The Astral (16 page)

“Me, too,” I said.

“So you’re a long way from Bushwick, coming by here.”

“I don’t live there anymore,” I said. “Her daughter came back a couple weeks ago, and Zeldah felt it was better for everyone if I moved along.”

“Because of the daughter,” said George, as if he understood everything.

“So guess where I live now? The Astral. Right downstairs from my wife. She’s on the top floor, I’m on the second floor. I never see her, but I know she’s there.”

“Men living alone,” said George. “Happiest people in the world.”

“Not necessarily.”

Karina came in on a gust of warm early evening. Before the door shut behind her, I could see outside that the air was glowing the pale peach-gold of almost sunset. I caught a whiff of tree blossoms from somewhere, then the door sealed us all off from anything natural or salubrious.

“Hello, sweetheart,” I said as she alighted on the stool next to me. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Her red hair was newly cut in a pixie; she looked very young and fresh faced. “You look very pretty.”

“Is that your daughter?” Mary cooed. “Isn’t she cute.”

“Karina,” I said, “meet the ladies. Mary, Sue, Cindy.”

“Nice to meet you, darling,” said Cindy.

Karina waved at them all and turned to me. “I just saw Mom.” She paused, as if she was mulling over how to tell me something that would upset me.

“Spit it out,” I said. “She met someone else?”

Karina shook her head, but she kept her eyes straight ahead.

“Which means yes,” I said, “but you’re too kind to tell me.”

“I don’t know, actually,” she said. “No, it’s something else.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“I brought you a phone,” she told me. She held out a cell phone and shook it at me insistently, willing me to accept it. “I paid for a month of calls for you, and then you’re on your own. I got you a good plan. Please take it, Dad. Don’t be such a Luddite.”

I ignored the phone, too distraught to acknowledge her generosity and thoughtfulness. “What is it, about your mother?”

She set the phone on the bar next to my glass. “First of all,” she said, “I found some people who can tell us about this cult Hector’s in and help us get him out. I told Mom exactly what I’m about to tell you: we have to do this as a family. It’s the only way it will work, that’s what they told me. She agreed to go to a meeting with them even though I said you had to be there, too. She said to tell you she won’t look at you or speak to you, but she’ll go. She’ll do anything for Hector, no matter how mad at him she is. They live in Queens. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night at seven. She’ll take the bus from work and meet us there.”

I could hardly hear when she was saying. “Tell me the rest,” I said.

She sighed. “She’s losing her job.”

“What? She’s been there for more than thirty years!”

“The hospital’s closing. They’ve gone bankrupt or something. Everyone has to go.”

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, trying not to hyperventilate with alarm. “That job is everything to her. She loves it there, it’s her second home.”

“Dad, she’ll find another job, she’s a nurse. But you’re right, she’s not doing well at all. This is the last thing she needs.”

“She must be having a nervous breakdown about the hospital!” I said.

“She’s heartbroken,” said Karina.

I couldn’t respond to this. There was nothing I could say.

Karina gave me a sidelong look and asked, “What’s going on with Marion these days?”

“I just saw her yesterday for the first time in two months. She’s doing very well.”

“Mom is totally obsessed with her. I mean obsessed.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Still?”

“As much as ever. Maybe more. She’s started mentally going over all her memories of dinners and parties and other times where you were all together, through the years. She’s analyzing all these memories for clues, for things she feels she ignored or missed at the time. And guess what? She’s decided you guys got involved about fifteen years ago and were having an affair all this time.”

“What?”

“She is absolutely sure of it. Positive. She can hardly function.”

“I can see why, if it means questioning fifteen years of a seemingly happy marriage. What makes her think this? What got her onto this?”

“Well,” said Karina, “at one point, about three weeks ago, Mom was almost ready to believe you.”

“No,” I said. I almost couldn’t bear to hear this. “No.”

