Jeremy Thrane (11 page)

But under her skin-and-bones polish, her sleekly aggressive aplomb, was Cathy Benitez with her unfortunate perm and Valley-girl baby fat, going to the mall with her girlfriends, French-smoking menthols; occasionally, Giselle’s veneer cracked to reveal an occasional dropped “g,” a fleeting suburban gawkiness, a vestigial “so fucking what?” quirk of the upper lip. But these flaws were the key to her allure; they evinced the efforts of self-invention and also its success. She was quite a little masterpiece, I thought.

When I looked beyond her to where Ted was standing, bottle of gin in his hands, the knowledge of what was going on hit me in several stages—first, the immediate bolt of recognition, then a gradual soaking-in, and finally there it was, complete and undeniable, solid as a rock in my mind. I’d never quite realized how married they were. I’d assumed
the whole thing was a phony, polite sham for them both. Suddenly, I felt clunky and dull. Ted was right, I’d let myself go a little in recent years.

Then Ted looked at me, sharply with a question in his eyes, or a plea. I felt a small surge of victory, but it burst and faded immediately: Telling Giselle everything point-blank went entirely against my nature. Ted must have been reassured by the blandness of my expression; as if he knew that he was safe for the moment, he turned his back on us to mix the drinks while Giselle prattled on. Turning to glance at the clock, I caught sight of Yoshi’s little grove of potted orange trees at the far end of the room. They looked as fussily artificial as concubines hand-fed rare delicacies and rose water, perfumed and powdered and brought before the emperor. Their leaves were as shiny as waxed bell peppers. Their lurid orange fruit bent the thin boughs. “Right, Jeremy?” Giselle said, and I felt myself nod as Ted handed her a brimming glass.

I’d been a waiter at a theater-district bistro for several tedious years before I’d hooked up with Ted. The night I met him, he was a cute little nobody playing the supporting lead in an off-Broadway play that was about to close. He’d just come out of a show and had wandered into Café Bonne-Foi alone for a late supper, and I had waited on him. He’d been in a chatty mood, and as it happened, I’d had a few things to say myself. I hadn’t even been hitting on him. I hadn’t realized he was gay, I’d been too caught up in what I was saying to think about anything so crass as getting laid. We talked about his play, which I’d seen and liked, and then I mentioned my own writing, which in those days was taking the form of plays.

One thing led, as it so often did, to another: He asked me to have a drink with him when my shift was over, and at a nearby piano bar, while the drag-queen singer warbled her way through her repertoire, we’d talked earnestly about the decline of the theater and our mutual love of Noël Coward. After several drinks I was sufficiently certain of our mutual attraction to say, “You’re not gay, are you, by any chance,” knowing full well he was and that he preferred to keep it a secret. Because I had divined this without being told and agreed to protect him from the outset, he had trusted me enough to sleep with me that night at my walk-up in the East Village, but it hadn’t taken long for him to ask me to
move in to the Gramercy Park town house he’d bought with part of his inheritance from his dead grandfather. I’d pose as his secretary or something, we decided, but back then it was all a lark because we had fallen, as the saying went, head over heels in love.

“Well, it’s not as if they didn’t warn you,” Ted was saying to Giselle.

“Yes, but it took a couple of days of intense concentration—I mean, I really reached for those scenes—and then they’re just thrown out? Come on.”

“But all the work that gets thrown out gets used somewhere else. Remember the other day when we were talking about that? You reach into your deepest self and pull something out for one character, it goes on the floor, but the next time you’re called upon to give that part of yourself, it’s there, because you’ve done it before. Nothing goes to waste, Giselle, that’s the most mysterious part; you’re saved from wasting anything by the process itself.”

“Oh, I know,” she said in her flat, throaty California voice, “it’s amazing. It’s like, the hand of God has to be in there somewhere. It feels so spiritual sometimes, it gives me chills.”

Soon afterward I said a transparently stiff good night to both of them without actually looking either in the eye, and then I escaped upstairs.

Up in my room, I stood in the darkness by the floor-to-ceiling windows, peering through the long white curtains out into the lamplit streets of Gramercy Park. Outside in the park the treetops swayed in the night wind, although I couldn’t hear them through the thick glass.

