The Astral by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online

kerosene factory workers; Astral Oil’s slogan had been “The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil.” To which they might have appended “And the refineries of Astral Oil are primed with cheap labor.” Some claimed that Mae West had been born in this building; I didn’t see why that couldn’t have been so.
    As soon as I saw the place, I changed my mind about going home. In order to get into my own apartment, I would have had to bribe the super, since my wife had no doubt changed the locks on me, and I couldn’t afford to bribe anyone. And I had lost interest in sneaking into my longtime home to look into my own refrigerator and rustle up some breakfast and sit in my old chair and take a shower, which had been my original, if vague, intent. Seeing Luz walk away from me in tears like that had filled me with a furious itch to do something worthy of her disapprobation and mistrust. My anger was tempered with the kind of nausea that demanded palliative action. If she was going to vilify me, then I would goddamned well give her a reason to. No reason to be all sad-sack about things. I needed to find a woman, any woman, to justify all of this.
    I walked back up to Manhattan Avenue, where all the public clocks were stopped at some arbitrary hour. I stomped along until I came to the doughnut shop and saw their window full of freshly made doughnuts, real doughnuts, and saw the Polish girls behind the counter, handing waxed-paper bags and change to customers.
    I went in and took a seat at the counter. “Chocolate cake doughnut and a cruller,” I said to the luscious, sultry lass who approached me inquisitively. “Coffee with milk and sugar.” She brought it all without expression. I ogled her as she refilled the cup of the guy next to me, a beefy Polish gentleman who smelled of last night’s vodka binge and who had a head like a boulder. His eyes were of a blue so pale they had almost no color at all; his hair, so blond it was likewise almost colorless, was buzzed over his scalp. His big round head was set into bricklayer’s shoulders, a torso like the back of an armchair. I knew all this because I turned to look at him to ascertain why he was looking at me. He did not appear to like what he saw. We had a brief silent staredown.
    “Beautiful day,” I said, biting into my cruller.
    He didn’t answer. I turned my attention back to the girl, who was now slouching by the cash register, looking at nothing. She wore the expression so many of the Polski lasses wore, that contemptuous, flat, blasé look that warned all comers that she had heard it before and hadn’t cared for it much the first twenty-seven times. An old photographer friend of Marion’s and mine had once boasted to me that he frequently hired these doughnut-shop girls to pose for him. He’d always offered to show me the pictures he’d taken, but he never seemed to get around to it. I could only assume he was fibbing wishfully, or else he’d shoved all the photos into a shoebox he kept under his bed and took out to drool over on rainy nights.
    And who could blame him? Polish girls managed to ooze and withhold sex simultaneously. They dressed for Mass and grocery shopping alike in slippery little cleavagey minidresses, sheer hose, and stilettos. They smelled of some pheromonal perfume only they seemed to have access to. Their bodies were at once soft and tight, breasty and rumpy but willow waisted and slender armed and long legged, like some idealized doll. They seemed totally removed from the effect they had on men. They didn’t flirt, didn’t acknowledge or encourage our stares. In fact, they seemed to be unaware of us, as if they’d put that dress on by accident, as if they looked and smelled like that through no effort or design of their own. And they wore their disdainful expressions on faces as comically gorgeous as cartoon vixens’, with peachy skin, curved lips, ski-jump noses, and heavy-lidded eyes of a dizzying, mad blue.
    The guy next