The Astral (22 page)

“What do kids learn in English these days?” I asked. “Does anyone diagram sentences anymore? Do kids read poetry? Or is it all standardized testing?”

“It’s a lot of standardized testing, but I sneak in the occasional goodie if we get ahead of schedule and have twenty minutes to spare. Creative writing, grammar game-show-style competitions, we manage to have some fun a few times a semester.”

I was so smitten, I almost fell off my chair. “I wish I’d had you as my English teacher,” I said. “I had an old crone named Mrs. Morneau who was obsessed with Armageddon. She scared the bejeezus out of me.”

“I had Sister Mary-Bernadette,” said Karina. “I worshipped her. She was my first crush. The day she read my essay aloud to the class, I almost passed out.”

“You went to Catholic school?” Diane asked, laughing. “You sent her there?” she said to me.

“Her mother did,” I said. “I had no say in the matter.”

“I liked Northside,” said Karina. “It was all girls, which was great for me, being a dyke. And we wore uniforms, so I never had to worry about clothes, and the teachers were weird and sexually pent up, but so were all us kids, so we all had that in common. And if you were smart and did your homework, they loved you.”

“What do you do, Harry?” Diane asked. “Where are you from?”

I launched into a monologue about being a poet, growing up in Iowa, and a bit about my current situation, keeping the details of my marital schism sketchy but making it as clear as I could without upsetting Karina that I was single and available, just in case that was the direction in which Diane’s antennae were waving. While I talked, I watched Diane respond to me, all my senses alert as I tried to parse out this intake of breath, that wide-eyed nod, that encouraging laugh, that throat-clearing invitation to continue. I was woefully out of practice. She was probably just being friendly, and she was this engaged and warm with everyone on the planet.

The three of us drank more beer, and then we went out with more bottles of beer to sit on the stoop and enjoy the warm night and watch the kids walking by in loud clumps, all drifting somewhere. After an amicable, contented silence, we all three stretched and yawned at the same time. Karina yawned again. “Bedtime for me,” she said. “Don’t move, you two, just promise me you’ll lock up, Dad. Diane, it’s late and I know you have a ways to go, so please feel free to crash on the couch, it’s pretty comfy.”

“Oh,” said Diane. “What time is it? I wasn’t keeping track.”

“I’ll put out a shirt for you,” said Karina. “I might have a spare toothbrush somewhere, too.”

“A Dumpster toothbrush?” I asked.

“I draw the line at personal hygiene items,” said Karina.

She left us there on the stoop. Diane put her head back and gave me a sidelong smile. “I think I drank too much,” she said. “I need to get out more, I’ve been such a good citizen.”

“How do you reconcile the freegan lifestyle with teaching school?” I asked her. “Seems like a full-time job wouldn’t leave much time for foraging.”

“Oh,” she said, laughing a little, “I’m not a full-on freegan, I just really like the principles, and I respect them all a lot. I do what I can, I come to the meetings, I think they’re absolutely right in their ideals, but I can’t commit as fully to it as they have, obviously.”

“So,” I said, teasing her, “you’re like one of those straight women who think lesbians have the right idea, and hang out with them, and support their politics, but sleep with men.”

“I am exactly like that.”

“I actually did think you were a lesbian,” I said. “When I first saw you, I thought you were in love with Karina because of the way you were looking at her. And I must say, I approved of you as a daughter-in-law, based on initial impressions.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “I’m probably no more than five years younger than you!”

“I’m fifty-seven,” I said.

“I’m forty-nine,” she said. “And I’m as straight as a die. I just think Karina is the most fantastic young woman. By the way, I love how you’re such good friends with your daughter. I’ve always imagined that she had great parents.”

“I tried,” I said. “But to be honest, she was born that way. We didn’t have to do much. Do you have kids?”

“Only my students,” she said. “They’re enough for me. I love to go home and be completely alone.”

So she lived alone. We kept talking, idly, easily, leaning into each other with warm relaxation. Her lips were moist, because she kept licking them. Her eyes sparkled in the streetlamp with diamonds of promised sex. I had no further doubts now as to the object of her interest.

I stood up. “I’d better get to bed,” I said. “It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.”

