The Astral (23 page)

Marion was silent for an instant, her gaze on the ground in front of us, her expression inscrutable. “Talking about cult mind control made you think of your marriage?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve never told anyone that.” We walked several paces. “It sounds crazy, doesn’t it.”

Marion laughed. “Harry. You think Luz brainwashed you?”

“Well,” I said, feeling a little sheepish.

Her clever, quick face contracted with sympathetic laughter. “Please. You can’t compare your marriage to cult indoctrination. You were not under mind control, you were just part of a marriage. That’s the way it always works.”

We had been walking around the park through the throngs, talking as if all the other people were props. Now, as if we’d made a conscious agreement to do so, we approached an empty bench and sat down. Two small leashed dogs truffle-pigged under the bench for scraps. A few more idled nearby on leashes while their owners talked. Behind us, across Driggs, the dog run was full of canine yaps, barks, and shrieks.

“So many dogs,” I said. “This neighborhood never used to have so many dogs.”

“I almost adopted one,” said Marion. “A huge silver pit bull, a female named Xanadu.”

“Named what?”

“I know,” she said. “The people at the shelter named her. They’re borderline psychotic. Especially the guy who runs it, this fat, bug-eyed misanthrope named Sal who’s violently rude to you if you show signs of being unworthy of adopting one of his dogs. His shelter is just awful, it smells of piss, the animals are crammed together in an echo chamber, they feed them the cheapest food … The people there are the ones who really need help. They all seem damaged and out of their minds, and they hate people and are rabidly protective of these poor animals. Did all their parents molest them? Were they tortured as babies?”

“Maybe they’re just garden-variety crazy,” I said.

“Or maybe they’re right. The older I get, the less I want to have anything to do with any people at all. I’m thinking of selling my house and moving to Maine. I mean it, Harry. It’s all going to shit anyway.” She trailed off. “Anyway, poor Xanadu found another home right after I changed my mind.”

“Why didn’t you adopt her?”

“Because I decided I didn’t like her. She was beautiful, but so stupid and mulish. When I told them, at the shelter, they looked at me as if I’d committed bestiality. I went in a week later to ask about a different dog, and they froze up and wouldn’t meet my eye till I walked out in something like disgrace. Jesus!”

I laughed and leaned back against the sun-warmed bench and took a lungful of humid, grass-smelling air. “I just got fired this morning,” I said. “From the lumberyard. My crackhead friend Yanti screwed me over because he was afraid that otherwise it would have been him.”

“Really?” she said. “Jesus, I’m sorry. What are you going to do?”

The topic of James had long been a delicate one for Marion. I understood. The navigation of the aftermath of an extramarital affair was fraught and uncharted, especially when the participants all lived in proximity to one another. But Marion always wanted the truth, no mollycoddling or euphemisms.

“James offered me a job at their company,” I said.

Her expression hardly changed, just a slight flinch in the corner of her left eye; I chalked this up to the healing powers of Adrian. “That’s good,” she said.

“Also, I just moved in with Karina. She needs a roommate, and I need to get away from Luz. For now, I’m living in Crown Heights. It’s good to get out of this neighborhood. I’m surprised at how good it feels. I have so much history here, I can’t walk down any street without thinking of a thousand things that happened on it, without seeing someone I recognize. It’s been so long. Decades of accrued stuff. I had started to think I was grafted onto this part of town. I didn’t realize it was possible just to up and leave it. Crown Heights is only a few miles away, but it could be a whole new country, as far as I’m concerned. I feel so much better all of a sudden. Here I just got fired from my job, and I’m almost happy because it means I won’t have to spend any more time in this part of the world.”

“I can imagine,” said Marion. “Adrian lives in the South Slope. I love visiting him in his little bare-bones apartment. My house is full of so many years of accumulated emotion, good and bad, but so much of it painful. My marriage, my affair, all the work troubles I’ve had, the fallouts with gallery owners and the competition with other photographers and drunken parties … going to Adrian’s is like taking a vacation.”

“So,” I said, trying to sound merely curious, not at all judgmental, “how did you and Adrian meet? He was the guy in the bar who kept calling you, right?”

“No, believe it or not, he’s yet another much-younger man.” She laughed. “We were set up by a mutual friend of his aunt’s and mine, my friend Laura. On a blind date. She said, ‘My friend’s nephew is perfect for you. I just know it. He’s young, but don’t let that stop you, give him a chance.’ The only reason I went was that he was so young, I figured nothing could come of it, so I was safe. That was a week ago. The joke’s apparently on me.” She stretched and yawned and rubbed her hands together. “Anyway, I’m so happy you’re finally getting free of Luz. So glad, I can’t even tell you.”

