Jeremy Thrane (27 page)

“I know,” I said wretchedly as a man behind me cleared his throat. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a boulder-sized black guy in a down jacket and watch cap, scowling at me. He had a round, perfectly smooth face; he couldn’t have been much older than seventeen.

“You going to be long?” he asked in a tone that said the only possible answer was no.

I put my hand over the receiver and hissed, “Yes, I am,” then turned around and cleared my own throat aggressively so he’d move on.

“You probably also know,” Ted was saying, “that you were one of the best friends I’ve ever had. I trusted you with my life. Felicia too.”

“I know,” I breathed. I wanted to climb through the phone and hurl myself at him, pin him to the ground and eat him raw. I couldn’t help it, it was a biochemical phenomenon expressed by some formula: The
strength of his indifference to me was inversely proportional to my desire for him, or something like that.

“She called me recently from rehab to make amends,” he said. “Can you imagine anything more ironic? First it was the drugs talking, now it’s the treatment.”

“Yeah,” I said, laughing a little, “she called me too. It seemed completely contrived. She apologized for things I don’t even remember her doing. She sounded like she was reading from a script.”

“She’s a horrible actress,” said Ted.

“You know,” I blurted out, my heart constricting with hope, “Gary already knew about us; I didn’t tell him anything and I didn’t contradict him. That’s all.”

“Haven’t you ever realized that not everyone has to know everyone else’s business?”

“Are you still sleeping with Yoshi?”

“What?”

“Faggots think they own the fucking city,” the kid behind me muttered. “Just ’cause they’re
gay
.”

After a charged pause, Ted said very quietly, “What did you say?”

“Come on, Ted,” I said, outraged apprehension prickling along my scalp as the guy’s down jacket rustled and his exasperated, raspy breathing sounded in my ear. “Surely you can admit it now.”

“Giselle is divorcing me, she’s going to get custody of Bret, my parents are beside themselves. Whether I’m sleeping with Yoshi is not really the point.”

“Please deposit five cents for the next three minutes,” said the phone lady.

“Hold on,” I said urgently. “I have another nickel right here.”

“Oh, come on, get off the phone,” said the black guy.

I shoved a nickel into the slot; for a couple of seconds the line jangled and whirred, then opened up again. “Hello?” I said several times. “Ted!” But there was only a humming silence, then a click, and finally a dial tone.

I replaced the receiver, sagged against the Plexiglas wall of the booth, and closed my eyes, wrapped my fingers around the little
rungs of the metal shelf and held on to keep from sliding down to the pavement.

“You done in there?”

My antagonist and I stared at each other for a moment. His eyes were dark and hard. I don’t know what mine looked like. “Oh, get a cell phone,” I muttered.

“
You
get a cell phone,” he said right back.

For the next few blocks I bumbled along the sidewalk, “I did him wrong” resounding in my head so loudly, it was indistinguishable from a splitting headache. But I hadn’t done him wrong, I’d been accidentally overheard in a restaurant and had subsequently been unable to deny Gary O’Nan’s sneaky innuendo; Ted had convincingly painted me as the wrongdoer and himself as the helpless victim, but I had been unable to set him straight because my desire to have sex with him again had rendered me temporarily stupid, and now my frustrated anger was mutating into guilt because it had no external outlet, so I had no alternative but to turn it on myself. That was the source of this headache, not guilt.

As I puzzled my laborious way through this maze, I almost bumped into several people, almost stepped on a tiny dog in a sweater on a leash, almost knocked over a deli fruit bin. A garbage can zoomed into my field of vision and I crashed into it. Then I veered off the curb into the gutter and held up an arm at the oncoming traffic. Almost immediately, a taxi shot across two lanes and squealed to a halt, idling less than a foot from where I stood. I opened the door, slid across the heated seat, shouted my address into the air between the back and front seats, then collapsed with my temple against the steamy window, writhing slowly, consumed with a self-loathing so noxious, it felt like an internal pit of acid. All was supposedly fair in love and war. “Nothing shall be sole or whole that has not been rent.”

“Wait,” I called out to the driver, and then I heard myself giving him Sebastian’s address. For the remainder of the ride I watched the low tunnel of traffic lights through the windshield and gulped breaths of heated, strawberry-scented air, floating in a limbo of anticipation, not even trying to pretend to myself that this sudden change of plan was anything but selfish. I wanted Sebastian to pour me a glass of wine,
offer me a chair by his synthetic fire. I wanted to sit there like an exalted king on a pedestal, basking in his deep, yearning adoration.

