Jeremy Thrane (4 page)

Just after Lola was born in 1970, our mother finally left Angus with all three of us kids in tow. He turned his ramshackle Victorian house into a commune for fellow activists and politicos who reeked of BO and patchouli. Except for the occasional uncomfortable weekend (when our father called, always at the last minute, to insist that we visit him for a couple of days, not because he wanted us around, I later understood, but to irritate his ex-wife, who’d had the temerity to leave him), we didn’t
see much of him during those years. According to friends of both my parents, he’d had some kind of crisis or breakdown in 1974, left the Berkeley house to his comrades and chucked his San Francisco law practice. He then, according to legend, ran off to Turkey as crew on a freighter and disappeared into clouds of brazier smoke and dust. We didn’t know why he’d vanished or how he’d managed to live, since he’d never had any money and it was unlikely he would have tried to start a law practice in Istanbul. I had long ago accepted that he was most likely dead, and whatever story he’d lived since his disappearance had died with him.
Angus in Efes
was my effort to imagine for myself what had happened, a way of laying him to rest.

In the rear of my apartment was a small but luxurious bathroom with a skylight and a huge claw-footed tub, thick towels, and a cupboard filled with bath salts and oils. The one cleaning task I performed faithfully was scrubbing the bathtub weekly with cleanser and clearing the drain of hair balls and gook. I routinely took epic baths, sometimes spending four hours in there at a stretch, working my way through most of a bottle of wine, listening to a flotilla of CDs, well-worn stack of boysie mags at hand (among them, now that I thought about it, a couple of moldy and bespattered issues of
Boytoy
) and a book or two. I’d dropped
Middlemarch
into the water at least three times already, having felt the immediate necessity of an osmotic soaking-in of Eliot’s wizardry. To me the most palpable evidence of her mind-boggling genius lay in her character Rosamond, who was blond and gorgeous, while Eliot herself, not even her most devoted fans could deny, had been butt ugly. She must have resented her own creation and wished her ill, on some subterranean level anyway, but instead of making Rosamond a twittering caricature on whom to wreak all her ugly-girl revenge fantasies, Eliot had allowed her the dignity of an independent soul, making her accountable for her own choices and actions, however reprehensible they may have been. How had she created that living, rosy, awful girl out of words? I felt my own imagination on its knees before a mind as vast and inscrutable as the Sphinx. It gave me an excruciating pleasure I sought whenever I could bear it.

I filled the tub with hot water, took off my clothes, plunged in, scrubbed myself fast, and got out. I was tempted to lie there all day, staring
up through the skylight at the shifting clouds and listening to the steady drip, drip from the faucet to the surface of the water, but I had work to do.

Next to the bathroom was the ship’s-galley-sized kitchenette, which I’d had installed to allow me a third culinary option besides choking down Basia’s food or eating in restaurants. This shipshape mini-kitchen was conducive to the kind of diet Amanda, Lola, and I had eaten as kids, sleeping three to a pup tent in southwestern campgrounds and on beaches in Baja California while our mother ran through much of her trust fund living the footloose life of the post-adolescent sixties flower child. We’d lived on peanut butter sandwiches, canned peas, granola bars, Life cereal out of the box, Fig Newtons, and Tang. Later on, during our commune period, our mother and the other grown-ups were all too busy “finding themselves” and “communing with nature” (in other words, dropping acid and lying around naked) to force us kids to eat their soybean stew and tofu-prune casserole, so we kids came and went all day, pillaging the larder as we ran through. These had been strange, lonely, formless, anxious years, but they hadn’t been all bad by any means. Our mother had seemed to flourish under the dictates of free love as she’d never done in her fraught, violent marriage. We’d never seen her happy and youthful before, and since we looked to her for clues about how to feel about everything, some of her relief and pleasure was refracted onto us the way sunlight on a wall diffuses the gloom of an adjacent shaded alleyway.

