The Last Book Party(10)

“Technically, no. Not when you’re the one being toasted.”

“Right. Thanks for the etiquette lesson.” Jeremy picked up his mug and finished the rest of his beer in one swallow.

When Malcolm went to get another pitcher for the table, I asked Jeremy how he knew Franny. Their friendship made little sense to me. Where Franny was all lightness and warmth, Jeremy seemed dark and cynical.

“Boarding school at Choate. Freshman year,” Jeremy said.

“Roommates?”

He shook his head. “More like partners in crime.”

“What’d you do?”

“Pot, Quaaludes, busting curfew—the usual overprivileged adolescent shit.”

“It hardly sounds criminal,” I said.

“What’d you do in high school, write in pen in the margins of a school copy of Wuthering Heights?”

“Ink in a book? Never,” I said.

“Dare a controversial new design for the yearbook?”

“Literary magazine.”

Franny and Jeremy together still perplexed me. Jeremy struck me as a quintessential prep-school snob who had already sized me up and judged me harshly as the suburban public school girl I was.

I asked Jeremy if he’d ever been to Franny’s place in Truro.

“Been there? I practically lived there. Had my best vacations there. Thanksgivings too.”

He said this as if it were a badge of honor, and a claiming of territory. No wonder Jeremy seemed so full of himself; he was part of that literary world.

Malcolm slid back into the booth and handed Jeremy another beer.

“So, cherub,” he said to me, “did you know that Jeremy was something of an adolescent prodigy? When he was still in high school, he had a collection of short stories published—a small press, of course, but impressive nonetheless. A recasting of Winesburg, Ohio—but at Choate! An Enclave in Wallingford.”

Jeremy seemed embarrassed.

“The head of the English department made it happen,” he said.

I couldn’t help but be impressed and a little jealous that while still a teenager Jeremy had hit the trifecta of literary success: talent, confidence, and connections.

“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.”