The Astral (6 page)

“I am not insane,” she said. Her voice was soft but piercing. “Apologize for that, too.”

“Wow,” I said.

She didn’t move her eyes from mine. Her face was a stubborn, slitty-eyed mask, fixed with a cold smile. She looked like a small olive-skinned raptor with rabbit teeth.

Because she was right, and because I wanted her, in fact I wanted her more than ever, because I needed her, or someone like her, I said, “All right then, if that’s what will make you happy.” I leaned back in the booth and took another swig of beer. “I admit it, and I am sorry.” A tongue of lust licked at my groin. I ate a dumpling.

“Good,” she said, flinty voiced, eyes pinpoints, “but I need to know why you would even think such a thing. It’s disturbing, Harry.”

I laughed. There was nothing else I could do.

Luz paused a moment, surprised, and then laughed too, raucous, unrestrained. Her laughter from then on was the source of her greatest power over me, whether or not she ever knew it.

Or rather, her laughter was the source of one of her greatest powers over me. We went to bed that night, the night we met. Luz brought me with her, without discussion, back to the Astral. We climbed the stairs to her third-floor one-bedroom, laughing and excited. In bed, naked, with me, she was kittenish, sinuous, carnal, darling, ravenous, generous, selfish, laughing, violent, intimate, cooing, and soft. And from that night on, I was in her thrall. No matter what she said or did out of bed, and no matter how needy, bossy, or crazy I knew she was from the outset, I was hers.

Luz agreed to marry me after my first proposal, barely a year later, even though I was a penniless teacher, even though I was not a practicing Catholic. We both knew exactly what we were getting into, what the deal was. Luz would inspire and control me, and, when she had to, support me and our kids. And, although for the most part I would disappoint and infuriate her, would always be wrong, always fall short, I did have one thing to offer, or rather, two: she announced, early on, after reading some of my poems, that I was a literary genius, and that therefore I would write great poetry and give her brilliant children who were half white and had a better chance of acceptance and success than she had had.

She asked the super at the Astral to give us a bigger place on a higher floor. We moved in together just before our City Hall wedding. Our two witnesses were Marion and Luz’s older sister, Carmen. Luz’s mother had wanted her to marry a Mexican, or at least a Catholic. Her sisters warned her that I wasn’t successful or professionally promising enough. Luckily, I didn’t have to deal with any male relatives, and by the time Karina and Hector were born, the Izquierdos seemed to have collectively resigned themselves to my presence in the family, and might have even decided they liked me well enough after all. What they thought of me now that Luz had kicked me out, I could only guess.

Chapter Six

  T
raffic,” said Karina, stopping behind a gas tanker. At the point of tension, I had an unbidden but startlingly beautiful image of us hitting the thing, making it explode into a lethal fire embracing the expressway, the entire wall of stopped cars, with a quick blast that would liquefy us all. “There’s always traffic now. Everywhere. Too many cars and not enough roads.” Karina tapped the steering wheel with her thumbs, exactly the same thing her mother did when she drove.

We had been driving for quite a while, and she had not yet mentioned the mess of pulp that was now my face. She had come to pick me up at Marion’s and had reacted silently but strongly when Marion had come down the steps behind me and leaned in the driver’s side window to say hello to her. Karina had said a cool hello, but other than that had succeeded in ignoring Marion, whom she had known since she was three days old. Then we drove off, leaving Marion behind, and Karina’s cool manner had continued in the car with me. I assumed from this suppressed reaction and subsequent silence that she was keeping her judgment to herself, but was in no way reserving it. Something had changed in her attitude since the other night at Marlene’s. The air in the car was thick with unspoken things. I found myself in the grip of an irrational resentment of Marion. I had been remembering lately certain things she had said about and to Luz through the years, things that had seemed unimportant at the time, but which in retrospect had taken on a condescending tone, as if she had never taken Luz entirely seriously. Although she was quite intelligent, Luz wasn’t artistic or especially well educated, and she was a practicing Catholic. It occurred to me now for the first time that maybe Marion had always looked down on her because of all this; maybe this had had some part in causing this terrible seismic rift in my family.

Just as irrationally, I also found myself annoyed at Karina. My private life was my own damned business, as her own private life was hers. I owed her no explanation whatsoever. And yet there she sat, simmering and brooding.

“Don’t you wonder what happened to my face?” I asked her in a louder voice than necessary.

Karina glanced over at me. “Mom told me. You got in a fight and got thrown in jail.”

“I got attacked out of nowhere by a drunk while minding my own business in the doughnut shop, and the cops let me go.”

“But you have to go to court.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “The case will very likely get thrown out.”

