Jeremy Thrane (20 page)

“I made it past the three-headed watchdog,” I said. “I solved the riddle and he had to let me pass.”

“You’re mixing up your Cerberus and your Sphinx,” she said. “You might as well come and sit on the toilet seat and talk to me.”

“Okay,” I said with a surge of cozy, sociable happiness, and perched on the plushly cushioned toilet seat. She had created quite a little nest for herself in there. An empty cup and bowl were on the tiled floor by the tub. She was leaning back against an inflatable pillow, her face glistening and rosy, her hair tied up in a scarf. She rearranged the bubbles to conceal most of herself. They made tiny popping noises.

“Hello there,” she said.

“It’s like a sauna in here.”

“I like it hot,” she said. “It makes my bones feel warmer.”

“I’ve missed you, Felicia,” I said.

“Quite frankly,” she said, “you haven’t missed a thing. I have never felt so hellishly depressed in my whole life. My therapist wants to put me on Prozac, but I said no more drugs, I’m going to tough it out.”

“Good for you,” I said. I handed her one of the glasses of whiskey. “I brought you something to warm your insides. I thought we could drink to rehab.”

She handed it back to me. “I can’t anymore,” she said. “I quit all that, remember?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, staring hard at her. “I thought you said you didn’t have to stop drinking because you didn’t have a drinking problem.”

“Drinking defeats the purpose of the program,” she said impatiently. “Alcohol is a drug like any other.”

“No wonder you’re depressed,” I said. She didn’t laugh. “That was a joke, Felicia,” I added. I set her untouched glass on the floor by the other dishes and took a swig of my own.

“So,” she said, “what are you up to these days? Are you still writing pornography for that creepy guy you knew in high school?”

“Yes,” I said with the queasy anxiety I always felt when I thought about Sebastian. “He pays me a lot of money.”

“Hang on,” she said. “I’m getting out. Avert your eyes, please.”

I closed my eyes while she sloshed her way out of the tub. I heard busy toweling sounds, then the slick whir of roll-on deodorant, and then she said, “All right, everything’s tucked away in the bathrobe. Let’s go sit on the couch and throw spitballs at Wayne.”

“I thought you loved Wayne,” I said.

“Adore,” she said, making a face. “He’s been getting on my nerves so much lately, I’d fire him if I just could face training someone else. But the way I’m feeling these days, all I really want to do is sleep. Let’s see what’s on TV.”

We boarded the leather couch, which enfolded us in its billowing depths. I reached for the remote control and switched on her grand old console TV, which had been retrofitted with cable technology, and therefore had crisp, clear reception and something like ten thousand channels
to choose from. It throbbed to wavering life, then resolved itself into a close-up of a raven-haired girl with shining red lips and dark wet eyes saying something in Spanish, then a shot of a barrel-chested lad with lips like twin earthworms and a wavy, forceful coif so perfectly sculpted, it could have been made of plastic, like Ken’s hair.

“Oh,” said Felicia, “my favorite novela. She’s going to leave him for his crippled twin brother, I just know it.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Not a word,” she said. “I invent plots to go with the dialogue. You’d be amazed how often I’m right.”

“I already am,” I said ruefully.

“Oh, because I told you Ted was a selfish, heartless person just like me? See, it’s a gift. Now watch, she’s going to slap him, you can tell by the way her eyes are narrowing like that. Watch. I knew it!”

After a few minutes of this, I flicked my way through a sitcom whose laugh track sounded as if the studio audience contained a number of hyenas and gibbons, several car commercials of identically enormous SUVs churning through pristine rain forests, a seventies movie where the men sported bell-bottom-shaped sideburns and the women had waterfall hairdos and false eyelashes, a cheesy, overwrought hip-hop video, and finally a movie starring, to my amazement, Ted.

“Oh my God,” Felicia and I said in unison, and looked at each other, laughing.

“Look at him,” I said. “He looks so young.”

“He was so cute,” she said wistfully.

It was one of his early movies, a not-bad romantic comedy about a psychiatrist who fell in love with a suicidal patient. Ted was completely unconvincing as the psychiatrist, but he was so cocky and high-spirited, it didn’t matter that he’d been miscast. I nipped at my glass, refilled it, nipped some more.

