The Astral (15 page)

“Not quite,” she said. “There’s just a little more to say. Part of me is disappointed in us, that we shied away from the one person we might have been fulfilled by if we’d both had the balls. And part of me is relieved. I know it’s too late now, and that’s a relief, too. I wanted to hide in plain view with Ike. I wanted to be adored, a bit blindly. It made me lonely but it also made me feel very safe. I wanted to be the star with him, and if I’d married you, I would have had competition.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, I know.”

“But we might have challenged each other even more as mates than we ever did as friends. We might have been better artists and people because of our rivalry, our shared need to be great. We might have pushed each other to our limits, and we might have achieved tremendous things. The saying goes, you should marry your best friend, and I always thought that was silly, but now I don’t know.”

“We’ll never know,” I said. I was clutched with regret suddenly.

“Nope,” she said. “And now we never talk about this again as long as we live.”

“Are you seeing someone new?” I asked. “You have that air about you.”

“Not yet.” She smiled. “That very young guy called me. The one I met in the bar back in March, the night I was so mad at Amy. He’s called me a few times, but I’ve put him off. I’ve just felt it was too soon after Ike’s death. He wouldn’t give up, so I gave in and agreed to have dinner next week.”

“Ah,” I said, allowing myself to feel, just this once, a bracing thump of jealousy. “And so it begins.”

“The widow ventures forth from her shrouded mourning chamber,” she said. “I have to take the black veil off sooner or later. It’s been a year.”

“I’ll toast to that,” I said.

We finished our beers, paid up, left a generous tip, and went out into the warm spring night, making our way through the usual flock of smokers clustered on the sidewalk around the front door. We kissed each other on the cheek and went off in opposite directions, me to my house, she to hers, as always, as ever.

Chapter Thirteen

  T
he next morning dawned in Greenpoint as it did everywhere else in the world, but maybe not as poignantly or as fleetingly. The low sun splashed a silky tenderness onto the grimy building facades and over the trash-heaped, rubbled empty lots along Franklin and then Kent. In the early morning stillness, the air was almost fresh, almost breathable, as if strong nighttime winds had magically scoured it. I rode my bicycle along the riverfront. I glided to the lumberyard with my raggedy hair streaming behind me, my shirt pressing against my bony chest. The river glittered and pulsed in the sunlight. The air blowing across the lumberyard lot smelled of new life, gentle promise.

But the morning was a wretched stretch of scrambling and shame. An invoice had been lost, possibly in the mail, possibly by me, possibly at the hand of Yahweh. I, being the suspect at hand, struck my boss as the likeliest culprit and was subjected to a dressing-down in Yiddish, which he had evidently forgotten I didn’t fully understand, except for the common invectives every New Yorker knew as a matter of course. I blinked with ersatz apology (ersatz because I strongly suspected the hand of Yahweh, who, I joked to myself silently through my teeth, would hear from me later). As Moishe yelled, I noted the curious fact that the edges of his beard were the same shade of yellow as his dog teeth and the whites of his eyes. The corners of his teeth, the corners of his beard, the corners of his eyes; there was something about it that smacked of the Torah. It reminded me of the biblical injunction “Do not reap the corners of your field,” or something like that, the reason they all wore those side curls. The rest of Moishe’s head was a pasty, dramatic off-white: skin, teeth, hair, beard, all except those feral, symbolic touches of dingy ochre.

When Moishe lost steam and flew off to attack someone else, I shuffled straight-faced back to my place at the counter and clicked at the computer keys, double-checking my work, keeping everything meticulous and spit-spot. Then, twenty minutes later, it developed that the invoice had been found—in the men’s room! Behind a toilet-paper roll! Stuffed there like a dirty sock! This I learned because Moishe had switched to English. It was evidently not my fault after all. Although I didn’t see why this exonerated me, I accepted my release from ignominy and resigned myself again, as I did every hour of every day, to the mystery of this place. I accepted the now-tainted scrap of paper, smoothed it, and stowed it in the pile of the accounts payable du jour. For the rest of the morning, I did my work and kept my pencils sharpened.

At noon, Yanti and I ate our lunches together at the end of the street that dead-ended at the water by the lumberyard lot, sitting on a resin-smelling, felled telephone pole. We’d each brought our food from home. Yanti had chicken and dumplings and beet salad left over from the night before, cooked by his boss’s wife, which he washed down with a plastic bottle of sweet, wholesome homemade iced tea. I was jealous of his lunch, so neatly tucked by a woman’s hands into plastic bowls with airtight lids. I had made my usual bachelor lunch, cold and fatty and not nearly as nourishing as it should have been: a baloney and packaged cheese-slice sandwich on generic wheat bread, a small bag of corn chips, a package of powdered-sugar mini-doughnuts, and a carton of orange juice. Yanti snorted with pleasure and smacked his lips and burped. I looked across the glittering water at the dull brown projects of the Lower East Side and finished my sad sandwich.

