The Astral (28 page)

I knew James so well; I could see him inflate and pinken in the warm internal wind of compassion. I’d hit him in the solar plexus with a sweet-spot massage. “I’m happy for you both,” he said, and I could tell that he was even happier that he could say that and mean it without any imminent threat to his sense of well-being. “And you probably haven’t heard, but Luz has found another job, as a private full-time nurse for a rich old man on the Upper East Side. She shares the twenty-four-hour day with two other nurses, in shifts, and he pays them all a fortune. She seems to like it. She told Lisa that after St. Vincent’s, taking care of one old man in a plush apartment is like being at a spa.”

James’s phone rang; he answered it, dealt with whoever it was, and hung up.

“Should I get to work?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “Not yet. More coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. “You make a great cup of coffee, I have to say.”

“All it takes is the best machine and the best fresh-ground coffee and the best water and perfect proportions,” he said, pouring and stirring. “Nothing to it.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking the fresh cup from him. “How’s Lisa these days? I haven’t seen her in months.”

“The same,” he said, beaming with amusement. “In her mind, we’re on the verge of bankruptcy, the kids seem troubled and depressed, she thinks she has melanoma. She’s so charmingly catastrophic during the best of times, I’d worry if she suddenly thought everything was okay. Then I’d know we were in trouble. Speaking of trouble, how is Hector doing in the group?”

“Karina and I were just out there. He’s immersed in this cult, he’s marrying the leader, and they think he’s the Messiah.” I told him about the trials, the aftermath. “Luz is going to have another nervous breakdown when I tell her, but she has to know.”

“Yes,” said James. “Should I have Lisa run interference for you? She could tell Luz you need to talk to her about Hector.”

“I’ll call her myself, thanks,” I said. Then I reconsidered; Lisa would pave the way for me, act as an interstitial spur for Luz, who generally needed goading, arm-twisting even, to do anything she didn’t want to do. “On second thought, maybe it would be better if Lisa said something first.”

“Consider it done,” said James with a lordly, husbandly magnanimity I decided to accept as his fee for services rendered. He leapt up and danced across the blond-wood floor of his domain like a caffeinated Chinese pixie, over to the far corner, where he curled himself around his instrument, a polished antique he’d nicknamed Jezebel, and began plucking with vigor at its two lower strings in that funny, ham-fisted way of upright bass playing. “Are you writing these days?”

“I seem to have quit,” I said to the accompaniment of the bass’s
plunk-plunk-plunk
.

He put the bass aside and leaned one hip on his worktable. “What do you mean, quit?”

“I started a new book this spring,” I said, “but it’s fizzled out.” I paused. A feeling was swelling in me, one I hadn’t acknowledged to myself yet, something that had been lurking in my depths and was just now showing itself to me for the first time. “I’ve become unspeakably, pun intended, bored by the sound and sight of my own poetic voice. I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can. I’ve said everything I have to say. When Luz wrecked my last book, I think she de-balled me.”

“Impossible!” said James. “There’s always more.”

“No,” I said. The dark, creaturelike feeling in me emerged further from the depths and showed me more of itself. As I spoke, I made it manifest, held it up and looked at it. “I’ve lost the egomaniacal steam that powered the whole enterprise. Without that juice, my subjects have dried up and blown away.”

James bunched his lips together and let out a thoughtful puff of air. “It seems to me you should be starting your elegiac phase. What about yearning and loss? Meditations on mortality, the scope of the years, the decay of the body, that sort of thing.”

“I’ve been bushwhacking in that direction for months now.” I laughed.

“I’d love to see what you’re doing,” he said with an endearingly earnest expression. He picked up a piece of what looked like raw silk and ran it through his hands. “Why are you having so much trouble with such a worthy subject?”

“It seems,” I said, “I’ve hit a brick wall head-on and sustained a concussion. Pardon the metaphor. I can’t avoid it. Speaking of metaphor. That’s the crux of it. Nothing has objective value; the only realities I’ve acknowledged are perception and experience, and they’re subjective and shifting and up for grabs. There is no sun, so to speak, there is no ultimate, verifiable, central truth. Therefore, anything can be anything else if you juxtapose them on the page. That’s how my mind works. That’s been my source of power really, but it’s a form of egomania, it’s a kind of swagger that doesn’t age well, it can’t weather the temporal equations of midlife. When I was younger, which is to say until a few months ago, I put all my faith in tropes. I believed only in the magic of verbal transformation. I sidestepped lyricism and went for irony. I thought I was so smart. I thought I was avoiding the sand traps other poets fell into, the loopy flights of faith, the leaps and curlicues of religion, the whole goddamned God thing. I thought I was better than they were. I wrote in formal verse, I hewed to the traditional structures, but I did not accept the common notion that poetry has to involve transcendence. I avoided transcendence. I deliberately denied its possibility. I kept my work in the world, bound up in what can be seen and felt. But now …”

James was nodding with slow head bobs of encouragement at this outrush, but whether or not he had a clue what I was talking about, I couldn’t tell. No one loved empathizing with others’ troubles, artistic and otherwise, more than he did. His emotionally vampiric nature thrived on this sort of bloodletting. I waited for his response; he liked to cogitate at length during shared moments of silence in the course of conversations. He fondled the piece of silk, put it down, picked up a small square of laminate and ran his fingertip over its gloss until he had clouded it with skin oils.