I switched on the standing lamp, stood thoughtfully in front of the full-length mirror for a moment, then began to take off my clothes. Having no reason to be especially vain, I usually ignored my reflection unless I needed to make sure my hair was acceptable or my collar was straight, but now I looked at my naked self as objectively as I could. I was tall, dark-haired, strong-jawed, solid, and broad-shouldered, with a swimmer’s slight padding of fat over defined muscles. I wasn’t handsome, but I liked to think that I had a certain edgy comeliness on good days. My penis, although not extra large, was shapely and assertive, and could usually go whatever distance was required of it. But now, on what I was dismayed to recognize as the cusp of early middle age, my hair was graying just a little at the temples, my muscles were softening somewhat, and my whole body had widened slightly, had taken on a new maturity that I didn’t entirely dislike but wasn’t thrilled with either, because who would be? I put my hands on my hips and turned from side to side, surveying the new landscape, assessing the damage. My face was craggier; my forehead was becoming lined; I had crow’s-feet, and my butt was sagging maybe just a tad, and I was getting the beginnings of what might turn into a gut someday if I didn’t watch it. But I saw no
reason whatsoever to call myself fat or old. In fact, if I’d met myself in a bar, I would have considered myself lucky to take myself home.

I put on a T-shirt and a clean pair of boxer shorts, and brushed my teeth, trying to remember the last time I’d done so. I stared into the piercing blue eyes of a mournful, shaggy, dark-haired, big-jawed Norwegian, with what on someone else I might have described as a humorously self-contained but sensual mouth. I looked so much like my father, I could have played him in a made-for-TV movie. My hair needed cutting; I’d missed a swath of stubble on the underside of my chin that morning. Other people washed their faces before bed as a matter of course, the same way they kept their nails neat and orderly, and threw away their underwear when it got torn or stained. Sometimes I felt as if I hadn’t been properly brought up. Well, no wonder: I’d been raised in campgrounds and communes for the first twelve years of my life. When and where would I have learned basic hygiene?

I washed my face, as if to prove to myself that I knew how. My pale and flummoxed reflection blinked back at me.

I went out and picked up my phone and dialed.

“Hello?” said Wayne in his officiously lilting voice.

“Wayne,” I said, “it’s Jeremy. Is Felicia available?”

“She was right here a minute ago, but the sound of the phone sent her scurrying underneath her little rock.”

“Give me the phone, you cross-eyed fuckhead,” I heard Felicia drawl in the near distance, and then she said right into the phone, “Jeremy?”

I hesitated. “How’d you know it was me?”

“It’s always you. What’s wrong?”

“How’d you know something was wrong?”

“Don’t get all suspicious, I’m not spying on you or anything, I’m just cutting to the chase because Wayne and I are right in the middle of doing something.”

“I bet you are,” I said smuttily. Wayne was a faunlike slip of a thing, as gay as a blade of grass. The idea of him and Felicia in bed together was ludicrous yet oddly compelling, if only because they were equally pale, bony, and asexual; it would have been like the coupling of two grasshoppers.

She sighed sternly. “Jeremy, I apologize profusely about earlier. I swear I’ll never—”

“Ted dumped me,” I said.

“Oh he did not,” she said immediately in a shocked voice, which was all it took for me to burst into tears. “I don’t believe it,” she said after a moment.

“It’s true,” I sobbed.

“He must be insane, Jeremy,” she said in a horrified voice. “He loves you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said brokenly.

“What did he say?”

“He said he doesn’t want his daughter to find out he’s gay, so he’s got to stop sleeping with me. Although I’m welcome to sponge off him for the rest of my life. I guess that’s his idea of palimony.”

She was silent for a moment. I could almost hear her brain ticking. “He must have decided it was too risky, that’s all, but he can’t possibly be happy about this.”

“No, actually, I think he’s fallen out of love with me,” I said, and blew my nose into a hankie.

“Well, maybe you’ve fallen out of love with him but you just don’t know it yet,” she said soothingly. “Maybe you’ve outgrown him, Jeremy.”

