The Astral (9 page)

A little later on, Marion and Ike had some sort of marital altercation and walked off together still arguing long before the rest of us were ready to go. After they left, Luz and I danced shoulder to shoulder with everyone. Hector and Karina were nearby with a flock of all the other midsized kids. The band was good, a retro jazz ensemble with a terrific girl singer. There my wife and I were, dancing with our friends, their kids, our kids. I remember that we all sang along, kids and grown-ups, to “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” half laughing at the sentiment but giving it our throaty all. That was the band’s last number of the night. Passing the old restaurant, I saw our ghosts there, held in time like a stuck thought burned into the air, although back then we had taken that happy night for granted.

I threaded through a thin smattering of early young workgoers, past dogs on leashes attached to humans. I stopped in at a deli on Manhattan Avenue and got myself a paper cup of hot coffee, which I sipped as I walked almost all the way to the End of the World. As I passed India Street, I glanced down its length reflexively and was half relieved, half disappointed to see no sign of Luz, who was probably on the bus to work already; she was always on time. As the saying used to go back in olden times when people wore watches, you could set your watch by her. The empty street taunted me with decades of lingering memories. It looked slightly darker and more shadowy than the rest of the world, as if nostalgia had given it a sepia, long-ago cast. I turned my face away and tottered on into the wind that became stronger the closer I got to Newtown Creek, as if the water had unleashed some icy, toxic sprite of air that was funneled by the chute of the avenue right into my face.

Mazatlán had just opened. I went in and sat at the counter. It was warm and lively in there, with a melodramatic Latino pop video full of half-naked glistening women in heat on the overhead TV screen, the smell of hot grease and coffee, and a lit-up 1970s Corona sign on the far wall. My toes curled in my shoes with relief at getting out of that cold wind.

Every table was already taken, and even the counter was well populated. As was appropriate for this hour on a weekday, the clientele was either older working class or young, hungover hipster.

“Hola,”
I said to Juana, who kissed me on the forehead as she went by and sloshed some hot coffee into a cup for me.

“Airy,” she said,
“cómo estás?”

Before I could answer, she was off. I waited to catch the eye of my brother-in-law, Jaime, who wielded a single spatula in the execution of various tasks involving eggs, tortillas, bacon, home fries, and sausages. Jaime had been married to Luz’s older sister, Carmen, since they were just out of high school. Carmen and Jaime had four grown daughters and three grandchildren, and they both worked harder and with more dedication and forbearance than almost anyone else I knew except Luz herself. Nevertheless, Jaime somehow always managed to look like a rockabilly punk with a bad attitude who was just one wrong step short of getting suspended from high school. He wore checked cowboy shirts with the sleeves rolled up and flashy boots with appliquéd lizards on the toes. His hair stood straight up like a three-inch black bristle brush, and he had equally brushy sideburns. Why he took such stylish pains I had no idea; he was in no band, and he pursued no women. It was no doubt his one means of self-expression in a tame, obedient life, the equivalent of my poetry writing.

“Hermano,”
he called to me over his shoulder, “want some breakfast?”

“No thanks, Jaime,” I said. “I’m looking for a job, actually.”

He turned. “What happened to your face, man?”

“Got into a fight with a drunk guy.”

He gave me a look, long enough for me to understand that he knew every detail of my recent behavior according to his wife as told to by mine, but not so long that I would read any judgment or disapprobation into it, if only because that wasn’t his style, and then he turned back to his grill. “You okay?”

“No,” I said. I had always liked Jaime. He was entertaining to talk to at Izquierdo family gatherings, the kind of man who never said anything objectionable but always seemed to be about to. Under his carefully honed veneer of offhanded cool-cat levity, he was thoughtful, decent, and kind, and his wife and daughters and grandkids walked all over him.

“Yeah, didn’t think so,” he said. “I’m really sorry, bro. We’re not really hiring, but I will definitely put in a word for you. How’s your cooking?”

“I’d be happy to wash dishes,” I said. “That’s more what I had in mind. My cooking is not good. But I think I can get dishes clean pretty well.”

“It pays shit,” he said. “But you get to eat before and after your shifts, so there’s that benefit.”

“Shit is better than what I’m making now. Especially with food.”

“How do I reach you?” He set a plate of fried eggs, tortillas, and potatoes in front of me, then slid the hot sauce and ketchup within my reach. I could have kissed him. My second good meal in twelve hours.

