Jeremy Thrane (19 page)

On a January afternoon, I wrote the ending of
Angus in Efes
. The past months had been spent paring the thing down from a bloated thousand-page whale to a sleek four-hundred-page shark, and once I’d done this, all that had remained had been to kill Angus off in cold blood at long last, after all these years. All day I had wrestled with the description of his corpse’s dismemberment by savage beak and claw, its dispersal through fast-moving avian digestive systems, then its gradual bespattering over the Turkish countryside and back into dust. I had plenty of birdshit on hand to help me get the description just right, but this was helpful only in theory.

I was sitting at an old wooden desk I’d found on the sidewalk, at the computer I’d bought with money earned churning out pulp for Sebastian Philpott’s porn magazine. In the kitchen, my roommate, Scott, was making popcorn; I clattered the keys in a syncopated rhythm, with the space bar adding a nice thumping backbeat to the frenzied explosions of corn kernels against the lid of the air popper. Writing Angus’s death scene was somewhat anticlimactic after all this buildup and foreshadowing. I scraped my chair back a little and squinted at the screen. I didn’t like what I’d written today very much; it reminded me of a florid passage in second-rate magic realism.

I stared out the window for a while as a “commentator” nattered on to the NPR audience about her kooky family. Why did so many of these performance artists and regional storytellers seem to have squeaky voices, speech impediments, or accents? This one, a chirpy Appalachian lisper, had all three. Outside, the sky was a sun-shot, hellish blue. Water towers perched atop buildings looked like oversized potbellied stoves
on spindly legs, and shaggy, unwieldy cartoon animals on cliff tops, and rickety jerry-built rocket ships, and other improbable things. In an apartment across the street, a man sat in front of a mirror with a white towel around his neck, lifting hand weights over and over and over. Watching him both soothed and irritated me, as did the NPR commentator.

I deleted a word and substituted another one, moved a sentence, added and deleted a phrase, gradually removing all traces of magic, leaving only the realism.

Suddenly, just like that, I had finished my first novel.

I looked askance at the computer screen for a while. Then I scrolled through the manuscript with the sinking feeling that I’d been missing the real point the whole time I’d been writing the thing, envisioning this so-called “real point” as a red-hot pinpoint right in front of my eyes but too intense and concentrated and searing to look at directly. I was cheered and reassured when a midwestern associate professor came on with his review of a new Balinese folk-rock album with musical excerpts: traditional instruments, augmented by a synthesizer and drum machine. I never ceased to marvel at these reviewers’ unilateral, tireless enthusiasm for every world-music release, earnest new novel, and offbeat indie film. It gave me hope and bugged the shit out of me, simultaneously.

I heard the soft rustle of hot popcorn being tipped into a bowl. “Jeremy?” Scott called in his fluted voice. “Want some popcorn?”

“No thanks,” I called back through my cardboard-thin door, striving to keep my own voice a good octave beneath his. I’d moved into the smaller of the two bedrooms in his apartment with grave misgivings nothing had made me relinquish yet. Scott was so young, so sunny, so pretty, so at ease in the world of gyms and grope bars and brunches and summer shares, smiling and slithering through his Chelsea days with a casual confidence I’d never even managed to learn to fake, let alone truly feel. He worked in an art gallery; he had a boyfriend as pretty as he was; he took courses at the New School and spent summer weekends in the Hamptons. He was twenty-three years old. I was desperately attracted to him. He made me feel for the first time in my life like a dirty old man, feverishly clattering out stroke stories for
Boytoy
at my dingy gray computer
keyboard in my sweaty little blue-lit cave while he swanned blithely around the living room, knotting his silk tie and running a comb through his hair, which was vehemently copious, sun-kissed, and fragrant. Whenever I stood near him in the kitchen, my nostrils flared, inhaling the smell of Agree shampoo or some more au courant, salon-only elixir that cost twenty times as much as Agree but had that same smell of corruptible innocence.

I went out to the living room. The small apartment smelled of hot fluffy corn, but there was not one whiff of butter. Scott ate no fat. He was sitting on the sleek black leather couch, leaning back, one leg slung over a skinny chrome arm, his throat elongating as he tossed kernels into his open mouth. Juanita sat perkily on his forearm, sharing his snack. Squanto may have been bughouse, but Scott had nothing to lose.

