Jeremy Thrane (21 page)

At twenty to seven, I headed into the wind and walked back up to Sebastian’s building, which was just three blocks west of Felicia’s. I arrived exactly on time, almost to the minute. My saliva had frozen on my lips and the bulb at the end of my nose was a shining, multifaceted red jewel I could have snapped off and had set in gold filigree and hung around my neck.

“Jeremy!” Sebastian cried when I emerged from the elevator, which gave directly into his foyer since he occupied the entire top floor. Warm air enveloped me immediately, invitingly, not stiflingly like the air at Felicia’s. I gave myself over to it as if to an embrace.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, beaming. “Let me take your wraps.” One of the things I had to like about Sebastian was his inability to hide what he was feeling; in spite of myself, I found it heartwarming to be greeted with such frank enthusiasm by my putative employer. He hooked my coat and scarf onto a peg in the entryway while I stowed the whiskey underneath; Sebastian didn’t drink hard alcohol. “I hope you’re hungry. I’m making corn bisque and crab omelets.”

“That sounds good,” I said, suddenly ravenous.

“I opened a bottle of Cabernet, it’s been breathing for twenty minutes and should be ready to drink about now, but if you’d rather something a little more, oh, I don’t know, what do I know about wine? The man at the store said it was good, and so I laid in a case or two.”

“Cabernet sounds fine,” I said with a straight face. I’d learned the hard way that Sebastian disliked being laughed at for his habit of apologizing for his generosity. He didn’t say so, exactly; he just retreated momentarily into an affronted silence that lasted only until his natural earnest ebullience reasserted itself.

He ushered me to the low divan by the fake crackling electric log in
the fake fireplace and seated me, then disappeared for a moment. The prospect of a glass of Sebastian’s costly, exciting wine cheered me so much, I wanted to clack my heels together in a little jig, but I stayed still, and waited quietly.

“Here you are,” he said as he handed me a glass. “If you don’t like it, just say so and I’ll open something else. But before we get down to it, why don’t I just run your new work upstairs.”

“It’s in my coat pocket,” I said. “Let me get it, just a sec.”

He was already halfway to the foyer. “No, no, that’s all right,” he said, reaching into my coat.

“The inner pocket,” I told him resignedly, swallowing my annoyance. In an odd way, Sebastian’s pushy largesse felt less genuinely considerate than Felicia’s frank selfishness.

“I’ll take a look at it after dinner,” said Sebastian, coming briskly down the stairs. “Something to look forward to.” He sat on an ottoman with his usual ungainly decorousness, crossing his legs at the ankles and slumping his spine. “How is the wine?”

“It’s good,” I said, an intentional understatement.

He dipped his tongue into his glass, then made a series of little wet nursing-kitten sounds. He looked like a big cartoon boy; his face was as soft and featureless as a boiled lima bean, his body as squishy and formless as a pastry tube. He lacked the sarcous density that would have lent dignity to his passions and enthusiasms. Tonight he wore a navy-blue turtleneck and baggy brown corduroy trousers. His chestnut-brown hair sprang in wiry clumps from the bald spot on the crown of his head.

“Oh!” he said suddenly. “The hors d’oeuvre plate. I’ll be right back.”

He set his glass down, disappeared, then came back bearing a hexagonal black lacquered tray. I knew this tray well. He hauled it out and loaded it with little bits of color-coordinated food every time I set foot in his place. Tonight it held small mounds of gherkins, pickled beets, green olives, red-dyed pistachios, green grapes, and tiny teardrop-shaped tomatoes.

“Now,” he said, settling himself again on his ottoman, “tell me what you’ve been up to! And then I want to talk about something else. I have a surprise for you.”

“I finished my novel today,” I said.

“To you, then!” He held his glass high in the air. I lifted mine a little, and we drank. “Will you send it to your agent?”

“I don’t have an agent yet. I have to find one.”

“But I thought—the script I just read was—”

“That’s my movie agent,” I said, “and anyway, that script is a piece of—”

“A masterpiece! I finished it this morning. I read it in one sitting; I could not put it down.”

“Well, thank you, that means a lot to—”

“That’s my surprise!” he said. “I’m going to bankroll it. What do you call it, produce it. I spoke to your agent today about it. The ending is so beautiful—” He stopped, staring intently at me, so intently I couldn’t look away from him, or squirm.

