The Astral (3 page)

I hesitated; I had quit twenty years before. Then I took one and said, “Oh well, what the hell.” I lit it, inhaled with confidence as I recalled doing in my youth, coughed and choked and hacked, and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “I don’t know what’s happened,” I said. “They must make them stronger than they used to.”

“Well, not exactly,” she said, smiling, smoking.

“What did he write about then, if not you?”

“Some interesting things about politics and music and reactions to movies and plays, but mostly boring things. His aches and pains, especially as he got sicker. Minor irritations, things he saw on his walks. Some observations about people, but not me. Never me. The point is, the man who wrote those journals isn’t Ike, not the Ike I was married to all those years. I don’t know who the hell that guy is.”

“Surely he was allowed to have a private life that didn’t include you,” I said. “Surely he was allowed to write about whatever he wanted.”

“Surely he was,” she said. “Of course he was. But surely I’m allowed to make whatever I will of those writings.”

“But there’s nothing in the marriage vows that precludes recording one’s private thoughts!” I said. “Nothing, as far as I can recall, although I took them so long ago, it’s a blur. But ‘I swear to write only about my all-consuming obsessive love for you’ doesn’t seem to have been one of them.”

Marion laughed and leaned back in her chair with her lanky legs stretched out. Her bare feet were pale and bony and almost translucent. The silver in her hair sparkled metallically in the light of the chandelier behind her in the hallway. “But you don’t know for sure.”

“I’m almost certain.”

“Marriage is so odd,” she said. “You owe each other so much, but nothing at all.”

“It’s like performing in a theater sometimes, you’re playing a role,” I said. “You go through the motions night after night and it all adds up to commitment and longevity and the appearance of intimacy. I feel like I’ve just come offstage.” I thought about Ike’s death for a moment, the suddenness of it, his funeral and memorial, Marion living here without him. “You have, too.”

“And here we are in the dressing room,” said Marion. “All out of costume, just ourselves.”

There was a brief silence. My head buzzed as if there were a gigantic rotating fan somewhere nearby, but I knew there wasn’t, it was coming from inside my own skull. Marion’s face looked ravaged and drawn, lit by the stark whiteness of the back porch light coming in through the window.

“Thank God you’re my friend,” I said.

“Harry!”

I wiped snot and tears away.

She leaned forward and eased my whiskey glass from my grasp, peering at me. “How much have you had to drink? Never mind, I’d better feed you.”

“I could eat a sandwich,” I said.

She leapt up and pulled things from the fridge: I noted with doglike interest a package of ham, a block of cheese, half a baguette, jars of mustard and mayonnaise. She piled it all in front of me, handed me a knife and plate, and sat down again. I mashed a lot of everything into the bread and wolfed it down.

“Where are you living now?”

“Flophouse,” I said, my mouth crammed full.

“You can stay here, you know,” she said, lighting another cigarette.

“That’s one way to drive her around the bend.”

“Well, it’s a bit cramped, with the upstairs rented. But I do have a couch.”

“She would buy a submachine gun and mow us both down.”

“Chips?”

“Please.”

She reached behind her and unearthed a bag of potato chips and handed it over. One thing about Marion, she always had food.

“Your new book,” she said. “She destroyed it?”

“Every leaf and molecule.”

We pondered this.

Marion poured herself more wine, then released my whiskey glass to my own recognizance. I took a slug, or a draught, as the poets used to say, the real ones. “Was your impression that there was no chance in hell of my being let back in?”

She didn’t answer right away.

“That means yes?”

“I was under the impression,” she said carefully, “that what you did or did not do is not the point. Want to know what I really think? Honestly, Harry, there’s not a thing you can say. She’s not rational. This goes beyond that. She wants to think you’re evil and I’m evil. Maybe it’s like a kid hearing a fairy tale, so she can be safe. Or not. Really I have no idea. It shocks me, a little. She’s perfectly intelligent.”

“Intelligence doesn’t preclude madness or irrationality.”

“I was afraid of her when she was here. She sat across from me and watched me and asked leading questions like a trial lawyer.” She mock shivered, laughed, and was serious again. “She seemed icily insane.”

I knit my eyebrows together. “Luz isn’t entirely crazy,” I said. “I did have an affair, once.”

“Twelve years ago!” She laughed.

“Which feels like five minutes.”

