Jeremy Thrane (9 page)

“They’re going to run more tests; we’re getting a second opinion.”

“Are we ready here?” said the waiter. Then he caught sight of my mother’s face, put both hands up briefly in apology, and withdrew. He had a lovely dimple in his cheek.

“Emma, this is so very, very shocking and painful,” Irene was saying. “I can’t imagine what it would be to lose Richard, little by little, his mind only. And Leonard has such an extraordinary brain … really one of the best I’ve ever encountered, so original and interesting—oh,” she said with a small cry of shared pain, “God, it’s just so sad, so infuriating, Alzheimer’s, so cruel and unfair.”

“Do you need me to come and stay with you guys for a while?” said Amanda, rubbing my mother’s hand.

“No,” said Emma. “Thank you. No, I just wanted to tell you all, just so you know. There’s really nothing anyone can do at this point.” Emma drew herself up, took her hands back, and dabbed at her eyes. She caught the waiter’s eye and nodded. He returned and we all ordered, and then
when he’d gone she said, “Oh, poor Leonard,” and burst once more into tears. Amanda and Irene immediately leapt into comforting action, Amanda patting her hand, Irene proffering a napkin and making concerned lowing noises. The air suddenly felt violet with estrogen, the small space of the booth crowded with soft, heaving breasts. I’d grown up with women, I was used to this sort of atmosphere, but it never failed to make me feel somewhat detached. I was suddenly extra aware of my cod all snug in its lair, my bifurcated testosterone-charged brain and flat, unencumbered chest, my bristly chin and cheeks.

Just then, my snails were set down before me, green and glistening in their hot dish, redolent, half repellent. I speared one with the tiny fork provided for this purpose and put it into my mouth. Its rubbery muscular texture was slightly nauseating in a way I liked a lot. As Irene watched me with a delicate sneer of revulsion she probably was not aware of, a three-piece jazz combo, stand-up bass, piano, and saxophone, finished setting up right near us and began to play “St. Louis Blues.” They always had good live music here; it made this place feel like a Parisian basement bistro. “I hate to see the evening sun go down,” my internal voice sang along with the melody. I wished I were in Paris with Ted right now in a place like this, that we were drinking a bottle of St. Émilion and playing footsie under the table, even though Ted and I had never played footsie in public and probably never would.

“Oh, goodness,” said Irene, scowling theatrically at the musicians. “I just hate it when there’s music in restaurants. It gets so
loud
.”

“They’re not even amplified,” I said.

She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me. “Yes, but people will come in and start shouting at each other, it always happens whenever there’s music.”

I looked blankly at her, then ate another snail.

Our salads arrived. My plate was piled with mesclun, glistening with herb-flecked oil, and stained deep red from scattered cubes of peppered beet. Chunks of goat cheese soaked up some of the red stain. My mouth watered. “Fresh pepper?” asked the waiter, who looked faintly piratical all of a sudden; a piece of his dark hair had fallen over one eye. He proffered a large, phallic pepper mill; I wanted to make a tiger claw with my hand and go “Grrrr.” Instead, I nodded and took a sip of wine while
he went to work over my plate. I loved Frenchmen, their earnest yet devil-may-care philosophizing, the way they said “toopty puh” to mean tiny bit, the way they ate with ferocious thoughtfulness, as if their lives depended on experiencing every nuance of flavor in each molecule of food. I found them adorably self-serious, hilariously grave, like Red Skelton’s painted clowns, if those clowns wore striped sailor shirts and smoked Gauloises.

I caught my mother’s eye and smiled at her, ashamed of letting my horndog instincts take my attention away from her pain and sorrow. “At least you don’t have to go through another divorce now,” I said.

Irene looked startled and Amanda ignored me, but my mother immediately laughed. “Oh, God, it would be awful.”

“What a pain in the ass that would have been. Can you imagine trying to find an apartment in this market?”

“Not to mention the emotional trauma, the legal complications—”

“Now Leonard’s stuck with you forever,” I said, and we smiled into each other’s eyes.

“Poor man,” she said.

