Jack Holmes and His Friend (12 page)

Jack preferred Will’s cold, uncaressed body, vague and pale and almost inert inside his baggy clothes. Surely Will hadn’t connected with—or even visited—most of the corners of his body,
as if it were a religious cult fallen into disuse, its shrines allowed to go to seed. One night, back in the fall, Will was joking about a girl who had wanted to go down on him. He had chided her out of it, saying, “I wouldn’t if I were you. You never know what you’re going to find down there.” Will went on to compare his crotch to the floor of his workroom, with its sedimentation of food and food wrappers, dirty socks, abandoned underwear, old newspapers, and mud tracked in by his expensive shoes. Will had his three suits and his blazer (with the old gold fox-head buttons) dry-cleaned regularly, and his father’s fragile, monogrammed shirts with the fraying collars washed and pressed by the French cleaners on Lexington near his sister Elaine’s rented town house, and he polished his shoes himself and rinsed out his baggy boxer shorts and long lisle stockings. But otherwise, everything in his room, he said, was filthy, mostly organic, slowly decomposing into topsoil. The miracle was that Will could turn himself out so impeccably every morning.

Of course, when Will said, “You never know what you’re going to find down there,” Jack was soon obsessing about exactly what one would discover, the tangled pubic hair, a mousy brown, then the balls, the size of quail eggs, riding high and close in a sac matted with shorter, coarser hairs woven into a merkin so thick that no flesh could be seen through it, then a smallish, circumcised suburban penis, the kind he associated with the shower room at boarding school, and finally the hair running down his inner thighs and shading off into ordinary, sun-bleached leg hair, again the very hair that reminded him of high school basketball players sitting on the sidelines, their silky shorts hiked up and their elbows resting on their knees. At the time, Jack figured, his fear of being caught staring had inhibited him;
he hadn’t realized back in high school how he was glorying in all those long, hairy, muscled legs with the hair leading the eye up to their hidden treasure.

Jack preferred Will’s inaccessibility to Peter’s constant presence. Jack preferred daydreaming about the life he might lead with Will to having a real affair with Peter. He liked to imagine what Will’s body would feel like and how it might respond rather than to know all too well how Peter’s functioned. Real sex was too meaty, too medical, as if sex plunged you into all those pulsing, sweating systems, the nerves and valves and secretions, whereas imaginary sex remained speculative, spiritual, sepulchral.

He stopped answering Peter’s calls and even, one evening, his exasperated ringing of the doorbell, and soon enough the Joffrey was off on another national tour. It occurred to Jack that it might have been kinder if he’d simply admitted to Peter that he was in love with another man, a real man, and that he, Jack, was just another fag. Such a confession would have shocked Peter, as if he’d been sleeping with a female. Jack had heard Peter explain that he couldn’t possibly go to bed with another dancer (“And do what?” he’d demanded. “Bump pussies?”). Peter wasn’t even sure he could accept macho men who didn’t at least occasionally have sex with women.

Or maybe Jack had finally rid himself of homosexuality, and he was back to mooning over an unobtainable straight guy. Maybe Will’s function was to be unobtainable, to allow Jack a bit of same-sex yearning without the danger of real cock-and-balls encounters. Jack had hated waking up with Peter. An empty
bed every morning was Jack’s proof that he hadn’t chosen his sexuality yet, that he was a blank slate.

In his soul Jack had returned to Will. For him the silent reversion felt momentous, though he was sure Will hadn’t even noticed it. That wasn’t quite fair; Will was a novelist and observed, if not everything, at least whatever fell within his purview. For Will had once explained, in the pretentious way he adopted whenever he talked about his art, that novelists see no more than the man in the street unless it fits into the narrow range of their sensibilities: “It’s as if a camera were rigged to click only at one particular intensity of light and no other.”

Now Jack began to pretend he was behind in his work and to stay late at the office and wait for Will in order to grab a bite with him. Now he started quizzing Will about the novel and made him renew his promise that he, Jack, would be the first reader.

“And so you shall be, my boy,” Will said. “The moment it’s sold.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Jack said, not sure what that expression meant; he hoped it solemnized a promise.