“Harry.”

“She knows me.”

“What? Come on.”

“I mean she knows what I’m capable of.” I remembered Luz’s electric, weeping fury as she’d uprooted me from our home, her dark, outraged, heartbroken face. “I might as well be guilty.”

Marion laughed, a short, dry scoff.

“I wish I were guilty,” I said.

There was a long silence. Between us the air vibrated with that sound I’d heard before, the one I had thought came from my skull.

She slashed at the air with her arm. “Oh, to hell with it,” she said. “This is a private drama you two are playing out that no one can talk you out of. There’s nothing I can say to you. You don’t want advice. You’re trapped in this thing with her, and you don’t want to get out.”

“Well, maybe, but only because—”

“Go on.” She flapped her hands at me. “This has nothing to do with me at all. Go on, go off to your flophouse like the criminal you are. Put on your hair shirt and flagellate yourself all night.”

Before I knew it, my coat and cap were on, and I was outside in the cold night, heading up Berry Street with my head down.

Chapter Three

  L
ying awake just after dawn, I heard a grunting, coughing racket in a nearby room, one of my neighbors having some kind of fit. I jumped out of my fly-stained little bed and pulled on my shoes, corduroy trousers, and jacket and clattered downstairs and out the door. I walked with my head down toward Greenpoint Avenue. It was slightly warmer out here than it had been the night before, and the wind had died away to nothing. A bird chirped from God knew what tree. A cat slunk through the gutter past me, intent on breakfast. Bird and cat and I were alone out here, greeting the day together. Just ahead was a bodega with its metal grate up. I went in and got myself a cup of burnt-smelling coffee in a paper cup.

My funds were small and dwindling. Luz was the breadwinner in our family. I was too proud, now that she had falsely accused me, to use any of her hard-earned money and was relying instead on the meager contents of the bank account I’d opened shortly after I had first arrived in New York and augmented with my paltry poetry earnings through the years. My small local original bank had been bought and sold and bought and sold several times over, so now, through no doing of my own, my wee little bit of money was held in the monster fist of one of the conglomerates. I was amazed to have any left at all. I’d recently done a bit of adding and figuring, and I was fairly confident that if I lived frugally and adopted some of Karina’s more practical habits, I might make it till summer. On the other hand, I might have to get a job. I had no idea who would hire me, given my limited skills and experience. I was keeping the idea at bay for now, but occasionally a glimmer struck me—the most obviously expedient of these was bartending at Marlene’s on the nights when George stayed home to watch his programs. I could rustle up a few students for poetry workshop, teach English to immigrants, collect cans from recycling bags on curbs and cash them in at the Associated. I had plans lined up, just in case.

The coffee was so hot it scalded my teeth, but I kept on nipping at it. I had some species of a hangover, an ache in my temples and a roiling in my gut and a terrible feeling that my dearest friend was now angry at me in addition to my dearest wife. I have never been able to tolerate having anyone angry at me unless there was a clear, specific course of action I could take to make everything all right again.

The morning sun lit the aluminum siding on the low frame houses so the street glowed with bilious industrial colors, dried-blood red and pus yellow and abscess green. Overhead was a sky as big and wild as a sky in a spaghetti western. Clouds piled and massed in a streaky, inconstant blue of various depths and intensities. A panel truck careered along the avenue and jounced by me, its bones rattling in the potholes. Then came the B43, empty, lit up inside like a diner in a Hopper painting, lumbering toward the end of its route at Newtown Creek.

When I was a wet-eyed boy starting out in the poetry racket, I pledged my lights to metered, rhymed verse. My models were old-fashioned, and so was I. Through the decades, I kept quiet company with a disparate, brilliant fellowship of my own assemblage: Blake, Crane, Auden, Pound, Yeats, Chesterton, and a few others. As a youth, I plunked out traditional songs while all around me roared honking street jazz. My stiff little formal lyrics gradually attenuated through the decades into the easy human pulse of a beating heart, my doggedly perfect rhymes gave way to a visceral, practiced conversation, and my tight-assed jejune ideas about love and the world melted into raw emotional stuff poured into a mold and held there, barely.

