The Astral (27 page)

“You gorgeous thing,” I said. I cradled her head in one hand and her hip in the other. Her body was more elegant than Luz’s, longer and lankier. Her skin was creamy and fair; Luz’s was olive, pigmented, roughened in places. No sooner had I realized that I was thinking along these lines than I banished all comparisons, all thoughts of my wife. I tried to think about nothing but Diane while I touched her and kissed her and made love to her, but there was a warm, dark, womblike tunnel my mind always got sucked into during sex, and here I was again in its compelling vortex, surrendering myself to its gravity, as always. But after it released me and I emerged out the other end back into light and life, Diane was as affectionate and cuddly with me as if she hadn’t known I was gone. She wrapped her long legs around mine and rested her hand on my stomach and kissed my neck and shoulder and face until I was hard again. We stayed in that bed for a long time, hours, till well after dark. Finally we ran out of steam and slept for a little while, then woke up ravenous. We got out of bed and sat, naked, on the couch together. We drank more wine and ate big platefuls of room-temperature overcooked spaghetti with grated Parmesan and olive oil.

“This is the best meal I’ve ever had,” I said.

“You poor thing,” she said.

We grinned at each other, dazzled and light-headed. She looked wondrous, like a girl in a painting. I felt wondrous and didn’t care how I looked.

“What’s in all those boxes?” I asked.

“My secret papers.”

“Really?”

“Well, lots of tax returns and files and records, but mostly books. I have so many damned books.”

“You should hire someone to build shelves in here. It would look so nice, a wall of books in the sleeping alcove.”

“I know,” she said. She looked at me with no expression. “I should.”

“I could …” I tried to think: did I know how to build bookshelves?

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not, I just met you.” She was still smiling, but something had shifted just now between us; the mood was not as easy as it had been ten seconds ago. “Harry …”

I finished my spaghetti and put my plate on the coffee table. It occurred to me that we were both sitting butt naked on her perfectly clean couch after hours of lovemaking. I shifted a bit, crossed my legs, hoped I wasn’t getting bodily fluids and sweat on the upholstery. I missed the euphoric glow between us, that endorphin high that had just dimmed a bit because of what I’d stupidly said about those damned bookshelves. “What?”

“Just so you know, I have no expectations here. I know you just got out of a marriage. You’re not even divorced yet.”

“I have the papers,” I said. “It’s just a formality at this point. I’m a free and single agent. Really.”

“Okay,” she said, putting both hands up as if she were warding me off. “But nonetheless, I want to make it really clear that I’m not putting any kind of hold on you or anything, I’m not like that.”

“I hesitated just now,” I said, feeling my way into it, “because I wasn’t sure whether or not I knew how to build bookshelves, not because I didn’t want to. Sorry if that was awkward. I would hate to offer and then show up with boards and bungle around all afternoon and end up fucking up your entire wall. But if I knew how, I’d love to do it. It would be satisfying to empty most of those boxes. Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” she said, relaxing again. “Want more wine? I have another bottle in the fridge.”

“I would love some more wine,” I said. “If only because that means I don’t have to leave yet.”

“You’re welcome to stay over!” Something shifted in her face again. “Although again, if you’d rather go home, I understand. Some people prefer to sleep in their own beds.”

Evidently, she thought I was some kind of wild animal reluctant to be trapped, a woodland creature she had to coax into her lair with treats and promises of freedom. I could see how nervous I made her, the possibility of what this might be, the tentative but headlong tumble we had just taken together. She was vulnerable; I understood that. So was I, but of course there was no way she could know that right away. She would learn it soon enough.

“Go home to my monklike single cot at my daughter’s house rather than entangling my limbs all night with a gorgeous woman in her beautiful bed? Do you think I’m insane? Diane, I want to stay here for a solid week, are you kidding?”

She was laughing, not even trying to pretend she wasn’t relieved. “I’ll be right back.”

She went into the kitchen and came back with an opened bottle of cold white wine and poured some into our glasses.

“And now,” I said, “it’s after dinner, so you have to tell me.”

“About what?” she asked over the rim of her wineglass.

