The Astral (26 page)

“I’m not a criminal,” said Hector. He was trying his hardest to sound calm and serene, but there was a microquiver in his voice. He was, even after all Christa’s seductive instructions and flattering determinations, still the boy Luz and I had raised. He still had a conscience, and it wasn’t perfectly clear at the moment. “What law have I broken?”

“Don’t pull that shit with me,” I said. “All these people have given every cent they have to Christa. They’ve given everything up. You’ve tricked them into believing a lie. And of course you know Christa’s already gone to jail once.”

“She has repented of that,” he said. “She has come clean in the blood of—”

“There was a platform out there, under the water,” I said. “You and Christa put it there.”

Hector stared out at the water. A track of moonlight shimmered on the quiet waves. The air smelled piney and salty and fresh. I was shivering, but I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet.

“I could row myself out there right now and find it,” I said. “There’s no use denying it.”

“You wouldn’t understand, Dad,” said Hector.

“Understand what?”

“The need to use gentle deception to achieve a higher end. You wouldn’t understand any of it. You have no faith; to you it’s all one thing or another.”

“To me, it’s perfectly clear. You pretended to do something, and you actually did something else. You lied, in fact, three times tonight.”

“In the service of Yashua, certain steps become necessary,” he said. “To achieve the final victory, we need to share an absolute certainty together, this group. We have to live in solid and harmonious belief.”

“You mean Christa needs total control, and she’s using you to get it. She produced the Messiah; now everyone is doubly bound to her. Including you. Especially you. I hope you won’t end up the lapdog of a con artist. I hope you’ll eventually realize that it’s not worth it. You’re a true believer, Hector. As far as that goes, you’re the real thing, and this is just lies and trickery. Christa’s corrupting you with all this power and glory. And you’ll never be able to stay true to what you really believe.”

“Fine words, Dad. You have no idea what you’re talking about. No idea at all. Let’s go back now. I’ve let you have your say.”

We walked back to the house. The party had gone on without us, and when Hector reappeared, there was a general shout of joy. He didn’t say good-bye or good night to me; he disappeared into the crowd and was embraced as their savior.

I walked back down the drive, teeth chattering. Karina rolled down her window when she saw me coming. “How did it go?” she asked.

“He’s not leaving anytime soon,” I told her. “He’s having too much fun.”

“How am I going to tell Mom?” she said as I got into the car.

“You’re not,” I said. “I’m going to tell her. It has to be me.”

She started the engine. “You promise?”

“Of course,” I said.

“That place could be kind of great if they weren’t so full of shit,” said Karina, turning from the driveway onto the road. “Why do they have to be so full of shit?”

“I think that’s the point.”

We drove home in the moonlight. I felt nostalgic and embittered. What Karina felt, I didn’t know, but I imagined it was something along those lines. Moonshine, I thought. Flimflammery, chicanery, humbuggery, quackery, hogwash.

Chapter Twenty-one

  D
iane had asked me to come at 7:00, but, fueled by eagerness, I made it to Kensington by 6:55, so I locked my bike to a lamppost down the block from her place and dawdled around her block and the next one until I was a correct, thoughtful ten minutes late. I climbed the steps of her building, a three-story brick row house that was architecturally identical to every other house on her block, and rang the doorbell. A yappy dog barked its fool head off somewhere in the house, but it didn’t scare me away. I heard footsteps. Diane opened the door. She looked flushed and sparkly eyed, which was exactly how I felt, like a teenager on a date with his big crush. “Come in,” she said, sounding a little breathless.

I followed her, unable to resist the temptation to notice how pretty her ass looked in the formfitting summer skirt she had on, up two flights to her apartment. The high-pitched barking grew louder as we passed the second-floor apartment, then subsided as we mounted, and trailed off into yips as we went into Diane’s place and shut the door behind us. We were in a small kitchen; something was bubbling in a pot on the stove.

“Glad that’s not your dog,” I said.

