Jeremy Thrane (16 page)

“Feckin’s green card wife,” Liam said. “His sweet nothin.” He gave Amanda a smack on her hip. “I’m hoping to bag one of those crickets.”

“Are you calling my sister a cricket?” I said in a bantering, guyish tone, but I was out of my depth here.

Amanda walked around the bar and helped herself to a draft from one of the taps; Karina didn’t flicker an eye in her direction. Amanda was the artist in residence here, loosely speaking.

Liam took a drag of his cigarette from the far corner of his mouth and I saw a flash of a smile. “Isn’t she a cricket, then.” He had an overbite, crooked lower teeth crammed together and discolored by tobacco. His hands were bony and long-fingered, the knuckles of each finger tufted with black hair. He encircled Amanda’s wrist with his hand, took
her mug away with the other, and downed the beer she’d just poured in several gulps. Wiping foam off his upper lip, he told her, “Easy on the beer, you don’t want to turn into a cow, do you.”

“I’m already your cash cow. Get your own fucking beer, and get a job while you’re at it.”

“Well, sure,” he said, “if I were legal.” He winked at me. I had the feeling this conversation was ancient, and they were rehashing it only because they had a fresh audience. There didn’t seem to be much heat or interest on either side, it was more like an empty ritual whose original meaning had long since fallen by the wayside.

A while later, Amanda took the stage with her band. They were called Radish Night, after some festival in Oaxaca, where everyone carved radishes into grotesque figures and displayed them, or something along those lines; it had been a while since Amanda had explained it to me, and I hadn’t paid much attention. It was Sunday, midnight, but there was quite a crowd. This was a relief; I’d expected to be one of only a few willing to stay up this late to hear them, and I’d dreaded having to keep my expression bland and nonjudgmental, knowing my hawk-eyed sister would notice any mocking flare of the nostrils immediately. It was presumably a worknight for most of these people, but they were all crowding eagerly and expectantly in front of the stage as Amanda and her bass player noodled around, warming up while the drummer and accordion player meandered onstage, all four of them looking as tarted up as I remembered from last time. Maybe that explained their success: Four gorgeous girls with instruments, how could that fail? It almost never did, as far as I knew.

I dutifully fought my way toward the stage to stand crammed between several of Amanda’s more heavily perfumed fans. I didn’t want to be there, but when I thought about it, there was really nowhere else I would have preferred. I didn’t want to be anywhere. My inner eye was suffused with staggeringly painful images from the other night. It had been dawning on me all day that I’d been frozen psychocryogenically the whole time Ted and I had been together; whatever had kept me with him all those years had also retarded my emotional growth. I had predicated a large part of my daily existence on certain assumptions about him, namely that he loved me, that I knew him, and that I could trust him,
all of which had been revealed all at once to be facets in a house of mirrors constructed by Ted for his own protection and convenience, and no one else’s. I had been allowed to enjoy my pleasant little illusions about him as long as he wanted me, but here I stood now, ground up and spat out by his inexorable, well-oiled machine.

Amanda, looking larger than life under the stage lights, nodded to her drummer, and they launched into their set. I braced myself for emotionally overwrought, postcollegiate, jangly alterna-rock, and vowed to find something to like about it, even if it was only that every song eventually ended. But after several bars I was shocked to find that I had a lump in my throat. Of all the mawkish things, the song was evidently about a kid who got lost on her way home from the store after dark. Amanda’s voice sounded husky and sad; the song’s narrator wandered through dark, unfamiliar streets, thinking that everything she’d ever known was gone and she might never find her way back to her own lighted windows. “A gypsy moth beating on windows,” went one line.

