Jeremy Thrane (38 page)

“I’ll be over there,” I said shortly, “talking to the famous artist.”

“Well, she’s not famous yet,” said Phil, busily working his focus dials, “but give her a day or two.”

Trembling with an intense emotion I couldn’t quite identify, or possibly a welter of different emotions I might have been able to parse out later, in retrospect, if I cared to, I wended my unsteady way through the crowd, which seemed to have doubled since I had arrived.

Felicia was across the room, talking to several good-looking men. Gary, although not technically good-looking, was among them, holding a pen and a notebook, in which he was busily scribbling as if he were a real journalist instead of whatever he actually was.

“Hi, Gary,” I said to him.

He looked up eagerly, but when he saw that it was only me, his enthusiasm
faded visibly. He had been perfectly happy to see me at Giselle’s premiere, back when I was a potential fount of gossip material for him, but now that I was a lowly copy editor at the magazine where he was a bona fide columnist, his attitude toward me had understandably altered.

“Hi there,” he answered, and went back to whatever he was writing.

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a feeling,” Felicia was saying, her accent oozing enough southernness to incite another civil war, “since you don’t really feel anything at all, that’s the point. The Plexiglas over the photographs is meant to suggest a sense of imperviousness, the way it makes you feel, so invulnerable and superior. It’s bulletproof, by the way, same as they use in taxicabs and liquor stores. The idea is,” she added, laughing a little, “everyone sees right through it.”

“They see through it,” muttered Gary, writing busily.

“It’s quite impressive,” said a pouty-lipped faun with a pan-European accent; he sported a porkpie hat and a scruffy little goatee. I would have bet he was named Ronni or Rudi, one of those nicknames inexplicably shared by Eurotrash hipster dudes and preteen Valley girls.

Felicia’s eyes flicked to mine as if she’d known all along that I was standing right there.

“Thank you,” she said. “Jeremy!”

She detached herself from them all and sidled over to me and kissed my unresponsive cheek. She had to stand on tiptoe to reach it, because I didn’t bend even slightly.

I looked into her face. Nine months ago she had been ethereal as a flamingo, but all that spooky beauty was gone; she looked much prettier now, younger, gleaming, and curvaceous, and as commonplace as a robin. Her bare arms were stringy with new muscle; her rosy flesh thrummed with a peppery buzz of ambition it could barely contain. She felt hot and solid and tough. I could feel how jacked-up she was. The whites of her eyes were so clear they looked unreal, and she smelled soapily clean, like a freshly bathed boy.

“Flowers for me? You sweetheart!”

As she embraced me, I experienced the strangest jolt of attraction I’d ever felt in my entire life. Fumes from the nonalcoholic wine I held
wafted up to my nostrils, fruity and coarse; I breathed them in as if they were in fact an amulet against her palpable, audacious, boyish charms. I backed away from her.

“Actually, they’re for someone else,” I said. “I just came over to say hello and good-bye. I’ve meeting a friend.”

“You’re leaving already?” she said, slightly put out. “You just got here. Well, thank you for coming, and I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch. As you can see, I’ve been busy getting this together. But before you go, tell me, and be frank now, how do you like the show?”

I hesitated just long enough for her to notice. “It’s okay,” I said.

She looked at me, chewing her lip, waiting for me to continue. “I thought you’d have a lot more to say than that,” she said after a moment. “Especially about the darkest moment of our friendship.”

“Did you,” I said in my homo voice. “Sorry to let you down. Goodbye, Felicia.”

“Wait,” she said. “I swear I didn’t know at the time. I was taping everything in those days for something else I was working on. The recorder was on, that’s all. When I heard our conversation, it seemed perfect for this piece.”

“You had the recorder on the whole time we were at Benito’s?”

“It didn’t occur to me to mention it,” she said.

“So you taped that whole conversation about Ted too?” I said, aghast.

“Well, I erased that,” she said shiftily, suddenly looking away from me.

“You did not,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What if you used me as a character in a novel, and repeated one of our conversations verbatim? Wouldn’t that be exactly the same thing?”

I looked at her. She held my gaze; it reminded me of our shielding conversational technique, back when we’d protected each other from conversations like this one.

