Jeremy Thrane (8 page)

As we all clapped with a fervor that seemed somehow unrelated to the quality of this particular reading and indicative more of a blanket admiration, I felt obscurely guilty in spite of myself, seeing how well regarded she was. I was her firstborn child and only son, and as such I’d been given the distinct impression, although of course she’d never actually said this out loud, that I was expected to become some sort of successful something. I’d always suspected (maybe this was just paranoia) that she’d hoped I would become a lawyer like my father, discarding the rough spots in his personality, of course, but embodying his idealism and political fervor; unfortunately, I had inherited neither. After I graduated from college, I announced that I was going to be a writer. To this my mother (herself a writer) had said something earnest and concerned but carefully nonjudgmental, to the effect that kids who had no idea what to do next called themselves writers and flailed around for a decade or so, working at bad jobs and getting depressed and feeling alienated, and she hoped this wouldn’t be the case with me. Ever since, she’d maintained a tactful silence on the subject of what the hell I did with all my free time. I mentioned my novel every so often, but whether or not she took this seriously, I was never entirely sure because she never said. She’d always made it a point not to tell her children what to do, a policy that while admirable in principle made me extremely uneasy in practice; not knowing what she thought, I was free to imagine the worst.

I stood and inched my way toward the door, aimed a cursory “Hello” at Irene and the other Rheingolds, then turned to Amanda, who was right behind me, to whisper that I’d see her and Emma outside. Richard Rheingold meanwhile had lumbered his way over to my mother and was clasping both her hands in his like a hungry, friendly bear. In spite of myself, I found myself embroiled suddenly in some sort of conversation with Irene.

“Jeremy,” she was saying in her girlish, affected voice, “I want to
hear all about this new agent. That’s just wonderful news; your mother must be terribly proud of you. Who
is
he? What
agency
is he with?”

I narrowed my eyes at Amanda, who seemed to be deeply interested in something Beatrice was telling her about her preschool teaching career. The news that I had somehow managed to convince an agent to represent me must have zipped over the phone lines from Amanda’s Williamsburg apartment to the Upper West Side; I could almost hear them, their amused surprise, “He has an
agent
? Finally! You must be so relieved, Emma! Have you read the screenplay?”

I mumbled the man’s name and agency. “But he’s not necessarily going to do a thing for me,” I added.

“Oh, yes, what a heartbreaking industry,” Irene said with sympathetic woe, fixing me with her small, flickering eyes. As she talked, she pursed her lips, fluttered her hands, grimaced in an oddly parodic actressy way, as if she were unflatteringly mimicking herself. “But someone took you on! That means you’ve made tremendous progress with your work. Well, you must have in all these years since you last showed me anything. That was back when you were just out of college, wasn’t it? That funny little play you were writing, I remember it reminded me a bit of early Ionesco. It was absurdist and dark in the most charmingly post-collegiate way, as if you weren’t quite sure yet what you wanted to write about.”

This sort of mewing insult was all too typical of her, but I couldn’t be truly offended by anything she said, because even her most cutting remarks seemed devoid of any edge or intent; they always sounded as if they had quotation marks around them. I attributed this to the fact that Irene had never had to struggle or work for a living or worry about money, so her cattiness was more a nervous habit than an indication of any genuine cast of mind. Richard was a famous and well-loved concert pianist and could have had any number of other women, I was sure—I had never understood what kept him with Irene, but no one knew better than I did how impossible it was to tell anything about couples’ private lives from watching them together in public.

Three middle-aged women, I saw out of the corner of my eye, had converged on my mother with a flurry of compliments and comments, edging Richard out. He stood by the radiator, listening politely to them.
They all looked as if they lived on Central Park West, held season tickets to the Philharmonic, pursued “culture” the way their small-town heartland-dwelling counterparts did jigsaw puzzles and needlepoint, and never missed an issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
. They were all, I realized, near clones of Irene; they wore the same pseudo-ethnic clothing and had identical girlishly long gray hair.

“You have such a wonderfully metaphorical but at the same time grounded way of expressing the most private and profound female experiences,” the one with the longest hair said.

