The Astral (11 page)

“So,” he said, scooching closer to me, breathing on my face, “what’s it like to be with Marion Delahunt? I always thought she was hot, as a matter of fact, and I never got a taste of that. But I bet her shit is correct.”

His drink was already almost half gone.

“You’re such a fucking tool,” I said before I could stop myself.

He put both hands up. “Just asking, man.”

I shook my head. “I’m not sleeping with her.”

“Sure, sure.”

I stared at him hard, unsmiling, trying in some cockamamie way to defend Marion’s honor.

“Hey, I believe you.” He leaned in even closer. I could smell his musky skin. “But if you were,” he said with silky intimacy, “then good on you.”

I harrumphed on a burst of exhaled air. “You fuckhead, you know Marion wouldn’t touch either of us with a cattle prod.”

“Yeah! That’s an image. Marion Delahunt with a cattle prod. Now I’m getting turned on.” He laughed at his own incorrigible horndoggedness, and then I laughed too, and then we both backed down.

“You asshole,” I said, still laughing.

“Hey, someone’s got to be an asshole around here.”

“How’s Tina? How are your kids?”

“They’re all still around here somewhere, I think. Well, the kids are in college now, but Tina stuck around, I’m pretty sure. So what were you thinking, about the old days?”

“How much fun they were. They probably weren’t really. But in retrospect, it does seem that we enjoyed ourselves a lot.”

“You? You had a stick up your ass even then. I fucking cannot believe you never tapped Marion, seriously, man. Jesus fucking Christ, you spent every minute together. And then you married someone else. Not that she’s not a tremendous person, Luz, she’s a lovely person, but now Marion. That is a girl. I used to dream about that girl back when I had dreams.”

“She’s my friend,” I said. Here was my chance to defend myself, but I wasn’t relishing it as much as I’d thought I would. “Like brother and sister. I have never touched her. It’s not like that.”

Dan leaned his head on one hand and rested it there and gazed at me with melancholy skepticism. His face had not aged much through the years, but his skin had darkened with time, his schnozz had become wider and flatter, so now he almost looked like the hip black dude he’d once aspired to be. His hairline had receded far back on his skull; his longish, once-black hair was now mostly silver. The effect was wizardy and comical. He looked like a swarthy elf.

“Yeah, the old days,” he said. “We were no happier then.”

“Are you sure?”

“Think about it.”

“I’m sure I was,” I said. “Look at me.”

“You really aren’t fucking Marion? And your wife threw you out anyway?”

“That’s right.”

“Harsh,” he said. “That’s unfortunate, Harry, I’m sorry. At the very least you could actually be, you know, getting some.”

“I appreciate your delicacy and tact,” I said.

He sat up straight and put one didactic finger in the air. “Chicanery. Tomfoolery. Skullduggery,” he said with suggestive challenge and then waited for me to take my turn.

“Quackery,” I said after a moment of consideration; I wasn’t in the mood for this old game. Anyway, I was out of practice. “Treachery, humbuggery.”

“Hey now,” he said. He drank from his little bucket. “Roguery, robbery, forgery.”

I drank from mine. “Buggery, which is different from humbuggery and therefore counts, pettifoggery, brigandry.”

He slapped the bar and knit his bristly silver-black brows together. “Perjury, usury, savagery.”

“How’s your work going, really?” I said.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“I thought so.”

“How’s yours?”

“Lingerie,” I said with tipsy vehemence, and he laughed.

“I’m gonna let that one slide.”

“Hackery, gimcrackery.”

“Jiggery-pokery, rookery … cuckoldry.”

“Diablerie. Harlotry. Flimflammery.”

We toasted each other with our silly drinks and together studied the pulchritudinous bartendress with thoughtful attention.

“Buffoonery, japery,” she said, coming toward us to inspect our drinks. “Ready for more, gentlemen?”

“Japery,” said Dan. “Good one.”

She rolled her eyes, but not in an unfriendly way.

“No more for me,” I said. “My budget won’t allow it.”

