Kate Christensen - The Astral

ALSO BY KATE CHRISTENSEN

In the Drink
Jeremy Thrane
The Epicures Lament
The Great Man
Trouble

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Kate Christensen

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in slightly different form in Open City Magazine.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

City Lights Books: Excerpt from Malaguea, from Poem of the Deep Song/Poema del Cante Jondo by Federico Garca Lorca, translated by Carlos Bauer, copyright 1991 by Carlos Bauer. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

Random House, Inc., and the Wylie Agency LLC: Excerpt from Funeral Blues, from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden, copyright 1940, copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and the Wylie Agency LLC.

Jacket design by Emily Mahon.
Jacket illustration Susan Wides. Courtesy of Kim Foster Gallery.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Christensen, Kate
The Astral : a novel / Kate Christensen. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Middle-aged menFiction. 2. AdulteryFiction. 3. Parent and childFiction. 4. City and town lifeNew York (State)New YorkFiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H716A9 2011
813.54dc22

2010049794

eISBN: 978-0-385-53092-7

v3.1

For Brendan

Bring me an axe and spade,

Bring me a winding-sheet;

When I my grave have made,

Let winds and tempest beat:

Then down Ill lie, as cold as clay.

True love doth pass away!

WILLIAM BLAKE, FRAGMENT FROM SONG

Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay,

Though her parting dims the day,

Stealing grace from all alive;

Heartily know,

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, GIVE ALL TO LOVE

T oxic water streamed with gold like the belly of a turning fish: sunset over Newtown Creek. Tattered pinkish-black clouds blew overhead in the March wind. The water below me rippled with tendons and cowlicks. Just across the brief waterway were the low mute banks of Hunters Point, church spire, low-slung old warehouses. An empty barge made its way down the creek toward the East River and the long glittering skyscrapery isle. I stood behind the chain-link fence the city had slapped up to keep the likes of me from jumping in.

I was hungry and in need of a bath and a drink. At my back thronged the dark ghosts of Greenpoint, feeding silently off the underwater lake of spilled oil that lay under it all, the polyfluorocarbons from the industrial warehouses. I had named this place the End of the World years ago, when it was an even more polluted, hopeless wasteland, but it still fit.

As I stood staring out through the webbing of fence, my mind cast itself through the rivulets of my own lost verse. I netted little flashes of lines and phrases Id been reworking, Held spellbound, your mollusk voice / Quietly swathing my cochlea / In tentacles of damask cloth and Slow-weathered verdigris of our once bronzed thighs, but they sounded dead to me now. All I could really hear was Luz, Luz, Luz like the feeble pulsing signals of a dying heart. Heartache was a physical thing, a pain in my chest, a sort of recoiling tension with an ache like a bruise. There was a withheld quality to my breathing lately, as if I had been sucker punched and was waiting to get my wind back, but no wind came. I could remember whole published poems, but if these new, destroyed verses still existed in my brain, they fled from the webbing of my memory like darting schools of tiny fish, scooching away the instant before capture.

I turned away from this butt end of waterfront warehouses and walked back the way Id come, along Manhattan Avenue, past the flophouse where I lived now, bare mattresses piled in the front window. I passed junk shops full of old radios, used dolls, and cowboy shirts, Goldsholle and Garfinkel Inc., Mexican bodegas, liquor stores, the abandoned hulk of JK Restaurant Supply with its twisted metal grate, small markets with root vegetables in boxes along the sidewalk, butchers shops festooned with loops of kielbasy. I went through the intersection at Greenpoint Avenue, the dingy McDonalds, defeated Starbucks, opposing Arab newsstands, and on to the old Associated Supermarket with its sexy Polish girls pouting at nothing as they rang up your groceries. The outdoor clock at the Smolenski Funeral Home was permanently stopped at 6:30, both hands pointing straight down to hell.

I hung a right off Manhattan Avenue and aimed myself toward the glowing neon sign in the window of Marlenes, one of the last local old-man bars. Was I an old man yet, at fifty-seven? Id been going there for years. The place had rusty tin ceilings, original wainscoting, two-dollar drafts in small, icy mugs, and moose antlers. The one concession to the new millennium was a flat-screen the size of a small car.

Hello there, Harry, said George as I came in. The most deadpan voice I have ever heard. If he has any feelings that cause him to lie awake wracked with turmoil in the small hours of the morning, hes not telling. What hell do is pour you a grudging whiskey finger for three bucks. Never a double; thats not the way they do things at Marlenes.

George has a pocked face the color of gray chalk, a thin colorless wavelet of hair pasted to his scalp, and small protruding eyes. He has a day job at the Acme Smoked Fish warehouse on Gem Street, but he moonlights, so to speak, at Marlenes, for the social life it affords him; otherwise he would have none, he once confided in me with endearing frankness. Marlene is his sister.

I parked myself on a stool midway down the empty bar. George handed me a whiskey and I swallowed it whole and felt a little warmer. My mother was Irish, my father English, but whiskey unites my opposing factions; I like the smokier, pricier, older single malts, but the cheap blended brands do the job just the same.

How are things, George? I asked as he set my second whiskey before me.

Never better, he said. Yourself, Harry?

I looked him in the eye. Never better.

Marlenes opens every day before noon and closes in the very early morning and is almost always populated by its regulars, most notably several local women who park themselves in a row at the bar and settle in for the duration like birds on a wire, smoking and kibitzing and getting shitfaced. But here George and I were tonight with the place to ourselves, separated by a barrier of scuffed wood, he serving, me drinking, a scenario that plays itself out everywhere, all the time, two lonely men doing some manner of business together, not quite making eye contact.