The Astral (4 page)

“She said she felt like she was on trial,” I added. “Why did you do that to her?”

“You always got so happy and excited when she called,” she said. “If you and I were talking, and she called, you interrupted me to answer the phone, and your whole expression changed. When you had dinner with her, you came home looking like you were in love and you just got out of bed. And since Ike died, she was predatory. She was enticing you and trying to take you over. Like a lone wolf trying to steal another wolf’s mate. I could see it, Harry. I trusted her and let her into our family. She had no children of her own, and I let her be a godmother to ours, and this is what she did.”

We had been round and round on this pony ride many times already, but once we got on, we couldn’t get off. And, as always at this point in the roundabout, I felt a rising and uneasy sense of guilt: she had forced me, in her accusations, to admit something to myself that I had never before allowed to surface. It was partially true, what she said. I loved being with Marion. She understood me and knew me deeply, she asked me for nothing, and she made me laugh. And of course there had always existed a certain potential well of attraction between us. I had always enjoyed the possibility, had always appreciated that it was there and could exist without any of the mess.

And after Ike’s death, it was true, I had spent more time with Marion. Since Ike died, we had gone out together every week or two to a local pub for hamburgers and drafts, and each time, although I had as a matter of course invited Luz along, she had stayed home, giving no reason except that she was tired. Of course, now I knew she’d felt intense, mounting paranoia about Marion and me. But how would I have known that? She had never said a word to me about it, and all along she was watching us with suspicion, resenting my closeness with Marion, her brain ticking, looking for clues by eavesdropping on our phone calls, reading our letters and e-mails. Of course the specter of my long-ago affair was haunting her. That, I understood.

And maybe Marion and I had become a bit more overtly affectionate. Yes, we had. Maybe Luz was sensing a sudden and real shift in the decades-old balance between Marion and me, an upset that caused our untapped feelings to bubble a little, harmlessly but palpably. I had been feeling lost and alone in recent years, like a failure, a has-been. Marion had just lost her husband. We were pals, comrades, drinking buddies in our hour of mutual need and sadness. But I had not touched her, nor she me, except for the usual hug and kiss hello and good-bye. And that was the only thing that mattered right now. Luz could accuse me of loving Marion, of feeling a certain attraction to her, of occasionally preferring Marion’s company to hers, all of which I could readily admit, but her sole grounds for throwing me out had been that we had slept together. And we had not.

“I have never slept with Marion,” I heard myself saying; it was the next line, right on cue. “Nor have I ever wanted to. I love her. That’s different. I’m not in love with her; she’s my friend. I’m always happy to talk to my friend.”

But Luz had seen the flicker of guilt in my face while I was thinking, had tracked my thoughts and, as always, read into them without any allowance for nuance or degree. An eye-shift of guilt was all the proof she needed.

“You’re lying,” she said. “You two have cooked up some kind of story and expect me to believe it just because you both tell me the same thing. What did you do, rehearse it? Marion is as full of shit as you are. Just tell me the truth, Harry, give me that one sign of respect. I know you’ve slept with her. I know it here.” She punched herself in the stomach. “Just admit it, and we can go from there.”

All the horrible memories of the aftermath of my affair twelve years before resurged and made me want to vomit. It didn’t matter that this time I was innocent, didn’t matter what I had or hadn’t done. It was the same thing all over again. The half of me that was Irish Catholic wanted to confess and be done with it. But I couldn’t lie to Luz. The English Protestant half of me told me I couldn’t.

“Dios mio,”
she said, watching me.

For an instant she let me see how much intolerable pain she was in, and then her face snapped shut again.

Well, she had created it for herself. Maybe she wanted it. What a fierce little wackadoo, this person I was married to.

“Just because your stomach thinks it’s true doesn’t mean it’s true,” I said. “Your stomach doesn’t know everything.”

“Every time you deny it, I get angrier. It makes it worse. First you betray me, then you lie to me. That’s insult added to injury.”

