The Astral (12 page)

After our walk, the dogs and I arrived back home and bounded together up the steps and into Zeldah’s living room. And there was Camille, perched on the couch, looking radiant and amused. I felt exactly like one of the dogs, panting and openmouthed and unable to hide my joy at the sight of her. I wanted to leap at her and lick her entire face with big swipes of my tongue and sneak in a few furtive humps of her leg.

The dogs did all of that. She suffered their enthusiasm and smiled at me.

“Welcome back, Camille,” I said.

“Well, hello there, Harry,” she said in her laughing, honeyed voice.

“Okay,” called Zeldah from the kitchen. “It’s about ready.”

We gathered at the table. Zeldah had lit candles and put out place mats, something she never did when it was just her and me. I looked at the feast Zeldah had made after a long day on her feet ministering to other people’s hair: catfish dipped in cornmeal and fried, caramelized chunks of baked butternut squash, boiled greens, black-eyed peas, and corn bread. I sighed with happiness.

We bowed our heads. Zeldah said, “Dear Jesus, we thank you for bringing my girl back, and for the food we are about to eat. Amen.”

Camille and I murmured “Amen” in unison, and I could feel the word leaving our lips simultaneously, which was nothing like kissing, but felt intimate nonetheless.

When Zeldah asked me to move out the next day, I was caught unawares. I had intended nothing. She looked directly at me, told me she liked me fine, nothing personal, a man would be a man, but she had to protect her girl.

For the second time in recent history, a woman was asking me to get out of her house because of some imagined sexual infraction I hadn’t committed. The irony, rich and cosmically hilarious though it may have been, afforded me a wild, itching grief and very little humor at all.

I felt as if a rare chance for freedom and salvation had been snatched away from me unexpectedly, as if a kind of innocent, happy second childhood had come my way like an unexpected blessing, saved me for a while, and then ended with an unspoken but harsh and half-true accusation. I’d scrambled to pack my things, glad I owned so little. I loaded myself onto my bike, weighted down with my bag of clothes and books, and pointed myself toward the old flophouse near the End of the World. After one unhappy, uncomfortable night there, I went to see the super of the Astral.

My decision to move back in there was instantaneous. It was the homing instinct, the bracing, comforting realization that I could live there if I wanted to. My loneliness now was so keen and all-encompassing, I couldn’t imagine going to live in a different building, a place I didn’t know at all, among strangers. I yearned to go home.

The super gave me the cheapest, smallest unit in the building, for almost as much rent as Luz paid for the place upstairs. It was on the second floor just off the entryway, a studio with a tiny kitchenette in the foyer, a chintzy bathroom a whole step up from the rest of the place because the plumbing had been put in as an afterthought, pipes run along the baseboards, and a painted plywood floor. The toilet ran all the time and wobbled when I sat on it. The sides of the hard plastic shower stall were festooned with splotches of bile-green mold that resisted cleanser and scrubber. The room itself was irregularly shaped; it narrowed from the entryway to the window as if whoever had partitioned it couldn’t have been bothered to use a level or a measure when he slapped up the drywall. But there was indeed a window, which was good, and it looked out onto the street, which was also good, and my upstairs neighbor didn’t stomp around too much, so all was far from lost.

Still, this minuscule dump was a big comedown from the sunlit, spacious aerie on the top floor with its three bedrooms and comfortable living room, the butter-colored cozy kitchen with the Formica table and chairs, the earthy smell of well-watered houseplants in the windows. I tried not to think too much about my old marital bed, a sublimely comfortable king-sized pillow-top mattress, as I lay down here on my hard single futon on its wooden frame, looking up at the spiderwebs in the ceiling corners, the dingy off-white paint, the sepia stain over my armchair. Well, here I was, and it was home, for now. There were no bedbugs or roaches in 2-C, so that was a start.