“So am I, and I mean that. You were absolutely right about her.” I cleared my throat. “I met a woman last night. A schoolteacher. She was at Karina’s for dinner; they’re friends, but she’s almost as old as we are.”

“What do I care about how old she is? What’s she like?”

“Beautiful and smart,” I said. “I like her. She likes me. I can’t believe I’m allowed to … you know.”

“Fuck her?”

I laughed. “I was going to say ‘ask her out.’ But yes, now that you mention it.”

“Isn’t that the best part of having a marriage end? You’re suddenly allowed to sleep with other people, and no one can say boo to you about it.”

“I was just thinking that last night,” I said.

“After Ike died, I cried so much I thought I would never stop. I got an eye infection from crying. Our marriage was complicated and difficult, but I would always have chosen it over not having it. I thought I’d never get over the loss. We’ve been through hell this year, you and I. We both lost our spouses. So good for us, here we both are.”

“Good for us,” I said.

We settled into a daydreamy silence, two old friends basking in the sun, letting the war wounds heal, or so I liked to think of us right then.

Chapter Nineteen

  T
he upside to being fired, the only upside, was that now I didn’t have to go off to work every day; my time was my own to spend as I wished.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Karina had just made a pot of coffee and was scrambling eggs. We sat over breakfast at her table and made a plan for the day: we would drive out to Long Island that afternoon and surprise Hector, swoop in on him unannounced and try to get him to come to dinner with us somewhere nearby. Failing that, we’d try to cadge an invitation to dinner at his house, but it would be better to get him alone. “Divide and conquer,” said Karina.

“Karina,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“You frequently do.”

“You were there, you saw it all happen. In your opinion, was I a terrible husband to your mother?”

“You were my father,” she said, looking straight at me. “She was my mother. You both seemed like good people to me from a very early age. Maybe sometimes she wanted you to pay attention to her more than you did, but in my opinion, Mom is pretty demanding, and you were busy.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “I love how nonmelodramatic you are. Such a straight shooter.”

“I’m no romantic, am I. Since this whole thing blew up between you, spending time with both of you, I have to say, I’ve started seeing you more objectively as separate individuals, and knowing you both as well as I do, I find it amazing that your marriage lasted as long as it did. Like, fundamentally, chemically, you seem like you come from different tribes of people. I don’t mean because she’s Mexican and you’re … whatever you are, Iowan. I mean your makeups are foreign to each other somehow. Does that make sense?”

I cupped my coffee mug in both hands and looked right back at my daughter. “Yes,” I said. We smiled at each other, but the air between us was tinged with blue sadness and regret.

After I’d done the dishes, I went upstairs to make a call. James picked up on the second ring. “Custom Case,” he said. “Oh shit, sorry, this is my cell. Hello?”

“James, it’s Harry.”

“Harry! Hello, good to hear your voice.”

“I’ll get right to the point: I got shitcanned from the lumberyard yesterday.”

“What happened?”

“As far as I can tell,” I said, “I was framed by a fearful crackhead who thought it was either him or me. He hid some invoices, and being the odd man out, I took the fall. Is your offer still open? I assure you, I’m very good at this sort of work.”

“I have no doubt,” he said. “When can you start? Monday? On the terms I mentioned the other night?”

“It’s a deal. Do I come to the Red Hook building?”

“That’s right, you know where it is. Come to my office at nine, and I’ll show you around.”

Just like that, I had another job. It was good to have friends in this world.

Karina and I set out in her car after lunch. It was a cool, clear, blazingly bright day. The breeze blew through the open windows and circulated in the car, making everything feel exciting and full of possibility. Being in Karina’s car with her driving along always freed me somehow to say the things I couldn’t quite say when we were inside, stationary. “I liked your friend Diane a lot,” I said, almost shouting to be heard over the rushing wind and the roar and hiss of trucks.

Karina looked sideways at me. “You two were flirting like teenagers.”

“We were,” I said. “It’s true. Karina, I have to tell you something very serious about your mother and me.”

“What?” she said.

“We’re not going to get back together,” I said. “We’re going to get a divorce.”

It was a relief to tell her, and much easier to yell it in a moving car than to have to say it facing her at a quiet breakfast table.

