Jeremy Thrane (36 page)

“The question for me,” said Fernando, “is what is dog-do.”

Max poured more wine all around. “Here’s my thing about the sneakers,” he said. He’d recovered his equanimity under the cover of distraction I’d provided. “We keep doing something that goes against the letter of the law just because everyone around us does it too. Well, this year I’m going to wear rubber rainboots over bare feet to services on Yom Kippur. My feet will be cold, they’ll chafe, they’ll itch, and I’ll fulfill both letter and spirit.”

“You’ll look like a schmuck,” said his father.

“I don’t care,” said Max.

“You’re such a rebel, Maxie,” said Rita affectionately. “I think you’ll look very cute in your rubber boots going off to synagogue.”

“I’m not doing it to be a rebel,” said Max crabbily. “I’m doing it to make a point.”

“Dog-do,” I told Fernando, “is dog shit.”

“I have no idea why you’re talking about this at my birthday party,” said Max.

“Because,” said Fischl, “to agree to spell a word the same facilitates communication and understanding. We all wear sneakers to shul because
the Talmud says no leather on our feet for Yom Kippur. It brings people together. It doesn’t say to wear shoes that make our feet hurt, although that might have been the original idea, it says no leather. Sneakers are a very nice loophole for old yids like me who are in enough pain not eating for twenty-four hours, we don’t need our feet hurting too.”

“I disagree,” said Max. “We understand the law by following the law. Following the law even more stringently is maybe to understand it even better. If you’re going to do it in the first place, you might as well do it right.”

“Right?” said Fischl irascibly. “What’s right is wearing sneakers.”

“But,” I said, “let’s say Max wears rainboots this year, and someone else sees him and thinks it’s a good idea and wears them next year, and the year after that people at the next synagogue start wearing them, then it starts to be a whole new tradition, rainboots on Yom Kippur. Then someone else comes along and questions that, saying why not go even further, why not wear boards with thumbtacks sticking into the soles of your feet?”

Fischl smacked his lips loudly over an enormous bite of cake. “All I hope is that I’m dead by then.”

“I can’t hear a word anyone is saying,” said Rivka, tapping her shrieking hearing aid. “This damn thing, I need a new one.”

“You’re not missing anything, Mommy,” said Max loudly. “Everyone’s making fun of me.”

“No,” said Rita, kissing him on the cheek, “we’re celebrating your existence.”

Around midnight, after the rain had stopped and the “grown-ups” had all gone to bed, Max and Fernando and I took a short walk around the neighborhood. When we were several blocks away from the Goldenbergs’ house, Fernando pulled Max into the darkness under a huge, spreading tree. As I cooled my heels a few yards away, doing calf stretches on the curb, breathing the smell of wet lawns and staring into the misty, streetlamp-stained darkness, an odd and unexpected sadness gripped and squeezed my upper abdomen like a girdle. This piercing melancholy served the unexpected dual purpose of easing my overstuffed discomfort, so on the whole it was, like most things, a mixed bag.

As we started back to the Goldenbergs’ house, I said, “Max, while I was in the bathroom I overheard your mother and Rita in the kitchen, talking about you.”

To my surprise, Max was silent for a while, then he said without looking at me, “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”

“But you have no idea what—”

“Don’t tell me,” he repeated firmly.

“He means he knows already,” said Fernando.

“How do you know what I was going to say?” I snapped at him. “How do you know he knows already?”

“I know Max,” said Fernando. I felt a surge of testosterone in him as he said this, but I didn’t back down.

“So do I,” I said.

“Maybe not as well as you think,” Fernando said clearly, looking me right in the eye.

“I say we go in and have a nightcap down in the rec room,” said Max jovially, as if no one had said anything at all since he had made out with Fernando under that tree. “Let’s open the cognac Fernando brought. There’s cake left. We can play my old records, it’s soundproofed. I used to have parties down there in high school. We used to take turns puking in the bathroom sink, we drank so much.”

“The same bathroom where I overheard your mother and Rita?” I asked stubbornly.

“The same bathroom,” said Max. “The one that keeps all secrets.” He slid his hand into the crook of my arm and rested his other arm across Fernando’s shoulders, pulling us both close to him so the three of us walked in lockstep together on the echoing, wet asphalt in the middle of the street.