“It’s on the house,” she said, busying herself with ice, bourbon, and mixers. “Slow day; I’d rather have company than stand here alone. The regular crowd doesn’t show up till late afternoon. I’m Lexy, by the way.”

“I’m Harry,” I said, “and this is Dan. We’re the early bird special crowd.”

“He means we’re too old to be in here,” said Dan.

“Pish tosh,” she said, setting fresh Moonshine Fizzes in front of us. “Poppycock. Balderdash.”

Neither Dan nor I had a comeback. We stared at her with slack-jawed interest.

“The poets crap out,” I said.

“We’re a dying breed,” said Dan.

“Oh, don’t be such a drama queen,” I said.

Lexy tapped the bar with her fingernail. “The obvious one is moonshine,” she said. “Anyway, what the fuck? I know a lot of poets, and they’re like half your age.”

“Claptrap, malarkey, flummery!” said Dan.

“That’s the spirit,” said Lexy, whose name had now revealed itself to be comically apt and possibly made up.

“Rot,” I said. “Tripe, twaddle. Is that your real name?”

“Short for Lexicographer,” she said. Her face was so pretty, it confounded the eyes: creamy-skinned, brown-eyed, aquiline-nosed, luscious-lipped. Her bare upper arms glistened with dewy, muscular, supple youth. Her neck was a pearly stalk made of lily petals. “My last name is Verbiage.”

“Wow,” said Dan in that calculatedly hipstery, testosterone-infused breathiness that women had once found incomprehensibly seductive. “Your parents must be out of their fucking minds.”

“Or I must,” she said. “No, I’m kidding, it’s short for Alexis, last name’s Levy.”

“Get the fuck out, Levy, mine is too,” said Dan.

“Get the fuck out, Levy,” she said, laughing. “I guess we’re distant cousins.”

“I hope not,” said Dan.

She laughed again. When she laughed, her mouth gleamed, her teeth shone. She was perfect, like a sex android. She was a wet-dream wish fulfillment. Years of conditioning by the prevailing social winds, not to mention my wife and daughter, almost forced me to back away from my carnivorous attitude toward this intelligent, autonomous young woman, but I was drunk and attracted enough to let it prevail.

“You’re a poet, Lexy Levy?” Dan asked in his nasal hip-hop coo.

“Nah,” she said, “I’m a playwright. But I really am friends with a lot of poets. They’re everywhere. It is not a dying art, not at all.”

“Where do the kids read, these days?”

“ ‘The kids,’ as you call them, read all over the place. There’s a bar on Grand Street, there’s another one on North Sixth, all over the place. So, Dan Levy.” She squinted at him. “Should I know your name?”

“Not unless you follow obscure old zines and chapbooks,” he said. “Harry here, you might have heard of him. He has a legitimate publisher.”

“Had,” I said. “She moved to London.”

“What’s your last name, Harry?”

“Quirk,” I said. “As in eyebrow. As in idiosyncrasy.”

“Harry Quirk!” she said. Her lit-up, excited expression was quite possibly the best thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life, besides the birth of my kids and maybe my wedding day. But maybe not. “I can’t believe it! Harry Quirk! One of my friends, like, worships you. She owns all your books. She thinks you’re like an unsung genius. Oh my God, I can’t believe this, I have to text her, hold on.”

She got out her cell phone and began punching buttons on it.

I watched her with apprehensive disbelief. The day had reached its zenith, its apogee, along with the sun. From here, it would be all downhill: the friend would show up, I would invariably have another Moonshine Fizz and, in my state of flattered excitement, behave like the knucklehead I was and thereby greatly disappoint my alleged fan, who was no doubt Lexy Levy’s equal in wit and beauty, and then I would wind up feeling queasily, stupidly, pointlessly drunk.

I slipped from my bar stool and waved good-bye to the Levys, who watched me go with some consternation and surprise. Back in the cold, bright day, I made my way to Marion’s empty house, where I lay in lordly supine bliss like an emperor on the couch and surfed a fresh wave of hope and joy into a long, restorative nap.

