The Astral (8 page)

Well. Two years before the supposedly solidly nuclear time I was remembering, I’d had that affair. I was not on the whole as much of a slouch around the house as other husbands I had heard about. I frequently shopped and cooked and cleaned, and I always paid all the bills and took out the trash. However, on more days than I cared to recall, Luz came home from her shift, climbed the stairs to the top floor of the Astral, and unlocked our door bearing the groceries she’d bought with the money she had earned, to find me at our dining room table, surrounded by crumpled-up paper, blinking and muttering, “Oh, is it that time already?” After giving me a surprisingly affectionate kiss, she would carry the groceries to the kitchen, where she cooked supper with Karina, the two of them yakking away, and sometime during the meal Hector would wander in late from wherever the hell he’d been and join us and fill his plate, and no one would have much to say, really, and after the meal I washed the dishes while everyone else dispersed to solitary escapes, the kids to their computers and Luz to the telephone to talk one by one to her mother and sisters, who all lived in Queens and were therefore essentially on another planet. When the kitchen was clean, I crawled into a hot bath with a book to alternately read and stare unseeingly at my bony knees rising from the gently steaming water, rewriting poetry in my head. I crawled into the bed I shared with Luz in our tiny bedroom to find her already asleep. Sometimes she would grunt in her sleep by way of greeting. Sometimes she would awaken enough to spoon herself around me. Once in a great while, we would cleave to each other in sex that was more fondly reminiscent than passionate, but no matter, I always felt, sex was sex. In the morning, she was gone before I awoke, and so were the kids.

It hadn’t been perfect, but we had been a family once, and now, it seemed, we were four separate people flung asunder to our various, unrelated fates. This made me feel lonelier than I had ever been in my life. Maybe Karina was right. Maybe Christa was no good, maybe this whole place, this group, this belief system or whatever it was, was a festering bunch of damaging hooey. If that turned out to be the case, then I had to exert whatever influence I had to try to persuade Hector to leave. I wanted this for the good of my son, of course, as any parent would have.

But secondarily, I wanted it for Luz. She loved Hector more than she loved anyone else on earth, with the kind of passion that set my teeth on edge because it was not aimed at me. I had never objected overtly to this all-encompassing adoration of her firstborn, her boy, but I had felt at times with uneasy premonition that it was out of proportion, that there was something Oedipal and potentially tragic about it. Hector looked a lot like Luz’s dead father, after whom he was named. I had often wondered whether Luz’s grasping, smothering fixation on him had driven Hector away, first into strange, violent medieval fantasies as a boy, then into video games and drugs as an adolescent, and finally to fundamentalist religiosity, the perfect instrument to break his Catholic mother’s heart. Hector had dropped out of Bard College at twenty and gone out West, to Missoula, then Santa Fe, and finally Mexico, where he’d lived in a sort of commune outside of San Cristóbal de las Casas for five years with a little band of Christian hippies. The last time the four of us had been together as a family was last summer, when Hector was home for a few days on his way from Mexico to live in the community in Sag Harbor. He didn’t tell us how or why he’d been invited to live there, only that he was going.

“It sounds like the perfect place for me,” he told Luz, Karina, and me. He had rolled in that afternoon with a smoke-smelling backpack, a fuzzy little beard, and a woven bracelet around his wrist. He’d taken a Greyhound bus all the way from Santa Fe, where he’d spent a week with friends en route from Mexico. We hadn’t seen him in more than a year and a half. We were all sitting around the kitchen table, eating the feast Luz had made in honor of the prodigal son’s return.

“Perfect why?” Luz asked. She had missed Hector desperately the years he’d been gone, mourning him as if he were dead and sobbing to me that she’d lost her baby, her boy. But she wasn’t showing any of this tender maternal longing now. “You’re a Catholic,
mi hijo
. These people don’t sound legitimate to me, this group. They sound like hippies, or worse.”

“What’s worse than hippies, Mom?” Hector asked.

She flashed her eyes at him. “What will you do all day there? What kind of life is that for you?”

“What have I been doing all day for years? I’ll live with people who believe the same things I do, and I’ll work to support myself. You should be glad I went to Mexico. I learned about my heritage, I speak fluent Spanish, I lived among my people. Why aren’t you happy about that either? Would you rather I went off and robbed convenience stores and fathered illegitimate children and took drugs?”

