Jeremy Thrane (22 page)

I felt a bottomless hunger at the first taste of the corn bisque. I polished it off before Sebastian sat to eat his own soup, then swabbed out
my bowl with a hunk of the bread. He refilled my bowl as soon as he saw it was empty. “I like to cook for enthusiastic eaters,” he said.

“Who else do you cook for?” I asked, trying not to sound insultingly skeptical.

“My other writers,” he said as he slid half an omelet onto my plate and sat across from me. “My friends.” He looked at me through the candle flames wavering between us. The points of fire gave his eyes strange, lionlike glints. He tasted the soup, nodded, and poured us both more wine.

“You don’t know this,” he said thoughtfully, “and you may be shocked to learn it, but as it happened, I was an extraordinarily beautiful boy. Until puberty, that is. Older men fawned over me, and boys my own age vied for my attention. Gay and straight, they all wanted to be my friends. I was golden, especially by English standards, a little Adonis.”

“You were?” I kept my tone perfectly neutral, with some effort.

“Then my thyroid began to fail, and my entire physiognomy changed. If I hadn’t been so sick, and so devastated by my sudden ugliness, I would have found the experience fascinating, from a biological standpoint. It coincided with our move to the States. I turned thirteen, learned to jerk off, became interested in practicing my new skills with other boys, but horrifyingly, at the same time, almost overnight, I turned into a gargoyle. I also found myself in a strange country where the children were well built and healthy, had perfect teeth, and could be very, very cruel. Much more so than in England, where everyone looks a little queer, by which I mean odd.”

“Didn’t the medication help?”

“Oh, well, I take it every day, of course, but it does nothing for me aesthetically. I wonder, now, how much of it had to do with inevitable genetic predisposition and how much was the disease. In any case, my adolescence was—” He quirked his lips. “Well, you knew me then, you saw how it was for me. You were the only person in the school who didn’t make my life a living hell. We each had to keep our distance from the other for obvious self-protective reasons, didn’t we; in a school like ours it was preferable to go it alone than to band together and risk
being branded beyond doubt. But I sensed that we were kindred spirits, even then, and as it turned out, I was right.”

“Well,” I said, deeply uncomfortable.

“And although you must have known, because it was so painfully obvious,” he went on, “I was obsessed with you in high school.”

“I didn’t know,” I said in a panic, “don’t worry about it.”

“No, not obsessed exactly; that implies a neurotic attachment that goes beyond the rational. The truth is, I loved you.”

I looked away from him. I didn’t see what he was hoping to accomplish here.

“I felt I understood you,” he went on as if he couldn’t stop now that he’d launched into this soul-baring speech, as if its momentum were fueled by the uncorking of the energy it had taken to keep all these feelings inside him. “A silent sympathy, if you will. I never hoped for anything in return. So when you ask—” He covered his face with both his hands and rubbed it hard, then looked at me again and said, “When you ask me why I ‘fuss over you,’ as you put it, that is the reason. I see no reason to hide this from you anymore; anyway, it’s no doubt become fairly evident.”

I put my fork down on my plate carefully. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, I realized. It gave his face a naked look, made his eyes even more pronounced and gave them an eerie incandescence, like a leprechaun’s or a bobcat’s.

“I’m not as foolish as I may seem. I know you lived with Ted Masterson for ten years and may still be in love with him. I know what I look like. I have so much to offer you, but I expect nothing from you, believe me. I won’t call in my chits, as you put it; that would imply that this has all been a strategic game on my part, and I assure you it’s nothing of the sort.”

I gulped some wine, then forced myself to meet his luminous, intent, rapt, bulging eyes. I could hear my own heartbeat in the immense silence. His loft was a shadowy, cavernous space; we were huddled together in a pool of light. The gigantic multipaned windows that ran the length of one wall reflected our small, wavering patch of light, our two pale faces; beyond the reflection, superimposed on it, glimmering lights
from faraway buildings, a dense welter of clouds, the slow twinkling crawl of a passing airplane or satellite. I swallowed. “Well,” I said glumly. “Thank you for telling me. I’m flattered.”