“I’ve encouraged her in this direction all along. I’ve always said I don’t think you two were ever involved. I think she started to listen to me. I told Mom I really believe that you love her.”

“I do,” I said on a wave of irrational, childish hope that this story would have a better ending than the brutal one I knew was coming. “I love her. I always have, I always will.”

“She went to Helen, her therapist, and said that she had found a letter Marion wrote to you when she was in France, right after Ike died, saying how glad she was that you were such a good friend to her and how glad she was to have a close male friend who had always been like a brother to her, like family. She actually wrote that she was glad there had never been any romance between you.”

“I remember that letter!” I said. “Oh God, she found it?”

“She called me and read it to me and I said, ‘Sounds like they’re telling the truth, Mom.’ She agreed.”

I almost levitated in my seat with terrified joy. “And?”

“She went in and told Helen about it and Helen said, ‘What if they planted that letter to throw you off?’ Helen is sure you two are having an affair and have been for a long time. She told Mom to proceed on that assumption, that to think otherwise is naïve and irrational.”

“Are you serious?”

“Mom likes her. She thinks she’s dark. A maverick.”

“Dark mavericks make great bookies,” I said. “Palm readers, magicians. Not therapists! Never!”

“I’m afraid when she loses her job she’ll go over the edge.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. Then I said, “Does she know I’m living right downstairs from her?”

“She does now. She thought you and Marion were still living together. She almost didn’t believe me when I told her about Zeldah. I swore it. And also swore that you’re back in the Astral. She thinks it’s a trick, she thinks you’re up to something. She asked if you and Zeldah were lovers. I swear to God, Dad, she’s losing it.”

“I would say she needed therapy,” I said, talking lightly although I was distressed and shattered. “But therapy seems to be her undoing. Thank you, George, bless you, in fact,” I added as he set a fresh round in front of me. “ ‘The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; / Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. / For nothing now can ever come to any good.’ ”

“Did you write that?” Karina asked. I couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or put off.

“I wish I had,” I said. “Karina, Karina, I don’t know what to do. God, I miss your mother. I saw her yesterday morning, and she wouldn’t speak to me.”

“I know she misses you, too,” said Karina. Her face looked pinched and wizened. “I know she does, it’s just her pride, and the things Helen tells her, that won’t let her admit she’s wrong.”

“I wish I could sue that crazy quack,” I said. “There should be laws against this sort of therapist. Why aren’t there laws?”

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” said Karina. “I didn’t want to. It’s hard to be the go-between.”

“How is it that this woman is given such power over other people’s lives? She’s a sociopath! She’s dangerous!”

“Dad, stop, calm down.”

“Please tell your mother Helen’s wrong. It’s all imaginary, and this crazy shrink is reinforcing all her paranoia.” I balled my hands into fists and socked my own thighs. “I can’t stand this.”

“Dad, Dad,” said Karina.

“I have to do something.”

“You can’t do anything.”

“She was ready to forgive me? She believed me? Do you think she would have taken me back?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” said Karina. Her voice sounded cracked.

Finally, it dawned on me that I was upsetting my daughter. “I’m sorry,” I said.

A few yards down, George leaned against the bar, his arms folded as he listened to the magpies twitter and caw, his face a mask of ashen solitude that admitted neither passion nor yearning. I envied him with all I had.

Chapter Fourteen

  U
sing my new cell phone, I called Helen’s office number the next morning and told her voice mail I needed to see her as soon as possible. She called back within the hour and gave me an appointment that same day, at five o’clock. On the phone, her voice sounded businesslike enough, revealing nothing.

I arranged to leave the lumberyard early and spent the day rehearsing what I would say to her. My plan was to spend the entire fifty minutes putting her on trial and convicting her of her unbelievable heinousness. At the end, I would inform her that I wasn’t going to pay her for the time because she owed it to me; it was the least she could do after ruining my life and my marriage and my wife’s life. Then I would walk out, my job done.