“Hello,” said Sebastian when I had paid the driver and got out of the cab, found another working phone booth, and located a quarter in my pants pocket, “Jeremy, where are you?”

I heard voices in the background, laughter, music. “Right downstairs from your place. Are you having a party or something?”

“No, not really a party, just a few people over. Would you like to come up?”

“No, I don’t want to intrude—”

“Oh, you certainly won’t be intruding,” he said with a little laugh. “Some of these people are big fans of yours. See you in a few minutes?”

“No, I couldn’t,” I said like the scared rabbit my sister had accused me of being. “I was just passing by. I’ll see you another time.”

“Do come up,” said Sebastian firmly. “I’ll unlock the elevator for you. We’ll be so happy to see you.” He hung up, leaving me to either scurry back to my warren or brazen it out. As I walked the two blocks to his building, I was beset by a horrible image of Sebastian in a black Speedo, fondling a male blow-up doll, listening to a tape marked “generic party noise” all by himself.

But when the elevator doors slid open, I was bathed in simultaneous gusts of warmth, cigarette smoke, cologne, candlelight, conversation, jazz, and laughter. I heard the festive sound of a champagne cork being popped. A tiny brown dog, yapping with frantic fury, hurled itself out of nowhere at my legs. I looked down to disengage it and saw its teeth bared in a cute parody of ferocity, its eyes bulging like Sebastian’s, but instead of brimming with overeager friendliness, these eyes were almost white with the need to kill me. Its hairless, tan-colored, projectile-shaped body trembled with murderous appetite.

Sebastian rushed out of the same nowhere the dog had emerged from, like spaceships uncloaking or coming out of warp. “Chad!” he cried. “Chad, that’s our friend, that’s Jeremy!” He bent down and whisked the Chihuahua off my calves and tucked him, still yapping, under his arm. Then he kissed my cheek and smiled for an instant into my eyes to show me that he hadn’t taken my rejection to heart, and he
hadn’t given up on me in any way. “Jeremy, I’m so glad you came, I wasn’t sure you would. Come and meet everyone.”

“I’ve already met Chad,” I said uneasily. “I’m not sure I want to meet anyone else.”

“Isn’t he horrible?” Sebastian said cheerfully. “He’s not mine, thank God, he’s Peter’s. He seems to think he’s a Doberman guarding a junkyard. Well, we all need our little illusions about ourselves.”

“We do,” I said inanely.

“Jeremy, these are some of your readers. Gentlemen, meet Jeremy Thrane, the real man behind the pseudonymous and wildly popular Blaze Cinders.”

I found myself drawn into a circle of sleekly handsome young men. “Hello,” I said, bewildered. Someone handed me a flute of champagne; instinctively, I took a big gulp, which fizzed in my sinuses.

“Blaze,” said a chesty redhead with tortoiseshell glasses and a trim little gingery mustache, “it’s so good to meet you in person, I feel like I already know you. You write the
hottest
—”

“He knows,” said Sebastian imperturbably. “Anyway, he just dropped by for a moment, so don’t monopolize him. I’m going to get those canapés out of the oven, I’ll be right back, and then, Jeremy, let’s you and I go up and have a little tête-à-tête.”

“Do let’s,” I muttered, not sure what I thought of this inexplicable and unprecedented transformation of Sebastian, and for that matter his loft, since last night. Fat beige candles bloomed with light everywhere—on the mantel over the ersatz fire, along the windowsills, on the floor by the couches, on the dining room table, up the spiral staircase. Tall brown porcelain jars bristling with peach-colored tulips sat here and there. A gigantic woven tapestry I’d never seen before hung on the far wall; at first glance it looked like a rocket ship flying against a complicated decorative background, but on closer inspection I saw that it was an erect penis, stylized but distinctly phallic.

“Do I know you?” asked a smirking little black guy with a glint in his eye.

“He’s Blaze Cinders!” bayed the redhead. “ ‘Adventures in Sodom.’ My favorite
Boytoy
writer, bar none.”