This was my cue. “I’ve simply got to run now,” I said in my homo voice, an affected drawl I reserved for social occasions such as this one and for people like Irene. “Ciao, Irene, lovely to see you.”

Irene waggled her fingers at me before turning, probably with relief, to Amanda and her daughter, Beatrice. I escaped at last to the front stoop, where I sat down and leaned back against the top step and muttered “Squanto was bughouse to squander his bounty” over and over again to myself. Just where did I get off, being so catty about my mother’s best friend and her ilk, when I myself was kept in lavish splendor by a famous man who supported me and my own so-called writing career? Just then, into my line of vision strolled a superb example of sapiens, genus homo—young, moist-lipped, tight-buttocked, such stuff as dreams were made on. I tracked him through narrowed eyes, a low growl bubbling deep in my throat.

Ted was probably getting home right about now. I was extremely relieved to have an excuse to miss the homecoming. I imagined it as a scene out of a Gothic novel, the seasonal return of the Lord of the Manor bounding up the front stairs, followed by his wife and child, the nanny, his valet, Giselle’s lady-in-waiting or whatever the fuck she was called, and the limo driver with the bags. As the secret mad wife in the attic, I wasn’t due onstage until around midnight, carrying a burning candelabrum and wearing a soiled white nightgown. After supper with my mother and sister, I planned to cool my heels in a movie or bar while the household went through its paces, while the valet and lady-in-waiting unpacked the haute-couture finery and hung it in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom in readiness for Monday night’s premiere and party, and the nanny installed little Bret in the nursery, Ted and Giselle admired
Yoshi’s obscene-looking orchids in their second-floor glassed-in balcony hothouse. At eight o’clock would come Basia’s summons to the dining room table for body-temperature borscht, fleshy dumplings that resisted the teeth, and her specialty, pork cutlets as chewy as slabs of latex. After dinner, bath time and bedtime for the Kewpie-faced angel, the grunt work done by the nanny, the adoring parents standing by … and then? Then Ted might start to wonder where the hell I was, and I didn’t want to be too easily located when his attention, as it must, turned to me. I had my pride.

“There you are,” said my mother.

I looked up at her through a thick fog. She looked fragile and upset.

“Where’s Amanda?” I asked.

“She’ll be out in a minute,” said my mother.

“What’s wrong?”

She sat next to me on the stoop and leaned against me. “I’ll tell you at dinner, when Amanda can hear too.”

“That was a good reading, Mom.”

“I was so distracted. But that’s very nice of you to say.” She squeezed my arm and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“And you look beautiful, as always.”

“Oh, Jeremy, if only everyone were exactly like you.”

There were a few things I could say to this, but I chose to say none of them. A few minutes later, all the members of our dinner party, with one unwelcome addition, had assembled on the sidewalk, freed of extraneous conversational entanglements, ready to roll. Irene, it developed, had been invited along, whether by my sister or my mother I hadn’t been able to ascertain, so my blame had no object and remained stuck in my craw. “The reservations were for three,” I said weakly but mulishly.

“Well, they can pull up an extra chair,” said my mother, equally mulishly but much more assertively. She had never understood my aversion to Irene; it was one of the few things she refused to indulge in me.

We were going, at my own suggestion, to a little bistro I frequented whenever possible. The three women strolled, yapping, while I surged ahead, eager to get this over with and also a bit peckish. Since that awful scene at Benito’s this afternoon, I’d been looking forward to the sheer comfort of a St. Émilion I particularly liked to drink with an order of
garlicky snails, chèvre-beet-mesclun salad, moules frites, and finally a cognac with mousse au chocolat and café au lait. The evening had just begun; it was absurdly early to eat dinner, but my mother ate this early almost every night, yet another of her eccentricities in a city where some people might have considered even an eight o’clock dinner invitation much too early.

When we arrived, it appeared that reservations had not been necessary; the staff were all still lounging at the bar with pre-shift cigarettes and demitasses, and seemed mildly put out by our arrival. No one else was there except a couple of old fruits sipping wine at the bar. I felt their eyes rake over me; I didn’t return their glances, but it perked me up to be viewed as a morsel, my rose having long ago given up the ghost of its first bloom. Actually, now that I thought about it, “first” implied a second.