But it was a terrible place to be sick. Late that night, when the pain was bad and my fever was very high and my pulse was weak, I became aware of how easy it might be to die. The process presented itself to me as a simple bodily function, as elemental and uncomplicated as breathing. I could feel the membrane there, felt myself go up to it and press the top of my head against it the way a newborn crests before emerging. I tested it with curiosity and some real intent. It was tougher than I’d thought, the portal out of life. It resisted me, and I lacked the strength to push through, so I merely slept instead.

The following early afternoon, I awoke in high spirits. My fever had broken. I felt a lot better, I discovered as I stood upright.

I heated up a can of chicken broth and drank the whole savory, salty potful, then finished the banana I had abandoned. I dressed, tottering a bit, and made my shaky, purblind way out the door and down the hall to my neighbor’s little den. He was a lively gaunt Irish fellow of roughly my vintage who enjoyed hosting wild parties in his tiny place, the more the merrier, the later the better. I found him awake, barely, with his hair askew and his face dented by the sheets. I imagined I looked like his mirror image, for different, less enviable reasons. I could see, behind him in his bed, tawny limbs, a swath of flossy hair, cigarette smoke rising in a burst from a sweet mouth. He leaned against his door frame and fished around in his pants pocket and handed me his cell phone with a bleary smile. I took it with an equally bleary smile.

They weren’t happy to hear from me at the lumberyard, but apparently by some miracle I still had a job; when I’d failed to show up, Yanti had covered for me. Not knowing where I was, he had made up some story about me being sick with the flu, and so, because my story matched his, all was saved. I promised to be in tomorrow. Moishe somewhat indifferently told me I’d better be. “I will,” I said, and clapped shut the flat shiny beetle.

“Thanks, Brian,” I said to my neighbor, and he dismissed the dollar bill I tried to give him for letting me make the call.

“Put it toward your own phone,” he said, as he always did.

Back in my room, I stripped the bed and gathered up my discarded sick clothes and carried them all to the Laundromat in the building. I sat in a chair and watched the suds go round and round. There was a dim ringing in my ears, the echo of fever’s weird rhythms. Everything looked too big, too hard-edged, too bright. My papery skin registered every current of air passing over it with the sense-memory of pain.

In due time, I transferred the wet cloth wad to a dryer and sat slack-jawed and lulled, watching it tumble through hot air for the better part of an hour. When the machine stopped, I came out of my trance and carried the hot tangle back to my room and sorted it out and made the bed, folded the clothes and stowed them in their rickety dresser. I washed the dirty dishes in my tiny sink, dried them with my newly clean dish towel, and put them into the metal overhead cupboard. I turned the shower on full heat, full blast, and stood under it soaping and shampooing myself as long as I could stand it. Dry, in clean clothes, I swept and dusted and mopped my little room, opened the window to let clean air in, tidied up a few papers and books and magazines, drank a pint of orange juice I found in the mini-fridge, took two pain relievers, ate a baloney sandwich and half an apple, then crawled back into bed.

It had never occurred to me to wonder, during my smugly domesticated thirty years with my nurse wife, what solitary people did—how they coped when they got very sick. Now I knew very well what they did. What good it did me, I wasn’t sure.

Chapter Eleven

  T
he next morning I clawed my way out of bed, drank coffee, dressed, and locked my door behind me. The Astral had several lobbies, all bleak little featureless foyers that were little more than stairwells lined with mailboxes with signs that said
NO LOITERING
. I disobeyed the sign and hung around my own lobby, my face pressed to the smeared, greasy glass door, watching the sidewalk on India Street until I caught sight of Luz in a crisp white blouse, carrying her nurse shoes in a bag to keep them pristine until she got to the hospital.

I went out and easily fell into step beside her. “Luz,” I said. “Good morning.”

She didn’t look at me or answer, but I could feel her start of surprise at my sudden appearance.

I felt everything I had to say to her rise in my throat. “I know you don’t want to talk to me. I know you’re angry. But I’m here. I won’t go anywhere.”