Her office was in the West Village. I walked through the small marble lobby and rode the little jewel box of an elevator up to the sixth floor. I found the door marked “Helen Vollmann, M.S.W.” and went in and sat in one of the armchairs in her tiny waiting room. I was five minutes early. While I waited, I examined the framed
New Yorker
covers on the wall, touched the potted succulent, and determined that it was artificial, and turned off the noise machine in order to eavesdrop on whichever client was in with her. I couldn’t hear anything, so I turned it back on. I yawned and scratched my earlobe and stared hard at the most odiously whimsical of the
New Yorker
covers, a pigtailed little girl on roller skates gliding through the Metropolitan Museum, gazing up at an empty suit of armor.

I was well aware of the fact that every one of Helen’s clients saw her voluntarily, knowing full well that everyone else they knew was seeing her, too. This didn’t excuse anything, it just made me even more wary of her. My friends were not stupid or naïve people. Any harm Helen caused couldn’t have come about if they hadn’t all given her so much power. And these many crimes I wanted to accuse her of were no doubt justified, as far as she was concerned, by the fact that her self-romanticizing professional unconventionality put her beyond the normal ethical boundaries of therapy, such as they were, and allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted. This must have been the thing they all liked so much about her.

But, naïve as it may have been to feel this way, it truly shocked me that Helen had commanded Luz to disregard irrefutable evidence to the contrary and to persist in believing that Marion and I were sleeping together. And it had always shocked me that Helen had agreed to see an entire group of friends, including several sets of married couples, as well as people they’d been involved with before they got married and others who had had affairs with members of these couples. Obviously, she was a bat out of hell, and someone had to stop her.

When Helen’s door opened and she came out and introduced herself and shook my hand, I was flustered and surprised. I wasn’t sure what I had expected her to look like, maybe Morticia Addams crossed with Joan Crawford with a dash of Lizzie Borden; whatever I’d expected, this was decidedly not it. She turned out to be an ordinary-looking woman with a helmet of coiffed blond hair, neither stout nor thin, a plain, pleasantly shrewd face, about my own age, but better preserved than I was. She wore a white blouse under a black suit whose skirt reached her knees, a turquoise bracelet, and gold earrings. Her shoes were plain black pumps. So far, she was an exact replica of more than half the therapists within a five-mile radius. No doubt this was one way she inspired confidence: she looked like a therapist, she decorated like a therapist, therefore …

“Have a seat, Harry,” she said, indicating the black leather couch across from the ergonomic chair with padded headrest into which she slid. I eased myself onto the couch, which gave a little gasp as I displaced a pocket of air beneath my rump.

The showdown was at hand.

“So,” she said, leaning forward to look intently at me and clasping her hands around her kneecaps, “what brings you here today?” I noticed a furrow between her eyes, slight dewlaps around her mouth, and was comforted.

“Where do I begin?” I said. “I hardly know.”

“Most people who first come to see me do so because of a crisis,” she said with businesslike concern. “Maybe this is true of you.”

“You know who I am,” I said. “And you know what crisis happened in my life recently.”

Her face took on a skeptical, disapproving, mildly kvetchy expression. “So you have indeed experienced a crisis.”

“Cut the crap, Helen. My wife sees you, half my friends see you, my ex-lover sees you. You know exactly who I am.”

She looked at me. The sour expression deepened. I didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t here to impress her. I stared back at her with equally sour disapproval on my own face.

When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to say anything, something detonated in my head. My skull pulsed with my heartbeat. The silence lengthened. It ballooned, expanded, grew tipsy, and collapsed in on itself.

“What brings me here today,” I said, “is the need to take your turkey neck between my two hands and twist it till you fall limp as a rag doll.”

Her nostrils stretched themselves wide, but except for that, she didn’t move or react.

“ ‘Limp as a rag doll’ is a cliché,” I said, my eyes white-hot, my heart beating too hard. “I apologize for that. How tedious of me.”

