Jeremy Thrane (37 page)

“Here you go,” said the guy who’d been hired to stand behind the table dispensing beverages, handing me a glass. My response to the ubiquitous bad red wine in plastic cups at gallery openings was almost
Pavlovian by now: I could feel the pounding in my skull the moment it was handed to me. I always supplied myself with one, though, and carried it with me throughout the “event” as a less extreme version of the cyanide capsules Second World War spies carried behind enemy lines; as a last resort, I could always gulp it down and announce that I “needed” another one, excuse me, nice talking to you.

It was very hot and loud in there. I wondered where Felicia had found all these people; last time I’d seen her, she’d hardly known anyone. Either she’d hired a bunch of out-of-work actors to impersonate art lovers, or she’d been extremely schmoozy since I’d seen her last, or these were all her fellow 12-steppers, reciting all their sobriety mantras under their breath and wishing they could have a real drink. Or so I imagined, based on the way I would have felt if I’d been they, since I had never fully understood the mechanism of addiction. Since my own habits were pleasurable rather than problematic, I had never seen any reason whatsoever to give any of them up, whereas for these people, an uncontrollable appetite for intoxication seemed to have necessarily mutated into an equal and opposite passion for renunciation. For a lot of them, it had probably been a matter of life and death. From what I knew of the process, though, they still identified as strongly as ever with whatever substance had controlled them, but now they avoided it as radically as they’d sought it; instead of drinking or snorting or shooting up to excess, they gathered ritualistically in groups, where they exorcised these demons while vicariously reliving their pleasures. It all seemed very romantic and obsessive in a medieval Christian sort of way.

“Jeremy,” I heard someone say.

There was no mistaking that lugubriously snippy voice.

“Wayne,” I said automatically, and turning, picked his pinched Dickensian guttersnipe’s face out of the crowd.

“How are your teeth?” he asked with insinuating resentment.

“My
teeth
? Oh, the dentist.”

“I think it’s time for another appointment,” he said. “It’s been about six months since you took mine.”

“Listen, Wayne, you know I went only because Felicia made me.”

“I work for her,” said Wayne. I took this opportunity to study Wayne’s own teeth. They looked smaller than normal, but otherwise
undistinguished. “I have to do what she says. But you’re her friend. You could have refused.”

“That’s what you think,” I said.

“They’re looking a little yellow, you should watch that,” he said. “There’s a new whitening technique you might look into. Bye now.” He slid off into the crowd. I decided to say hello to Felicia, look at her work, and get the hell out of there. If this thing ever ended, there would be plenty of people ahead of me in line for a postmortem chat with her, and I wasn’t in the mood to pull rank, especially because I had no faith that it would get me anywhere.

Just as I was assembling my musculature to take me through these motions, I saw Sebastian across the room. I hadn’t been sure that he’d come; he’d said he’d try to make it if he could. I drifted along the edges of the crowd until I arrived at his left elbow. “Hello, Sebastian,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Jeremy!” he cried, and kissed my cheek. “I just got here. Have you been here long?”

“Long enough to collect my ration of wine,” I said.

“I don’t think it has any alcohol in it,” he said, looking with warning censure into his own plastic glass. “But maybe you got the real thing, I don’t know.”

I tasted my wine. “Damn,” I muttered. “Do you want to go and get a real drink somewhere?”

“I’m due to meet Peter in half an hour,” he said apologetically. “Shall we look at the show? Have you seen it yet?”

We fought our way through the crowd to a hanging blanket at the far end of the room, an enormous quiltlike tapestry.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “It’s made of heroin packets. She sewed them together.”

“I don’t believe they’re sewn,” said Sebastian, peering at them. “That looks like Scotch tape to me.”

“Scotch tape,” I said as a memory fell into place in my mind. “And I don’t believe she taped them herself.” Mercury made a silver square, Blood a red one, Money a green one, Time Bomb a white one, and so forth, like a real old-timey country patchwork quilt. The colors were opaque, delicate, almost Japanese-looking, like rice-paper origami panes;
the doubled facing pieces of tape provided a fingernail-thin transparent ligament between each one, holding them all barely but discretely apart. The huge, fragile thing undulated slightly in the air currents. It was beautiful, but I didn’t like it at all; it gave me the creeps.

“ ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ ” Sebastian read off a small white card on the wall next to it.

“Felicia used to be a lot more subtle with her titles. And she used to be a painter. Where are the paintings?”

“Well,” said Sebastian, looking around, “there don’t seem to be any.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, recalling that the invitation had said “Dreaming in Installments: a multimedia installation by Felicia Boudreaux.” I took another gulp of grape juice and was immediately, briefly plunged back into some remote corner of my childhood. “It’s a multimedia installation, that’s why there are no paintings.”

“You brought her flowers,” said Sebastian. “How thoughtful of you.”

I looked absently down at the bouquet I held in my other arm. “I called the American Bar Association,” I said. “Like you suggested.”

“Oh, tell me!” he said, turning a little pink with excitement.

“They gave me my father’s current address and phone number. All I had to do was ask. He’s in Washington State, near Seattle.”

“Have you called him?” he asked avidly, his eyes as wet and bulging as freshly shucked oysters.

“Oh my God,” I said, “what a terrifying thought. Now that he’s so close.”

“Yes,” he said, his face inches too close to mine. “Yes, I can well imagine how terrifying. But you must do it, Jeremy; you’ll never be satisfied until you do.”

“What’s that thing over there?” I said. My eye had been caught by something as the press of bodies momentarily thinned around it. It was ridiculous to expect to see any art at an opening, I knew perfectly well, but since this was the work of an old friend, I had to make the effort to view each piece in its entirety instead of hanging back and glancing at whatever snippet was revealed by the shifting crowd.

“That thing” turned out to be a life-sized, Felicia-shaped, faceless mannequin with white-blond hair in a chopstick-fixed chignon. Long, shiny needles poked out of its flesh-colored skin at neatly spaced one-inch
intervals so the whole surface bristled dangerously. Two syringes had been plunged into the nipples and another into the crotch. All three were half full of fluid the color of fresh blood. “A Higher Power,” this one was called. It, too, was coldly beautiful, but beyond that it had no resonance; it meant nothing except that drug addiction was sexy and dangerous and all-consuming, which everyone already knew.

“Good heavens,” Sebastian said. “This is absolutely wonderful. It’s quite original, don’t you think? Powerful and effective.”

“I suppose,” I said queasily, wondering with disappointed skepticism what this enthusiasm said about Sebastian’s praise of my own writing.

On the next wall was a series of fifteen or so photographs hung behind one long, thick sheet of clear Plexiglas bolted to the wall. Felicia’s expressionless face filled the entire frame of each shot. They were all identical except that in each successive one her eyelids drooped more and more over her clear green eyes. In the last one, they were closed.

Sebastian bent slightly to examine the typed card. “ ‘Land of Nod.’ ”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Let’s go see what all the fuss is about over there.”

A crowd was gathered around three pedestals on which, I saw when I was close enough, were carefully constructed dioramas of Felicia’s loft itself, her bathroom, bedroom, and the main open space, including tiny reproductions of her paintings on the walls. There was the bathroom sink with its spoon, candle, and Chinese jar of packets, there was Felicia on her bed with her dress hiked up to show her flanks, a syringe in her hand, and there was her living room couch, upon which sat—“That looks like me,” I said with horror. “Sitting there on the couch. It looks just like me; look at the face.” I stared at the thing, coldly curious. So that was what I looked like. Not bad; not bad at all.

“How flattering, Jeremy, she’s got you in her show.”

I wasn’t sure yet whether or not I was flattered by this; actually, I was pretty sure I was creeped out. That particular day hadn’t been among the better ones of my life. And the expression on the little Jeremy’s face was the same tragic–lemur blend of sadness and archness I’d once admired in the expressions of the people in her paintings. There I sat on her couch like a lonely exile, a solitary dreamer, a man who didn’t know what he
was missing. The tiny Felicia, on the other hand, bore an expression of ardent anticipation, her eyes half shut and her neck arched as if she were about to be penetrated by a lover.

“There seems to be an audio component to this display,” said Sebastian. “Look, they’re all listening to those earphone things.”

Dangling from each pedestal was a cluster of headsets. I picked one up and put it to my ears; Sebastian did likewise. I heard my own voice, and then Felicia’s.