I turned to look down at her, to address the rest of what I had to say to the top of her head, but she had disappeared. I whirled around. She had made a full stop, suddenly, so I had been left striding along talking to no one. I watched her duck across the street and continue along without me, her head down.

Some poison slid its way into her bloodstream
,

Deranged her, siphoned off her fear into a pool

Of molten hate from which a black and terrible goddess

Sprang and pulled my ribs apart and crafted straw Eves

Out of a snake-pit of caprice and held them up as evidence
,

These writhing lies, and nailed them over our bed
.

I went back to the Astral and unlocked my bike. I wheeled it along the heaving sidewalk to Franklin, mounted it, and rolled southward along the neatly painted bike lane, relieved to be alive on this heavy morning with fat warm droplets from low swollen clouds flying splat into my face. Much younger, speedier bicyclists went by me, their silky hair whipping around behind them, wheels whirring. I took my stately, convalescing time. As I pedaled along, I recited to myself a poem I had memorized years ago and had recently read again, Czeslaw Milosz’s “On Parting with My Wife, Janina.” For the last ten years of her life, Janina had apparently been incapacitated by a severe illness, which one, I didn’t know, and then she died and was cremated. Czeslaw nursed his wife through this difficult decade, and then, after she died, wrote a raw, self-castigating poem describing her corpse’s consecration to the flames and the terrible guilt, sorrow, grief this caused in him—“I loved her, without knowing who she really was … I inflicted pain on her … I betrayed her …”

At the end of the poem came a hot outrush of what I had always taken to be a good way of removing himself from this unbearable sense of having failed her, by crying out for the fire to come and get us all. I had once thought it made a kind of sense, metaphorically, but my recent fever had taught me otherwise. A fire had raged through my own living body and left it weak and battered, not purged, not transformed, just more fragile. The closeness to death I’d felt the other night had been a breath of something friendly and familiar and inviting. Now it seemed to me that Janina Milosz had shuffled off her diseased body and vanished, and Czeslaw was left on this side of things to mutter to himself and expose his own failings, probably born of ten years’ worth of suppressed resentment and horror at nursing the decaying, dying, diseased woman who had been his lover and mate. All of this I fully understood and empathized with, but then he leapt from grief and guilt into a yearning for some incandescent, wholly imagined transcendent immolation. As I recited the poem to myself now, I was with him all the way up till the end. I found myself wishing that he had cast his imagination back to his wife instead and re-created her somehow, attempted to know her through the poem meant to honor her.

This stubborn need and desire for the concrete and emotionally direct was my own failing, I knew. These guys who took the big leaps—Yeats, Blake, Milosz—I loved them all, but I could never go with them in any way but verbally. Reading, I felt them fly into the celestial light, to fairyland, up to the divine embrace. And my own family knew how to do this. Luz believed in the resurrection, in confession and Communion. She didn’t go to St. Cecilia’s every Sunday to Mass, but she went often enough, and she got something out of all that incense, prayer, the eating of the wafer, the drinking of the Thunderbird or Manischewitz or whatever was in the carafe that day. And Hector had inherited from his mother this ability to live among the deities in exaltation and exploded it into exponential fundamentalism. His life was so outside my ken, I couldn’t imagine what propelled him through his days. Although Karina was like me, practical and earthbound, she had strong ethical and political structures and strictures, and her life approached religiosity in her adherence to them. All I had was poetry, and these days, my faith in its forms had left me high and dry. I could not write anymore, it seemed.
The Astral
, my epic poem of loss and displacement, was going no better now than it had at Zeldah’s, although I’d returned to the place of inspiration. If anything, I was more stuck than ever. Starting over from scratch with a new book of poems after the destruction of that other, almost-finished book required a strength of character I knew I possessed but was having a lot of trouble mustering and making manifest.

