Jack Holmes and His Friend (11 page)

“And what about sex?” Jack asked.

“You’d still like me if I were a girl? Maybe even more.”

“But you’d probably get shyer and more delicate and want me to marry you if you were a girl. I wouldn’t like that as much. Right now you’re a wild man. I don’t know much about men. Are all men like that, hell bound for pleasure, so frank and passionate?”

“Some men are big prisses. And a lot of gays would be afraid of your dick. If you went to a sauna they’d all follow you around, but then they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They’d throw it over one shoulder and burp it and weep.”

Jack laughed at the image.

Peter left at dawn because the company was taking a bus to Albany, where they’d be performing for three nights. At the door Peter said, “You’re the universal ball, Jack Holmes. Everyone at that party wanted you.”

“They did?”

“You really didn’t notice, did you? That’s nice.” He put on his gloves. “Modesty is nice in a man.”

“But you can’t just go away like this.”

“Catch a train up to Albany on Tuesday and spend the
night with me and ride in the company bus back to New York with us.”

“Wouldn’t you feel awkward?”

Peter stood on tiptoe and made Jack bend down and kissed him on the nose. “I’d be proud, Jack Holmes. Not everyone has a young, straight, handsome beau.”

“I’m not sure about the straight or the handsome, but thanks.”

Jack went back to bed and looked at the tube of body lotion for dry elbow he’d used as a lubricant; Peter had laughed at his amateurishness. It smelled of gardenias, like Jack’s grandmother’s soap. For all his talk of changing his sex, Peter’s dick had been hard and energetic, pushing into Jack’s chest. Jack felt exhilarated—the “universal ball.” Did people really think of him like that? A man for everyone? He’d never felt so confident. Was it because Peter was as yielding and in need of protection as a girl but had all the boldness and strength of a boy?

Jack could imagine awakening sexually and becoming obsessed with Peter’s ass, devoted to it and to him, but somehow he couldn’t picture Peter caring for anything much beyond his own career.

Jack did take Tuesday afternoon off from work and flew up to Albany. During the intermission there were lots of girls aged eight to ten, all pacing the lobby and showing each other versions of new steps as they sipped their Cokes. Their mothers, standing off to one side, were dowdy and fat and dressed in aquamarine silk tops with sprays of glass and gold beads appliquéd across one breast; Jack thought they were probably more presentable in their ordinary work clothes. Albany felt very proletariat.

Jack was full of anticipation as he went back to his seat. Peter
was about to dance in
Viva Vivaldi!,
and Jack had the jitters, almost as if he were a stage mother too.

He was astonished by Peter’s performance. He was at varying moments a boy, a man, and a great lady—the grande dame came out when he took his bows, clutched the cellophane-wrapped roses to his breast, and pretended to search out individuals in the very top balcony. The Cuban dancer who shared the bill with him was so masculine he seemed to belong to another species.

Peter wasn’t quite as happy to see him as Jack had expected, and over hamburgers at a diner, which was the only place still open at that hour (eleven), he seemed mildly curious about why Jack had come so far “for nothing,” as he put it bitterly.

“Nothing? Man, that was one of the great performances.”

“Get real, Jack,” Peter said. “You know nothing about it. How many shows have you sat through?”

“Three. But I’ve seen tons on TV.”

“Probably another three,” Peter drawled, “so we’re up to six—and anyway, you don’t know what you’re looking at.”

Jack said, “You’re really good at accepting compliments. Anyway, call me an idiot, but you don’t have to be a lion to gasp over the lions at the circus.”

Peter pretended to be vexed, but he couldn’t keep from smiling. “The circus! I just knew it.” After a silence he said, “I’m in a bad mood because Mr. Joffrey criticized me after the matinee for putting on feminine airs. He said the public doesn’t go for that shit—that’s exactly how he put it.” Jack didn’t know what to say. He thought, Peter is a paranoid prima donna.

Back at the hotel Peter said he was exhausted and sore all over, and they’d all have to pile in the bus at six A.M. to arrive in the city by two.

“I’m taking the seven o’clock train back,” Jack said.

“You’re not riding with us?”

“I’ve pushed myself on you enough,” Jack said, feeling cool behind his politeness.

“Come over here.” Peter patted the edge of the bed beside him. Jack complied. Peter said, “Why don’t you kiss me?”