“About the fact that marriages only end now if a middle-aged wife falls in love with a twelve-year-old boy.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Women want attention, we want closeness, whether we admit it or not. When our husbands start to ignore us, we find it elsewhere. It used to be with other women who wanted the same thing, and now it’s with cute young lambs coming up all bright eyed and emotionally clued-in because they were raised by mothers who taught them to pay a lot of attention to women. And they’re excited by us because we don’t want babies, we’re usually in no hurry to marry, and we’re self-sufficient and experienced and sexually confident. Am I generalizing ridiculously? At least I’m not asking you if you believe in God.”

“That was a bit sophomoric, wasn’t it.”

“Especially because you don’t.”

We laughed.

“But tell me,” I said, going back to it like a terrier after a scent. “Women leave their husbands, or kick them out, because they feel like we’re ignoring them?”

She looked closely at me for a moment, during which I reflected that maybe this question had revealed more about me and my state of mind vis-à-vis my marriage than was wise, given the fact that Diane and I were now … something to each other.

“Let’s leave it,” I said.

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “The real answer is that I can’t possibly know why every woman leaves her husband, but it’s in my nature to generalize, so I’ll say a qualified yes, barring abuse, addiction, et cetera. Men take up so much room. You’re humble and attentive until we marry you, and after the wedding you gradually realize we’re not leaving. That gives you license to tune us out when we tell you what we want and spread your legs on subway seats and take over the bed snoring and blanket stealing and keep the TV on much too loud and just generally act like we’re there only to be adjuncts to your gloriousness. It’s a real difficulty, when you’re a woman living with a man, to feel like you entirely exist. Even still, now, after all this so-called feminism and equality. Do I sound angry?”

“No,” I said. “For some reason, you don’t.”

“That’s because I’m not angry, I’m amused. At my age, anger is pretty hard to sustain. I love living alone. I’m in no hurry to get married again. The second I do, I’ll be back in the same place as before, whether I marry you, the postman, the boy next door, or Brad Pitt.”

“I heatedly and entirely but respectfully disagree,” I said. “I don’t think I ever ignored my wife. I’m sure I did other terrible things, but not that.”

“Maybe your wife had a different reason, then,” she said. “But if I asked her over a cup of tea, I’m sure she’d tell me some things that would surprise you.”

The thought of Luz and Diane having tea and discussing me pleased me greatly, of course, but I couldn’t admit this, of course. “I’m trembling with fear, imagining the two of you dissecting me over tea,” I said.

“No you’re not,” said Diane, rolling her eyes. “You’re thrilled.”

“And if I married you, if I were lucky enough ever to do such a thing, I would never ignore you. Never. I would worship and treasure you to the end.”

She rolled her eyes again, but this time she was laughing, and I could see that she had melted toward me again. She wanted to be proved wrong, and I wanted to prove her wrong. The problem was that she was very likely right, if only because she was more intelligent than I in these matters. Luckily, we didn’t have to contend with that yet or possibly ever or at any rate for a long time. For now, we could finish our glasses of wine and go back to bed. We made love again, more tenderly than before, with knowing, fond smiles into each other’s eyes. Afterward, I curled my body around Diane’s and held her close while she slept.

Her mattress was firm, the air in the room warm enough not to need a cover but not too warm for comfort, and I couldn’t believe my luck to be lying here naked with such a woman. But I lay awake, thinking. I had to admit to myself, in the dark of night with no one watching, that it made me feel extremely sheepish to be doing this at my age, getting involved with a woman like Diane as if I were the kind of man a woman like Diane would want to get involved with. The fact that she was so wonderful made me feel worse. She had been partially right, in what she’d said about men taking up too much space, but she’d missed the point, the real reason we behaved the way we did toward our wives, toward any woman we were involved with. By middle age, most of us, the smart ones, anyway, had lost faith in our own charms and prospects. We saw ourselves for the hairy-eared, buffoonish, cantankerous things we had become, and we couldn’t muster the self-love necessary to undergird our outward affections. We subsided into snoring, opinionated, passive fortresses encircled by alligator-infested moats. We let our wives slip away because we hated ourselves, not because we didn’t love them. Those young frisky boys in their twenties and early thirties still had the audacity and confidence we older men had lost through simple attrition. Eventually, the world taught us that we weren’t nearly as great as our egos had once caused us to believe. But this knowledge came to us not in the form of self-pity or self-centeredness or self-anything; it was quite the opposite, it was accompanied by a loss of self. When I’d watched Hector walk over the pond, his feet skimming the water’s surface, for the instant before I’d dismissed it as ridiculous trumped-up bunk, it had struck me as a pretty good metaphor for being a certain kind of young man.

