The Astral (14 page)

The night air was tinged with a fuzzy electric-yellow light from streetlamps and smelled of starter fluid from hibachis in nearby yards, wet earth and grass from Marion’s yard, and grilled fish. The air itself had dimension and depth. I began tinkering with my newest crown sonnet in my mind as I watched that acid-ochre light play on the faces of the two real women I loved most, Marion’s fair-skinned, bony face fretted with fine wrinkles, her long, swooping nose, deep-set eyes, and slightly craggy brow, Luz’s olive-skinned face, dotted with velvety moles, her blunt rounded nose and black eyes under a smooth, rounded brow. They were as different looking as two women could be. I appreciated the contrasts between them.

But I wasn’t writing a poem about either one of them. I’d fashioned its subject out of whole cloth. Like the other women I was purportedly writing to and about, she didn’t exist anywhere but my imagination. I was wrestling with the final couplet of the sonnet, which now went, “And so your body holds not one life, but two: / That of your past, and that of my love for you.” I knew it was bad. I knew, in fact, that it was embarrassingly puerile, but I couldn’t think of another way to get at what I was trying to say about the imagined sexual love of the speaker for his middle-aged mistress. I pictured him as a long-married man, like me; all of the narrators in these poems were imaginary, as well. I imagined their love affair as long-standing, clandestine, fraught with urgency. She seemed to be falling out of love with him, and he wrote the poem to try to woo her back, to convince her that ending the affair would cause more harm than good, and anyway, she was bound to him because he loved her so much. He was writing, in effect, a profane, erotic ode to her aging and beloved body.

When Luz went inside to use the toilet, I knew that she would be able to hear everything Marion and I said. She would immediately put together the fact that I had likewise overheard what she and Marion had said earlier while I was in there. This would be useful to me on the way home. I was planning to tell her what I’d overheard, and then she’d have to admit that my affair was still bothering her, and then I could reassure her, and then all would be well.

“Harry,” said Marion when Luz had gone inside. “Is everything all right with you two?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because Luz seems out of sorts. It could be the trouble at work. But I thought I’d check with you. It’s none of my business, but I’m concerned.”

I could sense Luz inside Marion’s house, sitting there on the toilet, listening.

“She’s barely speaking to me, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“Yeah, that was kind of what I meant.”

“She goes through these times,” I said. “I can’t do anything if she won’t tell me what’s pissing her off. So I wait.”

“Maybe you should take some sort of action,” said Marion.

I was too mellow, too hazy with wine and food to feel alarmed by any of it. I was amused; what could Marion possibly know about what was going on with Luz when she almost never saw her? I lived with Luz every day. I would know if something was seriously amiss. “Marion, she’s not acting any differently from how’s she’s acted for almost thirty years. She’ll come around, she always does. I think you’re projecting.”

“Maybe,” said Marion. “Maybe not. I wouldn’t say anything, but you’re my best friend, Harry.”

“I’m not at all offended,” I said.

“Good,” said Marion. “I also wanted to say that—”

Just then, Luz came back outside and sat in her chair and took a sip of wine. “Sorry,” she said into the abrupt silence. “Am I interrupting a conversation?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Marion’s worried about us. She’s worried that you’re really angry at me this time.”

“This time,” said Luz. “This time?”

“Of course,” said Marion, standing up and beginning to clear plates, “it’s really none of my beeswax. Wait here, I’ll get dessert.” She went in.

“I overheard everything you two said just now,” said Luz.

“Likewise, when I was inside,” I said. “Every word.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then you knew I could hear you!”

She laughed. The sound of her laughter, so rare and refreshing, gave me a warm internal detonation.

“I can’t believe you missed a trick,” I said.

She laughed again and put down her weapons. And so, once again, things failed to come to a head, to burst out into the open air between us. For the rest of the night—during dessert, then a nightcap—we seemed to be friends again, my wife and I. She seemed warmer toward Marion, too. Something in what she had overheard had made her so, but I had no idea what it was.

