The Astral (5 page)

I sat down again and was silent. Boleslaw fell asleep, snoring with a drunk’s unconcern, habituated as he was to sleeping on hard benches. My face hurt like hell. I separated the pain into two opponents, broken nose vs. split eye, and allowed them to compete for Most Unbearable. First the nose pulled ahead with a slow, sharp throb. Then the eye came up the backstretch. Then they settled into a pulsing gallop together, neck and neck.

About two hours later, the police let me go with a slip of paper stating that, on a date in the not-too-distant future, I was expected to show up in court to plead my case and accept my punishment. For now, I was free. I left Boleslaw sleeping there without saying good-bye. I hoped never to see him again.

Marion had been waiting all this time in the station house, drinking coffee and chatting with the cops and tapping her foot. When she saw me, she leapt up and strode right toward me, shaking her head. She wore a fitted dark red pantsuit, motorcycle boots, and a long black fake-fur coat. A big heavy-looking camera was slung around her neck. Her loose hair glinted. Her face was very pale. She looked shocked to see the condition I was in.

“Marion,” I began.

“I’m taking you to my doctor,” she said, cutting off my thanks. “We’ll go up there right now. This is an emergency; he’ll see you.”

I tried to say something, but my mouth had frozen.

“I’m paying, so shut up.”

“I have insurance,” I said, or thought I said.

“In return, I get to take your picture. Holy shit, Harry, you look like a grenade exploded on your face. Hold still. Right here. It’ll just take two seconds.”

She posed me in front of the admitting desk with cops moving around in the penned-in desk area behind me and snapped me from several angles. I tried to look as gruesome as I could, which wasn’t hard.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The doctor was three blocks away, on Norman. Marion worked some magic, or else they were having a slow morning, and I was ushered in right away. The kindly doctor shot me full of novocaine and stitched up my eye and adjusted my nose and swabbed around my swollen, bloody lip with some sort of numbing, soothing agent.

Afterward, I felt much better but couldn’t talk. Marion helped me walk to her car, loaded me in, and drove me to her own house. She helped me up the steps and deposited me on her couch like the big baby I had become. She covered me with an afghan and brought me a glass of water to wash down my pain pills, then went away and let me sleep until dark.

I woke up so hungry I was nauseated. My eye throbbed gently but on the whole didn’t feel too bad. My nose felt pretty awful, but that was another story. I threw off the afghan and walked stiff legged into Marion’s kitchen. She sat in her red bathrobe with her feet up on the table, reading a book by lamplight, drinking a glass of wine.

“How do you feel?” she asked when she saw me. “I made some soup. It’s on the stove.”

“I can’t ever thank you enough,” I said.

“Your wife called me while you were asleep.”

“Did you tell her what happened?”

“She said in the nastiest imaginable tone, ‘I bet he’s at your house, isn’t he,’ and I’m sure as hell not going to lie to her or anyone about you or anything, so I told her you were here, and why. And then she told me what she thinks of me. Apparently she has hated me or at least been threatened by and jealous of me for a very long time. I should have known, I see now, but somehow I didn’t.”

I helped myself to some chicken noodle soup and sat at the table and looked into my bowl, remembering Luz’s many ongoing leading questions about Marion through the years, questions I had always chosen to ignore, being innocent. “What did she say?”

“That she has been watching us for years. She’s eavesdropped on our phone conversations. She said she did this because she knew all along and wanted evidence. She claims she’s got all the evidence she needs. She said my manner with you is predatory and yours with me is flirtatious. She thinks I am a sleazebag without a conscience. I am also a liar and a narcissist and a mediocre artist. We both are all those things, actually. Good God, Harry, if it weren’t so shocking and insane, I would think it was hilarious. But I’m afraid she’s really crazy. She is obsessed with the idea of us together. Almost like she wants us to be having an affair, and she can’t accept that we’re not no matter what we say. There is absolutely nothing either one of us can say to her.”

I looked up from my soup, which I was now slurping. “I have to try,” I said.