She followed me inside and waited near me as I locked the door. We were in the dark foyer, at the foot of the stairs, I turned toward her, intending to say good night, to be polite, to shake her hand, and the next thing I knew, we were kissing. I was certain I hadn’t done anything to provoke this, but if that was true, it meant that Diane had single-handedly caused us to go from standing separately to full-blown making out, which couldn’t possibly have been the case, because I had felt no coercion; it took two, of course, to tango.

Her body was softer and cuddlier than I had expected. Her mouth tasted of beer and her own native sweetness. She smelled so good I wanted to inhale her right up my nose. It had been so long since I had touched a woman, so long since I had been touched by one, I felt dizzy, almost nauseous, from the unaccustomed contact. Her hands pressed under my shirt at the small of my back. My hand cupped the nape of her neck. My other hand had boldly found her breast. Her nipple was erect. So was every part of me.

But my brain was ticking away. I looked down the barrel of consequence and saw nothing good. I remembered the psychopathic lout Boleslaw, beating me up out of the blue for flirting with a doughnut girl, those hours in a holding cell with a broken nose and bleeding mouth. I saw Zeldah Speck’s pained, proud, apologetic face as she asked me to leave her house, all because of my unacted-upon crush on her precious daughter. Then I recalled my prescient, uncharacteristic intelligence in cutting my losses and running away from the Mullet at the threat of the approach of Lexy Levy’s starstruck, no doubt thermonuclearly hot friend, my alleged fan. How wise that had been; how unwise it had been those other two times to allow myself to experience attraction. I had been punished, swiftly and well, both times, although I’d technically done nothing, ironic echoes of being thrown out by Luz. And the one time I’d exercised restraint, I’d been rewarded with a glorious nap, no hangover, and the offer of a job at the lumberyard.

Diane was making a purring sound in the back of her throat.

I said with my mouth on hers, “No, no,” and tried to break free.

“Let’s go lie on the couch,” she whispered, and softened against me even more. “This feels so good.”

We started kissing again, maybe because I stupidly felt this might forestall the thing I knew I couldn’t do, the thing she so clearly wanted. Or, really, we both wanted the same thing, but we weren’t in her daughter’s house, so she was freer than I was. Her mouth was open and hot and wet. Nothing on earth in my entire life had ever, it seemed, felt as good as her face mashed openmouthed into my face, the smell of her breath and the silkiness of her hair and her hard nipple under my eager hand and the amazing knowledge that she wanted me to fuck her.

The intelligent, self-protective, infuriatingly sane part of my brain projected against my skull’s internal screen the dream I’d had during my nap after running away from the Mullet: myself alone floating in a rowboat on a still, clear lake, mountains looming, shaggy old New England forests all around, suspended there with a feeling of happy, boyish, innocent freedom.

This was my daughter’s house. I was here on my first night as her tenant. She had gone up to bed easily, naturally, without any apparent warning, which meant that, despite everything, she still thought I was worthy of her trust. Her good opinion of me would be devastating to lose, beyond recovery, tragic, the emotional equivalent of the Gulf oil spill. And I knew now that such things could happen. I was immune to nothing. What was the opposite of a fairy godmother? That’s what I had.

“We’d better not, it’s my daughter’s house,” I said as quietly as I could, aware that Karina’s bedroom was directly above us, and this place echoed because it had no rugs or curtains. “Can I call you? Can I take you to dinner? I’d love to see you again.”

“Okay, yes, good night,” she said on a long, regretful exhale.

“Sleep well,” I said. Then I was safe, alone, upstairs in my new room. Karina had made up the bed, opened the windows, put some flowers from her yard in a jar on the bureau. I brushed my teeth and crawled chastely between the clean sheets in T-shirt and briefs and lay awake with a drunken buzzing head, feeling as if I’d narrowly escaped a situation I craved more than anything. Outside, things were just revving up; it wasn’t even midnight yet. I heard yelling, music, thumping bass lines, engines revving, the whole world out there alive and awake, and my body couldn’t calm itself down until almost dawn, when the world turned cool, quiet, the sharp-edged streetlamps blinked off, and the light became gentle and pink and soft.

