Jeremy Thrane (13 page)

“You won’t love global warming when it turns into the next Ice Age,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d recently learned, somewhat against my will, that Max’s new love, Fernando Narvaez, was a forty-year-old Mexican painter he’d met at an art opening the night before. They’d sat all night on a porch swing in the roof garden of the Chelsea penthouse apartment where Fernando was house-sitting, looking out over the city, drinking Gibsons, watching the sun come up behind the water towers. “We didn’t have sex,” said Max, flushed and wide-eyed with the wonderment of this. “When we said good-bye the next morning, we shook hands.”

“Are you sure he’s gay? Maybe there’s something he’s not telling you. Maybe he’s married.”

He cut his eyes meaningfully at me by way of answer. “Do not compare Fernando to Ted,” he said. “Don’t even say their names in the same sentence. You’re gun-shy right now and I frankly don’t blame you, but this is different.”

I’d always suspected that Max was jealous of my relationship with Ted on some level, so I had held my tongue whenever he went on and on about how selfish and vain Ted was, how he didn’t deserve to suck the first knuckle of my big toe, how I was with him only because my father had been unavailable and I was repeating a familiar pattern.

“I’m not gun-shy, Max,” I said. “I’m devastated.”

Max looked up at the skeptical, hard-faced waitress, who was waiting to take our order. “We’ll start with two hundred grams of Kremlyovskaya,” he told her.

Her brief, bitter nod conveyed the distinct impression that this order was American and gauche, but whatever we might have ordered vodka-wise would have been, no matter what brand or how many grams we asked for. She stalked away. Max leaned back in his chair with a happy sigh. A warmish breeze blew in off the water; in the light from the setting sun the ocean looked like a shimmering bath. Toy-sized tankers and sailboats slid silently along, far away on the horizon. The broad, scuffed beach held a few late-season kite flyers and beachcombers. When the vodka arrived in a small sweaty-cold carafe, Max poured half of it into two small glasses and we drank it off, then he poured the second round, which we sipped. At first the vodka gave off an ammoniac vapor, but as it warmed, it turned peppery and robust.

Two plates of hot crepes arrived, each accompanied by a mound of coarse orange caviar. Then came bowls of hot borscht dense with tender meat, potato chunks, and lima beans. By the time the pelmenis came, we were full, but we wolfed down every slippery, nuggety beef dumpling, dipped into small paper cups of sour cream. We ordered another two hundred grams. When it came, Max fished out his multi-pill cocktail from his pocket, clapped all the pills into his mouth at once, and washed them down with a snort of vodka.

“L’chaim,” he said, raising his vodka glass to the crowds of Russian Jewish émigrés out for a post-sunset constitutional along the boardwalk. For a moment we could have been at a Black Sea resort in the fifties, but this illusion was immediately dispelled by the appearance of a seven-foot-tall black stringbean of a guy in baggy pants and a bomber jacket, a tiny carved-face Chinese woman, then an old man with scaly skin, froglike goiters, barrel chest, and bandy legs.

“It’s funny,” said Max, “watching all these Jews go by.”

“Why is it funny?”

“It just is. I went to Hebrew school, I had a bar mitzvah, I thought I’d become a yeshiva bucher like my friend Avram. And I would have, I would be an observant Jew this minute if it weren’t for Leviticus. What do I do with this? ‘Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence.’ He puts homosexuality on the same level as bestiality and incest: ‘All who do any of those abhorrent things, such persons shall be cut off from their people.’ ”

“It doesn’t say not to lie with a male,” I said. “It says only not to do it the way you’d do it with a woman. That would be literally impossible, am I right?”

Max laughed. His stocky reddish-blond freckle-faced good looks, suggestive equally of soccer field and shtetl, were heightened by his electrified hormones and the anticipation of future bliss; his happiness was as unshakable as my churlishness. “Try running that line of reasoning past my father,” he said. “Anyway, my point is that I have nothing against the religion except that it condemns me.”

“Why don’t you go to a gay synagogue, then?”

“One of those free-to-be-Jew-and-me places?” Max said, almost rising up from his chair in horror. “Those P.C. touchy-feely folksong ‘temples’? You know how they do it? They bargain with God like they’re at an electronics store. ‘Oy-oy, God, okay, I’ll fast on Yom Kippur but I can’t keep kosher, with the two sets of dishes and the restrictions. If I’m not supposed to eat shrimp lo mein then why is it so good?’ I don’t think God wants to hear about it. I don’t think he’s open to negotiation. Either you’re in or you’re out, end of story. I sleep with men. I’m out. Call me old-fashioned.”

