you find in the end that you don’t know this person really, not at all. Maybe I knew her at the beginning. I don’t know. If so, then at some point in all those years she turned into a stranger. I don’t know when or how, but there it is.”

“Since Ike died,” said Marion, “I’ve been going through his papers. He kept journals, did you know that? I didn’t. I found all of them in a box in the closet under the stairs. It took me weeks to open the first one, but once I did, I couldn’t stop reading.”

I gazed at her with keen interest. Anything to do with the topic of wives reading their husbands’ private papers secretly, without permission, was a matter of grave urgency to me at this moment. “You violated his privacy,” I said. “And he can’t defend himself.”

“The thing is,” she said, rolling her eyes at my dramatic defense of Ike and ignoring it. “The thing is, it’s so odd, I don’t know what he’s even talking about half the time; he hardly refers to me at all, as if I were some sort of pet or object. I suppose I went looking for proof that he had loved me … signs of my own existence. But I found someone else instead. I don’t know what to make of it. And he’s gone now, you’re right. I can’t ask him.” She reached into her bathrobe pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one with a purple lighter, then offered the whole caboodle to me.