“Please. You still wish you could confess your guilt? You still want to give any weight to these ridiculous accusations?”

“She’s my wife,” I said. “I don’t want my marriage to end like this. I want to make it right. I’m innocent, and she’s wrong. I have to make her see. I can’t just let her think these things. She’s making herself sick. I want to go back to her and put all this behind us.”

“So you’ll go back again, and again, and keep trying to explain,” said Marion. She sounded weary. “And she will bait you and accuse you and seem to believe you and then she’ll go psycho all over again when she realizes she doesn’t have what she wants, which is evidence of our affair, of your guilt, and therefore of her own justification in behaving this outrageously. It’s so clear. It will never happen, Harry. She can’t possibly accept our innocence now. She can never accept it because then she’ll have to admit that she behaved like an out-of-control lunatic. As long as she thinks we’re guilty, she feels justified and sane. She would rather that than to take you back and admit she was wrong and forgive us both for what we didn’t do. Honestly, as your friend, I think you should let her deal with this by herself. Don’t address any of this. Don’t engage with it. You’ll just fan the flames.”

“What did you say to her on the phone just now?”

“I cut her off. I told her I didn’t want to hear it. I wished her well and said that I hoped she’d get some real help. Then I asked her please not to contact me again, ever, in any way, and then I hung up.”

“You hung up on Luz?”

“Yes, I hung up on Luz.”

I got up for another bowl of soup. “Well,” I said.

Luz was not the sort of person people hung up on; most people were intimidated by and respectful of her cold, aloof, self-protective dignity. Of course, all her dignity had exploded. Her armor was shredded, and her weakness was exposed. I knew how terrified this must make her feel. No matter how right Marion was, and I knew she was right, and no matter how furious I was at my wife for treating both me and my old friend this way, I couldn’t shake a certain compassion for what she was experiencing right now, picturing Marion and me all cozy together in Marion’s kitchen, which was in fact the case.

“This soup is good,” I said. “Thank you for taking me in.”

“The couch is yours, and to hell with what Luz or anyone thinks. Of course the news is probably all over the neighborhood by now that you and I are shacked up.”

Marion was, in her way, as proud as Luz. She was trying to pretend for both our sakes that she wasn’t bothered by any of it, but I could tell how upset she was by all of this. She was as deeply angry and horrified as I was.

“Tell who?” I said. “Who is there for Luz to tell? Why would she do that?”

“Because, Harry. Not to be overly dramatic here, but she wants vengeance. No doubt she’s put the news out far and wide that I’ve stolen you away from her, James and Lisa and Phil and Suzie, everyone who knows us.”

I looked at her.

“Well,” she went on firmly, “our real friends are our real friends, and anyone who wants to judge something they know nothing about, and which is none of anyone’s fucking business, can go right to fucking hell.”

“I hope she’s not talking to anyone,” I said.

“Of course she is.”

“Then let’s have a real affair!” I laughed angrily. “Let’s do it, then! Why not? If everyone is going to think we did anyway, why not?”

Marion gave me a look and handed me the whiskey bottle and a glass.

I poured myself some whiskey, took a gulp, set my glass down, and said, “None of it’s funny, I know.”

“No,” said Marion.

“Sorry to joke,” I said.

“Ah come on,” she said, “we need all the humor we can get right now.”

We looked together at the lamp as if some genie might pop out of the lightbulb and return Luz to sanity and composure. None did, so we drank more, and then we went to bed, separately, but united in shared pained outrage.

Chapter Five

  I
lay on Marion’s couch, wide awake. Since I couldn’t bite my right thumb with my lip all split, I worried its cuticle with my left index and middle fingers, scraping the skin until I could peel off a bit, then starting over. It distracted me from my face. My relationship with this thumb was lifelong and complex. Sucking it deep into my mouth and allowing the ridges of my rooftop and the folds of my tongue to create a rhythmic vacuum of adhesive flesh had been my infant solace, probably from the womb, and then, after my mother died, I stopped thumb-sucking cold turkey, even in the privacy of my bed at night, and started chewing it. It stopped being a pacifying tool and turned instead into the victim of my self-mutilating aggression, the catchall scapegoat of my inchoate fears, secret woes, and unspoken furies. I started ripping the skin off around the nail, cuticle and all. Years went by during which I transformed the skin around my thumbnail into a shiny coat of scar tissue. By the time I graduated from college, the nail itself had stopped growing normally; it was ridged and misshapen, lumpy on its nail bed.