We faced off in a booth, Amanda and me against Emma and Irene. Amanda lit a cigarette while I scanned the wine menu to see whether they’d added anything that sounded better than the old standby.

“I wish you’d quit smoking, Amanda,” said Emma. Lucy, her mother, had died two years before of lung cancer and emphysema.

“I’ll stop in two years,” said Amanda. “You were thirty-five when you quit.”

“Isn’t it ironic,” my mother said to Irene, “how our children emulate us only in the things we most dislike about ourselves?”

“Beatrice has just decided to cut off all her hair,” said Irene, peering through her reading glasses at the wine menu. “My own greatest mistake at her age.”

“At least don’t smoke in front of Mom,” I said to Amanda. “Her mother died of lung cancer, for God’s sake.”

Amanda didn’t look at me or acknowledge what I’d said except to send a wave of dislike my way, from which I gathered that I had been sent to a penalty box in her head, but I was tired of her disdainful silences, and now made it a policy to ignore them. If she had something to say to me, she could say it aloud.

“Where is Leonard tonight?” I asked my mother, although the thought of spending an hour or two or, God forbid, three with my
brooding, intimidating stepfather, with his lashing out and unpredictable querulousness, was not a pleasant one; I wanted to change the subject before Amanda and I started bashing each other over the head with our plates. It was appalling the way we turned into overgrown kids whenever we were with our mother.

“Leonard,” she said. “That’s what I—”

“We’ll have the Beaujolais,” Irene was saying to the waiter with a shuddering little moue. He nodded and disappeared before I could protest. I noticed cruelly that her jowls had softened and drooped even more since the last time I’d seen her, sometime last spring. Mentally, I liposuctioned her neck and lifted her face, stapling the flaps to her ears, causing her to grimace in a permanent deranged smile.

The wine arrived, was pronounced drinkable by Irene, who had no idea what she was talking about, and was poured all around.

“To Emma,” said Irene. “A wonderful, wonderful reading.”

Our glasses met over the breadbasket and clinked gently. We drank.

I sighed and set down my glass. “What were you going to say about Leonard?” I asked Emma.

My mother looked bleakly at me.

She and Leonard lived up on West Eighty-seventh near Riverside, a world away from Gramercy Park. I’d been sitting at their kitchen table recently, doing the crossword puzzle and drinking coffee, when Leonard came in, rifled through the cupboard as if he were looking for something, and then slammed the door shut and banged the counter with his fist.

“What’s going on out here?” my mother said, coming into the kitchen.

“Where is the cheese?” said Leonard. “Why didn’t you buy some more or at least put cheese on the shopping list! I just went out and came back and there is no cheese for my lunch!”

She stared at him. “Leonard,” she said, “it’s only eleven o’clock. There’s plenty of cheese. What’s wrong with you?”

“With me? Me? I have to go out to the store again, Emma!”

“I just bought a cheddar and a Muenster yesterday.”

“At least put them where I can find them!”

Emma opened the door of the refrigerator, reached into the cheese compartment, and took out two blocks of unopened cheese. “Here you are,” she said briskly, setting them on the counter.

They looked at each other; I might as well not have been there. Leonard was flushed. His wool cap was still on, slightly askew. He had a wild-eyed look, as if he’d been drinking or doing something illicit.

Now I rehearsed in my head the words “It’s going to be all right, Mom. He’ll be okay without you. You’ll be fine on your own.”

“So, Mom,” Amanda asked, “what is it?”

“I thought he was just acting like a bastard, but it isn’t that.” She laughed and blew her nose in her napkin, which she replaced in her lap and smoothed over her thighs. “The irony is that I was about ready to give up on him. Then he went for a routine checkup, and the doctor suspected he might have something going on with his brain and ran some tests. And well, he’s apparently in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.”

We all stared at her.

“Poor man, all he cares about are waves and particles! He’ll forget everything he knows.” Her tears fell onto the piece of buttered bread she’d abandoned on a small white plate.

“Is there anything they can do?” I asked stupidly.