Jeremy Thrane (34 page)

I’d never seen Max on his home turf before.

“Are you kvelling, Max?”

“You won’t be making fun when you sink your teeth into that meat,” he said, finally executing his left turn. “How is your movie deal coming along?”

“I had lunch with some big studio cheeses yesterday. They want my soul on a platter. They want me to move to Los Angeles and join their wonderful community.”

“What? Are you thinking of going?”

“Well, I don’t know. First I have to write a treatment for a screenplay for them based on some memoir by a teenage girl who aborted her father’s baby. They seem to think I’m some kind of specialist in kinky incest, based on my screenplay.”

“That’s great,” he said. “Jeremy, I’m so proud of you.”

“Max,” I said, “it’s not great. Screenwriters are hacks; screenplays get mashed to lowest-common-denominator porridge. Oh, God, the thought of it. If I fall into that black hole, I’ll never get out alive. I’ll sit in that bungalow and scratch myself into a pile of dead skin on the floor and blow away.”

He slid the car into an illegal parking place and turned off the engine. “Has your agent heard back from any of those editors he sent your novel to?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “he has.”

Max turned in his seat to look straight at me. The seat belt cut into his cheek, but he didn’t seem to care. “What did they say?”

“ ‘Dear Mr. Fine,’ ” I said in the voice of a snooty, know-it-all editor, “ ‘I fail to share or even understand your enthusiasm for Jeremy Thrane’s tedious piece of crap,
Angus in Efes
. Best of luck placing it elsewhere. May we venture to suggest a vanity press? Sincerely, and so forth.’ They could hardly bring themselves to be polite about it, that’s how unbelievably bad they thought it was.”

“What do they know?” he said indignantly, but his protest didn’t ring wholly true.

“Be honest,” I said. “Have you read the copy I gave you yet? And if so, what did you think?”

The windshield wipers greased the windshield with rain for several thumping cycles before he answered. “You know I’m no literary critic,” he said lightly. “I thought the book was well written and imaginative. I’m not sure about the plot, but what does plot matter in contemporary novels, isn’t that right? But if you’re doomed to be a rich and successful Hollywood screenwriter, I don’t see why that’s such a tragedy.”

“I worked on that novel for almost ten years,” I said. “The screenplay was nothing.”

“I thought it was hilarious,” he said “But your novel is very good too. It’s just maybe not as commercially viable, but what do I know? Wait here and guard the car while I run in and get the groceries.”

While he was gone, I stared at the fire hydrant right next to the car; I contemplated his diagnosis of my literary future and decided not to discuss it further with him.

“Okay, I have two questions for you,” I told him when he returned with a bulging plastic bag. “How did we meet and all that, when they ask me, and what do I say during the game to fake a degree of familiarity with the great American pastime?”

“The truth: We met at Charlie’s wedding,” said Max blithely, “and as far as the game goes, I have no idea why you’re so worried about this. You played baseball in school, it’ll all come back to you.”

“What will come back to me is standing in left field, praying to God, who I suddenly believed in, that the ball wouldn’t come near me.”

“It’s all going to be fine,” said Max soothingly. “My parents love you already, don’t worry, they’ll do all the talking. All you have to do is look at Bar Mitzvah pictures, listen to all their stories about what a brilliant child I was, and eat five big helpings of food and try for a sixth. And do not, Jeremy, whatever you do, blow my cover if anyone refers to my ex-girlfriends. Jessica was the lawyer, Debbie was the medical student, Lisa was the actress. All very nice but extremely busy Jewish girls who unfortunately could never make it out here to meet my parents. You got that?”

A few minutes later, on a street Max called Synagogue Row, which
was lined with one huge, hideous mausoleum after another, he pulled into a driveway in front of a rambling white one-story house surrounded by old trees. He turned off the engine. “I forgot to ask,” he said. “How’s your love life these days?”

“Oh my God,” I said. “There’s no time to tell you the whole story, but I picked up this guy the other night, about a week ago.”

“Do tell,” he said. “We can wait a minute before we go in.”

“I went to the Dugout at four in the afternoon, and there he was at the bar, this seedy-looking but sort of hot little delinquent type. We started flirting, I bought him a beer, he asked for another one, we got a little drunk. He said he was into partying, he mentioned he’d been a go-go dancer, he’d been in prison. Whatever, I didn’t pay too much attention, you know how it is when the hormones are in full throttle. He asked if I wanted a date.” I paused. “Define ‘date’ for me, Max.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I hope this isn’t going where I absolutely think it is.”

