The Astral (13 page)

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She pulled a cigarette and lighter from the outer pocket of her bag, lit up, and took a drag. “What a lot of silly melodrama. We’re all just a bunch of aging bohemians.”

I laughed. “Meet me later,” I said. “Let’s get a burger.”

“See you at Tom’s at seven,” she said.

I left Marion at the L stop and turned back toward the south side. I was tired, from leftover fatigue from the flu, stress, general unhappiness. I stopped in at a deli and bought a ham and cheese sandwich. I ate as I walked. The sun shone. The air glittered with surges of life renewing itself. Walking through the neighborhood I had lived in for more than three decades, I felt as if I were in a primitive imitation of a landscape almost recalled, in a spell of déjà vu, a neighborhood with near-semblance to a known place. But instead of giving way with a snap back to real time, the eerie almost-remembrance persisted. I was sure I had been here before.

Chapter Twelve

  T
om’s Alehouse was a down-home neighborhood joint on Bedford near McCarren Park, low ceilinged, dark, and generous with the food portions. Marion was in a two-seater booth in the back room when I got there. She already had a pint in front of her. I slid onto the high bench opposite her and eyed her beer with envy.

“How was your date?” I asked her, helping myself to a gulp. It was good to be back at Tom’s with Marion. It had been months.

“What date?” said Marion. “I had a shrink appointment.”

I set her glass back down with a thunk. “With Helen?”

“Harry!”

The dark-haired, Aussie-accented waitress appeared; I asked for a pint and a burger. Marion seconded the order.

“So you’re not seeing Helen?” I asked. “You promise?”

“Am I completely insane? Have I lost all reason? No and no. Therefore, I’m not seeing Helen. When Ike was seeing her during our troubles all those years ago, she demanded that I come in with him for a few sessions. Not for couples counseling, mind you. So she could set me straight about some things that I clearly didn’t understand. She had an agenda! I went nowhere near her, of course.”

“I know,” I said. “By the way, Luz is seeing her once a week.”

Our fresh beers arrived just as we collectively finished the first one. Marion lifted hers, stared at the foam on top, and set it back down again.

“So Luz is seeing Helen,” she said with unhappy resignation.

“I think so, yes,” I said. “Also, I’ve moved back into the Astral.”

“What?” She looked shocked. “Are you two back together, then?”

“I’m in a shitty little studio many floors down. She isn’t speaking to me. So no, we’re not back together. But I figure I’m showing her something she needs to know.”

“Harry! Maybe you have lost all reason. Why did you go back?”

“Because I got thrown out of where I was before.” I told her about Zeldah, Camille, and my supposed potential transgression.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “So many people are so scared of other people’s desires and lusts. Right before I had the affair with James, I think, in retrospect, I wanted to leave Ike, but I didn’t know it, I couldn’t face it. So I started drinking too much and flirting with everyone. I think I was directing all my frustrations outward to avoid admitting that to myself. So I slept with James, who was just as lonely and unhappy as I was. We were a match and dry kindling. The affair was inevitable, looking back. Stupid, but inevitable. And afterward, Ike was perfectly sane and rational about the entire thing. It made me love and respect him even more. Lisa, on the other hand, was a screeching harpy.”

“She forgave James easily enough,” I said. “It was you she couldn’t tolerate.”

Marion gave me an impatient look. “The point is, when someone is thinking of leaving a marriage, sometimes they have to create a huge disturbance in the fabric, behave destructively, run amok in some way, to rip open an escape hatch. No one seems to understand this but those of us who have been through it. Anyway, I was talking about Luz today with my entirely legitimate therapist, thinking about why she threw you out.”

“She didn’t drink too much or flirt with anyone.”

“No, not at all,” said Marion. “She imploded, I exploded. It’s much less socially damaging in the long run to implode, but it’s harder to identify when it’s happening, so it’s potentially more dangerous. It’s like she had a tumor growing somewhere deep and hidden, whereas with me, it was all on the surface, like a violent allergic rash. Less toxic and deadly in the long run, but much more unsightly, short-term.”

“She watches and waits,” I said.

“And judges and concludes,” said Marion. “And persecutes you for thought crimes.”

“Exactly.” I laughed. “My marriage was like a court of law in which I was always guilty, but I didn’t exactly know why. A court of law in a Kafka novel.”