Chapter Twenty-two

  R
iding my bike to James’s factory building on Monday morning was pleasurable and entertaining. The route from Crown Heights to Red Hook was short and direct, but it ran through a mishmash of different villages and zones. Karina’s neighborhood, wide avenues lined with brownstones and trees, gave onto a chaotic many-laned thoroughfare of chain stores and zooming traffic I eventually left for a street of cavernous, bullet-riddled industrial buildings that turned just as abruptly into winding, rather sweet lanes of row houses, then just as suddenly I was dodging truck traffic and pedaling under the catastrophically loud BQE on the nondescript boulevard that led into the serene, anarchic maritime backwater known as Red Hook, that flat round curve of land jutting into the water like a polyp on Brooklyn’s side, beautiful and mysterious with its wharfs and old warehouses and detached wooden frame houses and little family-run stores and restaurants. Except for the vast IKEA store and a gigantic supermarket on the waterfront, the place felt untouched, preserved. No subways ran here, and only limited bus service. It felt like the kind of place people didn’t leave or visit, a self-contained little time capsule of waterfront Brooklyn life whose quietude was rare and undisturbed.

As I pedaled along, a realization arrived in the forefront of my mind, thumping all of a piece on its porch like a delivered newspaper: Diane was probably as much of a piece of work as Luz, but of a different variety. She might be just as needy and demanding, but in a softer, quieter way. She might require as much attention as Luz had, and would be just as hurt when I failed to give it. But somehow I sensed that she wouldn’t obsess or accuse. She wouldn’t spy on or persecute me for thought crimes with relentless, cold intent. She might crumple a bit, retreat into a den to lick her wounds and keen to herself, and I would have to go in after her and bring her out; otherwise, she might stay there. I could feel between us already the potential for tangles of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and perceived neglect. I knew myself, knew I had it in me to appear to be a bastard when I was distracted and writing and living in my head. Things wouldn’t change just because I was with a different woman. I wouldn’t become better suddenly; Diane wasn’t necessarily better than Luz. But I preferred her softness and quietness to Luz’s outrage and hardness.

We were all crazy, that was a given. Maybe, though, I could choose someone whose vulnerabilities and reactions I could actually live with, whose brand of craziness jibed with my own. I wouldn’t mind going after Diane when she retreated; I would prefer that to being attacked by Luz. It was worth a shot. Nothing was perfect, but this might be more comfortable somehow than my marriage had been. Maybe I was a better man for Diane than I had been for Luz, maybe I wasn’t an asshole, I just hadn’t been able to act correctly in the face of Luz’s adamantine, irrational, fearsome lack of faith in me.

James’s company was housed in the Beard Street Warehouse, an old, beautiful, restored group of factory buildings on the waterfront. After I was buzzed in, I rode up to the fourth floor in a creaking freight elevator. James was waiting in the elevator bay, looking dapper and freshly shaven and, as always, unnaturally well rested.

“Welcome to Custom Case, Harry,” he said with a half-ironic smile. He gave me the usual warm hug that went on a fraction of a second too long, not homosexually, but socially maladroitly. He led me through a steel door down a creaking, blond-wood hallway to his office, an enormous, high-ceilinged, mostly empty grotto. This was where James spent most of his waking hours, running his small empire, writing songs, surfing the Internet, and doing God knew what else. It was the kind of private, luxurious retreat most men would have given their left nut for. There was a double bass and music stand in a corner next to a huge leather couch, an expensive stereo system with mounted speakers on a high shelf, a swivel chair and stainless-steel desk in the middle of the space with nothing on it but a gigantic flat-screen monitor, and beyond that, a worktable covered in wood and cloth samples and a couple of instrument cases I assumed were prototypes. Huge scrim-covered windows looked straight out into New York Harbor. Off in the distance, through the filmy scrims, the Statue of Liberty held her torch high, looking as militant and masculine and implacable as ever. Across the water were the low, ugly banks of Jersey, softened, Photoshopped by the gauze.