Twenty-seven years before, we’d run out of gas at dusk on a cracked, desolate section of highway in the Sonoran desert. I, eight years old, had been instructed to wait with my little sisters, doors locked, windows cracked an inch for air, while our mother hitchhiked to Ajo, a town twenty-odd miles up the road. By the time she returned, morale was at an all-time low. Despite my efforts to keep everyone distracted with twenty questions and license-plate-counting games, Amanda had managed to convince the now-sobbing-inconsolably Lola that our mother had been kidnapped and murdered by the driver of the red sports car who’d stopped to pick her up, and that Emma wasn’t really Lola’s mother at all; Lola was adopted, and her real parents had been emotionally retarded, just like her. And the hand brake wasn’t set, so the VW bus was about to roll and go out of control and bump through the desert until it blew up, killing us all.

The sight of our mother getting out of a blue sedan, seemingly unscathed, gas can hanging with reassuring heaviness from her hand, struck us all dumb with relief. Not only did she have gas, she carried a bulging paper bag that said “A&W” on it. “Dinner,” she announced. As
she filled the gas tank, we fell on the food, which was ambrosiacal, unbelievably delicious.

“When you think about it,” I’d said after we’d eaten, “if we hadn’t run out of gas, we would never have found the best A&W in the world.”

“That’s called a silver lining,” my mother said with the gnomic authority of her forebears, who’d invented such aphorisms in an attempt to reconcile their contradictory, incontravenable urges toward asceticism and prurience, altruism and greed, waste and conservatism, all the bifurcated tines of bare forked man. “And every cloud has one.”

What she should have said was “What do you know, you little Pollyanna faggot?” but no matter. My lifelong pact with my mother, a mutual agreement that it was both admirable and expedient to put a positive spin on misfortune whenever possible, with extra points for black humor and self-mockery, had just been sealed.

After dinner, I saw Emma and Irene into a cab and said a chilly good-bye to my sister. Ted was home now. I wanted to rush home and seize him in my arms and drag him off to bed. Whose bed? Mine, of course; we always slept in mine. I hadn’t cleaned up my apartment, I realized then. Usually, I made at least a couple of cursory swipes through the muck with a shovel, metaphorically speaking. This time, for some reason, I had neglected to make a single preparation: I hadn’t tidied up or laid in a supply of postcoital refreshments; I hadn’t changed my sheets. If this was due to any foreboding, I wasn’t aware of it; it simmered in the way-back of my mind, where I always tried to keep things I didn’t want to know.

Instead of going home, I walked over to the Village East and bought a ticket for the eight o’clock showing of
In the Outback
. It didn’t start for forty minutes, so I got a newspaper and went to a bar a few blocks away from the theater and sat on a barstool. The bartender cocked his ear. “Absolut on the rocks with olives, please,” I said. He nodded and headed down the bar; I watched him to make sure he didn’t give me Stolichnaya by mistake, which had a perturbing milky aftertaste. This bar looked like a lot of others I’d been in: smoky, low-ceilinged room with wood paneling and a pressed-tin ceiling, neon beer signs in the window, scuffed linoleum on the floor, the ascending rows of bottles doubled by the mirror behind them. Four stools down sat an old man; I’d seen him before, in those other bars that looked like this one. After his initial glance at me, he went back to staring into his glass of beer, taking a pull from it, wiping his mouth and staring again, as if all his faculties were trained on figuring out how many more gulps he had before it was gone. “I’ll take another,” he said without looking up, pawing at the change on
the bar near his glass. The two guys in the back were playing a wordless game of pool; the balls clacked with a silky, well-oiled sound. The bartender set a glass on the bar in front of me, took the money I gave him, and sauntered back to the cash register.

