Jeremy Thrane (2 page)

While my breakfast sizzled on the grill, I took the lid off my sweet, milky coffee and blew on it to make one static wavelet on its creamy brown surface that subsided the instant I stopped blowing. As I replaced the lid, my eye was caught by the cover of the top copy of the
National Enquirer
in the rack: “Sizzling Stars Heat Up the Sunset Strip.” There were Ted and Giselle, looking smugly into each other’s eyes. Her blond hair blew against his sculpted cheek. A flash of that irrational fondness I always felt when I unexpectedly saw anything familiar in a strange place was subsumed immediately by irritated envy. I was still half asleep; it wasn’t fair of them to intrude on my solitary pleasures before I’d even had my coffee.

Giselle’s husband, Ted Masterson, had been my boyfriend for the past ten years. Or, rather, Giselle had married my boyfriend, Ted, seven years earlier, having no idea that Ted had another life tucked away in New York. For his first several years in Hollywood, his star had seemed perpetually about to rise, but, until he’d married Giselle, it had stubbornly remained a red dwarf suspended about halfway between horizon and zenith. In the seven years since their splashy media-orgy of a wedding, his roles and asking price had steadily improved. He needed her; I had grudgingly accepted his marriage as a sound career move, but I didn’t like it. And the few times I’d met Giselle, I hadn’t liked
her either; all the things I loved about Ted—his genuine acting talent, his sense of humor, his ironic cast of mind, and most notably his homosexuality—were quashed by her influence. She was a scrappy little white-trash kid who’d clawed her way up the glass mountain to land on the roof of the world. Her pre-stardom name had been Cathy Benitez, a castoff she’d abandoned along with her former self, a chubby, slitty-eyed, Valley-bred mall rat—I’d seen pictures—in favor of Giselle Fleece, white-blond movie star with upper arms as thin as stalks of celery and a practiced half-smile. They’d both married up, in a way. Her alliance with Ted, an old-money Ivy-League Connecticut WASP, gave Giselle a vicarious aura of aristocracy without eclipsing her. And as for Ted, there was no doubt about the career advantages he’d gained in exchange for his bargain with some internal devil, but I pitied him for it. His vanity was his greatest weakness. He’d given up more for its gratification than I could ever imagine sacrificing for anything, except maybe, come to think of it, Ted himself. But I hadn’t made any bargains with any devil that I could think of. I just kept my mouth shut and did as I pleased while he was out of town.

In recent years, our once incendiary, inventive sex life had buckled under the combined weight of his double life and our mutual silence, mine tactful, Ted’s withholding, on all the topics he and I had ceased over time to talk about. I had no high hopes for this weekend’s visit. Half of me was tempted to get out of town for the duration, but the other, stronger half wanted to see Ted as often as possible, even if it meant pretending to be nothing more than his old friend the whole time. But I hoped that he would find a way for us to be alone together, if only for an hour or two.

I pulled the residual aura of my night with Frankie around me like a protective cloak and looked away from the newspaper rack, but the happy mindlessness of my hung-over reverie was shattered. Was there no escape for me from those two, nowhere I could go that I wouldn’t find some reminder of their strategic public alliance? Their show went on every waking moment. Wherever they went, it seemed, the Fleece-Masterson family contrived to be caught in ostensibly casual but alarmingly flattering poses, and not only “heating up the Sunset Strip”—there seemed to be cameras awaiting them at the zoo, the gourmet grocery
store, the video rental place, the fro-yo stand, Pink’s, the Four Seasons. In recent published photos taken by enterprising photographers through long-range lenses in Tuscany and Venice, they glowed from a gondola, a balcony, a vineyard, a yacht, a cap of red curls nestled between them like a lapdog. This was their daughter, on whom they’d bestowed the unlikely name of Bretagne, Bret for short, when they’d adopted her five years ago. Giselle was too busy shooting back-to-back blockbusters to take time out for pregnancy, or so their publicists maintained. I’d never met Bret, but I’d seen plenty of pictures, and in all of them she looked like a terrifyingly precocious Hollywood kid, the type of enfant terrible who’d be pregnant, or worse, by the age of twelve.

The premiere for Giselle’s new movie, to which I had been invited formally, by mail, was Monday night at eight at the Ziegfeld. Their private plane was scheduled to touch down early this evening at LaGuardia. Ted and Giselle would arrive in their limo with their entourage shortly thereafter at Ted’s Gramercy Park house, where I lived; I’d hoped not to have to see them until much later, when the photographers had gone away and Bretagne was asleep and the house was quiet.