“Has it occurred to you that I’m not lying?”

“Of course you’re lying. You fucked around on me once, and now you’ve done it again.”

“But consider for one minute the possibility that I haven’t. One minute. That’s all I ask.”

Her face was shut and blank. “I know it here,” she said, punching her own stomach again.

I was dizzy with the surreal feeling of existing in an entirely different universe from my wife. “You destroyed a year of my work,” I said. “For no reason. I’m completely innocent.” Suddenly I wanted to punch her in the stomach right where she had punched herself, but harder. Lethally hard.

“You deserved it.” She poked me on the shoulder, her finger like a talon. “I hope you never write another word. I hope you rot in hell on earth.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “You’re pigheaded and wrong and you’re acting like a lunatic.”

She managed to slither around me only because I was reluctant to restrain her forcibly. But she wasn’t getting away that easily. I turned and kept pace with her on the sidewalk, managing to walk beside her even as she did her best to shepherd me into the gutter.

“An entire year of work, gone,” I said. “Gone.”

We walked along angrily together. Our paces had always matched despite the near foot disparity in our heights. We walked half a block in tight silence.

And then I wasn’t angry anymore. Poor Luz, believing I had wronged her so cruelly with our trusted friend.

It was much easier to be angry. The alternative was crushing sadness.

“Luz,” I said to the top of her head, “I love you, I want to come back. If you’ll believe me, I’ll forgive you. Clean slate, start over, everything forgotten. I’ll write another book, it doesn’t matter. This is no good. I miss you every second. I need you, Luz. There just isn’t anyone else. You’re the only woman I want.”

Her head was down, so I couldn’t see her expression. Something about the contained way she was crying, the almost furtive, intense secrecy of it, gave me a small explosion of fear that her mental state was more shaky than I’d suspected. The words
nervous breakdown
and
hormonal changes
surfaced in my brain.

“Is it menopause?” I asked her. I couldn’t help myself. “Is that what this is about?”

She made a livid, startled, choking sound, as well she should have, and darted away from me. I let her go. Our futile ritual conversation was over. I watched her disappear along the sidewalk like a small retreating crow in her long black coat.

When she was out of sight, I threw my coffee cup into someone’s garbage can and trudged down toward the Astral.

I had told her I loved her over and over these past few days, but I didn’t know what this meant anymore. When we were young and new, I loved her with the pure intensity of early romance, and when our babies were little, I loved her with the urgent loss of the new father supplanted by his young. But through the decades, things had gotten dirty between us, corrupted by familiarity, the pain we caused each other on purpose and by accident, our blind spots, all the things we couldn’t say or see. By now, I felt so many complicated, ancient, powerful things for and about Luz, a mishmash of memories and associations and anger and irritation and physical knowledge and attachment and blind habit and nostalgia and dependency and intertwined roots, I wasn’t sure it could all be lumped together as love or any other one word. Love was a word for the young and hopeful. I wanted to get old and die with the woman I’d come through so much with, my fellow grizzled veteran of the same wars. I wanted my memories all in one place until the end. It didn’t matter what either of us had said or done. But maybe that was a kind of love. And maybe it was more than that; maybe Luz and I had achieved love in its highest form between a man and a woman. Not that it did me any good now.

Chapter Four

  M
idway down the block, the Astral Apartments came into view, an enormous, six-story redbrick tenement castle-fortress that spanned a whole block of Franklin between India and Java. The place was compelling to look at from without, blighted from within. Great rock-face brownstone arches curved over the entryways; above them, windows were set into recessed arches that rose to the fifth floor of the facade, and above these were crenellated decorative rooftop embellishments. Three-sided bay windows were festooned ghettolike with webbed metal gates, stubbled with air conditioners, made fancy looking with decorative brickwork and lintels. The building’s huge corners were rounded and towerlike. No opportunity to decorate had been wasted; even the structural steel storefronts on the first floor, housing a café and a Laundromat, were gussied up by their own rivets. The place had been built by Charles Pratt in the late 1880s to house his Astral Oil kerosene factory workers; Astral Oil’s slogan had been “The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil.” To which they might have appended “And the refineries of Astral Oil are primed with cheap labor.” Some claimed that Mae West had been born in this building; I didn’t see why that couldn’t have been so.