“Adolescent love is a strange phenomenon. It’s like no other love I’ve ever experienced, it’s hard-wired into my brain. Did you love someone in high school?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly.

He waited, watching me over the rim of his wineglass.

“I did,” I added. I looked at my watch, just a flick of my eyes.

“May I ask whom?”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter who,” I said, embarrassed. The silence grew; he didn’t look away from my face. His expression was gentle and accepting. “Okay—it was Brian Heydorn,” I blurted out finally, trying to laugh.

“Brian
Heydorn
!” He looked disappointed. “But that’s so obvious, Jeremy.”

“He was beautiful,” I said. “Probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. It’s hard-wired. If I met him today, even if he were a potbellied, bald used-car salesman, which he probably is, I’d still faint with joy if he laid a hand on me.”

“I would faint with joy,” Sebastian said quietly, quizzically, “if you laid a hand on me.”

I cringed. “Have you been in love with other men besides me?” I asked him through the lump of dread in my throat.

He laughed, a little sadly. “Of course I have. I’m not a hermit or a virgin. I’ve had three relationships, as you Americans call them.”

“You’re an American, Sebastian; you’ve lived here most of your life.”

“One ended in early death,” Sebastian went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “the second in an amicable separation, and the third in anguished heartbreak.” He paused, looked off into the middle distance, then recollected himself and said briskly, “Have you finished your supper? Can I offer you some coffee? No? Come upstairs with me now. We’ll have a look at the work you’ve done, and I’ll pay you for it. I’ve got a pear tart for dessert, and some Calvados I’ve been saving.”

Upstairs in the office, staring at the light-gray computer screen with
its slowly pulsing cursor, Sebastian read aloud my first-person description of sex with a character who resembled my roommate Scott in every particular, down to the waxed skin around his nipples and the cute little pout of his lips when he was thinking; I’d pounded it onanistically onto my keyboard as I watched Scott stripping to the waist, just back from a recent bout at the gym, then toweling his hair, shirtless after his shower.

Sebastian read this new scene out loud, enunciating as perfectly as if he were reciting Shakespeare, with a fruity British accent. My
Boytoy
style was modeled on the crisp, declarative, manly, Hemingway-colored prose of adventure stories, those heterosexual male-bonding outdoorsy against-the-elements fantasies: But of course, instead of ice climbing, bear wrestling, or sailing through a hurricane, my male heroes wrestled each other, mounted each other’s bucking bodies, and rode out the storms of their raging passions. The style adapted itself beautifully to gay sex, if only because it had always been about gay sex. I had simply, or so I imagined, stripped the masks and opacities from it, and shown it for what it was.

I stood awkwardly by in the gloom, waiting for Sebastian to finish reading, afraid my scene would ignite his unrequited yearning and cause him to embarrass us both in some way. My own words sounded unbearably silly to my ears; I hoped my novel wasn’t equally hackneyed, but greatly feared that it was, or worse.

“This one isn’t the best I’ve done,” I said when he finished. “I wrote it in a hurry. I’ve been working so hard to finish my novel.”

“It’s wonderful, Jeremy,” Sebastian said, without looking up from the screen. “In fact, I have to confess that I read your stories for my own—pleasure. I find them doubly erotic simply because you wrote them. I read them and think of you.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Please don’t tell me that.”

“I apologize,” he said mournfully.

“You have to admit it’s a creepy thing to say.”

“Of course. I overstepped my bounds, I see that.”

“I’d better get going,” I said.

“Your money—”

“You can pay me another time.”

“I was sure you’d be flattered,” he said with anguish. “I meant it as a compliment.”

“Oh, I think it’s very flattering,” I called over my shoulder on my way down the stairs. “Thank you, Sebastian. I’ll let myself out.” I went to the entryway by the elevator and fumbled my hands into the sleeves of my coat. “Thanks for dinner,” I called up to him. “It was delicious.”

“I’m sorry,” he called from the top of the staircase. “I didn’t mean to disgust or repel you, it’s the last thing I wanted, believe me.”

“I believe you,” I said.

