Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Page A

clutching sadness.The colors were drenched and bilious, the skin tones as flat as the walls. Felicia was a great painter, I’d always thought, but no gallery owner had ever shown the remotest interest in her slides.
    Felicia came out of her bedroom a few minutes later and sat next to me. She had put on fresh makeup and redone her hair, and wore a red silk robe tied at the waist. She was beautiful again and back in business.
    “Sorry about that,” she said breezily.
    “I’ve got to go,” I said.
    “Jeremy. Accept my apology.”
    “This whole thing is bullshit. You started doing it because you liked the idea of yourself doing it. Now look at you.”
    She laughed loopily. “I don’t have to answer to anyone.”
    “That’s hardly the point, Felicia. Think about it.”
    “Oh, fiddle,” she said, and cupped my face in her hands, which were as cool as a nurse’s. “I want to be a drug-addicted neurotic semi-recluse. You want to be what you are; it’s the same thing, Jeremy.”
    “What am I, Felicia?”
    “You’re a slut,” she said, but this time it sounded like an insult.
    “Okay,” I said, aware that I was about to say something I couldn’t retract, but I wanted to say it and I wanted her to hear it, because it would be like lancing a long-festering boil, “but it’s not the same thing at all. Your choice is willfully self-destructive and mine isn’t and that’s a real difference, no matter how you want to justify it. I take care of myself.” I hadn’t known that I was this angry with her. The words themselves seemed to be drawing forth a poison from deep within me. “I’d never ask you to stick me in the ass with a syringe, for example.”
    “You didn’t have to,” she said, yawning, unperturbed. I knew I ought to rush back uptown and say something to Gary to convince him he’d misunderstood everything, and my mother was giving a poetry reading later on today, which I’d promised her I’d attend, but it wasn’t easy to extricate myself from this couch. Felicia’s head had dropped slightly; her forehead rested just an inch above my shoulder. Her face had softened and her eyelids were partially closed. The leather cushions we sat on seemed to draw us down together into a squishy, decadent vortex. Nothing seemed to matter here at Felicia’s except staying here. I could see why she almost never went out.
    “What kind of intervention was that, Jeremy?” she asked. “Was that the best you could do?” She laughed then, silently, but so hard she coughed, and I had to thump her on the back. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, gasping, “but that was the most pathetic little confrontation I ever heard.”
    “I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up and went over to the door. I didn’t look back at her because I was sure she was lolling her head back against the couch cushions, still convulsed with silent laughter, and I had no interest in seeing her like that.
    “Jeremy, come back here and get your sense of humor,” she called. “I think it’s under the couch or somewhere.”
    I opened the door.
    “Don’t go,” she said, and this time there was a note of pleading in her voice. “Don’t leave all mad at me like that. I won’t be able to get any painting done today, I’ll be too upset.”
    Felicia had always frankly cared more about herself and her own needs and desires than just about anything else. But because I always knew exactly how she felt and what she wanted, I felt no need to cover up my own desires and moods. I found it oddly refreshing that her gestures of generosity were always offered on her own terms, which seemed much more genuine than the tactful equivocating or selfless white lies of “nice” people. Her self-centeredness infuriated me, but I didn’t mind being infuriated when I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t. For this reason, I always forgave her.
    “I have to go,” I said, softening. “I’ll call you later.”
    “Give Ted my love,” she called