Jeremy Thrane (5 page)

I said out of nowhere, through a mouthful of potato, “I have an announcement to make, which is that I’m gay.”

Amanda rolled her eyes; it was all over the playground at our school. Lola, who was eight, ignored me, her usual policy when confronted with something she didn’t understand. My stepfather, Lou, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, Jeremy, good for you.”

To my puzzled irritation, my mother burst out laughing. “Oh, baby,” she said. “Have you slept with a boy yet?”

“Mom! I’m only twelve.”

“That is pretty young,” she said, smiling.

“I’m gay, Mom,” I said levelly.

Then I saw a flicker of something in her eyes, as if a wave of the New England Puritanism she’d spent her entire adult life striving to eradicate had risen up against the internal dam she’d built against it. But evidently her convictions held, because she eased back into her chair again.

“Well,” she said. “Good for you for telling us, Jeremy, that took a lot of courage. And I hope you won’t ever hesitate to ask for help or advice, and if there’s any way I can give it to you, I will.” She took a bite of pot roast, and that was that; the subject was changed, and dinner went on as usual.

But I remained edgy and tense throughout the meal, a feeling that had returned frequently since then. I had seen what I was up against.

I sat at my desk while Juanita unraveled the sleeve of my sweater, hopped along the back of my chair, perched on my shoulder, and nuzzled her hard little beak into my scalp. I always listened to NPR when I wrote; it provided such a soothing backdrop. My private motto for NPR was “Story time for grown-ups.” The announcers’ calm, correct pronunciation of every word, no matter how formidable, foreign, or vowelless, no matter what faraway or nearby calamities they were describing, allowed me to bask in the happy illusion that the world was safe and orderly and this latest catastrophe only an aberration.

Angus in Efes
was my own small way of making sense of the rest of his life after my father vanished, and laying him to rest. When I’d begun the novel, it was with the idea that I’d bash out a first draft, revise it quickly, publish it, and move on, but after ten years I was still adding episodes, deepening scenes, polishing passages I’d already polished twelve times. And I hadn’t been able to write the ending yet, possibly because in the years I’d been writing about him, I’d become almost as attached to the fictional Angus as if he had been an actual parent. During the solitude of Ted’s lengthy absences, it was Angus who provided my days with meaningful structure, who gave me a reason to get up every morning. Instead of pining like Tennyson’s pathetic, sighing, lovesick Mariana in her moated grange (“He will not come,” she said./ She wept, “I am aweary, aweary/Oh God, that I were dead”), I conjured a verbal facsimile of my vanished father out of thin air and a computer screen, and made him say and do whatever I wanted him to. I couldn’t keep Ted with me for long, but Angus was my captive. I was
beginning to think I would write and rewrite this book for the rest of my life.

But no matter. My work was an internal sandbag to shield me from slings and arrows, not a target for them. I frequently tested whatever section or scene I was currently working on against the stark realities and blurred complexities I found in the world, and these checks shored me up, gave me a wholly private satisfaction, a pleasure having nothing to do with success or recognition. This in no way precluded fantasies of fame and glory, but it did forestall the rejection and criticism I’d have to undergo in order to attain them. I didn’t mind being a crackpot attic-dwelling hermit far removed from such things as advances, reviews, promotion, because the idea of being misunderstood by reviewers, or even skewered and eviscerated for failing to uphold whatever subjective standards they espoused, horrified the bejeezus out of me. Like Bartleby, given the choice, I preferred not to.

Well, with one rather daunting exception. As I had just confessed to Sebastian, I had recently tossed off, just for fun, a screenplay I’d called with ironic pomposity
The Way of All Flesh
. I’d written it because I needed to take a break, write something disposable and mindless and over-the-top to temporarily dispel the earnest, analytical tone of my novel, replace Angus Thrane with a very different kind of father, Marxism with another obsession entirely. I had never for a moment expected this trifle to end up anywhere but the garbage. It was the most puerile thing I had ever written.