“No way,” I said. “Really? You think so?”

“I think it’s totally possible that your affair with Ted has run its natural course,” she said. “I think maybe you’re ready to move on, and maybe you’ll be happier now that you’re free.”

For some reason, despite all the “maybes” and the fact that she’d been saying exactly the opposite earlier today, I was reassured by this idea. After we’d said good-bye, I got into bed and turned out the light, seething, bruised, but comforted enough to sleep.

I woke early the next morning and looked up at the ceiling. Here I was again, incrementally closer to death than I’d been yesterday. The days rolled by in a soothing, unstoppable, numbing rhythm. I had no desire to get up. Ted had dumped me. It was unbelievable that so much could have changed from yesterday morning to this one, but there it was. The rest of my life stretched away into the future on a bleak, bare road.

After a moment, a little blue flame leapt in my mind, and almost automatically, I fumbled among the books on my bed stand and pulled out my Wallace Stevens collection. After a while, I found “Sunday Morning” and began to read it, although I knew it almost by heart: late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, a green cockatoo, complacencies of the peignoir, holy hush of ancient sacrifice. It pulled me in with a strong undertow, leaving thoughts of Ted on some stark, gravelly shore that receded into a medieval-style mist. By the time I reached the seventh stanza, the words had taken hold powerfully in my mind:

I felt a vertiginous rush, a desire to leap headlong into the poem and burst it open to reveal its shining innards. As my eyes unfocused slightly and the letters blurred, the words met my thoughts somewhere in the air between my eyes and the page where the whole poem hung, apprehensible in its entirety, and just beyond it an infinitely deep time-chamber only a split second long, the universe visible through the hairline crack of one poem. My brain tingled with a ski-jump swoop of exhilaration that lifted me just high enough to glimpse the whole of everything, through the words, just beyond my apprehension. Then it was gone, leaving the residue of a deep, shivery joy.

My fingers worried the page, curling it and ripping it out of its curl repeatedly with a soothingly destructive persistence until the telephone rang. I picked it up.

“Jeremy? Hi. I can’t sleep.” It was Amanda.

I looked at the clock. “So get up. It’s eight o’clock.”

“I sleep during the day.”

“Then go to bed.”

She sniffed loudly, then sniffed again.

“Do you have a cold?”

“Anyway, I’m just—whatever. Things aren’t going too well at the
moment. This thing with Leonard, that whole conversation last night, I don’t know, it brought back all this old shit for me. Like the way Angus left us, and Lola’s been in Australia all these years—we’ve never been much of a family. All this shit that’s been going on with Liam—I miss Lola. I could use a sister right now.”

“I’m sort of a sister.”

She gave a short, unamused laugh. “So how was the romantic reunion?”

“Ted and I broke up last night.”

“You did? What happened?” To my surprise, she sounded genuinely concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I will be,” I said briskly, not wanting her pity. “But I need to get out of here for a day or two.”

“We have an empty room here,” she said.

“Here” meant a squalid Brooklyn apartment, home not only to Amanda and Liam, but also their freeloading long-term houseguest Feckin. But Felicia and Max and my mother would all demand one or another form of emotional currency in return for their hospitality, and unfortunately, I had nothing whatsoever to offer in that vein right now. I’d only disappoint them. Whereas I could buy Amanda and her Irishmen a bottle of whiskey and some token groceries, and they’d leave me alone. I considered the offer for a moment and decided I might as well accept.

“But it’s your music studio,” I said.

“I can live without it for a couple of days.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, well, it’s no palace, but sure. Listen, we have a show tomorrow night at Bombshell. Around midnight. In case you’re bored. I’ll put you on the list if you want.” She said this offhandedly, but I suspected she wasn’t saying this just to make conversation. She’d always made it clear without actually saying it that she knew how I felt about her music and preferred to perform without having to see me squinting skeptically and critically up at her. Apparently, she’d had a change of heart.

So this was Amanda’s emotional currency; oh, well.

“Great,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

“You’re better off without him,” she said abruptly. After a brief,
crackling silence she went on. “You deserve to be with someone who, you know. Admits you exist.”