Chapter Eighteen

  I
pried myself out of bed the next morning before anyone else was awake. I put on some clothes and tiptoed down to the foyer, trying not to make a sound on the rickety old stairs, which were as creaky and fragile as an osteoporotic grandmother’s spine. I let myself out without disturbing Diane, whose sleeping form I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye with a jolt of remembered lust as I passed the French doors that led to the living room.

It was a warm, heavy, overcast morning. The street was so quiet I could hear my shoes on the pavement. I had rushed from Karina’s house in a fever to be gone, and had therefore neither urinated nor drunk any coffee; my bladder was full, my head aching from beer and lack of sleep. I had left my bike locked outside the Astral, so I headed to Church and Utica. Getting to the lumberyard from Crown Heights was easy enough, a straight forty-five-minute shot north on the B46. I sat on the jouncing, almost-empty bus, squeezing my thighs together, clenching my teeth, apologizing to my bladder, and jonesing for caffeine. This had the advantageous effect of consuming all my attention so I didn’t have to consider what had happened, or almost happened, with Diane. But the thought of calling her and arranging another meeting away from Karina’s house was so tantalizingly sweet, I could taste it on my tongue, counteracting the stale beer and morning mouth.

I got off the bus and walked down Broadway, almost goose-stepping with the pressure in my bladder. Luckily, the pretentiously overpriced coffee place near Berry Street was open, so I went in, peed a steady, foamy, gaspingly joyful stream for what felt like five minutes into the vintage toilet in the artful bathroom, bought a four-dollar coffee, dumped as much milk and sugar into it as it would hold in lieu of breakfast, and walked down to the lumberyard gulping it as fast as I could.

At the lumberyard, something dastardly had evidently occurred. More papers were missing from Accounts Payable. Moishe was in a dark temper. I stood by the desk and sipped a coffee from the office machine, cringing at the acrid taste of overcooked bad grounds, nondairy creamer, and artificial sweetener (all the Hasids seemed to be diabetic; real sugar was in short supply here) after that organic French roast, farm-fresh half-and-half, and raw turbinado sugar from the hipster place. My stomach roiled with empty postbeer sleep-deprived tension as Moishe scrabbled through the office, muttering, opening drawers, and breathing hard through his nose like a maddened beast.

Yanti hadn’t arrived yet. Levi and I exchanged worried looks as Moishe’s rage crescendoed toward some sort of climax, we knew not what. Levi and I had never established any sort of camaraderie during the months I’d been at the lumberyard; he was so colorless and bland and almost invisible, and for my part, I was a non-Hasid, and worse, Yanti’s friend. I had gathered that he and Yanti were mortal enemies. This had something to do with Moishe’s patronage of Yanti, the overboss’s favoritism for the naughty crackhead black sheep while the quiet labors of Levi, pink-eyed rabbit diligent unobtrusive Levi, went unnoticed.

I gave a fuck about exactly none of this internecine competition. All I cared about was my own livelihood. Someone in Accounts Payable was apparently sabotaging someone else in Accounts Payable. There were only three of us: I hoped I was neither of these people, but I could only be sure of one end of the equation. I knew I was good at this job. It was very surprisingly easy for me, a dreamy poet, to move financial numbers around quickly and without error. But it stood to reason that maybe someone wanted me out. I was the new guy here; business was off along with the whole country’s economy. And, according to rumor, the lumberyard had just been sold to developers and was going to be supplanted by a twenty-two-story high-rise condo building, but I had decided to believe that when it happened.

Moishe grilled Levi in Yiddish for a while, gesturing to the files, to the computer, to me, to the floor, to what I guessed was either Hashem or the ceiling tiles. Levi answered in a voice so tragically circumspect, his manner so insanely cowed, I thought he might bust out a machine gun in the manner of downtrodden, clinically enraged, finally-exploding underlings everywhere and mow Moishe down. But by some miracle, he did not. Nor did I once hear the name Yanti mentioned with outraged, defensive, finger-pointing blame, which suggested to me that Levi was either delirious with altruism, guilty as charged, or aware of something going on that I had no clue about.

