Jeremy Thrane (39 page)

“Oh, thanks,” he said. “Actually, I was sort of looking forward to a beer, but—” He lifted the glass as if to toast me and took a sip. “Ahh,” he said, “that’s good, actually. God, I hate this place. The service is terrible, the food is worse, but I always seem to end up here. Did you see the play?”

“No, I missed it.”

“Oh, too bad. It went without a hitch tonight.” He took another gulp of his martini and set it down again. “I can get you tickets if you’re interested.”

“I’ve heard good things about it,” I said. “I’d love to see it.”

“You’ve heard mixed things about it,” he said, “if you’ve seen all the reviews. But I’m not discouraged; it’s gotten a lot of attention, and that’s all that matters, especially when it’s just our first play. We’ve sold out every performance.”

“That might have to do with the fact that you’re in it.”

“Well,” he said shortly, then smiled again. “You’re looking good,” he said out of nowhere; but his tone was impersonal, as if he were simply making conversation until his friends arrived.

“The screenplay I wrote is being produced,” I blurted out. “A production company is hiring me to write another one. Have you heard of Waverly Productions?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Well, that’s them. They actually want me to move out to L.A.” I laughed modestly.

“You? I can’t see you there.” He looked startled, even impressed, which gave me a strange mixture of regret and panic; I felt cheap for bringing it up, as if I were trying to prove something to him.

“Me neither,” I said. “By the way, I was just at Felicia’s opening.”

“Yeah, I got something in the mail about that but I couldn’t make it, obviously. I’ll have to go check it out some time. How’s Felicia?”

“Recovering,” I said.

“Clean?” he asked with his familiar grin.

“As a whistle.”

“The twelve steps in action?”

“Every man jack of them.”

There was a brief pause, during which we smiled somewhat stupidly at each other. I realized that I’d been staring at him since he’d arrived. My eyes felt as if they were emitting laser beams.

“How’s your drink?” I asked pointedly.

“Great,” he said, his mind clearly elsewhere.

“Actually, I’m referring to—forget it.” I paused, then added more loudly than necessary, with a flash of anger, “Guess who I ran into tonight.”

“I give up.”

“Yoshi.”

Ted’s left eye twitched slightly. “Yoshi,” he repeated.

“I just saw him tonight, near SoHo,” I said. “We walked together for just a block or two, so we didn’t talk for long. He said he lives down there now.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said, glancing at the door.

“You threw me away for him,” I said with cold, clipped fury.

Ted stared at me. “Can’t we just let this go?” he asked with a small frown. “It’s over. The damage has been done.”

“Well, it all seems to have worked out nicely for you in the end.”

“Assuming this is the end,” he said. He took a tidy, conservative nip of his drink, then set his glass down carefully in the center of the napkin.

Just then his fellow actors surrounded us. Ted introduced me to them, but the inside of my head felt hollow and cold, and I immediately forgot all their names; they all looked identical to me, young, short, good-looking, with wide, smiling red mouths and an abnormal amount of social energy. I finished my martini and set the glass on the counter with deliberate care.

Ted stood up and put his arm around one of them and kissed him on the lips. “Tony,” he said, “you were fucking fantastic tonight.”

“Baby,” Tony said with a toss of his head, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

The rest of them hooted in unison. “I think he has,” said an apple-cheeked lad with a Shakespearean goatee. Tony nuzzled Ted’s neck.

I stood up and tossed some money onto the counter, too much, but I didn’t want to wait for change or stay there another nanosecond. Somehow I said good-bye to them all and made it out of there. I pissed in a doorway, then walked home, too sober to forget anything, wondering yet again, with a grim, frustrated fury that was becoming all too familiar, why not one editor in New York would publish my novel. Maybe I was doomed, as Max had said, to be a successful screenwriter. But as soon as I thought that, a small voice in the back of my head piped up, as it always did when I was on this mental hamster wheel, and said that all those editors were dunderheads who wouldn’t recognize a good book if it bit them in the ass. But, said a louder and more compelling voice, maybe my book wasn’t good at all; maybe it was just the kind of pretentious, overwritten thing I most deplored. No, said the smaller voice; it couldn’t be.

