Jeremy Thrane (33 page)

At ten minutes before three, I sensed a sudden twittering disturbance of the atmosphere of the editors’ offices, several notches up on the excitement scale from the usual manic fizz they generated on their own. Then I heard a throaty female voice asking for me. One of the twenty-five-year-old male mannequins said with disdain, “I think he’s somewhere over there,” which I assumed was accompanied by a pissy little flap of the hand in the direction of the ghetto in which I was a socially impossible nonentity.

First I caught a burst of perfume that smelled like the essential distillation of a way of life I’d never know; it was probably called “Envy” or “Better Than You.” A second later, I found myself looking up into a theatrically chalk-white face surrounded by a glossy, curling mass of hair the color of cherry soda. I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Bianca Mantooth; our months’-long, ongoing, semicontentious relationship had been conducted to date entirely on paper. If this were indeed Bianca rather than her older sister, then her byline photo had been taken a number of years earlier. The flat white powder, a stark and stylish makeup
choice for a woman ten years younger, had on Bianca an unfortunate tendency to accentuate the fine spiderweb of wrinkles that crinkled from each eye and the curved lines on either side of her mouth. I could also tell that in a few years she was going to have a forehead-crease situation unless she staved it off with Botox injections, which she probably would.

“Jeremy?” she said.

“Bianca,” I said, standing up and offering my hand, which she shook with the tips of her smooth, thin fingers. “Nice to meet you after all these months.”

Frederick’s usual finicky bustle of activity had suddenly stopped. I didn’t blame him; I would have been eavesdropping as avidly as he was if the situation had been reversed.

“So,” she said sharply, parking her streamlined tuchus on the edge of my desk and looking around my cubicle, “this is where my deathless prose gets butchered.”

“Butchered?” I said with a woefulness I hoped sounded sincere. “I truly hope you jest.”

I suspected that she was here to see for herself what a dork I was. I had decided to play along with her preconceptions, quote Shakespeare, or at least pepper my dialogue with a “methinks” and a “shan’t” every so often, since “There is a willow grows aslant a brook” or “Is this a dagger that I see before me, its handle toward my hand?” seemed unlikely to arise naturally. I hoped these archaisms would give her a vindicated glee that would cause her to go away feeling delighted with the world in general and herself in particular, and maybe then she wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass to work with.

“I’ll just say it,” she said. “You’re a troublemaker, Jeremy. I can’t write a sentence without you coming down on me for being an illiterate airhead. I can read your mind, I know what you’re thinking when you go over my stuff—this chick never went to college, she can’t write her way out of a paper bag, why does she get to be the rich famous writer while I’m just an underpaid copy editor?”

“I’m paid all right, actually,” I said disingenuously.

I heard a muffled snort from Frederick’s cubicle as Bianca tucked her leg up underneath her, minxlike, and slithered into a more comfortable position on my desk. She settled her back against the cubicle wall I
shared with Frederick, then tossed a handful of her tresses over one shoulder to unleash another daunting cloud of perfume. “You know what? I’m thinking of getting a rubber stamp that says ‘stet,’ that’s how sick I am of having to write it everywhere. But you never give up, do you? You really believe in yourself, don’t you? You think this is
Pygmalion
, and someday I’ll learn to use proper English if you keep badgering me. Right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have to admit, I wish you would. It would make my job a lot easier, not that that’s any concern of yours.”

“You’re surprised I know about
Pygmalion
, aren’t you? I bet you thought I only knew
My Fair Lady
.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “People know all kinds of surprising things.”

“Well, I appreciate your efforts on my behalf, but I happen to know exactly what I’m doing. You know and I know it’s not textbook; but it’s what they want.” She gestured toward the editors’ offices. “They represent the person I’m writing for. Not you, darling. And it’s a little insulting to me, frankly, that you seem to think I don’t know any better.”

“I stand corrected, it would seem,” I said mildly.

“The English language has been changing and evolving ever since it began,” she said. “Let me guess: You cringe at the use of ‘impact on’ or ‘reference’ as a verb. You want to scream when someone says ‘off of.’ ”

“Not to mention the catch-all overuse of the word ‘event,’ ” I said. “All the world’s a corporate boardroom these days, it would seem.”

“I bet my whole stack of chips they’ll all be taught in the next century as correct usage in grammar classes by sticklers just like you, committed to defending the greatest language on the planet against people like me. What you forget is that it’s the people like me who’ve made it so great, people who aren’t afraid to break the rules and shake it all up.”

“You and Shakespeare,” I agreed.

“We’re the fresh winds of change, the creative forces of evolution.” She stood up and offered me her elegant fingertips again. I was tempted to proffer my own fingertips but gave her a real handshake instead.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I said formally.

“Keep your mind open, Jeremy,” she said with affection. “You might learn a thing or two from me, wouldn’t that be a shock.”

She was gone before I could assure her that it might not be a shock at all, but that was probably just as well.

Frederick’s mournful, sallow face loomed into my field of vision, rising like a full moon over the top of our cubicle divider. “My friend,” he said, one pontificating forefinger in the air, as if checking the direction of the wind, his hair pasted with sweat to his pate like seaweed on rocks at low tide, “that is one ill-informed and arrogant female, although her calculated appeal is not altogether lost on me. Where exactly does she get off, telling you how to do your job? I might have put her in her place if she had said those things to me. I might have pointed out that I was hired by Simon, the same Simon who writes her paychecks, to render comprehensible her so-called deathless prose.”

“I think she might have said that ironically,” I said.

“ ‘Breathless’ is more like it,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Or depthless.” He gave a ghoulish honk at his own wit. “I might have added that breaking the rules of grammar and usage and spelling is all very well if you’re Bianca Mantooth, but it wouldn’t do much for a black inner-city teenager trying to escape fast-food minimum-wage slavery, or a Hispanic or Chinese immigrant who doesn’t want to be stuck behind a sewing machine for the rest of his or her life.” He scowled with monkish fervor. “I could say a great deal more in this vein, but I don’t want to make you feel any more hapless than you must already feel.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, Frederick. As far as I’m concerned, she won fair and square. You have to pick your battles. It’s only
Downtown;
if she wrote for
The New Yorker
, it would be a very different story, but she never has and never will.”

“I hope not,” he said skeptically. He inhaled deeply through his nose. “I hope not. Although their standards have sunk execrably low in recent years. They’re not the paragon they once were. What a strong smell she left behind her. Like a persimmon grove, if there is such a thing. Or an opium den.” He inhaled through his nose again as if he held a glass of wine and was identifying its bouquet. “Incense, exotic fruit, a lot of spice and something else, something tarry and dark and unspeakable …” He gave me a look of piercing yearning as his head sank from view, back down to his eraser-rubbled desk, his rubber bands, and dental floss.

“For now the winter is past,” I thought sleepily, my head lolling against the cracked leatherette headrest, “the rains are over and gone.” Sheets of rain washed over the train windows, blurring the suburbs that rolled past as the train made its way through them. I’d left work early again, pleading a recurrence of yesterday’s illness, and caught the train that left Penn Station at 5:29, laden with my packed overnight bag, a dozen white tulips for Rivka and two expensive bottles of kosher red wine, which the white-bearded expert at Warehouse Wines and Liquors had assured me was “as good as any comparably priced nonkosher wine.” I hope white tulips weren’t nonkosher or symbolic of death or something; I hadn’t thought to ask Max, I’d just bought them on a whim on my way to the station. Judaism, it seemed, was a formidably exact science, and not for the faint of heart.

On my lap was
Walking Under Bridges
, which had devolved from its rather promisingly knowing, fresh, and snub-nosed beginning into an all-too-predictable and familiar catalogue of horrors, without either the leavening of insight or the undergirding of rage. The tone vacillated between arch cuteness and flat-footed affectlessness, as if Shirley Temple and Lolita had taken turns at the word processor. About a quarter of the way through, I’d caught myself actually suspecting that this girl was just trying to cash in on the public appetite for this sort of thing, and had quite possibly invented the whole raped-by-her-father deal out of cynical wholecloth. I hadn’t been able to read a word since. How I’d turn this pathetic little diary into the light, witty screenplay Josh and Mai Lin seemed to expect of me was a total conundrum. Why they required it to be light and witty at all was even more baffling.

Max had gone out to Great Neck this morning. His clients had all had to suffer through their neuroses and tics without him for a day; fleetingly, I imagined them all licking doorknobs and slashing their wrists and crying in the fetal position while a wine-drunk Max blew out his birthday candles. But could you blow out birthday candles on the Sabbath? Anyway, by the time the cake emerged, it would be well past his usual quitting time. And if I hadn’t been filled with trepidation about the ordeal ahead and in need of mental distraction, I wouldn’t have given two figs about any of this.

I was often mistaken for a straight man when I wasn’t trying to fool anyone, but on the rare occasion that I was required to pretend, I would inevitably catch myself swishing my wrist or cocking my hip or lisping slightly, none of which I ever did normally. Then I’d wonder whether anyone had noticed, then decide no one had, then realize that someone was looking at me speculatively. The collar of my white shirt was already damp; my hands were clenching and unclenching in my lap. Oh well; at least I didn’t have to pretend to be Jewish.

Fernando was due in well before dark, as I was, and might even have been on this train with me, but he and I hadn’t arranged to meet up and travel together, the simple reason being that the few times we’d met we’d vaguely and irrationally disliked each other, so riding the train separately meant having to spend that much less time pretending to get along for Max’s sake.

Goddammit. I would never have asked this of Max. He had such a sense of entitlement sometimes, it was unbelievable; maybe that was the result of being the only child of doting parents. The tormented only child of clutchingly doting parents. I had never seen any pictures of Rivka and Fischl, because Max didn’t display any in his apartment, so I envisioned them as two birds of prey holding Max between them in their claws.

Their fully grown fledgling was at the train station by himself to meet me when I disembarked at precisely 6:05. He stood under an enormous red umbrella, wearing a seersucker suit.

“Happy birthday, Jay,” I said as I walked toward him. His yarmulke was embroidered with the Yankees logo; I felt a flutter of nervousness.

“Mr. Gatsby to you,” he said back, taking the bag of wine from me with one hand and parting the folds of the paper cone of tulips with the
other to peer in at them. “White tulips,” he said neutrally. “Isn’t that a little limp-wristed?”

He put the umbrella over my head, and we made our way up some stairs and across a catwalk to the parking lot.

“What should I have brought instead?”

“Maybe carnations or daisies, you know, those dumb butch flowers.”

“Sorry,” I said testily. “Should I just throw them away?”

“Oh, stop it, I’m just kidding. I’ve been jumpy all day. You, I’m not worried about. But Fernando. He’s already there, by the way; he’s making conversation with my father in the den.”

“Why are you worried about him?”

“Because he refuses to understand that he can’t kiss me in front of them,” said Max, who sounded a lot more smug than jumpy about this. “This morning as I was leaving he said, ‘I might not be able to restrain myself for an entire evening.’ ”

“How hot-blooded of him,” I said, annoyed.

“You look nice,” he said with a sidelong glance at me.

“Thank you,” I said dubiously. I was wearing a beige linen suit Max himself had given me as a hand-me-down when he decided he’d had it long enough. It was wrinkled already from the train ride, and fit me strangely, since he was shorter and stockier than I was.

We had arrived at the parking lot. As we approached a charcoal-gray car, one of those ugly new machines that looked like high-tech running shoes, Max took a key chain out of his pocket and aimed it at the car; the alarm gave a shrill yip. I got into the passenger seat, and we were off, rolling at a stately geriatric pace through the streets of downtown Great Neck.

“Mommy,” said Max, turning on his blinker two hundred yards from the nearest intersection, “said to stop at the store and pick up olives and some crackers, even though you wouldn’t believe how much food there is already.”

Apparently, grown Jewish children said “Mommy” as a matter of course, but every time he referred to his mother that way, I jumped as if he’d suddenly put on a diaper.

“Did she make her brisket?”

He rolled his eyes. “Ecch,” he said, “you’ll die when you walk in the house. I hope you’re hungry.”