Jeremy Thrane (42 page)

“He looks like he went down with the boat and came back up with it,” I said.

Henry laughed.

“I liked your performance just now,” I added somewhat shyly.

“Thanks, but I’m not really a guitar player, I was faking it as a favor to your sister. And I liked the poem you read during the ceremony. Who wrote it?”

I paused. I found him even more appealing close up than onstage. “Yeats,” I said curtly. “I wasn’t sure it was appropriate, but it’s an old favorite of mine.”

“It was entirely appropriate,” he said. He fiddled with a control knob. “Anyway, so I’m not a guitarist. My actual instrument is a thing I designed and built that some people think sounds like a cross between a cello and a cat in heat. I think it’s really beautiful although that’s not a popular opinion. Laura says I should be arrested for playing it.”

“The accordion player,” I said.

“Right.”

“She’s your girlfriend?”

“My roommate.” He hesitated, as if he were considering his next words carefully. “I don’t exactly do, you know, the girlfriend thing. You don’t either, I take it.”

At this, I felt woolly-tongued and light-headed. “No,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said.

We didn’t look at each other. Our shoulders were almost touching. The wet, smeared banks of New Jersey glowed at us through the windshield.

“What kind of music do you play on that thing?” I asked him.

“It’s improvised,” he said. “I make it up as I go.”

“I know what improvised means,” I said. “I know this sounds backward and conservative, but how can you control what you do without being able to revise and polish it later?”

“I try to revise as I go, in the moment,” he said. “The process is not all that different from making more quote-unquote conventional kinds of art. You look for the surprising but inevitable in the chaotic and arbitrary. You try not to be self-indulgent or obvious, but to take risks and challenge yourself.”

“That sounds sort of pat to me,” I said, disappointed. “Are you sure you’re not pretentious and full of it?”

“No,” he said thoughtfully.

“Oh my God,” I said as another thought struck me. “Don’t tell me you play free jazz.”

“Why?” he asked curiously. “You don’t like free jazz?”

“It never goes anywhere,” I said. “It’s an excuse for people who can’t play their instruments to pretend they’re virtuosos and noodle around. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes; you can’t say it sucks, because there’s no objective criterion whatsoever.”

Henry laughed. “How much free jazz have you heard?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “But still.”

“Well,” he said. “As it happens, I’m playing with a few other people tomorrow night. If you agree to come and listen with an open mind, I’ll put you on the list.”

“Okay,” I said. I paused. “Do you actually make a living doing that?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “I make a living as a plumber.”

“The most lucrative job in the universe.”

“It pays the bills,” he said easily, “and I hate it with a passion. What do you do?”

“I’m not quite sure,” I said. “I spent ten years writing a novel no editor will have anything to do with.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s no good.”

“I doubt that,” he said promptly.

“The weird thing is, I spent a week writing an idiotic screenplay that’s being made into a movie, and now I might move to L.A. to work for a production company. I never had any intention of doing that.”

He leaned his elbow against the dashboard and rested his head on his hand. “Then why are you moving to Los Angeles?”

“I’m giving up my idealistic true love,” I said dramatically, aware that he might not have the slightest idea what I was talking about, “to marry the scheming slut.”

When Henry laughed, the scent of his breath came to me on the gusts of mirth from his lungs. It smelled so healthy and clean a flash fire shot through my groin.

“There’s a poem by Wallace Stevens,” I said, “called ‘Farewell to Florida.’ It’s one of the saddest and most purely beautiful poems I’ve ever read. It’s narrated by a man on a boat heading north through a wintry
sea, leaving a woman behind in Key West, her ‘South of pine and coral and coraline sea’: a defunct love, a hated place, or so the poem says, but every line ends on a heartbroken sob.”

“Recite some,” said Henry.

My mind went completely blank all of a sudden. “ ‘The moon is at the mast-head and the past is dead,’ ” I said. “ ‘Her mind will never speak to me again, I am free.’ Then later on: ‘… she will not follow in any word/Or look, nor ever again in thought, except/That I loved her once … Farewell. Go on, high ship.’ ” I paused, suddenly embarrassed, but his intent, penetrating expression didn’t waver, which gave me courage to continue. “ ‘The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam,’ ” I went on. “ ‘To be free again, to return to the violent mind … carry me, misty deck, carry me to the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.’ ”

He gave me a searching look. “What does this have to do with your move to Los Angeles?”