“So,” she said, smiling, turning to face me, “let’s see, can I offer you a drink?”

I handed her the bottle of white Bordeaux I’d bought, chilled, at the wine store in Karina’s neighborhood. “I think it’s still pretty cold, but maybe a few minutes in the freezer—”

“Thank you for bringing that!” she said. “It looks great.” She opened the bottle, struggling a bit with the cork while I stood by, hovering, thinking I should have done it myself. We took our glasses of wine into the bright, crowded living room and sat side by side on her couch. The knee-level plate on the coffee table in front of us held a round white cheese, a knife, and some round white crackers. Nervously, my adrenaline peaking and crashing, I cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker and stuck it into my mouth. “Nice place,” I said with my mouth full.

She looked around her living room. “Do you think? I have so much stuff, it doesn’t really fit in here. I keep meaning to get some freegans to come and haul half of it away.”

“It’s cozy,” I said after I swallowed. I hadn’t been on a first date in more than thirty years; Samantha didn’t count. The other night, Karina had made us an instantly intimate threesome, we’d been drinking beer, it had all felt so easy. Now, at Diane’s place, just the two of us, dinner on the stove, nothing to do after we ate but go to bed, a couple of obligatory hours to fill until then with conversation, the liquid ease between us had cooled and hardened. I felt a resurgence of the worry I’d felt as I toweled myself off post-shower just before biking over here. Because of all the bicycling and walking I’d been doing in recent months, I was in much better shape than I had been when Luz had thrown me out last winter and called me withered and washed up, but I was pushing fifty-eight, things were not what they had been and never would be again no matter what I did. Meanwhile, Diane looked so good, her face firm, her arm muscles lovely and bare in her sleeveless blouse, her calves full and supple. What did women do to keep themselves so youthful looking? I ate another piece of Brie, no cracker this time (they were a bit stale), hoping she wasn’t disappointed by what she saw in the clear light of evening. I had shaved carefully, had dressed with great pains to look presentable in a fresh white shirt and clean summer-weight trousers, but I should have trimmed my shaggy white eyebrows, I realized now, should have got myself a new haircut.

“I got divorced a few years back,” Diane was saying. She ran her palms down the fronts of her thighs as if she were drying them on her skirt. “I didn’t want to pay to put all my things in storage, so I just sort of moved them in here temporarily right after we separated, thinking I’d get a bigger place when we sold our house and split the money. But I hate moving so much, and it was such a monumental pain to move into this apartment up two flights, you know, and to find it in the first place, then get settled, everything, I’ve just sort of … stayed here.”

“Karina mentioned that you’d been through a bad breakup,” I said.

“Oh!” She looked startled. “Oh, no, that was more recently … that was the, um, the guy I sort of left my husband for. It didn’t work out. Well, it lasted three years, so it was hardly a flash in the pan. I sound defensive. I feel defensive.” She was talking fast, looking straight ahead. “I stuck it out with Eric much too long, probably unconsciously just so my ex-husband, Alex, wouldn’t be able to say ‘I told you so.’ My ex-husband is like a spiteful older brother at this point, waiting for my life to fuck up, hoping I’ll fall flat on my face without him so he can feel vindicated somehow.” She rubbed her palms together, rubbed them over her hair. “I’m talking too much. I’m nervous, to be honest. I’ve been looking forward to this evening so much. I haven’t been on a date since Eric and I broke up.” She lifted her wineglass and said, “A toast to this evening. I have a feeling it’s been a while for you, too.”

I clinked my glass against hers, we drank, and then I said, feeling insecure but trying to sound suave and confident, “How can you tell?”

“Karina told me,” she said, and we both laughed, finally meeting each other’s eyes.