“Clichés can be useful,” she said, reaching with casual slowness for the cordless phone on the table. “That one is particularly vivid.”

My left arm morphed into a serpent and slithered to the phone and wrapped itself around it, retracted it, and shoved it down my shirt. “No, you don’t,” I said. “You’re going to answer for what you’ve done.”

“You are out of control,” she said. “Please leave my office.”

“What you’ve done,” I said, “is not answerable, so I’m not sure how this will go. The rag doll comes to mind again.”

She had not reacted to me or shifted in her chair or even changed her expression very much. I strongly suspected that she perceived me as an unfortunate consequence of the kind of therapeutic work she did as a dark, edgy maverick, nothing more. Through her eyes, I saw myself: deranged, unhinged, someone to be coolly managed and turned over to the authorities.

“I can feel how angry you are,” she said.

“Wow, you must be a genius,” I said.

“And threatening me isn’t going to help you. Hurting or killing me isn’t going to help you, because you’d have to suffer the consequences.”

I almost laughed, but kept myself in check because once I started, I wasn’t sure I could stop. “Consequences?” I said. “I’d happily get ass-raped for forty years in a maximum-security prison as a reward for strangling you till you squawk. It’s not a deterrent, believe me.”

“Ah, yes, ass-raping,” she said. “Let’s talk about your happiness at the idea. Some people crave it, more than you would think. Some people secretly want it so badly, they’re willing to do anything at all so they can finally surrender to it. Whether it’s a cock, a dildo, or a vegetable, they want something shoved up their ass, if only they could bring themselves to ask someone to do it to them. Most middle-aged, heterosexual married men feel this way, Harry, it’s not abnormal at all. It’s a craving for domination, variety, for someone else to wield the cock for a change. It’s something that happens in midlife … men become more feminine, they get in touch with their animas. I think what you’re doing here might have everything to do with your desire to explore your deep, unconscious need to get ass-raped. It has nothing to do with me, or your wife. I think it could be very rewarding for you to explore this here. I could help you uncover the urges and unfulfilled needs that brought you here.”

“So this is how you work,” I said. We were talking in conversational tones, with something that resembled gentleness and civility but wasn’t either of those things. “My need to have a dildo shoved up my ass! Yes! That must be exactly why I’m here. Never mind the fact that you wrecked my already damaged marriage and pushed my poor wife even further over the edge. I need a good sodomizing! I can see why everyone’s so enthralled by you. You’re dark and irreverent and original. I am impressed.”

“Are you?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Absolutely brilliant. Avant-garde. I’m waiting for you to offer to whip out a dildo and therapeutically shove it up my ass.”

“Yes,” she said. “Interesting. I wonder where this hostility toward women comes from.”

“Not women,” I said. “Just you.”

“Your mother was probably undemonstrative, withholding. But she was powerful, too. She kept you in a state of always wanting more. You most likely have never forgiven her for it.”

She had scored a bull’s-eye. I knew she could tell. But so what? Luz had probably told her all this.

“And now it’s your turn,” I said. “And it’s harder for me to read you, because I don’t have your friends and your wife as my clients, so I don’t know anything about you except what I can see for myself. And you know what? I can see plenty. You are fucked-up sexually and otherwise. Maybe someone molested you, but I doubt it, you’re more twisted than that. It has to be more complicated. I think your mother trapped you in a psychosexual spiderweb. She damaged you with her neediness and her guilt-trips, as you shrinks call them. You have never entirely gotten free of her, even though she’s very likely dead by now, since you’re no spring chicken yourself.”

She had nothing to say to any of this; I paused, just in case.

