Jeremy Thrane (26 page)

“Why do you keep talking about this?” I asked her through a surge of resentment. “Are you digging for dirt to use in your review?”

Leonard gave me one of his inscrutable, saturnalian smiles.

“Goodness, no,” said Irene, her hands fluttering near her face like an autistic child’s, her jaw twisting in a way she probably imagined was self-deprecatory and charming, but which made her look unbelievably weird, “why would I do that?”

“I really have no idea,” I said in my homo voice, my face expressionless.

“Oh, stop it, Jeremy,” said my mother. “If she wants to ask questions about Lola to help her with her review, what on earth is wrong with that? Anyway, it’s flattering,” she said to Irene, “that you’re interested. It happened so long ago, I haven’t thought much about it in a while.”

Irene said promptly, her brow furrowed in sisterly empathy, “Did you fear for her life at any time, Emma?”

“Well, of course I did, but as far as deprogramming went, I felt a
moral dilemma. I’ve always believed that it’s wrong to push my own beliefs on my children. I’ve tried to let them do their own thing, as we used to say; I even thought about letting them choose their own names at one point. Remember that, Jer?”

As she said all this, the spirit of the sixties sprang from its lair and I saw in my mind’s eye a bunch of young, half-naked adults, among them my mother, passing a joint as they lay around on dusty velveteen couches and armchairs; nearby, we kids lay sprawled on the rug, watching dust motes float in the sun, feeling skittish, bored, not quite sure what we were supposed to be doing.

“I remember that phase,” I said. “My first choice was Boycott, which I thought was a kind of grape. It was either that, or Pow, because Amanda wanted to be Mia.”

“It’s good I decided to keep the names you had,” said my mother with a laugh.

“I think that’s a bunch of caca,” said Leonard. “Kids don’t know anything. I would have hired a deprogrammer and yanked her out of there.”

“Don’t start again with how I should have raised my children, Leonard,” Emma said in the prickly way she had whenever she was criticized.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m telling you what I would have done with a daughter in a mind-control situation. I told you the same thing then, and I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Well, it all turned out all right,” said Irene. “You were an absolutely wonderful mother, Emma.”

“Thank you,” said my mother huffily.

“You were,” Irene said firmly, as if her saying so put an end to any discussion.

“Well, thank you,” my mother said again, and they nodded at each other.

“How do you think we should have been raised?” I asked Leonard with real curiosity.

He looked at my mother. “I’m not sure I should get into this,” he said. “I don’t want to offend the sensibilities of the bohemian faction over there.”

“Oh, go ahead and tell my son all the things you think I did wrong,”
said Emma. “They’re all grown up now; the die is cast, the damage has been done.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, laughing.

I waited for her to reassure me that we’d turned out just fine as far as she was concerned, but she was looking at Leonard with a startled, frozen expression. When I glanced over at him, he made a strangled sound and pounded his fist against his forehead as if he were trying to jar something loose in there. “Goddammit!” he roared.

Emma leapt up and put her arms around him and said soothingly, “Leonard, I’m right here, it’s okay.”

“Leave me be,” he said, pushing her off him. He stood and paced around the room. The unlit chandelier overhead trembled slightly with each step he took; the tiers of crystals winked with reflected candlelight. “I can’t think with all this noise!” he said harshly. “Everyone just shut up. Shut up.”

“Should we go now, Emma?” Irene asked with pained compassion.

“Should we?” I echoed skeptically, thinking our leaving was probably the last thing my mother wanted.

“Oh, no,” she said, “no, you two, don’t go, he’ll be all right, he’ll calm down in a minute.”

“I will not be all right and I will not calm down. This is so fucking disgusting!” He stood by the hutch and looked wild-eyed at my mother, grasping clumps of his hair in both hands. “You have no idea how disgusting.”

“I know,” she said, smoothing her palms down her thighs and then making a this-is-the-church, this-is-the-steeple thing, slowly wringing her hands. She had made those same gestures when I was little, when either of my sisters had thrown a tantrum, or wouldn’t speak to her, or got hysterically manic. Seeing her do this now, I quailed with an ancient protective exasperation. “He gets so upset these days,” she said, not lowering her voice or looking away from him. “His emotions are so fierce now, so sudden, almost out of nowhere. They always were, of course, but lately it’s like hurricanes compared to thunderstorms.”

