Jack Holmes and His Friend (13 page)

Jack had always thought of himself as an extra in an opera, as an indistinguishable part of the crowd scene, but his passion for Will had singled him out, drawn him forward from the hooded ranks, shone a spotlight on his upraised face. In his own eyes, at least, he was now a lead if not a star, and he didn’t like the attention.

But now he understood better than at any time previously how much pressure Will’s family exerted on him. Jack placed all his own queer hopes of seducing Will on Will’s destiny as a novelist. Because Will’s art required him to study his world and himself, to map out his foibles and sound its shallows, he had every reason to be as original in his life as in his writing. Will’s idol, Thomas Pynchon, had studied New York by looking up from its sewers, and he had mixed comic book riffs into the reasonable strains of urban realism. Wasn’t Will under an obligation to be just as odd and original, just as strange?

But did Will have any talent? It was just a prejudice, but Jack thought that Will would be more forthright about his writing if he knew he was good, and if he were good, he’d know he was. Were there really any mute, unsung Miltons? Milton himself had become famous very young, hadn’t he, as much for his beauty as for his Latin verses. Jack felt that both he and Will were betting everything on Will’s talent. If his novel was a success,
Will would be free of his family. If he was free of his family and Virginia and Catholicism, Will might realize he loved Jack as much as Jack loved him.

In a dream, Jack floated up out of his bed and met Will in the bathroom between their rooms. They embraced—in fact Will was surprisingly the more ardent one, digging a sharp finger into Jack’s back and streaking a slimy tongue, like a snail’s pseudopod, down Jack’s long neck.

He woke up to hear someone outside calling Will’s name. When Jack went to the window, he could see it was Will’s mother in jodhpurs and a tight jacket and a matching hat tied under her chin. Will threw open his window and called down, “What is it, Mother? I was sleeping.”

“Leander wants to say hello,” she said. It took a moment for Jack to realize that Leander was the horse.

“Well, hello to you, Leander. Now I’m going to grab a few more z’s.”

“You could ride the Puckster if you wanted.”

“We’ll see, Mother.”

Jack realized he’d observed no other contact between mother and son except for the misguided prompt about Taffy. They were both shy and needed to move the horses as chessmen in their game.

Will went off to the hunt ball that evening, but Jack had said that he hated dances and didn’t have a tux and preferred watching TV at home and relaxing with the children, who all cheered. They’d taken a liking to Jack, who played silly games with them and was even willing to be the fox they hunted. At one point Jack caught little Teddy streaking baby Phoebe’s forehead with a bead of sweat that had fallen from Jack’s face. “What are you doing?” Jack asked.

“I’m blooding her.”

“Bleeding her?”

“No, silly. I’m blooding her.”

When Jack looked up at Elaine, she sighed and said, “It’s another grotesque ritual from the wonderful world of fox killing. The first time a child goes on a hunt, they daub him or her with the fox’s blood, Lord knows why. It’s called ‘blooding.’ Marks them for life as a moron.” Elaine laughed. “People don’t do it much anymore. It’s dying out. You’re going to tell everyone in New York about your weekend with the savages.”

“Do you think foxhunting should be outlawed?” Jack asked her.

Before she could answer, Will came in wearing black tie, about to head out for the ball. “Oh, look at His Serene Elegantissimo,” Elaine said.

“Yes,” Will said, “I’ll make the most elegant shadows in the darkest corner.”

“Promise me,” Elaine said, “that you’ll ask Taffy to dance just once, just once, Will.”

“I’m sorry,” Will said, “but I don’t socialize with albino feebs.”

“She has thirty-seven million dollars,” Elaine said. “If you add her millions to her IQ, it brings her nicely up into the normal range.”

“Just because
you’re
a fortune hunter, there’s no reason to assume—” Will said, but Elaine beat the air with her hand and anxiously hushed him, glancing significantly at the children.

“Okay, I’m off,” Will said. Framed by the wide doorway, he looked like a celebrity photo out of the past, a black-and-white Weegee of a Biddle or an Astor. Jack thought that this weekend had stolen Will from him, made him less of an individual and
more of a personage, less a close-up and more just another face in a dynastic lineup.

After he’d gone and Jack had rough-housed with the children for half an hour, Elaine said, sipping on her cigarette, “You two boys are such good friends!”