“I’d rather you stayed close,” said Luz. “Then I wouldn’t have to worry about you all the time.”

“The red snapper is great,” said Karina, “and this is crazy. I don’t go to Mass, Mom. You seem fine with that. Why does Hector have to be Catholic when I’m not?”

“Thanks,” said Hector to Karina. “Good point.”

“Hector,” said Luz, “is a Catholic and he has been since he was a little boy. I’m trying to help him remember that. You never had any interest in church, Karina, you’re an atheist like your father. But Hector is like me, he believes in the Eucharist, the Holy Trinity, going to confession. I know him better than he knows himself. It’s my job as his mother to say these things. I can’t let him ruin his life.”

“Please,” said Hector. “Spare me the sanctimonious dogma. I’m an adult, I can make my own decisions about where to live and what to believe.”

“Really,” said Luz, so worked up she was spitting fire. “What exactly do you believe, then?”

“I believe in the word of Jesus Christ. I’m sorry, I don’t have much patience for priests and rosaries and confession. The Vatican is a place of hypocrisy and power mongering. The Catholic Church controls belief and dictates faith. I have a direct relationship with God. I don’t need anyone to watch me when I talk to him. I don’t need to stare at Christ nailed to a cross while I pray.”

Luz put her hand to her breastbone. I could see how much agony she was in. “Harry,” she said to me.

“What does it matter, Luz?” I said, trying to comfort her. “He’s a Christian, at least. You should be glad of that and let him go his own way.”

Luz turned to Hector and said with clinical chill, “If you go and live with those people, I’ll cut you off.”

Hector laughed. “What is this, a vaudeville melodrama?”

“I mean it,” said Luz.

“I have no doubt,” said Hector, “and okay, that’s your choice. If you can’t accept the way I am, then stop speaking to me, go ahead.”

“I can’t accept this,” said Luz. “You’re breaking my heart.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Karina. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m gay, and I don’t believe in God at all, and you see me every week, Mom. I really don’t understand what the big deal is here.”

Luz looked askance at Karina, as if she had nearly forgotten what she was doing there. “You’re a good girl,” she said, waving her away. “You treat me with respect, you’re a loving, sweet person, what you do is your own business. But Hector.” Her face glinted with hardness. Her tears were suppressed with every muscle in her jaw, their pressure mounting in her lymph nodes.

“Right,” said Hector. “You hold me to totally different standards. You’ve made it clear all my life that you wanted me to become a priest. Sorry to disappoint you, but I want to live as an equal in a community of friends, I want to worship as I choose and answer to no one, and someday I want to get married, not to give you a heart attack or anything.”

“I didn’t expect you to be a priest,” said Luz. “I don’t know where you got that. All I ask is that you stay true to the way we do things and respect the church you were raised in.”

“I hate the church I was raised in,” said Hector. “I reject it absolutely. I’ll never go back. You have to stop trying to control me. It might work on Dad, but it doesn’t work on me.”

Luz pointed toward the front door of the apartment. “Go,” she said. “Right now. You can’t sit there and speak to me like that, you can’t treat your mother with such disrespect, and I will never accept this choice of yours.”

Hector left shortly thereafter. I tried to console her, but Luz was pale and resolute. She refused to discuss Hector. She refused to admit that she was devastated.

So now she had banished both husband and son.

Karina was right; marrying that bimbo, which was exactly what Christa was, would be the final twist of the knife. It would cause Luz as much pain as anything I had ever done, or not done.

I could not squelch a foretaste of the heroic sense of accomplishment I would enjoy, the possibility of presenting myself to my estranged wife as the savior of her baby. In this beautiful scenario, she would then have no choice but to take me back, and in the end, that would be good for us all. It was the one thing I could do to make things right again, short of procuring evidence of my nonaffair with Marion, which was of course impossible.

I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly Marion was turning lights on and clattering around in the kitchen.

Chapter Eight

  W
hat a night,” Marion said when I lurched into the kitchen, clumsy with sleep, to join her at the table. “I offended Amy so badly she’ll never speak to me again. How was your night?”

