Jeremy Thrane (29 page)

“Have you had your meeting yet with the guy from the production company?” he asked, looking up from his plate of fontina-porcini-basil ravioli in butternut-squash puree. In his eyes was the gleeful excitement he couldn’t contain whenever he talked about anything to do with the movie biz.

“It’s tomorrow afternoon,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Will you call and let me know how it goes?”

“I don’t know why you’re so hot on the movie industry, Sebastian.
It’s like a big corporate-run high school. Producers are the studentcouncil treasurers, directors are the class presidents, and casting agents are like those kids who tried to get other kids to do things but never did anything themselves, they just hung out by their lockers all the time. Actors are football players, starlets are cheerleaders. Rock stars are druggy rebels and screenwriters are nobodies like we used to be.”

“But this time around I’m not a nobody.” Sebastian gave me a shy, happy smile. “Even the launch of
Boytoy
wasn’t this much fun. It’s worth every penny I’m spending on it, even if I never see any of it again.”

“You won’t,” I said.

“I don’t understand why you’re so negative about all this. Aren’t you even a little bit excited? And you’re not a nobody either, I don’t care what you say about screenwriters. Maybe you’ll change your mind at the premiere. I guarantee you’ll get star treatment there.”

“I hate premieres,” I said.

“Oh, Jeremy,” said Sebastian with fond amusement. He often assumed this tone with me now that he was no longer in love with me, as if I were a long-cherished ideal he’d outgrown, which I was. “Most screenwriters consider their work their lifeblood, but no one wants it, so they languish in development jobs till they’re put out to pasture or promoted. You wrote a fantastic script without even trying. Almost no one does that. You should be proud and happy.”

“Maybe so,” I said through a mouthful of environmentally irresponsible but undeniably delicious fish. “But imagine George Eliot’s opinion of my script. Picture Matthew Arnold at the screening. And what do you think Thomas Hardy would make of the scene where Michael Jackson goes on about how sweet his little boyfriends are when they play with his pets, and how he loves to watch them, and why is that so wrong? They’d be glad they were dead, that’s for sure.”

“What have they got to do with this movie?” said Sebastian with a sidelong gleam of amusement. “Anyway, they might think it was a lot of fun.”

“I doubt that,” I said. I wiped my mouth and added casually, “By the way, have you read my novel yet? It’s all right if you haven’t. I’m just curious.”

“No, I haven’t had time,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I interjected, “really, no rush, I was just asking because—”

“I’m taking it along when Peter and I go to Tuscany next month. I have no time to read anything but contracts and proposals until then.”

“Oh,” I said, hating how vulnerable it had made me to expose my work to the eyes of anyone at all, even Sebastian, who was historically guaranteed to deem it genius. It made me feel as if I’d grown a whole new trembling, pink, fragile, raw vital organ, but instead of being safely inside my abdomen with all my other organs, this one was external and visible, and possessed the capacity to move around independently of me. Often I lost track of it, and then would remember with a jolt of ice-cold shock that I didn’t know who was assessing it at any given moment, who was prodding and jabbing it, who was diagnosing it as diseased, malfunctioning, deformed. I lay awake at night, going over random paragraphs in my mind, alternately wretched and ecstatic. Recalling certain overly flowery passages, I burned with shame, wondering miserably how anyone could ever want to publish such a thing, but a moment later the memory of a powerful scene or fortuitous turn of phrase almost caused me to levitate with a vengeful urge to lop the heads off those witless editors. It was a masterpiece, it was a piece of crap; I was a cockroach, I was a demigod. It was all very unnerving, and paranoia-inducing in the extreme.

“Howard’s not having much luck selling it,” I added dolefully. “Are you sure he’s a reputable agent?”

“Well, he sold Allan’s computer manual for a huge amount of money. But as I told you when I advised you to send it to him, his track record with literary fiction is a complete cipher to me; I recommended him only in order to provide you with another option. Poor Jeremy. This whole thing must be so trying for you.”