“Through Karina,” I said. I couldn’t give him Marion’s number, couldn’t have her picking up when Jaime called, it wasn’t right somehow. “I don’t have a phone at the moment.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll ask the boss. You never know.”

I finished my food and said good-bye and left as big a tip as I could risk, given my low funds, and hightailed it out of there feeling shamefaced and angry at myself for not having been a more productive person all these years. As I made my way back along Manhattan Avenue, I remembered my dream from the night before. I was lying in Luz’s and my bed with the flu and a high fever and Luz kept bringing me bowls of delicious-smelling soups and stews, pozole,
sopa de lima
with fried tortilla strips, the oxtail soup with the thick, bright green broth she only made on special occasions like Christmas and birthdays, spicy black bean soup with sour cream and toasted cumin seeds. They all looked and smelled like the essence of life-giving restoratives. I was very hungry and kept trying to sit up and eat them as she offered them to me one by one, but I was too weak, too sickly, and each time I fell back onto the pillows while she looked hurt and disappointed.

I stepped on this line of thinking before it could take over my brain, since it did no one any good, least of all me. I dwelled instead on Jaime’s brotherly kindness, the fact that thanks to him, I had just eaten a big, solid breakfast and might have found a job somewhere where I could stand to be for eight or more hours at a stretch.

I ducked my head into my coat and was swamped with a memory of Christmas past: the year Karina was twelve, Hector fourteen, it was our turn, as it was every four years, to have the Izquierdo family over for Christmas dinner. We four had gone to midnight Mass the night before. It was something we had always done, and I didn’t mind. I liked the holiday masses well enough, it was the regular Mass I couldn’t stomach; it reminded me too much of my childhood, that snow-bright midwestern winter light refracted in the church, a stark shaft of sun illuminating the bloody Christ on the crucifix. My mother whispered to me during the service, and the sound of her papery, dry voice in my ear made me shrivel inside to the size of a closed fist. It was overwhelming, the cryptlike vaults and apses, the cold breath of the air in the church, Father Mahoney’s reedy, undertaker’s voice, the dusty incense that smelled like perfume on a woman’s corpse, the wafer that turned to fleshlike paste on my tongue.

But the crowded Christmas Mass at St. Cecilia’s was always a cheery, neighborly affair, even festive, and we four walked home through the quiet, cold streets of Greenpoint together afterward, Karina and I up ahead, walking fast and mangling Christmas carols with made-up lyrics mocking the crass materialism of the holiday (“Deck the halls with lots of presents” and “Silent night, give me some loot, all is calm, give me some gifts”), Luz and Hector lagging behind, earnestly discussing Catholic doctrine. When we got home, it was very late, but Luz always let the kids open their presents before bed. That way, we could sleep late the next morning while they played with their new toys, which were now all computer games and digital gadgets, sadly for their midwestern-raised poet father who had come of age in the fifties and wanted his own children to read the classics and play with chemistry sets and sleds as he had. That morning, we lolled in our bed and made love, fairly passionately for a long-married couple. We were still okay then; I hadn’t had my stupid affair yet, that wasn’t until the following summer. We were still intact.

The Izquierdos arrived from Queens at two o’clock on Christmas afternoon bearing food and presents. Luz had spent Christmas Eve day making the green oxtail soup and the pork in spicy sauce that her family always ate on Christmas. Her sister Carmen brought cinnamon chocolate cake with whipped cream, her sister Pilar brought a bottle of rum, peanuts, and cans of guava juice and condensed milk to make the traditional family blender cocktail, and their mother, Natividad, brought homemade tamales. The Izquierdo women were a look-alike bunch, all of them fierce, glossy, tiny, and preternaturally talkative. I always enjoyed seeing them in the aggregate.

After dinner, all the cousins went into Hector’s and Karina’s rooms. Carmen, Luz, and Pilar sat with their mother in the living room, jabbering away about their jobs and kids and, as a no-doubt distant afterthought, their husbands. After we husbands had washed and dried and put away all the dishes, we stood in the kitchen leaning against the counters drinking beer, joking with a funny kind of pride about how demanding and bossy our wives were, how in thrall we were to the domestic tyranny of children and schedules and Izquierdo sisters. Pilar’s husband, Roberto, a round-faced, unflappable courthouse clerk, was as genial, devoted, and secretly subversive as Jaime and I were; in other words, we were the perfect husbands for the Izquierdo sisters, who all, even as grown adults, constantly jostled for dominance amongst themselves and competed for their mother’s attention. I sensed among us three husbands a shared undercurrent of potential rebellious mischief held in check out of inertia, self-discipline, and a strong preference for harmony and fidelity. We were a convivial threesome; our wives were distracted, so we were free to idle, making conversation.