Our apartment was decorated in Early Aspirant (by Scott, of course; I had virtually no furniture besides the secondhand futon bed and computer I’d bought and the bookshelf, chair, and desk I’d found on the street). He frequented flea markets and apartment sales. He had spent every cent of his disposable income on a Jazz Age chandelier, a mod multiarmed metal standing lamp, a kidney-shaped coffee table, a faux-zebra armchair, a velvet and mahogany fainting couch, a geometrically interesting hutch with a glass front behind which his collection of vintage glassware was displayed (never used, except by me on the sly; Scott didn’t drink alcohol), a rug with brown zigzags on a red background which Scott had boasted was the best deal he’d ever found but which to my admittedly untrained eye looked like Charlie Brown’s shirt, and a few big sit-upon pillows so painstakingly, obsessively embroidered, they might have been originally intended for the sultan of Brunei’s summerhouse. Our apartment was therefore crammed full of a hodgepodge of different eras and clashing colors, but this place wasn’t intended to be anything more than a storeroom. He planned to arrange these things brilliantly some day in his real apartment, the one he was going to buy as soon as he could afford it. He sipped mineral water and nibbled salad in restaurants; he visited his older, wealthier friends at their summer shares (who were no doubt thrilled to host this lovely boy), thus avoiding having to pony up for one himself; he owned a small amount of classic clothing he took extremely good care of; his gym membership was
free because his boyfriend Matt was a personal trainer. All of his energies were directed toward having a beautiful home. “I grew up in a trailer park in Gary, Indiana,” he’d told me once, “and I ain’t never going back. I mean, I’m never going back.” This was the sort of detail that made it almost unbearable to spend too much time around Scott; he was a walking compendium of the classic Boy Scout virtues and some others besides. He was modest, brave, unassuming, diligent, generous, kind, honest, clean. He was perfect. Quite literally, he had no flaws that I’d ever been able to ascertain, and I’d looked long and hard. The smallest, meanest, blackest corner of my heart harbored a healthy loathing for him. The rest of me felt otherwise, but this sliver of dislike was just enough to enable me to make a nice living from churning out one scenario after another about a delectable young blond being despoiled by a series of lecherous old sodomites like me.

I perched on the very edge of the fainting couch; I was afraid it would make him anxious to see me inflicting wear and tear on his precious things before he’d begun his real life with them, so I always made an ingratiating show of gingerly apology whenever I came into direct contact with any of them.

We sat that way for a moment. Scott, who seemed to be completely comfortable in his own skin, never seemed to feel itchy, as I did, at protracted welling periods of no conversation between two people in a room. The way I felt around him seemed to be a mirrored reverse of my adolescent awkwardness, which in truth had held a kind of power. His youth made me painfully aware that I was, in the current market, date-stamped to show my limited shelf life to anyone who cared to examine me, but at the same time I viewed him with a kind of condescending envy: He didn’t know yet what lay in store for him, but I did.

“I just finished my novel,” I said as the silence threatened to become uncomfortable for me.

The idling blankness behind his eyes brightened and began to whir, as if he were a freshly recharged battery-operated thing. “How does it end?”

“My father gets killed by Muslims and eaten by vultures.”

“Could you put mine in there somewhere too?”

“What would you like me to do to him?”

Scott laughed. I caught a glimpse of pink gums, broad flat white teeth, a clean tongue. The pit of my stomach went dull with lust. “I don’t know. Something really bad. I’m sure you’d write it perfectly.”

I wondered, not at all for the first time, whether he was toying with me, whether his perpetual friendliness was a big act. Did he make fun of me to his friends, recount my bumbling attempts to befriend him, imitate my reluctance to sit on his furniture? Abjectness and a surfeit of solitude had made me uncharacteristically and painfully unsure of myself. Lying alone on my bed, listening to Scott and Matt laughing together in Scott’s room, I often thought I heard frightening overtones of fun-poking at me. Sometimes when I was talking to Scott, explaining at some length my failed relationship with Ted or describing my former life, I thought I saw in his face a veiled pity, a stifled yawn. I had no idea, really, what Scott thought of me, assuming he paid any attention to me at all beyond the fact that I paid my rent, which wasn’t cheap, on time and in cash.

