Jeremy Thrane (15 page)

After a few paragraphs, my pen began to move as if it were powered by electricity, and all I could do was hold on and watch it all unfold. I found myself hoping Angus would put this guy in his place, to argue back with his usual articulate confidence, but for some reason I was powerless to help him. Cowed by the other man’s sheer size and superior volume and authentic Turkishness, Angus tried to interrupt the flow of spittle, but only stuttered, interjected, parried, and in the end shrank defensively into himself with a narrowing of his shoulders.

When I came to, it was early evening and I was blinking and dazed. That scene I’d written crackled and popped, and I was a hell of a writer, and so forth; such were the illusions afforded by inspiration, akin to what a new mother must have felt for her garden-variety baby. I left the diner and took a long walk through North Brooklyn. The sky overhead ran the gamut from a wild sunset in the extreme west to an intense pale blue in the far east, the whole thing clotted with clouds, stippled with blowing leaves and wheeling seagulls. Everything below it, down here, was man-made and corrupt, rusty, comical—spray-painted tags on sides of buildings, razor wire coiled along the tops of corrugated fences, stenciled letters on Dumpsters, blowing plastic bags—all knit together to make a flawed but teeming whole, like bird tracks, tree bark, and filigrees of lichen or bare branches in the woods. The Empire State Building was ice
white at its uppermost tip, ice blue farther down the shaft, like one of those multicolored bomb-shaped Popsicles we used to get from the ice cream truck.

Angus wasn’t the only fanatic in my immediate family. Every generation had at least one: My maternal great-grandfather had been a British-born hellfire-and-brimstone anti-Catholic traveling preacher, thumping his Bible in Presbyterian pulpits all over America; my mother’s aunt and uncle had been avid devotees of the “clairvoyant philosopher” Rudolf Steiner; my sister Lola had been a member of a doomsday cult in Arizona for eight years before moving to Australia, where she and her husband now ran an emu farm. She wasn’t a fanatic anymore, but she was still weird.

I’d been completely spared the believer gene; I didn’t understand these people. All my life I’d been highly resistant to any strain of dogmatically imposed repression or abstraction; my intellectual white blood cells attacked ideological invaders and wiped them out before they could take root. The idea of trying to improve or change the human race as a whole seemed totally hopeless to me. I couldn’t imagine making leaps of faith all the time as if my soul were a ballerina on ecstasy: If the purpose of my life were to transcend it, how exactly would I live it? And I’d always found the concepts of sacrifice and suffering extremely boring. Believers were wet blankets, wrecking all the fun and crying at the party, yapping on about how things should be, not about how things were. It wasn’t enough for them to restrict their own pleasure; they had to spoil it for everyone else on earth too.

Had a gun been placed against my head with the insistence that I identify my deepest belief or else, I might have cast my lot with Matthew Arnold’s call for sweetness and light on the one hand and true love on the darkling plain on the other, although I’d have had to leave his later social-reform ideas completely out of it, not buying into that sort of thing myself. As far as I could tell, even the most high-minded, well-intentioned, idealistic organizations devolved sooner or later into platforms for power-mad zealots and would-be pundits, fueled by empty rhetoric like everything else. The very thought of joining groups, even those ostensibly made up of “my own kind,” ACT UP, Gay Pride marches, and the like, immediately made me itch to do something to
offend them all and get myself kicked out. This attitude might have been a rational, intelligent stand against didacticism and cant, but it might also have been nothing more than my way of rebelling against my father.

I headed along Wythe Avenue toward Broadway. The street was almost deserted except for truck drivers unloading their cargo at docks, an occasional whore on a corner smoking and pacing and clutching her purse, solitary walkers-home. Off to the right, between rows of low industrial buildings on streets going off at odd angles, across the blue-black shimmer of the East River, I caught glimpses of Manhattan. Straight ahead above the decaying web of the Williamsburg Bridge, smoke billowed into the violet sky, drifting sideways to blur and obscure the tiny white lights on the struts. The juxtaposition of violet sky, black bridge, and gray smoke caused me to stop and stare for several minutes before I continued on my way to the subway. At the Marcy Avenue subway station I waited for a J train and rode it over the bridge, looking out the window at the lights and water.

I came up out of the subway, stopped at a pay phone, and called my mother’s number.

“Hello?” she said in a wet, clogged voice.