“Well, we met at work.”

“You got Will his job. He’s so grateful to you.”

“I didn’t even know Will then; it was just a favor I was doing for Alice. Why didn’t she come down for the races?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Not her sort of thing. Alice is such a free spirit! Of course, she’s making her documentary about us all. Maybe next year she’ll get around to shooting the race. You must come back next year. I can see how close you and Will are.”

“I’m devoted to Will,” Jack said, as if to defend his friend’s honor, “but I’m only one of Will’s many acquaintances.”

“Much more than that. Will is such a loner. He’s one of the rare people I know who genuinely prefer their own company, but with you—”

“It’s almost as if he’s alone?” Jack asked, laughing at the revelation.

“Possibly,” she conceded. “Because with true soul mates we experience no conflict. We’re completely at peace.”

Jack couldn’t tell if she was mocking him by speaking in such a serious way. The whole discussion made him uneasy. Did she suspect they were both queers and feel that her duty as a sister and a Catholic was to intervene, to get her brother out of the clutches of this fiend-friend? Or did the queer option intrigue her? Perhaps now that, as a divorcée, she was a pariah (unless the pope could be bribed to annul her marriage), she was looking for allies in her rebellion against piety. After all, despite her
efforts to protect her children’s innocence, she was celebrated among her friends for her candor about seeking a rich second husband. Would she consider a homosexual to be a fellow rebel against conformity?

Jack didn’t think he was a nonconformist; he simply loved Will. If he could have magically turned himself into a girl whom Will would want to marry, he’d have done it without hesitation. He’d have converted to Catholicism, become a woman, borne Will’s many children, shopped for dresses at Peck and Peck, learned to cook Rice-A-Roni—where was the rebellion in any of that? Not that Jack was interested in being a woman. He’d never daydreamed about a sex change. He didn’t secretly experiment with makeup or window-shop for dresses or fold his towel into a turban and study his steamy reflection in the mirror, the way Peter did. He liked women and had more female friends than male, but if the price of marrying Will had been banishing all other women from the face of the earth, he would gladly have paid it.

“Are you going to wait up for Will?” Elaine asked as she prepared to go back to the Rookery. She gave him a sweet, confiding smile.

“Wait up!?” Jack exclaimed, as if the very notion were absurd, though he’d been planning on it. “I’m off now to grab some z’s.” He realized as he said it how pathetic he was to deny Will with an expression right out of his mouth.

In bed Jack beat off thinking about Will’s naked body. He thought about the scar from the boil on his neck and about his strong legs and deflated, charmless butt. Jack was careful not to get any come on Will’s mother’s sheets.

On the train back to New York the cars were steeped in cigarette smoke, and no one had washed the toilets in a century. Jack
had to piss over lava layers of other people’s shit ranging from yellow to black. Wet cigarette butts were crushed out in the sink. The paper doilies used as headrests on the seats were soiled and dangling lopsidedly. The train would creep into a field, then squeal to a stop and sit there for twenty minutes, creaking strangely before inching backward for another ten minutes.

The only way not to go crazy in a train is to treat it as a Christian penance, Will said. His eyes looked very small and poached through his wraparound sunglasses, which gave an incongruously contemporary look to his long Gothic face, more suited to a visor than to tinted plastic.

“And did you ever dance with the famous Taffy?” Jack asked. The violent lurching of the train had caused Jack’s right knee to touch Will’s left; neither of them pulled apart.

“You can’t imagine what an abortion she is,” Will said. “The whole ball was a collection of freaks—I tried to see it through your eyes, as if you’d gone. Reedy eighteen-year-old boys pushing matrons of eighty around the floor. Some of the extra men so immature they were playing tag in the cloakroom. And the food—as if all any dish required to be gourmet was a gooey white sauce.”

Jack turned his body slightly toward Will’s and put a hand on Will’s thigh, then twisted his head away in an agony of laughter and said, “Stop! You’re killing me.”

Will levered his long body out of the seat and lurched off to the filthy toilet—surely, Jack thought, just an excuse to pull free, since he had peed only ten minutes before, and sure enough, on his return Will sprawled across the empty seats on the other side of the aisle and said he was going to try to sleep a bit. He rolled up his gabardine coat as a pillow.

