Jeremy Thrane (30 page)

“All right,” I said wearily. “I’ll do it because it’s your birthday, but you know exactly how I feel about this kind of charade. You’re going to owe me.”

“Anything,” he said. “Bless you.”

“What should I bring?”

“You could bring some kosher wine,” said Max. “Also, don’t forget, it’s baseball season, so we’ll be watching the game before dinner.”

“Oh,” I said, immediately concerned. “That’s right. The game.” If Fischl were half the Yankee fan Max had made him out to be, the game would no doubt be rife with land mines onto which I feared I would almost surely step with unthinking remarks that betrayed either my complete ignorance of the game or worse, my frank attraction to one of the players. Fernando could get away with not knowing the rules of baseball; he was a foreigner.

“Don’t worry,” said Max firmly. “I’ll pick you up at the train. Just call and let me know which one you’ll be on.”

After we’d hung up, I dialed Information and asked for the number of the American Bar Association. Then, without pausing to think, I dialed the number I’d been given. As it rang I waited, hardly breathing, doodling endless figure eights on the margins of Bianca Mantooth’s copy, until someone picked up.

“I’m trying to locate a lawyer named Angus Thrane,” I said. “He was once based in San Francisco, California, a long time ago. I’m not sure where he is now. I thought you might have his whereabouts on file.”

“Can you spell that last name, please?” the woman who’d answered on behalf of the American Bar Association asked in her warmly melodious voice.

While I waited on hold, I was treated to a Muzak version of some song that had played every other minute on KRIZ and KUPD when I was in junior high, in Phoenix. I couldn’t place it right away, but it had been Amanda’s absolute number-one favorite song for about three weeks. She’d performed a dance routine to this song in one of the Thrane family
extravaganza revue shows my sisters and I had occasionally foisted on our mother and Lou when we had nothing better to do with our Saturday afternoons. In a purple leotard and metallic-thread leg warmers, Amanda, bony and flat-chested and all of eleven years old, had lip-synched and slithered around the living room. Just as I recognized the song as “You Light Up My Life” and began to gag, the Muzak was cut off abruptly with a beep.

“Hello?” came the dulcet purr of the American Bar Association lady.

I fully expected her to tell me to stop bothering her, this was highly classified information and I was wasting everyone’s time. But instead, to my stupefaction, she gave me the street address and telephone number of a man named Angus Thrane, a retired attorney who had practiced in San Francisco but now lived in the San Juan Islands in Washington State.

“The San Juan Islands?” I asked skeptically. I hadn’t pictured my father in the Pacific Northwest. The climate was all wrong for him. He needed to be somewhere hot and severe and uncompromising, like the Middle East or the Arizona desert. “Are you sure?”

“Well, that’s the information we’ve got on him,” she said. “Can I help you with anything else today?”

“No,” I said in a dazed voice. “No, you’ve helped me so much already. I can’t thank you enough.”

I hung up. Then I stood by my desk, gazing into space, flexing my hands with gingerly curiosity to see whether I’d been altered biochemically somehow in the past three minutes. I looked down at what I’d written, stared at it until all the letters and numbers swam and merged and blurred. Shaking myself back to consciousness, I folded the piece of paper and put it into my pocket, forgetting it was supposed to stay here with the rest of the dog-do story.

When it was time to go meet Josh Turnbull at the offices of Waverly Productions, I stuck my head into the airspace of Frederick’s cubicle. He clutched a pencil over a typewritten page of single-spaced lines of irregular length, from which I surmised that he was laboring over his own poetry while Daphne was in a meeting. His desktop was rubbled with pink eraser detritus. A floaty tendril of longish hair hovered above his
scalp, waggling gently with the motion of his head like a phonograph-needle arm as he scanned his work.

“Frederick,” I said gently when he didn’t look up. “Sorry to bother you.”

“Jeremy!” He snapped to attention. He was stoop-shouldered; his skin had an indoor, defeated cast, as if he shaved too much and rarely went anywhere exciting. “What brings you to these parts?”

“I’m not feeling well. Can you tell Daphne I’ve gone home when she gets back from her meeting?”

“Consider it done,” he said. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

“No,” I said. “Just under the weather.”