Chapter Ten

  O
ne night in mid-May, as I slept alone in my tiny apartment on the second floor of the Astral, my body lost a battle with an interloping virus, and by the time I awoke, the battlefield had long been conceded.

I had moved back into the Astral only recently and hadn’t yet accustomed myself to this lower elevation, difference in air pressure, and strange new neighbors. I was back, but I wasn’t exactly back. It might have been the stress of the move and the strangeness of being only half here that caused me to succumb to the late-spring virus that had been felling the general populace.

On awakening, I noticed first a strange taste in my mouth, metallic and foul. Next I noticed that my skin was crackling and hot, then I became aware that my head was full of sharp stabs, and finally, as I came fully awake, I felt the dull pressure of phlegm in my chest and throat. I fell back into bed. I had no time or patience for influenza. I had fallen asleep determined to do many things in the coming days, but now none of these things could happen until my immune system had killed the intruder. I was forced to cooperate by spending the morning in fetal position under the covers, then panting hotly on top of them, then shivering under them again, then sweating and clawing at my shirt to get it off and throwing the blankets from my burning near-carcass, then collapsing into my wracked chilled flesh and clinging to the bed as if it were pitching on a stormy, cold sea. My entire body hurt, or rather, its surfaces did, as if my entire skin from scalp to tiptoe had been sprayed with a corrosive, tenderizing chemical, or as if I had dipped myself in Newtown Creek.

I had no phone and was too sick to go down the hall and borrow my neighbor’s; I was on my own. I couldn’t call the lumberyard to let them know I wouldn’t be in, couldn’t call Karina. At noon, I got up and with great effort and concentration made myself some coffee to help with my powerful headache. I drank most of a cup before I fell back to violent sleep. In the midafternoon, I forced myself awake again and urinated a weak, unconvincing, dark yellow puddle into the skanky toilet, then filled a smudged glass with lukewarm water from the tap and drank it with greed. As the setting sun bounced its secondhand glow onto nearby buildings and thereby through my north-facing window, I awoke to find myself drenched in sweat that was both hot and cold at once. I changed my shirt and U-trou, as my prep-school-educated friend Chip used to call his briefs, tried and failed to eat a banana, and drank another glass of water, then fell into bed.

I bleated a little, thinking of Luz coming home from work, walking past my window without knowing I was in here, walking right by me as I shivered and mewled. And if she had known I was sick, she might have walked by anyway. I was sure of it, the more I thought about it; she would walk by and enjoy it. She was probably cooking her supper now up on the top floor, alone in our apartment. I wondered what she was making. I felt as vulnerable as a newly hatched insect, rickety and wet and easily squashed, confused by this sudden change. My fever caused a mirage in my perceptions, my internal landscape and physical surroundings alike distorted by shimmering heat waves. My body heaved and gasped and shuddered with pain, and my psyche created a concomitant reaction by summoning all the regret it possessed, at the immediate forefront of which, ahead of my ruined marriage, lost poetry, my son in a cult, my daughter a lovelorn trash collector, my parents forgotten corpses in the fields of Muscatine, Iowa, my former dreams of flaming literary glory a small burning heap of charred rags, I regretted having been forced, two weeks ago, to leave the wholesome safety of my hideout in Bushwick, the easygoing, sane company of Zeldah Speck, and the comforting daily contact with a pack of dogs.

For six weeks, I had lived in a room in Zeldah’s basement. She was a zaftig, caustically wry, unassuming, deeply religious black woman of about my own age who owned a tidy, bare-bones little Section 8 house just off Broadway in the heart of Bushwick. I’d moved in with her in mid-March, right after I started working in the waterfront lumberyard office with Yanti and got my own set of stubby pencils and fingerless gloves. She was a friend of Karina’s, or rather, she was a fellow do-gooder who knew Karina from do-gooder circles. Instead of Dumpster diving and giving things to needy people, Zeldah took in abandoned dogs and tried to find them devoted, stellar owners, so in a sense, she was also in the recycling and redistributing business.

She had an extra bedroom, Karina had told me, and she needed someone to walk the dogs morning and night and keep an eye on them on the weekends while she was making the rounds of the city in her Chevy van, picking up and delivering dogs and incidentally preaching the gospel to anyone who was available to hear it.