Right now, mourning my living wife and wrecked book of poetry and ability to write at all, I envied all those romantically inclined types who had the means—poetic, religious, or otherwise—of ecstatic transcendence. Mired to the end, I’d be, and then I’d die and cast it all off and go away, but until then, I was stuck on the ground, scratching my ass or whatever else itched. It had always been thus. I was not an ecstatic or a mystic. I had not one cell of that. When the time came, I’d find out where it all went by going there, but until then, I had nowhere to go but here, nothing to write about, when I could write, but dull, brute experience itself.

This frame of mind lasted long enough to get me to the lumberyard, where it immediately evaporated under the whirling press of exigencies, flapping side curls, scraps of paper with numbers written on them. After a couple of missed days, my vivid vacation in the foreign country of illness, the lumberyard struck me on returning as more strange and wondrous than ever before, these pasty fundamentalist Jews running around in their eighteenth-century stockings and fantastical hats, their glasses fogged with urgency having to do with drywall. I turned on my computer and kept my head down and did my work and told Yanti I was feeling much better, thanks. Today’s task was preparing vendor checks. As lowest man on the totem pole in Accounts Payable, most of the data-entry drudgery fell to me. I didn’t mind this. I had a heretofore untapped proficiency with a spreadsheet. I liked inserting numbers in boxes. The careful recording of monetary information soothed and interested me.

What I disliked was when I was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone at my elbow, which was never for me, but which I was expected to answer with the words, “J and B, Accounts Payable.” I was no receptionist. I had no “people skills.” But answer it I must, through gritted teeth. Today, it rang more than seemed possible. A glitch while I was out had caused a general grumbling and grousing among certain of our suppliers that I was expected to explain and fix. No sooner had I placated one unhappy vendor than another decided to tax my reserves of goodwill. Soon it would be time to do the payroll; I looked forward to payroll every two weeks the way Santa Claus must have looked forward to Christmas, if he’d existed. I loved preparing paychecks, loved the intimacy of everyone’s machine-punched time sheets, knowing everyone’s hourly wage. I enjoyed the secret warm feeling in my chest I got, making sure everyone was paid what he’d earned. But these vendors were another story. I secretly resented them with childish superstition, sure they were bilking the lumberyard, sure they were overcharging or rooking us. With quiet, steely efficiency, I dispatched their phone calls, thinking to myself as I did so, You rooster, you crook, you shyster, you nogoodnik, you shameless cheater.

At noon, I realized I had forgotten to bring a lunch. Getting sick, I had fallen out of the rhythms of my workaday life so easily. I left the lumberyard and headed for Marion’s house like a hungry homing pigeon who knows where to find some birdseed. I skidded up to her stoop, locked my bike to a street sign, and rang the bell, looking forward to seeing my old friend and eating her ever-present deli meats and cheeses on a baguette.

The door opened. Marion looked out. I almost didn’t recognize her. She wore eye makeup and no lipstick; she had had her hair cut shoulder length and dyed its former glossy chestnut. She wore something very flattering, I didn’t inspect it closely enough to determine what it was, but I had the overall impression that she’d gained a little weight and that she looked many years younger than the last time I’d seen her. Two months ago, she had been gorgeously wrecked, battered by Ike’s death, honed and lean and slightly mad looking. Now she looked smooth, and she even smelled different, more citrusy. I had a strong, sudden impression that she went out a lot these days; she was put together in that easy way of women who have a lot of dates and appointments.

When she saw me on her stoop, her expression changed, only slightly, but I caught it.

“Marion,” I said. “Hello, I haven’t seen you in so long.”

“I know,” she said. She neither smiled nor invited me in.

“Well,” I said, caught off guard. I had anticipated a sandwich, a chat, a cup of coffee. Marion had never once looked at me with such an expression before in all the years I’d known her. It felt like a dark, cold wind coming off a beloved tropical island. “I came by to say hello. How are you? You look great.”

“I’m on my way out,” she said. “I have an appointment in the city.”