“My son is in a cult,” I said, yawning widely and rubbing my face between my hands.

“Oh great,” she said. “Sounds like we’re even.” She looked even paler than usual, maybe because she was wearing makeup, which didn’t especially become her.

I finished yawning and reached over for the whiskey bottle and glass and poured some for myself while Marion poured herself some wine.

“How did you offend Amy?” I asked. Amy was Marion’s younger sister. She and her husband were both biochemists. They had two overachieving sons, both currently getting PhDs at Harvard. I had met Amy a few times and had found her humorless, sexless, and challengingly, frighteningly bright.

“I told her about this whole thing with Luz,” said Marion. “She told me she’s felt my friendship with you was inappropriate for years but never said anything. She said she didn’t blame Luz a bit for being suspicious and upset, she would be too if Joe had a friend like me. And she was shocked when I told her you were staying here. I mean horrified. She told me I’m risking public shunning. Like this is a Tolstoy novel.” She laughed. “As if I’ll be forced to wear a scarlet A.”

“I think you mean Hawthorne,” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“How did you offend her? She’ll speak to you again. She’s your sister.”

“I told her she’s living in the nineteenth century. She told me to wait and see, and to be very careful. I told her … whatever, she is so fucking annoying when she gets judgmental.”

“So you told her what?”

“That obviously
she’s
the one who’s judging me. As usual. I was furious. Thinking those things about our friendship all those years, that’s bad enough, but never saying anything? And then after my affair with James, she practically tried to commit me to a mental institution. Not literally, but you know. Amy has always made it clear that she thinks I act in sexually inappropriate ways, even while Ike and I were married. That’s probably because Joe is a lump of clay and Amy is about as sexy as a car battery. And she seems to think I’m some kind of famous photographer and I need taking down a peg because I’m full of myself. In fact, I barely eke out a living and I have to hustle for work. But she’s got this idea about me, she’s had it all our lives. Thinking she has to take me down.”

“Was she offended when you called her judgmental?”

“No, she was offended when I called her a sanctimonious, narrow-minded cunt and stomped out of the restaurant.”

I tried not to laugh and on the whole succeeded. “Oh,” I said.

“It’s not funny.”

“No,” I said. “But you were right.”

She snorted. “I love you, Harry. So I went to a bar down the street from the restaurant she’d picked, which of course was vegan and overpriced, and I left her to pay the bill. I sat at the bar and drank two glasses of wine by myself and flirted with the bartender, the two guys at the bar, and the delivery guy who brought me my cheeseburger and fries. One of the men sitting at the bar asked me for my number and asked me out for dinner next week. He was extremely cute, but much too young, of course, and I’m sure he was just being nice.”

“He wasn’t just being nice,” I said. “He’s going to call you.”

“Amy’s not going to speak to me for a very long time.” Marion put her feet, which were encased in thick red socks, on the table. She twisted her hair up with her hands and secured it on top of her head without the benefit of any tool that I could see. I’d always wondered how women did that, but had never asked.

“How do you make your hair stay up like that?”

“I tie it in a knot,” she said, as if that explained anything. “Anyway, what about Hector? Tell me about this horrible cult.”

“It’s not that horrible,” I said. “They’re a bunch of nice white kids living in a beach manor. It’s idyllic, except that they’re under the thumb of a cheesy blonde in her late forties who calls herself Christa and apparently talks a lot about the end times.”

“End times,” said Marion. “That gives me dire thoughts of Kool-Aid.”

“She’s planning to marry Hector, the token brown person, and the virgin, and the mystical savant, so I’m told.”

“Is Hector really still a virgin? At twenty-seven?”

“Well, I don’t have ironclad proof. But he became deadly serious about chastity when he found Jesus. And as far as I could tell, he wasn’t getting any action in high school. He spent almost his entire adolescence in front of the computer.”

“Do you think he’s in any danger in this place?”

“It all looked fine on the surface to me, but Karina was not so sanguine. She thinks he’s been hypnotized.”

“He’s marrying some woman he just met,” said Marion.

“Apparently,” I said. “Well, he’s old enough to do whatever he wants.”

“He has no idea what he’s doing! He’s a baby! He needs guidance!”