“I—well, thanks,” I said, caught mid-munch on a salty little gherkin. “You don’t think it’s too weird and absurd? And pointlessly kinky?”

“First of all, not one of those qualities is even remotely negative, in my opinion. And second, no! It’s not too anything, it’s even better than your writing for
Boytoy
, and that’s saying a lot. I always admired your writing; even back in high school I knew you were marked for greatness.”

Back in high school he had acutely embarrassed me with his unasked-for admiration. Now, twenty years later, with money he’d made from his porn rag, he was planning to produce a script I’d written in a week. In some odd way, this struck me as perfectly appropriate.

I cracked open a pistachio with my teeth and put the lurid halves of its shell on my knee for lack of anywhere better. Sebastian leapt up, fetched an ashtray from the marble mantelpiece, and set it on the floor by my foot. As he did so, I felt a brief unconscious fear that he would try to touch me in some way and braced myself, but without a glance in my direction he returned to his ottoman. I relaxed and dropped the nutshell into the ashtray, which was shiny, pink, and swan-shaped, and could have been the genitalia of some theme-park Disney character.

“Well, that’s what I think, anyway, for whatever my opinion is worth,” Sebastian added somewhat stiffly without looking at me, as if he
had discerned my mental recoil from him and was wounded, not by the implicit rejection, but by my lack of trust in his utter propriety where I was concerned. “I know I’m not the most literary man on the planet, but I know what I like, and it’s stood me in good stead all these years.”

“Another toast, Sebastian.” I lifted my glass. “To bachelor bliss.”

Sebastian looked startled for an instant, as if he’d been expecting me to say something very different, then said somewhat lugubriously, “To bachelor bliss, then.” When he leaned over to bash his wineglass against mine, he almost spilled some on the old Persian rug. He got tipsy implausibly fast, after several sips in fact, which led me to think he was highly suggestible, so the smell and taste of alcohol induced a psychosomatic giddiness in him.

I noticed that he was looking at me searchingly.

“Are you all right, Jeremy?” he asked suddenly.

Now it was my turn to be startled. “Why is everyone asking me this?”

“You seem sad,” he said simply. “About everything in general, or something in particular, I don’t know which it is.”

I considered this for a moment; my instinctive urge to say something flippant met a stronger reluctance to deflect this attentive empathy, a too-rare commodity these days. The past few months had been filled with soul searching and scrambling for me, two highly incompatible activities. My mother was understandably taken up with her own troubles; Max and Fernando had vanished into a cloud of torrid eroticism; Felicia was sequestered with Wayne and her touchstones; Amanda had just returned from a protracted tour with her band; Ted was gone.

“Maybe it’s both,” I said in a rush. “I have a feeling lately. It’s hard to explain; it’s as if I’m not living life to the fullest, not making the most of my time on earth, swimming in the top six inches of the ocean, if that makes any sense.”

“You’re lonely,” he said. “Of course it makes sense.”

“I am lonely, it’s true,” I said. “But you know, I’ve never been lonely before, even when Ted was gone for months at a time. Somehow my solitude was always infused with him even when he wasn’t there.”

“Yes,” said Sebastian. “I can see how that could be the case.”

“I don’t like this at all,” I said. “In spite of all my daily activities, I’m bobbing along up here, nothing is forcing me to go deeper, or I don’t have enough ballast. I know there’s a whole other world down there; I can feel it, but I can’t get to it.”

“You’re referring to your bachelor bliss, aren’t you, and it isn’t bliss at all. It manifests itself as an internal problem, a depression, an emptiness, but really, the ballast you’re talking about is wholly external.”

“Maybe,” I said skeptically, wondering how he always managed to worm out of me my deepest, more fiercely guarded feelings. No one else had this effect on me, not even Max or Felicia, my two oldest and closest friends. I supposed it was because Sebastian’s own complete lack of guile made it seem futile to try to mask any feelings of weakness out of pride or fear of exposure, so I had nothing to fear from him. Or maybe my newfound loneliness was making me say and do things I wouldn’t ordinarily have done.

“You are in mourning, Jeremy,” said Sebastian. “It’ll pass, with time.”

“But this feeling also has to do with getting older, the sense that there’s only limited time left in my life to do the things I want to do.” A distressingly plaintive note had crept into my voice; I forced myself to stop talking. This sort of disclosure was not something I normally allowed myself to make even to myself. Self-pity, I had found, fed on itself; it was host and parasite rolled into one.