Will invited Jack to go down to Virginia for the point-to-point races. Jack started to make jokes about “dead pieces of animals glued to walls,” but he noticed that those jokes were only funny if they came from an insider; all outsiders who dared to criticize the hunt were considered boorish at worst, irrelevant at least.

They arrived late. The yardman, Cicero, met Jack and Will and Elaine and her children at the train station and drove them out to Upperville in the family’s decrepit, dark blue town car; the interior was carpeted with dog hairs and someone’s cast-aside cashmere sweater worn through at the elbows. No one in
the main house was still awake; Pinky, the black maid, was setting “Miz” Elaine’s little house to rights. Pinky looked bone tired and merely mimed a welcome by slapping her knees and bending over to kiss Elaine’s children, Teddy and Phoebe. “Give me some sugar,” she murmured to Teddy, who pushed her aside. He was tired and irritable. Phoebe behaved with an eerie perfection. Her platinum blonde pageboy held back with a royal blue ribbon was impeccable, and she presented her pink cheek to be pecked by the maid.

In the big house only one dim lamp (a polychrome Chinese bull) was turned on under its café crème lamp shade, dangling fringe and scorched by a bulb on one side. A marble clock ticked expensively beside the capacious wing armchair Will had flopped down in; the clock showed a cherub, finger to his lips, just starting to draw a marble curtain across the clockface. It must have been made for a bedroom long ago, Jack figured. He didn’t want to comment on the family’s things. He’d once heard Will criticize someone who’d asked too many questions of that sort.

Jack took the matching chair, and they both sipped Johnny Walker from the bottle Jack had brought down as a “house gift.” They didn’t say much. Jack had to keep remembering that this was Will’s childhood home, as familiar to him as the back of his hand. For Will there was nothing here that was challenging or unknown.

It was an early-nineteenth-century house painted white but peeling. It was at the end of a mile-long lane, straight as the part in Will’s hair. There must have been fifteen or sixteen rooms, and as Jack strolled through the reception rooms, he saw they were full of hunting prints and images of foxes—everything from eighteenth-century fox heads cast in bronze to dime-store knick-
knacks of foxes trotting across crudely painted green grass. The value or quality didn’t seem to matter, just the image of the totemic animal. The wallpaper in the library looked very old and hand-painted, like that in the White House; it showed scenes of the hunt, the women sidesaddle in full skirts, the men in red or black coats, and their mounts surrounded by twenty hounds or more. The paper was sun-faded in one corner.

In every room there were bouquets of wildflowers in silver vases. Big armchairs in worn chintz were drawn up to the cold fireplaces. The glass panes in the windows were tinted violet and were so old they’d warped. The glass was thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom, a reminder that glass is a slow liquid that flows downward over a century or two. In the dining room the big oval table and the ten spindly chairs and the inlaid sideboard resting on tapering legs were all an oxblood mahogany polished so often that you could see where the veneer was wearing thin. The whole house, it seemed, was maintained by Pinky (who cooked and cleaned) and her husband, Cicero. They were as black and shiny as eggplants and seldom spoke and never smiled. Will said that Pinky’s great-grandparents had been slaves right here at Greenmount. He didn’t seem ashamed of it, rather the contrary. Out back was Elaine’s pretty little house, the Rookery, which her father had built her after her divorce. Jack helped her carry her bags in.

At the paddock the next morning Jack could feel small hands of tension digging into his shoulders. His neck was getting stiff, and he bobbed his head to limber it up. He was tense because he didn’t know any of these people and they, of course, knew each other. He was tense because there were all sorts of rituals and uniforms that he didn’t understand or possess, and that clearly
counted a lot to the participants. Will put a hand on Jack’s near shoulder and said, “I hope these people aren’t boring you too much. They’re real grind-asses, aren’t they?”

They were walking back to the drinks table, which was set up near the paddock. “Boring? No, I just feel foolish because I’m not wearing the right clothes.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s just a Virginia thing—no one from elsewhere would dream of owning these weird jackets. Why would they? They’re ugly as shit.” Will lit two cigarettes and handed one to Jack, something he’d never done before. In the strong overhead light Will’s gunshot eyes were lost in shadow, but he was obviously looking closely at Jack. “I’m just grateful you came down here so we can look at the freak show together.”