After I moved to New York, I tried to leave it alone. But I couldn’t stop. On the subway, alone in a bar waiting for a friend, after a shower in front of my little black-and-white TV set, I ripped the scar tissue off and made more scar tissue. Then, one drunken night in 1979, just after I’d turned twenty-seven, I was in a bar and did something stupid, I can’t remember what, but the result was that I chipped one of my lower front teeth. This had the unexpected side benefit of turning that tooth’s edge into a miniature knife blade that made my thumb-ripping even more efficient, so efficient that, several months later, nipping off what I thought was a hunk of previously undiscovered cuticle from my poor tortured thumb, I dislodged and excised a tiny half-moon of thumbnail, exposing a sliver of naked nail bed underneath the cuticle itself.

Vaguely repentant and scared, like an addict who had finally gone too far, I slapped some antibiotic cream and a Band-Aid on it and went to sleep. In the morning, when I ripped the Band-Aid off to find out what had transpired in the night, I saw that the sliver of naked nail bed had sprouted a pink, spongy, porous, highly sensitive muffin of flesh that puffed above the nail. It was evidently full of nerve endings, because it hurt like hell whenever I bumped it accidentally or even brushed it on a towel, a sweater. It was oozing, wet, weird, a cellular, blood-vessel-filled swollen tissue unlike anything else on my body. I decided not to put another Band-Aid on it; being so spongy and moist, it looked like it wanted air.

In Muscatine, on my childhood friend Gabriel’s horse farm, when a horse’s wound sprouted this kind of puffy, extra-sensitized skin, Gabe’s father called it “proud flesh.” As far as I could recall, the vet threw lime powder on this proud flesh and brushed it hard to remove it. I had no access to lime powder and the idea of putting anything so caustic on it and abrading it with a brush made me scream inwardly with intolerable imagined pain. I waited for it to go away on its own. Instead, it got more infected and oozed more and throbbed with pain so sharp I couldn’t sleep.

In those days, I was working as a teacher of English as a second language to adult immigrants, a job that gave me lots of time off and a good per-hour wage but no health insurance. I shared an apartment with two other guys in the East Village and lived as frugally as I could, and it was still hard to save a dime at the end of every month. I was mad at myself for causing this injury, and mad at my thumb for betraying me, finally, after all these years of our quasi-sexual, quasi-abusive relationship. I felt like a molester who’d finally been ratted on: guilty, embarrassed, perversely furious.

Finally, after about a week of pain no amount of alcohol or aspirins could alleviate, I caved and went to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. It was a Monday afternoon; I’d figured this was the best time of the week to go, because it wouldn’t be crowded then with the bread-and-butter dramatis personae of the ER: overdosing suburban kids who’d been sold stepped-on, shitty drugs, stab victims of hotheaded ghetto family members, and drunks with broken noses and bleeding eyes.

I was right. After a short wait with several calm, ordinary-seeming people who all appeared, as I no doubt did, to have nothing wrong with them whatsoever, a female voice called “Harry Quirk” over a loudspeaker, and I went into the little office and sat down.

“So what brings you here today?” asked the triage nurse, a sweet-faced, lithe Hispanic girl who looked too young to be working anywhere at all, let alone at a real job like this.

I showed her my thumb. “Proud flesh,” I told her.

“Proud what?” She laughed. She had big white front teeth. She was wholesome looking, chipmunky, with dark straight hair and no makeup, a blunt little nose, dark eyes. What kept her face from outright plainness were those eyes: they flashed, cool and intelligent, and their alluring gleam was half hidden by heavy lids, thick short lashes. Her arms in their navy blue short-sleeved uniform shirt were muscled, slender, long, and I could see the shape of her thighs under the navy blue trousers.

