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The Astral: A Novel - Softcover

Christensen, Kate

 
9780307473356: The Astral: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 030747335X ISBN 13: 9780307473356
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry’s floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz’s arms—and back to his better self—in a novel that is funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Christensen is the author of five previous novels, most recently Trouble. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publica­tions, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, Elle, and Open City. She lives in New York City.

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Chapter One

Toxic 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 I’d 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 I’d 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 McDonald’s, 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 Marlene’s, one of the last local old-man bars. Was I an old man yet, at fifty-seven? I’d 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, he’s not telling. What he’ll do is pour you a grudging whiskey finger for three bucks. Never a double; that’s not the way they do things at Marlene’s.

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 Marlene’s, 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.”

Marlene’s 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.

“Couldn’t find the remote the other night,” said George. “Looked for it everywhere, all over my apartment. High and low. Even tried the freezer.”

“What were you watching?”

“One of my programs,” he said. “The one with the doctors. So I’m looking for it and the phone rings. I go to pick up the phone and press the remote and say, Hello? So there was the remote. Then I couldn’t find the phone. Finally found it on top of the fridge where I left it when I was looking for the remote. Sometimes it seems like the world is playing a joke.”

“And it’s not always funny,” I said. “By the way, Luz threw me out.”

“What? She did? When was this?” He looked truly shocked. Long-term marriages apparently appear as permanent to others as geographical formations; when one dissolves, it’s as if Fuji or Fiji had disappeared overnight.

“Not too long ago,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “that’s tough. That’s just tough. So where you living now?”

“I’m renting a room in the hotel down by Newtown Creek.”

He cocked his head and set another whiskey in front of me. “This one’s on me.”

“Thanks, George.” I lifted my glass. “‘Blindly we lurch through life like crones / Plying high heels on the cobblestones.’” That was from one of my old poems, the ones that were as accessible to my memory as my own name.

“Sure,” he said. He was used to my delusions that I was the neighborhood bard. He folded his arms and looked down at the scuffed surface of the bar. “Those cobblestone bricks down on West Street are made of wood, not clay, did you know that?”

“Near Noble Street,” I said. “You can see the tree rings in them if you look closely. I wrote a poem about it. ‘Frets, concentric, fraught with letters from old clouds.’”

“I was afraid they’d catch fire when the Terminal Market went up a few years back.”

“Me too,” I said. “I kept thinking, if the wind were blowing inland, the whole neighborhood would catch. It would have happened so fast--a piece of burning ash falling just so.”

I had watched the grand old warehouse burn with Luz beside me, both of our faces pressed to the same windowpane.

George shot me a look. “Right, you live in the Astral,” he said. “That must have been scary.”

“Used to.”

“That’s right,” said George, the tip of his tongue swiping at his upper lip. “Maybe you’re better off out of that place. I hear...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030747335X
ISBN 13 
9780307473356
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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