Her face was implacably unsympathetic. She was on her mother’s side, all of a sudden. Of course she was. Her character is made up of some contradictory combination of Luz’s proud, cerebral righteousness and my own well-intentioned foolhardiness. She is eager to be loved by one and all, eager to do the right thing, whatever that may be, just like her father, but will also rapidly and efficiently turn her mother’s swift rapier judgment on anyone who fails to live up to her standards. Clearly, Luz had made her believe all the terrible things about Marion and me that she was also, no doubt, making others believe as well. There was no refuting any unspoken accusation, I knew, but it was typical of my quixotic doggedness that I was determined to try.

“As for Marion and me,” I told my daughter, “we’re not sleeping together.”

The car gave a slight lurch; we leapt forward and sped up as the traffic eased suddenly.

“But you’re staying there,” said Karina. “I offered you the spare room at my place.”

So that’s what this was about.

“I can’t mooch off my daughter,” I said. “I refuse to be a burden on you in any way. An old friend, that’s different. That’s what friends are for.”

“That’s what family is for. And Mom is going even more off her rocker now that you’re living together. It’s just adding fuel to her fire. She’s throwing things. She’s beyond enraged. Last night I was afraid I would have to take her to the emergency room for a sedative or tranquilizer or something, it was that bad. Like a full-blown panic attack. You should find somewhere else to live or I’m afraid she’ll go totally berserk, Dad. Whether or not you guys are having an affair, it doesn’t matter at all.”

“You should not be involved in this,” I said.

“How can I not be?” Karina was suddenly near tears. “Mom calls me and starts ranting and I feel like if I don’t go over right away and keep her company she’ll … I feel like I’m all she has.”

Our car shuddered in the thermonuclear backwash from several eighteen-wheelers in a row exploding by us. Karina kept us on course, looking straight ahead at the expressway, which was so thick with traffic it was hard to believe we were moving at all.

I decided to change the subject. “How are you doing these days?” I said abruptly. “How’s the freegan business going?”

As always, Karina recovered her aplomb quickly. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve been invited to be interviewed for a talk show on WBAI next week. Listen, Dad, I have to say, I think this group of Hector’s sounds weird. I’ve thought so since he joined. I think maybe …” She tapped her thumbs against the wheel.

“You think maybe what?”

“That it’s some kind of cult.”

I snorted. “Everything’s some kind of cult,” I said, “if you scratch it hard enough. Hell, look at Catholicism.”

“I took a class in college on cults and religions, Dad. Cults are distinguishable from religions in very crucial ways, and it’s not hard to tell the difference: in a cult, there’s a hidden doctrine and there’s mind control. Catholicism has no hidden doctrine: what you see up front is what you get. And there’s no mind control, either, despite all the guilt and pressure and catechism. Mind control is a very specific thing.”

“Tell that to the Vatican.”

“I will,” she said, laughing. “I’ll get them on the blower right away.”

“How’s your new girlfriend?” I asked.

“We broke up,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m not,” said Karina.

“Take this exit, the next one coming up,” I said, squinting at the directions, which Karina had printed from the Internet. Hector’s group’s place was near Sag Harbor. Apparently they lived communally in a manor house on a big property that one of the members had inherited. It all sounded very grand to me, hardly in keeping with their purported aims, which were to live humbly and simply, sharing everything as the first-century Christians had, not that this mattered at all to me one way or another. In fact, if anything, it was a good thing for me if these kids lived well. Hector had invited us for dinner and had told Karina, when she’d called to confirm that we were coming, that tonight was the celebration of a couple’s engagement, so we were in for a party, with wine, dancing, music, and a feast. I was looking forward to this feast. Since Luz had booted me, I was constantly hungry and never seemed to be able to feed myself properly. I’d had to tighten my belt a notch already. My trousers were sagging in the butt even more than usual. I looked forward to eating a lot of whatever they were cooking. I hoped they weren’t vegetarians.

The roads were winding and narrow but empty. My chest throbbed; all the blood in my body felt as if it were expanding in my veins and skull, heating up, trying to burst free. As I directed us to the house, clutching the directions as if they held the answer to some or even many of my current problems, I allowed the thought to penetrate me that Luz might not take me back, soon or ever. I needed a job and a place to live. The brown shingled beach houses of the rich and privileged sat humped amid bare woods and dunes like big harmless cartoon bears. I stared at them through choleric eyes, imagining the ills, pains, struggles, and heartaches of the souls who would come to live in them in the warmer months. I would have bet that most of them would be no happier than I was now, and some even less so. Envy of the rich was something I had ever felt a whiff of. If anything, having nothing tangible to struggle against caused them to notice the emptiness of time without purpose. Just like the rest of us, they were bored and tired and full of yearning. Those big houses were illusory. No one could occupy more than three rooms. The rest of their houses mocked them, empty and unused, dark, shadowy places they tracked through on their way to the kitchen, the den, the bedroom.