I paid for my breakfast and left the deli, heading into a thick breeze moving without undue haste past me and on into the depths of the financial district I’d just left behind. As I walked, I wolfed from its waxed paper bed the luscious fusion of salty thin-sliced ham, hot soft scrambled egg, and chewy poppy seed roll, then balled up the paper and tossed it into an overflowing trash can without missing a step or beat of my stride. The morning was cool and hazy, the city’s edges softened and blurred by clouds boiling up from manholes, steam blowing from square aluminum-bright deli vents, the coal-black whiffets left hanging after buses pulled away. Every lungful of air I inhaled held this vaporous urban discharge from vents, grates, and engines, seething with the electric waves from millions of skulls, currents of mental activity to which my own were added along with my outward breath.

Walking through these early-morning streets, the idea of Ted’s fame, no matter how minor compared to Giselle’s, seemed almost ridiculous. How could a person project himself into such proportions all out of keeping with his common, limited, private consciousness? I recalled then a look Ted’s face took on sometimes, a maddening expression of
blue-blooded entitlement, his eyes glazed over like a sated overlord’s, his mouth slack and his voice underlain with a flat, nasal Connecticut imperiousness that brooked neither interruption nor dissent. How could I love and hate someone so intensely, both at once? My loathing for parts of Ted felt like a noxious fuel, choking me while it propelled me through the summits and valleys of love, but keeping me to a narrow, strenuous track.

The sidewalk fell rhythmically away beneath my feet. Its surface was dotted with hard, black little tumors. This time of year, the chewing-gum mounds were interspersed with leaf-shaped black tattoos, ghostly negative silhouettes inked by rain and gravity pressing fallen leaves into the concrete. Bolts of cheap, glittering cloth were displayed in dusty old shopwindows along lower Broadway like ancient treasures in Aladdin caves. In SoHo, the women suddenly became huge-breasted and almost otherworldly in their aggressive chicness, and the air was charged with attitude as dizzying as perfume, even though it was the first thing in the morning.

“Jeremy,” someone called.

I hated running into people on the street as much as I hated picking up the phone and having it be someone I didn’t want to talk to. My first impulse was always to hang up or pretend I hadn’t heard my name. But I overcame it now, and stopped and looked around.

“Jeremy,” I heard again, and there was Sebastian Philpott, seventeen years older than he’d been the last time I’d seen him, minus a tonsure-sized skullcap’s worth of hair. He sidled up to me and stood about a foot closer to me than I would have liked, his bulbous eyes peering intently into mine as he breathed quietly through his mouth.

“Hello,” I said flatly.

A fleeting memory arose in my mind: Sebastian, trailing me one day after English class, sweating gently with the effort it took to catch up to me. He’d called my name exactly as he had a second ago. When I’d turned to see what he wanted, the naked admiration in his popout eyes might have struck me as poignant if I hadn’t been an adolescent with my own popularity problems. I had just read my latest short story aloud in English class and wanted to flee the scene.

“What is it?” I’d asked impatiently.

“Could I—would you mind if I copied your story for myself?” he asked. “I’d like to see the way it looks on the page. I feel I missed so much of the subtlety and nuance, hearing it read aloud.”

“You can have the fucking thing,” I said, and thrust at him the wretched, toiled-over notebook pages covered with my crabbed handwriting, multiple cross-outs, and splotches of whatever food I’d been eating as I wrote. The next day he tried to discuss my themes and imagery with me, and I’d said, “Oh, come on, Sebastian,” and fled from him again.

“This is an amazing coincidence,” he was saying now. “I was just thinking about you last week, wondering whatever happened to you. How have you been?”

We’d been the only two queers in our high school, or, rather, the only two I had known about at the time. Neither of us had kept our homosexuality a secret, but neither had we broadcast it. We hadn’t been friends and had never slept together; the mere idea of touching his white, frail, puffy body made me shudder. It wasn’t his fault that he was white, frail, and puffy; he was asthmatic, hypersensitive to sunlight, and took thyroid medication that made him bloat, but nonetheless his personality did little to compensate for his physical shortcomings.

“Oh, I’ve been fine,” I said.

“What have you been doing?”

“Not much,” I said truthfully with synthetic breeziness.

“Are you still writing?”

“I’m working on a novel,” I said, and would have left it at that, but pride compelled me to add, “and I recently finished a screenplay and got a movie agent.”