“I never liked Luz,” Marion said. “That’s not something I ever admitted to anyone before now, even myself, but I can admit it now, because of all this. I never liked her. It’s a horrible thing to say, it sounds so snobbish and superior, but I never considered her my equal, or yours, frankly. Not because she’s not smart, she is smart, but she’s not at all … imaginative or interesting. Or maybe it’s that she has no capacity for joy or wildness. It’s not snobbery, I assure you. I just don’t like her, in my gut. I always thought she was a cold bitch, and worst of all, untrustworthy—”

“Luz?” I said, amazed.

“Let’s leave aside for now the fact that she eavesdropped on our conversations and read your private work and our correspondence,” she said.

“All’s fair in love and war,” I said. “She thought I was cheating on her.”

“I disagree!” said Marion. “No one has the right to spy on another person. No one. I never would have spied on Ike, no matter what. Maybe it’s just that I had too much pride, and too much respect for him and myself and our marriage. I would have asked him directly. No, it’s more than that with Luz. The crux of it is, I don’t trust someone with such a misleading, carefully controlled exterior who’s volcanically angry inside, totally lacking in self-knowledge, and compensating for her blindness toward herself with wacky suspicions and theories. Which ought to make me feel sorry for her, but I hate her guts as much as she apparently hates mine. Which is not fun. I don’t enjoy hating anyone. I feel like this was forced on me. Or something. Am I ranting?”

“Yes,” I said. “I love Luz. She’s my wife. No matter how right you may be about a lot of this, you’re missing how vulnerable she is, and how these things come out of self-protectiveness. She’s been badly hurt, by her father when she was little, and by me when I slept with Samantha.”

“Luz and Lisa,” said Marion, as if she were listing species of household vermin. “They try to achieve power they don’t otherwise have by terrorizing their husbands, vilifying other women as evil predators, and portraying themselves as the innocent, wronged victims of their spineless husband and some femme fatale.”

“Spineless,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling. No matter what she was going on about, Marion amused me with her hotheaded rants; I never paid strict attention to the thrust of them. She was always half right. “Thanks a lot.”

“I walked by Lisa on the street the other day,” said Marion. “After all these years, she still stares at me all bug-eyed and moonfaced and tragic as if I had killed her puppy, as if I had strangled her newborn baby in its sleep. And what did I do? I slept with her poor, sex-starved husband, and then I sent him back to her and walked away without another word. Meanwhile, she had an affair herself. How can she be so hypocritical?”

“I think most people would prefer to keep their spouses to themselves, Marion,” I said. “To play devil’s advocate for one moment, I think most people take umbrage when someone else borrows their husband for sexual purposes. And it’s only human to want vengeance when someone wrongs you, isn’t it? To tell everyone about it.”

“Vengeance, victimization, wronging, it’s all psychodrama,” said Marion.

“Very human emotions, some might say,” I said, knowing this would only egg her on.

“If someone has an affair,” Marion shot back, “either the marriage is over and the person wants out, or there’s a big problem in the marriage that needs to be addressed. Either way, it’s between the two or three or four people involved and no one else. Lisa shamed Ike by telling everyone. He was the one she really punished. If she hadn’t said anything, we could have all moved on in private.”

“So what would you have done if Ike had had an affair?” I asked.

“I would have been wildly hurt and sad, of course, because I loved him, maybe even heartbroken if I thought he loved her. But I would have understood, or at least, I would have tried to. I would have tried to figure out my own part in it all. That’s what you do when you truly love someone, not beat your chest and rend your garments and accuse and demand retribution. The woman he was involved with would have been beside the point, whether or not I knew her, whoever the hell she was. The other woman is always beside the point. And this notion that I’m predatory is so fucking childish, like I’m the big bad wolf in a fairy tale. Ridiculous. Lisa is a redheaded troll.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “ ‘Redheaded’ is a pejorative?”

“Your hair is white.”

“It was not always thus,” I said. “And I also tend to bristle at the phrase ‘spineless husband.’ No matter what you may think, I moved back to the Astral with every good intention in the world. My part in this is voluntary and conscious. No matter how crazy she seems, I’m choosing to engage with Luz in all of this. I want to try to convince her to let me come back. This isn’t passivity or resignation, Marion, it’s what I want to do. It feels like the only course of action I can take.”

“Good luck with that,” she said with wry skepticism.

“I need it,” I said.

We addressed ourselves with enthusiasm and focus to our hamburgers when they arrived.