“I’ll go and see her,” I told my daughter. “Go today,” she said. So after work I rode up Broadway on the sturdy blue one-speed that had been rescued for me by Karina from a Dumpster in Bed-Stuy. I rang the doorbell, and when Zeldah peered at me from behind the chain on the door, I said, “I’m Karina Quirk’s father, and I’ve come to take care of your dogs.” She unlocked the door and let me in without a word. She was barely five feet tall and about the same in circumference and black as coffee; I am, of course, an unnaturally pale, tall, and skinny person. We made a striking pair. She marched me down to the basement and into the backyard, a fenced enclosure of torn-up lawn containing a muscular, writhing, haunchy mass of musky-smelling, panting, slavering beasts. They bugged their eyes at me, and I offered them a hand to sniff. “They like you,” said Zeldah with more hopefulness than truth. “You’ll be fine.” Then she showed me my basement bedroom, a little windowless cubicle next to the laundry room furnished with a single bed, a small bureau, and a chair, just like a prison cell except without a sink or toilet. “Yes, I’ll be fine,” I said. Zeldah told me to settle in and that we were having rice and beans and chicken for supper and to come upstairs in a little bit, and I was installed, just like that.

The next morning, I took the dogs out for a walk. It was almost, but not entirely, a disaster. We came back, and I took them downstairs through the basement and put them out in the yard and came back upstairs for breakfast. Zeldah was decked out in her pink smock and loose-fitting white pants, ready for a day at the beauty parlor, coiffing heads. We ate in silence at the table. In all the time I lived there, we were never chatty in the morning. We saved our thoughts and gossip and business for evenings after work, which I found very restful and easy.

Zeldah finished loading the dishwasher and picked up her purse. I went to the coat closet and hauled out the gigantic bag of kibble, which Zeldah bought in bulk at Costco every few weeks, and poured the morning’s rations into a bucket. After I fed the dogs, I rode my bike all the way down Broadway and turned left onto Kent. At the end of the workday, I rode back up Broadway, went through the house and down to the dog yard, put leashes on Spike, King, Serena, Jeeves, Tom Thumb, and Mickey, collected a huge wad of plastic bags, and out we went. It went better the second time. They tried to knock me down and trip me. I picked up a staggering amount of dog do without getting any on my hands, and I managed to keep them from knocking anyone down or bolting or humping me.

We went back home, where Zeldah was making stew, and I opened a beer and, feeling shy, went downstairs and sat in my room until she called down that it was ready. After dinner, we sat reading quietly together, I with a poetry book, Zeldah with her Bible, which quickly became a routine: me on the brown fake-leather couch, Zeldah nearby in her matching brown fake-leather swivel easy chair, sitting with one foot tucked under her, the other planted on the floor, turning the chair to and fro. She always put on the ten o’clock news. For the entire half hour of its duration, she kept her eyes on the screen, rapt and attentive, arguing nonstop with newscasters and advertisements alike in a stream of genteelly euphemistic, Christian-lady hotheadedness. “About that Afghanistan situation, you go in somewhere like that you better clean up your mess before you come home. Don’t you be telling me that stuff works, I tried it once when I had a sleepless night and I had nightmares. Look at that sad meal, I wouldn’t eat that if you paid me a hundred dollars. If you want good food, you have to make it yourself.”

Every morning before work, I walked the dogs along Broadway past closed fried-chicken palaces and cheap clothes emporia, dark behind their pulled-down grates, while the train came to a high, metallic, drawn-out stop on the elevated tracks overhead. The dogs jostled and snuffled for crumbs on the ground. When King was adopted by someone who seemed worthy enough to pass muster, we were down to five dogs. Zeldah was careful about the people she gave her animals to; if she got a whiff of violence or neglectfulness, the person was given the heave-ho. She took tremendous pleasure in telling people they were unworthy of one of her dogs. Dogs, she loved; people, not.

