Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Page B

plaintively as I slammed the door behind me.

4 | SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
    The Quill and Palette Club was housed in a brownstone on West Tenth Street, a stately, high-ceilinged, former-single-family house very similar to the one in which I lived. I climbed the front steps and stepped into the bright, narrow front hallway, much less ostentatious than Ted’s foyer and much more suited to my own tastes. In the big, crowded salon, I took a chair near the back, beyond the open French doors that divided the room in half. The old man next to me cupped his knees with his palms; the skin on the backs of his hands was an eerie, creamy white. The sight of these cool, gentle, pillowlike hands gave me a deep desire to go to sleep with my cheek resting on one of them. I closed my eyes for a moment, found myself nearly in tears, snapped them open again. The tears had come welling from somewhere deep inside me along with an immense fatigue. I had the sense of everything in the room around me, intolerably apart from me, a strange feeling of not fully existing, of having a skewed, incomplete perception of the world. My dream about Ted disappearing into the forest came back to me as if I were still in it: His plane was landing right about now.
    People arrived, took seats, talked in small groups, laughed, and rustled their jackets off. I watched them, vaguely apprehensive that one of them would turn out to be an old family friend, and I’d have to get up and go through the tedious process of pretending to be delighted to see him or her, but luckily, I didn’t see anyone I knew. Then my sister Amanda materialized all at once in the chair I’d saved for her.
    Was Amanda losing weight again? I glanced briefly at her catlike little face with its small, straight nose and clear brown-gold eyes. Her cheeks were drawn and her skin too pale, I thought; she was beginningto look like our dead grandmother, who’d been a sticklike little bird with a dowager’s hump. She was overdressed, as usual, so it was hard to tell; she wore an all-black, many-layered outfit that culminated, at its lowest point, in ugly, fragile shoes with enormous soles so ludicrously misshapen, they looked like Dr. Seuss buildings. I assumed they were Japanese.
    “Hey, Jer,” she said, giving me a dry peck on the cheek, which I immediately wiped off in case she’d deposited any maroon lipstick. She smelled of musk and cigarette smoke. She peeled off a sort of velvet capelet affair and sniffed. Amanda sniffed frequently, habitually, which I found, like so many things about her, wildly irritating: She didn’t have a cold or allergies, and as far as I knew, she didn’t use cocaine.
    Amanda and I had always been semi-telepathically connected, so it wasn’t necessary for us to tell each other what we thought of each other. From the air around her head I absorbed the opinion that I should get a life, try to publish my work, and stop hiding in Ted’s attic. I thought, and knew she knew I thought, that she should dump her no-good live-in boyfriend and get over herself. She was incredibly self-serious about all aspects of her life, from the pretentious, overwrought music her band played to the way he sat there, her eyes narrowed, her neck very still, as if waiting for all eyes to fall upon her and widen in bewitchment.
    “Ted get back yet?”
    “He’s coming in tonight,” I said.
    “With Giselle Fleece, right? I’d love to meet her. What’s her schedule like while she’s here?”
    “I’m not her personal secretary,” I said.
    She sniffed. “There’s Mom,” she said.
    “I see her,” I said back.
    Our mother, full name Emma Pepper Thrane Jackson Margolis, was striding to a chair near the podium, her posture ramrod straight as always, silver-black hair piled high on her head like a gypsy’s.
    A large elderly woman got up and tapped the mike.
    “I’m very pleased to welcome you to the fall readings at the Quill and Palette Club,” she said in a high, quavering voice like