Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online Page A

just then. “Oh my God,” I said under my breath without moving my lips.
    Felicia glanced over at Phil, then continued to skate her gaze around the room.
    “Who are they?”
    “
Downtown
magazine.”
    “They couldn’t hear us,” she murmured positively.
    “We were almost shouting.”
    “No, we weren’t,” she said, and gestured for the waiter. As the reedy young man in the bow tie made his way over, I made a show of noticing them for the first time.
    “Hello!” I called. “Phil, how are you? Oh, hi, Gary.”
    The lugubrious mask of a sad clown appeared in profile just above the pointy hump of Phil’s back. Gary’s glance was like the flick of a scorpion’s tail. I gave a brief, hearty wave and looked up at the hovering waiter, my heart trying to rise through my esophagus to flee my body.
    “I could use another one of these,” said Felicia, tipping her near-empty martini glass into the ashtray. Two oily-wet olives rolled into the ashes and came to rest against a squashed butt. The waiter picked up the ashtray and replaced it with a clean one from his apron pocket. After he’d disappeared, I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned, “Aaaagh.”
    “I’m thinking of a number between eight and twenty-nine,” said Felicia briskly.
    I opened my eyes, narrowed my focus, and occluded my peripheral vision so that I could see only Felicia. We stared into each other’s eyes.
    “Between eight and twenty-nine,” I repeated.
    This was a trick we’d developed at parties, to look as though we were engaged in an intimate, emotional conversation whenever there was someone in the vicinity who needed to be prevented from approaching and causing either of us boredom or injury. It also worked as a distraction when one of us was upset about something. I could no longer see Phil or Gary; I was shielded by our taut, exclusive gaze. “Twenty-seven,” I said fiercely.
    “No,” she said, but not without sympathy. “Let me narrow it down for you a little: It’s an odd number, it’s a prime number, and it’s the age I was when Ted and I drove to New Orleans for spring break and stayed at that hotel on Prytania Street with that witchy proprietress who spooked us so much we had to leave.”
    “Nineteen,” I said.
    “That is it exactly,” she said. “Do you feel better now? They didn’t hear you.”
    “You mean us,” I said. “You’ve got a big mouth too, you know, it wasn’t just me.” I took one of her cigarettes from her mint-green pack and lit it with a rasp of her thin gold lighter. The mentholated smoke numbed my lungs as if it were ice cold, and the head rush made me want to lie down. I took a second, deeper drag and stubbed it out in the fresh ashtray. My plate of spaghetti arrived, looking as obscenely horrific as theworms-and-clotted-blood jokes of my childhood. On the table in front of Felicia, oily brown liquid roiled in a vast white plate, the soup du jour. She was looking past it, at the table where Gary and Phil were sitting.
    “Report,” I muttered. “What are they doing?”
    “They’re paying,” she said out of the side of her mouth. She appeared to be enjoying this. “The older guy is heading for the men’s room. That other guy is picking up the tab. He’s at the cash register now. Who is he?”
    “I can’t believe this is happening,” I said.
    “He looks so familiar,” she said. “It’s because he has a sadass. All the boys down south have ’em. Big baggy old rear ends. Comes from sitting around bossing the darkies all day.”
    “Darkies,” I repeated in disbelief.
    “Oh, yes, Jeremy. My grandmother once told my father when he was a little boy, ‘We don’t say “niggers,” darling, we say “darkies.” ’ ”
    I stared at her.
    “And you wonder why I left?” she added, shaking her head.
    “No,” I said, but I didn’t say anything more. I’d always taken Felicia’s references to her childhood in the Deep South with a big grain of salt, because I’d noticed that she