Gary O’Nan’s little item had duly appeared in
Downtown
shortly after Giselle’s premiere, only it had turned out to be not so little after all. Other gossip columnists had naturally pounced on this like vultures on Angus; a wild inferno of gossip had then spread through the industry, attracted the notice of the mainstream press, eventually and inevitably
reached Giselle herself. Throughout this furor, I’d turned down requests for interviews, offers to sell “my story” to tabloids, rags, glossies, and upscale magazines alike, shielded my face from the occasional clued-in paparazzo, evaded a couple of reporters intent on getting me to say something, anything at all, so they could quote me in whatever update they were concocting for their columns.

Eventually, as always, their rabid attention moved on to fresher scandals, leaving me reeling a little in its rocking, fluffy wake. The overall public reaction was on the whole supportive of Ted, but it wasn’t primarily the public whose reaction Ted had feared. Just before Christmas, Giselle had filed for a legal separation; Ted’s parents had no doubt been told or read about it or heard or found out as well. Of course, I felt a certain amount of compassion for him, but most of all I also felt empty, neutral, numb, as if the slate had been, in some indefinable way, wiped clean. I didn’t know much about Ted’s reaction to any of this. As far as I knew, he hadn’t given any interviews. He’d effectively disappeared from the public eye, and I didn’t blame him. He and I hadn’t spoken since the night of the premiere.

“You know what?” Felicia said suddenly. “I miss him.”

“Me too.”

“I know you do,” she said, her voice syrupy with the newfound empathy she’d picked up at rehab camp.

“I’m not pining for him, Felicia,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I’ve moved on, I just miss his company sometimes.” I turned the TV off and looked out the window at the early darkness. “He was a lot of fun.”

“Are you taking care of yourself these days?”

“What do you mean?”

“When’s the last time you got your hair cut?”

“I’m growing it out,” I said. “It’s warmer that way.”

“When did you last go to the dentist?”

I didn’t answer; I couldn’t remember.

“See, I knew it. Wayne,” she called imperiously, “don’t you have a dentist appointment tomorrow?”

Wayne was across the room in a splotch of lamplight on the floor, making something that involved Scotch tape, many small squares of colored
paper, and a lot of bending over. He stood up, rubbing his lower back. “At ten,” he said. “Just a checkup and cleaning; I shouldn’t be long.”

“Well, you’ll have to reschedule. Call and tell them your slot has been filled by Jeremy Thrane, and make a new appointment for yourself.”

Wayne contemplatively fingered his sagging forelock, darting glances around the loft like a cornered rat. “Felicia,” he said after a moment, “it’s my dentist appointment.”

“Well, I know, but you’re giving it to Jeremy. He needs it more than you do.”

“Don’t, Wayne,” I said. “I can make my own dentist appointment.”

“But you won’t,” said Felicia. She wrapped herself more securely in her red flannel bathrobe and collapsed against the couch cushions as if being pinned there by gale force winds. “You guys, cooperate with me here, don’t be such a pair of pills. Wayne, make that call and give Jeremy the information. And Jeremy, ten tomorrow, don’t you dare oversleep.”

Wayne and I exchanged a look before he stalked off to get the cordless phone from the kitchen counter. A moment later I could hear him muttering to someone I surmised was the receptionist.

“What’s got into you?” I asked her.

“This is a hard time for me,” she said. “A transitional time. I’m learning how to be in the world again. Remembering how to manage daily life on my own. And for some reason, it helps to think about someone else for a change. Listen, are you eating enough fruits and vegetables? I’ve got a juicer now, I could have Wayne whip you up a—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Wayne’s done enough for me today. Anyway, I’m going over to Sebastian’s for dinner.”

“I’m worried about you,” she said mulishly.

I regarded her with skeptical amusement. “You are? You haven’t returned my calls in three weeks.”

“I know,” she said without apology. “It’s just one of those daily things, using the telephone as a clean and sober person. I haven’t quite mastered that skill yet, but I think about you a lot. I would have Wayne call you and tell you, but I know you can’t stand him.”

Wayne and I exchanged another brief look from across the room. He had finished his phone call and was once again taping the colored squares of paper together.