On the long walk home, I said, “So why haven’t you been speaking to me? What have I done?”

“Forget it,” she said, yawning. “I’m too tired, let’s just go home.”

“And so to bed,” I said. I shouldn’t have let it go. Two blocks passed as we walked along. Instead of drawing my wife out, instead of adamantly refusing to collude in her silent condemnation of me anymore, I was still thinking about that damned final couplet. I had mentally thrown out the old one during dinner and was suddenly alight with an idea for something much better. He had nothing to give her but his body and their long history together; nothing to offer but more clandestine sex, but that had to be enough, or a part of him would die.

“Harry,” said Luz in that clipped way she had when she felt neglected, “what are you thinking about?”

“The poem I’m working on.”

“When can I read your new book?”

“When it’s finished,” I said.

“So,” she said. “What are the new poems about?”

“They’re dramatic monologues,” I said. “Men speaking to the women they love. Everyone is imaginary.”

“Ah,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t really listening.

Out of a long-standing reluctance to discuss my work in progress with my wife, I then failed to repeat and impress on her the absolutely, purely imaginary nature of the women in my poems. This was the only time I talked to her about it. When she opened and read the book months later without my knowledge or consent, she immediately leapt to the wrong conclusion, possibly understandably, possibly not. And so, the next time we talked about my book of sonnets to imaginary women, it had already been destroyed, and Luz had thrown my computer from our window onto the sidewalk below. She told me I was having an affair with Marion and demanded that I move out.

It was too late then to tell her what I could have told her, simply and directly, that night. And if I had, everything might have turned out very differently. I would never know.

“Remember that night last summer?” I said now to Marion as she dredged a french fry in a puddle of ketchup. “When Luz and I came over for dinner? Luz asked you to lunch while I was in the bathroom. I overheard her. She wanted to talk about our problems. She said something like, ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’m still doing with Harry.’ ”

“I remember that night well,” said Marion. “I tried to warn you there was something going on with her.”

“Did you ever have that lunch?”

“We never did,” said Marion. “She called me the following week, and I said I was busy and couldn’t. It didn’t seem loyal to you. I was never friends with Luz like that, one-on-one. I didn’t understand why she wanted to start that, suddenly. And to be frank, I had no interest.”

“Why do you think she asked you?”

“Why? It’s obvious. She wanted to discuss your marriage with me so that I’d somehow accidentally reveal in some way that you and I were involved.”

“I should have been more attentive to her,” I said. “I should have tried harder to tell her things. I wasn’t the most forthcoming person, either.”

“Harry! Stop it. I mean it. Anything you’d said to her would have been used against you. Maybe it’s nothing you did. Maybe she simply knew that you didn’t love her anymore, and that’s what drove her around the bend. She trumped up this whole melodrama about you and me to forklift you out. Instead of being direct, she had to create a big mess.”

“But I do still love Luz,” I said. “You know I do.”

Marion didn’t answer, just gave me a look I knew well, a wiseass combination of empathy, condescension, and ironic amusement.

“I just remembered one of my sonnets,” I said. “The whole thing just came back to me, while I was eating.”

“Recite it,” she said, “right now. I’ll write it down so you don’t forget it again.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, taking a pen out of her bag and aligning an unused napkin in front of her as if it were a piece of paper. “Come on, Harry.”

With self-conscious impatience, I said the thing out loud while Marion scribbled it down.

The quickening years have late outdistanced you
,

And now they bring your ripened flesh to bear

On all that would arouse us, once taboo
,

Now seems to you a futureless affair
.

Under every tree that bears sick fruit
,

In every paradise whose walls exclude
,

Desire will plant a parched and furtive root

No matter how our sanctioned lives intrude
.

How true it is—we’re softer and more wrinkled:

Every body bears the marks of age
.

Love only knows the stars have always twinkled
,

And all the rest is commonplace outrage
.

