Jeremy Thrane (32 page)

As I opened the door of the Cedar Tavern and stepped inside, sunlight nipped at my heels and was shut out to wait for me on the sidewalk. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the dark old room was populated by the usual locals and a smattering of tourists acting casual in hopes of being mistaken for locals; the giveaway was the way they surreptitiously but hopefully checked the door when I came in just in case I might be a famously hard-drinking painter or writer from the mythic past. Anyone who’d ever spent time here in recent years knew how futile an exercise this was, and had ceased to bother; that whole species had either died out or gone into hiding.

Amanda and Emma were waiting for me right where they’d said they’d be, in a booth near the back, half-empty martini glasses in front of them. “Howdy, gals,” I said, plunking myself down next to my mother. “Been here long?”

They were unable to answer. Their foreheads were lowered almost to the tabletop; they clutched their stomachs, and their faces were contorted. High keening noises came from their grimacing mouths.

“Ahhhh,” said my mother, wiping her eyes. She gave a few weak little bleats of diminishing laughter, shaking her head.

“What’s so funny?” I asked indignantly.

My mother patted my hand. “Girl talk,” she said. She and Amanda grinned maniacally at each other. From this I surmised that they’d been laughing at me, or, quite likely, laughing at men in general, and pinning it all on the first one they saw. And even though I sympathized, I resented being made the butt of the joke. Men hadn’t exactly been doing me any favors lately either.

Amanda said with moist eyes, the aftermath of uncontrollable hilarity hovering around her mouth, “What are you drinking?”

The prospect of a drink usually made me feel festive and lucky, but at the moment it just gave me a headache. “Nothing, thanks,” I said. “I’m tired of drinking.”

“How about a martini,” she said. “Vodka, olives, no vermouth, right?”

“No,” I said. “Not a martini. Surprise me. I want something new and unexpected.”

She gave me a thumbs-up and headed for the bar.

“It’s just gallows humor, really,” said my mother. “We’re both in states of near hysteria right now; we were just trying to channel it in a positive direction.”

“Why are you hysterical?”

“Well, it might have something to do with the fact that Amanda’s wedding is on Sunday,” said my mother. “And as for me, Leonard had a bad spell this morning. He accused me of taking his keys and hiding the book he was reading because he couldn’t find either one. He gets so accusatory; it’s hard to remember sometimes that he isn’t himself any more.”

“Why don’t you get a nurse?”

“Well, this time Irene came over to help me.”

“She did?” I asked, amazed.

“Well, she would have come right away, but Richard needed her to listen while he played through the concerto he’s performing with the Philharmonic next month; apparently, he’s got some new interpretation of it and he’s very nervous about it. So she couldn’t get there for about an hour, and by then Leonard had calmed down.”

“You should call me next time. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“I would, but Irene lives just two blocks away.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’d rather wait an hour for her than half an hour for me?”

“She’s just so focused on whatever she’s doing at any given moment,” my mother said soothingly. “She loses track of time.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I know you’ll defend her no matter what I say about her.”

“I was trying to work on the wedding poem I’m writing for Amanda and Liam,” said Emma, “but Leonard upset me so much, I couldn’t concentrate at all the rest of the day. I hope I can finish it in time. I’m getting worried; it’s so rough now.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“My first wedding, the day I married your father,” she said. “The way my mother looked at me after the short ceremony that changed me, like a spell or enchantment, from her daughter into Angus’s wife. I hope the fact that the marriage ended badly isn’t a downer, considering the occasion. It’s supposed to be about mothers and daughters, not the beginning of my first divorce.”

“That reminds me,” I said, “I have something to show you really fast, before Amanda comes back. Don’t tell her. I want to give it to her at the wedding.” I took the piece of paper out of my pocket and handed it over.

Emma put on her reading glasses, unfolded the paper, and started to read Bianca Mantooth’s copy, ignoring what was penciled in the margin. “Purebred dogs are the new silicone implants, the must-have fashion accessory of the new millennium,” she read in an excited but uncomprehending voice. She looked up at me. “You’re giving her and Liam a dog? I don’t think they—”

“Look at what I wrote in pencil. There.”

“Angus Thrane,” she read aloud before she knew what she was reading. She went silent and stared at the information, then looked up at me again, then glanced over at Amanda, who was talking to the bartender. She stared at the paper again. “Where did you get this?”

“I called the ABA.”

“The what?”

“The American Bar Association. And they gave it to me just like that.”