I leaned back against the cushions and looked around the room, which was indeed crammed floor to ceiling, in piles, over every available spot of wall and floor: furniture, books, primitive-looking stringed instruments and drums, framed photos and paintings, plants, candles, painted wooden masks, woven hangings, needlepoint pillows, and vases. I could see why she’d want to keep it all; it was a fine accumulation of possessions, the accrual of a no doubt rich and interesting life. Still, it didn’t fit comfortably into this room, didn’t fit at all.

I reached over and put my hand on hers. I could feel its fine bones, her heartbeat. I let my hand rest there, a little too heavily, and she sighed and leaned against me.

“Diane,” I said. “I’ve thought about you constantly since the other night.”

“Have you? Me too.” Her hair smelled like a fresh, fruity shampoo, strawberries or peaches; I could feel the rhythm of her breathing against my shoulder. “I have no idea what I made for dinner. I’m no cook, to be honest.”

“I don’t care,” I said. I enfolded her sweet, skittish hand in mine and felt much better.

We sat there for a moment, not talking.

“Oh!” she said. “Damn. The pasta.” She jumped up, ran into the kitchen, and made a commotion of clanging and rushing water. While she was gone, I studied the living room more closely. The place was truly packed with artifacts. It was like a museum storage room, with paths between stacks to navigate through, essentially a repository of the past, mostly her marriage; I could see that Diane and Alex had traveled to Mexico, Turkey, and China, had had friends who were painters and photographers, had more than a passing interest in musical instruments, even if only for display. Or maybe Alex had hated all this stuff, and she had foisted it onto him. Maybe he’d chafed at all this, and now that they were divorced, he lived in a bare, modern chrome-and-glass box.

I saw, through an arched doorway into another small room, cardboard boxes stacked against the far wall, just as neatly, just as crowded together as everything in here, halfway up to the ceiling. Everything was so neatly placed, I could discern patterns and groupings; there was method to this obsessive-compulsiveness. If this apartment was viewed as a metaphor for Diane’s mind, then she had a brain that was orderly and full, and she had an excellent memory, and she had trouble letting go of the past, of anything, for that matter. Or rather, she had no trouble letting go of things that she was finished with, but the things she treasured, she was tenacious about. She’d jettisoned a husband, a house, a whole life, for example, so obviously these objects were the things she cherished most, these memories in physical form.

How interesting but daunting this was, to start over so late. Luz and I had been so young when we met, we’d had nothing much about our pasts to tell each other. With Diane, I felt a certain reluctance to open the subject of the past. Once we started, we’d have to talk nonstop for months to catch each other up on all that we’d missed. So much catch-up for so little time left to spend together. The math seemed lopsided, although I suspected we’d discover some sort of shorthand, since we were almost the same age.

Diane came back and sat next to me again, but not as close as she’d been before. “A little overdone, but still edible,” she said, gesturing, not looking at me. It seemed she’d become shy again during her stint in the kitchen. “The thing about cooking, for me, is that it seems like everyone else always makes such a big deal out of it. You know, buying the right ingredients, having the new recipe no one else knows about. For some reason, it’s always annoyed me, this obsessive snobbery about food, so I resisted the trend. I feel like I don’t want to be like that about food, it’s just
food
, for Pete’s sake, we all eat it, so I went in the opposite direction. Dinner tonight will definitely reflect this.”

I laughed. “Do you believe in God?” I asked.

She laughed too, and seemed to feel more at ease. “What an odd question. Is it apropos of my being a bad cook, because I’ll probably rot in hell?”

“No,” I said. “In fact, I applaud your attitude toward food. No, it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently.”

“I don’t
not
believe in God,” she said. “I mean, it isn’t something I think about very much, so I don’t have a firm opinion one way or another. My family had no religion. I consider myself an ignorant agnostic. What about you?”

“I’m an evangelical, fundamentalist nonbeliever. I actively disbelieve in God. I’m thinking of going door-to-door.”

She regarded me with curious amusement. “But how do you know there’s no God? How can you be so sure?”

“I’m as sure that there isn’t a God as my son Hector is sure there is one. We’re equally mule headed and equally extreme. Like father, like son, I guess.”