“Okay,” I said mildly. “Just asking.”

“Just answering,” he said testily, subsiding.

We leaned back in our white plastic armchairs and fell into a wordless waking doze, encased in our separate and incompatible moods. The sky was nearly dark.

“Should we order another round?” he asked after a while.

“No,” I said. “Let’s walk over to Coney Island.”

“What’s there this time of year?”

I waggled my eyebrows at him. “It’s spooky,” I said.

“I’m not sure you can handle spooky in your heartbroken state, sweetheart.”

“Oh, so you’ve noticed that I’m heartbroken.”

“You’ll be all right.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “I suppose it happens to all of us, sooner or later.”

“Well, except you,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“When have you ever been heartbroken?”

“You broke my heart,” he said as he made a “check” motion at the waitress, who glowered at him. “But I’m over you, just like you’ll get over Ted.”

The news that Max had been in love with me was somewhat dubious, since I’d never seen any evidence of this, but I found it flattering nonetheless. After he’d paid the bill, we set off along the boardwalk, scuffing our feet, inhaling the breeze off the water. The rough, narrow boards were laid out in herringbone patterns that did psychedelic things if you looked down at them as you walked over them. I was suddenly almost giddy with a tipsy, cheerfully aggrieved euphoria. Possibilities for the rest of my life occurred to me—other men I might love, jobs I might get, neighborhoods I might live in. These ideas arose just long enough to thrill me with their potential, then vanished before I could panic about all the decisions I had to make to put them into effect.

Coney Island was dark and empty now, the stuffed-animal-hung booths shuttered, glittering lights turned off for the winter. The shrieking, lumpen summer hordes of teenagers had migrated to their winter haunts of video-game parlors and fast-food joints, and wouldn’t be back to eat corn dogs and crash bumper cars until late spring. Instead of skull-pounding music, we heard low, inhuman moans, wind blowing through the metal struts of the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel. On a ramp off the boardwalk, we ran into a couple of cute little Hispanic queers hanging out with their boom box. We flirted with them for a while, or, rather, with the idea of going under the boardwalk for a Doublemint quickie, something we hadn’t done together in years. Max traveled everywhere with a supply of fresh condoms; he had slipped me two before sending me home with Frankie, and I knew he’d come through again now. But
we soon got bored with the extended posturing and display these boys seemed to require as foreplay, so we waved good-bye to them, climbed down onto the beach, took off our shoes, and strolled along the sand at the edge of the waves, back toward Brighton Beach. The night was not warm enough for this, but our blood alcohol level numbed us enough to let us ignore our chattering teeth. We passed rocky promontories and broken pilings jutting wet and black from the moonlit water like scraggly rows of ruined teeth or tree stumps in a bayou. We raced each other then, sprinting down the beach until we simultaneously stopped short, panting and warmed through. Thoughts of Max’s precariously dormant virus kept intruding, as they often did whenever we reached these heights of giddiness together, but for some ghoulish reason, this only heightened the fun.

“I just remembered,” I said, panting, “this kid at the commune in Redding, where we stayed for a while. I can’t remember his name, but he wanted to fuck me.”

Max bent at the waist, rested his hands on his knees, and looked up at me over his shoulder. “A kid how old?”

“Nine,” I said. “And I was seven.”

“What did you do?”

“I said I would fuck him if he climbed the chinaberry tree and jumped onto the roof of the house and climbed down the drain spout. He did it. Then I told him I would if he dove into the water tank, which was freezing cold and supposedly dangerous, but he went right in.”

Max stood up, having regained his wind, and we walked up the sand toward the boardwalk. “Then,” I went on, “he broke into a house down the road and stole a blanket because I asked him to, and a couple of other things too, I can’t remember what.”

“A blanket,” said Max. “Why?”

“It was cold there. I remember being cold all the time. It was wet and rainy.”

“But he dove into the water tank? You must have been a very cute kid.”

“He was no martyr,” I said. “He finally told me to pay up, but the next morning my mother loaded us up and off we went, and I couldn’t keep my end of the bargain. I couldn’t even say good-bye. I would have
gone through with it. I was scared out of my wits, but I’d made a deal. I still think about him sometimes.”