“Did you have to say who you were?”

“No.”

She shook her head. “My God. You could have been a vindictive ex-con he put away, or a stalker, or worse.”

“Or his long-lost son who’s tracking him down.”

She laughed. “Have you called him yet?”

“I just got it this morning. I want to give it to Amanda and Lola before I do anything. When does Lola get here?”

“Tomorrow night,” she said. She looked at the paper again. “Angus Thrane,” she said grimly. “That bastard. All this time. And he’s probably still as selfish and full of himself as he ever was. If I ever saw him again, I think I would strangle him with my bare hands.”

We looked at each other, each of us thinking our separate thoughts about Angus.

“Here you go,” said Amanda, setting my glass in front of me. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing,” I said, taking the paper from my mother, folding it up, and putting it back into my pocket. I took a taste of my cocktail, which was cloudy green, tasted like toothpaste, and was so sweet it curled my tongue. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a grasshopper,” said Amanda.

“You got me a grasshopper?”

“Is it awful?” Amanda asked, laughing. “I was trying to surprise you. It’s not easy.”

I took another taste. “This is an old-lady drink, Amanda.”

“Hey,” said my mother. “What’s wrong with being an old lady?”

I tried another sip. “It’s not bad once you get used to it. Try it.”

“Ecch,” said Amanda. “Hey, Jeremy, how was your meeting today?”

I told them I’d asked Josh and Mai Lin if they were recruiting me into a cult. They found this uproarious; their martinis were almost gone, which might have explained why. For some reason, they found the idea of my living in a bungalow in Santa Monica even funnier; I laughed along with them, although I was still half considering the idea, or at least mulling it over in the back of my brain.

“The question is,” I said, “what’s the catch? It can’t be as flat-out wonderful as they say it is.”

“Of course not,” said Amanda. “Nothing ever is. They probably work you to death, or steal your best ideas and don’t give you credit.”

“How much will they pay you?” asked my mother.

“No idea,” I said. “It’s not customary to discuss salary until they make a concrete offer and we start talking terms.”

“Listen to you,” my mother said fondly. “You sound so savvy.”

At this, Amanda and I flicked a glance at each other so quickly no one else could possibly have noticed, not even our mother, who was gazing at both of us with misty-eyed, vodka-enhanced affection. When it was my turn to buy another round, I fetched three grasshoppers from the bar. Emma lifted hers and offered enthusiastic toasts to marriage, then to Amanda’s wedding, and finally to Liam himself. As we hit our glasses together for the third time, I was afraid we might break them with the vehemence of our collective goodwill.

“Your shoes, Amanda,” Emma said, remembering suddenly.

Amanda waved the thought away. “I’ll just wear some old ones.”

“No, you need new ones to get married in,” she said. “Let’s drink up and find you some. It’s only eight; the stores will still be open.”

We left our three empty greenish glasses on the table and went burbling off to SoHo, where Amanda hit upon a pair of strappy, golden, pointy-heeled shoes at the second store we tried, exactly the sort of fairy-princess things she might have chosen as a little girl for her Barbie, if she’d had one. As she teetered around the store, stopping by every mirror to gaze at her feet, my mother and I exchanged a look, and then she got out her wallet.

On my way home, I stopped into a drugstore and bought two greeting cards, one a poetic, embossed wedding card, onto which I planned to copy Angus’s address and telephone number, and the other a manly, jokey birthday card. I was at a loss for actual birthday-present ideas that wouldn’t strike the Goldenbergs as suspiciously gay, but a gift certificate from a sporting goods store seemed like a nice, butch sort of present, not too intimate, not too emotional. I knew Max would actually use it, since he belonged to a gym, so I wouldn’t be wasting my money. When I’d done all my shopping, I stopped into a bar a block away from where I lived, which I’d never been to before. I was there for a few hours, and
made a passel of temporary new friends, none of whom seemed interested in going home with me, but when I thought about it I found I wasn’t all that interested in taking any of them home either. I had a fine time anyway. I felt witty and attractive and magnetic. My shirt looked extremely good on me, I noticed in the mirror behind the bar; I described my illustrious future at Waverly Productions, my job lolling in the atrium on a couch, spouting ideas, and impersonating a latter-day Dorothy Parker at beach parties after work. Everyone seemed to find this extremely fascinating, judging from the fact that I didn’t have to buy myself a drink all night.