I looked away from him, at my hands, the rain on the windshield. “New York is the violent mind,” I said. “And L.A. is ‘vivid blooms curled over the shadowless hut’ and ‘trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.’ It’s a tropical hell. And freeways … I don’t have a driver’s license, Henry. I have to get one. And I have to write screenplays.”

“The darkness is your real life, you know,” said Henry as if he were cautioning me. “You won’t escape that by going somewhere else.”

“I’m not escaping,” I said. “I’m joining the fray. I’m jumping into the pool. It’ll be all right. I’ll be fine.”

I felt him watching my profile for a moment but couldn’t turn my head to meet his eyes.

“You’re not moving to Los Angeles,” he said.

His voice was so near to my ear it resonated in my chest cavity. Why was he standing so close to me, speaking right in my ear, questioning my decisions and assumptions? Who did he think he was? Why didn’t he go back to the party? I sensed, without quite knowing how to explain it to myself in words, a stubborn, stalwart quality in this Henry Tolliver, a hunkering-down kind of attention I was profoundly unused to having trained on myself, and which disconcerted me. Although I didn’t mind it, exactly.

I looked at him. He didn’t look away. Our gaze continued until it got a little uncomfortable for me, so I slid my eyes to the ship’s wheel. I felt a sudden itch to twirl it and pretend the ship was heading out to open sea, anything to ease up on the unexpected intensity of his focus. I felt like telling him to lighten the hell up and stop taking me so seriously.

“How do you know?” I asked childishly.

Henry splayed his hands flat on the surface of the control panel. They were square, strong-fingered, sturdy. I felt a swooping sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“I just know,” he said.

“But you just met me.”

“No,” he said with a sort of laugh. “You just met me.”

I sighed deeply, not out of unhappiness, but in order to punctuate this conversation with something other than words, which I had temporarily run out of.

Well past midnight, when I got home from the wedding party, I cleaned my room. Although Scott and Matt were sleeping and presumably wouldn’t want to be awakened by my bustling and clattering around, I collected, rinsed, and stacked in the dishwasher all the dirty plates, cups, glasses, and silverware that had accrued in my room, then ran the dishwasher twice, with extra soap, to get the dried crud off everything. When I’d set the first cycle going, I changed my sheets, swept and mopped my floor, dusted every surface including the windowsills and moldings, then sponged them with a detergent and a rag, and washed the inside panes of both my windows.

During the dishwasher’s second cycle, I folded all my clothes, put all my dirty laundry in the hamper I usually ignored, organized my books into tidy rows, and threw away all papers, envelopes, old Kleenex, and the detritus from my desk. When all was clean and quiet, I stood for a while in the middle of my room and surveyed my new landscape. I could see my reflection in the windows. Then, soberly and carefully, as if I were the kind of person who always did so, I washed my face and brushed and flossed my teeth. In clean boxer shorts and T-shirt, I went to bed and slept deeply in my clean sheets, dreaming the easy, untroubled dreams of the just and righteous, until just before my alarm went off the next morning.

As I drank my coffee in my newly bare, tidy room, I discovered that my mind felt unusually alert and orderly, my emotions clear, my body at ease. Why had I chosen to live in squalor all these years, purposefully surrounded myself with decay, disorder, mess, and the unbeautiful leavings of my daily life? All I could figure out by way of explanation was
my psyche seemed to have undergone, in Star Trek parlance, a phase variance, and now for some reason I felt like living in a clean room instead. It didn’t seem like an enormous thing on the surface, but internally I was acutely aware of a parallel and seemingly contradictory shift, a loosening of the chest, a removal of certain stringent internal dicta whose weight I wasn’t aware of until they were lifted and I experienced their sudden negative absence. For some reason I was free of them now. I could remember other times like this one; they reminded me of knotholes in trees, spots of unusual density and concentration around which the rest of time and space flowed normally. What caused them I couldn’t say; I simply assumed I’d undergo future ones, periodically, until I died.