“I took him home to my little room, where he gave me highly efficient if belabored head. Afterward he sprawled there on my bed, smoking a repellent cheroot sort of thing. By this time, the endorphins had worn off and I was thoroughly sick of him and was trying to get rid of him, and that’s when things got hairy. He demanded money. He thought he’d made that clear at the outset.”

“Did you pay him?”

I said dourly, “Well, he sort of mentioned at that point that he’d been in Sing Sing for murder. Actually, the way he put it was, ‘I was in a fight with this dude and I did what I had to do. I’m not proud of it but I did my time.’ Then I gave him whatever I had in my wallet, which was around sixteen dollars. He tried to intimidate me into going to the ATM, but that turned out to be fruitless because I wasn’t budging because I hadn’t agreed to this, I’d been tricked, so to speak, so he finally left. Then a while later I noticed my new CD player was missing.”

Max tsk-tsked, giving my shoulder a gentle, consoling shake. “If it had happened to me, this story would be hilarious.”

“For some strange reason, I find that sort of comforting,” I said.

We got out of the car and made our way, huddled together under the umbrella, to the house, carrying the flowers, wine, and groceries. To my
mind’s eye, we could not have looked more overtly homosexual, mincing over the wet grass, our trouser legs swishing, our steps small and geisha-like. I started to laugh to myself, then stopped when the front door opened and a woman looked out at us through the screen door. I caught a glimpse of cheekbones and blond hair.

“Welcome,” she called as we came through the rain toward her over the sopping-wet, acid-green lawn.

“Mommy,” Max said, “this is Jeremy.”

If Max hadn’t told me that his mother was almost eighty, I would have guessed she was sixty, tops. She had a foxy urban face with a wide curved mouth, a long elegant nose, and a chin-length blond wig, which I knew all the Orthodox Jewish wives wore because their real hair was too enticingly erotic for anyone but their husbands to lay eyes on. She was tall and leggy, about the same height as Max. She wore a man’s white Oxford shirt over a long, straight black skirt that fishtailed out slightly at the bottom.

“Hello, Mrs. Goldenberg,” I said, handing her the tulips.

“Who?” she cried, looking over her shoulder. “Call me Rivka, please, you make me feel like Maxie’s grandma. What are these? White tulips? Oh, you are wonderful. Wipe your feet and come in. By the way, Jeremy, my hearing aid is crapola tonight, so shout if you have anything to say to me.”

We wiped our feet on the black rubber mat and then followed her into the brightly lit white-carpeted house, down some steps, through a silent, shrouded living room and along a hallway lined with pictures of Max at every stage of his development from birth onward. “My walk of fame,” he muttered behind me. I caught sight of a picture of him at age fourteen or so, wearing a suit, looking for all the world like a three-dollar queer; how was it that parents didn’t instinctively guess these things? Well, people saw what they wanted to see, that was the only plausible explanation I’d ever come up with.

Rivka turned and took my overnight bag from me. “You’ll be in here,” she said, placing it just inside the doorway of a room we were passing; I hoped I would remember which one when the time came to toddle off to bed. We continued on to the huge kitchen, which smelled as good as Max had promised it would and was actually two Siamese-twin
kitchens joined by a big island in the middle, with opposing, identical sets of cupboards, stoves, refrigerators, sinks, dishwashers. The left half was all activity, steam rising from pots on the stove, dishes in the open dishwasher, vegetables in a colander; the right half was gleaming and quiet and perfectly clean. A bay window looked out to a dripping, lush little garden; I caught a glimpse of someone I assumed was Rita crouched on the ground between the rows out there, draped in a black poncho, picking small round red things that looked like strawberries and putting them into a basket on her arm. I set the bag of wine and the flowers on the countertop. Max began to put the groceries away.

Rivka stood in the left-hand kitchen with her hand on one cocked hip, the other flat on the counter next to a cutting board dotted with little bits of cut-up ingredients whose identity I couldn’t ascertain but which filled me with excitement. “Now, who wants a drink? We have vodka, gin, whiskey, rum, and rye.” She took three tall drinking glasses out of a cupboard.

“Rye, please,” I said eagerly. I’d never had rye, but everyone in noir novels drank it, the guy in
The Lost Weekend
, Marlowe in the Chandler novels, all those small-time shysters and down-at-heels grifters.

