The Astral (21 page)

“Would you like it if I moved into your spare room? Maybe you could use some company out there. And help with your finances. I’ll pay the going rate for rent.”

“You’re leaving the Astral?”

“Let’s talk about it,” I said. “For now, go home and do something fun.”

“Like cleaning out my fridge?”

“Emphatically not.”

“That’s what’s on the agenda. Can’t be helped.”

“Kids these days,” I said, kissing her and getting out of the car. “Whatever happened to sex and drugs and vandalism?”

She laughed and drove off.

I let myself into the building, went up the one flight to my apartment, unlocked the door, turned on the lights, puttered around for a while, took a shower, and got into bed just before ten o’clock. I lay on my futon listening to people on the stairs, in the apartment above me, outside on the sidewalk.

For the first time, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would have wanted to go back to Luz anymore, even if she had had a complete reversal of heart and had thrown herself at me, pleading, in tears. Nothing would change if I went back. I was tired of trying to prove to her that all men weren’t like her charming, lying, unreliable, long-vanished, now-dead father; I had never asked her or anyone to undo my equally dead mother’s long-ago damage. And I was deeply tired of her unpredictable oscillations between abject devotion and irrational psychodrama. Devotion was nothing but control in sheep’s clothing, and psychodrama was a means of avoiding a true internal reckoning with one’s own self. I was exhausted by her self-blindness, her toxic rage. She had worn me down with her shredding cruelty. This last inquisition had almost done me in. She had spied on and misread and tried to destroy my friendship with Marion, my oldest friend, someone who had never asked a thing of me beyond my company. She had spied on and misread and destroyed my new book, those silly, innocent poems written to keep me true to her, written out of a sense of freedom and playfulness and love. She could not understand either thing, and those were the things that mattered most to me, besides my marriage and family. And she had ejected me from my home, the place where my kids had grown up, where I had lived for most of my adult life. She had wrecked everything I loved with her furious, desperate, insecure need to control my thoughts, my mind, my heart, my body, like a one-woman fascistic government.

Why, exactly, had I been fighting so hard to go back to that? I felt as if I’d been like a dog going after an unattainable but rotten bone. I had been chasing after her primarily because I couldn’t have her, and because, like a dog, I wanted the familiar, the comfortable, the known. But our marriage hadn’t been any good for either one of us, not for a long time, maybe not ever. Living with me, her dreamy, self-absorbed, once-unfaithful husband, Luz had been in a constant state of suspicion and frustration, loneliness and anger. I had tried to squash myself to fit her expectations, shrink myself down to a safe and manageable size so she wouldn’t feel threatened by my brash curiosity, my appetites and lusts, my energetic spleen. I’d tried, but I had failed. She was a tame little thing. She wanted, above all else, reliability, stability, safety, and attention. I was a wild animal who’d been trying to live in a cage, to behave, to domesticate myself. I scared her, and she bored me. Well, I was free now. She’d forced me out, of course, but now, for the first time, I was choosing to be out, and that made all the difference.

I lay awake for a very long time, feeling tender and a bit wobbly inside. Saving my marriage had obsessed me for so long, I had shaped myself around the battle. My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado’s aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Chapter Seventeen

  K
arina had bought her house right after college. She had swashbuckled out to Crown Heights on a tip from someone who knew of a nineteenth-century row house that was allegedly in foreclosure and available “for nothing.” The house itself had turned out to be full of trash and scarily decrepit inside, but underneath the ugly fixtures and wallpaper, it had original moldings and French doors, a backyard, a working fireplace, and, according to the engineer Karina hired, decent structural integrity. Karina plunked down all the money she’d socked away over the course of a short but frugal and very hardworking lifetime, which, along with help from Luz’s savings and a midsized inheritance from my father, was enough to buy the place outright.