“Also,” I went on, “judging by the dry, lonely look around your mouth, I have a feeling that you wanted kids of your own and couldn’t have them and were too narcissistic and stubborn to adopt. You’ve been unlucky in love, too. You choose losers and snakes. And you give yourself to them, become their slaves, and they cheat on you. All of them. You have it in for cheaters, you think everyone cheats as a matter of course just because you’re always betrayed. And you probably get dumped by them all, too, and don’t see it coming, even now after all these years. And you’ll fall for another shithead, maybe on a singles cruise next fall, maybe you’ll pick him up in a bar, maybe you’ll find him through online dating; you’ll never give up and you’ll never learn. I think you’re lonely and hard up and full of bitterness and pain and regret, but what do I know? I’m just a layman, I’m no maverick. So I don’t really care. What I do care about is the fact that you work out your unfulfilled needs on your clients and derive a sense of power from their dependence on you and get off on it when you’re alone at night. You probably masturbate to images of your clients. James Lee? You wanted him bad. You couldn’t believe it when he had an affair with Marion Delahunt instead of taking you up on your offer to fuck him. You’ve been punishing her ever since in any way you can. And me. Who knows why, but you’ve got it in for me, too. I’m probably a stand-in in your head for all those men who treated you so badly.”

I was right on target with almost all of it, I could see it in her eyes, which were hooded and opaque, but that didn’t fool me.

She sniffed. “Say more. This seems very cathartic for you.”

“You don’t give a fuck about me or anyone else,” I said. “Don’t pretend with me. Then there’s the matter of Samantha Green.”

She continued to look at me.

“Oh,” I explained. “How quickly you forget. I had an affair with her twelve years ago. I’m sure Luz talks about her quite often in here. And she was a client of yours, and maybe still is.”

“Samantha,” said Helen. “I know who she is.”

“How can you justify seeing both the mistress and the wife as clients? How can you possibly think you’re objective about anything?” I paused, breathing hard. “Is it true that you told Luz to ignore any evidence that I’m not having an affair with Marion?”

“My work with Luz stays between us,” she said. “I have strict professional boundaries.”

“You are a liar. You have no boundaries whatsoever, professional or otherwise.” I stood up. The phone fell out of my shirt. I kicked it under the couch, and then I began to pace back and forth over the rug, which was a woven modern Rorschach-like pattern. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that it resembled a smashed beetle. What this said about my psyche, I didn’t care.

“Luz is in danger of losing her marriage because of you,” I said. “Because of you, she is unable to do what she really wants to do, which is to forgive me and take me back. She knows in her heart that I’m faithful to her. She can’t admit it without help. Her pride won’t let her, and you’re capitalizing on that. You’re keeping her helpless and making her unstable. You crave other people’s dependence on you. You couldn’t have kids, and men always leave you, but at least your clients need and respect you.”

I engaged Helen in a staredown. She didn’t blink or look away. Some hurt creature deep in the underground pools of her sky-blue eyes quivered and wept, but her face was adamantine, her expression controlled.

“You’re driving my wife crazy,” I said. “She is having a nervous breakdown, and it’s being exacerbated if not outright caused by you, the person she pays to help her, the professional she came to in dire pain. You’re making it worse. You’re trying to wreck her life. But how will she pay you if you drive her into extreme, bottomless despair and she kills herself?”

I stopped pacing and stood directly over her, my fists clenched, my voice implacable. “You are evil,” I said. She flinched slightly. I took pleasure in this but didn’t let it slow me down. “Evil. I don’t use the word lightly. You are encouraging my wife to believe a lie about the husband who dearly loves her, and whom she dearly loves, out of your own perverse need to portray me as a cruel bastard. You’re inflicting your own twisted history onto her. Because why should anyone else’s story have a happy ending when yours never does?” I breathed. In, out, in, out. “I am not having an affair with Marion or anyone. Is that clear?”

Helen did not respond to this.

“Unfortunately,” I said, “there doesn’t seem to be any sort of system in place for prosecuting evil therapists. Add to that the fact that I will do anything to save my marriage. And factor in as well the fact that I’m innocent. Luz is innocent. Marion is innocent. You’re the one who’s guilty.”