“Why not use that as your subject?” he said after a lot of consternated eyebrow twitching. “Write about this need for some sort of faith in order to keep on writing. The search for transcendence after a deliberately faithless life. This could be an epic poem. A masterwork.”

I laughed; he did not.

“I’m quite serious,” he said. “I think you’re bored with your own cleverness. You need something else to get caught up in. A challenge. And this is nothing if not a challenge for someone like you—to admit that your own experience is limited and your perceptions are circumscribed and there are wild mysteries out there that only honesty, curiosity, and humility can penetrate. I would be excited to read poetry like that by Harry Quirk. A lot of people would.”

“I’d better get to work now,” I said, setting my empty coffee cup on the edge of his desk. “Accounts Payable is where I belong these days.”

“Accounts Payable,” said James, his shining black hair catching the gleam of the floor. “Accounts Payable. There’s your next book’s title …”

“Thank you, James,” I said as I followed him out of his palatial office, down the hall to a much smaller, windowless office with three desks in it. “I’ll think about that.”

“Welcome to your new office,” he said. “I’ll send Maureen over to show you what’s what. And let’s have lunch later. I want to talk more about this. Come back at twelve thirty, we’ll go out.”

“All right,” I said, and then he was gone. I located the desk that didn’t seem to be inhabited, the one with no personal effects on it, and sat down and awaited the arrival of Maureen, whoever she was.

Chapter Twenty-three

  I
t felt strange to let myself into the Astral again with my old key, strange to climb the old stairs and knock on my own apartment door, and stranger still to be let into my old home by my hard-faced, silent wife without a kiss or any warmth whatsoever.

She led me into the kitchen. I sat down at our old chrome-and-Formica table, in the same chair I’d sat in for decades. I rested my left fingertips on the familiarly comforting, rusty patch on the chair’s underside.

Luz had agreed to see me only because Lisa had told her I had urgent news about our son that I had to tell her in person, and she had refused to meet somewhere neutral. We had both just put in long days at work, and I could see how tired she was. She looked older, paler, smaller somehow than she had the last time I’d seen her. That she had found a good new job was a source of no small relief for me; that I had a job at all was, I could only surmise but strongly suspected, of similar relief to her.

Luz put the kettle on without asking what I wanted to drink. Of course, she thought she knew that I wanted coffee, even though, given the choice, I would have asked for tea. Karina had been giving me a cup of strong black tea with honey and lemon when I came home from work, and I’d started to look forward to it with Pavlovian anticipation as I biked back to Crown Heights from Red Hook. Tea, at least the way my daughter made it, tasted so much better than coffee, I was considering switching in the mornings, too. I watched Luz measure scoops of coffee into a filter and didn’t say a word about this or anything else.

I had come armored with the allure of my new life, my recent resolutions and revelations, last week’s and last night’s conversation and exciting sex with Diane, and, of course, the signed divorce papers in my pocket. I couldn’t shake the persistent, extreme unreality of the juxtaposition of my present circumstances with being back here. The silence between us felt consensually prolonged, genuinely fraught, and equally painful to us both. While the water in the kettle heated, Luz stood against the counter with her arms folded, not looking at me. I could tell that she was making this coffee for me not out of generosity or kindness, but because she wanted something to do. Evening sunlight came through the window in an oblong splotch of brightness that lay flat against the butter-yellow wall and the laminated cabinet doors.

Finally, she set a cup of coffee in front of me, sugared and creamed exactly to my ancient liking. She sat down across from me and finally looked directly at me with her hands around her own mug of coffee. Our gaze held.

“So tell me,” she said. Her voice was as cool and flat as her face. Between us, the tabletop gleamed with decades of wiping.

“First,” I said, taking the papers from my pocket and unfolding them and smoothing them. “I signed these. Here. They’re all yours.” I slid them across the table toward her. They came to rest at her cup, right side up so she could see for herself. But she didn’t even glance at them. She was clearly waiting for me to say what I’d come to say, drink my coffee, and then leave this place, probably forever.