The next morning I woke up with the kind of hangover that made me feel as if I were made of fine crystal. On my way to work, every jolt of the subway vibrated in my head with a high, clear ringing sound. The skin on my face felt tissue-thin and crackling. My eyes seemed to have become slightly too large for their sockets; when I blinked, my eyelids scraped against my eyeballs with an almost pleasant friction.

“Feeling better?” Frederick asked solicitously when I showed up at five after nine with my shirt half out of my pants and my hair uncombed.

“Much, thanks,” I said robustly, unfolding Bianca Mantooth’s missing page, erasing Angus’s information, and restoring it to its manuscript.

“Good,” said Frederick. “Bianca Mantooth called Daphne after you left yesterday. She’s stopping by the office this morning to say hello to Simon.”

Simon was the editor in chief. His office was two floors above ours. “Oh,” I said, inspecting my coffee cup to make sure there were no dead bugs in it. “Lucky day for Simon, I guess.”

“She also said she wanted to see you,” Frederick said. “She wanted to make sure you’d be here.”

“Me?”

“That’s all I know,” he said sympathetically. “There’s a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen; I just made it.”

I went to the men’s room, where I relieved my bladder of the remains of the pint of orange juice I’d downed on my way to work, then fetched a cupful of coffee from the kitchen and brought it back to my cubicle. I
sipped it slowly, letting my eyes rest on the laminated brown surface of my desk, whose interesting light-and-dark swirly patterns convincingly mimicked the natural whorled grain of wood. Frederick was probably right; this place was very likely an evil corporate minimum-security prison, and I the urban, noncriminal equivalent of an incarcerated pieceworker, but I enjoyed having a reason to get out of bed early every morning and somewhere to go all day. The work was easy, and the editors left the copy editors alone; they were young and fabulous, and we were old and weird, so they didn’t waste their precious time trying to befriend us. My cubicle was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. My waste-basket was emptied every night. The bathrooms were spotless and generously stocked with toilet paper, soap, and paper towels. And whenever I wanted, I could get almost any kind of food delivered quickly and cheaply. This morning, for example, the astonishingly inexpensive Western omelet with rye toast and side of hash browns I ordered from a nearby deli arrived piping hot in twenty minutes in a tidy Styrofoam container with napkins, extra ketchup, and tiny salt and pepper packets. It seemed I had found another comfortable cage for myself. Maybe I liked cages; I suspected that Frederick, for all his grousing and muckraking, did too.

The hours crept by; the morning ended. Everyone straggled off to forage for food. I left at one o’clock, as I always did, and spent my lunch hour hunched over a prepackaged California roll and a Styrofoam cup of reconstituted miso soup at a Japanese fast-food hole in the wall, reading
Walking Under Bridges
, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected, and was even funny in places, as Mai Lin had said it would be. I envisioned myself walking barefoot across my new backyard in the smoggy Santa Monica morning sun to pick a ripe avocado for my breakfast. The idea didn’t entirely repel me, although it was hard to picture what I would do after I ate the avocado and put on my shoes; I drew a blank when I tried to imagine sitting at a conference table in the Waverly Productions atrium with my fellow transplants, earnestly discussing story arc and character motivation. Arc and motivation struck me as completely spurious storytelling devices, invented for the purposes of writing from a formula, developing a protagonist from point A to point B to point C,
three acts and you’re out; I had considered none of this when I wrote
Angus in Efes
, for example, but maybe that was my problem, and I could learn otherwise.

After lunch I went back to my cubicle for the languorous midafternoon lull, when all the editors gathered in each other’s offices to backbite and kibitz and discuss which lucky hot spot to grace with their collectively fabulous presence tonight, and Daphne disappeared as she did almost every afternoon, I suspected to take a nap on the couch in the ladies’ lounge. While she was gone, Frederick flossed his teeth and whistled tunelessly and shot rubber bands into the air; Rosa’s usual hum of low-level pissiness curdled into almost-intelligible invectives and snarls. I thought I heard a “pinche cabron pendejo” and a little later, “Chingate! Me vale madre! Vete al carajo”; her boyfriend, I gathered, was not going to propose to her no matter how inventively she threatened him. I put my feet up on my desk and checked Scott’s answering machine, but there was nothing there for him or me. I made it through another twenty pages of
Walking Under Bridges
before one of the miniskirted gazelles wafted by on the air-conditioning, deposited some fresh copy on my desk without a word, and hightailed it back to her rarefied domain.