Jeremy Thrane (25 page)

The blinds were pulled down in the library, but light showed around their edges, and after a moment I saw the silhouette of a man cross the room. Yoshi must have stayed home from the ashram to avail himself of my old haunt; no doubt he’d taken over the chair where I’d once spent so many pleasurable hours daydreaming by the fire, book on my knees, martini glass in one hand. Yoshi didn’t drink martinis or read, and as far as I knew, he didn’t daydream; what the hell did he think he was doing in there? Maybe he had moved up to the attic after my departure. I would have bet anything he’d slithered right up there the minute I’d cleared out. I’d left all my furniture, my bookshelves, even the cans of soup in the cupboards. At the thought of Yoshi using my stuff, hatred swept over me. I wanted to pee in his orange trees, poke him in the eye with his own chopstick.

But when the man crossed the room again, I recognized Ted’s erect bearing and the way his hair foofed up in front. I stood there in the cold, looking up at where his silhouette had been, feeling like a jilted Peeping Tom, a lovelorn Little Match Boy, but I saw nothing more. Realizing after a while that my feet were frozen through, I went around the corner to the warm darkness of Pete’s Tavern. I asked the bartender for a pint of ale and carried the brimming glass over to an empty booth, where I took my increasingly besmirched and tattered paperback copy of
Jude the Obscure
from my coat pocket and held it open in front of me to the last page I’d dog-eared. For the first ten minutes, the letters might just as well have been cigarette ash or cockroach droppings; the ale slipped down without my even noticing where it went or that I was drinking it. Then I realized that the sentence I was reading had some actual bearing on the thoughts that were preventing me from advancing on to the next sentence, and the one after that: “Hers,” meaning Sue’s, the woman Jude was in love with, who had just married another man, “was now the city phantom, while those of the intellectual and devotional worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no longer able to assert their presence there.” Recognizing that my own city phantom might rise up and take over my consciousness, I forced my turbulent emotions to be given
over wholly to the book and was immediately very glad I had. Thomas Hardy’s dark, skeptical, hard-nosed sobriety enthralled me. Jude’s problems took me so out of myself, I almost forgot where I was; he struck me as a better man in every way than I was, and Hardy an infinitely better writer.

At six-thirty, in a funk, I put the book back into my coat pocket. Half an hour later I was on the Upper West Side, turning onto my mother’s street, a tree-lined block of buildings full of rambling, grand, book-and-plant-filled apartments bought for almost nothing thirty, forty, even fifty years ago by “lefty” writers and composers, now middle-aged or elderly, who’d raised children there, held consciousness-raising and Communist Party meetings, started grassroots campaigns and circulated petitions; now they read the
Nation
and
Tikkun
, half-glasses perched on their noses, drinking herbal tea out of hand-crafted mugs, looking up occasionally to admire the tapestries and carved masks they’d brought back from Bali and Turkey. My mother and Leonard lived in just this sort of apartment.

In the doorway of my mother’s building, lying near the double glass front doors, was a used condom. The sight of that shed membrane with its soft ring of a mouth made me feel itchy and curious, like a dog sniffing at another dog’s spoor. I felt a twinge of indignation: rutting in my mother’s doorway, the nerve, the lucky dogs. “And love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” indeed. As I rode the elevator up, I realized I had just gone longer than I could remember having gone in years without pitching my mansion, so to speak. Frankie had been the last, in October. This was an unacceptable state of affairs that needed to be addressed and mitigated immediately.

My mother came to the door with a pot holder in her hand, looking harried. “Oh, good,” she said, “you got my message.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

She gave me a look, but all she said was “I’m so glad to see you.”

She turned and I followed her down the long, dark hallway lined with small lithographs, etchings, oils, watercolors, and photographs, all given to Emma by her artist friends. At the end of the hall, which had doors all down its length leading to rooms on either side—their bedroom, a guest bedroom, Leonard’s study, Emma’s studio, the bathroom,
a storage room—was the gallery of rooms joined by French doors or archways, the dining room, kitchen, living room, and library, which contained two old couches, several high bookshelves, and an old black-and-white television set. Sitting on one of those couches, I was dismayed and annoyed to see, was Irene Rheingold wearing half-moon glasses, sipping something out of a hand-crafted mug, I would have bet a hundred dollars was peppermint tea. Leonard sat glowering as usual on the other couch, leaving me little choice but to join him there, since I preferred to sit next to almost anyone on earth but Irene.