Immediately after the closing, Karina moved into the place with her college girlfriend, Maureen, a sullen, chubby, multi-pierced, barely verbal girl with dead-white skin and a jet-black crew cut who, despite her lack of any other discernible charms, happened to be in possession of contracting skills and uncanny physical strength. She lived with Karina rent-free in return for doing much of the renovation. Karina acted as gofer and assistant before and after her daily job, a low-paid internship at a news website. It was amazing, watching them go at it. After demolishing cheesy paneling, drop ceilings, bad partitions, linoleum, and shag rugs, and digging the backyard out of a two-foot-high pile of trash and rocks, they spent months rewiring, replumbing, replastering, drywalling, painting, and refinishing the oak floors. These two young girls, with some help from me, Hector, and a handful of college friends, refinished the basement to turn it into a rental apartment, built a kitchen from scratch in a former first-story bedroom, and knocked down a wall to make the upstairs bathroom big enough for a claw-foot tub and a washer and dryer. They found all their building supplies, fixtures, appliances, and fittings for nearly nothing at an outer-borough warehouse full of donated and recycled construction materials. They planted a lawn and flower beds out back with turf and seedlings they got from a hinterland Long Island nursery that was going out of business, poured a concrete patio and found a piece of corrugated fiber-glass for the roof. They furnished the place by “curb-shopping,” as they called it. They found kitchenware, linens, gardening tools, and planters on various freegan websites. Suddenly, Karina’s crappy, ugly house had been rejiggered into an oasis in a blighted ghetto with a rental-income basement apartment and a nice yard for cook-outs on hot nights. The
Times
real estate section got wind of it and asked to do a story; Karina, with characteristic fuck-you mistrust of unwanted publicity, turned them down flat.

Conveniently, when the bulk of the renovation was pretty much completed, they broke up and Maureen moved out, and that was the end of her, as far as I could tell. I couldn’t pretend to be anything but relieved. Despite her prodigious handiness, Maureen had seemed entirely unsuitable for my lovely, bright daughter, not nearly worthy, but what father ever thought anyone was good enough for his girl? Karina had lived in her house alone ever since, except for her downstairs tenant, a quiet middle-aged black man named Dewey who worked odd hours as a livery cabdriver and rarely made a peep when he was home. Dewey’s rent covered Karina’s car expenses, utilities, and taxes; she Dumpster-dove for as much food as possible and all her clothes and household goods. She worked freelance temp jobs when she had to. Her life as a “power freegan,” as she jokingly called herself, was passionately committed but pragmatically nondidactic. “Most people could never do this,” she had said when I’d asked her about the philosophy behind it all. “I think it’s right, and it’s nice to live so cheaply when there’s so much free good stuff out there, but I know it’s not for everyone, I know it’s extreme.” She had been interviewed a few times, as one of the movement’s more articulate, low-key, nonrabid spokespeople, on radio talk shows on the likes of WBAI and WFUV. She helped run one of the better-trafficked freegan websites and held meetings in her living room. One of these meetings was in full swing on the last day of May, the night I arrived with my belongings to take up residence in the spare upstairs bedroom as a rent-paying tenant.

I came up out of the IRT station at the Utica Avenue stop with my suitcase and bag. I walked through Crown Heights feeling a kind of dazed anticipation I hadn’t felt since I was a young man, before I was married. I was amazed by the euphoric relief I felt, getting out of Greenpoint, coming here, away from the Astral and the people Luz and I knew in common.

It took me a while to identify the cause of this newfound happiness, but about a block away from Karina’s house, as I checked out the saucy, tight-jeans-clad ass of the woman walking ahead of me, it hit me that, for the first time in all these years, all these decades, I was free to fuck someone besides Luz, aboveboard, no sneaking around, free and clear. This realization was as fizzy and exciting as a drug or a blast of cold air on a scorching day. Tempering it slightly was the fact that moving in with my daughter might cramp my style just a bit, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Just knowing I was allowed to seemed like enough for now.