As the weeks went on, with experience and slightly warmer weather, my mornings and evenings with the dogs had become easier. The dogs got to know me; I got to know them; we all knew the route and the routine: down Broadway, over past the projects, and back again the roundabout way through a network of funny, crooked little streets, and home. Picking up all their shit no longer fazed me; I carried at least twelve bags with me whenever we went out and had memorized the locations of all the garbage cans. And the mechanics of all of us sidewinding along, joined together by six-foot leather thongs like a gigantic, unwieldy sea creature trying to walk on land, wasn’t quite the comedy show it had been. I had begun to train them to heel, to stop at the crosswalks, and to walk in an orderly fashion without bumping or nipping at one another. They turned out to have pretty good characters, these dogs. The only problem had been King, who was touched, easily spooked, extremely stupid, and intolerant of the other dogs, but he had gone to Connecticut and was giving someone else a migraine.

Simply by virtue of staying away from the old haunts and working too hard to dwell on anything, my regret, loneliness, and heartache lessened. And on one particular morning, the day Zeldah threw me out, I was feeling unusually chipper, although I was trying not to admit to myself or think too hard about the reason why: Zeldah’s daughter Camille was due to arrive back home tonight after spending a month in Georgia, looking after Zeldah’s sickly older sister. Camille was a wicked beauty, sharp-tongued and lustrous at the same time, the daughter of the redoubtable Zeldah and the sweet, beautiful Rastafarian dude Zeldah had been married to for a brief time before he’d died of lung cancer. She was thirty, which of course meant she was far too young for me, which naturally added to her allure. She was also my landlady’s most precious thing in the world. I could not dream of sullying her or even look at her funny, and I had no intention of ever doing so except in the privacy of my imagination in my little monk’s cell in the basement at night, and then, only with the utmost respect and consideration, since my balls were only just regenerating from the crushing they’d gotten from Luz and I had little power, onanistic or otherwise, these days.

As I left for work that morning, Zeldah called after me, “I’m praying today for God to bring my baby back home tonight and for her safety always.”

I was used to other people’s prayers; Luz had prayed for me for years. Her requests had generally taken the form of hoping I would become a Catholic for the good of my own mortal soul. I found having someone pray for something I actually wanted surprisingly invigorating. “Amen,” I called back up to Zeldah.

But it wasn’t a simple prayer. Her tone had held a warning. I hadn’t sensed it.

Zeldah was in the kitchen when I got home from work, stirring things in pots and peering into cupboards. The house smelled of garlic and spices. I took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and headed down to the basement. For an hour I sat in my straight-backed chair at the small, crappy table I’d found in the street. I worked on the epic poem I’d been trying to write, which was entitled, fittingly enough,
The Astral
. I envisioned it as the story of Adam banished by Eve, sent from the marital Edenic nest to live alone in the cold wilderness. It was intended to be a sort of modern-day, secular, personal
Paradise Lost
or
Inferno
, but it wasn’t going well. Adam’s voice was too bathetic; there was something false and self-exculpatory about the whole enterprise, or maybe the problem was that I didn’t believe in God. I wrote in a notebook I’d bought in the ninety-nine-cent store with pictures of fluffy ducks on the cover; I had no laptop anymore and couldn’t afford a new one.

Well past the cusp of midlife, in the dark and the cold
,

I am suddenly alone and cannot see my way ahead
.

Behind me, the lights and warmth of our garden lie
,

Our garden where my dark and vengeful wife will lie

Down to sleep tonight without me, and all the trivial

Testaments to her being I took as given—

Her hair on the pillows, in the drains, in my food
,

Her reading glasses, her glass of water
,

The splayed book by her side of the bed
,

Our bed, our old bed in our old apartment

Where we lived high above the street like gods
,

All of it is gone
.

At six thirty, I leashed the dogs and took them upstairs, quivering with nervous anticipation at the thought that Camille might have arrived for dinner. I found Zeldah sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette with slow, careful dreaminess. She smoked one cigarette a day, right before she cooked dinner, because, according to her, it stimulated the appetite. I would never have thought this was something she needed help with, but of course I would never have said so.