“What am I, Felicia?”

“You’re a slut,” she said coldly.

I gasped aloud.

“Okay,” my recorded voice went on insistently, “but it’s not the same thing at all. Your choice is willfully self-destructive and mine isn’t and that’s a real difference, no matter how you want to justify it. I take care of myself. I’d never ask you to stick me in the ass with a syringe, for example.”

“You didn’t have to,” she said with a tiny catlike yawn. “What kind of intervention was that, Jeremy? Was that the best you could do?” There came the sound of coughing, then several thudding sounds: She’d choked on her own laughter, I’d thumped her on the back. “I’m sorry,” she said then, “but that was the most pathetic little confrontation I ever heard.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Jeremy, come back here and get your sense of humor,” she called. “I think it’s under the couch or somewhere.”

Footsteps, then the sound of the front door being unlocked.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Don’t leave all mad at me like that. I won’t be able to get any painting done today, I’ll be too upset.”

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

“Give Ted my love,” she said; had she really sounded so lonely at the time?

There was a brief hiss, then a click, and then the whole thing apparently started over.

“I’m not going to do this for you, Felicia,” I heard myself say. I sounded petulant and irritated.

“Please,” she answered breathlessly.

“No,” I said. “I can’t even watch.”

Footsteps resounded and died away. There was a pause; breaking the silence was the faint hiss and honk of faraway traffic, and then a long, slow exhalation; it sounded as if the microphone were right by Felicia’s mouth. Then I heard footsteps, then came a pause.

“Sorry about that,” Felicia’s airy voice said.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Jeremy. Accept my apology.”

“This whole thing is bullshit. You started doing it because you liked the idea of yourself doing it. Now look at you.”

She laughed. “I don’t have to answer to anyone.”

“That’s hardly the point, Felicia. Think about it.”

“Oh, fiddle,” she said. “I want to be a drug-addicted neurotic semirecluse. You want to be what you are; it’s the same thing, Jeremy.”

“What am I, Felicia?”

“You’re a slut.”

“Okay,” I said (had I really sounded so earnestly self-righteous?), “but it’s not the same thing at all.”

I took off my headset, then Sebastian’s. He didn’t resist; he merely blinked at me and stooped slightly to read the card.

“It’s called ‘Hitting Bottom,’ ” he said. “Clever, don’t you think?”

I looked at him. “Did she plan this? I can’t believe she did this to me!”

“But you come off heroically,” he said, perplexed.

“In what way, exactly?”

“You told her the truth.”

“But she knew all along,” I said. We were shouting, trying to be heard over everyone else who was trying to be heard. “She planned this whole thing. She set me up.”

“I might be flattered,” said Sebastian, “if it were me.”

“I always knew she was like that,” I said insistently, “totally out for herself. But as long as I thought she was on my side and we were in it together, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.”

A couple of the people around us looked curiously at me, then at the diorama, then back at me again.

“She meant to go into rehab all along,” I said directly into his ear,
lowering my voice. “This had nothing to do with her decision. This is fake. She’s fake. She probably got addicted on purpose.”

A flashbulb went off in my face. I was briefly blinded by twin slippery gold-black starbursts wherever I looked. When they faded, I recognized Phil Martensen, aiming his camera, about to shoot me again.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him, directing all my rage at his unassuming silhouette.

He came out blinking from behind his camera. “We’re covering the opening for
Downtown
,” he said blandly. “Gary’s writing a feature on Felicia. You’re a friend of hers and of some interest to readers due to recent events.”

“Because of the whole Ted story,” I said disgustedly. “Aren’t your readers completely sick of him yet?”

“If you don’t want your picture taken, of course I won’t take it, but in that case you might want to step aside so I can get a clear shot at Mr. Philpott here, who I believe is the founder and editor in chief of
Boytoy
. Right? If he’s game, of course.”

“I don’t mind in the least,” said Sebastian happily. “I’m producing a script Jeremy wrote, you might mention that as well. Jeremy, do come and stand by me, don’t be shy. Let’s give them something to talk about.” He smiled starrily at me, then at Phil. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” he said, “but I’ve never had the chance before.”