“I hear you,” he said, moving his hands in a squidlike motion between our heads to demonstrate the wavelength we shared. “I’ve been feeling that way for twenty years. Always happy to cover for a comrade.”

“Thanks, Frederick.”

I began to edge away, but not fast enough.

“You know,” he continued, stretching a rubber band pensively between his fingers, “you’d think they’d be happy to see us go home when we’re sick.”

“You would,” I agreed swiftly, but I was caught.

“But they want us here anyway. Sick or dying, they don’t give a fuck. The fundamental axiom of the copy editor’s life is that we can’t afford a life, which is good, because then we’d know what we were missing.” He tossed the rubber band onto his desk.

I edged my elbow up to the top of the cubicle wall and rested my weight against it. Had Frederick been the type who thrived on academic striving and political intrigue, he might have been a professor, but he wasn’t, so he vented his pedagogical instincts on any random person who wandered into his sphere of influence. These impromptu diatribes were his outlet, along with reading his poetry at spoken-word slams and open-mike bookstore readings.

“It all goes like clockwork,” he said with nasal vehemence, “as long as we can manage to buy enough food to keep us strong enough to work. But when we get sick it’s our loss. No insurance, no benefits, no paid sick days. If we died, they’d just wheel us off to the dustbin and install
another drone from the supply closet.” One corner of his mouth turned up in a mocking little half-smile as he talked as if he were kidding, but I knew otherwise by then, so I didn’t laugh the way I might have several months before. “But we forget this, conveniently for them, because we’re lulled by our steady little paychecks going drip, drip, drip like Chinese water torture into our bank accounts.”

I cast a casual eye at the clock on the wall and saw that it was getting late. “Good metaphor,” I said. “If you have direct deposit, which I don’t.”

“It’s a corporate gulag, my friend,” he said. “Make no mistake about that. The absence of natural materials is a deliberate assault on passion and intellect. These soft chairs, the filtered air, the free soft drinks in the kitchen, all these denatured creature comforts are symbols of death in life.” He rapped his knuckles with a series of dull thuds on the particle board separating his cubicle from mine. “It’s hollow and flimsy and fake, but it might as well be razor wire. Before you know it, you’re fifty. I’m fifty, for example, as of last week. But you! You’re still young enough to get out alive. You’ve still got juice in you, you’ve still got hope.”

“I’m not that young,” I said, “and at the moment—”

“Go,” he said, waving me off. “Run while you can. Go! Don’t come back!” He scratched his head, not because it itched, I suspected, but because he was trying to contain his excitement at the idea of my busting out of there.

I went out to the elevator, boarded a downward car, and watched the descending numbers light up as a swooping sensation rose from the pit of my stomach to my inner ear. The lyrics to “You Light Up My Life” presented themselves cloyingly; I pushed them away. Then I walked out into the wet street without an umbrella, without a raincoat. By the time I’d gone half a block, I was sopping wet. An uptown bus veered precipitously into a stop just ahead; without thinking, I climbed its stairs, presented my Metrocard, and grabbed hold of the overhead pole just as the driver wheeled sharply back into the traffic without checking to see who might have been in his way, then muscled the bus up the avenue as if he were too enraged, bored, and homicidal to care who got hit in the process. I swayed and bobbed with the herky-jerky forward momentum, periodically checking our progress through the steamy windows.

A man bumped against me at a sudden stop. When I looked at him, he smiled. “Sorry,” he said. He was a standard-issue brown-haired guy in his mid-thirties, like me. The lines at the corners of his eyes fanned out, crinkled; he looked both amused and sympathetic, and it struck me that he was intelligent. This made me trust him immediately, as if intelligence were a moral quality like integrity or loyalty, even though I knew perfectly well it wasn’t.

I smiled back at him and couldn’t stop. I felt priapically turbocharged and giddy from the sudden, swift, unexpected possession of the information in my pocket.

“That’s all right,” I said. Our bodies were warm against each other. His face glowed in the milky air; our identically wet hair suggested hot showers, swims together in pools beneath waterfalls. We both seemed on the verge of laughing, and held our gaze. Tiny signals flashed between us, bursts of photons that penetrated my bloodstream, caromed between platelets in hot saffron bursts. Here he was. I took a deep breath to say something else to him, I wasn’t sure what. The force of my inhalation seemed to draw him in closer, so near that my exhaled words could have passed from my lips to his ear like a kiss.