Jack felt a surge of joy race through his body, and he was afraid his cheeks might be turning red. “I don’t think of it as a freak show. It’s a noble old tradition. I’m only afraid of looking out of place.”

“Don’t worry about that. Remember, you’re with me, and blood don’t get any bluer than mine.” Will laughed at his own absurdity, but Jack felt that Will’s words were like a heavy wool cape draped over his shoulders protecting him from the cold.

Will had on the right plaid jacket, but a faded hand-me-down one, which suited him and seemed all the more traditional. He guided Jack around and introduced him not as a school friend nor as a friend from work; he’d just say, “Furlong, this is Jack,” and he wouldn’t give any further talking points to his friends.

That evening they had dinner with Will’s family. They were nine at the table, and Pinky brought out a platter of sloppy joes but on a heavy nineteenth-century salver. There was also a
Rice-A-Roni pilaf served in a large silver bowl on which cherubs chased each other around the lip. Most of the conversation was about fetching the butter dish or the applesauce. Jack had no idea what sort of wine they were drinking, since it was presented in an amber glass ewer inserted into a silver sleeve, but he was sure it was a cheap one, maybe even a local one.

Will’s father said grace before they began to eat. Something brief and impersonal, not at all like the long, improvised to-do lists Jack’s Baptist relatives liked to impose on the deity (“And may little Billy be successful in his 4-H contest later today, O Lord”). Here the meal seemed like a giant jigsaw puzzle that had to be swiftly put together, then taken apart with no time at all to contemplate the final pattern. No, it was all just coming and going, this meal.

Jack kept thinking how lucky he’d been not to be born into a big, powerful family with traditions and expectations. He, Jack, had had nothing to rebel against except brute force and lunatic excess, whereas Will had to dodge through the minefield of his mother’s strategic silences and his father’s withering smiles. Will’s mother, as she was dishing up the chocolate pudding, said, “Will, you should be a little nicer to Taffy. She’s pining over you.”

“Taffy Ladew? You can’t be serious. That girl is an albino and has an IQ of 70.”

Elaine said, “Mother, Will isn’t interested in girls. At least not currently.”

Will said, “Why, sure I am. And I have a lot to offer them with the five dollars I currently have in the bank, my eleven square feet of habitation ripe with old banana peels on the floor, my serious acne problem, my unpublished novel, a beginner’s job in publishing, and no prospects. What girl wouldn’t leap at the chance to date me?”

Will’s mother said unsmilingly, “Not all girls are materialistic, Will. You have a fine mind and a sterling character.”

Will made a face and said, “And those merits will get you a one-way subway ride in New York City.”

Will’s father said, rather primly, “You may have just put your finger on what’s wrong with New York. Who wants an after-dinner drink? Thank you, dear, for the lovely meal,” and Will Sr. stood up and sauntered off.

Neither of Will’s parents treated Jack with any perceptible warmth. They didn’t ask him questions or tease him or collude with him; they weren’t seductive, as Jack’s parents had been with his friends, behavior that had made it impossible for Jack to complain about his mother and father. Jack’s parents used to systematically make conquests of the boys he brought home from school, though later, after the guests had departed, they ridiculed them in shockingly precise ways (“Such sensual little hands that Tommy has”).

Will’s parents, by contrast, were refreshingly cool and content to maintain their distance as parents and hosts. Jack thought that Will Sr. was more handsome than his son, more poised and elegant and sorted. If Will Jr. became more and more like his father over time, that would be all to the good.

Will’s father now sat in the drawing room in front of a portrait of himself as a younger man.

Lying in his uncomfortable four-poster bed that night, Jack thought that with such a family baying behind him and nipping at his heels, Will could never vanish or throw the others off his scent. Jack had been surprised that Will’s mother had been urging him to pursue Taffy Ladew, whose family was famous for gardens worthy of Versailles and nearly as extensive and varied. Her ambition to find Will a rich wife seemed out of character.
Of course Will couldn’t ever experiment with homosex, even if he happened to belong to the 3 percent of the population who liked that sort of thing. No, Will would be reviled if he so much as married a delicate blonde heiress who was a Protestant, for chrissakes. Something Will Sr. had said had revealed that New York publishing was already considered daring enough, given that the young Will could have entered the failing family law practice.