And again, this time without all those daiquiris and the exhilaration of Alice’s spoon dance, Jack delved into all this hot, coiled muscularity; he even stood up and walked around the small room with his cock in Peter and Peter’s powerful legs wrapped around his waist.

Later, as they were both dozing off, Jack said, “Call me an ignorant philistine, but it was terrific seeing you up there dancing tonight.”

“For me,” Peter whispered, “you’ve been nothing but a pain in the butt. Exactly what I like most in the world.”

It seemed only half an hour later when the phone rang. The company manager told Peter to be downstairs in twenty-five minutes.

Jack took the train since he wasn’t quite ready to brave the stares of all those dancers. He wasn’t prepared to sit there while all those girls, those ballerinas, looked at him and saw Peter’s lover, Peter’s queer lover. The other boys, the company fags, might smirk and exchange looks. But the girls—that was a test Jack didn’t want to subject himself to. Being with Peter alone and being with Peter in public were two different things.

Something told Jack that a nondancer could never fit into that world. Peter said they were all so competitive, and even as he was in front of the curtain receiving an ovation, he could hear a bitch in the chorus whispering, “Did you see how he started traveling downstage when he was doing his turns?” Another
queen chimed in, “And what about that nelly port de bras? The broken wrist, the wilting fingertips, the shoulders like an anorectic
Vogue
model?”

The dancers were like members of holy orders—no outsider could ever breach the walls isolating them, their dedication, their single-mindedness. They’d chosen to deform their bodies and give up the world all in the name of a career that could last at best fifteen years. How could someone like Jack ever understand their sacrifices? For Jack, Peter was a problem not because he was effeminate but because he was a dancer.

6.

There was a two-week period when Peter wasn’t touring. The company was back in New York and, aside from a class or two, Peter had nothing to do. He’d drop by Jack’s apartment in the early evening and lie down on the floor, which was covered with tatami mats. Jack would undress him, undo the elastic bandages around one knee and both feet. He’d wash Peter’s feet and legs in warm water and soap, then get him to roll facedown on a towel. Jack had bought some patchouli-scented oil, and he’d slowly, patiently massage the kinks out of Peter’s short, wide feet with the high insteps and blunt toes and square-cut nails. His feet felt alert and sensitive, as if they were the bodily organs that could see, read.

Jack then went to Peter’s shoulders and sat astride his small, muscular waist and rubbery buttocks. He worked his fingers into Peter’s shoulders and with his thumbs pushed the tension up his spine toward his neck.

“Too hard, Jack Holmes,” Peter complained. “That hurts.”

When Jack relented and scribbled whispery, feathery cursive letters across Peter’s white, spongy skin, he said, “Too light, Jack Holmes. That doesn’t hurt enough.”

Jack moved down to his lower back, which joined his tailbone
in a more intricate way than usual, and dug deep with his thumbs. Then Jack’s big, octave-and-a-half hands fanned out over Peter’s high buttocks and molded them into Silly Putty shapes. But from time to time Jack was forced to stop and sit back and look at what God and the individual will and institutional discipline had wrought. He remembered that a philosophy professor in Ann Arbor had said that vision was the most spiritual sense and smelling the most animal; Jack went back and forth from gazing at Peter’s ass with angelic indifference to spreading his cheeks and grazing his hole with his thumb and bringing it up to his nose with canine rapture. He thought that this blend of patchouli and boy mud was the most intoxicating scent, the true smell of modernity. Jack knew nothing about hippies, incense, or drugs, but he suspected that dozens of skinny, bearded guys on the Lower East Side were stretching out their male friends at this very moment, burning doss sticks and working their thumbs into unwashed curry-chutes. He could picture the imprint of an oily body on the bedticking thrown onto the floor … the smell of the sixties: ass and incense.

Jack told himself that he wasn’t really gay. He was just lonely. Besides, Peter would be on tour at the end of this two-week period, and then they wouldn’t see each other again for six months. Anyway, Jack was only catching up with all those hippie polymorphs out there on the Lower East Side, the free spirits he envied and feared. Anyway, it felt like being with a girl because Peter insisted on the role he was to play, and besides, he didn’t want Jack to touch his dick. Truth be told, Peter was more feminine than Hillary and a more traditional woman than Rebekkah. And when Peter had his sex change, he’d be even more in character, wouldn’t he? And Jack would find him/her even more alluring, wouldn’t he?