“Really?” She whipped around to look at me, her hands on the wheel, not slowing down. Her expression was stricken and shocked. The car swerved slightly. She jerked her head back to look at the road.

“Yes,” I said. “I have to accept that it’s over.”

“Are you sure? Did you talk to her?”

“If I could have talked to her,” I said into the hullabaloo of traffic, “believe me, I would have. The last thing she said to me was that she wanted a divorce, and that was a long, long time ago. She isn’t going to take me back. I have to stop trying to convince myself otherwise and get on with things.”

“ ‘Things’ meaning Diane?”

I mulled this over for a few minutes.

“Hello, Dad?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I know she’s your friend. I know this is probably really weird.”

“Probably!” she said. “Yes! Very weird!”

We drove without speaking for a number of miles, came to a knot of traffic, slowed down, crawled along, and didn’t look at each other.

“Did you sleep with her the other night? In my house?” Karina asked.

“Of course not!” I said. My relief at my ability to be emphatically honest about this was so intense, I felt a little light-headed. “I would never do that.”

“I’m not your mother,” she said. “Just—you know.”

The traffic cleared; we sped up again.

“Listen,” I said, feeling nervous but determined. “I’d like to ask her out to dinner. I promise never to bring her to your house if you’d rather I didn’t. I also promise I am not betraying your mother here. She doesn’t give a damn what I do anymore.”

Karina was tapping her thumbs on the steering wheel in a probably entirely unconscious imitation of Luz. “You’re a grown man, Dad. I’m not your keeper. I guess, to be perfectly honest, I have to admit that you have every right to do whatever you want and I really appreciate that you told me all this.” She stopped chattering for an instant. “I won’t be a brat about this. I love Diane. She’s been through a bad breakup. She could use a distraction right now. It’s okay, really, I swear.”

I reached over and rubbed the spot between her shoulder blades. “Easy there,” I said.

“I’m trying here,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “So am I, believe me. It may not seem like it, but I am.”

“This is all just kind of weird.”

“It is weird. Your father is asking permission to date your friend. And on top of that, he lives in your house like some role-reversal kid.”

“As long as you’re home by ten.” She tried to smile and almost succeeded. “And use a condom.”

We drove into the driveway of Hector’s house just before three and parked in the shade of a grove of scrubby ocean-side trees. It was chilly out here on the Island and much windier than it had been in the city. Karina had wisely brought a sweatshirt, which she put on now; I had unwisely ignored her advice to bring a jacket, and so had no recourse but to grit my teeth and get out of the car in my short-sleeved cotton shirt. We walked toward the house on the oyster-shell drive, our crunching footsteps the only sound besides the wind in the sand dunes and treetops. The house looked deserted. The windows were blue mirrors reflecting empty sky. No one was on the porch or lawn.

We climbed the steps and rang the bell. It vibrated in the hollow interior of the house.

“Maybe they’re all out somewhere,” said Karina, just as the door opened. “Oh!” she said.

The young woman’s face showed no signs of recognition. Maybe she was a new member, or maybe she had been trained to pretend not to know outsiders, or maybe she had forgotten all about us. She looked identical to all the other young women we’d met when we were here before, fresh faced and neat and primly dressed, so it was impossible to know.

“We’re here to visit Hector,” I said. “I mean Bard. Is he around?”

The cult clone didn’t budge. “He’s being prepared right now. I’m sorry, please come another day.”

“Prepared for what?” Karina asked.

She smiled and began to close the door.

Karina stuck her foot out and stopped it, but not as if she’d meant to; she did it as if her foot had involuntarily jerked that way.

“I’m Bard’s little sister, and this is our dad,” she said in her sweetest voice, ducking her head so a lock of red hair fell against her pale, freckled cheek, looking up through her lashes. “We were in the neighborhood and were hoping he could come for a walk maybe, and to dinner with us tonight. We miss him so much. Could you please just tell him we’re here?”

The girl’s blank expression hardly flickered. “Wait here,” she said and closed the door.

Karina and I sat in some chairs on the porch around the side of the house and looked out at the ocean, which was corrugated and foamy from the wind. I shivered in my summer shirt.

“Do you think they’ll let him come out?” Karina asked.

“I wonder whether they’ll let us go in,” I said.