I stood there staring at her for a moment. “Wait,” I said, “you’re angry at me.”

“No, I’m not,” she said.

“Because I haven’t been in touch.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she looked at me as if I were simpleminded and daft. We stood there, Marion impatient to be off and not trying very hard to hide it, and me, feeling guilty without knowing precisely why, as I seemed to do so often of late.

“Because of this mess with Luz?” I said. “I am sorry beyond words. It’s a nightmare.”

“I have to go,” she said. Her whole body hummed with gathering energy like a plane before it starts down the runway.

“Let’s meet later then. Tell me a time.”

She looked sideways up at the sky and clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Listen, walk me to the L. We can talk on the way.”

She shut and locked her door and started down the stairs. I left my bike where it was and fell into step beside her on the sidewalk. Neither of us spoke for a time.

“I’m sorry,” I said again after almost a block of this strange, tense silence.

“Why are you sorry? For what?” said this new, glamorous, voluptuous version of Marion without looking directly at me.

“I’m sure I did something,” I said. “You wouldn’t be angry otherwise.”

“No,” she said. “The thing is, I’m not angry at you. You haven’t done anything. You’ve been through hell. You’re still going through hell.”

“Well, I haven’t called you in a long time,” I said. “Maybe you feel I abandoned you.”

“You owe me nothing,” she said. “Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other’s company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: you owe me nothing. I mean it.”

“Still,” I said. “Let me apologize. I need to.”

We were dodging beautiful, intent kids with artful haircuts and either too-tight or too-baggy clothing, or both, going about their inscrutable business, kids who looked past us as if we weren’t there.

“It’s nothing you did,” said Marion. “In fact, it’s been a slight relief to have fallen out of touch with you for a couple of months. I’m weirdly traumatized by the whole thing with Luz. She’s told all our mutual friends about our supposed affair. Not one person has asked me whether or not Luz is telling the truth. Not one. So that’s what they all think of me. Good to know.”

I watched her face and said nothing. The added weight, or something, had smoothed her skin, made her look refreshed and dewy. Her hair fell around her cheeks. She had looked just like this about fifteen years before. I would have suspected a face-lift or other artificial measures, but I knew Marion too well to ever think she’d resort to expensive trickery to look young. She couldn’t afford it, and she’d never cared that much about aging.

Of course. She had a lover. That was it. I quailed a little at the thought. But I couldn’t be jealous; I didn’t feel that way about her. Maybe I was jealous
of
her, for having found someone new.

As we crossed Grand Street, I avoided stepping in a pile of dog shit. “I’m the one who brought this on you,” I said.

She laughed. “Harry! Stop with the hair shirt.”

“It’s grafted onto my torso.”

She turned toward me and looked at me for what felt like the first time in this entire conversation. “Maybe I should have been more careful about my claims on our friendship when Luz came along. Maybe I should have backed off a lot more than I did. I just assumed she knew it was pure friendship between you and me. I gave her too much credit for sanity. But I should have known better … I’ve been feeling guilty about it, like I brought it on us all somehow. Maybe my sister was right. I just kept right on acting the same toward you after you and Luz got married, same as always.”

“That’s nothing to feel guilty about,” I said. “I did the same thing, I didn’t change at all toward you when you and Ike got married, why should I? You and I are like family to each other.”

“It’s been so hard, these past months,” she said. “I mean it’s really been a kind of relief, not talking to you, although I’ve missed you and wondered how you were. But in those weeks after Luz lost it, every time I talked to you, I started having a small panic attack. Afterward, it would take me days to calm down. And I would walk through the streets, completely paranoid, expecting to be ignored or judged by people I had not long ago considered my friends and felt perfectly comfortable with. My dreams started turning dark and twisted. I felt like a pariah for something that wasn’t based in any kind of reality at all. Talking to you, even though it was very comforting on one level, somehow fueled all that and made it worse. I started questioning my actions, started feeling really terrible.”