Free The Astral by Kate Christensen

girls up out of the blue and say he was coming to get us to take us to the Jersey Shore or, like, to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes at Christmastime. We’d get dressed up and wait in a row on the couch not saying a word. We’d sit there and sit there. Sometimes I would get so excited I threw up. My mother tried to tell us, but we never listened.”
    “Let me guess,” I said.
    “Yeah,” she said. “You know how that story always goes. But we fell for it, every time.”
    “Is he still alive?”
    “He died eight years ago,” she said.
    For some wholly irrational, brutally self-serving reason, I was relieved. This meant that I would have no competition for Luz’s love, not in this world, anyway. And Luz and I were even: she had lost her most beloved parent, I had lost mine. We would be free to be alone together, man and wife, without parental rivals. This struck me as a boon.
    “I can’t believe you’re glad he’s dead,” she said, her eyes glinting, narrowed.
    “What?” I said, shocked. How had she read my mind?
    “Admit it.”
    “Luz,” I said, “why would I be glad your father is dead? I just met you, I never met him, I lost my own mother—”
    “I saw it in your face,” she said. “Don’t argue.”
    I stared at her, my chopsticks suspended with a piece of Chinese broccoli dangling from their pincers. She was right, of course, but this was the sort of thing most people would have let go, would have overlooked in the interest of lighthearted flirting, especially on a first date.
    “Right,” I said. I ate the piece of broccoli and chewed and swallowed. “You’re insane, you know that?”
    “I am not insane,” she said. Her voice was soft but piercing. “Apologize for that, too.”
    “Wow,” I said.
    She didn’t move her eyes from mine. Her face was a stubborn, slitty-eyed mask, fixed with a cold smile. She looked like a small olive-skinned raptor with rabbit teeth.
    Because she was right, and because I wanted her, in fact I wanted her more than ever, because I needed her, or someone like her, I said, “All right then, if that’s what will make you happy.” I leaned back in the booth and took another swig of beer. “I admit it, and I am sorry.” A tongue of lust licked at my groin. I ate a dumpling.
    “Good,” she said, flinty voiced, eyes pinpoints, “but I need to know why you would even think such a thing. It’s disturbing, Harry.”
    I laughed. There was nothing else I could do.
    Luz paused a moment, surprised, and then laughed too, raucous, unrestrained. Her laughter from then on was the source of her greatest power over me, whether or not she ever knew it.
    Or rather, her laughter was the source of one of her greatest powers over me. We went to bed that night, the night we met. Luz brought me with her, without discussion, back to the Astral. We climbed the stairs to her third-floor one-bedroom, laughing and excited. In bed, naked, with me, she was kittenish, sinuous, carnal, darling, ravenous, generous, selfish, laughing, violent, intimate, cooing, and soft. And from that night on, I was in her thrall. No matter what she said or did out of bed, and no matter how needy, bossy, or crazy I knew she was from the outset, I was hers.
    Luz agreed to marry me after my first proposal, barely a year later, even though I was a penniless teacher, even though I was not a practicing Catholic. We both knew exactly what we were getting into, what the deal was. Luz would inspire and control me, and, when she had to, support me and our kids. And, although for the most part I would disappoint and infuriate her, would always be wrong, always fall short, I did have one thing to offer, or rather, two: she announced, early on, after reading some of my poems, that I was a literary genius, and that therefore I would write great poetry and give her brilliant children who were half white and had a better chance of acceptance and success than she had had.
    She asked the super at the Astral to