Although I had expected nothing more or less than what I was getting from her, this enraged me. After all these years together, she couldn’t even bother to look at the papers I’d signed or acknowledge the fact that we were now as good as divorced. Of course she had walled herself behind a thick pane of glass to obscure her emotions and refract the sight of me into something tolerably negligible, but it pissed me off anyway.

“Hector is marrying his cult leader,” I said, spitting the words like hard little pebbles at the glass. “They’ve decided he’s the second coming of Christ. We have no hope whatsoever of getting him out of there, because he’s in charge, he’s not a victim—”

“I know,” said Luz. “He told me.”

“When?”

“He called last week. We talked for a long time.”

“And you didn’t go right out there to try to rescue him?”

“What’s the point?” she said. She looked exhausted and pinched, but much too remote and removed for compassion. “You just said it yourself. He’s not leaving. He’s getting married. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Then what the hell am I doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You agreed to talk to me because Lisa told you I had something to say about Hector.”

“How was I supposed to know it was what I already knew? I haven’t slept much since I talked to Hector, but really, I don’t know what I can say to you about it.”

I knew exactly what she meant: we weren’t in this together, so she would suffer through the loss of Hector alone, without me, and I would have to do the same.

My rage doubled in size. To hell with that. “Karina and I just went out there, and I have to say, it’s not a bad place, all in all. But we saw those so-called Messiah tests. We saw him walk on water and turn water into wine and heal a girl with lupus.”

I waited. She said nothing, but I had her attention.

“That is what our son is doing with his life. And this Christa person is sleazy and corrupt. I was thinking about how you would have stormed in there and gone all Catholic on him.”

“I don’t ‘go all Catholic,’ Harry.” The side of her mouth twitched in a half smile.

“Yes, you certainly do.”

There was an uncomfortable moment of almost-warmth between us, which Luz deftly sandbagged by sighing and saying with that same cold, sour detachment, “Well, anyway, on the phone I couldn’t say much. I just listened. He could tell I was upset. I asked if I can go to his wedding, and he said outsiders aren’t invited, it’s a private ceremony. Outsiders. That’s who I am now. You can imagine how that feels.”

I finished my coffee and set the cup on the table in exactly the same spot I had always set my empty coffee cup: near the middle of the table, situated to cover a small, comma-shaped burn mark in the Formica. I had done it unthinkingly, like a dog who pees in the same spot every day.

“And lupus?” Luz said.

Her voice had always had a nasal edge, a mosquito-like, breathy whine I’d once found poignant and sometimes sexy and often hilarious, when she was meanly making fun of someone or laughing at something. But now it was provoking in me an itchy, restless need to stand up and pace around. I pushed my chair back and went to the sink and got a glass of water and stood with my back to the counter, turning the glass in my hands so it sweated into my palms.

“It’s an autoimmune disorder,” she was saying. “It’s incurable and progressive. Her symptoms won’t go away, and then what?”

“And then they’ll throw her out for her lack of faith,” I said, “and she’ll have to go home and live with her parents, and Hector will be untouched.”

“Hector’s the only one I’m concerned about here.”

“Of course,” I said; her maddening, willful myopia would never go away. “But everyone there is someone’s kid, and Hector is running the show, so your concern can take a little breather for a while. He’s got a new persona, I think he got it from you. Can that be considered a calling? Cult leader? That’s his career. That’s his dream job. You should be very proud of your son.”

“It’s not funny,” she said with icy calm.

“I’m not laughing,” I said.

“You think this is
my
fault?”

“Is that what I said?”

“It’s obviously what you think.”

I took a gulp from my glass of water. It tasted as if it had someone else’s sweat and blood in it, like some intimate, disgusting thing. I turned and spat into the sink and poured out the rest of the glass. “Has the water here always tasted this foul?”

“The water is fine,” she said. She sat very still, her back straight. She was sitting in the chair that had always been Hector’s, the one with its back against the wall, facing into the room. “It’s always been fine.”

“Then the problem must be me,” I said with a sharp edge I was unable to mitigate into humor.

Luz let this one go, and I suddenly ran out of fuel to feed the flames. We were vacillating between being too tired to let our anger at each other get out of control and being too angry to let our tiredness stop us. Ten years ago, we might have been trying to strangle each other at this juncture. Thank God for advancing age; it was good for keeping some measure of civil peace, at least.

“I heard you slept with someone,” said Luz. The mosquito whine in her voice was intensified by the judgmental, belittling tone I knew well.

So she hadn’t been too tired to fight, she’d been conserving her venom like a coiled snake, and now she was striking.

“But James said—”

She gleamed with cold triumph. “Of course he told Lisa. What did you expect? Everyone knows, Harry, they’re all talking, and it doesn’t sound good. It’s vulgar and insulting to me.”

