Jeremy Thrane (3 page)

Yoshi had heard me open the front door; I knew it by the casual flip of his slippers as he slid noiselessly into the kitchen. My coming in so early in the morning could mean only one thing, that I’d been tomcatting around the night before Ted was due back. In Yoshi’s mind, I was almost certain, I was a freeloading layabout who’d scored the large, airy, sunny attic rooms, who sponged off Ted’s largesse, coming and going as I pleased. In my mind, Yoshi was a complete phony who’d conned Ted into supporting him, so I supposed we were even.

I had a strong feeling that Yoshi was only pretending to be Japanese. He had a fortuitous Asiatic appearance, but I suspected that he was actually of Finnish or Dutch extraction, I didn’t know or particularly care which. He had long, straight black hair that he wore in a braid down his
back, a short-legged, long-torsoed physique, and eyelids with a thick enough fold to render him plausibly Japanese. He had been Ted’s personal trainer for his most recently released film, shot on location in the Australian outback. He had tutored Ted in kung-fu karate-chop jujitsu movements to give credibility to his portrayal of Brock Martel, action-Jackson with a cause, who in the name of saving the earth leapt from speedboats, scrambled over electric fences, ran through rocky deserts in the blistering sun. I only half believed Ted when he boasted about the challenges of playing such he-men; in addition to Yoshi, he was also furnished with stunt doubles, a masseur and yoga instructor, a gaggle of lackeys who flocked to him between takes with spring water, handheld fans, whatever else he required. One night nearly a year ago at their Alice Springs hotel bar over tisanes, Yoshi had confided to Ted that his secret dream was to be an indoor gardener in a private house, and once the film was wrapped, Ted had given him his wish.

Soon afterward, Yoshi had arrived at Gramercy Park with one solitary duffel bag containing, among other things, the tatami mat he did his yoga stretches on and the various pairs of enameled chopsticks he wielded ostentatiously at our occasional household dinners. He had taken possession of the basement suite, next door to the weight room and sauna, and seemed to be in no hurry to leave. I didn’t blame him. I knew how well he was paid for fussing over the orange trees and orchids because I wrote his paychecks every month.

Since he’d moved in, an instinctive and mutual animadversion had hummed between Yoshi and me like a low-level magnetic repulsion. Sometimes it happened that he needed to water or prune plants in a room in which I happened to be lounging, the library, for example, where a cluster of persnickety potted orange trees lived. They required more attention than the average lapdog and went into a snit and dropped all their leaves whenever they got a draft or a teaspoonful too much water or just didn’t like the way things were going. Sometimes when I sat reading peacefully in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, the hair on my arms suddenly stood straight up. That was how I knew Yoshi was standing in the doorway and wished to come in as soon as possible to check on those damn trees. In the next half hour or so, I contrived to go
elsewhere in a manner that showed him clearly that it was my own choice to leave the room, having nothing to do with anything he might have indicated to me. Once I’d left the room, he waited just long enough before he went in to prove that he hadn’t been waiting for me to leave because he paid no attention to me either. The intensity of our noncontact was like an anti-obsession, the exact reverse of a crush.

Now I followed Yoshi into the kitchen to keep him from insinuating anything to Basia about my whereabouts last night. I always did my utmost not to offend Basia, primarily because I liked her, but also because I was a little afraid of her. She was a five-foot-tall fireplug, a former Soviet gymnast whose sedentary retirement had caused her to grow almost as big around as she was tall. She had snapping black eyes, a commanding voice, and wore her jet-black hair in a large braided bun. She owned a number of identical black dresses, long-sleeved and ankle-length, over which she tied capacious white aprons. Over the course of a typical culinary day, these became smeared with strange-colored substances whose sources I preferred not to speculate about. She ruled the kitchen, a despotic, beetle-browed suzerain, and although her food was invariably colorless, lardy, and salty beyond belief, I was careful not to bite the hand that fed me, lest it bite me back.