“We think we know we’re going to die someday, but we don’t really,” Sebastian said crisply. “It’s like final exams in college. We’re never really prepared for it, no matter how old we are when it happens, and meanwhile we fritter away our study time.” He brushed his hands on his trousers and stood up. “Would you like to move to the dining room and eat our supper? I’ll just whip up the omelets, and then we’ll be all set. Now, I used canned crabmeat, I hope you don’t mind; the crabs at the fish market looked a little seedy, and the canned stuff is not bad. Come sit at the table while I cook.”

I followed Sebastian over to the far end of the loft where the kitchen and dining area were, and sat at the table while he went around the island and got down to business, pulling things out of the refrigerator.

“I’m serious about your script,” he said, cracking eggs into a red bowl and poking them with a whisk to break the yolks. “I know you think this is idle chatter, but I mean business.”

“Well, I hope you won’t blame me when it turns out to be a losing proposition.”

“Ah, but it’s not going to be a losing proposition,” he said as he flicked a pat of butter into the hot omelet pan.

“I hope you’re right.”

The air filled with the rich, melting smell that had been so patently absent from my apartment this afternoon. Sebastian poured the beaten eggs into the pan with a sizzle of fat, then busied himself opening the can of crabmeat. “Do you like capers?”

“I do.”

“You’ll find some in your omelet, then. I think it goes extremely well with crab.”

I watched him occupy himself at the stove for a while. Poor Sebastian. Whether I liked it or not, he and I were the same kind, sensitive plants who felt everything very strongly, our lily-white hands clasped to our frail chests, earnestly importuning: “Lord, I do fear/Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year/My soul is all but out of me. Let fall/No burning leaf—prithee, let no bird call.” My old neighbor Dina Sandusky was another such teabag who hadn’t steeped quite long enough in the pot. So was Felicia, and so, come to think of it, were all the people I tended to attract, except Ted. In a science fiction movie, our species would have been depicted as gelatinous quivering forms with two giant rubber eyeballs on springs, gaping mouths with oversized taste buds, extruded bundles of nerve endings, our primary functions gustatory, aesthetic, contemplative, and emotional. What good were we? Maybe we served as processing plants for the psychic by-products of commerce, politics, advertising, technology, the excess emotions of Type-A super-achievers with no time to deal with such useless things themselves; their raw passions and inchoate yearnings left them and found us, blew across our inner landscapes, strummed the aeolean harps of our rib cages, caused seismic tremors in our brain pans.

“Why are you so nice to me, Sebastian?” I asked in a rush of claustrophobic irritation.

He kept his back to me. “Why do you think?”

“Maybe you need someone to fuss over,” I said snidely. “Maybe you’re the one who’s lonely.”

“Do I fuss over you?”

“A little bit, you do.”

“How so?”

“You do things for me all the time, even though I don’t ask you to, and I give you nothing in return. I’ve never cooked you dinner, for example, and you pay me much too well for the trash I churn out for you. It makes me uncomfortable. Are you planning to call in your chits anytime soon, or what?”

There was a long silence during which he fussed at the stove with the spatula, added things to the omelet, stirred something in a pot. I started to think that I’d hurt his feelings. I was clearing my throat to halfheartedly apologize, when he set a bowl of golden, savory-smelling soup on the table in front of me and said, “I’m not going to tell you what you seem to want to hear, which I suppose is something along the lines of ‘I need you as much as you need me,’ which of course is true, but what an utterly ridiculous thing to have to say aloud to another adult. It should be obvious. When did you become so suspicious of others? Now eat your soup.”

“Aren’t you having any?”

“I’ll sit down in a minute. Don’t wait, I hate it when my guests let their food get cold out of what they think is politeness. It’s not polite, it’s silly. Eat.”

Guests? Who were his other guests? I tasted the soup. It was velvety and rich, with a smoky, subtle array of flavors under the robust potato-and-corn base. “What’s in this?” I asked.

“Oh, let’s see, Worcestershire sauce, a bay leaf, a pinch of fresh thyme, minced celery and leeks, a drop of Tabasco, white pepper. But the secret ingredient is Mrs. Dash, although it’s not a secret anymore now. I’m putting some in the omelet too.” He set a cutting board with a fresh loaf of bread and a knife on the table, and a plate with a hunk of cheese. “Help yourself.”