After Amanda’s wedding rehearsal at our mother’s apartment, I set out into the warm, clear early evening, walking downtown toward TriBeCa; the address Felicia had given me was over ninety blocks away, but I needed all the exercise I could get after the brisket and birthday cake, the cream-cheese-lox-and-bagel breakfast we’d had this morning, and the leftover brisket on rye Rita had made me for the train. I was also feeling in need of some air and escape; Amanda’s wedding rehearsal had been from start to finish a crowded melee of taut nerves, tears, and babbling voices. I had no idea how or whether anything we were doing would translate tomorrow into an actual wedding ceremony. The wedding wouldn’t even be held at my mother’s house, it would be on a pier in Chelsea. I’d barely spoken to my sister Lola, newly arrived from Australia with her husband, Fletcher, whom I’d never met before.

As I’d squired Amanda down the “aisle,” otherwise known as the hallway, she was shaking a little, but whether with fear or emotion I couldn’t tell. Her hand on my bare arm was sweaty and cold.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I told her under my breath.

“I think Mom’s hurt that I didn’t ask her to walk me down the aisle,” she replied.

“It’s not too late to change your mind about that either,” I said.

“I want you,” she said stubbornly, and my whole chest swelled with a strong, yeasty brew I identified as brotherly love.

A second later I handed her over to a virulently pale post-bachelor-party Liam, hulking in the library with the likeable oddball they’d hired to perform the ceremony, the best man Feckin, and Amanda’s slutty bass player, whom she’d appointed as her maid of honor. We’d decided to
forego the poems and songs that would precede the ceremony, so I had nothing else to do now but duck into the bathroom for a while. When I came out, a red-eyed Irish lass I’d never met before was waiting to get in, inspecting all the pictures along the hallway in the meantime. Then I went and hung out in front of my mother’s open refrigerator door, purely out of ancient habit rather than hunger, not really even looking at anything, merely basking in the glow of the tiny bulb and feeling perfectly at home.

I felt someone breathing behind me.

“What the feckin Jaysus is kasha?” a voice I recognized said. “What’s that green-lookin slime back there? Is that food?”

“Help yourself,” I said, and went away to let Feckin inspect the yogurt and wheat germ and homemade stewed prunes a little more closely, in private.

A short time later, when the rehearsal was officially over, everyone went out to a nearby Chinese restaurant, but I got out of having to go along by mentioning Felicia’s opening; if my mother and Amanda respected anything in the world, it was art of any kind. So I was set free, with plenty of time to walk the whole way down.

I ricocheted down Broadway, the great spinal aorta of Manhattan, its teeming core, from one familiar but eternally exotic landmark to the next, from the fruit and vegetable sidewalk bins at Fairway to Gray’s Papaya to the lit-up jets of the Lincoln Center fountain, through the corporate-skyscraper corridor of Midtown; every time I took one of these extended hikes up or down Broadway, I fell into the same indefatigable, dreamy fascination with everything I saw that I experienced whenever I traveled in a foreign country. An invisible conveyer belt pulled me through the untawdry, Disneyfied but still psychedelic New Times Square, past the video screens and billboards that blinked and foamed and fizzed high above the theater marquees and chain hotels, down to the garish pink neon weirdness of the urban mall on Thirty-fourth Street, and on through the dark, third-world-country-atmosphered rug-and-jewelry district. At Union Square I crossed Fourteenth Street and picked up Broadway again on its little jog east, then whizzed down the chute of lower Broadway, past shops crammed full of NYU students, across Houston into SoHo, past shops crammed full of Eurotrash tourists, all of
them in plate-glass storefronts at the bottom of solidly corniced and mullioned buildings that looked far too old and dignified to house these overpriced jet-set shoe emporia and overlit fly-by-night sunglass boutiques. As I approached Canal Street, my muscles loose, my feet pleasurably fatigued, my mind in a happy fog, I veered toward a deli and scanned the buckets of flowers lined up on the sidewalk near the door. At some point on my long trek, inspired by my mild success with those tulips for Rivka, I had apparently decided to buy Felicia a bouquet.

As the tiny, borderline-malevolent Korean woman behind the counter wrapped a bunch of tiger lilies in a sheet of flowered paper, I felt the hair on my arms stand up in a way I knew all too well. Turning to identify the cause, I espied Yoshi in the exotic foods aisle, staring at me with much of the dismay I felt evident on my own face. He was holding, I couldn’t help noticing, a package of those pressed seaweed sheets they rolled sushi with. I knew what they were called but preferred not to even think the word for fear of somehow appearing to legitimize his whole Japanese affectation in any way and having this show in my face.

“Yoshi,” I said, stifling a childish desire to call him “Sushi” instead and pretend I’d done it by mistake.