Then it was my turn: Moishe interrogated me in his thick-tongued, condescending English, making it clear that he was naturally angry at our entire department for fucking up but even more so at whoever had spawned and raised me, thereby forcing him to wrap his superior lips around this lowly, common tongue spoken by Puerto Ricans, as a second language, of course, but even so, he hated it.

And then things moved with blurry speed. Moishe’s interrogation of me turned out to be no interrogation after all, but a dramatic monologue in the tradition of various dramatis personae, Hamlet among them, in which the speaker determines by means of a lengthy soliloquy that he is being had and will shed the offender’s blood in retribution. Back when the missing invoice turned up in the men’s room, Moishe had given me the grudging benefit of the considerable doubt. There had been a couple of other instances when it was to everyone’s advantage to chalk things up to human error and forget about it, but apparently I had been under suspicion for quite some time. This was the first I’d known about my apparent culpability in these matters, but of course, I didn’t speak Yiddish, so I had missed most of what went on around here.

Once Moishe had ultimately decided, with exhaustive Shakespearean incisiveness, that it was my fault, all of it, I was invited to collect my things and beat it. Then he disappeared in a puff of black, sulfurous smoke.

“If you cut me, do I not bleed? Does a goy fall in the forest?” I said, feigning insouciance to mask my shame and worry. I threw away my coffee cup and looked around the office to make sure none of my few belongings were here. “Something is rotten in the state of Yidmark. If I were a skidmark, I would beedle deedle beedle dreidl doodle on skid row—”

“It was Yanti,” said Levi at my elbow. “He screwed you. They were gonna cut one of us. He was afraid it would be him.”

“Thanks for speaking up on my behalf,” I said.

“I’m telling you,” he said, his nose twitching. “It was Yanti.”

We exchanged a level look.

“It’s all right, Levi, I know you take care of your own even when they’re crackheads you can’t stand. It’s a tribal thing. I was lucky to have this job at all.”

“He’s no friend to you,” said Levi, and then he crept back down his rabbit hole and vanished.

I left the lumberyard laughing grimly. As I wended my way on foot along Kent Avenue to Franklin and thus to the Astral to collect my bicycle, I parsed out this latest setback in a life that seemed increasingly to be made up of little else. The childish sense that I was being punished suggested the existence of a punisher, and I believed in no such thing; therefore, these negative occurrences, as I had decided to euphemistically refer to them from now on to myself, were merely the natural social consequences of my own actions, nothing personal. They were just ironic tropes, and my entire life was a catastrophic little essay.

It was too early to go to Marlene’s. I rode my bicycle up Calyer then turned right on Guernsey, a sordid, narrow canyon that ran for several blocks between two facing sheer high walls of claustrophobia-inducing attached apartment buildings. The malevolent tops of tall trees met overhead in sinister patterns of spindly branches. The people who lived on this street always seemed to me like troglodytes in their caves, or mythic nocturnal beasts, pale, spooky wraiths dashing along the dark sidewalk, afraid to make eye contact, haunted by their own ghosts. On this summery morning, the street was chill and shadowy and smelled of stale urine.

I emerged into the light of day again and rode my bicycle into McCarren Park. Every Saturday morning in good weather, the Greenmarket took over an entire corner of the park, where happy, healthy neighbors pawed through heirloom squash, homemade jams, and organic lettuces while their children frolicked in the grass. That corner was empty today, but even so, I could feel the subatomic waves of didactic gourmandise that emanated from the very pavement now. I avoided that little swath of hell and wheeled between the scruffy baseball diamonds, then crossed Driggs and rode past the dog run, filled with maladjusted mutts and their neurotic, self-righteous owners. I dismounted and locked my bike to a fence, then moseyed over to the running track that ringed the soccer field. I sat on a bench in a patch of hot, diffuse sunlight and watched people running around and around on the springy red rubber track. Each runner’s body and running style were completely different from all the others: a skinny old man who ran with a sidewinding, shoulder-hunched lurch; a fat little Latina in swishy shorts who trotted and trundled; a willowy girl whose blond ponytail swept side to side between her shoulder blades as she loped along; a massive, muscular black guy whose thighs were so hugely developed, he had to mince in a pigeon-toed, prissy hop. People were the landscape in the city, and the weather, and the wildlife. I hadn’t sat and watched the locals in a long time, I realized. It felt odd not to be at work, odd to be unemployed again. I missed Luz, but I batted that feeling away, knowing it was just a bad old habit, and it was only coming back now because I was forlorn.