The screenplay’s protagonist, an undertaker, was also a necrophiliac and a pedophile, although he tried to keep these under wraps. In act one, his own twelve-year-old son was killed by a speeding flower-delivery truck and wound up on his table. During a long night of sweaty moral wrestling, our hero paced back and forth by the laidout body of his son while a number of opinionated, diverse advisers—Plato, Lucrezia Borgia, Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock from
Star Trek
, Henry the Eighth, and Lizzie Borden—materialized and advised the bereft but aroused father on their own philosophies of life, death, familial bonds, fatherly duties, and man-boy love as they applied to his own particular dilemma. In a mockingly tender scene, the father finally made his decision and acted upon it. On the sound track, the Vienna Boys’ Choir sang “Ruht Wohl,”
the heartrending lullaby-chorale from Bach’s
Passion According to St. John
, as the camera rose above the man and dead child, circled them, then closed in until they were just flesh.

Nothing would ever have happened to this thing if it hadn’t been for Max, the same Max who’d sent me home with Frankie last night and who, throughout the long tenure of our friendship, had caused me to do a significant number of other things I wouldn’t otherwise have done. One night when he was over for dinner, I had laughingly explained its basic premise to him; over a couple of cognacs he’d managed to convince me to give him a copy. Without checking with me first, he’d mailed it to a friend of a friend who had just launched a small start-up agency and was desperately in search of “properties.” I got a call two weeks later from some out-of-breath guy on a cell phone in what sounded like freeway traffic, saying that he’d loved the script and wanted to “shop it around.” I was momentarily at a loss. “It’s ‘Kissed’ meets ‘Happiness,’ ” he said; I pictured highlighted hair slicked back with top-shelf gel, manicured hands, and a snarky frat-boy grin, and wrote him off as a perverted wing nut.

“I won’t hold my breath,” I said, “ha-ha,” and hung up, ashen with embarrassment. I wasn’t shocked that I hadn’t received a single call from him in the three months since our conversation.

Today I was working on a scene in which Angus, lunching at a shady café table, watched as several village kids played with a feral dog, teasing and provoking him until the enraged animal bit one of them savagely. Rather than dashing to the rescue of the bleeding child, Angus leaned back in his chair, gazed at the sky, and mused to himself at some length about the superiority of socialism to the lamentably savage and seemingly ineluctable Darwinian struggle of natural law. This scene was proving tricky to write. It was hard to keep my narrative voice neutral, putting aside my scorn for my protagonist and imagining what had made my father tick. This was the crux of the whole book, but on some days I was more up to the task than others.

At eleven, the sun came out for a moment, then faded again behind the clouds. My ears pricked up when I heard a correspondent asking a Guatemalan woman about an annual festival in her village. A faint, melancholy bawk-bawk-bawk came in right on cue; I’d expected this,
because I’d noticed that there was frequently a chicken clucking in the background when a native Spanish speaker was being interviewed on NPR. Maybe they had a tape of a chicken in their studio and dubbed it in, or maybe they arranged to have a chicken present for their Latin American interviews. I didn’t know the reason, and I didn’t want to know; it was one of the small but essential mainstays of my daily life like the Dog Walker’s tantrums or Dina Sandusky’s solitaire cheats.

Overcome all at once with fatigue, I went into the big room and stretched out on my bed on top of the quilt, and almost immediately I was plunged into a feverish, hazy, half-panicky dream in which Ted was walking away from me into a flickering light, into some sort of forest that darkened gradually and became a cavern into which he vanished. Standing at the entrance, I called his name, but he was gone. I awoke suffused with sadness. It was nearly one in the afternoon, but I felt as if I’d been sleeping for only five minutes. Disoriented and groggy, I splashed cold water on my face and put on my jacket.

“Did you invite your little boyfriend to the premiere?” I asked Felicia Boudreaux about half an hour later. We were facing each other in a booth at Benito’s, our favorite Italian restaurant.

She stared at me. “What little boyfriend?”

“You have to ask?” I said. “How many do you have? I meant Wayne.”

She flopped a hand at me. “Oh, get out of here.”

“You get out of here. Every time I call you, he answers the phone, even if it’s midnight or breakfast time. Where does he sleep, if not with you?”

“He’s my assistant,” she said. “We keep weird hours. Not everyone is as much of a slut as you are, Jeremy.”

“Well, it’s not easy sleeping around for two,” I said without rancor; I loved it when she called me a slut, because she said it fondly, as if she vicariously admired me. “When are you going to do your share?”