“Hey!” Peter said. “Are you drifting off?”

“What?”

“Are you falling asleep on the job?”

In response Jack rolled Peter over to reveal the solid erection the boy had been hatching. Against Peter’s protests, Jack applied an extra dollop of oil to the problem and worked with it for a long time.

Maybe things weren’t so clear. Then again, maybe anyone, male or female, straight or gay, would want to play with this exquisite body.

But Jack resolved he’d start dating girls again.

By the fourth evening Jack was fed up with Peter. He complained all the time about Mr. Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, the resident choreographer. They weren’t treating him with the requisite deference. They hadn’t scheduled any new ballets for him during the next season. Even the two big ballets he’d starred in for several seasons were being programmed less frequently—an outrage, considering how much the public adored him. The two bosses both kept complaining that he, Peter, was too effeminate, not in his actual performances but in the way he took his bows, the way he exulted in the applause he inspired. Of course, it was ludicrous for the men to complain; it was obvious that they were jealous, they who were losing their hair and thickening in the waist no matter how many classes they gave or took. They were standing in Peter’s way, and he wasn’t going to tolerate it! A dancer had only so many good years, and he couldn’t lose a single one. Mr. Joffrey had never found his own niche in the dance world. He wasn’t Balanchine and he wasn’t Robbins and he wasn’t Cunningham—he wasn’t anything
distinctive, just an inept manager with a mildly talented choreographer. Even doddering old Martha Graham, gesturing from her couch as Phaedra—even she was more real than Joffrey. “She’ll be remembered, mark my words,” Peter exclaimed, “but Mr. Joffrey will be forgotten. He’s done nothing original. Of course, if he’d build the company around me, he might have a chance at immortality.”

Hour after hour, Peter raved about how invaluable he was and what a fool Joffrey was for not recognizing his genius. Jack was certain that Peter must be mistaken, that no dancer, no matter how talented, could be indispensable. Performers received that adulation, but they couldn’t ensure the continuity—not even Nijinsky had turned out to be all that valuable, and he’d been the most famous dancer of the century.

Jack stopped listening. He wanted to get his hands on Peter to calm him down.

After Jack would massage Peter, he’d fuck him in six or seven different positions that Peter would suggest or even dictate. Peter treated the spurts of Jack’s semen in the same way that he received applause—he threw his head back, lowered his eyelids, pursed his lips, and drank it all in as the homage of Jack’s ardor. “Only you, Jack Holmes, only you,” he’d murmur, as if only Jack owned the right size screwdriver to open this particular control box.

Jack would cook him a burger or make a chicken salad, serve him iced tea or orange juice, though there was always something wrong—the tea might overstimulate or constipate him, the juice was too acidic, the burger too carnivorous, the chicken choked with hormones. “I’ll have to teach you to eat healthy,” Peter said. “I eat lots of steamed vegetables and brown rice, and I arrange it all on the plate according to the principles of yang and yin.”

“Oh sure,” Jack said. “I’ll run right out and do that. I went to a macrobiotic restaurant on Fifty-fifth off Sixth—the waitress was the biggest grouch in New York, and no wonder: she was starving!”

Peter laughed, like a child who’s made a big dog bark. “Seriously,” he said, “you’ll feel a lot lighter, more airborne.”

“I leave flying to you, Peter. I just want to stoke the old furnace.”

Suddenly Jack realized he’d heard Will call eating “stoking the old furnace” more than once. Jack wondered if he was impersonating Will’s mild heartiness with Peter in a parody of preppy masculinity. Did Peter bring out the manly in him? Or did Peter’s diva combination of young woman and magic child demand an equal but opposite charade of understated macho wryness?

Or was Jack so in love with Will that when he missed him he became him?

This possibility made him turn away, disgusted, from Peter, who was sprawling naked on Jack’s tatami mat. Suddenly everything about this man-boy-girl seemed obscene—his overdeveloped ass with its powerful grip, his drag queen delusions of grandeur, his skinny white torso punctuated by just a pair of black dots like a blank page inscribed with nothing but two periods, a double finality so at odds with so much potential. Peter’s big, pouty lips, his husky voice, the slightly doctored color and wave of his hair, his unappeased narcissism—he was a walking, leaping, undulating formula for unhappiness.