The night was hot and loud, humid and full of smoke from sidewalk oil drum barbecues, joints and cigarettes, diesel exhaust pipes, fast-food air vents. It was Memorial Day. A hip-hop-pumping Escalade with spinning rims stopped at a red light, bouncing from the force of the bass line. Three male Hasids rushed past me in full summer regalia, white kneesocks, lightweight hats like fur discs on their heads. The fried chicken place on the corner was lit up with fluorescent cheer, crammed full of kids, all black. I wanted to tell them to disperse, they were just feeding into racial stereotypes, but the chicken smelled great. I almost went in and got some. I could understand why they were all there.

“Dad,” said Karina as she let me into her house, “do you want to go up and get settled, or do you want to meet these people? Up to you.”

“I apologize for the brusqueness of this question,” I said. “Do you have any food?”

“Why are you always so hungry?”

“I don’t know. I forget to eat. It’s a rather complicated—”

“I made chili,” she said. “But I warn you, all of the ingredients are freeganized.”

I stowed my things upstairs and went down to the kitchen, where I filled a ceramic bowl with vegetarian chili. It looked and smelled delicious, and I had no qualms about eating it, because I knew that Karina didn’t literally pull food out of Dumpsters. She went around to grocery stores and restaurants and picked up unwanted, still good food before it went out with the garbage. This chili, the beans and vegetables and spices, was no doubt made from ingredients past their expiration dates but still perfectly edible, collected by Karina as she made her rounds in her car. It was almost as if she had bought groceries from a supermarket, except that it had been free.

I joined the group of trash-divers in the living room. Everyone was standing around talking, a farrago of races and ages and types and physiques, the common denominator of which was evidently a great deal of what they used to call “good energy” back when I was Karina’s age. I sat in my chair, which Karina had salvaged from a closing restaurant along with seven others just like it, and watched everyone as I shoveled the food into my mouth. As my blood sugar rose to acceptable levels, I noticed that one of the women present seemed to be in love with my daughter. She was a tall, broad-shouldered brunette who must have been forty at least, although I was a bad judge of anyone’s age. She was clean-cut, athletic looking, and “handsome,” as old-timey novelists used to describe the kind of woman who wasn’t born conventionally pretty but became better looking as she aged. She leaned against the mantel out of the fray and didn’t say much, but she listened to everything Karina said with the shiny-eyed raptness of someone in the grip of ardent admiration. I also noticed, as I swabbed my empty bowl with corn bread and washed the last savory mouthfuls down with beer, that Karina hardly noticed this attractive older woman. She was too busy arguing with a gray-dreadlocked man about the ethics of veganism, which he espoused and Karina did not, necessarily. “If perfectly good milk and cheese are there for the taking,” she pointed out, “why not use them?”

“Where do you draw the line?” said Dreadlocks. “It’s a slippery slope from dairy products to Perdue chicken and downer hamburger meat.”

“No, it’s not,” said Karina. Her manner was easygoing, but her face was fierce. “I can make those distinctions. What am I, a two-year-old?”

“The important thing,” said Karina’s dark-haired admirer, “is not to support the consumerist, cruelty-based economy. We can all decide where we fall within those parameters. There’s a lot of room for differences.”

“What would you do without that economy, though?” I asked. I held up my empty bowl. “If it weren’t for all the abundant wastefulness, what would you eat? Would you forage for edible weeds in Prospect Park?”

Karina gave a small snort. “Dad,” she said, “come on. Of course we would. Or we’d grow it ourselves. A lot of people here do that already.”

I subsided into humble silence. As the meeting ended and people dispersed, Karina’s admirer approached me and sat in the empty chair beside me. “I’m Diane,” she said. Her handshake was surprisingly gentle and feminine. “You’re Karina’s dad?”

“Yes,” I said. “My name is Harry.”

She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs and gave me a direct, engaging smile. She had a strong, squarish face, ice-blue eyes, and a small, full-lipped mouth. Her hair was cut in a kind of bob so it fell in a silky swath around her cheekbones. She looked Nordic and semi-famous, like a former Olympic ski champion. It occurred to me that she might have been flirting with me, and that maybe I’d misread both her sexual orientation and her feelings toward my daughter.