I unfolded the
Times
and glanced at it. I already knew without looking what was in there: gunshot wounds, strip malls, clear-cut rain forests, fundamentalists, dirty oceans, syndicate-run garbage transfer stations, toxic waste, scary stories about how the earth was a creaking, falling-apart old whirligig spinning into the wild black yonder. But I read it anyway as I drank my drink. Then I left the bar and went back to the theater, where I watched the movie with hundreds of others, all of us staring up at Ted’s image together. His face could have been a computer-generated composite of the best features of several Hollywood studs throughout the ages. This recycled-grade-A-parts quality made him simultaneously excitingly glamorous and reassuringly familiar, like the boy next door if you happened to live on a movie set. I would have bet that the entire audience, men and women, gay and straight, old and young, wanted him in one way or another, whether or not they would all have admitted it. I was the only one here, as far as I knew, who had actually had him. But this cinematic Ted Masterson was someone I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He was completely different when we were alone together. To me, in private, he made mocking, black-hearted fun of everything he represented and espoused in public, the political posturing of his fellow Hollywood actors, the cookie-cutter corporate-spawned focus-group-generated screenplays, the hypocrisy of an industry that supported homosexuality in theory but punished it in practice. And yet he had chosen this hypocrisy. It wasn’t about the money, he had stacks of money. He needed to be famous; I assumed he kept coming back to me to remind himself that he still had a soul, but I didn’t know for sure.

By the end I was gritting my teeth, even though I had already seen the movie twice, so I’d known what to expect. Brock Martel was an old-fashioned two-dimensional good guy. He embodied principles: truth, justice, conservationist ecology. The villain was a corrupt politician spearheading a diabolical plan to turn peaceful, scenic family-run ranches into oil fields; Brock Martel chased him on horseback through the outback,
followed him in his tiny sports car into Sydney, which the director had turned into a penumbral city of film noir fog and shadows rather than the sunny, light-hearted metropolis I’d always imagined it to be; finally hero and villain leapt from their cars and danced around violently together under a streetlamp, karate-chopping each other. Thanks to Yoshi, who had clearly trained Ted well in martial arts fakery, the hero was the one who walked away from the fight.

Laughing slightly at my own weird distress, I made my way out of the theater with the crowd onto the nighttime sidewalk, into a cool, wet night. Second Avenue was almost deserted; most of the storefronts I passed were dark behind metal gates and bars. I peered into darkened bodegas and diners, Laundromats and beauty shops and newsstands, small ground-floor enterprises, plain little storefronts and kiosks. Second Avenue was one of the few places in Manhattan that hadn’t been overrun yet with corporate chains; it felt old-fashioned and peaceful, but its little family-run businesses were as frangible as tigers and coral reefs in their threatened natural habitats. The look-alike herds of Gaps and Banana Republics and Starbuckses moving en masse into the city gave me a jangling, horror-struck anxiety, the sense of some national blight-at-large encroaching, the real America I’d hoped never to have to inhabit. I knew perfectly well that flux was the natural condition of all things: cells divided and died, stars burned out, corporate baby boomers imposed their gutless, bland, Peter Pan aesthetic on everything on the entire planet, and so forth. There was nothing I could do about it, but I didn’t have to like it.

I let myself into the house and stood in the foyer for a moment, listening to the sounds of the house. The living room was empty; the kitchen, I could see by the darkness under the door, was deserted, so Basia was probably in her room, which was behind the kitchen. I found to my surprise that I had stage fright: clammy palms, weak knees, speedy heartbeat. Would I have to deal with Giselle? Was Bretagne still awake? Would Ted be glad to see me? That was the real question, of course. The last time I’d seen Ted had been two months ago. He’d blown into town for two nights on his way to Europe; he claimed he’d come to see me, but I’d hardly seen him the whole time except for one furtive, oddly frustrating interlude very late the second night, when he’d come up to my
bedroom after I’d fallen asleep, having given up on him. He’d crawled into bed with me, we tumbled around for a while, then he crept away again. Yoshi, meanwhile, had flounced around the house all weekend, licking his chops and purring. I wasn’t stupid or naive; I figured I could see what was going on, but the fact that Yoshi might have designs on Ted didn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that Ted and Giselle shared a daily life, a house, a child. The ghost of La Rochefoucauld muttered helpfully in my inner ear: “Absence diminishes common passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.” I felt a sudden surge of lust as powerful as thirst.

There was a light on in the library to my right. I rapped on the opened door and went in without waiting for a response. Ted stood in front of the fireplace. I was pleasantly surprised to find him alone. He turned and saw me, and his expression didn’t change. “Hi,” he said; he didn’t come forward to embrace me, and I didn’t go to him. Some invisible force field kept us apart.

“Welcome home,” I said tentatively.

“Why weren’t you at dinner? Where were you?”

“My mother’s reading, then I ate with my family. I told you about it.”