“Mom,” I said, “how are you?”

She blew her nose audibly. “Oh, never better. How are you?”

“The same,” I said. “Ted and I broke up. I’m staying with Amanda, I don’t know whether she told you.”

“She did,” said my mother. “What happened with Ted?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now. I just called to see how you were doing.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about my shitty life either, which brings this conversation to a bit of a standstill.”

“Are you going to Amanda’s performance tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, I’m not in the mood for all that smoke and noise. I think we’ll just go to bed early. Anyway, give her my love.”

“Let me know if you need anything. Give my best to Leonard.”

“I hope Ted offered to support you for a while until you get on your feet.”

“I turned him down. Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m a little out of practice at making a living, but I’ll remember how.”

“I’ve got money if you need some,” she said, “and you can always stay with us, you know, as long as you want.”

I hesitated. “Do you need me to?” I asked delicately.

“Only if you want to,” she said.

“But do you need me?”

She made an exasperated noise. “Jeremy,” she said. “If I need you, I’ll ask. I’m trying to tell you that you’re welcome here as long as you’d like to stay.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mom.”

On Carmine Street I opened the door to Frankie’s restaurant and found a small table near the back. A waiter, not Frankie, but probably his brother or cousin, handed me a menu and went to stand on the other side of the little room. When I put the menu down on the checked tablecloth, he stepped forward again and I named the things I wanted. He wrote on a pad, put the menu under his arm and departed, returned with a glass of ice-clogged water, a rattan basket with a small sliced loaf of warm, crusty bread wrapped in a white napkin, and a small monkey dish packed with butter so cold, I had to dig at it with my knife to get some out. It ripped the soft insides of the bread when I tried to spread it. There were few things more delicious than ice cold butter on warm Italian bread. A moment later Frankie’s relative brought me a glass of a Chianti so deeply reddish purple, it looked like blood in the large bulb of a laboratory vessel. These were the rituals I cherished, the niceties and formalities I happily spent any amount of money to experience on a regular basis. Sitting in a room filled with tables and strangers, sipping a glass of something that warmed my stomach while I waited for the food I’d chosen to be brought to me, made my toes curl with a profound well-being. It made me feel cared for, cherished, nurtured, attended to.

A middle-aged couple came in, sat down, perused menus, ordered, drank wine. A family took possession of the large round front table. My salad arrived, chunks of crisp, cold iceberg lettuce awash in oregano-flecked olive oil and red wine vinegar. I sprinkled it with black pepper and devoured it, watching as the mother of the large brood unbuttoned
her shirt and tucked her suckling infant inside it, his mouth clamped onto her breast. He kneaded her flesh with his tiny hand as he drank. I knew exactly how he felt. This salad made me want to knead someone’s flesh with contentment. I sopped up extra oil with a small piece of bread and chewed.

My dinner arrived: veal parmesan with a side of garlicky greens. I tucked in. Looking toward the door with my mouth full of tender breaded baby meat, I espied Frankie, arriving for his night shift in a cheap leather jacket that looked a size too small for him.

He didn’t see me at first. I was just one of a number of customers, not his. He disappeared into a back room, emerged a while later in a crisp white shirt and black bow tie. He cast a quick, practiced eye around the room. When it landed on me, he raised his eyebrows and unhesitatingly made his way over to me.

He stood by my table and gave me his hand to shake. “Jeremy, hey. How you doin’.”

“Hi, Frankie,” I said.

“Where’s your friend Max?”

“He’s around somewhere. How’s it going?”

“Same old fucking thing. How ’bout you.”

“Okay,” I said, and we exchanged uncomfortable little grins. I started to ask him something else, then realized that the air between us was completely dead, and that Frankie and I had no further sexual business in this lifetime. He had work to do, and my food awaited me. “Well, it was good seeing you again,” I said. “I’ll take my check if you run into my waiter.”

“In my flat in London you had to put coins in a slot in the meter to get your hot water,” Liam was saying, perched on a barstool at Bombshell later that night. He jiggled his knee, jackhammerlike, talking in a fast monotone, as if he’d long ago sent the words to the cargo bay of his brain to await shipping out and had stopped thinking the thought itself long before he said it aloud. “Know what I did? I made ice cubes the same size as shillings, stuck them in, and they melted and were never seen again. That flummoxed the coin collectors for months. Never figured it out. Had free baths all that time.”

