The Astral (29 page)

She stood looking up at me, her face wet. “I know you do. But let me say what I have to say first.”

“Okay,” I said. I folded my arms and waited.

“When I went to see Helen, she told me right away that the problem was simple, you didn’t love me anymore, and there was nothing I could do about it but ask for a divorce. I didn’t believe her at first. I wanted to believe you still loved me, and I wanted you to win me back. I wanted you to save our marriage.”

“Could have fooled me,” I said. “It seemed to me it was completely over when you threw me out. You wouldn’t give me a chance to save it.”

Luz made a gesture telling me to shut up, it was her turn. “But you know what? She was right, I finally realized. You didn’t love me anymore. It happened gradually for years. My heart broke over and over and over. I was in love with you to the very end, Harry. You can argue with me all you want, but I know how I felt. You couldn’t save our marriage because you didn’t love me anymore.”

“I couldn’t save our marriage because you refused to speak to me,” I said with weary, mordant amusement. “Seems to me that’s the minimum requirement.”

She wasn’t listening to me. “And I was so heartbroken, you hurt me so badly, I wanted to hurt you back. Helen helped me understand that too. I needed to cause you a fraction of the pain you caused me. It was so hard to get your attention. I had no power. Well, that got your attention.”

I laughed, a bark of angry expostulation. I couldn’t help it. “Yes,” I said. “I think spying on my correspondence and tearing up my book and throwing me out of our house and vilifying me and my best friend to the entire neighborhood with a trumped-up lie got my attention. Scalding my face with acid would have worked, too. Cutting off one of my balls would have been very effective as well. So I hope it made you feel better, Luz, because that would be the one good thing that might have come out of this entire terrible time that you single-handedly caused.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t feel better at all. But I had to hurt you back. It was all I had. You were off with another woman, I was left alone, I wanted to cause you pain. Don’t you see? It was the only thing I could do.”

“Leaving the ludicrous notion of ‘other women’ aside for the moment,” I said, “what you’re saying is, you cooked up this whole destructive psychodrama instead of just telling me how you felt. You wanted to condemn and execute me instead of figuring out what was really going on and trying to fix it. That’s what you’re saying?”

“I tried to figure it out with you for ten years.”

“Where was I when you were doing this supposed figuring out?”

“Standing right there with your arms folded, like that. Waiting for me to be quiet so you could go away again.” Tears ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t sob.

“You are so good at playing the victim,” I said. “You’re a genius at it. You kept me enthralled for years with all your needs and rages and vulnerabilities. You were the most fascinating, beautiful thing I ever met.”

“And then what happened?” she said. “Tell me. I want to know. What changed? How did I lose you?”

“I think we’ll never agree on what happened, and that’s the problem right there,” I said. “We can stand here talking until we’re ninety and gaga, and we won’t agree on what happened for those years we lived here together. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe that’s what happened. We spent thirty years under this roof together, and we have totally different ideas about that entire time we called a marriage.”

I stared at her. My hands were clenched. Neither of us took our eyes off the other’s face while we thought about this.

“Maybe,” she said.

My hands unclenched. “Well, we agree on that,” I said.

“Finally,” she said with a bleak, pale, small smile.

“I really loved you,” I said. “More than I’ve ever loved anyone else.”

“Me, too,” she said.

We were quiet again, looking at each other without expression. Something ballooned between us, a rich, heavy, immense bubble. It grew until it couldn’t sustain its own weight, and then it collapsed into empty air.

“I have to go,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Good-bye, Harry.”

I left her standing there. I walked out of our apartment, closing the door firmly behind me, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk, where the humid, sunny evening air jolted me like a good shot of whiskey, which was exactly what I wanted right then. I stood on the sidewalk getting my bearings, taking stock of my internal state, until I came to a conclusion about where to go next.

Instead of unlocking my bicycle and wheeling it to Marlene’s, I left it where it was and walked up the leafy tunnel of sidewalk along India Street to Manhattan Avenue. I turned left and headed toward the butt end, Newtown Creek, chuckling to myself, light of step, feeling nimble and hearty. I swashbuckled past a woman with a dog, a man with a hat, a kid with a scowl on his red, angry face. I caught sight of my own reflection in the window of the secondhand shop. I looked jaunty, like a free man.

As I passed the flophouse where I’d briefly lived all those months ago, I almost crumpled to my knees as an attack of terrible sadness engulfed and weakened me. Luz was alone back there in the Astral, up in the aerie where we’d lived as young lovers and then as parents and then alone together again, no longer young, or really lovers. She sat now by herself at our old table looking at my empty mug, crying, and it was more than I could bear, it made me feel so desolate I wanted to fall in a heap in front of this mattress-piled storefront window and howl with the unfairness of it.

Crippled by sadness, my shoulders hunched and my neck twisted, I scuttled on to the End of the World. I stood looking out through the chain-link fence at Hunters Point. The church spire glinted in the slanting sunlight, the warehouses were reflective, blinding white rectangles, the surface of Newtown Creek was a writhing skin of warm scum and oil.

On the other side of the fence, near me, on the sloping concrete jetty by the warehouse, two plump, brown, shirtless boys were dangling lines into the creek and peering into the water. A small cooler sat next to them on the concrete slab. Several bodies of indeterminate character writhed in a net sack next to the cooler.

“What are you fishing for?” I asked.

“Crabs,” one of them said.

“You eat those?”

“Yeah,” said the other one with enthusiasm. “They good.”

“What’s in the cooler?”

“Chicken. It’s for bait.”

“Why not just eat the chicken and save the trouble of catching crabs?”

They laughed and didn’t answer.

“You swim in there?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” said the first one. They were obviously brothers, close in age. They looked like good boys, reckless and merry, occasionally pranksters or sneaks, but on the whole, solid citizens in the making.

“Have you grown another head yet?” I asked.

They laughed and kept crab baiting.

“There’s a lot of really nasty chemicals and poisons in there,” I said, but they weren’t listening to me anymore, they’d caught another crab and were busy securing it and stowing it with the others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Christensen is the author of five previous novels, including
In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament
, and
Trouble
.
The Great Man
won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, most recently the
New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House
, and
Elle
.