But instead of making me wince, the song gave me the electric pricks of an acupuncture session. An olfactory hallucination washed around my skull until it hit my inner nostrils—the smell of sage on sun-heated rocks, that ticklish, intense burst—which brought back a sudden memory of waking up at dawn when I was eight or nine, all three of us kids shivering in the chilly air as we ate cold charred hot dogs and leftover canned chili while our mother broke camp, shoving everything in the back of the bus, firing up the engine, calling out “All aboard!” like a train conductor. Off we lurched, yawning and half awake, our windshield scraped by low pine branches, along a pitted dirt road to the highway. While Amanda and Lola began the vicious, journey-long struggle for legroom in the backseat, I opened the maps. Our mother made a habit of teaming up for safety with other traveling families, so we usually had a rendezvous arranged at another campground down the road. Puerto Penasco, Mingus Mountain, Big Sur, Mendocino, the Tetons, Aspen, Four Corners, Bryce Canyon, Point Reyes, Oak Creek Canyon—pine shadows shifting in afternoon sunlight on wooden picnic tables, cardboard boxes full of Space Bars and granola, the shriek of a tent zipper in the middle of the night when someone got up to pee, rock-ringed ash-filled fireplaces with sticky charred grates over them, the smell of
upholstery stuffing in the midday desert sun coming out of cracks in melting vinyl in the front seat of the dusty, spattered VW bus, which had been red, and which we’d called the Rolling Tomato for reasons I’d forgotten but which I knew would come back to me if I let them.

“We’re gypsy WASPs,” our mother had told us as we looked out windows at subdivisions, tract homes, neat, clean children with dogs and bikes, on our way to sleep in the wilderness of canyons, mountains, beach. Our mother’s tone implied that we were superior to these people because they had to live boring lives in boring houses with their boring families while we got to drive around in the Rolling Tomato, part of a freer, richer, more interesting world than they would ever know. But Amanda had told me, when we’d grown up and left all that behind, that more than anything in those days she’d wanted a bedroom with a pink ruffled canopy bed, Barbies, a vanity table, and a family with a father who worked all day and read the paper at night, a mother with a real hairdo who let us eat sugar cereal and watch cartoons. Once when we parked in a Safeway parking lot and a family in a station wagon pulled up next to us, the daughter, who was around Amanda’s age, stared at Amanda in her too-short jeans, her tie-dyed T-shirt, the woven headband around her rat’s-nest hair, and smoke-smudged face from last night’s campfire, and Amanda had felt like dying of envy and shame.

The next song was in Spanish. I had no idea what it was about, but it stirred the short hairs on the back of my neck. Amanda accompanied herself with some sort of flamenco strumming while the accordion plunged and wheezed along. At the heart of the song was a buoyant sadness I was feeling just lovelorn enough to comprehend. I may have been a fool about the whole Ted thing, it seemed to say, but everyone was a fool, we were all in this together. At this rate I’d be a puddle of goop by the end of her set.

Just then I caught sight of Feckin lounging laconically off to one side, his half-smile flickering through the veil of smoke, clamping his cigarette firmly in place so he could keep his hands plunged into his trouser pockets to achieve the proper air of ironic distance. He caught my eye, quirked an eyebrow, and looked away. Teary-eyed, I fumbled in my pants pocket for the hankie I kept there, and encountered with my fingertips the rough edge of another mint from the restaurant the
other night. Was I wearing these same jeans again? I was. I honked my nose into the cotton square, thinking of Frankie’s funny, somewhat poetical cock, long and skinny and curved, and that funny little depression at the base of his spine, as if he’d been born with a tail that had been amputated.

Radish Night played another song, and then another one. Everyone in the audience except for Feckin and no doubt Liam, wherever he was, seemed to be suspended separately in a tensile force field, like scarabs in amber or pieces of fruit cocktail in Jell-O; it was hard for me to breathe through the fracas in my chest cavity. I was aware that the person next to me was dancing in a way I would ordinarily have found irresistibly annoying, throwing himself about in a spastic liberal-arts-college-boy frenzy, thrashing his head like a horse with a fly in its ear. He wore baggy suburban would-be hip-hop pants that showed the corrugated elastic of his boxer shorts. His sideburns had been carved so they ended in points in the hollows of his cheeks. To maintain them, he must have devoted a certain portion of his day to their upkeep and grooming, wielding his razor like a topiary gardener. The part of my brain that was still aware of such things recognized him as the type who went regularly to yoga classes in hopes of enticing lithe, trendy girls back to his overpriced Williamsburg loft for body massages and Japanese twig tea; I would have bet that he consumed huge amounts of sugar to make up for the lack of meat, caffeine, and alcohol in his diet. I always suspected for some instinctive reason that such boys had unusually well-formed stools, which for another instinctive reason made me despise them even more, even as I couldn’t tear my eyes away from their silly dance-floor shenanigans.