As soon as I saw the place, I changed my mind about going home. In order to get into my own apartment, I would have had to bribe the super, since my wife had no doubt changed the locks on me, and I couldn’t afford to bribe anyone. And I had lost interest in sneaking into my longtime home to look into my own refrigerator and rustle up some breakfast and sit in my old chair and take a shower, which had been my original, if vague, intent. Seeing Luz walk away from me in tears like that had filled me with a furious itch to do something worthy of her disapprobation and mistrust. My anger was tempered with the kind of nausea that demanded palliative action. If she was going to vilify me, then I would goddamned well give her a reason to. No reason to be all sad-sack about things. I needed to find a woman, any woman, to justify all of this.

I walked back up to Manhattan Avenue, where all the public clocks were stopped at some arbitrary hour. I stomped along until I came to the doughnut shop and saw their window full of freshly made doughnuts, real doughnuts, and saw the Polish girls behind the counter, handing waxed-paper bags and change to customers.

I went in and took a seat at the counter. “Chocolate cake doughnut and a cruller,” I said to the luscious, sultry lass who approached me inquisitively. “Coffee with milk and sugar.” She brought it all without expression. I ogled her as she refilled the cup of the guy next to me, a beefy Polish gentleman who smelled of last night’s vodka binge and who had a head like a boulder. His eyes were of a blue so pale they had almost no color at all; his hair, so blond it was likewise almost colorless, was buzzed over his scalp. His big round head was set into bricklayer’s shoulders, a torso like the back of an armchair. I knew all this because I turned to look at him to ascertain why he was looking at me. He did not appear to like what he saw. We had a brief silent staredown.

“Beautiful day,” I said, biting into my cruller.

He didn’t answer. I turned my attention back to the girl, who was now slouching by the cash register, looking at nothing. She wore the expression so many of the Polski lasses wore, that contemptuous, flat, blasé look that warned all comers that she had heard it before and hadn’t cared for it much the first twenty-seven times. An old photographer friend of Marion’s and mine had once boasted to me that he frequently hired these doughnut-shop girls to pose for him. He’d always offered to show me the pictures he’d taken, but he never seemed to get around to it. I could only assume he was fibbing wishfully, or else he’d shoved all the photos into a shoebox he kept under his bed and took out to drool over on rainy nights.

And who could blame him? Polish girls managed to ooze and withhold sex simultaneously. They dressed for Mass and grocery shopping alike in slippery little cleavagey minidresses, sheer hose, and stilettos. They smelled of some pheromonal perfume only they seemed to have access to. Their bodies were at once soft and tight, breasty and rumpy but willow waisted and slender armed and long legged, like some idealized doll. They seemed totally removed from the effect they had on men. They didn’t flirt, didn’t acknowledge or encourage our stares. In fact, they seemed to be unaware of us, as if they’d put that dress on by accident, as if they looked and smelled like that through no effort or design of their own. And they wore their disdainful expressions on faces as comically gorgeous as cartoon vixens’, with peachy skin, curved lips, ski-jump noses, and heavy-lidded eyes of a dizzying, mad blue.

The guy next to me was muttering under his breath, something in Polish I didn’t catch but that was not, I was guessing, his mother’s recipe for stuffed cabbage. And he was shifting on his stool in a way that made my hackles rise. If he had taken a dislike to me, he was welcome to it, as long as he kept it to himself.

Feeling a little better than I had fifteen minutes before, cheered by the doughnut girl and sugar and grease and the warmth of this little place and the rumbling, incipient violence to my left, I finished my cruller and began on my chocolate doughnut. I motioned to the girl and then to my coffee cup. Without appearing to exert the slightest effort, she was before me in a flash with the pot, pouring. I looked up at her and smiled.