“Karina told me he’s in some sort of religious group on Long Island?”

“He’s the leader now, I think. He and their guru, Christa. And he’s marrying her. I should be so proud of my boy, he’s risen to the top of his company! He’s the equivalent of the CEO, if Christa is the president, or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s more than twenty years older than he is, by the way, not that that matters.”

Talking about Hector and his life in this jokey way loosened a vise around my brain. I hadn’t told Luz yet, hadn’t even tried to talk to her. I was deeply dreading my conversation with her because she would, in a manner of speaking, rend her garments and weep and pull out her hair when she heard what was going on with him. Meanwhile, Diane smiled, taking everything I said at face value, including my tone.

“Has Christa ever been married before?” she asked.

“I don’t know, why?”

She grinned. “Middle-aged women used to leave their husbands for other middle-aged women. Now we leave them for much-younger men. My ex-boyfriend was twelve years younger than me. Things always happen in clumps. We’re that kind of species.”

“Who do middle-aged men leave their wives for?”

“Middle-aged men don’t leave their wives.”

“You seem very certain of all this.” Our wineglasses were empty. My arm was draped over the back of the couch, the standard high-school movie-theater trick. I caressed her shoulder and drew her in closer so her head nestled into my shoulder. She bent her knees up to curl against me, resting her forearm on my thigh and holding my kneecap in her hand. Things were progressing rapidly and well.

“I’ve conducted a certain amount of research,” she said, her breath warm against my neck, her forearm pleasantly weighty on my thigh. “Informal, of course, but no less accurate for that.”

“Technically, I left my wife. She threw me out, but I left.”

“But if she hadn’t thrown you out, you’d still be there,” she said. Her dark, silky hair rustled in my ear and released another sexy strawberry-scented cloud. I inhaled deeply, my nose against her head. “Right?”

“Okay,” I said. “But what does it all mean? What conclusions do you draw?”

“Ah,” she said. “I’ll tell you that after dinner.”

“I don’t care about dinner,” I said, sliding my free hand up her neck to cup her cheek, turning her face to mine. Our kiss started out gentle, hesitant, romantic, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Soon our mouths were open and wet and mashed together, and we were breathing hard, and our hands were clutching at whatever parts of each other’s body we could grab. It was a full-on gropefest, hotly adolescent, unabashedly horny. “Can we take off all our clothes now?” I said without taking my mouth from hers.

“I don’t know,” she said. “An atheist like you?”

“I believe in many things,” I said. “Besides God. Does that count?”

She pulled back to look at me, laughing. “Like what?”

“I’m a poet,” I said with my eyebrows raised to indicate how significant this was. “That means I’m soulful, romantic, and earnest.”

“And mystical,” she said.

“Very mystical,” I said. My fingertips were bunched around her nipple, stroking it.

“You know who the real mystics are? Physicists. They’re the ones with their thumbs on the throat of the universe or whatever the saying is.”

“Yes!” I said. “Poetry is tame by comparison.” I took her hand. “Let’s go to bed,” I said. “But you have to lead me, because I don’t know the way to the bedroom.”

“It’s not really a bedroom,” she said, and led me through the archway into the room with all the boxes. In the corner was an antique cast-iron bed, made up with a white coverlet.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a sleeping alcove, according to Realtor-speak,” she said, stripping off her shirt. She had no bra on underneath. Her breasts were small, well shaped, and as appealing as the rest of her. Giddy and thrilled, I divested myself of trousers and briefs in one motion, swooping them over my erection and quickly down, out of legholes, and free. We fell naked onto the pristine bed. I lifted myself onto one elbow to look down at her. Her legs were strong and shapely, her hips full and divine. We both had slack little bellies, the slightly thickened waists and softened stomachs of otherwise thin people of a certain age. Hers was adorable and sexy, but I averted my eyes from my own damn self, knowing all too well what it looked like.