“No,” I said musingly. “It really wouldn’t be the same thing at all. You made an actual tape of my voice and made a replica of me with a stupid expression on its face.”

“Is that what I did?” she gasped, half laughing. “Is that what you call it?”

“If I put you in a novel, I would give you a whole array of stupid expressions, and I would try to disguise you enough so no one but you would know it was you,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Congratulations. I think you’re going to be a big success.”

She touched my arm as I turned to leave and said lightly, “Jeremy, my feelings for you are still exactly the same as they ever were. They haven’t changed at all.”

“Oh,” I said, watching her expression, “but mine for you have.”

I ambled up Broadway, enjoying the sweet, green, carefree smell of late spring that vanquished bus exhaust, garbage fumes, and dried urine. I hadn’t said good-bye to Sebastian, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at all, at least not for the first two or three blocks. I cruised smoothly along in autopilot, meshing and interlocking like a cog with my fellow pedestrians in an intricate human machine, gliding past wad-dlers and dawdlers, hitting all the green lights.

But as I walked, my mood gradually darkened. As I crossed Canal Street, I suffered a piercing convulsion in my stomach that felt like gas, but wasn’t gas, and found myself darting and bumbling erratically. Maybe I had been too hard on Felicia just now. Maybe I had overreacted, maybe she hadn’t meant any harm with her damn diorama. Maybe the mini-Jeremy and the recording of our conversation had been meant as a tribute. And maybe my unwillingness to compromise my idealized, archaic insistence on authenticity weighed me down like a cargo of lead and sand while everyone else raced lightly on ahead, realizing their ambitions, finding mates, moving on to fulfilled and carefree lives, unhampered by useless pangs of conscience, uncircumscribed by all this superannuated deadweight I seemed to have mistaken for ballast.

A woman laden with shopping bags came charging toward me. I dodged to the right to let her pass, but she moved along with me, directly into my path. Then we both stepped to the left in awkward congruity, then to the right again. She rolled her eyes and said with brisk exasperation, “Stand still and I’ll go around you,” then veered around me and continued on her way.

I stood there for a moment and took a deep breath, considering my options, then went into a dark old-man bar, sat on a stool, ordered a vodka on the rocks. My drink came. I took a good long pull on it and
then breathed deeply again. The bar smelled comfortingly of stale cigarettes and mold.

But this was just how I was; I couldn’t be any other way. If I found myself alone in the world, at least I was alone with the knowledge that I had always tried to be true to myself.

Another pang clutched my innards. Why the hell wasn’t anybody buying my novel? Maybe the whole exercise of being true to myself was one of the very things I clung to out of the misguided belief that anything so ponderous must be valuable. People who jettisoned such things seemed to be rewarded with money, love, success; everyone I knew seemed happier and lighter than I was. The common, shallow pool they swam in was cloudy and of dubious aroma, but it buoyed them, allowed them to bob carelessly around and bump against each other; its murk provided concealment, and its tepid-bathlike warmth invited them never to emerge into the air, which felt so much colder in comparison.

I took another gulp of my drink. Its warmth spread through my chest. I chuckled at the image of myself, sitting all straight and proud on my high horse, nostrils flaring at the whiffs of mediocrity and pretension drifting up from the darkling plain.

“To
The Way of All Flesh
,” I said aloud as I toasted the air in front of me.

“Come again?” said the gentleman to my right.

“The movie I wrote,” I said. “They’re shooting it soon. It’s already generating a lot of buzz, apparently.”

He looked impressed, if a tad mystified. “Here’s to it,” he said, and we clacked glasses. I left a tip under my empty glass, picked up my flowers, and went out again into the warm, spring-scented evening. I bought a newspaper, opened it to the theater section, and stood under a streetlamp while I searched for the address of the Bankhead Theater, and once I’d found it, there was nothing for me to do but go there, to the far edge of the West Village. It was nine-forty; Ted’s play had started at eight. By the time I got there, it would probably just be ending. I headed fast up Seventh Avenue South, secure in the knowledge that I was destined to stand at the stage door, waiting for Ted to emerge after tonight’s performance, bouquet in the crook of my arm.