I heated a can of chicken noodle soup while I slapped together a baloney sandwich with lots of mayo on honey-wheatberry bread. As I ate my second breakfast, sitting on the window seat tucked under an eave in my study, I spied on my neighbor, Dina Sandusky, in hers; my window looked directly down into her skylight, under which she sat at her desk, oblivious to me. She was playing solitaire. I watched her turn over a card, put it back, and turn over a different one. Then she changed her mind and went back to the first one. Dina was a freelance journalist who specialized in stories about rape victims, abortion rights, and similar “serious” topics for women’s magazines. I also knew the following about her from living next door to her for four years: She donated regularly to Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace,
washed her dishes and hair in biodegradable gook, and took her own shopping bag to neighborhood mom’n’pops and local farmers’ markets instead of cheaper, better-stocked, more conveniently located chain stores. This integrity extended to her research and interviewing tactics as well but not, apparently, to certain other activities, among them playing solitaire.

She was pretty in an interesting, bookish way; her chestnut-brown hair was cut in a semi-chic bob, she had a heart-shaped, asymmetrical face with strong, almost masculine features. She had a tense, quivering, greyhound-like quality, quite possibly because she was tormented by all the obsessive moral imperatives she was occasionally tempted to betray, but only in ways she hoped wouldn’t count.

A few days before, I’d run into her on the street. When I saw the copy of
Middlemarch
she carried, I blurted out, “Oh, that’s my favorite novel of all time.”

“Mine too,” she said.

“I love Rosamond.”

“Do you?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Why? She’s so selfish and awful.”

“She is selfish and awful, but that’s the point. The book comes to life whenever she’s around. Dorothea is such a sanctimonious prude. And that disgusting old man she marries—”

“Mr. Casaubon,” she said immediately. “I agree, he’s so awful. I think Dorothea is meant to represent—”

“See,” I said, “that’s the trouble, she represents something, she’s some kind of paragon. She’s the only character who reveals Eliot’s didactic upbringing. No thank you.”

Her eyes widened. “But to me she seems totally believable. She gives herself over to what she believes is the right thing. She marries Casaubon, and she’s happy with him, he gives her the sense of being needed, at least at first. But when erotic love comes to her, she can’t resist it. Erotic love is stronger than altruism or duty, Eliot knew that.”

Then she looked at me with shining eyes, as if she were drinking me in, even though she had her own husband, Cory, a perfectly nice but stultifyingly boring senior vice president sort of fellow about twelve years
her senior. She was literary, a daydreamer; I suspected that I reminded her of a dashing character out of a nineteenth-century novel. I could feel my wild, free-form hair lying romantically against the back collar of my black coat, my pale skin faintly flushed from the brisk walk I’d just had around town, checking out the Chelsea boys in their new fall outfits. “That’s interesting,” I said, making my voice go all rumbly; I felt a sudden powerful, uncharacteristically altruistic urge to confirm her fantasy of me. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

She gazed at me; I gazed back. I sensed that this moment was electric for her. I tried to sustain my end of it, but my eyes flickered sheepishly away from hers. We said good-bye and disappeared into our side-by-side houses.

Now I watched her wolf down half a bag of nonpareils, cramming them into her mouth. After this debauch, she stared into space with her hands hovering above her keyboard, her features distorted with wretchedness. I sat not twenty feet away from her, looking straight down at her through two windows and a well of air while she cried. “Poor Dina,” I said, although of course she couldn’t hear me. After a while she blew her nose and swept the cards to the side of her desk. A moment later she was typing away.

My phone rang as I was brushing the crumbs from my lap to join the other crumbs down there on the floor. I went into my bedroom, flopped down on my bed, and picked it up. “Hello?”

“So he didn’t eat you alive,” said Max with a chuckle I didn’t much care for.

“Other way around, if anything.”

“Did you have fun?”

I ignored this question. He would have to beg if he wanted sordid details. “He lives on Staten Island.”

“Really,” he said in a hushed voice, as if Frankie had taken me to a village up the Amazon. “What’s it like there?”

“Primitive and mysterious,” I said. “I just got home a little while ago, actually.”

Max had insisted after we’d ordered our food that Frankie was definitely hitting on me, and when I went to the bathroom, he’d told
Frankie that I couldn’t keep my eyes off his butt. Although Frankie and I hadn’t initially noticed each other, Max’s remarks had made us suddenly mutually irresistible. Max paid the check, leaving a huge tip, and then we went around the corner to a bar. When he was finished with his shift, Frankie showed up; Max had told him I’d be waiting for him. After a minimum of chitchat, Max said good night and got into a cab, leaving Frankie and me to share a nightcap and get to know each other a little. Frankie told me that he worked in his uncle’s restaurant and lived in the basement of his parents’ house on Staten Island, where he’d grown up. He was tired of sneaking around like a teenager: He was twenty-five years old, and he wanted to live his own life, and to hell with his parents. I put on my jacket and said, “Let’s go,” and off we went to Staten Island, where I’d done my best to fulfill his need for rebellion.