“Do you need any help, Mom?” I called, tossing my coat onto an empty chair.

“There’s nothing to do, really,” came her voice from the kitchen. “You can help Leonard entertain Irene while I finish up in here.”

I looked dubiously at Leonard, and then at Irene, who was leafing through a book; it seemed to me that Leonard was ignoring her and she was entertaining herself, but what did I know?

“Jeremy,” she said, simpering in her self-important way, “this is a cult memoir I was just asked to review for the
Voice
. It’s the story of a woman who was in a group remarkably similar to your sister’s, a doomsday cult out in Montana. And it’s absolutely fascinating.”

“I bet,” I said. What I meant was, I bet no matter what this ex–cult member said, she was assured of Irene’s unalloyed approbation, and if she happened to be handicapped or a lesbian, she would receive the kind of accolades due, in my opinion, only to Shakespeare. Irene, as a privileged liberal who got to enjoy a smug sense of moral upperhandedness along with every other imaginable kind of security, couldn’t imagine how anyone who suffered from a minority status, mental illness, addiction, poverty, single motherhood, handicaps, or worse could bear it, let alone write books about it. Her blanket awe at the literary efforts of the disadvantaged betrayed an elitism she would have been absolutely shocked to recognize in herself.

My mother emerged, handed me a glass of red wine, and vanished back into the kitchen.

“This is from her letters home, which make up the second section of the book.” Irene gave me a penetrating glance to make sure I was listening with the attention this book deserved instead of drooling and
staring into space. Then, my evinced degree of interest evidently having passed muster, she read aloud in a purse-lipped, hushed voice, “ ‘My dearest mother, I write to you in all urgent sincerity. The lake of fire will consume you all if you do not come with us back to Eden and finally to Him. Please come with us! I cannot leave you behind without trying my utmost to fight for your very souls! Please tell my sisters, those poor lost sheep gone astray, to come back to their shepherd, to come with us to Him.’ ”

“Baa,” I said, and took a gulp of wine. Next to me, Leonard gave a very small snort, audible to me only.

“Just think,” said Irene, “of her poor family. I find it very moving how impassioned she was, how convinced she was doing the right thing, but this must have been so painful for them to read.”

I’d heard identical self-righteous judgments expressed in letters Lola had written to our mother; these hadn’t stopped, although she’d been out of her cult for years. Her personality had been distinguished since birth by a didactic earnestness, a detached remoteness that bordered at times on semi-autism, with a dash of mulish arrogance thrown in like Angostura bitters. Our mother, accustomed to the relative obedience of Amanda and me, had found Lola, her baby, intractably pigheaded in her resistance to any point of view but her own, and given up. The only other disciplinary choice would have been slapping her silly, which Amanda knew didn’t work because she had tried it, only to find Lola as stolidly unresponsive as a tortured patriot. She had always done whatever her inner voice told her to do; Joan of Arc’s older siblings must have felt something similar to what we had felt for Lola. When, fifteen or sixteen years ago, she had joined a little raggedy band of weirdos living in huts by an abandoned mine in the mountains in Arizona, waiting for the Messiah and practicing the most stringent forms of self-denial, no one had been surprised. The surprise was that she had left under her own steam, and that she now led a relatively ordinary life in Queensland. I wondered what all those emus made of her.

“Her family probably thought she was nuts,” I said, “and wished she’d keep her opinions to herself.”

“ ‘In Eden,’ ” Irene read on without giving my remark the dignity of
a serious answer, “ ‘a dazzling screen spread over the earth, a scrim and shield between darkness and light. Our consciousness was unbroken, there was neither sleep nor waking, but one constant state of being. To go forward is to go back. Our loss is too great a burden to bear, the terrible solitude of humankind. I ache for you, for your own separation and alienation from Him. A great healing must occur and a destruction of the old ways for the loss to unbend, for the fabric of human time to fold on itself and collapse like a dying star into a knothole, and pull us through. I am prepared and silent, I will receive God, that most difficult and terrible path that leads to perfect oneness and joy.’ ”

I cleared my throat.