This bootless internal argument continued until I got home. Scott was out somewhere, to my relief; I had been dreading having to have to make cheerful chitchat with him while I was in this mood. I took the tiger lilies out of their paper, put them into a jar of water, carried them into my room, and put them on my nightstand. Although it was still early, I took off my clothes, turned off the light, and flung myself onto my bed. The flowers, slightly bedraggled by now but still mockingly gorgeous in the white, glimmering half-light from the city outside, were the last things I saw before I fell into a deep and mindless sleep.

And they were the first things I saw the next morning, too, when I opened my eyes and let my vision adjust slowly to the new day. I lay there for a while, as the five gangly stems came into focus along with the velvety orange petals streaked with dusky purple. I got out of bed and made my slightly unsteady, sleep-drunk way out to the living room, where Scott and Matt lay entwined on the fainting couch, watching Juanita enjoy her new bell toy. It dangled from her perch and responded with a merry tinkle whenever she butted it with her head.

“Morning, fellas,” I said as I reached a finger into the cage and withdrew her.

“Oh, don’t take her,” said Matt.

“Time for her calisthenics,” I said heartlessly. “Maybe there’s a bird show on the nature channel.” I put her on my bare shoulder, where she sat without fussing or pooping while I made myself a big cup of coffee. I went back to my room and set her on the nightstand by the vase of flowers. She looked lovely there, diminutive and green. She cocked her head and watched me politely as I stood in the middle of the room, drinking my coffee and scratching a mosquito bite on my arm.

“Jeremy?”

“Come on in.”

Scott, standing in the doorway, glanced at the grimy computer keyboard, rumpled bed, slovenly stacks of old scribbled-on drafts of chapters, discrete heaps of soiled clothes, and the astonishing array of food-caked dishes tucked handily here and there to double as repositories for my castoff toenail clippings should I find myself in need of them. The place where my new CD player had been was now a clean rectangle of shelf surrounded by a solid layer of black dust. Where did that black dust come from? New Jersey, most likely; it wasn’t my fault it kept falling on everything, I had nothing to do with it.

Scott stayed where he was, which made me feel like Oscar to his Felix. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” he said with a touch of nervousness. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but here goes.”

He took a deep breath. I cradled my coffee cup, bemused but intrigued. I had never seen him betray the slightest tremor of uncertainty; whatever news he had to impart was of secondary interest to me.

“Matt and I have been talking about moving in together for a couple of months now,” he said. “We’ve been looking for the right place and it just sort of fell into our laps. It’s available on July first, which means that I’d be moving out in a couple of weeks. But I’ve found you a replacement roommate. His name is Andy, and he’s a very good old friend of mine.”

“Andy,” I said noncommittally. “Well, actually, I’m probably moving out in a month or two as well.”

“Where to?” he asked with a startled flicker of disbelief.

“Los Angeles,” I said.

“Los Angeles,” he repeated with undisguised awe.

“That’s right. So Andy will have the whole place to himself.”

“Wow,” he said a little enviously. “Well, I hope you’re really happy out there.” He hesitated. “Is Juanita going with you?”

I looked deeply into my pet’s beady little eyes for a moment. “You can have her,” I said then, divining and granting her fondest wish. “Consider her my parting gift to you and Matt. A housewarming present.”

“We can have Juanita?” he echoed.

“Yes,” I said briskly. “You can take her now. We’ve said our goodbyes.”

“Come on, chickie-chick,” said Scott, extending a finger. She hopped right onto it and gazed up at him.

“Ciao,” I said in a Eurotrash variant of my homo voice as Scott and Juanita went together to the living room to celebrate with their new roomie.

Oh, God, everyone in L.A. was going to be a Scott clone. With dread I envisioned myself squinting in the sun in an outdoor café beneath smog-bleached palm trees, staring glumly at a plate of vegan sushi and a glass of mineral water with a paper-thin crescent of lemon stuck among the ice cubes. I could already deeply relate to the predicament of that lemon.