“Cup of coffee?” he asked, going over to a long table that held a mini-fridge, coffeemaker, and microwave. “Milk and sugar, right?”

I drank my coffee sitting in a straight-backed chair James pulled from a hidden corner while he rapidly went through a few e-mails and answered a phone call, something to do with a case for a harpist who needed it by that afternoon. He soothed her and got rid of her without promising anything, then turned to me with a bright grin.

“Glad you’re here,” he said. “It’s good to have a friend around the place.”

“Well, you’re saving my ass,” I said, “so I’m glad it’s good rather than obligatory and awkward.”

He swung his feet up on top of his desk. “How are you, these days?”

“Much better.”

“Have you called Debra MacDougal yet?” he asked with sidelong mischief. “Now that her husband ran off with her brother and she’s available?”

“I haven’t called her, no,” I said. “I think you’re the one who wants to, frankly.”

He laughed but didn’t otherwise respond to this.

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m living with Karina. I accepted Luz’s demand for a divorce. Time to move on, let go, all that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” he said. “I had heard you’d left the Astral and that the divorce was moving forward.”

“From Luz?”

“Not directly. She talks to Lisa, not me.”

“And I talk to you,” I said. “So anything I tell you now will get back to Luz through Lisa, because there is no code of secrecy among spouses.”

We exchanged a long, level look. I could tell he was dying to know whatever it was I didn’t want him to tell Lisa.

“I promise,” James said. “If you specifically ask me not to tell Lisa something, if you tell me it’s being said in strict confidence …”

“I met a woman,” I said. “You might have observed my rosy glow.”

James was genuinely surprised by this, although he made a visible effort to hide it. “Where did you meet her?” he asked, as if he could prove by demonstrating my lack of opportunities to meet women that my doing so was impossible, and therefore could not have happened, or, if it had, he could undo it by Socratic questioning.

“At a freegan meeting at my daughter’s house the night I arrived. We hit it off. I asked her to have dinner, she invited me over, I went, I spent the night.”

His upper face went into paroxysms of attempted comprehension. “You’re … sleeping with her?”

“Slept, singular,” I said. “Once. But I likely will again, I hope, if I’m lucky. I like her. Her name is Diane. She teaches junior-high English. She couldn’t be more different from Luz, which is refreshing for me. She’s got no psychodramatic tendencies or moralistic limitations that I can see. An oasis of calm and gentleness. Sweetness and light, that’s what she gives me.”

“Wow,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows again and blinked a few times rapidly, as if he were trying to massage into his brain the idea that I was actually, really, truly involved with someone besides Luz, sleeping with another woman besides my wife, and that I was now allowed to do so openly, without cheating or sneaking around. I could see how hard it was for him to grasp such a thought, how deeply it threatened the most closely hewed-to strictures and stringently imposed prohibitions of his own life. I waited until he shook his head one more time and said, “That is amazing news, man. Good for you.”

“It is good for me,” I said. “Diane is not someone to treat lightly. She’s a rare person …”

“You’re falling in love with her?” His voice squeaked a little. His brow was still wrinkled up into knots of computations and internal adjustments. My friendship with James had always made me think of Pete Dyer, the best friend I’d had as a kid, a short tough kid whose company I had initially fallen into in third grade by virtue of enforced proximity—he moved in next door, sat next to me in class, and our parents were becoming friends. Pete had been unable to contain his mounting disbelief, when we both turned fourteen, that I was now allowed to date girls and he wasn’t. “That can’t be true,” he’d said when I told him, “that
can’t
be true,” as if by insisting on the fact’s impossibility, over and over, he could undo it, thereby restoring us to parity and shared datelessness. Instead, I squired Annabelle Morrissey to the movies on the following Friday night, and Pete Dyer sat with our third-wheel fallback friend, Moe Harris, a few rows behind Annabelle and me.