But now this guy was my semblable, my brother, my fellow suspendee in Jell-O. To my surprise, I thought I understood how this music made him feel; the possibility that this was a gauge of how low I had sunk since being dumped by Ted rather than any improvement in Amanda’s music since the last time I’d seen her perform did occur briefly to me, but I was in no mood to take my own bait. I was having a lot of trouble getting a deep enough breath. The air in here was hot, smoky, charged. I gasped once or twice for air, but my lungs wouldn’t fill; my head felt light, then too small. Things kept zooming in and out of my
field of reference, and for a panic-stricken, brain-shattering instant I thought I’d been spray-dosed with some fast-acting drug. I felt as if I were tripping, then all of a sudden the stage lights closed in on my vision with an explosion of white light. A long or short time later, I had no idea which, I found myself on the floor, waking from a deep sleep. Faces bent over me, and someone tapped my wrist firmly.

“He’s all right, he just fainted but he’s awake now,” someone said over the music to someone else, and a pair of hands grabbed my armpits and hoisted me slowly, carefully to my feet. I was relaxed, unable to speak, completely trusting, as if we were all playing one of those slumber-party trust games my sisters had played in junior high. I was surrounded by kindly, faceless beings who patted me and zoomed in and out of my field of vision. I felt a little light-headed, but wide awake, as if I’d slept for hours or days. I gasped, inhaled deeply, kept inhaling, until the dizziness passed. The person behind me steadied me, hands resting warmly on my shoulders, until I had regained my balance, and then whoever it was released me and I stood, wobbly but upright, on my own. I’d never fainted before in my life. Now, as I passed from that black, mindless sleep to awareness, the music seemed even louder than before, so loud it penetrated the membranes of my cells and throbbed in each individual nucleus. Amanda was standing very still under the lights, without her guitar, singing empty-handed into the microphone with her eyes closed. She looked gigantic and gentle, a Statue of Liberty come to life.

When the set ended, I stood there, my ears ringing, too stupefied to applaud. Feckin had vanished, I guessed to the men’s room to relieve himself of the five or so pints of ale Liam had bought him with Amanda’s money. Where Liam had got himself off to I had no idea and didn’t care. I fought my way back to the bar and slid onto a just-vacated, still-warm stool and ordered a vodka on the rocks. When Karina set it in front of me, I tossed it down, ordered another one, tossed that down too. I was starting to feel normal again. I watched everyone at the bar with avid curiosity. Expressions flitted lightly over candlelit faces, fleeting facial movements that were gone almost before I could identify the feelings that prompted them. We were such a curious bunch, we humans.

A while later, Amanda was suddenly there next to me. “Jeremy,” she said into my ear, “you’re still here.”

I turned to look at her. She had that peaky look around her eyes that meant she was about to cry. “What’s wrong?” I said, surprised.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We sucked.”

“You did?” I asked, suddenly even more dubious of my own reaction.

“Liam just told me backstage,” she said. “I was out of tune on a couple of songs, the drummer fucked up an entrance, my voice cracked a couple of times. I’ve got to quit smoking. Fuck, I feel like going home and slitting my wrists. I need a bagel, I’m starving, will you come with me?”

We climbed the stairs to the street. The night was cool and overcast. My face was pelted by tiny pricks of water that felt heavy as mercury, ominously acidic on my cheeks, as if the flecks of rain were freighted with toxic waste. The sidewalk was obstructed by Dumpsters big as water buffalo, overflowing with collapsed cardboard cartons. As we passed an open industrial doorway, we were blasted by a wallop of diesel exhaust from a panel truck idling there, being loaded by shouting men pushing box-laden dollies. Amanda clutched her wrap around her narrow shoulders, her face downcast. Words kept firing up on the launch pad of my tongue, then fizzing out at takeoff.

“Liam is not necessarily your best advocate, Amanda,” I said finally.

She sniffed. “Whatever. He’s honest.”

No, he’s threatened by you and dependent on you, and because of that he treats you like shit to keep you in your place, I wanted to say, but I’d learned the hard way that telling someone the truth about their loved one, no matter how good your intentions were, always backfired messily and horribly upon the truth teller.

“I thought you were great,” I said.

She laughed and looked at me sideways. “Come on, tell me honestly.”