That evening I found myself sweating in Max’s old tuxedo next to my sister at the top of the gangway of a rusted-out boat called the
Skillet
. In its former life as an aid-giving ship, the
Skillet
had sunk to the bottom of the ocean; years later, it had been dragged to the surface, permanently docked next to a pier in Chelsea, and pressed into service as a floating pleasure palace. The sun shone through a shifting mass of clouds. Amanda looked as beautiful as any bride who’d ever tied the knot: Her hair was pinned on top of her head with a wreath of dried roses; a few stray ringlets fell around her face. She wore a form-fitting cream-colored satin dress and her new gold fairy slippers.

The Radish Night accordion player hit the first notes of the wedding march.

Amanda and I looked at each other. Her eyes glittered with tiny shards of sunlight reflected off the river. I was swamped by a knee-buckling pang of love for her.

“It’s show time,” I said. My throat was tight.

She gave a small, delicate sniff, as if to brace herself, then wordlessly put her hand into the crook of my arm. I walked her down the gangway, onto the pier and down the flower-strewn aisle between rows of folding chairs, past a hundred or so of her and Liam’s families, friends, former lovers, bartenders, and bandmates, all of whom stood up at once as soon as the music started and turned to watch our slow and stately procession toward and through them. I heard many gasps of “She’s beautiful” and saw tearily smiling faces. We made our way to the makeshift altar, where my sister’s bloodshot lug of an intended stood waiting for her in a white
tuxedo, so clean-shaven his cheeks looked scalded. He looked completely freaked out, which I took to be a clear sign that this wedding was not just a cynical joke for him. Feckin bristled alongside him, restive and disreputable in a moth-eaten tuxedo as ill-fitting as my own, with a cherry-red bow tie and cummerbund. Gina, the bass-playing Jezebel of a maid of honor, wore a bloodred strapless ball gown that clashed with Feckin’s accessories.

As I handed Amanda over to Liam, I looked him right in the eye, as a warning, then stepped back to stand next to my mother. Amanda turned her pale, somber face to Liam’s as the music ended. When my mother gave my arm a little squeeze, I realized that something was supposed to happen now, and that something was me.

I cleared my throat and fumbled in my pocket, then plunged headlong into the first line of the Yeats poem before I’d even located the piece of paper I’d copied it onto.

I knew the thing by heart but had decided not to recite it from memory, because then I’d have nothing to hide behind. I was only one third of the way through, and already I knew I’d chosen completely wrong, that I was attempting to foist my own notion of what should be read at a wedding upon my sister, whose face I was unable to see because I was looking only at the paper.

I wanted to do justice to the immortal words of the national bard of this small contingent of jet-lagged Irish people, but in spite of this wish, my
voice had established itself in a singsong that proved to be devastatingly difficult to escape. I plunged on, rounding the track toward the finish line.

After I said the last line, I folded the paper, shoved it into my pants pocket, plucked my handkerchief from my coat pocket, and mopped my brow, feeling overheated and abashed. Only then did I meet Amanda’s eyes, and only then did I see that her face was streaked with dusky tears. Even I had heard of waterproof mascara; why hadn’t she thought to lay in a supply before her wedding? I was blindsided by another wave of love for her.

A buxom Irishwoman, Liam’s cousin or aunt, strummed the strings of a guitar, then began to warble a minor-key ballad narrating every hitch and snafu of the doomed love affair between a farm boy and an ordinary brunette from County Cork. After a couple of verses I caught the eye of my sister Lola, who sat in the front row next to Fletcher Barkin, her big-headed, strapping Australian husband. She and I quirked our lips at each other. This was the first time in fifteen years I’d exchanged such a look with her; I’d forgotten her wry squint, the twitch of her nose that said she felt just the way I did, and that she and I had once shared this half-amused sense of the strangeness of things. Just as quickly, we both looked away, as if we were amoebas sliding our pseudopodia toward each other, then retracting them the instant the membranes touched, as if the whole point of the contact had been to establish our mutual separateness.