As the sky outside darkened so that our slouching reflections appeared in the kitchen windows with a collection of empty beer bottles behind us on the countertops, I could hear the women’s voices in the living room. Luz sounded especially wrought up. Every so often, the topic of their dead father came up, and it was always painful and contentious. Luz defended him, Pilar reviled him, and Carmen, the oldest sister, tried to analyze and understand him, while Natividad sat silently, sometimes fanning herself with one hand.

Finally, when the rum was gone and they were all talked out, the Izquierdo women, as one force, gathered up their children, empty dishes, new presents, bags, and husbands, and out they swept, calling good-byes and kissing all of us and thanking Luz for dinner. Their sudden absence was deafening, a reverse thunderclap on our eardrums. Luz and I stood looking at each other, marooned and tipsy amidst the wrapping paper and fallen pine needles and blinking tree lights and cake crumbs. I was pleasantly buzzed and sleepy, but I could see from my wife’s pinched, distraught face that it was by no means bedtime yet. She sat next to me on the couch and, because Hector and Karina were in their rooms and couldn’t see or hear, she gave herself over to the tears that she’d held back all day out of pride. “I’m the only one who loved him,” she said. “I feel so sad for him, he was so lonely, my mother never let him back, she banished him, he tried to come back but she never let him …”

Now that Luz had done the same thing to me that her mother had done to her father, these words struck me in hindsight as ironic at best and inescapably prophetic at paranoid worst. At the time, though, I leapt at the chance to assuage her vulnerability. She was usually so pent up and fierce. She cried like a little girl, a little girl who had had too much rum, and I soothed her, rubbed her back, kissed her teary cheeks, feeling fatherly and reassuring.

“You have to promise me,” she said, wiping her face, fixing me with her gimlet stare. “Harry, I mean it, promise me you’ll stay with me forever, you’ll never leave me.”

“Of course I promise,” I said, a bit puzzled by her fear that I would ever think of doing anything else. “I promised when I married you, and it’s still true.”

“Never leave me,” she said coldly. Her eyes were wet and bloodshot, but they were stone hard, untrusting, angry. “Say it.”

“I’ll never leave you,” I said. “I promise. Never, never, never.”

Ah, Luz. So much for that. I let the headwind blow me to Marlene’s, which was, of course, closed. I idled there in front anyway in case Marlene took it into her head to open up this early for the first time in the ninety-odd years she’d been running the place. I blew on my fists to warm them and watched a comically squat middle-aged hausfrau with an enormous head of curly salt-and-pepper hair and bulbous eyes walk her beagle. She was very gentle with the leash, unhurried, indulgent, allowing the little animal to piss wherever he wanted and to sniff every molecule in the pavement.

“Hello,” she said quizzically as she passed by me, probably thinking I was one of the neighborhood drunks waiting for my morning fix.

“Hello,” I said back. “Cold morning.”

“Well, it’s March, what do you expect,” she said like a nun reprimanding a sinner, and the brief warmth she’d inspired in me by her treatment of her pet curdled into antipathy. What a bitch. I watched her waddle on her way, glad to see her go. What made some people so unaccountably mean-spirited when others were so instinctively generous? I had never been able to fathom it.

I wandered down and over to Gem Street and stopped in at the Acme Smoked Fish office to find out whether they were hiring; I had a nice little fantasy of manning the loading docks with George the bartender. I made my way through the hosed-down, fish-smelling warehouse with a drain in the middle of the concrete floor, past the freezers and stainless-steel tables with nozzled hoses dangling overhead and galvanized trash-can-sized buckets. I went into the little office and filled out the application that was summarily handed me by the brusque walrus-shaped man at the desk, and although it contained nothing but evidence of my woeful unemployability, he put it into an important-looking file as if it might come in handy someday and thanked me for stopping by. I half hoped they would hire me; unlike many people, I liked the smell of fish, fresh, smoked, day old, and otherwise. I wished I could have written that on the application, since it was my best qualification for the job.