“Thank you,” I said. “You are incredibly beautiful.”

The man on my left gave a volcanic shudder. The girl looked at him, then went back to the cash register. Then everything happened very fast. The man said something to me in Polish, something brief and savage, a snarl on a hot gust of vodka fumes. I turned to tell him I didn’t speak Polish, but as my neck swiveled, he punched me in the ear. I dropped my doughnut. The girl shrieked and clapped her hands to her cheeks. Her counterpart in the back of the room called to someone in the kitchen. I rubbed my ear, puzzled and slow to understand. My fingers came away without any blood on them, but there was a high ringing sound in there. The Polish drunk, seeing that I needed elucidation, punched me again, this time in the side of the head, missing my ear. My vision went black and then cleared. I stood up and launched myself at him and got his thick bricklayer’s neck in a choke hold and squeezed my thumbs against his Adam’s apple. “Bastard,” I said between clenched teeth. I stared into his ice-hot-blue little eyes. Then I spat at him.

I was a malnourished string bean of a poet eligible for AARP membership. He was a youngish man who looked as if he spent half his time at the OTOM Gym on Calyer Street pumping iron and the other half drinking lethal-grade hooch in McCarren Park on a bench. It was not going to be a fair fight, but it felt good to pretend to myself, as he gathered his forces to kill me, that I was impressing the doughnut girls.

Then he struck. One meaty hand squeezed both of my bony ones, convincing me to release my grip on his windpipe. The other meaty hand punched me full in the face and picked up the metal napkin dispenser and slammed it into my eye. I was pulled off him by someone very firm and purposeful, and then my enemy and I were both in handcuffs being led out of the doughnut shop by two cops who clearly would have preferred to stay there all day. My nose was streaming blood. My eye throbbed. Adrenaline and pride prevented anything from hurting yet, but this was going to be a bitch.

The Polish drunk must have been the doughnut girl’s much-older boyfriend, I surmised, or her uncle or father, or a friend of her uncle or father, or a friend of her boyfriend’s. Whoever he was, he hadn’t liked the way I looked at her and had felt entitled to wipe that look off my face. Well, it was gone.

The 94th Precinct house was just a couple of blocks away on Meserole, but the cops put us into two separate squad cars and drove us there. This turned into a somewhat roundabout, laborious route because all the east-west streets in Greenpoint run one way. I sat in the backseat watching the cop drive. He was a terrible driver, the kind who sent me into a frenzy of corrective urges. He had a jerky accelerator foot and bad steering technique, at once too sudden and too indecisive. I had never had a driver’s license, myself, but I knew bad driving when I saw it.

My attacker and I were led out of the cars and into the building through the paper-strewn foyer into a warren of desks and filing cabinets and made to sit quietly several yards apart while two cops officially charged us with public misconduct and fingerprinted us and did all the bureaucratic hoopla required to make us feel like fifth graders who’d thrown spitballs and set off the fire alarm. When it was all over, I asked what was going to happen next.

“We keep you here for a while. Then maybe we take you to Queens.”

“I want my phone call,” I said.

I was led into the hallway where there was a dinosaur of a pay phone and then the cop put some coins in the slot and handed me the receiver. He was not a bad sort, as they go. I’d seen him around the neighborhood with his partner. He was a tall redheaded Irish-looking lad, rawboned, as they used to say; his partner was a chubby little Latino guy with a mustache. They always looked like a pair of comically mismatched dogs forced to walk along together.

I called Marion, of course.

“Harry,” she said. “Are you all right? You sound terrible. Did you make it home okay last night?”

“I’m in jail,” I said. It was hard to talk with my lip so swollen.

She was quiet just long enough to register her simultaneous amusement and alarm. “You’re what?”

“I’m only in a holding pen for now, at the station at Lorimer and Meserole. But it sounds like they’re going to take me to Queens and throw me into the real clink.”

“What did you do?”

