“Enough with the modesty,” Malcolm said to Jeremy. “Your teacher helped because you were that good.”
Malcolm was usually more reserved with his authors, and even if his interest wasn’t purely professional, Jeremy wasn’t his type. Malcolm’s typical objects of affection were blond and droll. Jeremy’s novel must really be something.
Presumably to change the subject, Jeremy asked if my family was part of Tillie and Henry’s crowd in Truro. I half choked on my beer, then wiped the foam from my lips.
“God, no,” I said.
“Not writers?”
“Different social circles,” I said. “Artists unsettle my parents. They find them too unpredictable, I think.”
Imagining my mother at Henry’s party, I saw her running a finger along a bookshelf checking for dust. Sneering at Tillie’s long braid, pronouncing it too girlish for a woman that age. It was hard to believe that my mother, so controlled and pragmatic, had once dreamt of an artistic career.
Uncomfortable with Jeremy’s questions, I turned the conversation back to his writing. I asked Malcolm if he’d read Jeremy’s stories.
“I have not,” he said, a glint in his eye. “Perhaps we should organize a reading.”
“Yes, let’s!” I said.
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Oh, gee, golly whiz, how great. Can we use your barn for a stage? Can you sew up some curtains?”
Malcolm patted Jeremy’s shoulder.
“Now, now, enough nasty.”
I didn’t let it go. I was curious to know what this privileged guy had written as a teenager and if there was anything in his collection that might explain his friendship with Franny.
“Where can we find your stories? I’d love to read them.”
Jeremy didn’t answer right away. Then, as if genuinely uncomfortable with the attention, he said, “It was a limited edition. You’d be hard put to find a copy.”
6
I imagined Lil with long blond hair, the kind that never got frizzy like mine, but curled into perfect little ringlets around her forehead and tumbled thickly down her back. Henry and Tillie would adore her. She would be a poet, or a painter, or do something surprising with batik. I pictured her with Franny roaming woodsy footpaths on an island in Maine. He would lie on pine needles taking photographs of tree trunks while she gathered scraps of bark for a sculpture. After wandering the island, they would make love on a mattress on the floor of an old lighthouse and then sleep until the sun went down. When Lil woke up, she would stretch like a cat. She would say she wanted something like chocolate pudding for dinner, and Franny would oblige.
At noon on Friday, I was sitting at my desk, a submission from the slush pile in front of me, imagining Franny and Lil afloat on their backs in a pond, when the phone rang. It was Malcolm, at his house in Bucks County, with an urgent errand. He wanted me to go into the storeroom “posthaste,” find a particular bound galley, and bring it to 160 East Twelfth Street, the basement apartment.
“Do hurry,” he said. “Jeremy asked for it today as he might be heading out of town this evening.”
Jeremy. I had little desire to see Jeremy. I cringed at the idea of appearing before him as the lowly errand runner that I was. I looked around for one of the summer interns, but they’d all skipped out early to start their weekends. I dragged myself into the storeroom to get a galley of the novel Armenian Rhapsody, by a writer who’d emigrated from Yerevan to Chicago as a teenager. It annoyed me that Jeremy was already feeling entitled enough to ask for a delivery to his apartment. I had no idea why it was so urgent that he get the galley today.
It was nearly one hundred degrees and muggy outside, and the air felt thick and dirty. I took the bus downtown and walked the last few blocks to Jeremy’s apartment, the leather straps of my sandals cutting into my feet, which had swelled from the heat. I twisted my hair into a bun and pulled a pencil from my tote bag, sticking it through the knot to keep my hair off my neck.
His building was a narrow brownstone. I went down the steps to the basement and pushed the bell. When the door opened, Jeremy stood in front of me with a spoon in his mouth and a jar of peanut butter in his hand, wearing a plain white T-shirt and baggy khaki shorts. He looked thinner than I’d remembered.
“Hi. Malcolm said you had a desperate need for Armenian Rhapsody.”
I reached into my bag and took out the galley. Jeremy slowly pulled the spoon from his mouth and put it and the jar of peanut butter down on a table by the door. He took the galley, flipped through the pages, and set it on the table.
“Do you want to come in?” he asked, without smiling, seeming almost nervous.
My eagerness to learn more about Franny trumped my wariness of Jeremy. “Just for a minute—to get out of the heat.” I moved toward the wheezing air conditioner in the window by the door.
The room was small and tidy, with one wall of exposed brick. There wasn’t much furniture—a navy-blue futon couch, an antique rocking chair, and an old camp trunk used as a coffee table, on which sat a glass milk bottle filled with dried flowers. Books were lined up neatly on two long wooden shelves propped up on cinder blocks. A pair of pink ballet shoes, their ribbons wrapped tightly around them, and pair of light-blue leg warmers were on the floor near the futon. A tiny kitchen with a half-size fridge, a stove, and a narrow sink was tucked into the corner. On top of the single kitchen cabinet was a clay pot containing an ivy plant with wilting brown leaves.
“Is this your place?” I asked.
“Mine? Are you kidding? Does this look like the kind of place I’d live in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know you.”
Jeremy pointed to a framed poster of Joni Mitchell on the wall.
“You know me enough to know that this couldn’t possibly be mine.”
“I like Joni Mitchell,” I said.
“Of course you do. As does my little sister, Debbie, which is why she hung it in her apartment.”
I was surprised to hear that he was someone’s older brother. From the small fridge, Jeremy pulled out two bottles of Bass Ale and handed one to me. He sat on the futon with his long legs stretched onto the trunk, leaving me the rocking chair. He told me his sister was at a dance festival in North Carolina for the month and he was staying at her place until he figured out where to go next.
“Next?” I asked.
“I’d been thinking of heading up to the Cape to hang with Franny for a while, but I think he’s staying up in Maine with Lil.”
I rocked a few times in the chair, then asked, “So where in Maine are they?”
Jeremy smiled slightly.
“At Lil’s mother’s house in Vinalhaven. Lil’s working at some lobster place where Franny’s hoping to get work too. It’s absurdly remote. You have to drive forever and then take a ferry to get there.”
I shook my head.
“What?”
“I had imagined them on an island,” I said.
“They are kind of an island to themselves,” he said.
When he didn’t continue, I asked, “Is Lil an artist too?”
“She would say so,” Jeremy said.
“Would you?”
He said nothing, which was enough for me to understand he didn’t think much of Lil. Perhaps he found their relationship as illogical as I found his friendship with Franny. We sat in silence for a moment, Jeremy watching me rock in the chair. I stood up and stepped to the kitchen to put my beer in the sink.