“The term ‘a sea change,’ ” Frederick told me through the partition later that morning, apropos of something else entirely, as we ate our deli-delivered breakfasts at our desks, “comes from Ariel’s song in
The Tempest
. A dead body is subjected to immersion underwater for so long, its essential nature changes, gradually washes away, erodes, and is transformed. Bones become coral, eyes become pearls. It’s ‘a sea-change into something rich and strange.’ Formerly hyphenated, now two discrete words. You tell Bianca Mantooth that next time she comes around to harangue you.”

“I don’t think she would care,” I said to the partition wall through a mouthful of greasy home fries doused in ketchup, salt, and pepper. “She would just argue that the meaning itself has undergone a sea change. And she’d be right in both sense and usage.”

“What she really means to say here,” said Frederick, ignoring me entirely, “is that her wardrobe has ‘done a one-eighty’ since she got her Jack Russell terrier.”

“No,” I said, ripping open another little packet of ketchup, wondering half-consciously why they didn’t make them bigger, or easier to open. “ ‘Doing a one-eighty’ implies a turnaround, as in: ‘Ever since she went on Prozac, her whole personality has done a one-eighty.’ It doesn’t apply to a wardrobe, I don’t think.”

Although I was managing in the course of this conversation to put away my breakfast both quickly and handily, I had heard very few eating noises coming from Frederick’s cubicle so far.

“ ‘Do a one-eighty,’ ” he said with derision. “What an idiotic
expression. It sounds like ‘pop a wheelie.’ Of course, ‘do a three-sixty’ is much worse. ‘Volte face’ is much better, but no one uses it any more.”

I squirted the contents of one ketchup packet onto my Western omelet sandwich. It was roughly the same amount as one payload of semen; was this coincidental? Yes, and also sort of disgusting. Why did such thoughts occur to me while I was eating?

“I don’t know,” I said offhandedly. “If I left it in, I bet no one but us would ever care or notice.”

“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,’ ” Frederick replied in a hollow singsong. There was a slight burr in his throat that may have been caused by strong emotion, but could also have been a crumb of toast. “Correct usage is as essential to health as nutrition or honesty or moral courage or loving your neighbor.” He paused, but I heard no eating noises. “Or loving anyone, for that matter, no matter how far-fetched.”

I realized then that Frederick had a bit of a crush on Bianca, which was painfully intensified by his disapproval of everything she was and did; this sub-Socratic dialogue was probably his attempt simultaneously to vanquish his unwanted desire by exposing the unforgivable silliness of its object and to bolster his chances by proving his superiority to her. I also suspected that I was being used as a stand-in for the fair lady herself, and that he was secretly hoping I’d write everything he was saying on her article, attributing these insights to him, thus somehow causing her to fall in love with him, or at least consent to have dinner with him.

“Bianca is beautiful,” I pointed out innocently.

“Not so beautiful as all that,” he muttered. “A trifle calculated for my tastes.”

I stretched my legs out with leisurely pleasure on the low-pile mouse-colored carpet and waggled my toes in their clean socks. There was a bit of something on my chin; I licked it off. Grease, it turned out, with a deliciously salty, potato-y flavor. I licked again, in case I’d missed a molecule.

“In his short story ‘Winner Take Nothing,’ ” Frederick was saying, “Hemingway uses the term ‘sea change’ as a lamentable metaphor for the transformation of the ugliness of homosexual love into the beauty of a literary work.”

“He was such a he-man,” I said. “Do you have any extra ketchup packets over there?”

“More brilliantly by far,” Frederick said as three packets came sailing over the partition and landed on my desk, “
The Tempest
is also about the transformative power of love, maybe even the kind of love Bianca Mantooth feels for the small designer animal she calls BooBoo. So by that token, she—”

My telephone rang. I hated to be interrupted when I was eating breakfast. I would have let it roll over to voice mail, but I’d had enough of Frederick’s lovesick tirade.

“
Downtown
copy,” I barked into the receiver.

“Jeremy,” came the voice of Howard Fine, my literary agent. “Is that you?”

“Hi, Howard,” I said, my appetite suddenly gone. “What fresh hell do you have for me today?”