Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen

armpits of my shirt were drenched.
    Felicia slid into the booth next to me and put a fluttery hand on my arm. “I don’t feel well at all,” she said. She looked ghastly. Her black eye makeup was smearing into the tiny creases around her eyes, and she had a fleck of lipstick on her front tooth. Her knot of hair had slipped to one side of her head; the chopsticks looked silly and untethered. It was amazing how she could disintegrate in a moment like this.
    “You’re such a drama queen,” I said as I took the pen the waiter handed me and made a squiggle on the signature line of the credit card slip.
    “The tip,” she reminded me, her head almost on my shoulder. Her breath smelled like sour milk heavily underlain with rubbing alcohol. “It’s not enough. Two more is twenty percent.”
    “But the service sucked.”
    “We come here all the time. You want it to get worse?”
    I added two dollars.
    “I’m never too ill to remember the little people,” she murmured, for an instant almost herself again. Then her face crumpled into a monkey vizard of agony.
    I led her out onto the street and tucked her into a taxi. I was about to shut the door when her arm snaked out and twined around me. I tumbled in beside her, and the cab nosed itself into the traffic and set off downtown while Felicia sniffled and wiped her nose repeatedly on the back of her hand. A constant high keening noise came from way back in her throat. I handed her my handkerchief, then looked out the window and considered what had just happened.
    “It’s all your fault,” Felicia said into my shoulder. “If you hadn’t keptme waiting for so long—” I put my arm around her and she put her head down on my forearm.
    “You pull out all the stops, don’t you,” I said.
    “You’re so mean,” she murmured with a sickly smile. The cab stopped at a red light. Felicia sat up, dragged her knees up to her chest, and clasped her arms around them.
    “We’re crossing Canal. Almost there.” I looked at my watch: just after three. “Turn left here,” I said, and eased my wallet out of my back pocket. In the elevator of Felicia’s building, I wedged my hands under her arms. Her skin was clammy and had turned gray. Her eyes were glassy and inward. I half carried, half dragged her across the blond-wood expanse of her loft to the bedroom, where I slung her up onto the billowing feather-quilted bed. In the bathroom, I opened drawers and cabinets until I found her syringes and little Chinese porcelain box of glassine packets. I lit the jasmine-scented candle she kept by the side of the sink, shook a packet of powder into a spoon, added a thimbleful of water, cooked the stuff until it bubbled, then set a cotton ball into the spoon bowl and sucked it up into the syringe. I tapped out the air bubbles on the way back into the bedroom, where Felicia looked up at me with fluttering eyes from the bed and turned over. I took in with horror her Barbie-doll thighs, skinny flanks bruised greenish blue from the endless hypos, the eye-searing shock of her pantiless bush, white-blond and pornographically trimmed.
    I gasped as if I’d just been stuck with a pin and averted my gaze. “I’m not going to do this for you, Felicia,” I said.
    “Please,” she answered breathlessly.
    “No,” I said, handing her the syringe. “I can’t even watch.”
    I went out into the living room and sat on the couch for a while. I leaned against the deep leather cushions and looked out through the old factory window at the dense blue-white, boiling sky. All around me, facing me, were paintings of people arranged around restaurant tables or dance floors or bars. Their faces, lit by jukebox lights, votive candles, or matches held to cigarettes, were as sharply intelligent and unaccountably tragic as lemurs. They all looked deeply lonely, although they were in rooms filled with crowds and smoke and music; their expressions were a trompe-l’oeil blend of public arch amusement and inner