“Well,” I said dubiously, “good for you, I guess.”

“Good for me,” said Liam, “and bad for them.”

Bombshell was in a basement near the West Side Highway on Fourteenth Street, a former meat locker turned nightclub. The low ceilings were still embedded with the tracks from the pulleys and hooks where wet, crimson carcasses streaked with fat had swayed toward whirring blades, refrigerated trucks. The dampish rough concrete walls had been painted a rich Day-Glo gold and hung with blown-up black-and-white cheesecake publicity stills of B-movie golden girls, Rockettes, flapper showgirls, Ice Capades skaters, and chanteuses. Tiny fringed lamps protruded from the walls; votives in fishnet-swathed glass jars on each small table gave off small wavering bursts of light. Two sets of risers behind the bar held a chorus of bottles, the real stars of this operation. The place felt like a fairy cave or the inside of a huge hollowed-out butternut squash.

From the dark, shadowy area beyond the winglike curtains on one side, the silent, pug-nosed Mexican bar-back came and went, carrying
ice tubs and cases of beer. Karina Ventrix, the transvestite bartender, lounged behind the bar in a leather push-up bra that sagged on her flat chest, belted short-shorts over fishnets, stiletto thigh-high boots, and a blond pageboy wig. When she caught me looking at her, she narrowed her eyes at me. Drag queens never liked me. Although I’d asked to have it extra dry, she’d made my martini with so much vermouth, it had a greasy film on top. I didn’t want to further alienate her by complaining.

“Hey, how do I look?” Amanda asked.

She was gotten up in a floor-length green brocade dress, dangling rhinestone earrings that sparkled in the candlelight, a paisley-shaped bindi on her forehead, eyeliner painted out to her temples, a fake black mole by her lower lip. Her glossy dark hair was twisted and pinned up, one spit curl pasted against her left cheek. She wasn’t asking me, but I thought she wouldn’t have been out of place in a Louis Quatorze display at Madame Tussaud’s.

“You look way too good for him,” said Karina the bartender with a jerk of her head in Liam’s direction. As she did this, her wig slid slightly askew. I was interested to note, before she pushed it back into place, that her real hair was gray and sparse.

“Excuse me,” I said to her. “I asked for no vermouth in this martini.”

She looked at me. “That martini is as dry as you’re going to get around here.”

“Really,” I said.

“Karina,” said Amanda, “be nice to my brother.”

“Well, sure,” said Karina, “if he’s really your brother. He doesn’t look a thing like you.” She dumped my martini into the sink and busied herself with the shaker.

“When I lived in Amsterdam,” said Feckin, “I lived in a yurt in a squat in a burned-out Chinese restaurant with a feckin armchair stuck halfway up the staircase so you had to crawl around it.”

“What is a yurt?” Amanda asked Liam.

“A Himalayan hut,” he told her. “Big smelly tent made out of yak fur or something.”

Liam and Feckin were, I’d flattered myself into deciding, flirting with me. They’d never paid much attention to me before, but all of a
sudden now they were telling alternating competing stories, each of them trying to top the other in hopes of winning my—what? Hand in marriage? I wasn’t sure what the upshot of all this was, except that they were both shambling drunk and clearly in search of someone on whom to work off all their pent-up energy. Liam’s true love was obviously Feckin, not Amanda, and I wondered where Liam and Amanda’s ménage would be without Feckin there to diffuse tension and distract the two of them from their fundamental incompatibility. I’d seen these unconsummated hetero-boy love affairs before. Liam and Feckin were so intensely bonded, sex was in many ways beside the point.

Feckin stubbed out his smoked-down butt and lit another cigarette. “This Jap friend of mine called Sawa,” he said on the exhale, ignoring the smoke that swathed his face as impenetrably as a chador, “built the yurt from trash he hauled off the street. He ate garbage and old produce the stores couldn’t sell. He knew exactly how many pigeons lived upstairs, and just how long he could live off them if it ever came to that. I met my wife there. She lived upstairs in a flat in the attic that was covered in soot from a fire, and pigeon shit on top of that, with a big hole in the roof. Black-and-white room with the weather coming in. What a crazy girl. Ha! Suzanne, my sweet wife, wonder where she is now.” He nipped some whiskey, held it between his lower teeth and the pouch of his inner lip to warm it, then swallowed it with a small toss of his head.