“Have you heard from Ted since Giselle kicked him out?” I asked, trying to sound casually curious, like an old friend without an agenda. “Where is he living now?”

“I have no idea,” said Felicia. “I called him from rehab same as I called you, to, you know, apologize for my bad behavior and all that. I haven’t spoken to him since I got out. I don’t think he’s very pleased with either one of us. He seems to think I had something to do with that gossip column, but where he got that idea I haven’t a clue. He said there was no apology I could make that would atone for what I’d done to him. No, he’s not feeling too warmly toward us at all. Do you want a glass of water or something? You’re sweating.”

“That’s because it’s stifling in here! Why don’t you turn down the heat? And it’s so dark.”

“Are you too hot over there, Wayne?” she called.

“Not really,” came his snotty little voice.

“And you have enough light to see what you’re doing?”

He pretended not to hear this.

“I feel sort of bad about Ted,” Felicia went on. “We shouldn’t have done that, Jeremy, it was wrong. He was our friend. I’m resolving my trust issues right now; my therapist thinks I pushed Ted away preemptively, before he could push me away, because I have abandonment issues from when I was a little girl and my parents would go on those long trips without me. I tried to explain all this to Ted when I called him, but I don’t think he heard me at all.”

“We did nothing wrong,” I said firmly. “We were overheard, remember? Gary knew everything. We just filled in a couple of blanks for him, that’s all.”

She plucked at the sleeve of her robe, unraveling a little thread and worrying it with her thumbnail. “Well, I see it differently now,” she said.

“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?”

She gave me a coy look from under her eyelashes. “Come on now, Jeremy, don’t be like that. I haven’t been avoiding you.”

Filled with a sudden, overwhelming need to get out of there, I looked at my watch and saw that I wasn’t due at Sebastian’s for almost an hour. “Whoa, it’s late!” I said. “I’d better go. I just dropped in for a minute, I didn’t mean to stay this long.”

“Really?” she said contritely. “Come again soon. I’ll make you a fresh juice. That’s one of the touchstones I use to help me leapfrog through each day. I need them right now. A bubble bath every afternoon, that’s another one.”

“Some other people might use a job, grocery shopping, paying bills, those sorts of things,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “And you know what? They’re lucky; I have to find my own touchstones and it’s not always that easy. I don’t care how spoiled that sounds, it’s true.”

Wayne handed me a slip of paper as I was leaving. “The appointment was for X rays too,” he said poisonously. “Upper and lower.”

“Sorry,” I said. I tried to look apologetic, but a triumphant smile stole over my face instead; I couldn’t prevent it, although I had no idea what it was doing there.

I bounced down the stairs, plunged into the ice-blue evening and walked down Church Street to the tip of Manhattan with the wind blowing my coat against my spine. I stood for a while by the railing along the Battery promenade near the ferry terminal, looking out over the water at the freighters and pleasure-cruise ships strung with lights. After a while, without premeditation, I sat on a chilly bench, cradling the whiskey bottle in the crook of my arm, and began to sing as loudly as I could, since there was no one around to take me for a drunk or a lunatic, in a soulful baritone that sounded almost exactly like Angus’s: “In Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty, ’twas there that I first met sweet Molly Malone. She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh.’ ”

My father had taught me the lyrics to this and a lot of other old, mostly forgotten songs; he’d learned them all as a boy, up in the attic in his family’s house outside of St. Paul. He’d found a box of his grandfather’s old glee club sheet music and gradually memorized the songs, learning them note by note. Knowing this told me both everything and nothing about him.

“She was a fishmonger, and that was no wonder, her mother and father were fishmongers too. They wheeled their wheelbarrows, through streets broad and narrow, crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh.’ ” During the late sixties and early seventies, my father and his brotherhood of other crazy Marxist lawyers, Ed and Murray, had hung out in San Francisco jazz clubs. I imagined them hunkered together around a table, buying each other rounds of whiskey and beer till closing time, then
smoking joints in the car on the way to the all-night bowling alley. “She died of the fever, and nothing could save her, and that was the end of sweet Molly Malone. Now her ghost wheels her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow, crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh.’ ” I probably would have liked my father a lot if I’d known him, despite everything, and he might have liked me too: Maybe that was the crucial thing I’d left out of my novel.