“You’re freezing! Want my sweatshirt?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

We were almost whispering, as if what we were saying would reveal our true reason for being here if they overheard us. Karina looked as uneasy and guilty as I felt. “See him as much as you can,” June and Emery had told us. “Reassure him of your love, give him news of people he knows, keep reminding him of his real self. The more contact you have, the better, and the more he trusts you, the better.” At the moment, I felt as if we were betraying him, and I was afraid that he would know this instinctively. Our presence here felt false and manipulative, as if we were on a top-secret spy mission against our own son and brother, even though it was out of concern for him and a real desire to help him.

The cult maiden stuck her head around the corner of the house. “Come on in,” she said. “He’ll see you.”

Karina and I exchanged a look; she sounded as if she were talking about an emperor in state on his gold throne, a pasha being fanned by eunuchs. We followed her through the front door and up the curved staircase to a big, austerely clean bedroom on the second floor. The room held four bunk beds with white coverlets, a number of plain wooden bureaus, and a straight-backed chair at a small table. Hector lay on one of the lower bunks. He was barefoot and his hair was wet, and he wore white cotton trousers and a white cotton shirt. He was smiling, his eyes closed. I was shocked to see how fat he’d become. His stomach was soft and wobbly under the thin cotton. His jaw had grown little baby-fat jowls.

“I told Lake to bring you upstairs,” he said, still smiling, not opening his eyes. His voice was urgent with sincerity. “I must lie here for a while, but I can visit with you both as I do so.”

I stifled a derisive cough. He sounded like a minor character in a grade-B sci-fi movie, where everyone used the same old-fashioned, stilted locution, as if human verbal communication were going to regress to faux courtly speech instead of becoming slangier and more modern the way it usually did.

“Please sit down,” he added as if he had become accustomed to being obeyed.

I sat on the lower bunk nearest Hector’s; Karina took the chair.

“How are you, Hector?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

He laughed, but he didn’t sound amused. It was the laughter of someone who’d been asked a stupid, simpleminded question. “No,” he said. “Not sick at all. I’ve never felt better in my life. I am extremely well.”

Karina and I looked at each other. She started to say something, then caught herself, and we waited for him to go on. June had told us to do this when we wanted more information instead of asking direct questions, on the theory that if we left a space of silence, he would fill it. This whole dynamic felt so uneasily false, and this place gave me such willies, I could hardly stand it here another minute. I reminded myself that my son’s life might be in danger, figuratively and maybe even literally. I had to do this, and I had to do it right. No matter how deceptive I felt, there was no better way to help him. I could see, on Karina’s blunt little face, the same struggle to reconcile what we’d learned with her strong native instincts to tell the truth and be direct. I was glad Hector’s eyes were closed; he would almost certainly have seen it too, in both of us.

Lake reappeared in the doorway. “Bard,” she said, “can I offer your family some refreshments downstairs?”

“I’d like to talk to my father while I rest and prepare. Maybe my sister can help you all down in the kitchen.”

Karina stood up. “I’d love to,” she said. I could follow her reasoning as easily as if she were speaking aloud: It would be much easier to deal with strangers than her own brother, and she could ask the women as many questions as she wanted in the guise of honest curiosity. And she could do something with her hands.

Lake held the door for Karina, and they both disappeared.

Alone with my son, without Karina there to witness and share my perfidy, I felt a bit easier. I leaned back against the pillows on the bed and looked out at the sky and ocean, opposing blue expanses punctuated by whitecaps and tiny clouds, stitched together by diving gulls. Through the wavy old glass panes, it all looked unreal and pristine; I imagined that it was very easy to forget, living here, what was going on in most of the rest of the world. I imagined it was easy to forget everything. In the few minutes I’d been in this house, I’d begun to feel swayed by the collective influence of this weird group, or cult, whatever they were, felt my behavior influenced by theirs, even my thoughts. It was uncomfortable for me to admit this, even to myself, but once I’d realized it, I began to resist it. They were all exhausted, lost and paranoid and afraid, I reminded myself. They seemed happy, they seemed to have all the answers, and they seemed serenely content with whatever pecking order existed here, but that was all an illusion. Underneath, their real selves were seething, stifled. Any power this place had was derived from the squelching of authenticity and freedom. Historically, of course, I knew that this means of controlling people never worked for long. La la la, and so forth.

Hector was wriggling his hips a little, rocking them from side to side, his feet crossed at the ankles, his toes rubbing together. He’d always done this as a kid when he felt safe and cozy. It was the most genuine thing about him at the moment, that gesture, and I trusted it. I decided to cut the cult-intervention bullshit and just talk to him straight.

“You seem happy,” I said.

“I am very happy,” he said.

“What’s going on today? Where is everyone?”