I stood up. “I’m going out,” I said briskly. “Do we need anything?”

“Birdseed, I think.”

I glanced toward Juanita’s magnificent Victorian palace of a birdcage, gilt ribs bowing upward to meet in an arched cupola, with perches, a little doll-sized house with windows for her to peer out of, a mini-fountain she loved to splash around in. Juanita seemed to have accepted Scott as her new owner from the moment she understood that this splendid contraption was hers to live in and that he had provided it. We were out of birdseed because, although I was technically responsible for providing it since she was technically still my bird, I’d passive-aggressively neglected to lay in a fresh supply when the old one ran out because this served her right for switching allegiances when I needed her most. Anyway, she was gorging herself on popcorn at the moment, so any guilt I might have felt at having my faults as a pet owner made manifest was allayed by a fresh surge of resentment. She got to eat popcorn out of Scott’s hand.

“Birdseed,” I said. “I’ll be back later on.”

“Bundle up,” he called sweetly as I rooted around for my wallet in the pockets of the various pants on my bedroom floor.

Outside, I moved fast. An aerial view of me would have shown me
scuttling at the speed of an important beetle. The wind came at me vehemently, as if a giant fan had been set up to blow directly at me over a skating-rink-sized piece of dry ice. The disk containing the fresh porn I’d just written for Sebastian, which I couldn’t help thinking of as a semen sample in a test tube, was zipped into the inner pocket of my coat.

I stopped into a liquor store, where I slipped my hard-earned money through the slot in the bulletproof glass and received in exchange a bottle of Laguvulin. Outside again, I escorted it along in its brown paper suit, tucked into the crook of my arm like a little homunculus, my heavy, headless friend.

Seventh Avenue broadened and slowed as it went through the Village and became Seventh Avenue South, which was so wide, an entire row of buildings could have been built along one of its sides and there would still have been plenty of room for the traffic. Tacked onto a midsized skyscraper in the middle distance was the perky red neon Travelers Insurance umbrella, aggravating all its neighbors with its nighttime glow, reminding passersby that into every life a little rain must fall, and if we didn’t pay our premiums, it would pound down on our bare heads and drown us.

I had finished my novel. It now had an ending, however provisional and crude. At the back of my head, steering me like a rudder, was this slightly uneasy knowledge. Now there was nothing for it but to send it to an agent; semiliterate hacks did such things all the time, so I could too, although I wasn’t quite sure how the whole thing worked.

When the buzzer let me in, I climbed the old wooden staircase of Felicia’s building, since her elevator was currently lodged at the twelfth floor, according to the lit-up dial above the doors. I climbed the golden, burnished, bouncy boards, as wide across as I was tall or wider, gently grooved from decades, possibly centuries, of feet. The stairwell had the glowing, neutral, well-worn splendor of elegantly shabby old hotel bars in foreign countries I’d been in.

Wayne answered the door. “Well well,” he said with his usual air of laconic anomie, but something seemed off; the skin around his eyes and nose looked peaky and red, and the little fillip of dead-white hair that
usually crested over his forehead was drooping, as if he hadn’t had the wherewithal to deal with it this morning, or it with him.

“How are you, Wayne?” I asked, following him into the loft. It was extremely hot in here. I shed my coat.

“Me?” he said with a self-deprecating little scowl. “It’s Mademoiselle Boudreaux you should be worried about. Maybe you can cheer her up, I’ve tried everything. I ordered in some chicken noodle soup, I made hot chocolate—”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Bubble bath,” he said, and scuttled to the far end of the loft, where he seemed to be making a big mess with various items from an art supply store.

I detoured over to the kitchen and twisted the top off the whiskey and poured a good slug into two designer glasses that looked like old-fashioned jelly jars. When I knocked on the bathroom door I heard a little cough I took as an invitation, so I opened the door and went in. I saw a pair of pale knees protruding from slightly flat foam in the bathtub. I couldn’t see her face, which was hidden by the toilet alcove wall. “Felicia?” I said tentatively.

“Jeremy!” Her knees disappeared, the water heaved gently. Steam rose from the surface in wispy funnels. “What on earth are you doing here?”