“It is more trying than I ever imagined it would be,” I said with an abrupt, frustrated gesture, accidentally dinging my fork against my wineglass; everyone at the tables near us turned to look, as if I were about to make an announcement. “What I’m most terrified of,” I went on in a subdued voice, leaning over the table, “is that there is nothing else. I
don’t have a Plan B, as you producers say. This is it. And Howard reads those rejections to me as if they were letters to Dear Abby, as if he had no idea whatsoever how humiliating and suicide-inspiring it is for me to hear them. But what’s he supposed to say? He’s doing his best; it’s not his fault. I can’t take much more of this,” I concluded passionately, then took a big bracing gulp of wine.

Sebastian reached across the table and patted my hand. “Someone will buy your novel,” he said simply. “You’ll succeed as a writer. I’ve always known it, Jeremy.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said in a slightly calmer tone. “Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to write a book about someone I barely know who was so important to me. Maybe it was doomed from the start.”

“Something just occurred to me,” said Sebastian. “Isn’t your father a lawyer?”

“He was once; I don’t know whether he still is.”

“The American Bar Association might have some information on him. You could call and ask them. If you want to find him, that is.”

“That’s a thought,” I said through a rush of startled panic. “Listen, my friend Felicia is having her first opening on Saturday night. It’s in TriBeCa, from seven to nine; I was wondering whether you’d like to go with me.”

“Saturday night,” he said. “I’d like to go, but I can’t stay long. Peter and I are having dinner with friends. You’re welcome to come along.”

“I’ll probably go out with Felicia afterward. I haven’t seen her in ages, so I imagine we’ll have a lot to catch up on.”

“I thought all the galleries had moved to Chelsea,” said Sebastian.

“It’s her NA meeting place,” I said.

After dinner, as we said good night on the sidewalk, Sebastian took his new cell phone out of his bag and turned it on. “You turned it off for me?” I said, touched and amused by his willingness to forgo almost two hours’ worth of deliriously urgent movie talk in favor of my churlish sniveling. I was almost certain I wouldn’t have done the same for him. I headed uptown into the delectable violent night, walking fast so I’d get home in time to hear the theme music to
Star Trek
, which I enjoyed singing along with in a hammy falsetto on those nights when Scott stayed at Matt’s house.

———

The next day, I slumped over my desk in my cubicle, embroiled in an article called “Pooper-Scooper Soul Mates: The Dog Run Singles Scene” by Bianca Mantooth, a formerly trendy downtown writer whose last few books had sold poorly because they were shallow and badly written. Her earlier books had been too, but back then she’d had cachet; she had been a celebrity, so the artlessness of her writing had seemed fresh and hip and real. Now she scribbled barely literate musings on torn-out notebook pages crinkled and stained with spilled Cosmopolitans, which then had to be typed into the magazine’s editing program by someone else; she likewise submitted her expense accounts on cocktail napkins, which I knew because my cubicle was right across the aisle from Melanie’s, who worked in Accounting.
Downtown
was exactly the right milieu for Bianca; her level of literacy was right on par with that of the staff writers, and her astonishingly banal insights into city life fit right in with all the gossip and shameless pandering. In fact, she was one of the most kowtowed-to
Downtown
columnists, which might have been connected to the fact that she was rumored to have slept with the editor in chief back in the club-hopping eighties. Whatever the reason, I had to be extra careful with her copy; I couldn’t query a statement like “It’s worth getting dogdoo on your Pradas to hang with the Frenchies and Jack Russells at the dog run” without thinking very hard about it, because, although in my opinion it should have been “dog-do,” I knew these misspellings of hers were intentional, meant to enhance her childishly arch style, and querying them would only piss her off. I had learned this the hard way with the word “sintelating.” “Get a clue,” she’d scrawled impatiently over my politely evinced skepticism as to the English-language existence of such a word. “It’s spelled FI-NE-TIC-LY. Like, a joke!”

I had a low-level headache and needed a nap. I should have drunk more last night; half-assed hangovers did nothing to alter my sense of reality the way really sintelating ones could, rubbing off all the sharp edges from experience, sealing me in an invalid cocoon of cheerful relaxed semiderangement that allowed me to pretend to be someone else for its duration, someone happy-go-lucky and frivolous and somewhat dim. It was raining, I knew, although I was nowhere near a window and
couldn’t see the streaks of dirty water sliding along the panes, or the gray minicloud enveloping the skyscraper I sat in, or the lighter gray billows of steam rising from manholes in the street below, or the black bobbing umbrellas jabbing and jostling in their ongoing, pointless territorial combat. Even though I couldn’t see any of it up here in this climate-controlled warren of laminated surfaces under fluorescent light, I could feel it; the barometric pressure put me in a restless, slightly worried mood for no good reason, and the humidity made my fingertips feel as if they’d soaked in soapy water all morning.