“A screenplay!” he said, for some reason delighted by this news. “I’d love to read it.”

“It’s no masterpiece,” I said, “to put it mildly.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said with that same undaunted, eager expression. “I would love to read it. Would you have your agent send me a copy? Here’s my card.” He thrust a small white rectangle of cardboard into my hand. “Because, well, to tell you the truth, I’m in the market for a good script, because I’m looking to produce a movie.” He paused, then added with an embarrassment I would have suspected was feigned if it
had been anyone but Sebastian, “My accountant recommended it, actually, I never would have thought of it on my own. He thinks up all sorts of ways of avoiding undue taxation. A number of years ago I started my own magazine, and it seems to be very popular with advertisers. Money keeps streaming in.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“It’s called
Boytoy
. It’s pornography, primarily, but there are also celebrity profiles, health and lifestyle articles, that sort of thing.” He paused as another bright idea bubbled up in his neocortex. “We are in desperate need of a new columnist, or, rather, I am, the editorial we; it’s only me, I run the whole thing. I know it would be a comedown for a writer like you, but we try to keep the quality of the writing as high as possible. Jeremy, do you think you could write porn?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, dismayed.

“We pay extremely well, which is to say, I do. Come and have lunch someday soon, and we’ll discuss the terms and guidelines.”

“Maybe,” I said, and shook his hand, which was horribly soft, and so warm, it made me want to gag.

“Do call, Jeremy,” he said over his shoulder as he proceeded on his way. “Don’t lose my card. Well, if you do, it doesn’t matter, I’m in the book.”

Under Philpott or
Boytoy
? I was tempted to ask, but didn’t care, although I did experience a mild and passing astonishment at the way he so casually broadcasted his telephone number’s availability. This more than anything showed how unbridgeable the gap was between us. My own name hadn’t been in the book in over ten years, and I had no desire ever to have it there again, because if people I didn’t want to talk to had access to my number, then they might call me. Who these people were I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know; anyone who was so casual about such things was clearly not my soul mate and never would be.

A while later, looking up, I found myself on my own street; I’d walked the last twenty blocks in a blur. In Gramercy Park, a gust of air lifted and tossed the trees’ heavy, almost-bare branches with a barely audible creak, quick as a sigh. The paths were dim, deserted; the wrought-iron benches sat clenched and empty except for one purblind old man in corduroy pants, leaning on his cane, drooling quietly, harming no one.
Coming toward me on the sidewalk I heard the Dog Walker, talking as usual to his leashed charges. “Rosa, come on, don’t do this to me, I need one good dog, at least. Jesus fucking Christ, George, don’t fucking even think about it. Farkus! Farkus! Don’t do that! Christ, I’ve told you twenty times in the last hour alone! You never fucking listen to me! You never listen! What’s wrong with you guys today?”

He was a slight, grungy fellow with scraggly facial hair. His voice rose to a screech, subsided into resignation. The way he talked to his dogs reminded me of the way I had harangued my stuffed animals as a kid, fervently, without a shred of humor; part of me had suspected they were plotting to overthrow me and had to be kept in their place. The dogs, the center of all this emotional outpouring, walked calmly along on their leashes.

“Hi,” their tormentor said clearly as he passed me, meeting my eyes with a steady, sane expression. He was cute. I felt a sudden stirring of attraction. Then he said, “Don’t treat me like a fucking jackass. You think I’m in a bad mood now. I swear to God, don’t start this shit with me so early in the morning.” He was talking to the dogs, I thought, but I wasn’t entirely sure. He rounded the corner, toward whatever imaginary dog-related dramas awaited him there.

The front stairs of Ted’s house rose from the sidewalk to a heavy oaken door, into whose lock I fitted my key. He had bought this nineteenth-century town house fifteen years before. Its previous owners had rendered it unspeakably tasteless with shag rugs, lowered ceilings, and paneling. At huge expense, Ted had had it restored to a credibly somber replica of a nineteenth-century family house. Inside the foyer, light wavered palely through the glass fanlight above the door, casting smoky shadows over the umbrella stand, the coat tree, the parquet floor. A gold-leaf-etched mirror hung above a heavy mahogany table, on which stood a Chinese vase filled with dried sunflowers. The air smelled of pierogis, cabbage, meat-laden steam; through the French doors leading into the living room, I caught a glimpse of Yoshi’s sinisterly angular form gliding into the kitchen, where, I knew by the smells permeating the house, Basia was preparing Polish delicacies for the master’s homecoming.