“What was that?”

“Rye,” I repeated loudly as she trained her eyes on my lips.

“Fernando and I will have vodka,” said Max.

She put a few ice cubes in each glass. She filled the first one to the top with brown liquid out of a bottle that looked about forty years old and handed it to me. Even by my standards, this drink was huge. She poured the same amount of vodka into the other two and handed them to Max.

“She isn’t really trying to kill us,” said Max under his breath. “She doesn’t drink hard liquor; she has no idea. She pours seltzer and milk the same way. Come on, let’s go in the den.”

I took a sip of rye. It tasted exactly as I’d expected, like fermented wood chips with a whiff of formaldehyde. I took another, bigger sip and trotted along behind Max as he bustled down the hall to a dark room at the end. Fernando sat on a brown leather couch, looking perfectly at home and at ease, one ankle slung in manly fashion to rest on the other knee, his arms stretched along the back of the couch, his head leaning
comfortably against the wall. Sprawled on a green vinyl reclining chair was the most obese man I’d ever seen, or one of them. The chair was slung all the way back. He lay on it with all the resplendence of a lotus on a lily pad or a monument on a pedestal. His black yarmulke looked comically small; a gray beard covered his many chins with the uniformly shallow fuzz of lichen on rocks. He was more thing than man, more substance than flesh; the chair cupped and sustained him. I darted a glance at the TV screen to see whether or not the Game had begun yet, and was relieved to see that it hadn’t.

“This is Jeremy, Dad,” said Max.

“Hello, Mr. Goldenberg,” I said, raising my glass at him somewhat awkwardly. “How are you, Fernando.”

“Hello, Jeremy,” said Fernando with an inexplicably amused expression on his thick-lipped, intelligent face. I had to admit, he was pretty hot; maybe I disliked him because of the cellular taboo I felt against being attracted to my friends’ boyfriends. Why he didn’t like me was anyone’s guess, but I chalked it up to the logical truth that a certain percentage of people I met just wouldn’t. I noticed that he was wearing a yarmulke. Max had told me I didn’t have to wear one if I felt uncomfortable about it, so I’d accepted this as a way out and hadn’t given it much more thought. Well, he was Max’s boyfriend and I wasn’t. I touched the top of my bare head with my fingertips as Max handed him his drink and sat on the couch a good distance away from him; I slid into the armchair near the television set.

“We started the parsha discussion already since we’re not going to shul tonight,” Max’s father said in a hoarsely breathless voice. “We’re up to the grasshoppers, the fruit, how to read Torah.”

“Welcome to Hebrew school, Jeremy,” said Max. “Dad, maybe we could save the devar Torah until after you say how nice it is to meet Jeremy, you’ve heard so many good things about him, and how was his train trip, that sort of thing.”

“Is that what I’m called upon to do?” Fischl wheezed. “Is that polite?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, gulping my rye, which was going down surprisingly well. “No pleasantries necessary. What part of the Old Testament are you talking about?”

I had tried to sound light and conversational, but they all looked at me as if I’d committed an incredible faux pas.

“We call it the Torah,” said Max gently. “God wrote the Torah, whereas a bunch of different guys who weren’t even eyewitnesses wrote the Christian Bible, which they call the New Testament to differentiate it from the ‘old’ one, as if they were in any way comparable.”

“I see,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to offend anyone any more than I already had. “God actually held the pen, or whatever it was, the chisel? How did that work? How do you know?”

“That’s the point,” said Fischl. “Exactly. The spies went into the Promised Land and what did they find? They found giants! They went looking for danger, why?”

“What part of the Torah is this?” I asked.

“It’s in Numbers,” Max said to me; then, when I looked blankly back at him added, “Okay, really quick: God tells Moses to send some of his men to scout out Canaan, the Promised Land, which he’s told them will soon be theirs. They come back with fruit so big, they have to carry it in wagons, which seems promising, right? What a great place. But they tell stories about terrifying giants, the Canaanites, who made them feel as small as grasshoppers. When the other Jews hear this, they start kvetching and moaning that they’d rather go back to enslavement in Egypt than die by the Canaanites’ swords. Big mistake: God strikes the spies with a plague for their cowardice, and condemns the others to live the rest of their lives in the wilderness. No Promised Land for them if they’re going to be so whiny about it. But they disobey; off they go to Canaan without the Ark and without Moses, and of course they all get hacked to bits by the Canaanites.”