Jack felt cruelly rebuffed and decided that soon he would
come clean with Will, but he wasn’t quite sure how he would do it. At the next stop two old ladies got on. Their Southern voices sounded sweet and musical as they talked to each other in the seats just ahead. They spoke so softly that Jack couldn’t distinguish words. They were so near that Jack wouldn’t be able to talk privately with Will. He thought of his grandmother and her two sisters, whom he’d known just after the war when he was only six or seven, visiting out in East Texas. He could remember a room with the shades drawn, a room crowded by the big soft bed under its chenille bedspread. Little Jack sat on the bed in short pants and a carefully ironed white shirt, smiling and looking up at the three old ladies, all big and white and pillowy with huge naked breasts marked by veins.

He’d never seen his own mother naked, and he was surprised by these huge breasts. “Jack, aren’t you too old to be looking at ladies’ boozies?” his grandmother asked, laughing. One aunt ruffled his hair, and the other suggested he run out and play. He’d never thought of his grandmother as a woman before—more as a matron with a firm, molded mono-bosom and a diamond brooch and a low, Southern twang than as a woman with soft white breasts like warm dachshunds in constant motion, dogs with huge brown noses. The room where the three ladies were dressing smelled sweet from the clouds of powder they were dusting each other with. Half clothed, their bodies looked fat and pendent and puffy. He could see them, moving about on their stiff legs, reflected in the freestanding full-length mirror, the glass tilted slightly upward and held in a carved oak frame stained black. Their room felt secretive and girlish, and though his grandmother had always doted on him, he now saw her as a stranger, a member of a gleeful, secret sorority.

He liked these two old women ahead of him on the train and
thought he’d been too hasty in wanting to trade in the whole female race for a chance to marry Will. He looked out as the train passed a corrugated-metal shed, rusting in the weak sunlight, and his eyes filled with tears. He glanced quickly over at Will’s sprawled body, his hands folded over his chest like those of a tomb effigy, but he was certain Will wasn’t really sleeping.

The next day at the office he left promptly at five. Will said, “Where are you going in such a rush?”

Jack said, “I have an appointment with a psychotherapist.”

“What? A what? I didn’t know you were seeing a shrink.”

“It’s my first … session.”

“Why on earth—was Virginia too much for you? Did we drive you around the bend?”

“Yes, in a sense,” Jack said without a smile. From where he was standing, just outside Will’s cubicle, Will looked as if he were a character in a play, a very realistic contemporary one about New York life. Jack felt so tired; he was middle-aged spiritually.

Will looked up at him through his eyebrows, the same seductive look he’d used on his pretty young date at El Faro. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” Jack said, looking away. “I realized I’m in love with you and that it’s an illness and it’s getting worse and our friendship isn’t going anywhere.”

Will crossed his legs protectively and glanced at the magazine on his desk. “What? Are you joking? What are you saying?” He drew a deep breath, as if absorbing bad news. Then he said, “I’m so sorry if I’ve done anything to cause you any pain or to lead you on, if that doesn’t sound too high school.” Will sketched in a nervous smile but immediately canceled it in deference to Jack’s
disease. Jack noticed Will didn’t deny that their relationship wasn’t going anywhere, whatever that meant.

“Well, I’m going to be late if I don’t step on the gas,” Jack said. “Maybe we can talk about all of this later.” He noticed how Will’s face froze. “If you want to. Maybe you don’t want to.”

Will waved imaginary bees away from his face and said, “No, no, I want to, I want to,” which sounded sort of Jewish to Jack’s ears. Jack thought, We’re all so unused to expressing our feelings that we end up sounding like Woody Allen or Molly Goldberg. She’s our only model for passionate utterance. He felt sorry for Will, so cornered, obviously wishing it would all just go away.

“Want to have dinner around eight, down in the Village? Maybe Monte’s?” Jack asked. He was hurting inside. Somehow he’d expected a miracle, that Will would say, “I love you too, and we will live together our whole lives.” Until now Jack had been able to nurse his illusions; now he had to deal with the facts. In his fantasies he’d been playing with clouds; now he had to pick up solid boxes with sharp corners. Reality felt like a pitiful comedown.

“Sounds like a plan,” Will said, his eye feverishly scanning the article spread out before him, his hands tense on the armrests of his chair.