“I can hear you perfectly, Emma,” he announced in a loud, harsh voice.

“I know you can. I’m explaining to Jeremy and Irene so they know what’s happening.”

“Do not,” Leonard said, “treat me as if I’m—as if I’m, you know what. You know what you’re treating me like, Emma.”

They both looked startlingly old all of a sudden, my mother and Leonard.

“A child?” she said. “Insane? What?”

“Why are they here?”

“They came over for dinner,” my mother said.

“I haven’t had dinner.”

“We just ate.”

“You ate more than anyone, Leonard,” I said, hoping to strike a jovial, lighthearted note.

“You don’t even know me,” he snarled at me.

I stood up and backed away from him, out of the dining room, and went down the hall to the bathroom. I stayed in there for a while, leafing through a three-month-old issue of
Health
magazine, wondering how much of the information therein had since become outdated. I was feeling somewhat tense, and so I accomplished little in there besides learning that a diet rich in prunes and green tea would keep you alive forever. When I emerged, my hands washed with my mother’s unscented oatmeal soap, my hair combed with her carved wooden comb, Leonard was sitting at the table, and I could hear the rattle of dishes as my mother loaded the dishwasher in the kitchen. Irene was nowhere to be seen. I glanced at my stepfather.

“So,” he said. “This isn’t much fun.”

“It must be awful.”

He made a stab at a smile, baring his teeth at me. “Emma!”

“What is it,” said my mother, hurrying into the dining room, holding a sponge, her face pinched.

“Is there any dessert?”

“What do you feel like?”

“I’d like some ice cream if we’ve got any left,” he said.

“I’ll get it,” I said, and went into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. My mother came in behind me and shut the swinging doors.

“Where’s Irene?” I asked.

“She went home. She said to tell you good night.”

“She went home?”

“She said she needed to get some work done tonight.”

“Oh, right,” I said irritably. “Her all-important review. She couldn’t even clear the table. Not that I cleared the table either.” I slid over to the sink, took a glass from the drain, filled it with water, and took a sip, avoiding my mother’s intent gaze.

Leonard yelled from the dining room, “Emma! Did I ask for some ice cream?”

“You did, but you can wait a minute,” she called back in a sharp, high voice. She compressed her lips and rolled her eyes at me.

“Have you looked into getting a nurse?” I asked. “A health care worker?”

“I’m not ready to have a stranger here all day,” she said. “Leonard would bite the poor guy’s head off. We’ll manage, don’t worry. How have you been, Jeremy? I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to you all night.”

“I’m doing just fine,” I said. “Have you heard from Amanda lately?”

She sighed. “She called just before you arrived tonight and told me her news. What is she thinking? Why? Do you have any idea?”

Here it was, the head-cracking and brain-entrails reading. “They love each other, I guess,” I said with sober authority. “She says there’s more to Liam than meets the eye, and she hopes more than anything that we’ll be happy for her.”

“I don’t know what she sees in him, frankly,” said my mother. “Maybe she thinks he’s her only chance. She wants babies, she’s thirty-three, I understand that, but it’s terrible that she doesn’t have more faith that someone better will eventually come along.”

“What did you say when she told you?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked. I couldn’t hide it. She was extremely hurt. She started to cry and asked if I’d rather not come to the wedding.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “You two.”

“I apologized, she apologized, we both cried. I said I was happy for her if this was what she truly wanted, and she said of course I’ll be
invited to the wedding. But anything could happen between now and June. I’m not buying my mother-of-the-bride dress just yet.”

“Don’t you think she’s capable of deciding whether or not she really loves him?”

“Well, no, I don’t,” said Emma. “Look at all the mistakes I made. Frankly, I don’t want any of you to have to go through what I went through. I don’t think Amanda’s making the right decision here, but I can’t tell her or she’ll blow up at me again. I have to handle her with such kid gloves. I always have. Anything I say is the wrong thing. Can you talk to her?”

“I already did,” I said. “She was dreading having to tell you because she knew you’d disapprove but wouldn’t tell her.”

