Jeremy Thrane (6 page)

“Hello!” I called. “Phil, how are you? Oh, hi, Gary.”

The lugubrious mask of a sad clown appeared in profile just above the pointy hump of Phil’s back. Gary’s glance was like the flick of a scorpion’s tail. I gave a brief, hearty wave and looked up at the hovering waiter, my heart trying to rise through my esophagus to flee my body.

“I could use another one of these,” said Felicia, tipping her near-empty martini glass into the ashtray. Two oily-wet olives rolled into the ashes and came to rest against a squashed butt. The waiter picked up the ashtray and replaced it with a clean one from his apron pocket. After he’d disappeared, I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned, “Aaaagh.”

“I’m thinking of a number between eight and twenty-nine,” said Felicia briskly.

I opened my eyes, narrowed my focus, and occluded my peripheral vision so that I could see only Felicia. We stared into each other’s eyes.

“Between eight and twenty-nine,” I repeated.

This was a trick we’d developed at parties, to look as though we were engaged in an intimate, emotional conversation whenever there was someone in the vicinity who needed to be prevented from approaching and causing either of us boredom or injury. It also worked as a distraction when one of us was upset about something. I could no longer see Phil or Gary; I was shielded by our taut, exclusive gaze. “Twenty-seven,” I said fiercely.

“No,” she said, but not without sympathy. “Let me narrow it down for you a little: It’s an odd number, it’s a prime number, and it’s the age I was when Ted and I drove to New Orleans for spring break and stayed at that hotel on Prytania Street with that witchy proprietress who spooked us so much we had to leave.”

“Nineteen,” I said.

“That is it exactly,” she said. “Do you feel better now? They didn’t hear you.”

“You mean us,” I said. “You’ve got a big mouth too, you know, it wasn’t just me.” I took one of her cigarettes from her mint-green pack and lit it with a rasp of her thin gold lighter. The mentholated smoke numbed my lungs as if it were ice cold, and the head rush made me want to lie down. I took a second, deeper drag and stubbed it out in the fresh ashtray. My plate of spaghetti arrived, looking as obscenely horrific as the
worms-and-clotted-blood jokes of my childhood. On the table in front of Felicia, oily brown liquid roiled in a vast white plate, the soup du jour. She was looking past it, at the table where Gary and Phil were sitting.

“Report,” I muttered. “What are they doing?”

“They’re paying,” she said out of the side of her mouth. She appeared to be enjoying this. “The older guy is heading for the men’s room. That other guy is picking up the tab. He’s at the cash register now. Who is he?”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I said.

“He looks so familiar,” she said. “It’s because he has a sadass. All the boys down south have ’em. Big baggy old rear ends. Comes from sitting around bossing the darkies all day.”

“Darkies,” I repeated in disbelief.

“Oh, yes, Jeremy. My grandmother once told my father when he was a little boy, ‘We don’t say “niggers,” darling, we say “darkies.” ’ ”

I stared at her.

“And you wonder why I left?” she added, shaking her head.

“No,” I said, but I didn’t say anything more. I’d always taken Felicia’s references to her childhood in the Deep South with a big grain of salt, because I’d noticed that she and I had a peculiar effect on each other, something that happened all too often in these gay-man-straight-single-woman alliances, as if the ghost of Tennessee Williams hung over our conversations: I found myself playing up my homosexual mannerisms around her, just as I had the feeling I provoked her into acting more affectedly southern than she normally would have. “Okay, I’m going in. Watch my back.”

“You’re covered,” she said in a cloak-and-dagger undertone.

I entered the men’s room with a bright smile. “How are you, Phil,” I said, trying to sound jovial. I assumed the stance right next to him at the bank of urinals. I hoped I’d be able to pee under these circumstances.

“How’s everything, Jeremy,” said Phil in a blandly friendly tone that left me just as uncertain as I’d been a minute ago.