“In Iowa, the horse vet called it ‘proud flesh,’ ” I said. “I know it just looks like it’s swollen, but it’s actually a thing, it’s full of nerve endings, and it bleeds easily, and it’s infected.”

She looked from my proud-flesh muffin into my anxious face. She was still laughing. “Proud flesh,” she repeated.

“Yes, so it’s not just a simple thing, it feels like it’s got roots or tentacles or something under the nail bed, it’s really in there, so I don’t want someone just slicing it off. It hurts like a bitch.”

“Harry Quirk,” she said, looking at my chart. “It’s not up to me to diagnose that thing, all I’m doing is sending you to the right place. But I can tell you that ‘proud flesh’ is not what the doctor who sees you is going to call it.” She leaned in a little closer. I could smell the subtle warmth of her skin, her sweet young breath. I hoped I smelled all right, but I doubted it. She took my hand in both of hers and turned my thumb toward the light so she could see it better. No other person had ever looked so closely and intimately at my poor old mistreated thumb. Her clinical, unsurprised, nonjudgmental gaze dissipated some of my self-loathing. “Off the cuff, I’d say granuloma.”

“It looks like proud flesh,” I said. “Doesn’t it? The way it stands up like that, inflamed and aggrieved.”

She laughed at me again. “What do you do, Harry?”

“I’m a poet. To earn money, I teach English as a second language.”

“To immigrants,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“And you write poetry,” she said. She considered me. “I read poetry, but mostly in Spanish. I started doing it to help me with the language. My parents came from Veracruz, in Mexico, but I was born here. I grew up speaking Spanish at home but then I switched to English when I got older. I love Neruda, do you?”

She was flirting with me. I couldn’t believe my luck. “Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t read much Neruda.

“What kind of stuff do you write?”

“Rhyming metered stuff. Old-fashioned. In English.”

“You’re from Iowa? Your parents are farmers?”

“My father owns a restaurant,” I said. “It’s a diner-type place where the farmers go. And my mother was a nurse. Like you.”

She looked at me with her cool silent laugh, and I looked back at her.

There was a long pause.

“Go get your paperwork from the desk,” she said, breaking the spell, I thought on purpose, I hoped because she was as rattled by our chemistry as I was. “Tell them you’re supposed to go to fast track.”

I kept my eyes on her face, waiting to see whether I was right.

She dropped her eyes. Instantly, I was hard.

“When I’m done here,” I said, “I’m going to come back and get you. Let’s go take a walk.”

Her face was businesslike and vulnerable in equal parts, as if she were taking me in, assessing me, understanding all the things she would be sacrificing if she fell in love with me: financial security, cultural similarity, a traditional husband who knew how to fix things and hold his own in the world. What she was offered instead by my unprepossessingly lanky, fresh-faced self, I have never fully understood. All I knew then and know now was that, from the instant I met her, I had to have her: she was silky and cool, dusky and exotic but a true-blue good girl, an industrious little gopher. And she must have sensed, whatever else she felt about me from the outset, that I wanted her and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“I get off at five thirty,” she said.

When she got off work, I met her at the door to the emergency room and we walked briskly together down to Chinatown, to Wo Hop, a humble little place in a basement on Mott Street. We sat at a grease-stained booth by the mirror in the back and shared platters of sautéed Chinese broccoli, pork dumplings, and mu shu pork with extra pancakes. Luz chose these things quickly and snapped the big menu shut without another glance and handed it over to the smiling waiter. I was impressed by her decisiveness and precision with the lengthy, complicated menu. She showed absolutely no interest in what I might have wanted. This should have struck me as ominous, I now suppose, but I was so smitten, I found myself charmed by her frank, untrammeled need for control. This insistence on doing what she wanted would play itself out in ten thousand ways over the next three decades plus. I always capitulated to it. In fact, I craved it.

