Free Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen

turned to Amanda, who was right behind me, to whisper that I’d see her and Emma outside. Richard Rheingold meanwhile had lumbered his way over to my mother and was clasping both her hands in his like a hungry, friendly bear. In spite of myself, I found myself embroiled suddenly in some sort of conversation with Irene.
    “Jeremy,” she was saying in her girlish, affected voice, “I want tohear all about this new agent. That’s just wonderful news; your mother must be terribly proud of you. Who
is
he? What
agency
is he with?”
    I narrowed my eyes at Amanda, who seemed to be deeply interested in something Beatrice was telling her about her preschool teaching career. The news that I had somehow managed to convince an agent to represent me must have zipped over the phone lines from Amanda’s Williamsburg apartment to the Upper West Side; I could almost hear them, their amused surprise, “He has an
agent
? Finally! You must be so relieved, Emma! Have you read the screenplay?”
    I mumbled the man’s name and agency. “But he’s not necessarily going to do a thing for me,” I added.
    “Oh, yes, what a heartbreaking industry,” Irene said with sympathetic woe, fixing me with her small, flickering eyes. As she talked, she pursed her lips, fluttered her hands, grimaced in an oddly parodic actressy way, as if she were unflatteringly mimicking herself. “But someone took you on! That means you’ve made tremendous progress with your work. Well, you must have in all these years since you last showed me anything. That was back when you were just out of college, wasn’t it? That funny little play you were writing, I remember it reminded me a bit of early Ionesco. It was absurdist and dark in the most charmingly post-collegiate way, as if you weren’t quite sure yet what you wanted to write about.”
    This sort of mewing insult was all too typical of her, but I couldn’t be truly offended by anything she said, because even her most cutting remarks seemed devoid of any edge or intent; they always sounded as if they had quotation marks around them. I attributed this to the fact that Irene had never had to struggle or work for a living or worry about money, so her cattiness was more a nervous habit than an indication of any genuine cast of mind. Richard was a famous and well-loved concert pianist and could have had any number of other women, I was sure—I had never understood what kept him with Irene, but no one knew better than I did how impossible it was to tell anything about couples’ private lives from watching them together in public.
    Three middle-aged women, I saw out of the corner of my eye, had converged on my mother with a flurry of compliments and comments, edging Richard out. He stood by the radiator, listening politely to them.They all looked as if they lived on Central Park West, held season tickets to the Philharmonic, pursued “culture” the way their small-town heartland-dwelling counterparts did jigsaw puzzles and needlepoint, and never missed an issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
. They were all, I realized, near clones of Irene; they wore the same pseudo-ethnic clothing and had identical girlishly long gray hair.
    “You have such a wonderfully metaphorical but at the same time grounded way of expressing the most private and profound female experiences,” the one with the longest hair said.
    This was my cue. “I’ve simply got to run now,” I said in my homo voice, an affected drawl I reserved for social occasions such as this one and for people like Irene. “Ciao, Irene, lovely to see you.”
    Irene waggled her fingers at me before turning, probably with relief, to Amanda and her daughter, Beatrice. I escaped at last to the front stoop, where I sat down and leaned back against the top step and muttered “Squanto was bughouse to squander his bounty” over and over again to myself. Just where did I get off, being so catty about my mother’s best friend and her ilk, when I myself was kept in lavish