“Okay.” My gaze flicked uncontrollably over to Phil’s penis, which turned out to be as thick, yellowish, and unprepossessing as the rest of him. If Phil was aware that I’d peeked, he didn’t show it. I’d run into Phil for years at various parties and bars; we had several friends in common,
but I knew next to nothing about him. He was a master of the smoke screen, betraying evidence of neither a personal life nor emotions. This colossally impenetrable sangfroid was one reason why people rarely noticed him until his flashbulb had gone off in their faces.

“The food wasn’t too great today,” I was saying now. “Felicia barely touched her soup.”

Phil said without affect, “She’s such a beautiful girl.”

Then I heard myself saying something that made my ears blanch, something that went against everything I professed to believe. “She’s Ted’s ex-girlfriend,” I said in a voice so palpably flat, the words didn’t even bounce off the tiles, they fell to the bottom of the urinal and stayed there. “They dated for a while at Yale.”

Phil gave his turnip-colored stub a waggle and put it away. “Well, maybe they’ll get a new cook,” he said as he scrubbed his hands at the sink.

“Let’s hope so,” I said as he headed for the door. I ran scalding water over my hands until I was certain that Phil and Gary were now standing the requisite two feet apart in the elevator on their way back up to
Downtown
’s offices. Then I walked briskly back to the table, where Felicia sat tapping a cigarette against the tabletop, looking at her watch.

“What happened to you?” she asked unhappily; I knew this mood all too well and was used to treating her like a soap bubble when it came over her. “I was afraid you’d hanged yourself with your belt from the light fixture.”

“Why would I hang myself?” I asked as I handed the waiter the platinum Amex Ted had given me. “I never wear a belt.”

She rolled the cigarette against her bottom lip, looking sideways.

“What happened?” I said, my gorge rising.

She sighed, then leaned her head back and gently dandled the spoon in her soup, which no one had bothered to remove yet.

“Tell me,” I snapped.

She looked at me then. In her eyes was the infinite, fathomless sorrow of old idle hand-me-down money weary with the strain of reacclimatizing to each successive generation of antebellum decline. “Phil’s friend came up to me and asked was I from South Carolina and I said yes, I am. He changed his name, that’s how come I never realized who he was.
He used to be
Carstairs
O’Nan until his old granddad Carstairs the First cut him out of his will. I’m so sorry, I couldn’t help it, his granddaddy and mine are actually old—”

“All right,” I said witheringly. “What did he say?”

“He said he was looking forward to the premiere,” she said. “And then he asked if you were talking about Ted just now, and I said no, of course not.” Cradled in the hollow of her neck was an emerald on a short gold chain, a louche, cold, deadly green stone that jumped slightly with each beat of her pulse.

“Fuck,” I spat at her. The armpits of my shirt were drenched.

Felicia slid into the booth next to me and put a fluttery hand on my arm. “I don’t feel well at all,” she said. She looked ghastly. Her black eye makeup was smearing into the tiny creases around her eyes, and she had a fleck of lipstick on her front tooth. Her knot of hair had slipped to one side of her head; the chopsticks looked silly and untethered. It was amazing how she could disintegrate in a moment like this.

“You’re such a drama queen,” I said as I took the pen the waiter handed me and made a squiggle on the signature line of the credit card slip.

“The tip,” she reminded me, her head almost on my shoulder. Her breath smelled like sour milk heavily underlain with rubbing alcohol. “It’s not enough. Two more is twenty percent.”

“But the service sucked.”

“We come here all the time. You want it to get worse?”

I added two dollars.

“I’m never too ill to remember the little people,” she murmured, for an instant almost herself again. Then her face crumpled into a monkey vizard of agony.

I led her out onto the street and tucked her into a taxi. I was about to shut the door when her arm snaked out and twined around me. I tumbled in beside her, and the cab nosed itself into the traffic and set off downtown while Felicia sniffled and wiped her nose repeatedly on the back of her hand. A constant high keening noise came from way back in her throat. I handed her my handkerchief, then looked out the window and considered what had just happened.

“It’s all your fault,” Felicia said into my shoulder. “If you hadn’t kept
me waiting for so long—” I put my arm around her and she put her head down on my forearm.

“You pull out all the stops, don’t you,” I said.