Rosa, the secretary in the cubicle on my left, was gabbling nonstop in ticked-off Spanish, I assumed into the phone, I assumed to some wheedling shithead of a boyfriend, but I didn’t know for sure. From the cubicle on my right came the vigorously enthusiastic wet clicks of Frederick, my fellow copy editor, flossing his teeth. I fell into a waking coma. After ten minutes, I resurfaced from my trance, slapped a stickie right by the word “dogdoo” and penciled, “change to dog-DO? As in, ‘dogs DO that’? ‘DOO’ is not an English word.” Of course, Bianca would just stet it in her usual hissy-fit fashion and I’d be right back where I started. The copyediting department was made up of frustrated literary writers, namely Frederick and me, who resented the free and easy liberties these hacks took with the language of Wordsworth and Dickens. If we could have forced them to butcher, instead, some lesser but related language, Esperanto or pig Latin, for example, we would have. My relationship with Bianca Mantooth in particular was sort of like that of the dog owners in her story to their pets: Although I knew myself to be of a far superior species, I was duty bound to clean up after her. But if she objected to being pooper-scooped so diligently, she could take it up with Daphne, my supervisor, a beady-eyed, potbellied old crosspatch who never missed an apostrophe, lived in Queens with her sister, was afraid of no one and nothing on earth, and always stuck up for her own.

My phone rang. I picked it up and said, “
Downtown
copy,” which I’d hit upon my first day on the job as the way I liked to answer my phone. It sounded like a snappy thing a beat cop would say into a walkie-talkie. “This is Jeremy.”

“Hello,
Downtown
copy,” said Max. “What’s the four-one-one?”

“I should have let it go to voice mail,” I said. “I’m in no mood.”

“What mood are you in?”

“The mood when anyone cheerful makes me want to kill myself.”

“I’m turning forty tomorrow,” said Max. “I’m not cheerful. I’m calling to ask a huge, friendship-straining favor of you.”

“This might not be an ideal time for that.”

“I have no other time, I’ve got to have an answer right away, in the course of this phone call.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, gathering steam for his pitch. “I know it’s short notice, but I just this minute decided. I want my parents to know the love of my life before they die. They don’t have to know he’s the love of my life, but I’d like them to have met him. So I’m having a very small birthday party at their house tomorrow night, and I would love it if you would come.”

“What do I have to do with any of this, exactly?”

“Oh, bubeleh,” he said in his deepest, faggiest, most syrupy voice, “you’re the love of my other life. And also, you’ve always said you wanted to meet them. It’s Shabbat, so you have to get there in time for sunset, which should be no problem, since it’s June.”

“What time will this party be over? Are you allowed to drive me to the train on Shabbat?”

“You can stay over. There’s plenty of room.”

“I don’t know,” I said, nettled that in all the years Max and I had been friends, he’d never invited me to his parents’ house, and now all of a sudden this interloper he’d known all of six months was the star guest while I was hauled in as third wheel. “I frankly don’t see why you need me there.”

“Beside the fact that you’re one of my oldest and dearest friends,” he said, “I need you there as a buffer so they don’t notice the red-hot love hormones flying between Fernando and me. And I asked my mother to make her brisket.”

For years I had been subjected to drool-inducing descriptions of Rivka Goldenberg’s melt-in-your-mouth brisket that simmered all day in a thick and redolent broth, her crisp golden latkes with homemade applesauce, her unbelievable chopped liver, with just the right amount of schmaltz, so crumbly, so rich.

“I can’t stay till sundown on Saturday,” I said. “I have to be back in time for Amanda’s wedding rehearsal at four.”

“So Rita will drive you to the train whenever you’re ready to go,” he said. Rita Monteferrante had been the Goldenbergs’ live-in housekeeper for most of Max’s life. I’d never met her either. “She’ll pack you a lunch for the train,” he added entreatingly.