I began to cheer up a little. It might be nice to get some dull menial job, if I could, and stop wracking my brains to remember all that lost poetry. I could just let all of that go, maybe earn a paycheck at the Hasidic lumberyard carrying plywood and restocking the nail bins, and then put myself to sleep at night with a can of baked beans and a beer or two in front of the television. The lonely middle-aged men who haunted Greenpoint, those hard-faced solitaries drifting along the sidewalks with their hard-luck slouches, had always struck me as the loneliest people on earth, but maybe there was a particular coziness, too, in their lives. Maybe life without Luz wouldn’t be so bad, really, once I got used to it. As George the bartender had put it, no one moved your stuff when you were out.

“Left here,” I said, “at this driveway.”

We drove through an open gate and back along a crackling little lane through a meadow of dry brown grass. Karina parked on the shoulder, and we got out and stepped onto a driveway paved with crushed oyster shells. We walked toward the house, hugging our coats to our bodies in the wind. The sea air was sharply clean and tangy and cold. The house was a gigantic old gingerbready place with a wraparound veranda, a widow’s walk, dormers and bay windows, balconies, and a tower. Beyond it a dark, chilled ocean stretched away under a dense slate sky. I could feel a storm coming.

“I’m nervous,” said Karina.

“Why?”

“Who are these people?”

“Hector’s friends, I guess.”

We climbed the steps of the wide porch. Immediately, the front door opened, and a woman stuck her head out.

“Is Hector here?” asked Karina.

“Welcome!” the woman said. “Please come in!”

She was tall and thin and alight with some sort of joy whose cause was not immediately apparent. She wore a plain long-sleeved navy blue dress with an apron over it, and her hair was in a bun. I wondered whether she was the maid.

“I’m Mantle,” she said. She reached for our coats; we eased out of them and let them go. The house was bright and clean. Fresh roses in vases stood on tables, and there was a smell of food, a babble of voices elsewhere. I started to feel festive.

She stowed our coats in a capacious closet and shut the door, then turned and said, “You must be Hector’s family. We call him Bard, just so you know. I hope that won’t be too confusing for you.”

I laughed. “Because he dropped out of Bard, or because his father is one?”

“Are you going to give us new names, too?” said Karina.

“Only if you want to come and live with us,” she answered. “I’ll tell Bard you’re here.”

Karina cleared her throat. “What was your name, before?”

Mantle stopped midflight with a startled expression. “I was Teresa,” she said after a very brief instant of apparent reckoning, then she flew away.

Karina stared at me. “A cult,” she whispered.

“Dad, Karina,” said Hector, and there he was, decked out in a white shirt and dark blue trousers, both made of some kind of Indian cotton and cut loose and flowing like girls’ clothes. Last time I’d seen him had been eight months before. Back then, he had been a strung-out string bean hopped up on zealous anxiety and sparking like a whipping wire with no grounding, lost and angry, but now he looked plumper and calmer. His black hair was longer, tied against the back of his neck in a little ponytail. His sweet, round Mexican face was sprouting a mangy beard. I hugged him hard. I fought back unexpected tears. We had never been close. I’d always had a certain amount of tension with him, or maybe it was that he had always, since he was about six or seven, pushed me away with self-generated competitiveness, trying to beat me out for things I had absolutely no interest in fighting him for: Luz’s love, supremacy, power. I had endured with sympathy and secret amusement his carefully mounted assaults on my atheism, my very existence as his older simulacrum. My tolerance of his one-sided battle had only infuriated him, I knew. He wanted to weaken me, to put me in some place that would allow him to rest his foot on my neck. I had always understood that the growth of his ego was predicated on his ability to prove my ultimate inferiority to him and my incipient demise. I was aware that he had always loved and hated me equally, with a necessary and probably healthy force, but no matter what, he was my boy, and I was glad to see him.

“You look great,” I said through a choked-up throat.

“Yeah, but you’re fat,” said his younger sister.

Hector laughed. “The food here,” he said, patting his little belly with endearing pride. “You’ll see. What happened to your face, Dad?”

“Long story,” I said. “Nothing serious.”

“How’s Mom?”

“Another long story,” I said. “More serious.”

He seemed too buoyant to be curious. “Wow, it’s so good you’re here. Come and meet everyone.”

He took us into a small hallway, then through open French doors into a huge, formal dining room filled with about forty people. I had a sudden sense of surreal displacement; at first I thought they were all identical clones, then at second glance I realized it was because all of them were white, able-bodied, good-looking, and apparently under thirty-five, and they were all wearing the same outfits, everything crisp white and navy blue cotton: for the women, dresses and aprons, their hair in buns, and for the men, the same loose garb as Hector’s, all of them with ponytails at the napes of their necks and varying successes with facial hair, some with full beards and others, like Hector, with whatever they could muster. It was odd to see such deliberate uniformity. The room was big enough to accommodate five long tables set with white tablecloths and linen napkins, water and wineglasses, white plates and bowls and several layers of cutlery. Each had a vase of flowers in its center and candlesticks with tall white tapers. On a sideboard were bottles of wine, trivets, and bowls. I felt as if I were in some sort of elite postgraduate boarding school. There were no children present, which strongly added to this impression.