“When Luz went to work every day, I used to stay home all morning and then go out for lunch,” I said. “One slice of plain cheese pizza from a little storefront place on Manhattan Avenue, and that was all. And a small soda. Money was tight but I needed to get out of the house once a day. Then in nice weather I would walk over to the park and sit on a bench and watch the drunks and pigeons and dog owners. It was like going to the circus.”

“And what about on bad days? I mean in bad weather?”

“On bad days I would go up to the public library.” I squinted, remembering. “It smelled like dust in there. But it was always spotless. I never checked out books. I read them standing up in the stacks. I had a serious crush on one of the librarians, maybe that’s why I never brought books home, I felt too guilty. But I didn’t flirt with her, I was all business coming and going, hello, good-bye. I can’t flirt with a librarian no matter what the cliché is about them taking their hair down and their glasses off. This one’s hair was already down, anyway.”

We considered together a motorboat churning up a healthy wake until it powered away under the bridge.

“I used to tell my wife I was going to the grocery store and instead I would walk all over the place,” said Yanti. “For hours sometimes. I made sure to buy a lemon or a bottle of seltzer to take home. No one was fooled.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the lemon? If no one was fooled.”

“We needed a lemon.”

I laughed. Our lunch break was over, but neither of us moved. It was the kind of day when eleven-year-old boys played hooky, when young lovers necked the day away in the grass, when old men nodded in the sweet sunshine recalling the days when they’d done both. I guessed I was approaching the latter category now. I brushed crumbs off my lap.

“I hate this place,” said Yanti.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Moishe,” he said. “I live in his house. I work under him. I’m half a man.”

Yanti had been deteriorating fast these past months. His skin was gray. His eyes were rheumy and dull. He was fat as a hippo, and he breathed hard and smelled like a homeless person. I worried about my friend, but he was a stubborn old addict who would listen to no one. As long as he still had a job and a place to sleep, things weren’t so bad, and for years now, he’d managed himself so he was in no imminent danger of losing either. He’d die first, literally.

“I understand,” I said. “But I think it’s not that horrible. I feel lucky to be here.”

“Eh,” he said. “Yah.”

We crumpled our lunch bags and heaved ourselves up and went back to work. Later, the midafternoon sun disappeared behind thick, heaving clouds and then it started to rain. I could smell the warm water as it hit the concrete outside and bounced in puddles of oil and wood dust. My work seemed impossible suddenly, as if I were in a nightmare in which I was expected to carry out duties that made no sense, and my livelihood depended on it. But it wasn’t a dream. I felt as if I were underwater. The Yiddish all around me sounded like the most alien tongue on earth. Business was off because of the recession; every penny counted, even more than usual. Those of us who worked in Accounts Payable were under a constant low-pressure awareness that we could not screw up. This morning’s lost invoice haunted me. Who had put it there? Shoulder to shoulder, I worked with Yanti and Levi in our corner of the office. Was it one of the other two? I knew I hadn’t done it; Levi was a stolid, doughty young man with eyes rimmed in pink like a bunny’s. He possessed not one spark of mischief or rebellion. So, Yanti? I refused to suspect him of any wrongdoing. He was my compadre, and I was his. It must have been a dybbuk.

At five o’clock, I unlocked my bicycle and set off slowly back along Kent Avenue, wobbling a little at first until I got the knack of it all over again. The streets gleamed with rain. The river was milky, the wind warm and noxious, all traces of the morning’s splendor crushed by diesel fumes and commerce. It happened every single spring day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin. I began pumping the pedals. Riding a bike made me feel kidlike again—not young, or even youthful, but it gave me the illusion of being somewhat irresponsible and free in a way that walking did not.

Instead of going straight back to my empty little studio apartment, I turned right onto Calyer and slid off my bicycle in front of Marlene’s. Karina had called me at work that afternoon and asked if we could meet when I finished, so I told her to come to Marlene’s, not wanting to expose her to the dump I lived in now. It would only make her worry. I locked the bike to a scraggly little tree and plunged from the bright haze of late afternoon into the smoky indoor gloom and plunked myself down at the nearest end of the bar, by the window.

George emerged from the dimness like a fish swimming up out of nowhere in an aquarium tank, slow and expressionless.

“Whiskey, beer back,” I said. “How are you, George?”

“Never better, you?”

“Never better. I just got off work.” I tried to sound casual when I said this. I hadn’t been in a position to say this for most of my adult life, since writing and the occasional teaching gig hardly qualified as work in a place like Marlene’s.

George tossed two coasters in front of me, flipping them so they landed with a little puff of air and a slight bounce. “How was work?”