“You’re so mean,” she murmured with a sickly smile. The cab stopped at a red light. Felicia sat up, dragged her knees up to her chest, and clasped her arms around them.

“We’re crossing Canal. Almost there.” I looked at my watch: just after three. “Turn left here,” I said, and eased my wallet out of my back pocket. In the elevator of Felicia’s building, I wedged my hands under her arms. Her skin was clammy and had turned gray. Her eyes were glassy and inward. I half carried, half dragged her across the blond-wood expanse of her loft to the bedroom, where I slung her up onto the billowing feather-quilted bed. In the bathroom, I opened drawers and cabinets until I found her syringes and little Chinese porcelain box of glassine packets. I lit the jasmine-scented candle she kept by the side of the sink, shook a packet of powder into a spoon, added a thimbleful of water, cooked the stuff until it bubbled, then set a cotton ball into the spoon bowl and sucked it up into the syringe. I tapped out the air bubbles on the way back into the bedroom, where Felicia looked up at me with fluttering eyes from the bed and turned over. I took in with horror her Barbie-doll thighs, skinny flanks bruised greenish blue from the endless hypos, the eye-searing shock of her pantiless bush, white-blond and pornographically trimmed.

I gasped as if I’d just been stuck with a pin and averted my gaze. “I’m not going to do this for you, Felicia,” I said.

“Please,” she answered breathlessly.

“No,” I said, handing her the syringe. “I can’t even watch.”

I went out into the living room and sat on the couch for a while. I leaned against the deep leather cushions and looked out through the old factory window at the dense blue-white, boiling sky. All around me, facing me, were paintings of people arranged around restaurant tables or dance floors or bars. Their faces, lit by jukebox lights, votive candles, or matches held to cigarettes, were as sharply intelligent and unaccountably tragic as lemurs. They all looked deeply lonely, although they were in rooms filled with crowds and smoke and music; their expressions were a trompe-l’oeil blend of public arch amusement and inner clutching sadness.
The colors were drenched and bilious, the skin tones as flat as the walls. Felicia was a great painter, I’d always thought, but no gallery owner had ever shown the remotest interest in her slides.

Felicia came out of her bedroom a few minutes later and sat next to me. She had put on fresh makeup and redone her hair, and wore a red silk robe tied at the waist. She was beautiful again and back in business.

“Sorry about that,” she said breezily.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“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 loopily. “I don’t have to answer to anyone.”

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

“Oh, fiddle,” she said, and cupped my face in her hands, which were as cool as a nurse’s. “I want to be a drug-addicted neurotic semi-recluse. You want to be what you are; it’s the same thing, Jeremy.”

“What am I, Felicia?”

“You’re a slut,” she said, but this time it sounded like an insult.

“Okay,” I said, aware that I was about to say something I couldn’t retract, but I wanted to say it and I wanted her to hear it, because it would be like lancing a long-festering boil, “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 hadn’t known that I was this angry with her. The words themselves seemed to be drawing forth a poison from deep within me. “I’d never ask you to stick me in the ass with a syringe, for example.”

“You didn’t have to,” she said, yawning, unperturbed. I knew I ought to rush back uptown and say something to Gary to convince him he’d misunderstood everything, and my mother was giving a poetry reading later on today, which I’d promised her I’d attend, but it wasn’t easy to extricate myself from this couch. Felicia’s head had dropped slightly; her forehead rested just an inch above my shoulder. Her face had softened and her eyelids were partially closed. The leather cushions we sat on seemed to draw us down together into a squishy, decadent vortex. Nothing seemed to matter here at Felicia’s except staying here. I could see why she almost never went out.

“What kind of intervention was that, Jeremy?” she asked. “Was that the best you could do?” She laughed then, silently, but so hard she coughed, and I had to thump her on the back. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, gasping, “but that was the most pathetic little confrontation I ever heard.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up and went over to the door. I didn’t look back at her because I was sure she was lolling her head back against the couch cushions, still convulsed with silent laughter, and I had no interest in seeing her like that.

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

I opened the door.

“Don’t go,” she said, and this time there was a note of pleading in her voice. “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.”