As I ate, I remembered a hot, bright early Saturday evening last July. Marion had invited Luz and me over for dinner in her backyard. She and Luz hadn’t seen each other in almost two months. As Luz and I walked from the Astral along the waterfront to the south side, we were mostly silent. I felt as if she was lording something over me, something I didn’t know I’d done, and my instant reaction, wrongly or rightly, was resentment. So I clammed up. We didn’t say much as we stumped along. No doubt my silence fed into her idea that I didn’t care about her, that I was a selfish lout who took her for granted and ignored her.

When we got to Marion’s, I let Luz go up the stairs first and came up behind her. Luz rang the bell and stood looking off down the street. The hardness of her expression, so set, so stony and implacable, infuriated me; I fully believed I had done nothing to deserve it. I felt innocent and beleaguered and righteously nettled.

Marion answered the door looking pale and thin. “Hello!” she said.

“Hello,” said Luz with cool formality.

Marion was an old, close family friend who’d just been widowed; was this the best my wife could do?

As a sort of well-intentioned corrective, I embraced Marion with all the affection Luz had withheld from her. “Marion, hello,” I said with exactly as much warmth as I felt. “You look beautiful.”

“I look half dead,” she said. “Come on in, you two, it’s so good to see you. Especially you, Luz! It’s been so long, I’ve missed you.”

We sat on Marion’s patio and drank wine while she fiddled with her gas grill.

“Ike used to grill,” she said. “It was his thing, I was never allowed to. So this summer, I’ve taken it upon myself to master the damned thing, sort of in homage to his memory, sort of in bereaved defiance. It’s amazing how grief can be subsumed by grievance if I let it.”

I laughed, Luz didn’t. I could feel her bridling in defense of poor dead Ike.

“How’s work, Luz?” Marion asked with oblivious cheer.

“Lots of trouble,” said Luz. “I don’t mean the patients. There’s a doctor we think is stealing Dilaudid because he’s addicted to it, and we have to report him. One of the orderlies tried to commit suicide the other night and was brought into the ER by his wife. My friend was on that night, she knows him well, she said he was completely out of it, he didn’t recognize her. They pumped his stomach and sent him to psychiatric and he’s under observation.”

“Good lord,” said Marion. “That’s awful.”

“It’s terrible,” said Luz. “For one thing, it makes me so frustrated when things aren’t going right. I want to correct it all, but I can’t, and I find that more stressful than anything really.”

“I know you do,” said Marion. “You hate things you can’t control.”

“And it’s not just those things,” said Luz. “There are other random things that add up to even more stress in an already stressful job. I wonder what’s going on.”

“Mercury in retrograde?” said Marion, smiling.

Luz didn’t answer. She thought belief in astrology was a heathen superstition. To Marion, it was a playfully ironic lark. There was nothing I could say to solve this, short of revealing to both of them the extent of their misunderstanding, which I had no interest in doing.

I stood up and excused myself and went inside to the bathroom. I concluded my business and loitered there as the toilet tank refilled, reluctant to go back outside, but not sure why. The toilet tank topped up and fell silent, and then I heard voices. The open bathroom window looked out into the yard.

“Really, Luz, I had no idea,” Marion was saying. “It’s been so long, I figured everything was okay.”

“I’ve never really gotten over it,” Luz said. “I’m still so angry! Sometimes I think, what am I still doing with Harry?”

“Really?” Marion sounded surprised. “But you two are—”

“Maybe,” Luz said, “we could have lunch sometime and talk about it.”

“Maybe,” said Marion without conviction.

At the time, that night, I was surprised that Luz would turn to Marion, my oldest and closest friend, who had had an affair of her own, to talk to about her lingering resentment of my own affair. Now that I knew that she had already thought Marion and I were involved, I could only think that her obsessively intense envy of Marion had made her want to insert herself into our supposed affair and hijack it. I could understand this if I squinted and looked at it a certain way.

But back then, I knew nothing at all. When I went back outside, the salmon was on a platter and the grill was off. We sat at the table on the patio and helped ourselves to the grilled fish and passed bowls of cold salads, platters of grilled peppers and portobello mushroom caps. We opened a third bottle of wine; things had become almost pleasantly hazy. The night was warm, the food was good, and we all knew one another well, no matter what was going on under the surface. In my usual confrontation-loathing way, I decided to believe that everything was all right. Luz had mouthed off to Marion about me just now, but she said such things all the time to her sisters, and they to her. There was no heat behind any of it. Women liked to bond by complaining about their husbands. We weren’t perfect; they had a lot to complain about. So be it. I let it go and stretched my legs out under the table.