Jeremy Thrane (28 page)

“Oh,” I said. “How long has this been going on? Are you the leader?”

“I’m one of the original instigators. I met Peter and Joseph on Fire Island a couple of years ago, and one night we found ourselves naked in a hot tub together, all talking honestly for the first time in our lives about ourselves. After a while we confessed our secret insecurities about our penises. I won’t be betraying anyone if I tell you that Joseph thought his was too small, and Peter thought his was too crooked. The point is that it felt unimaginably good just to say this to each other, it literally changed the way we felt about ourselves.”

“What did you think was wrong with your—with you?”

“It’s all right if you’re uncomfortable at first, saying the word ‘penis.’ It’s not an easy word to say with a straight face.” He massaged my back again as he talked, less vigorously than before, more ruminatively. “I was afraid all my life that my penis was too big. People laugh when I tell them this. I mean it quite seriously: malformed, grossly oversized, weirdly gigantic. I imagined that it stuck out whenever I wore pants that were even slightly tight, which is why I favor a baggy style of trousers. Gym class was excruciating for me. Bad enough to be an obvious fag, you don’t want jocks thinking you’re getting a hard-on around them, they’ll beat you to jelly.”

“I never noticed you sticking out in gym class, Sebastian.”

“You never looked,” he said. We laughed. “Anyway, Peter and
Joseph and I agreed to get together every so often just to talk, and then came Bill and John and Wallace, who had plenty of shame and fear of their own, and they brought other friends, and we decided to get together here every other month to have a party and then sit around and say whatever is on our minds without fear of judgment or mockery. We all feel immeasurably better about ourselves, thanks to these parties. You might have noticed a certain phallic theme in the food and decor. We call these evenings ‘penis parties’ as a sort of joke on ourselves.”

There was a long silence then while he karate-chopped me from the base of my skull to the base of my spine. I had nothing to say. His hands on my back were comforting and invigorating. The babble of voices downstairs removed the pressing need to talk that complete silence would have engendered.

“Are you feeling better?” asked Sebastian.

“Thanks,” I said. “I am.”

There was another long silence. He slid his hands under my shirt and rested his warm palms against my kidneys. I had a hard-on so painful, I thought it would detonate if anything touched it. It throbbed and twitched in my undies like a tree branch in a gale.

“Jeremy,” he said falteringly, “I would love to touch you right now, to give you pleasure.”

I was silent.

“Please don’t say no. It’s a gift. Meaning that nothing, absolutely nothing, is expected in return, except that if I faint with pleasure, I hope you would revive me.”

I cleared my throat and said, “I’ll try.”

With a happy little groan, he slid a hand around to the fly of my jeans and undid it, then knelt between my legs and unloosed my cock, grasping it as it sprang from its trappings. I gazed at his downy, shining bald spot, his doughy, shapeless body, hunched unprepossessingly there on the floor.

He pushed me gently backward so I reclined against the couch pillows. “You have a beautiful penis, I knew you would,” he whispered, then took me into his mouth.

I stared up at the ceiling in a state of vague, passive, empty apprehension.

Afterward we went downstairs together, Sebastian leading the way. I smiled steadily at everyone as I said good night, but as Sebastian helped me on with my coat, I couldn’t look at him.

“It’s all right,” he said as I stepped into the elevator, but I wasn’t quite sure what was all right or how he knew. I went home and stayed up very late finishing
Jude the Obscure
. I knew I was supposed to pity and admire the brilliant, fey, emotional Sue and deplore the hussy Arabella, but I got so impatient with Sue’s principled equivocating, I almost threw the book across the room a couple of times; meanwhile, every time Arabella appeared, I smiled inwardly with relief. If she and Sue represented the two sides of woman, as I suspected they did, I infinitely preferred the amoral, scheming side to the neurasthenically cerebral one. My favorite scene in the book was the all-night whiskey-fueled card-playing party Arabella threw to get Jude drunk enough to remarry her. She was doing him a kind of favor, in my opinion, no matter how he felt when he sobered up and realized what had happened. She had rescued him from the swooning tragic Sue, from thinking too much, from abstraction and dithering, and offered him instead a bluntness on which to dull his pain. Hers was an oddly Zen kind of love; coarse and limited and cynical though she may have been, she took him for what he was and offered her whole imperfect self in return. I wanted to take him aside and explain this to him, but there was nothing for it but to muddle on with my own life instead.

PART THREE

“Maybe I’ll play the part of the bakery truck driver myself,” Sebastian said to me one evening in June. We sat at an outdoor café in the West Village; he was treating me to a dinner I’d accepted because I hadn’t felt like cooking, and was in need of some company. “I was a child actor, I think I’ve mentioned. At eleven, I played Mustardseed in a West End production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and was told I had quite a gift.”

“Mustardseed,” I said, laughing. “You could play the truck driver as well as anyone, I bet. How hard could it be to act in a movie anyway?”

“Oh, no,” he said, scandalized. “Film acting is a delicate and difficult art. I wouldn’t presume to think of doing so myself except that I was on the stage. You never forget how to act, it’s like riding a bicycle.”

“Oh, please,” I said, scowling at the waiters gossiping by the bus tubs, the gay young blades wafting by in springtime twosomes on Macdougal Street, and my dinner, ginger-sake-glazed swordfish with some sort of gourmet glop that looked like thick porridge but was touted as toasted-rice polenta. “Movie acting is like falling off a log, not riding a bicycle. The camera does all the work for you. You don’t even have to memorize your lines all at once. My pet bird Juanita could do a passable Lady Macbeth on film, given enough takes.”