As I stepped into the elevator, I expunged from my brain a gloom I decided was purely circumstantial and associative; it belonged back there with Sebastian, and not with me, so I left it hanging in his entryway. My mind washed of dolor, deliberately focused and calm, I went out. The sky let down whirling snow like a breast giving milk in one of my mother’s poems. I ducked my head and hurled myself into the wind tunnel of sidewalk as snowflakes hurled themselves at me kamikaze-like out of the pinkish, glowing darkness. Snow was so rare now, a throwback to an earlier era, back when winters here were harsh and cold. On my way to the subway station I hummed my way through “The Foggy, Foggy Dew” and “Clementine.” It was Angus’s Dead-Girl Song Night: She died of the fever and nothing could save her, she fell into the foaming brine, and the only only thing that I did that was wrong was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew. These songs and the snow inspired the same kind of jittery nostalgia: Both were emblems of lost eras, but whether they had been better eras than this one was doubtful. I didn’t miss my father any more than I missed blizzards, but, like all lost things, the memory of them had a certain poignant resonance, if only because they were gone.

Early the next morning, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Scott must have gone to Matt’s; the apartment was empty. While the coffee brewed, I poured some of the sunflower seeds I’d bought on my way home last night into the dish in Juanita’s cage. She immediately got down to serious work on them, cracking and nibbling and dropping empty seed husks, every now and then cocking a suspicious eye at me, as if she were wondering what the hell I was doing watching her; didn’t I have anything better to do?

I wandered back into the tiny kitchen and put together a sandwich of headless sardines lying snugly alternated, top to bottom, between two pieces of rye toast, anchored in place with a thick layer of mustard. When the coffee was ready, I breakfasted in my room, sitting on my bed while I ate, listening to Ted Hawkins and looking around at the half-folded shirts tumbling out of stacked milk crates, boxes of books, an old boom box on the floor with a pile of cassettes.

Scott invested all his money in permanent artifacts, things of beauty and style he would have forever; I spent mine on ephemera, food and drink, nights out, creature comforts that only made me fatter and taxed my liver and brought me closer to death. I didn’t care about things and never had. A forty-dollar bottle of something good pleased me more than a forty-dollar vintage lampshade, even though one was gone in a week and the other could some day be handed down to Scott’s adopted Chinese daughters, who were also part of his long-term plans.

When Ted Hawkins sang his first line, I felt a goose-bumpy happiness that lasted for the rest of the album. When it was over, I flipped the cassette and listened to Nick Drake. I closed my eyes and gave myself
over to the warbling, melancholy music, a roiling tributary that fed right into the river of sadness I was floating down. Both of them, Nick with his princesses and Ted with his green-eyed girls, their pristine guitars, yearning lyrics, pure voices, perfectly suited my mood this morning, this almost pleasurable dread of a dominatrix of a dental technician who would soon assault me with her powerful forearms and stainless-steel torture tools and half-hostile injunctions to floss, come in more often, brush more thoroughly. The anticipation of the sound of that pointy, picklike scraper in my skull as it dislodged calcified chunks of tartar and caught on my tender blood-rich gum tissue was enough to curl my toes. But if I didn’t go to Wayne’s damned dentist, I would never be able to visit Felicia again as long as he worked for her. He had fulfilled his end of the deal. If I failed to uphold mine, he would lord this over me every chance he got.

I flipped through my old Norton anthology until I found Yeats, purveyor of bee-loud glade and pilgrim soul, then adjusted my spine against the wall for a pre-dental anodyne of his serpentine, earthily mystical wisdom. I settled on “Crazy Jane Speaks to the Bishop,” and after a moment, my eyes began to boggle slightly as they tried to pluck each word from the page and pin it to my brain.

My loins thus girded with the morning’s neuralgic brew of melancholy song, the faint fishy aftertaste of breakfast, four ibuprofen tablets, and Crazy Jane, I arrived ten minutes late for my appointment and landed shortly thereafter in the frightening chair with a steadily beating heart and a resolute smile.

“Hello,” a youngish woman said on a singsong as she entered with a brand-new chart and clipped the paper bib around my neck with the little metal fastener that looked like a pair of toothy alligator jaws. “I’m Lorraine. Let’s have a quick look at your teeth before we get to work. Let’s see … my goodness, it’s been a while.”