“I never had anything like that happen to me when I was a kid,” said Max with some irritation. “I was outwardly toffee-nosed and inwardly seething.”

“You still are. You’re the poster boy for schizophrenia.”

“Do not joke about schizophrenia,” he said priggishly. “It’s a very serious disorder.”

“You’re such an ass,” I said, and we laughed.

We put on our shoes and went to a nightclub up on Brighton Avenue under the elevated train tracks. Amid a shirred red satin ceiling and mirrored panels on the walls, a band of dumpy, tackily dressed, middle-aged, sexy men played synthesizer, drums, and accordion; an equally dumpy, tackily dressed, sexy woman sang in a thrilling, husky voice into a dildo-sized microphone. After another beaker of chilled vodka, Max and I ventured out onto the dance floor, jigged and vamped together at first cautiously and then with increasing enthusiasm. The atmosphere was wildly festive, post-Sabbath, but even so, we cut quite a rug. I caught Slavic scowls from some of the waiters, who stood in a thuglike lineup against the far wall, arms folded, pompadours cresting backward in frozen waves. When we got back to our table, we were immediately handed the bill by our waiter. We paid up and got the hell out of there.

“I’m Corey Flintoff,” I announced to Max as we stumbled along the sidewalk under the elevated train tracks.

“And I’m Noah Adams.”

“And I’m Nina Totenberg.”

“Well, I’m Corva Coleman.”

“And
I’m
Karl Castle.”

“And I’m Linda Wertheimer.”

I clapped the side of my head. “Shit, I’ve run out of names.”

“And I’m Craig Windham,” said Max smugly.

Idling at the curb was an enormous black sedan with a livery company’s sticker on the windshield. We opened the back door and tumbled into the passenger seat, and told the driver where we were going. Without a word he put the car into gear and we were off. The car was like a rolling living room, plush and comfy; it smelled of ancient cigarette
smoke and chemical pine air freshener. The heater was on; the radio was tuned to 1010 WINS, but so softly we heard only a soothing babble, while our driver, a retired ex-cop, kept us awake and alert with his Brooklyn-accented recitative about New York, which he talked about as if it were his mercurial, troublesome but irresistible wife of fifty years. We bounced off the BQE onto the weather-blasted asphalt of Williamsburg. The car floated through the quiet and nearly deserted streets, rising and falling over the potholes and cracks as if it were a small boat on some narrow ribbon of ocean. The traffic lights turned green one by one as the car approached and slid through them without pausing.

When we pulled up in front of Amanda’s, I got out of our traveling pumpkin and it continued on without me. I entered the tacky little vestibule of Amanda’s building, rang the buzzer, then climbed the three flights to her seedy little apartment full of peeling linoleum and rickety furniture and ancient fixtures. She was in the kitchen when I came in, wearing a red silk bathrobe, her long black hair loose. She stood in the cold white air of the open refrigerator door.

“You hungry?” she asked. “I was about to raid the fridge.”

It was two in the morning, but I was suddenly wide awake and ravenous. “What have you got?”

“We’ll see,” she said, rummaging around. “Have a seat. So Mom called me today. She was feeling a little better. Leonard had a good day, apparently. They took a walk in Central Park.”

I sat at the kitchen table. A manic, tinny babble of voices came from the living room; I recalled from prior visits that Liam and Feckin liked to have the TV on constantly. On the table in front of me were a bag of Polish toffees, half a bottle of Ten High whiskey, butts bristling in a heap of ash in a Florida souvenir ashtray, an open pastilles tin with a Baggie of dope inside, beer-bottle caps, a lighter decorated with a bodacious blonde in a thong, two wrinkled old bell peppers, and a dog-eared fanzine called
Blunt
. I sat awkwardly in my chair, looking around, extremely conscious of being a guest here. She pulled from the white air of the fridge the remains of a roast chicken, a plastic container of green Sicilian olives, a sourdough loaf that had the chewy texture of a sponge and the odor of a clean baby’s skin. She put it all on the battered metal table, shoved some things aside to make room for two plates. “Fuck Liam,” she
said loudly enough so that he could hear her over the TV. “I’m officially off my diet now. He can lose weight himself if he wants someone around here to be thin.”