“Her language has such fire,” said Irene, “like old-time religious oratory. It’s quite formidable. Like outsider art in prose. She writes very well.”

“Not that well,” I muttered. “Fuzzy-headed crap.”

“Dinner is ready,” said my mother, appearing in the arched doorway.

My mother wasn’t much of a cook, but because she was my mother, her cooking never failed to comfort and nourish me. Tonight she’d brought to life a low-fat, high-fiber, antioxidant-rich menu from the Alzheimer’s cookbook she’d bought after Leonard was diagnosed: several huge broiled slabs of some bland, nontoxic, farm-raised fish, a massive platter of black, shiny, dauntingly chewy wild rice (something I secretly felt was suitable for consumption only by ruminants, who had both means and motive for eating such time-consuming, unrewarding stuff), and steamed broccoli unsullied by butter or salt, both of which I fetched from the kitchen and availed myself of liberally. Even though this wasn’t my idea of a fun meal, I managed to empty my plate of two helpings of everything. When I was finished, I leaned back in my chair, tongued a wild-rice hull from a tooth, and stifled a belch out of consideration for regional etiquette. The tapered white candles in their candlesticks had burned halfway down so the flames were at eye level, giving each of our faces a kind of reverse nimbus; the air between our faces fizzed with light.

“The theory is, simply put,” Leonard was saying, “that even though we live in an eleven-dimensional universe, we can’t detect the presence
of those other seven dimensions directly.” He had been remarkably lucid throughout the meal. “They’re curled into an incomprehensibly tiny seven-dimensional ball of string, as it were, at every point in the universe. If I do this”—and he waved his hand through the air—“I’m moving my hand not only through our four familiar space-time dimensions, but also through those other seven dimensions, coiled at the subatomic level.”

I discovered then that for the past few minutes I’d been absently fondling my stomach, which lay like half-risen bread dough over the waistband of my jeans; I’d been running my thumb over a two-inch-thick roll of flesh, pinching it, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. I straightened in my chair and it disappeared as if by magic; maybe it melted into those other dimensions. This lecture was bringing back some of the panicky agita of my high school physics class, when I’d been completely unable to grasp even the most elemental rudiments no matter how I applied myself.

“Why seven?” I asked. “Why not two or eight or thirteen?”

“Good question!” he almost shouted. “And the answer is this: Because quantum effects render all theories in other dimensions anomalous, the superstring theory works only in ten or eleven space-time dimensions. The eleven-dimensional model is the only one that unifies all five string theories. It’s called M-theory: ‘M’ for mystery, or mother, or membrane, or matrix. My own pet name for it is ‘mulligatawny,’ but I’m alone with that. It’s purely hypothetical at this stage. The cart’s way before the horse.”

“But how do you know it’s true, then?” I asked.

“Well,” he shot back, eyebrows twitching vehemently, “because it’s too beautiful not to be. It unifies every theory; it reconciles quantum and cosmic laws. Particle physicists all over the world devote their careers to contributing an equation, a further hypothesis. No one will be able to carry out experiments to test this theory for a long time; at the moment we’re all sort of like the medieval cathedral builders.”

“Amazing,” said Irene.

“Or like cult members waiting for the Messiah,” I said with a hint of raillery in her direction.

“Nothing like it at all,” said Leonard curtly.

“Oh, Emma,” said Irene. “How could you bear having a daughter in a cult all those years?”

“She chose it,” said my mother. “Just like she chose to move to the other side of the planet. There’s never been a single thing I could say to that girl. She came out of the womb with her own agenda.”

“Heartbreaking,” Irene breathed melodramatically. “She was lost to you all those years.”

She hadn’t expressed much concern when Lola had actually been in the cult, but here she sat, eating my mother’s food and sniffing around for material to use in her review. Irene had always seemed to consider the honor of her own company adequate and even abundant recompense for the indulgences and favors she accepted as a matter of course from her friends. My mother had nursed her through a hysterectomy a couple of years before, but I would have bet anything that Irene would find a convenient excuse to weasel out of doing anything to help her with Leonard. Although she had known Amanda and me all our lives, whenever we went out to dinner with the Rheingolds we were expected to pay our own share even though Emma always treated Beatrice. And the Rheingolds had plenty of money; it wasn’t about money. Thinking about all this, I wanted to pull her stupid long silver hair.