“Well, I’ve hung up my shingle for now, I think,” I said. “But thanks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m retiring,” I said apologetically. “I’ve decided to move on.”

“No! I have to know what happens to Brett,” said a peach-faced, muscle-bound lad with a slight lisp I suspected was entirely manufactured. “You can’t just leave us hanging. Does he or doesn’t he let that older guy take him to Europe?”

“See, you can’t quit now,” said someone else, laughing. “You’ve got us all hooked.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I was feeling oddly shy. These young boys seemed so sure of themselves, so mindfully self-possessed; I remembered how I had felt at their age, as if my skin were too large for the rest of me, or too small. They all appeared to be around the same age as Scott, with an equal denomination of erotic currency.

“I’m Peter, by the way,” said the redhead as he offered his hand, which I shook. “I don’t think you’ve ever been to one of these things before.”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t. I didn’t know Sebastian had things, actually.”

“All the time! Sebastian’s parties are the best! This is just the warm-up period, don’t worry, the real event starts once we’re all nice and liquored up. He has the
best
champagne.”

“Pig in a blanket?” Sebastian asked at my elbow. “Baby carrot with sour cream dip?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Sebastian, I never knew you threw parties.”

“I would have invited you to all of them, but I didn’t think this sort of thing was your cup of tea,” he said apologetically.

Then I got it, or at least I thought I did. “What?” I said on a rising note as my cod began to stir on a rising note of its own. “I write
pornography
, Sebastian. Or rather, I used to.”

He gave me an odd look. “I think you’ve misunderstood,” he said, handing the tray to a swarthy lad with a low-slung slouch I had been unconsciously admiring. “You’ll see. Come on upstairs and we’ll talk about whatever you came to talk to me about.”

As a matter of fact, I was feeling a certain inclination to stay downstairs
and mingle. “Oh, it wasn’t really anything very—” I began, but he had started up the spiral staircase, picking his way through the burning candles. I made my way up the stairs behind him. Below us, the young men stood in a loose-knit clump, talking, laughing, occasionally raising their glasses at one another.

“Sit,” Sebastian said to me, patting the sofa next to him. I sat down, and there we were, Sebastian and I, knee to knee in the
Boytoy
office, in the near darkness of refracted candlelight from below.

“By the way,” said Sebastian, “I spoke to your agent again and convinced him that I’m completely serious about producing this film. We’re discussing terms now. By which I mean money.”

“That’s great,” I said vaguely.

“But this isn’t what you’re here to talk about. Go ahead.”

“I called Ted from a pay phone tonight. He wasn’t exactly glad to hear from me.”

Sebastian leaned back against the couch cushions. “Poor Jeremy,” he said with a tenderness that made me ashamed of myself.

“I don’t know what made me do it. I wish I hadn’t. If I were the histrionic type, I’d probably want to drown myself.”

“Don’t drown yourself,” he said, smiling. He reached a hand over and placed it firmly on the back of my neck and rubbed the base of my skull.

His hand was warm; my neck muscles were tense. I didn’t flinch when he sat up and braced the heel of one hand against my spine as he worked his way down my spine with the other, vertebra by vertebra.

I cleared my throat. “Anyway, I called to ask him if he’d have a drink with me. He was beyond scornful. He despises me.”

“You still love him,” Sebastian said soothingly. His fingertips were splayed on either side of my spine, kneading away, making my head flop forward slightly with every thrust. He leaned forward, stilled his hands on my back, and kissed the back of my neck.

“It doesn’t matter how I feel,” I said. “I can’t have him. He doesn’t want me and never will, but I can’t help wanting him anyway even though it defies all logic.”

“I understand,” he said in my ear.

The half of me that wanted to push him away and run downstairs
was easily and immediately vanquished by the half of me that was too needy and demoralized to resist any sympathy, no matter where it came from or in what form. I leaned against Sebastian, and he rested his head against mine, his hands on my shoulders. A gale of laughter blew up from downstairs.

“It’s time to start the proceedings down there,” said Sebastian. “For the first time, I wish they weren’t here.”

“How often do you have these orgies?”

He laughed. “These what?”

“What is this all about?” I asked, nettled.

“It’s a support group,” he said soothingly. “It’s meant to be a normalizing, nonjudgmental, open-minded gathering where we all feel absolutely free to share our fears and our most shameful secrets.”