I tried not to take pride in the fact that he asked this without skepticism or scorn, as if he accepted me unquestioningly as the sort of man who went to a regular job at a lumberyard. “Work is work,” I said.

“I hear ya,” he said, pouring a scant dram of amber liquid into a squat glass. “I hear ya,” he repeated as he pulled beer from the tap into a small iced mug.

Chesty, emphysemic laughter erupted nearby, one cackle, one guffaw, and one titter. My old eyes adjusted enough to make out the gaggle of female regulars perched on their stools, the magpies, the crows, Mary and Sue and Cindy, but today not Jenny, a matching set of peroxide shag haircuts, glittering hollow eyes, beaky noses.

“Hey!” said George, delivering my drinks. “What’s so funny about the unemployment rate?”

“Ha,” said Cindy, her sharp eyes snapping at him, “there’s always something to complain about, you have to go to work, you can’t get work, you lose your job, you hate your boss, it doesn’t pay enough …”

“I haven’t worked in twelve years,” said Mary, who was the zaftig, mousy version of her bony, slutty sister, Sue. “I’m on disability. Can’t complain about that.”

“But her knee always hurts,” said Sue. “Anyway, Harry, we won’t bore you with our female issues. How ya been? Where ya working these days?”

“The big lumberyard on the waterfront, on the south side,” I said, this time almost entirely managing to stifle my pride.

“How’d you get work there? I thought they only hired other Hasidics.”

“I have a friend who works there,” I said. “He’s Hasidic, he owed me some favors, he pulled some strings.”

“That’s how you get a job, these days,” said George. “You should have come into Acme, I would have hooked you up.”

“I dropped off an application a couple of months ago when I was looking for work,” I said. “Are there openings there now? It’s closer to home than the lumberyard.”

“Eh, you’re better off at the lumberyard,” said George. “Acme’s got its dark side.”

“Everything has its dark side,” said Sue. She winked at me so hard her whole face seemed to shift to the left.

Sue was an aggressive flirt who, if a man didn’t keep tabs on his proximity to her carefully enough, might end up with her tongue shoved down his throat. She moved fast; she pounced. The presence of other people was no deterrent. She wasn’t picky or interested in reciprocity. All of this, I knew from experience. I slid my eyes away from hers, hoping it wasn’t too late.

“We all do,” Sue added as a suggestive lure meant to tempt me back to the fishhook of her gaze.

“Not me,” I said, swimming away. “Do you, George?”

“Do I what? Have a dark side? Hell, no. I keep to myself.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Sue, but she had lost her amorous energy. George and I were a couple of bottom-feeding trash fish, I could feel her thinking, not worth the bait. “The things you don’t tell anyone. Right, Mary?”

Mary tittered and waved her away.

“All right, another round here,” said Cindy, lighting up a cigarette.

Even though I didn’t normally smoke, I liked it that Marlene had found a way around the antismoking laws by calling the place a social club and charging everyone who came in twenty bucks a year to join. That way, it wasn’t a bar. It was a private establishment, for members only. A lot of cops from the nearby precinct belonged, so it was even sanctioned by the local law enforcers. I had my membership card in my wallet, a laminated piece of cardboard with my name printed on it by none other than George himself.

George got busy.

“What’s Acme’s dark side?” I asked him.

“Certain of my co-workers,” he said with a meaningful gleam at whose import I was left to grasp.

“Rough trade?”

“You could say that.” He set fresh beers in front of the ladies, who were yakking and chortling amongst themselves again. “You could say that. You writing any more of that poetry these days?”

“Not really,” I said with an involuntary inward convulsion of psychic weepiness. Thinking about writing poetry felt like crushing shards of glass into my brain. “I can’t seem to get anywhere with it,” I added.

“Sorry to hear it,” said George. “Are you living around here? I haven’t seen you in quite some time.”

“You know I was living in Bushwick for a couple of months, taking care of dogs for room and board?”

“I didn’t know,” George said, smoothing his lank, colorless quiff against his scalp with the flat of one hand, his eyes hollow ciphers.

“I lived in the basement of a fine upstanding woman named Zeldah Speck,” I said. “She’s a hairdresser by trade, but in her spare time she collects wayward dogs and finds them homes.”

“Don’t know about that,” said George. “There’s too many dogs already. I see nothing wrong with putting them all down.”

“I walked them twice a day. At night, I sat upstairs with a book after dinner while Zeldah read her Bible.”

“No TV? Couldn’t afford one?”

“She had cable,” I said. “All the channels.”

“You didn’t watch?” His voice cracked with puzzled agitation.

“We watched the news,” I said, which seemed to soothe him. “We got along well. Not like that. She was a Girl Scout leader kind of woman.”

“Always liked Girl Scout cookies,” said George.