Ted had first become aware of Basia when he was eight and she was thirteen, and his grandmother had taken him to see her perform in New Haven. Her lithe little swaybacked form was his ideal; he’d worshiped gymnasts as a boy, he’d told me, because they were so bendable, beautiful, and strong. “A prepubescent girl has the most upper-body strength proportional to her mass of any human stage of development, male or female,” he’d said as he handed me a few worn-out photos of little Basia, with her broad shoulders and wee hips, arching backward, flying over a bar. Her small, sharp, dark face was utterly expressionless, as if her mind had gone blank under the pressure. Ted had sent her a fan letter; she’d written back in a rudimentary English, which improved through the years as their pen-pal friendship continued. When she was ready to emigrate, he’d offered her a lifelong position as his cook and sponsored her green card application.

Ted had intended Basia’s job to be purely nominal, but she’d taken
it as intensely seriously as she’d once taken gymnastics. Her attitude toward cooking seemed to have been gleaned from her old coach’s philosophy: Work made you strong, and then you died, and dough, lard, salt, and cabbage were all you needed in the meantime. Her citizenship classes hadn’t impressed upon her the peculiarly American concept of the pursuit of human happiness. Pleasure was not in her lexicon.

Basia and Yoshi and I were all three, in one way or another, Ted’s fully grown dependents, the wards he’d stowed here in his New York house like a trio of problematic relatives he preferred to keep stashed at a safe distance but had to support because no one else would. We all benefited from his generosity, especially, I had to admit, me. Ted had given me unlimited access to his New York bank account, from which I paid salaries, household bills, and any other domestic overhead. I was very well kept; my cage had always been as comfortable and well appointed as I wanted it to be.

“Good morning,” I said, giving Basia a kiss on her dumpling-like cheek.

She scowled up at me. “You want breakfast?” she said.

“I just went out and got something,” I said, “but thanks.” I didn’t look at Yoshi as I said this, but I could feel him listening as he lounged snootily on a stool at the center island, under a raft of hanging copper vats and soup pots big enough to boil a sheep in.

Basia didn’t know that Ted and I were lovers. She didn’t know that Ted was gay, and I doubted that she’d figured out that I was, or Yoshi, no matter how languidly he swanned around the house, post-workout, with a white towel around his neck and his muscles all agleam. All Basia knew was that she lived in a house owned by Ted, whom she adored, along with two single, passably good-looking younger men. She had never complained about this, as far as I knew.

“No breakfast,” Basia repeated darkly.

“No, but thank you,” I told her, suddenly eager to get upstairs; I had just remembered that Nina, the housekeeper, an old friend of Basia’s, was coming at nine o’clock to vacuum, dust, air the bedding, whatever else housemaids did to prepare for the return of the master and his entourage. I wanted to stay well out of her way, because she despised her job and took it out on the floors she vacuumed, the shelves she dusted. She was
a hostile, snarling dervish when she cleaned; once a week, crashes resounded through the house, followed by yowls in Polish I suspected were curses. I never let her anywhere near my own rooms.

“Yoshi,” said Basia, turning her benign glare on him. “You want eggs, some fried potatoes? I have.”

Without waiting to hear Yoshi’s answer to Basia’s offer of skin-tough eggs and slimy hash browns, which I hoped would be in the reluctant affirmative as he apprehensively drew today’s chopsticks from the sleeve of his robe, I left the kitchen, threaded my way through the dining and living rooms, and started up the stairs. On the second-floor landing hung a dark oil painting in a gilt frame, the portrait of some long-dead English Masterson who bore a fleeting resemblance to Ted, with a jutting beak of a nose and ice-blue eyes turned inward, as if his nose conducted his public life while behind his eyes hid a complex soul. It was an interesting face, chilly and regal, but oddly vulnerable, if only because he had so far to fall. I called him Lord Muckety to myself, and as I passed his portrait, I winked at him.

On the fourth floor I unlocked my apartment door, stepped into my hideaway and closed the door behind me, kicked off my shoes and shed my jacket, and left them all in a heap by the door. My rooms had been furnished and decorated according to my own tastes. The enormous front room had a peaked ceiling and two large leaded-pane windows overlooking the park. I’d had three walls painted a warm, glowing tangerine with ivory trim on the moldings, and on the fourth I’d had a man come and build a floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelf, which was filled with books. In a corner cupboard were the stereo system, television, and VCR. My bed was firm, king-sized, its surface an expanse of charcoal-gray coverlet, with plenty of pillows and a good reading lamp on either side. A fully stocked liquor cabinet stood next to a small sofa and low coffee table; on the old hardwood floor was a dark gray wool rug. A cage in one corner, suspended from the ceiling, housed the other resident life-form, Juanita, a small green bird of average intelligence who liked to hop on my shoulder and nibble at my hair while I hand-fed her sunflower seeds and told her all my woes, which weren’t many, given the particulars of my life.

Because my fear of Nina prevented me from taking advantage of her services and I seemed to be incapable of housekeeping for myself, my
lovely, clean, airy rooms had transmogrified gradually into an archaeological museum of my own recent past. I’d moved in with the sincere hope that living in this nice place would magically induce me to caper around at regular intervals with rag and feather duster, setting things to rights and polishing already gleaming surfaces, but the way things had turned out, I was three months past my thirty-fifth birthday and I lived in a pigsty. Banana peels so old they resembled small mummified animals occasionally came to light from the couch pillows or between the dust-brittle curtains and the chalky windowsills. Encrusted plates lay under the couch, calcified with blood-brown lasagna residue, spattered with desiccated crusts of bread from some months-gone sandwich. My bed disgorged the occasional filthy sock or wadded-up Kleenex crusty with God knew what bodily discharge. The bookshelves were festooned with dust-laden spiderwebs. Bird shit had spattered here and there like hardened toothpaste; actually, some of it may have indeed been hardened toothpaste, since I’d never learned to brush my teeth without drooling, and tended to wander around my apartment while I did so.

Piles of books lay everywhere: My reading habits were scattershot and panicky. The better a book, the more frantically I dog-eared it, the more food I spilled on it. I almost couldn’t tolerate too much verbal brilliance flowing past my eyes; I was driven very nearly mad by my inability to physically ingest every word. I was currently halfway through
The Horse’s Mouth
, and I’d had to create a minor disaster-area shrine of broken pencils and wadded-up paper and dirty dishes around the book itself, whose binding was actually coming unglued from my maddened efforts to dismantle and possess it. I would have to buy another copy if I ever hoped to finish the thing.

The smaller middle room, my office, held a desk and computer, a filing cabinet, a telephone and fax machine: Ted had installed me in his house with the pretense of hiring me to be his archivist. In truth, of course, I was no more an archivist than Yoshi was a gardener or Basia a cook, and Ted’s real-life archivist, a paragon of organization named Roy who lived in L.A., had things perfectly well in hand. I used the computer for my own work, a novel called
Angus in Efes
, whose eponymous protagonist was based on the real-life Angus Thrane, my father. For fictional
purposes, I’d changed his last name to Heyerdahl, since he’d once told me that Thranes were descended from Vikings and therefore never got seasick, and
Kon-Tiki
had been one of my favorite childhood books.

Back in the Bay Area in the sixties, when I was a little kid, my father had been a hotheaded Marxist lawyer who’d specialized in pro bono work for the Black Panthers, activists, demonstrators, and conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. He was a hero to a lot of people, but those of us who lived with him saw another side of his personality entirely. When my mother asked him to help her with the housework a little too pleadingly for his tastes, my younger sister Amanda and I watched helplessly from the breakfast table while he ranted at her until finally, overcome by his helplessness to give himself over to what she wanted, he seized her, punched her in the breasts, and pulled her hair. She pulled it out in clumps as she sat, weeping, in a kitchen chair after he’d stomped out to one of his meetings or trials or protests. But for some reason, my father, not my mother, struck me as the weakling: He was enslaved by his own uncontrollable rage, whereas my mother was merely its shocked, involuntary target. I never, to put it mildly, identified with him all that much.

But he could be charming: In calmer moods, he took us camping in Mendocino, to baseball games at Candlestick Park, to Charlie Chaplin films and People’s Park, where we watched naked grown-ups cavort around in tribal rituals called “happenings.” A favorite Thrane family outing was going en masse to peace marches in San Francisco, where Amanda and I rode high above the crowd on our parents’ shoulders. As the boy and the firstborn, I always got to ride Angus; I felt like a rajah on a prize elephant, kicking my heels happily against his chest to make him go faster, looking down on the sign-carrying rabble below.