In the patchy squares of dirt between street and sidewalk, saplings had burst undauntedly into leaf once again. Although the air glittered with industrial particulates under a burning haze, these small young living things had put forth an unusually healthy-looking bunch of greenery this year. These leaves fluttered in the breeze like pennants on the
tips of the bayonets on the losing side in a battle, their fruitless, dubious bravery a comically poignant metaphor for every living thing under the sun, from paramecia to redwoods to me myself. The sight of those fresh leaves twirling on their stems in the polluted air should have buoyed me up, sprung a little eternal hope in my human breast, but they served only to make me feel weary. We all hewed to the ways and habits of our kind, fought to flourish at all costs, even though it hastened our collective end.

In early February, thanks to Gary O’Nan and in spite of the blank decade on my hypothetical résumé, I’d managed to wangle a job as a copy editor for
Downtown
magazine, a job that not only provided me with a low but respectable income, it dispelled forever all the naive notions I’d ever cherished about office buildings as steamily erotic settings for men’s room quickies. Long ago, I dimly recalled, I’d been a self-sufficient loner cozily enjoying a leisurely pot of fresh-brewed coffee every morning, high and secure in my sunny aerie. Now I hit the snooze button until the last possible second, leaving just enough time to leap from my bachelor’s grainy sheets to jam on some clothes and gulp the dregs of Scott’s coffee, now lukewarm and bitter, before running out the door. I spent my shockingly long days in a windowless cubicle, squinting at articles about the openings of “hot” new clubs, trying to render them error free, even readable, without compromising the vision, so to speak, of the author. On my way home in the evenings, I stopped for groceries and made dinner for myself alone in Scott’s kitchen, listening to music, drinking cheap but potable wine.

In March, Ted had, with much media fanfare, announced his return to the theater. He’d bought a run-down loft in the meat district and started his own small company. Their first play, an all-male gay-themed romantic comedy, had just opened to mixed reviews, but every drama critic in the city was raving about Ted’s courage and determination in returning to his theatrical roots. “Disproving once and for all Fitzgerald’s famous axiom about American lives,” gushed one, “Ted Masterson has launched himself into his own inspiring and triumphant second act.” This had appeared, appropriately enough, in
Downtown
, the very publication responsible for ringing down the curtain on Ted’s first act. I had read this particular column only because I had copyedited it. In fact, I’d
debated changing “axiom” to “saying” or “quotation,” just for the hell of it, but had passed my pencil over the piece with an unusually light hand. I’d wanted as little to do with it as possible.

On March 31, the day before April Fool’s Day,
Angus in Efes
had been officially taken on by a literary agent named Howard Fine, at which point it began a do-si-do into and out of the hands of a slew of editors, all of whom so far had deemed it unpublishable. Someone would buy it eventually, Howard assured me, and lacking any better alternative, I did my best to believe him. But each rejection upset, enraged, and depressed me even further, and although I tried not to dwell too much on them, it was becoming increasingly difficult not to panic. Howard worked out of his house in Bronxville and seemed to have no other clients besides me; he was the third literary agent I’d sent my novel to. I’d got his name from Sebastian, who knew his brother. He had called me less than a week after I’d sent my manuscript to him and offered to send it around on my behalf with an enthusiasm that surprised and flattered me; I suspected in my darker moments that Sebastian had paid him to represent me, but this was absurd.

While my novel was banished at every turn like Gloucester’s good son in
King Lear
, my cynical bastard of a screenplay had connived its way to incomprehensible success. In mid-April, Sebastian had officially bought the rights to
The Way of All Flesh
, which provided me with enough money to carry me for a while. But, in a burst of uncharacteristic prudence, instead of quitting my job at
Downtown
and living on this windfall until it ran out, I spent a chunk of it on health insurance and socked the rest away in a savings account, where it sat collecting interest, rainy-day money, mad money, my hedge against drudgery and privation. Meanwhile, the machinery of crew, locations, and casting was set in motion; the role of the pedophile-necrophiliac undertaker was given to Rick Thomas, the former star of a couple of 1970s cops-and-robbers flicks, who was currently down on his luck and desperate to get back into movies. His headshot showed a compellingly furtive, world-weary desperation; he was a little baggy around the edges, as if his skin had gradually collapsed inward over the years. His eyes were authentically pouchy and bloodshot; the end of his nose was flaking. He looked like exactly the right person for the job.

I had had no time this spring to start another novel. Rather, I’d had time in theory, but the combination of waiting for
Angus in Efes
to sell and working in an office all day made me want to spend all my leisure hours goofing off, as if I’d entered some sort of holding pattern in which the passage of time would have no real consequence until something big happened to resolve matters one way or the other. On the one or two nights a week when I went out with friends, I made sure to drink enough to give myself a good solid hangover the next day; the hours in the office went exponentially faster when I was only partly conscious. Instead of reading Victorian novels or poetry, I filled many of my solitary evenings at home with Scott’s TV. Sometimes I watched straight through from dinnertime sitcoms to the local news at ten to
Star Trek: Voyager
reruns, to which I’d somehow become addicted.
Voyager
was an old-fashioned naval romance with a corporate-utopian twist I was able to overlook due to the enthralling special effects and imaginative plots. I admired Captain Janeway to a degree that perplexed me. I couldn’t decide who was hotter, Commander Chakotay or Lieutenant Paris; it depended on my mood, but I was deeply torn. Luckily, I had no other romantic prospects to speak of, so I had plenty of time to consider the question.

Sebastian, on the other hand, had been happily coupled since February, when he’d finally accepted the fact that I would never return his love and, with his usual swift pragmatism, promptly installed in his loft the chesty redhead Peter along with his cute little mustache, his murderous Chihuahua Chad, and his crooked but perfectly normal penis. Now, no matter where Sebastian went, the psychic protoplasm of his connubial bliss went with him.