She reached over and lightly scratched the tip of my nose with one red fingernail. “You know Dr. Wong told me I have to be celibate during my treatment. My system can’t take the shock of transferring so much energy to someone else.”

I wanted very badly to say, “Maybe if you quit shooting up—” but
I didn’t want to piss her off. She brooked no challenge to her habits, any of them.

“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t blame you. It sucks that Ted is so unavailable, but you know. If he didn’t live this way, he’d be stuck playing the heroine’s loyal best friend or quirky hairdresser until he got old enough to play her weird bachelor uncle. I mean, think about it. What would you do if you were him?”

Felicia was one of Ted’s oldest friends, and by now, one of mine. She had been his quote-unquote girlfriend at Yale. The day they met, he’d asked her to see a movie with him. A week or two later, at the point at which their nascent affair had to be either consummated or nipped in the bud, she had confessed to him, just as he was beginning to panic, that she loathed sex. They worked out a mutually satisfying arrangement: After a date together, he took her home to sleep by herself, and then he cruised New Haven gay bars and picked up townies.

“If I were him,” I said, “I wouldn’t have married Giselle.”

“I wouldn’t take their marriage so personally if I were you.”

“Then how should I take it?”

She leaned her chin on one hand, her pointy elbow resting on the thick white tablecloth. Both cheekbone and hand were grotesquely, glamorously bony. The first two fingers on the hand that supported her chin held a long white mentholated cigarette whose smoke floated across her face like a film of nostalgia, as if this had all happened long ago. Her silk dress was the same bloodred shade as the booth. Her pale gold hair was piled on her head and stuck through with two chopsticks like a bowl of rice. She had rimmed her far-apart green eyes with black kohl and applied several layers of bloodred lipstick to her full, childlike mouth. Her face was serene and faintly, intelligently malicious, like a calm sea with a dark form skulking just beneath the surface.

“Ted’s just like me,” she said. “Selfish, and pragmatic. Sold to the highest bidder. You can’t expect any more of him than that.”

“That’s not true of either one of you,” I said hotly.

“Please,” she laughed. “I can’t believe you’re still romantic about him after all these years. Maybe that’s what’s kept you together. You choose to see him as someone better than he is, and it flatters him because he respects you.”

“Maybe I’ve seen parts of him that you haven’t,” I said stubbornly. “And maybe we truly love each other.”

“It’s possible,” she said. “I wouldn’t know. He’s never shown me anything but his worst and truest self, the way I show him mine. He doesn’t bother trying to impress me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m starving,” she said suddenly. This was a lie; she just wanted to change the subject before it turned into an argument. She was never hungry. She lived on menthols, vodka martinis, heroin, and weekly herbal injections from an old charlatan six flights up in a Chinatown tenement, Dr. Wong. He’d taken one feel of her pulse at her initial consultation and said, “Foggy brain. Very foggy brain.” This was preposterous; Felicia had honed herself to a flesh-and-bone razor’s edge of lucidity. The old quack was rooking her. But her romantic idea of herself was that she was poisonous and doomed, so she happily paid him to tell her this.

Apparently she was entertaining parallel thoughts about my own delusions, because she added then, “You shouldn’t be threatened by Giselle, Jeremy. You have completely separate roles in Ted’s life.”

“Well, things haven’t been so great between Ted and me lately,” I said emphatically. I looked around for the spaghetti I’d ordered and beheld with an appetite-suppressing convulsion the rounded back of Phil Martensen two tables away, sitting across from Gary O’Nan. Phil was a photographer, Gary a gossip columnist. They both worked for
Downtown
, the weekly tabloid-style magazine whose offices, now that I thought about it, were right around the corner. Felicia and I had been talking rather loudly just then. “Oh my God,” I said under my breath without moving my lips.

Felicia glanced over at Phil, then continued to skate her gaze around the room.

“Who are they?”

“
Downtown
magazine.”

“They couldn’t hear us,” she murmured positively.

“We were almost shouting.”

“No, we weren’t,” she said, and gestured for the waiter. As the reedy young man in the bow tie made his way over, I made a show of noticing them for the first time.