I tilted my glass of whiskey and gazed into it and sloshed the whiskey around until it whizzed about the glass in a maelstrom. “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not in the habit of telling my children what to do. That’s Luz’s department, and she’s distracted right now.”

“So you step in,” she said. “I mean it, you can’t let poor Hector get trapped in something he might not be able to get out of easily. You know how passive he is, how sensitive and malleable. He might disappear into this cult or whatever it is and never come back. I’ve heard stories of people lost to cults. It’s tragic.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s not ‘tragic’ in the classical sense, it’s just extremely sad. But I take your point.”

She rolled her eyes at me again. “Harry.”

“Actually, I was thinking before I fell asleep that I have to get him out of there.”

“How would you do that?”

“Hire a thug to kidnap him. Handcuff him in a cheap hotel room by an airport. Disconnect the phone. Torture him until he agrees never to go back.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“In other news,” I said, “apparently Luz is going to see Helen next week.”

“Oh my fucking God,” said Marion. She poured herself more wine and took a deep gulp. “Oh my fucking God,” she said again.

“Exactly,” I said. We stared at each other.

Almost everyone we knew went to Helen Vollmann for therapy, including our friends James and Lisa Lee, who both saw her separately and together, as well as our friends Phil and Suzie Michaels, as well as another friend, Tracy Scudder. But more to the point, Marion’s late husband, Ike, had seen her, and so had Samantha, the aspiring poet I’d had my brief, ill-advised, long-ago affair with. To make the plot even thicker, about three years before Ike died, Marion had had a very brief but apparently intense affair with James Lee, and so it had come to pass that in that affair’s painful, complicated aftermath, Helen had been the individual therapist for three of the four parties involved: Ike as well as both James and Lisa. Marion, the lone holdout, had stayed away because she was as suspicious of Helen as I was.

And with good reason. What therapist with a shred of ethical spine would agree to individually treat both members of a married couple, let alone an entire group of friends? The unhelpful lack of boundaries of this was clear even to me, who had never set foot in a therapist’s office. Who knew what Helen would say to Luz when she got hold of her? If Luz went to see Helen, it would be a disaster. Helen had never met Marion or me. But she knew that we had both already had affairs with other people from Ike, Samantha, James, and Lisa, and all four of them had certainly told her. Given her lack of ethical boundaries, Helen might very well decide that Marion and I, being prior cheaters, were therefore definitely sleeping together. She would proceed accordingly in her treatment of Luz, which would mean the certain death of my marriage and the end of any hope of ever convincing Luz of the truth and thereby saving her sanity and my own life.

“I’m going back to sleep,” I said. “I’m depressed as hell.”

“Same here,” she said. “I’m going to stay up for a while and stew. Sweet dreams.”

I went back to the couch and tossed around on the lumpy cushions with my brain in a spiderwebbed jumble until just after dawn, then got up, got dressed, and went out into the cold fresh morning. The sky over the bridge and river was a clean, pale, wind-scoured blue with banks of salmon-pink clouds floating just over the bridge’s struts. The rhythmic sound of tires on the expansion joints overhead was like high throaty animal cries in a swamp. I hiked up and over to the entrance and climbed the steep ramp, high up onto the bridge, and strode fast along the walkway over the road, hunched in my coat, the tips of my ears tingling, my nose going numb. I had for company various joggers, Hasidim, and kids on bikes. I stopped halfway across the bridge and looked downriver at the wide, streaming blue water just beginning to catch glints of light, the old piers and massive freight ships of the Navy Yard. Even Shaefer Landing, that monstrous bit of residential development squatting on the waterfront, gleamed a dreamlike, underwater green in the clear sunlight. At dawn, everything was new made. It was a poem, and in the old days I would have been inspired to write a good one. Now I conjured nothing but doggerel: “The sun-cudgeled copse of cars on the Billyburg Bridge / Sits stuck still in the morning arm of some god’s law …”