“It has nothing whatsoever to do with you,” I said in as hard a voice as I was capable of mustering. “I slept with someone, and I’m going to sleep with her again. In case you forgot, you threw me out and told me it was over. And we’re getting divorced. What do you care what I do now?”

We stared at each other.

“And by the way,” I went on, “it wasn’t Marion. Not ever. Not even close. Not that you give a shit about that or anything anymore, and not that I owe you one fucking word of explanation ever again. I’ve got to go.”

I put my glass in the sink and headed for the door, dying to get down the stairs and outside, where I could vent my rage by stomping to Marlene’s for a drink.

“Harry,” she said to my retreating back. “What made you change your mind?”

I halted with irascible reluctance and looked back over my shoulder at her. “About what?”

“The divorce.”

I turned in the doorway, my hands balled up. “I realized that I didn’t want to come back.”

“Yeah, I got that. But what made you realize that?”

“I finally got it through my head that you’re a controlling, closed-off, lethally angry bitch, and nothing I do is ever going to please you. Then I had an image of coming back to you, after I realized that about you, and I felt like I was going to choke, like I was going back into a cage. I decided I would never do that.” I grimaced at her. “Answer your question?”

“No,” she said. “Keep going. I want to hear this.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said.

“Is this some manipulative idea of Helen’s?”

“I stopped going to her.”

“You realized she’s a crock of shit?”

“I was finished with therapy.”

I scratched my head. “I have nothing more to say, frankly. I’m through. You’ve caused me enough pain and suffering already.”

“
I’ve
caused you!” She gave a gasping intake of breath that sounded like a half laugh. “I’ve caused
you
!”

“Yes, you caused me,” I said, my words clipped and brisk and matter-of-fact, because once I was finished saying all this, I was gone from here. “I couldn’t win. Either I was too distant and adulterous, or I was always underfoot and in your way. I was your genius in a box, but I wouldn’t stay where you wanted me, wouldn’t act the way you thought I should. You always had the moral upper hand. I was always in the wrong. You’d go off to church and come back feeling straight and narrow and good with God to find me sitting in my chair all loutish and scurrilous and atheistic, and you’d look at me with the most scathing … yes, exactly the way you’re looking at me now. Judgmental and superior and smoldering with anger. Your church can’t help you with that anger. It’s poisoning you, and no amount of genuflecting or holy water will get it out. It poisoned me, for years. No wonder I had to write poems about other women.”

Her toe was tapping against the rung of her chair. Her lips were pressed together so hard they were white. “Keep going,” she said when I stopped.

“Being with Diane is so easy. She likes me, I like her. She talks to me like one person to another person. When is the last time you did that? I can’t remember.”

“What?” she whispered. “You’re crazy. That is not how it was. We loved each other, Harry, it wasn’t all me criticizing you.” She began to weep with a guttural, deep hacking in her chest. “It wasn’t,” she said, her mouth stretching oddly around the words.

“You wanted me to say all this,” I said. “I’m explaining why I signed the papers. You convinced me. It’s over. You win. But so do I, it turns out.”

“We both lose.” She cried for a moment, grimacing with the effort to stop and get her words out. “You gave up, Harry.” She seemed about to add something else, then thought better of it.

“You were about to say, how typical. How like me that is, giving up. But I haven’t given up. I’ve accepted reality. That’s the thing I always do, I don’t give up, I see what’s there and act accordingly. I have no faith in the imperatives of any holy ghosts.”

“Maybe you should try it.”

I was still standing in the kitchen doorway with my hands clenched at my sides. “Maybe I will try it. But not with you!”

She looked at me, her face streaming with tears, her eyes swollen from crying.

“You want to think I’m a passive schlub who’s all washed up and a hack of a writer? Knock yourself out, sit here and think that all fucking night long, for the rest of your fucking life. I don’t care.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said with a short, low moo of tears. “You wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t look at me when I came home. You never saw me. If you had only—”

“Too late,” I said, “too late. You asked me to come over here because Lisa told you about Diane. Right? You already knew about Hector, so that wasn’t it. You heard I’ve got another woman and you summoned me here so you could find out about her firsthand and punish me all over again. Admit it. When I was begging you to let me come back, you wouldn’t talk to me. Now, right, sure, now you’re talking, now you’re crying, now you’re sad.”

She stood and came toward me and put her arms around my neck and stood on tiptoe and put her head in the crook of my shoulder, as she had done thousands of times before, and wept into my shirt. My hands stayed at my sides as I stood there like a civic statue in a courthouse square. I inched my torso away from hers.

“Nope,” I said. I reached up and removed her arms and pushed her away, not too hard. “Stop it, Luz, I have to go.”