Just then the bus stopped again and people got on and off, jostling me and forcing me to retreat farther along toward the rear of the bus. My lungs leaked their cargo in an inaudible little puff. In the new configuration, when the bus started up again, the brown-haired man was wedged into a pole-hanging crowd with his back to me. We had been separated by a short, pushy woman whose fat little arm shot assertively skyward in front of my face to grasp the pole. She had floury hands, as if she’d been rolling pizza dough; I wanted none of her. I tried to telegraph a silent message to the back of his head, but he didn’t turn around to meet my eye again, and got off at the next stop. His retreating raincoat, tan and slightly dingy, blended into the crowd of identical raincoats and vanished. The bus lurched on, dim and cavernous as a warehouse.

Now, all of a sudden, my father was in the San Juan Islands. His whereabouts were no longer unknown, he was no longer dead or abroad or lost or a figment of anyone’s imagination. He had been there all along, just a phone call away, which also meant that he could have found me at any time. I wasn’t listed in the phone book and neither were my mother
or sisters, but the Rheingolds had lived in the same apartment on Eighty-ninth Street since the early sixties and had had the same listed telephone number all that time. Angus had known them; the Rheingolds and Thranes had gone camping together, visited each other, had friends in common. As far as I knew, Angus had made no effort to contact them; he hadn’t cared to learn whether we’d survived without him, how we’d all turned out. This made the whole question of contacting him slightly more complicated. But I had absolutely nothing to lose, I told myself as I climbed down the bus steps onto the relative safety of the pavement. I’d already lost him.

An elevator as big as a bathroom took me to the eleventh floor of the Marks Building. The receptionist sat at a desk under spiky black letters that said “Waverly Productions.” Her hair was in an impeccable, shining bun that accentuated her deerlike head; her glistening eyes were focused unblinkingly on me. For the split second it took for the elevator doors to shut behind me, she and I assessed each other thoroughly and decided we were not kindred spirits. “I’m Jeremy Thrane,” I blurted out then, crossing the bare expanse of creaking, buffed hardwood floor, shedding water like a dog. “I have an appointment with Josh Turnbull at three-thirty. I think I’m a little early.”

“Have a seat,” she said coolly. “Can I offer you some bottled water? Coffee?”

“No,” I said, “I’m fine. Well, okay, some water would be great. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble,” she said with bland disdain. She leaned over from the waist like a dancer to open a cube refrigerator on the floor, then handed me a small, cold, wet plastic bottle and gestured to a pair of black leather armchairs under a potted ficus. As I sat damply in one and twisted the lid off the bottle, she picked up her telephone, pressed a button, moved her lips without making a sound, and hung up. “He’ll be with you shortly,” she said to me, then resumed her motionless, expressionless position, staring at the elevators in readiness to greet the next arrival, as if she’d hit some internal reset button.

My eyes began to water; it had been dark outside, but the windows up here let in inexplicably bright light. I noticed a distinct smell of celery, a sharp, thin odor that could have come from the barely dry plaster
on these spanking-new walls or vapor from the recent varnish on the floors. Or maybe it was the receptionist’s perfume; it suited her. Then I was seized with a sudden attack of flatulence that I was unable to discharge freely in the proximity of the snooty bunhead. As the time ticked by and Josh failed to materialize, the temptation became increasingly overwhelming to get out of there, release my excess gas, then get myself a grilled cheese on rye and a bowl of tomato soup at a diner somewhere.

Just as I was about to bail, I heard a male voice saying my name. I parked my half-drunk water bottle behind a leg of my chair, then stood up and shook the hand I was offered. Josh turned out to be a tall blond guy in a pair of crease-free blue pants and blindingly clean white Oxford shirt. I followed him down a short hall and into a room filled with couches and low tables, where we sank into facing couches at the same time. Then a young Chinese woman came in through a door I hadn’t noticed and perched smiling on the arm of Josh’s couch, pad and pencil at the ready. She had shiny shoulder-length hair and wore a straight pink skirt and a blouse that was the feminine version of Josh’s shirt. Same buttons, even: expensive-looking mother-of-pearl discs.