When the sun had risen high enough to begin to warm things up a bit, I turned back and came off the bridge and went down toward the river, hung a left on Wythe and walked its just-awakening length. I passed the old empty diner that had once been revamped into an upscale Italian place, now closed and boarded up, where Phil and Suzie had had their wedding about eighteen years before. The party had been held in the fenced-in garden with tables, with a little stage for a band, a bar, flower beds, vines, potted trees. It had rained in a hard, brief cloudburst that night, but we didn’t mind getting wet. We were all there, Luz and me, Ike and Marion, James and Lisa, Wendy and Giovanni, Debra MacDougal, Dan Levy and his wife, whose name I could never remember, Sylvia and John, Mick and Terry. Hector and Karina were there, too, at a table with everyone else’s kids. Luz wore a black strapless dress and the dangling sparkly chandelier earrings I’d given her for our tenth anniversary, and her shoulders were bare, her hair up. I remembered with a pang of loss how beautiful she had been that night, laughing and open and comfortable in her own skin, a rare mood for her.

It was a good night, a great party. Phil and Suzie had been together for more than eight years and had a five-year-old daughter and another kid on the way; she had finally gotten her divorce from her first husband, and so they were getting married. There was a lot of affectionate joking in the wedding toasts about Suzie making an honest man of Phil, the barn door being closed long after the cows had escaped, Suzie’s checkered past being laid to rest, the long-delayed shotgun wedding. We were a closely knit group of old friends back then. Five of them had gone to college together—Phil, Debra, James, Sylvia, and Giovanni—and most of us had met and coalesced into a group shortly after we’d all moved to New York in our early twenties. Phil and Giovanni and I had shared an East Village apartment during my first years in the city, until I married Luz and moved to the Astral. Dan and I had a long-standing, mostly friendly poetic rivalry. I’d of course known Marion for many years, and Ike and Luz had both been folded in when they’d married Marion and me. We had all known one another, it seemed, forever.

This was long before we were splintered into isolated factions by circumstances that ended friendships and tore the circle apart: a vicious fight between Sylvia and Lisa, former best friends who became sworn enemies after an unbreachable misunderstanding; a joint real-estate venture gone awry between Phil and Suzie, Sylvia and John; the public fallout of my affair with Samantha and Marion’s with James; and most recently, this terrible mess with Luz and Marion and me. These days, all remaining friendships were conducted on an individual basis, according to who took whose side in a given dispute, who believed whose side of any given story, whose loyalties ultimately lay where. But back then, and for years, we were a big, loose, easy flock of trusted pals, a de facto family of neighbors, fellow artists.

That night, at the wedding party, Luz and I sat at a table with Ike and Marion. We four were especially close in those days. We had frequent dinners together at each other’s house, they were our kids’ godparents. Ike and I had a warm if small-scale friendship; he was a good guy, I was a good guy. We didn’t have a lot in common, but we both loved Marion, and we respected each other. And although Marion and Luz had some degree of ongoing tension because they were so different and because Marion had been my friend before Luz came along, and so had a prior claim on me that Luz had to accept, they had always been amiable enough and even became affectionate after they’d had several drinks.

I recall that Marion drank even more than usual that night and seemed slightly unhinged, wild. I sensed that her attention was elsewhere, that she was flying off from us, but I wasn’t sure where or to whom. When Ike suggested with mild concern that she might have had enough to drink, Marion told him to back off. I laughed, Luz didn’t. I could sense Luz there next to me, offended by what she took to be Marion’s disrespect for her husband. She had never been amused by Marion’s teasing disparagements of Ike. He was a mensch, Ike, an ambitious, dapper, charming guy who had allowed Marion unlimited autonomy and freedom, supported her when sales of her work were down, understood her need for solitude, brought her coffee in the morning before he left for work. As always, Luz chose to keep her thoughts about Marion’s unseemly wifely behavior to herself, but I knew I’d hear them later, on the way home, and I’d be in the wearying position of having to choose between defending my friend, thus annoying my wife, or keeping my mouth shut and feeling disloyal to Marion, whose side I saw.

Marion had always made the mistake, if it could be called that, of talking to Luz and me as if we were in agreement about all matters. Luz’s cool responses and silences had never fazed her. Luz was my wife, so therefore Marion was as frank and easy with her as she was with me. It was Marion’s nature to be open, to assume that her friends wouldn’t judge her, the way she, out of loyalty and open-mindedness, and as a matter of principle, did not judge them.