We navigated our disposable wooden chopsticks and swilled Chinese beers from the bottle. The Tsing Tao was cold and pungent; the food was hot and salty. Soon the back of my neck was burning and my scalp prickled from an MSG overdose. I was pleasantly buzzed, and my gums were nicely stimulated by the soft wood of the chopsticks. I felt easy and relaxed and excited with this bossy, focused, hard-assed girl.

“Thanks for ordering,” I said.

“Most guys get annoyed when I do that,” she said. “It’s just that I have to have what I have to have.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like it when you say what you want. It’s soothing.”

She gave me a skeptical look.

“My mother was the same way,” I said by way of convincing her that I meant it. “She was the boss, she ran the house. It was me, my father, and her, and from the minute we woke up, she told us what to do. She picked out my clothes for me every morning, I ate what she put in front of me. We gave her no trouble, and the house ran like a navy ship. She was the admiral, my father was the cabin boy, and I was the ship’s monkey; that was basically the hierarchy. She dragged us to Mass, and then she made us wait in the car while she visited her aunt after church because her aunt didn’t like men, and we were compliant and meek about this, as we were about everything. Sometimes we’d sit in that car for an hour or more in the dead of winter. We kept the heat on and played Twenty Questions. Finally, my mother would come running back to the car through the cold blue air, her coat around her, to land in the passenger’s seat, breathless and half laughing. ‘I thought I’d never get out of there!’ she would say to us.” I imitated my mother’s high, fluted voice. “ ‘Sorry, boys, but you know Aunt Mathilda, you two are such gangsters, and she’s so
refained.
’ We always laughed, and we were always so happy to see her again. Dad was all right, a sweet man, really, and he adored her. My mother died when I was eleven, killed by a drunk driver when she was coming home from the market with our week’s groceries. After that, we totally fell apart …”

Luz looked keenly at me. “My father left when I was eleven,” she said. “That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? Then it was me, my mother, and my sisters. All girls. We didn’t fall apart, though, we were relieved, because he was a mean drunk. It was a lot calmer after he left. But we all loved him so much. When he wasn’t drunk, he was the most amazing man in the world. He met my mother when they were both only fifteen, in Veracruz, and after they got married, when they were twenty, they came to New York together and managed to make their lives here. But then he started drinking, and when he drank, he’d hit my mother and yell at us and pass out for twelve hours and wake up like a half-drowned dog, all apologetic and crying. He was so pathetic. Finally, after no more than five nights like this, my mother threw him out. You don’t mess with her. She was madly in love with him, but she just can’t be treated like that by anyone. It broke her heart though. She has never looked at another man, but she also never spoke to my father again. After he left, he would call us girls up out of the blue and say he was coming to get us to take us to the Jersey Shore or, like, to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes at Christmastime. We’d get dressed up and wait in a row on the couch not saying a word. We’d sit there and sit there. Sometimes I would get so excited I threw up. My mother tried to tell us, but we never listened.”

“Let me guess,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You know how that story always goes. But we fell for it, every time.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He died eight years ago,” she said.

For some wholly irrational, brutally self-serving reason, I was relieved. This meant that I would have no competition for Luz’s love, not in this world, anyway. And Luz and I were even: she had lost her most beloved parent, I had lost mine. We would be free to be alone together, man and wife, without parental rivals. This struck me as a boon.

“I can’t believe you’re glad he’s dead,” she said, her eyes glinting, narrowed.

“What?” I said, shocked. How had she read my mind?

“Admit it.”

“Luz,” I said, “why would I be glad your father is dead? I just met you, I never met him, I lost my own mother—”

“I saw it in your face,” she said. “Don’t argue.”

I stared at her, my chopsticks suspended with a piece of Chinese broccoli dangling from their pincers. She was right, of course, but this was the sort of thing most people would have let go, would have overlooked in the interest of lighthearted flirting, especially on a first date.

“Right,” I said. I ate the piece of broccoli and chewed and swallowed. “You’re insane, you know that?”