“Got hit in the ear by a meathead and had the bad luck to fight back.”

“Then you’re innocent! Do you have a lawyer?”

“They’ll give me one, I guess.”

“Have they set bail?”

“So far they’ve just read me the Miranda, fingerprinted me, and told me I was not welcome to disturb the peace any further.”

“I think that’s just a misdemeanor,” she said. “Are you sure they’re not going to just book you and release you?”

“They might,” I said. “As crimes go, this was pretty low on the totem pole.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

“No need,” I said. “I can walk from here if they let me go.”

“Please,” she said. “See you soon.”

We hung up.

Then I was thrown into the holding cell with the Polish guy, whose name as it turned out was to my private amusement Boleslaw Grabowski. There we were, alone together at last. Boleslaw stayed put on his bench, slumping a bit. I likewise slumped on my bench and pressed to my raw nose, lip, and eye the wad of Kleenex some nice lady cop had handed me. It was turning a lurid pink from a combination of drool and blood. Boleslaw seemed mildly pained by my continued existence, but on the whole quiescent.

“This is perfect,” I said out loud.

He cleared his throat with a strained, glottal quack, looking down at his shoes, which were as flat and shiny and red-brown as roaches.

“It’s good to have things go from bad to ludicrous,” I said. Violence beat in my veins to the rhythm of the throbbing in my head.

He was watching me now, wary, his eyes shifting from side to side.

“When things go wrong, it’s easy to feel that there’s a conspiracy against you, that some force is causing things to go badly for you through no fault of your own, or maybe through some fault of your own that you can’t recognize. Like a bad dog being punished.”

I spoke in a pleasant, easy voice, but his small eyes were narrowed as if he understood the meaning rather than the tone of what I was saying. I almost expected him to reply in perfect English, but things like that only happened in movies and books.

“You’re probably a Catholic,” I informed him. “And you probably believe, because you’ve been told since you were a wee pierogi by the guys who run the church, that there’s some father figure in the sky who made you punch me. Some dark part of yourself, of course, made you punch me, but you’re a puppet in your own mind. That is how you see yourself: a puppet of fate. Or destiny if you prefer, or whatever the word is in Polish. With your strings being pulled by that god up there.”

I looked at him with all the compassion I could muster, given the fact that my face was hamburger.

“But there’s no dignity in that way of thinking. Character lies in irony. That’s where the real story is. I went in search of a woman. And found the doughnut girl. And allowed myself to dream of what I wanted to do to her. And then wham boom, I got socked in the head and arrested. It would make me laugh if my lip wasn’t fucked up. It makes me laugh anyway.”

I tried and failed to laugh and noted that the effort hurt quite a bit, as did talking, but my teeth were chattering from the delayed shock and pain, so it was either gabble away or go catatonic.

“Maybe this sounds a bit simplistic to you. Maybe you think I’m being too hard on Catholicism and religious faith in general. Well, maybe I am, but I prefer the hard bedrock of ludicrous chance to the suffocating pillow of belief.”

I could tell Boleslaw was silently considering punching me in the head again.

“I have to confess, Boleslaw,” I said, pronouncing his name to rhyme with “coleslaw.” “I believe in rhyme and rhythm. But my adherence to form is loony. I make it much harder for myself than it has to be. I follow arcane rules that went out of business a hundred years ago. No one is making me. There’s no one there. I do it only because it strikes me as beautiful and difficult and interesting. The forms are just there to be used. They’re not God given. People invented them, people follow them. Adhering to the most beautiful poetic forms is as human as getting drunk on plonk on a park bench and pissing yourself. And that’s the ultimate irony, our dual nature.”

I felt a queer onrush of fellowship toward Boleslaw then. I stood up and paced around, shivering.

“So it’s hilarious, the way you hit me in the head. Irony is a gel that colors things a certain way. It doesn’t exist independently of the beholder. Two people can apprehend it together, which is always fun, and which I anticipate will happen when I see my friend Marion soon and tell her what happened.”