Walking toward me along the path next to the track was Marion. She wore a sleeveless sundress and sandals. Her hair blew around her face, golden brown now, no gray at all. She looked tanned, happy, and carefree. An arm was slung across her shoulders. It belonged to a young, dark-haired, gypsyish man. He was strikingly good-looking. I studied him. He probably provoked interest wherever he went, I thought with mild envy, and he probably knew how to handle it. He had that look about him. Marion was looking up at his face, saying something to him, laughing. He smiled at her, pulled her closer, kissed her on the mouth, and then they separated. He headed back toward Lorimer; she continued along the path toward me, smiling, preoccupied. She would very likely have walked right by me if I hadn’t said, “Hello there!”

She turned and saw me. “Harry,” she said, and stopped walking, idled there in front of me, smiling. “How have you been?”

I gestured with vague, all-encompassing, noncommittal limpness. “Fine,” I said. I stood up. “Where are you headed?”

We set off for the other side of the park.

I said, “So that’s why you look so good.”

“I won’t pretend I don’t know what you mean. Or that I’m not flattered to hear it.”

“How old is he?”

“He just turned thirty-three.”

“He’s almost twenty-five years younger than we are!” I tried to sound amused, but there was a well of unease in the pit of my gut. It felt like a betrayal. I would never have admitted this out loud in a million years, but I was threatened on some primal and of course wholly irrational level by Marion’s affair with this kid. We were supposed to stay in our own age group. Or rather, women were. What the hell did that snot-nosed postadolescent have to offer a woman of her experience and intelligence? What did he know about anything yet? Did he have the slightest clue what to do in bed?

“I know,” she said. She sounded amused and ebullient. “He was born in the late seventies. Can you fathom it?”

“When you and I first met, as adults, he wasn’t even born yet.”

She looked sideways at me, shaking her head. “How old was Samantha? You didn’t seem to mind.”

“I was embarrassed by her age,” I said. “I knew she was too young for me.”

“Bullshit,” said Marion. “You were no such thing, you just pretended to be. You loved that she was so young, it made you feel like a stud. Having a double standard about this is just idiotic. Age has nothing to do with anything. Anyway, his name is Adrian, and he’s amazing.”

His name was Adrian. Of course it was. It perfectly suited that quasi-Euro look he had, his feline slinkiness, the slight pouf in his black Mediterranean hair.

“I’m sure he is,” I said. “I’m happy for you.” I meant it, halfway.

We continued on, past benches full of people with dogs on leashes, self-conscious-looking picnickers on blankets in the grass, and a nonstop advancing phalanx of people walking toward us, most of them young. Marion and I knew each other too well to have this conversation without allowing some shakeout of static electricity to avoid escalation into some odd sort of conflict. We allowed the silence between us to grow until we were both comfortable together again. This was one of the graceful prerogatives of longtime friendship. I was so happy to feel it assert itself now, when I needed it most.

“Anyway,” she said, “what’s going on with you? Have you got a new girlfriend yet?”

“What?” I said, affecting outrage, but secretly flattered. “Last time I talked to you, I was still trying to save my marriage. As far as you know now, I’m still married.”

She laughed. “Last time I talked to you, you were in masochistic thrall to a raving psycho bitch who wanted us both dead. I don’t believe you still want her back, after everything she did and said.”

“We’re getting a divorce,” I said.

She stopped and turned to me, amazed. “You’re kidding. Since when?”

“Since a few days ago. I have the papers.”

“Good lord,” she said. “What changed your mind? Did something happen?”

I told her about everything that had happened since I’d seen her the week before, my session with Helen, my conversation with James, the meeting with the cult exit counselors. “And then it hit me,” I said, all inflamed with a need for her to know, that feverish intensity that can set in when a person talks for an unnaturally long time without being interrupted in the presence of a good listener. “Sitting there in their living room talking about the mechanisms of mind control, I was reminded of my marriage, and afterward I realized that I couldn’t go back even if she wanted me to, which she doesn’t.”