Poets rarely earn a dime to rub against another dime, but I got published in literary journals and magazines. I won little prizes here and there, attained a following, mostly of fellow poets. Then, in 1987, an editor named Glenda Savage at a small new Brooklyn press took me under her wing and published a collection of my work,
The Fourth Bell
, and then she published another, and then another, every three or four years, and I also published individual poems in actual glossy magazines that paid for it. In 1995,
Poets & Writers
ran a pretty little puff piece about me. I was asked to judge contests and teach at workshops and sit on panels with other poets to discuss the terrible state of contemporary poetry. I taught at the New School for a while until they phased me out. I contributed a nice little portion of the family income. Who could ask for anything more?

But then, around the turn of the millennium, it all dried up and blew away. Glenda Savage left Halcyon Press to move to London with her husband and three kids, and with her went my champion and protector. Halcyon stopped publishing me, and I couldn’t find anyone else who was willing to take up the task. In short, I fell out of favor. Who knows why these things happen? It was as if I had died, but I hadn’t died. I was still writing, a ghost ship icebound in a frozen sea. Or at least I had been writing until recently.

I had been working on a book of crown sonnets that had been almost finished when Luz destroyed it: ten corona sonnets, ten crowns on ten beautiful, made-up heads, ten merry-go-rounds of seven sonnets each, each one beginning with the last line of the one before it until the circle closed, the last poem ending with the first line of the first. I was hoping to be able to reconstruct them all by memory. If I had been many years younger and fresher brained, I would have been confident of my ability to do so. Now I wasn’t so sure. Luz seemed to have destroyed my memory along with everything else.

All my life I’d willingly set my poetics into predetermined molds, shaped language according to external dictates. I had surrendered up much of my volition, harnessed my imagination in service to strict poetic rules. Perhaps I needed someone else’s external, imposed will, because internally, I had none. My father shambled around the house after my mother died like a dry drunk with his pants unzipped. My mother was a devout Catholic and registered nurse who raised me, her only child, with loving but distant sternness, absolute religious conviction, and unswerving ideas about my potential genius, and then she died in a car accident when I was eleven and left me to the chaos of my pathetic, lost father’s downfall. I had spent the rest of my childhood reading, daydreaming, and waiting to escape from Iowa and never come back.

…

Of course I’d married someone so much like my mother, a woman I could never fully possess, who believed in my genius and supported but controlled me. And of course I likewise shackled myself to the most ironclad poetic forms. Inside, my viscera were unsupported by spine. In my brain, nuanced flickering dim lights illuminated shades and variegations; there was no certainty in me, no absolutes, no belief in anything but the essential mystery and unknowability of the universe. I needed to be propped up. I needed my muse, my wife, to withhold her deepest self from me, to judge me and find me wanting, so I could excoriate myself and win her and convince us both of my worth by writing these insanely disciplined, convolutedly accomplished poems. This allowed me the freedom, or so I had thought, to invent, and write love sonnets to, imaginary women. The whole system had been carefully calibrated and cantilevered, and self-perpetuating. And I wanted it back.

I discovered as I turned into India Street that I was aiming my steps homeward.

…

I wasn’t surprised to find this. I had evidently decided to overlook something essential about Luz: she was impossible to convince of anything she had decided was untrue. She could not and would not ever admit she was wrong on any point. I knew these things, but my rational self had given up and was going along for the ride, curious to see what would happen.

And as I walked, bits of my own verse came back to me, lines about one imaginary woman’s naked, tender inner arm, another’s pink-red lower lip shining with saliva, the arch of another’s bare foot as fretted and taut as fire-glazed glass, and I wanted to hit myself in the forehead with a baseball bat. Of course, it was possible that I had written these poems and left the notebooks lying on the kitchen table so she’d read them and throw me over the parapets, so that I’d be free to go off in search of the tender, the taut, the arched, the pink-red. Maybe I had wanted her to eject me.

But assuming I hadn’t, then I was a blithering nimrod. Luz has a cold, impeccable exterior inside which beats a soul as fragile and silken and easily crushed as a baby mouse. The contradiction is lethal, maddening, and lovely. Her exterior defends her interior with hawk-talon rabidity. She is quick to judge and pounce, as black and white in her moralistic reasoning as the average eleven-year-old. She knows not nuance, she recognizes neither grays nor subtlety. Her mind is a swift, keen, cold, unbending scalpel that cuts through malignant uncertainty, penetrates rotten inconsistencies, slices through defensive skin to extract what she takes to be absolute truth. When she is wounded, she goes for the kill. She is implacably resolute to the point of insanity: Her pride is paramount, and it will not admit to folly. She twists any idea until it matches her need to be right.