She blew some stray hair out of her face with a quick upward whiff. “You’re very lucky you never have to be a mother,” she said with a grim laugh. “That’s all I can say.”

There was a crash in the dining room, then we heard Leonard say, “Fuck it all to goddamn hell.”

“We should bring him his ice cream,” I said.

“And whatever else he needs for the rest of his life,” she muttered, opening the freezer. “How do all those other spouses do it, the ones who are so uncomplaining and supportive when their loved ones turn into two-year-olds?”

“I bet they all want to kill them,” I said.

She laughed loosely, with an edge of hysteria. “I’m laughing to keep from screaming,” she said.

“Don’t hold back on my account,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

A little later, as I walked down Broadway, a nonoptional imperative radiating from the pit of my stomach informed me that I was going to call Ted. With no internal protest, I sought a working phone booth. Most of them had empty wires dangling, their receivers ripped off by vandals, or had been craftily mutilated by some homeless guy so the quarter stuck in the slot, presumably so that same homeless guy, watching from a shadowy doorway, could retrieve it as soon as the schmuck who’d tried to make a call moved on. The first plausibly intact telephone I found ate my quarter; I called the operator and was assured that the
quarter would be deducted from Scott’s next phone bill. The second intact phone’s receiver smelled as if it had been sprayed with noxious bacteria or put down someone’s pants. The third, like Goldilocks’s porridge, was just right; the receiver smelled fine and gave a dial tone, my quarter clunked into the slot, and each number I dialed registered as a beeping tone in my ear. At last, Ted’s line purred twice in my ear before someone answered.

“Haro.”

“Yoshi,” I said with plummeting confidence, “it’s Jeremy.” I pictured him standing by the telephone table in the living room in the black tank top he wore to lift weights, prancily flaunting his long, flat stomach, repugnantly apple-round biceps, and sweat-free flesh. Ugh. My hand was slippery on the receiver. “May I speak to Ted, please?”

“I don’t think,” said Yoshi pointedly, “Ted wants to talk to you.”

“I think that’s for Ted to decide. Will you tell him I’m calling, please?”

After a brief but eloquent silence, he said, “Just a minute.”

Not a sound. I waited. Minutes later, I inserted a nickel at the request of a female automaton. The phone lady shut up and went away for a while, then returned to request another nickel. I did as she told me, much as I would have rolled up my sleeve for a shot at a nurse’s command; she had that same impersonal authority, and I needed all the guidance I could get here. Obviously, no one was going to come to the phone, but I waited, hanging on to the receiver, shivering and sweating. My excited nervousness gave way suddenly to a slash of fear through my sternum that left an electrical depression in its path, a damp sense of foreboding.

Then I heard footsteps, faint at first, then louder. Then a crackling sound, someone picking up the receiver, and then Ted said coldly, “What do you want, Jeremy?” right into my ear.

“Ted,” I stammered. “I didn’t think you’d come to the phone.”

“And why is that?”

“After all the pain and trouble I’ve caused you.”

“You can’t even imagine how much,” he said. “I’m interested to hear what you think you’ve got to say to me.”

“I’m not calling to apologize,” I said. “What would be the point?”

“What’s the point of calling, then?”

“I’d like to see you,” I blurted out. “Have a drink.”

He made an exasperated sound. “How did you know I was in town?”

“I didn’t,” I lied. “I just hoped.”

“You just hoped,” he said as if he’d seen me lurking outside his house earlier, as if he could read my mind. “Do you imagine we’ll just say hi, shake hands, have a nice friendly chat, let bygones be bygones?”

“No!” I said, although this was exactly what I had hoped. “I just wanted to talk about what happened. Face-to-face.”

“You wrecked my life,” he said, the words shooting out as if they were cold bullets. “You caused the end of my marriage, and you ruined my career. My parents are only now beginning to recover from the shock. My daughter—”

“Is she okay?” I asked tentatively.

“I just wonder,” he said. “What did I say or do that warranted that degree of retaliation, to make you think I didn’t have your best interests at heart? I told you I loved you like a brother, I made it clear that you were welcome to live in my house for the rest of your life. I did absolutely nothing wrong to you except decide not to sleep with you any more, and that was my right.”