“I love to see young people pairing off together,” said Max happily. “It warms my heart.”

“You gave him to me only because you didn’t want him,” I said. “You know what I liked about him?”

“Let me guess.”

“He’s trying to get up the nerve to come out to his parents.”

“And for what? So they can imagine him doing upsetting things they don’t understand? Come on, don’t start this whole thing up again.”

“I’m only making a comment about Frankie,” I said mildly.

“So,” he said in the concerned voice he used to turn the tables on me whenever I tried to confront him about anything. “You ready for the homecoming tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt I’ll see much of Ted this weekend. Giselle’s coming too, you know. And their kid.”

“No wonder you liked Frankie,” he said with a laugh. “Listen, I have a client coming in ten minutes and I haven’t looked over his file yet. Good luck tonight, sweetie. Call if you need me tomorrow, I’ll be around all day.”

We hung up, I to turn on my computer, Max to counsel his nine o’clock client. I had never been in therapy, but I gathered that a therapist was, at least initially, a blank screen onto which his patient projected omniscience, wisdom, maturity, and stability. Max specialized in counseling recently out-of-the-closet gays and their families, which meant
that homosexuals of all ages, along with their parents, children, spouses, or even the occasional sibling, trooped into Dr. Goldenberg’s office, sat on couches and chairs, and talked or didn’t talk for forty-five minutes, then emerged again and dispersed into the city for another week. During Max’s off hours, he was an avid clubgoer, and at thirty-nine still a frequent user of poppers, X, coke, K, and even the occasional snort of heroin. He insisted that this steady nighttime debauchery didn’t affect his ability to be an effective therapist, but I didn’t buy it. It seemed to me to be a clear-cut case of “Shrink, heal thyself,” or, rather, a continuation of unexamined adolescent acting-out, which in my opinion Max would have done well to face up to and resolve, for his health if nothing else. He was the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He’d been expected to become a businessman like his father and to marry a nice Jewish girl like his mother, and to provide little Rachels and Jacobs for his parents to shower with kisses and pinches on the cheek at Pesach and Yom Kippur.

Max and I had been friends for fourteen years, and during all this time I’d never met his parents, Fischl and Rivka Goldenberg, who called Max at least once a week, both of them together on separate extensions, to exhort him to come home soon for Shabbat dinner with Naomi Silverberg or Sarah Stein or Beth Berkowitz. For reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, off he’d go once a month or so like a good little boy to Great Neck. He’d return well after dark on Saturday night, raring to go out and stay out until dawn. I didn’t care much for clubs or drugs, but I went along to keep him company and make sure he didn’t get lost, hold his head while he barfed into gutters or toilets; the next day I often brought him porn videos and chicken soup when he was too hung over to get out of bed. Since three years before, when Max had discovered his HIV-positive status, I’d known that my role of his nursemaid wasn’t over by a long shot, depending on how long his regimen of pills kept symptoms at bay. I also knew that I’d be around when he needed me, because my own HIV status was negative, by some minor miracle, and I intended to keep it that way.

I’d also, as it happened, never spoken to or met Ted’s parents, Chet and Betsy Masterson. Photographs of them showed a look-alike pair of tall, craggy-faced, well-groomed, fiercely smiling Connecticut Yankees,
sheltered, correct, and set in their ways. Ted called them Martyr and Farter behind their backs, but to their faces he was a model son, courteous and solicitous to a degree that nonplused me, when I happened to overhear his side of their telephone conversations, as much as Max’s hangdog filial obedience did.

I seemed to be slated to spend my life with closeted men—I, who’d announced that I was a homosexual one night at the dinner table at the age of twelve. At that time, we lived in a normal suburban house like a normal family for the first time ever, because my mother had finally burned out on her Bobby McGee vagabondage and utopian bliss. She’d married an architect and installed her brood in his split-level Phoenix ranch-style cinderblock house, complete with yard, dog, and TV set, our first.