As she ripped my offending poems to shreds she called me a hack. She called me washed-up, overrated, pretentious, and sentimental. She told me she couldn’t believe any other woman would ever want me. It went on. I was old; I was flabby; I was useless and a coward. Her eyes sparked black flames of scorching poison. Even as I tried and failed to plead my own case, to save my own life, I had to admit to myself that she was in some way rather scarily magnificent. She was vengeance incarnate. She was a piece of something eternal and elemental. She would have made a brilliant banana-republic dictator or medieval religious despot.

“You are my love,” I had told her. “These women are nothing but inventions.”

“You liar,” she said, with venom. “You lying coward.”

The ongoing tedium of thirty years’ cohabitation hadn’t dimmed or slaked my feelings for her, only my ability to reassure her of them as often as she needed, or (to be honest) ever, really. She was justified in thinking I was lying, based on the affection I’d shown her in recent years. We had never stopped making love, but we had long ago stopped being romantic, which I know is much worse for women.

Then I stopped on the sidewalk, and my heart almost stopped, too. Coming up India Street toward me through the bright, clear morning air was my wife. She hadn’t seen me yet. She walked with eyes downcast, not quickly but with a clear sense of purpose. She was going toward the bus stop and thus to the subway at Bedford Avenue; her hair was in a neat bun and she wore sneakers, which meant that she carried her nurse shoes in her bag.

The shock of her familiar, beloved self coming toward me rendered me as still and speechless as if I had been electrically shocked. She didn’t notice me until she was several yards away, and there I was, blocking her path. She ground to a slow halt and idled there, waiting for me to let her by, staring at me as if I were a bum. Her eyes glittered.

“Excuse me,” she said when she saw I wasn’t budging.

“Just talk to me for five minutes.”

We did a little sidewalk dance, back and forth.

“I’ll be late for work.”

“You have never been late for work, and you never will be.”

“Let me by.”

“Please listen to me.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

We were speaking softly, normally.

“I’m not a liar. I’m not a cheat. I’m a knucklehead, yes, but I’m not having an affair with Marion or anyone else.”

“Liar,” she said.

“You upset her the other day. Her husband just died. She’s all alone. She needs your friendship now and she needs mine, too.”

“Go and be with her then,” said Luz to my chest as we do-si-doed. “Go and be with your
friend.
”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Yes.”

We came to a stop, finally. I looked down at her. She looked up at me.

“Can I come home?”

“No.”

“Have you heard from Hector?”

She looked at me sharply. “No,” she said. Luz had strong ideas about the ways to worship God. Before Hector had left to join the group, he and Luz had had a terrible fight about what she took to be his rebellious defection from the devout Catholicism she had inculcated in him from birth. She had told him that if he joined, she would cut him off. Apparently, as always, Luz had made good on her threat in the most literal way.

“Karina and I are going to drive out to Long Island and visit him. Will you come with us?”

She wavered; I saw it in her face. She was remembering that the four of us were a solid family, independently of what happened between her and me: she and I had kids together, kids we had loved and raised together, grown kids whose parents we still were.

But the tidal pull of our past wasn’t strong enough. She shook her head. “I’ll never go there,” she said, her lips tight.

“We’ll miss you.”

She stared at me, breathing through her nose. Her nostrils vibrated. “I want a divorce, Harry. I’m going to file.”

When she said this, all my internal organs shrank like salted slugs. “No,” I almost shouted.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I know you do. But you’re wrong.”

She stared hard at a spot just beyond my head. I watched her carefully, knowing that with the slightest sign of softening from her, I had a chance to make her listen to reason. I waited for a small, brief window of neutrality that could either be widened or made to snap shut. Her lips twitched slightly. I pounced.

“I saw Karina last night.”

She squinted at me. “So did I.”

“I know,” I said. “After she saw you, she came to find me at Marlene’s. She told me you were convinced I was having an affair with Marion and that you had talked to her about it, so I went to see Marion to find out what was going on. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. She said you had already made up your mind and wouldn’t listen to a word she said. She was hurt and angry. She has been a good friend to us both through the years, and this is coming out of nowhere, Luz.”

Luz made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat.