Jeremy Thrane (7 page)

Felicia had always frankly cared more about herself and her own needs and desires than just about anything else. But because I always knew exactly how she felt and what she wanted, I felt no need to cover up my own desires and moods. I found it oddly refreshing that her gestures of generosity were always offered on her own terms, which seemed much more genuine than the tactful equivocating or selfless white lies of “nice” people. Her self-centeredness infuriated me, but I didn’t mind being infuriated when I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t. For this reason, I always forgave her.

“I have to go,” I said, softening. “I’ll call you later.”

“Give Ted my love,” she called plaintively as I slammed the door behind me.

The Quill and Palette Club was housed in a brownstone on West Tenth Street, a stately, high-ceilinged, former-single-family house very similar to the one in which I lived. I climbed the front steps and stepped into the bright, narrow front hallway, much less ostentatious than Ted’s foyer and much more suited to my own tastes. In the big, crowded salon, I took a chair near the back, beyond the open French doors that divided the room in half. The old man next to me cupped his knees with his palms; the skin on the backs of his hands was an eerie, creamy white. The sight of these cool, gentle, pillowlike hands gave me a deep desire to go to sleep with my cheek resting on one of them. I closed my eyes for a moment, found myself nearly in tears, snapped them open again. The tears had come welling from somewhere deep inside me along with an immense fatigue. I had the sense of everything in the room around me, intolerably apart from me, a strange feeling of not fully existing, of having a skewed, incomplete perception of the world. My dream about Ted disappearing into the forest came back to me as if I were still in it: His plane was landing right about now.

People arrived, took seats, talked in small groups, laughed, and rustled their jackets off. I watched them, vaguely apprehensive that one of them would turn out to be an old family friend, and I’d have to get up and go through the tedious process of pretending to be delighted to see him or her, but luckily, I didn’t see anyone I knew. Then my sister Amanda materialized all at once in the chair I’d saved for her.

Was Amanda losing weight again? I glanced briefly at her catlike little face with its small, straight nose and clear brown-gold eyes. Her cheeks were drawn and her skin too pale, I thought; she was beginning
to look like our dead grandmother, who’d been a sticklike little bird with a dowager’s hump. She was overdressed, as usual, so it was hard to tell; she wore an all-black, many-layered outfit that culminated, at its lowest point, in ugly, fragile shoes with enormous soles so ludicrously misshapen, they looked like Dr. Seuss buildings. I assumed they were Japanese.

“Hey, Jer,” she said, giving me a dry peck on the cheek, which I immediately wiped off in case she’d deposited any maroon lipstick. She smelled of musk and cigarette smoke. She peeled off a sort of velvet capelet affair and sniffed. Amanda sniffed frequently, habitually, which I found, like so many things about her, wildly irritating: She didn’t have a cold or allergies, and as far as I knew, she didn’t use cocaine.

Amanda and I had always been semi-telepathically connected, so it wasn’t necessary for us to tell each other what we thought of each other. From the air around her head I absorbed the opinion that I should get a life, try to publish my work, and stop hiding in Ted’s attic. I thought, and knew she knew I thought, that she should dump her no-good live-in boyfriend and get over herself. She was incredibly self-serious about all aspects of her life, from the pretentious, overwrought music her band played to the way he sat there, her eyes narrowed, her neck very still, as if waiting for all eyes to fall upon her and widen in bewitchment.

“Ted get back yet?”

“He’s coming in tonight,” I said.

“With Giselle Fleece, right? I’d love to meet her. What’s her schedule like while she’s here?”

“I’m not her personal secretary,” I said.

She sniffed. “There’s Mom,” she said.

“I see her,” I said back.

Our mother, full name Emma Pepper Thrane Jackson Margolis, was striding to a chair near the podium, her posture ramrod straight as always, silver-black hair piled high on her head like a gypsy’s.

A large elderly woman got up and tapped the mike.

“I’m very pleased to welcome you to the fall readings at the Quill and Palette Club,” she said in a high, quavering voice like Julia Child’s. “We have a wonderful treat for our opening reading today: Emma Pepper just won this year’s Atlantic Poetry Award and also recently
completed her fourth residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her work, which has been widely published, acclaimed, and anthologized, is known for its passion, lyricism, and metaphysical insight. We’re very pleased indeed that she’s agreed to read for us today. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Pepper.”

My slender, somewhat fey mother might have appeared fragile to those who didn’t know her, but these characteristics were in fact the source of her strength: Whenever she felt dissatisfied with the life she found herself in, she had always had the ability to generate a new persona for herself that seemed to have neither scars nor regrets but which contained the familiar hallmarks of her personality, and then to transplant this fresh self into more fertile ground. Where more rigid souls might have broken or soberer ones imploded, she changed her skin and slipped away like an inmate walking unnoticed through a prison gate in borrowed street clothes.

She had begun writing poetry shortly after she’d married Lou Jackson, the stepfather who’d shaken my hand and congratulated me when I’d made my big announcement. The oppressive heat, air-conditioned silence, and dead boredom of our Phoenix neighborhood had caused her mind to go into creative hyperdrive. She’d turned from free spirit into mad housewife almost overnight. Finding herself home alone all day, she exploded into fierce monomaniacal activity. Often we came home from school to find her at the dining room table surrounded by scribbled-on papers, a wineglass and half-empty bottle of white wine, cigarette burning in an ashtray. As we burst en masse through the door, yapping about our days at school, she waved us frantically away, commanded us to go help ourselves to cookies, candy, whatever the hell we wanted, just please leave her alone for ten more minutes.

She went off to writers’ workshops during the summers, began submitting her work to literary magazines. She gave readings, won a small prize or two, kept writing. When I was in college, she left Lou and moved to New York, where she eventually met and married Leonard Margolis, her current husband, a physicist. She sold a poetry collection to Milkweed Press for a tiny poetry-sized advance, then sold a poem to
The New Yorker
, then another to
Harper’s
. She’d hit the big time, poetry-wise. She was asked to teach at Breadloaf and the New School, went to
both Yaddo and MacDowell, and gave frequent readings wherever she could.

She was at the forefront of a group of middle-aged poetesses whose intensely melodious free verse had as its common theme the subject of femaleness and its attendant joys and tribulations: coming of age, sex, marriage, giving birth, divorce, aging, loss, hysterectomies, their rage at their mothers, passion for their children, fond bemusement for their husbands and yearning for their lovers, past, present, and imaginary. My mother was beautiful, well spoken, dramatic, and husky-voiced. She was shamelessly crowd-pleasing, hotly exhibitionistic.

She began today’s reading with a poem made up of disparate images: a raccoon who’d wandered into the garden of her house in Saugerties, memories of playing in her grandmother’s closet as a child, the sound of her husband’s voice calling her name in his sleep. I listened straight-faced, breathing rapidly and shallowly, as if in the grip of mild nausea that threatened to worsen with any sudden movement. I sensed, but didn’t turn to see, Amanda’s rapt expression. She had stopped sniffing.

Just then I caught sight of my mother’s old friend Irene Rheingold sitting a few rows up with her husband, Richard, and their daughter, Beatrice, a big, strapping, shy girl of twenty-seven I was almost certain was gay, even though she herself may not have realized it yet. In my initial reconnaissance of the room, I’d somehow missed the Rheingolds, or maybe they’d arrived late. Irene Rheingold was the one of my mother’s friends I’d most dreaded having to pretend to be delighted to encounter. What was she wearing? A purple velvet medieval-maiden dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and an Empire waist, a chunky wood-bead and squash-blossom necklace. As her body had expanded in girth, her clothes, retaining their girlish, hippie-dippy whimsy, had simply grown along with her.

Irene sporadically reviewed novels and poetry, and although she wasn’t professionally affiliated with any particular magazine or publication, her reviews tended to cluster in
The Village Voice
and
The New York Review of Books
and
The New York Times Book Review
, an impressive résumé that might have suggested her opinion was valuable and worth cultivating, an implication belied by her unqualified championing of purple-prosy memoirish semiliterate “novels” by minority, lesbian, or
otherwise disadvantaged women, and her ecstatic spasms of devotion for “feminist” poets like my mother, whom she had recently dubbed, without a trace of irony, “Walt Whitman with a womb” in
The Voice
.

My mother, to her own discredit, had seen nothing to question in this praise, not a whiff of hyperbole or fatuity. The day it came out, I had been at her apartment, and had cringed through her side of the ensuing telephone conversation with Irene. “Such high praise,” she’d said breathily, “coming from such a brilliant critic. I’m actually weeping, Irene!” Her friendship with Irene itself betrayed this same lack of discrimination, a selective gullibility and glibness I had always found deplorable in her; she was so easily taken in by some things and some people, including herself. My mother could be incredibly naive and daft in ways I didn’t understand, given her perceptiveness and probity in other matters. If she had inculcated in herself a more rigorous, skeptical, demanding cast of mind, I couldn’t help thinking with a twinge at my involuntary perfidy, she might have been led to expect more both from her friends and her own work, which might have made her a better poet, and would certainly have engendered more respect in her son. But then, adult children always imagined they were vastly more sophisticated than their parents; that was part of the illusion of human evolution.

Because I was preoccupied with these thoughts about my mother, I didn’t notice until well into the reading that she wasn’t projecting her usual élan. Hearing an uncharacteristic tremor in her voice, I noticed then that she looked pale and tense, which was odd: Was she having an attack of nerves or stage fright? If so, this would be the first time ever, so I had to doubt it. Now that I thought about it, there had also been a tremor in her voice when she’d called yesterday to make sure I was coming to her reading, and to tell me she needed to talk about something important afterward. Was she leaving Leonard? If so, I wouldn’t blame her a bit; Leonard was an odd duck, to say the very least, a beetle-browed, silent fellow who drifted off into brown studies during dinner parties and couldn’t be interrupted, although he was given to outbursts whenever something wasn’t exactly right in his immediate environment. “Emma!” he might yell out of nowhere during dinner after passing most of the meal in dense silence, “you know I like the blue plates! Why are
you using these?” Maybe Emma had finally become fed up with him. If she had, I wouldn’t blame her.

She lost her place at one point, and near the end of one poem about Leonard her voice cracked, and she had to clear her throat several times before she could proceed. That was it, I thought. She was getting another divorce. She had her work, her friends; she’d be all right on her own. I’d been subjected at ages six and fifteen to her lengthy, self-imposed trials in which she played both defendant and prosecutor, with me representing judge, jury, and bailiff. Both times, after reviewing far more evidence than I’d ever wanted to be made aware of, I’d pronounced her innocent of any blame or fault. I could do it again, no problem.

“Jeremy, where are you? Oh, I see you, there you are,” said my mother suddenly. A chill finger of dread snaked its way down my spine as she fixed an unwavering gaze on my face, and several members of the audience turned and smiled at me. “This next poem,” she said in a voice rich with love, “is entitled ‘To My Firstborn Child.’ ”

The poem was very long, and described without mincing words the nearly twenty-four hours of labor she’d endured before I’d finally deigned to poke my head out and greet the world, her uterine spasms, shaved pubic region, distended belly, my head cresting bloody and wet from gaping vaginal lips, ripping her open. I cringed, feeling like an overgrown mama’s boy, trying to assemble my features into an adult expression instead of scratching myself frantically all over the way I very much wanted to do. I was no prude, to be sure, but I didn’t enjoy this public graphic portrayal of my natal self. The whole ordeal hadn’t been a picnic for me either, but that was beside the point.

To distract myself, I kicked around my head and teased silently with my tongue two words that had recently lodged in my brain, demanding a certain percentage of my running semiconscious attention: “Squanto” and “bughouse.” Was Squanto, I wondered now with all my heart as several more people turned to gaze moistly at me, the Thanksgiving Indian who had brought the Pilgrims a leather pouch in which were wrapped a few withered corn kernels, a plug of tobacco, and a squash? Did “bughouse” mean crazy, or did it mean loony bin? It didn’t matter; I’d gotten stuck on the whole question of what was in that leather pouch.

The audience, meanwhile, seemed completely rapt right up to the final lines: “And then at last I held you in my arms, my bloody scrap of flesh, my spark of life.” There was a hush, then an explosion of applause. Then my mother shut her book, said “Thank you all very much for coming,” and moved away from the podium as regally and sternly as an airline stewardess gliding behind her drinks cart.