My love, I have nothing more to give
.

Return to our old bed so I may live
.

“Good lord,” said Marion as she wrote the final line, “no wonder she threw you out! ‘Return to our old bed so I may live’ indeed.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s pretty damned incriminating if you don’t know the woman isn’t real.”

“If she thought it was me you wrote it to, no wonder she believes we’ve been having an affair for years.” She looked down at what she’d written. “I like this,” she said. “It’s good. I like the ‘sick fruit’ and the twisted Garden of Eden theme.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “I’m using that in this new thing I’m writing. The Garden of Eden is the Astral. Luz is Eve, and the apple is this book of sonnets.”

“Who is the snake?” Marion asked with a sidelong gleam of laughter. “Me?”

I laughed too. “Not at all,” I said. “The snake is figurative. The snake is Luz’s insecurity and fear. The snake is the obsessive suspicion that made her spy on us, that tempted her to read my book without permission.”

“And destroy it,” said Marion. “God damn her. Can you remember the other sonnets and reconstruct the book?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. The book is gone.”

The waitress came and took away our empty plates and an order for another round. One old, maudlin country and western song after another had been playing on the jukebox, tingeing our entire conversation like a heart-wrenching, tear-stained movie sound track. I hadn’t realized this, but when an old punk standard came on, the Ramones in fine fettle, I perked up and sat up a bit straighter on the hard wooden banquette.

“Were you really in love with James?” I asked her.

She cocked her head at me. “I was indeed, for about two weeks back there during a strange, dark, and terrible time in my marriage. Why do you ask?”

“James,” I said. “I don’t know. He doesn’t strike me as your type.”

She was watching me closely. “Why not?”

“He just doesn’t.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I don’t know why I have to have a type. What’s the matter, Harry, are you jealous?”

This flirtatious question seemed to come out of nowhere, shot like an arrow from darkness to pierce the ancient scrim of our friendship. It startled me. “Jealous of whom?” I said. “I’m not possessive of James. I can share him.”

She was still watching me. She didn’t laugh. “Come on, let’s just say it,” she said. “Just once, and then we walk out of here and never bring it up again or even think about it. Let’s clear the air, though. We need it after all this nonsense, Harry. Luz is crazy, yes, because we have never once breached her trust, but I think she’s put her finger on something that’s always been there, and it wouldn’t kill us, or our famously platonic multidecade friendship, to pick it up and look at it, just once.”

My heart did a slow thudding thing and I was suddenly in a cold sweat. “Okay,” I said. “Fine. All those years ago when we were young and single and ready to fall in love, what kept us from it?”

“I’ll go even further,” said Marion. “Why did we not marry each other? We’re so compatible, so much alike, and so well suited to each other’s habits and ways of seeing the world. Why did we marry two people so different from us? Would we have been happier together?”

“We’ll never know,” I said. “We might have made each other miserable.”

“I wonder,” she said. “I’ve never let myself wonder before. There’s an almost familial taboo in my mind where you’re concerned, there always has been, a serious
NO TRESPASSING
sign on the door marked ‘Harry.’ ”

“Me too,” I said. “So much so that I’ve never even thought of you that way.”

“You mean sexually.”

“Right,” I said. “And it’s not that I don’t think you’re beautiful. Somehow … I have always been so comfortable being your friend. I’ve never had that curiosity about you that I had when I met Luz, the burning urge to uncover her. You and I are open books to each other.”

“We are,” she said. “Indeed. I knew you immediately when I met you. I mean you and I are … we’re like birds of a feather, we’re allies, our souls are fraternal. But some people marry their soul mates. Some people aren’t afraid to be so known and seen and understood by their spouse.”

“You think we were afraid of each other?”

“We were afraid of ourselves.”

“Who’s writing this dialogue?” I said. Neither of us laughed. Our new pints of foamy beer arrived. We each took a good pull and set them back down at the same identical instant. “Have we talked enough about this?” I said.