“Jeremy,” he said without a trace of a Japanese accent. He looked paler than he’d been the last time I’d seen him. Maybe he’d stopped using Ted’s tanning bed. He also looked puffier, less aggressively buffed and oiled, and he’d had that damn ponytail lopped off so his black hair was as bristly and short as a dog’s fur. He looked better, if only because he looked less deserving of his high opinion of himself.

I turned back to the counter, received my change and the wrapped flowers from the scary little Korean lady, and would have happily left this unexpected reunion with my former housemate at this terse exchange of names, but he handed over some money for the package of nori and exited the store on my heels. It seemed we were headed in the same direction; we walked along in uneasy tandem for half a block. Finally Yoshi said, “It looks like we’re neighbors again. I live a few blocks from here.”

“I don’t live in this neighborhood,” I said. “Anyway,” I added after another brief pause, “I thought you lived with Ted.”

“I did,” he said.

I considered letting the matter drop, but curiosity prevailed. “What happened?”

“I moved out.”

“Why?” I asked, my heart beginning to pound slowly in a way that alerted me to the fact that this was something I probably wouldn’t enjoy hearing but was powerless not to inquire after. I thought of a rat gnawing off its own limb to escape a trap.

“He was pathetic after you did that to him,” Yoshi said with a faint sneer of triumph. “He sat around the house all day, feeling sorry for himself.”

“I didn’t do anything to him,” I snapped.

“So anyway,” he said. “I got fed up with him and found my own place. He wasn’t pleased.”

I said through a lump of bitterness in my throat, “You broke his heart?”

“Heart?” said Yoshi, giving me a look. “I insulted his pride. He thought I should have been more appreciative of what he’d given up for me.”

I cleared my throat. The bitter lump didn’t budge. “You mean me, I suppose,” I said flatly.

“Your loyal silence,” Yoshi said with airy unconcern.

“My loyal silence,” I repeated, attempting wryness but sounding as if I were being lightly strangled. Yoshi and I hated each other, I had long since figured out, because we were attracted to the same man for completely different reasons, and therefore saw through and despised each other’s efforts to attract him; what didn’t entirely make sense was why Yoshi’s efforts had triumphed over mine.

“Things happen,” said Yoshi enigmatically. “We all do what we have to do.” He paused on the corner of Grand Street. “I turn here,” he said. “Take care.”

“Oh, thank you, I certainly will, and you take care too,” I said with heartfelt hatred, but he’d already headed off, so I wasn’t sure whether or not he’d heard me.

I continued on my way in a welter of black-hearted rawness that slowly gave way to perverse satisfaction. No revenge I could knowingly have perpetrated could have achieved a more satisfying end. When Ted’s
life fell apart, just when he needed a true friend most, he was forced to recognize that he’d swapped me, the man who truly loved him, for a poisonous little snake.

I heard the opening before I saw it, a roar of voices through a door that opened directly onto the sidewalk on Walker Street. Through the doorway I saw people standing around in little clumps and immediately dreaded going in. Whenever I went to these things, I inevitably got trapped in intense but awkward one-on-one conversations with people who had even less reason for being there than I had, such as the artist’s old college roommate or the gallery owner’s out-of-town cousin or some guy who’d wandered in to pounce on an unsuspecting lamb like me to corner me far from the drinks table while he tried with smooth desperation to ascertain who I knew, how I could help him in his own art career, and what I thought of his idea for his new video installation. The fact that I knew no one in the art world and could converse with no interest or authority about video “art” seemed to be no deterrent whatsoever to such people.

I went in and threaded my speedy way to the drinks table like a race car in a video game, skirting all the obstacles without easing up off the accelerator and reaching my destination well ahead of schedule. As I waited for my glass of wine, I did a quick reconnoiter. Through the crowd I could see objects that would probably, on closer inspection, turn out to be the work Felicia was exhibiting. There was Felicia herself, over by the far wall. She wore a tight black wifebeater and looked considerably more substantial, healthily so, than she had the last time I’d seen her, which was over two months ago. Hovering just beyond her was someone I recognized vaguely from other openings, a wrinkled elf who used all her tragically limited powers to be mistaken for a twenty-five-year-old girl, aided by pink rouge, a belted minidress, and tights with go-go boots, her dead-black hair in two little braids. Coming toward me was a tall, intelligent-looking, alluring man who made my heart go pitter-pat but looked blankly at me when I caught his eye as if to say, “You can look all you want, of course.”