The fragrant, humid air felt drenched with life in all its forms and
stages; new leaves, floating spores, human pheromones, geraniums in pots on fire escapes, earth exhaling and sprouting wherever it could. My skin osmotically absorbed this zing; although I was exhausted and my feet were sore, the air itself kept me going forward at a youthful clip. Light from streetlamps shimmered on the pavement like leaf-thin, ancient-looking, golden-bronze ice, so I half expected to slip on it as I walked through its irregular pools. Colored neon bar and bodega signs glanced off the mica in the concrete, looking like the thinnest smears of colored water, red and blue and green; the whole city was wet with light. Window squares shone from dark apartment towers with a yellowish aquarium glow. Airplane lights trundled far overhead through a pink sky, as blurred and slow-going as the lights of boats seen from the ocean floor.

I found the Bankhead Repertory Theater on a crooked cobblestone street in the meat district. The address turned out to be that of an old factory building. There was no sign of any theater on the premises beyond the small plaque near the buzzer that said “Bankhead Rep.” I pressed it; there was no response. No doubt they paid no attention to it when there was a show in progress. It was now just after ten, so I guessed I didn’t have long to wait until the audience dispersed; I would go up and knock on his dressing room door instead of waiting for him to emerge. I envisioned myself walking down a dark hallway toward a glittery star on a door that opened at my knock to reveal a small room strewn with costumes, bright bulbs burning around a long mirror, and Ted, his makeup smeared with cold cream, sitting at a long, cluttered counter. I had seen too many old movies, read too many novels, not to have such a scene spring full-blown into my imagination at the mere thought of the words “dressing room.”

Just then the door buzzed, and without thinking I pushed it open. I climbed the stairs to the third landing, where I pushed open a heavy door marked “Bankhead Rep” in stenciled white letters. Immediately, I found myself in a hot, stuffy, brightly lit little antechamber filled with people, many of whom held plastic cups of bad red wine, most of whom were talking and gesturing with the up-with-people ebullience of theatrical hopefuls. Before I could chicken out, I pushed my way through them to a desk and said to the plump, dreadlocked girl sitting there,
“I’m looking for Ted Masterson. Can you tell me where to find his dressing room?”

“Well, they’re all backstage changing right now. It’s a total madhouse. Do you want to send him a message? I can tell him you’re out here.”

“Actually,” I stammered, thinking fast, “I was hoping he would meet me for a drink. I’ll be at Florent. My name is Jeremy Thrane. You promise you’ll tell him?”

“Jeremy,” she repeated. “Okay, I’ll tell him.” She wrote my name on a small slip of paper as I spelled it aloud for her, then she waggled it at me in farewell. I fought my way free of the rabidly peppy crowd and descended the stairs on shaky legs, then went along to Florent. I went in, slid onto a stool at the counter, and ordered a martini.

This was not the ideal place for a reunion. It was crowded and hugger-mugger; everyone could overhear everyone else’s conversations. I had to pee very badly, but I didn’t dare leave my post to go to the bathroom; what if he came in and didn’t see me? He’d go away and I’d never see him again, I was pretty sure, and then I’d lose my momentum, my impetus, my determination to have it out with him once and for all, whatever was making me sit there, staring out the window, tapping my foot in apprehension.

Finally, when I was beginning to think my bladder would explode before I ever saw Ted again, I saw him in front of Florent with several other men. They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, talking and gesturing.

“Can I get another martini?” I said to the bartender. “No olives.”

“Put it on your tab?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. My lips were trembling; my hand shook as I tried to raise my glass to my mouth. Ted came in just as his fresh, brimming drink was set on the counter. He came over to me, smiling warmly, which greatly shocked but didn’t disappoint me. “Hello there,” he said, sitting on the stool next to mine. “This is an unexpected surprise. Excuse me,” he said to a passing waiter, “there are going to be five of us in a couple of minutes. Is it possible to get a table? Want to join us, Jeremy? They all went to get cigarettes.”

He looked exactly the same. He wore jeans and a button-down shirt. He was freshly shaven; there was no sign of makeup on his face.

“I ordered you a drink,” I said intensely, feeling like a crazy person, feeling as if I were about to sing an aria or get down on bended knee. He was so mild, so casual and unaccusatory, almost indifferent; this was not at all how I had imagined the tenor of our reunion to be. “Here,” I said, and gestured to the martini.