As with Pete, I had been thrust into James’s company, and he into mine, since we were part of the same circle of friends, and our wives had become close friends. That we’d genuinely liked each other had been sheer luck, as it had been with Pete Dyer. And now, similarly, I could feel James trying and failing to overcome his preference for my company when I was rejected, cast out, wifeless, and frankly envying him, as I had been the last time I’d seen him. He’d been anticipating, and who could blame him, welcoming me to my new job with coffee and a sympathetic shoulder, offering comfort in the form of both a paycheck and marital advice from the double-barreled security of his incorporated kingdom and his secure married state. Instead, he had just learned that I, as a newly freed agent, was doing exactly the thing he secretly most wished he were allowed to do, and doing it with someone worthy and interesting and sexually available.

“No, no, not falling in love,” I was saying, my tone conciliatory. “I like her, I’m attracted to her, but it’s too soon to think about anything more serious than that. I’m still married, technically. I mean, I still feel married.”

“When does that wear off, I wonder?” he said with genuine curiosity.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’ll always feel married to Luz, somehow. I can’t erase all those years. I feel like I’m going on without her in one way, the most literal way, obviously, but not really. Not internally.”

James looked mellower, more comfortable, now that we were on the subject of my recent troubles. “If Luz asked you to come back, would you?” he asked, leaning forward, his nose twitching as if he were trying to sniff the answer before I gave it. I could see that he was certain the answer was yes, and that extracting this from me would reassuringly vindicate his own circumscribed life.

“I ran into Marion the other day,” I said, to distract him, and also, I had to admit, as a kind of payback for his self-serving question just now. “She has a new boyfriend. I saw them together in the park. It gave me a bit of a shock.”

I sat back and watched his brain shift gears, saw him reluctantly let go of the topic of Luz and me, momentarily hang in conversational limbo while he replayed what I’d just said, and then engage just as avidly, and more intensely, with the question of Marion’s new boyfriend.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because the guy is hardly older than Hector,” I said. “And he looks like an Italian movie star. I have to admit, I was a bit flummoxed at first. I asked her about it. She says she’s happy. I believe her.”

James was gently hyperventilating, staring at me so intently his eyes seemed to bulge. “Well,” he said. “Wow.”

“She looked gorgeous,” I added, cruelly, but also honestly. “Radiant, even.”

“Oh,” he said. “She must be happy, then.”

“She seemed a little defensive about it. But maybe that was just because she could tell I was …”

“Jealous?”

“God, no! I’m not that way about her, James, you know that. I was going to say disapproving. In a brotherly sense. I just felt at first that she should be with someone more … okay, a guy more like us, our age, someone who has more stature. You know. Ike was a solid guy, a grown-up. Whatever their problems were, they were equals. My first thought when I saw her with this guy, Adrian his name is, was that he was too young and too pretty and would take her for a ride. Anyway, after I talked to her, I felt differently about it. She’s happy, and that’s all I care about. And she’s no fool.”

“Maybe she’s filling her loneliness,” said James. He was recovering his equanimity. Analyzing the vulnerabilities, insecurities, and potential pitfalls behind choices he secretly envied made by the people he was close to never failed to perk James up. “She never had kids. Without Ike she’s all alone. This beautiful young guy must fill a big void for her.”

“Like getting a pet?” I said.

James had the good grace to laugh at this.

“She’s really happy,” I said, pressing it home out of loyalty to Marion. I wanted James to know this, wanted him to have to face it. As Marion had pointed out to me the other day, we had both overcome the loss of our spouses. I wanted, I suddenly realized, to make James know that this was possible. But James had no real desire to leave Lisa, so obviously I wasn’t telling him this in order to give him courage and hope. I was forced to admit to myself that by saying all this, I was trying to prove to him that his life wasn’t better than mine or Marion’s just because he had things that she and I lacked. True, she’d never had kids and she’d lost her husband, but now she had Adrian. And true, I’d lost Luz and been cast out of my home, but now I’d found Diane and a home with my daughter. I didn’t want James’s pity.

But as my brain went along this track, it led me to the obvious conclusion that empathetically pitying and fretting about those he secretly envied was James’s way of maintaining control over his own most repressed emotions, his primary recourse against his most self-serving, strongly quelled urges. And why would I want to deprive him of that? I was his friend.

“In the end,” I said, “Marion and I ended up acknowledging how hard it’s been this year. It’s been the most difficult time either of us has ever had. So it’s nice that we’ve both found a bit of comfort, in the aftermath of so much suffering.”