“Did you come to learn more about us?” she was asking.

“To be honest, no,” I said. “I just moved into Karina’s spare room, so I thought I’d be sociable.”

“Well,” she said with another charming smile, clasping both her hands in front of her. “She’ll have your head in a Dumpster in no time.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said.

Karina, having bid good night to the last of the freegans, pulled a chair over so we made a cozy triangle in front of the unlit fireplace.

“Paul gets a little intense for me,” she said to Diane. “I never know whether he’s completely serious or not.”

“He needs to cut off those damn dreadlocks,” said Diane.

Karina laughed. I got up and went into the kitchen and fetched fresh cold bottles of beer and brought them out to the ladies.

“Dreadlocks on white people are ridiculous,” Karina was saying. “Okay, if you’re twenty-three, it’s possibly cute. But he’s got to be what? My dad’s age?”

I whistled in shock that anyone besides me could be so old. We all laughed and then took swigs of beer, in unison.

“So Dad,” said Karina. “I’m really glad you’re here. But last time I saw you, like, four days ago, you were living in the Astral … I’m just wondering, did something happen? With Mom?”

I squinted at her. “No,” I said. “Nothing happened.”

“Sorry,” Karina said to Diane. “This is my first chance to ask, I’ve been wondering all night. My parents are not on good terms.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Diane to Karina. “Well, I’ll be off then, and let you two catch up.”

“No, no,” I said before she could get up. “It’s all right, I haven’t got anything to say that I can’t say in front of you.” I looked at Karina. “To put it simply, and then we can move on to more interesting topics, I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere with your mother, being there, and that I might as well be paying rent where it could make a difference for you. I’d give you money outright if I had it to spare, but at least this way, we both win. And I think it’s good for me to be out of the Astral for a while.”

“Oh,” said Karina. I watched her wrestle with the temptation to quiz me further, and win. “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”

I had decided not to tell her the whole truth, not right away, because she was right, all of this seemed extremely abrupt, out of the blue even, and Karina disliked sudden change. And this was not the time, of course, to tell her that Luz and I were filing for divorce. The day after the cult-intervention meeting with June and Emery, I had left a message on Luz’s cell phone letting her know that I was ready. “Luz, it’s Harry. I’ve been thinking a lot these past weeks, and I’ve come to accept that our marriage is really over. I’m ready to end it. I’d like to do it as amicably as possible.” I had said it without inflection or emotion. I had not asked her to call me back; I’d given her my address, as if she didn’t already know it, and as if she couldn’t just walk downstairs and hand the papers to me in person. She had mailed them immediately, without a note. So this was where things stood. I had the divorce papers upstairs. I hadn’t signed them yet, but I wasn’t planning to wait much longer. It was good to have things clear and definite.

“Wow,” said Diane. “Most daughters wouldn’t feel that way. I would never want my father to move in with me in a million years. I love the guy, but he would drive me nuts.”

“I hope I won’t drive you nuts, Karina,” I said.

“If you do, I’ll kick you out.”

We all laughed. Diane was gorgeous, I thought in my beer-glowing, full-bellied haze. Maybe she wasn’t after either me or my daughter; maybe she was happily married to a devoted, handsome, sexually adept man with a huge bank account.

“What do you do, Diane?” I asked her. “Where do you live?”

“I’m a schoolteacher. I live in Kensington. I teach junior high English at a private school in Park Slope.” She swept her swaths of hair off her face with both hands at once. It all fell right back again, silky, glossy. “Those kids are the most vulnerable, sweet, earnest things I’ve ever seen. They get such a bad reputation, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, but really they’re babies, they want attention and love and respect, and if they get it, they’re easy to deal with. Well, I’m free for the summer at the moment, so of course I’m all rosy about it. Ask me how I feel next February when it’s cold and everyone’s sleep deprived and cranky and no one’s done their homework.”