Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Page B

I’d let myself go a little in recent years.
    Then Ted looked at me, sharply with a question in his eyes, or a plea. I felt a small surge of victory, but it burst and faded immediately: Telling Giselle everything point-blank went entirely against my nature. Ted must have been reassured by the blandness of my expression; as if he knew that he was safe for the moment, he turned his back on us to mix the drinks while Giselle prattled on. Turning to glance at the clock, I caught sight of Yoshi’s little grove of potted orange trees at the far end of the room. They looked as fussily artificial as concubines hand-fed rare delicacies and rose water, perfumed and powdered and brought before the emperor. Their leaves were as shiny as waxed bell peppers. Their lurid orange fruit bent the thin boughs. “Right, Jeremy?” Giselle said, and I felt myself nod as Ted handed her a brimming glass.
    I’d been a waiter at a theater-district bistro for several tedious years before I’d hooked up with Ted. The night I met him, he was a cute little nobody playing the supporting lead in an off-Broadway play that was about to close. He’d just come out of a show and had wandered into Café Bonne-Foi alone for a late supper, and I had waited on him. He’d been in a chatty mood, and as it happened, I’d had a few things to say myself. I hadn’t even been hitting on him. I hadn’t realized he was gay, I’d been too caught up in what I was saying to think about anything so crass as getting laid. We talked about his play, which I’d seen and liked, and then I mentioned my own writing, which in those days was taking the form of plays.
    One thing led, as it so often did, to another: He asked me to have a drink with him when my shift was over, and at a nearby piano bar, while the drag-queen singer warbled her way through her repertoire, we’d talked earnestly about the decline of the theater and our mutual love of Noël Coward. After several drinks I was sufficiently certain of our mutual attraction to say, “You’re not gay, are you, by any chance,” knowing full well he was and that he preferred to keep it a secret. Because I had divined this without being told and agreed to protect him from the outset, he had trusted me enough to sleep with me that night at my walk-up in the East Village, but it hadn’t taken long for him to ask me tomove in to the Gramercy Park town house he’d bought with part of his inheritance from his dead grandfather. I’d pose as his secretary or something, we decided, but back then it was all a lark because we had fallen, as the saying went, head over heels in love.
    “Well, it’s not as if they didn’t warn you,” Ted was saying to Giselle.
    “Yes, but it took a couple of days of intense concentration—I mean, I really reached for those scenes—and then they’re just thrown out? Come on.”
    “But all the work that gets thrown out gets used somewhere else. Remember the other day when we were talking about that? You reach into your deepest self and pull something out for one character, it goes on the floor, but the next time you’re called upon to give that part of yourself, it’s there, because you’ve done it before. Nothing goes to waste, Giselle, that’s the most mysterious part; you’re saved from wasting anything by the process itself.”
    “Oh, I know,” she said in her flat, throaty California voice, “it’s amazing. It’s like, the hand of God has to be in there somewhere. It feels so spiritual sometimes, it gives me chills.”

6 | COLD POINT
    Soon afterward I said a transparently stiff good night to both of them without actually looking either in the eye, and then I escaped upstairs.
    Up in my room, I stood in the darkness by the floor-to-ceiling windows, peering through the long white curtains out into the lamplit streets of Gramercy Park. Outside in the park the treetops swayed in the night wind, although I couldn’t hear them through the thick glass.
    I switched on the standing