Jack Holmes and His Friend (15 page)

“What else? Is she nice?”

“I’m tempted to say she’s very well brought up, but I guess that’s not something surprising that you people would notice about each other.”

“You people!” Will growled.

“She’s tall, very lean, wears what I’d call party clothes, all pale colors and taffeta that crackles when she moves. Her contacts don’t fit her very well, and after we went up to her place for a drink, she eventually emerged from the bathroom in big black Steve Allen glasses.”

Will clutched his chest as if the thought of a thin debutante in glasses was the ultimate arrow to his heart. “She had you up for drinks! You lucky SOB! How late did you stay?”

“Till midnight. She had a great bottle of scotch.”

“What was her place like?”

“One bedroom. Everything matched. Light colors. Persian carpets—even they were light colors.”

“You’re practically engaged! Man, you know how to move.”

But Jack wasn’t ready to be hustled along into heterosexuality. “I told her I have homosexual … tendencies.”

“You did? After how much booze?”

Was Will wounded that he, Jack, had confided during a first meeting with a total stranger the things he had taken a year to tell Will? Or did he fear that it could get around in smart circles that he, Will, had a queer crony? Knowing that someone was queer could place him at your mercy and, if you blabbed about
it, could cost him his job. It was just as incriminating to be a fag’s friend.

Jack realized that his own indiscretion could get him fired.

“How does that work?” Will asked.

“What?”

“If you tell a pretty girl you’re queer, does she trust you more? Hey—good seduction technique, Holmes.”

“Stiff price to pay, though, don’t you think?” Jack asked, amused in a slightly disgusted way that Will’s own longings had upstaged any compassion he might have felt for his best buddy.

“So this Alexandra—did she match stories with you?”

“You mean, one of her men for one of mine? If she did, I’m not at liberty to tell you. Everything we said was confidential. We trust each other.”

“So there you are at midnight in a Park Avenue apartment drinking whiskey with a lovely bird, and she’s telling you all about her sex life.”

“She’s not exactly a bird; she’s really very human, Will, a bit of a lady, and just a bit brittle.”

“And with one of those upper-class Brearley drawls, I bet.”

“She did go to Brearley but later to Barnard, which was sort of a surprise to me. If you squeezed her too hard, you could break off a part.”

“You mean she’s bony?”

“She’s slender, but she has a very nice figure. While I was there she slipped into a rose satin peignoir—what do you call them? A housecoat? No, that sounds frumpy.”

“A hostess something-or-other.”

“That sounds right. She wears her hair up off her neck. And she has a long, slender neck and beautiful features. I’m sure she puts her lipstick on with a brush. She just happened to have a
lobster dip in the fridge, and she put it in a crystal bowl, the kind of bowl you’d receive at a bridal shower. You know, most of the people we know in New York, their apartments are dirty and cramped and smell funny and have rotting linoleum on the floor, and your aunt Wilma would be horrified. But Alexandra has a proper grown-up apartment on a high floor with a view, and I’m sure she has a maid.”

“Did she sit very close to you?”

“As a matter of fact she did.”

“You fucker,” Will said, grinning, a word that was extremely uncharacteristic of Will but that Jack thought might come out when he was with other Princetonians. They were all terrible drinkers and very rough.

Suddenly Jack felt that his sad condition as a homosexual, which had quickly begun to pall, had taken a turn for Will toward something more amusing.

“It’s not fair,” Will said. “You and your girls are meeting all these superior people, and I’m stuck with my sister’s B-list failures, her fallout from failing to land a husband.”

“Maybe I’ll introduce you to Alexandra.”

“No, she sounds like a pill with her hostess gown and ill-fitting contacts and her highborn breakable bones. No, I like a nice horsey woman with a good seat and chilblains.”

“I don’t think we do chilblains in America,” Jack observed. “I’m not even sure what they are.”

Jack was so afraid of falling into the slovenliness of depression that at home he washed every dish with a lab technician’s precision as soon as he used it. He ran the sweeper every day, as if he
were living as a mannequin in a display, a store window, featuring home furnishings.

Sleep overcame him like a fatality. He could never remember his dreams because he was always awakened by an alarm clock, and the bother of turning it off banished his nocturnal thoughts. But he did walk around during the day certain that his dreams had been dense with incident, metallic and crowded, almost as if they were the plate that printers etched in ink to stamp out cartoons, those miniaturized panels hectic with action and dialogue bubbles.

Will kept finding reasons to see Jack. Every time they were together, they had to talk about Alexandra, though often as not Will was openly dismissive of her. “You and your rich girls,” he would growl. “You are a snob, after all, Jack Holmes.”

“
My
rich girls?”

“Yeah, what about the blonde from Kennebunkport you sloughed off?”

Jack resented this tactic. Will clearly wanted to pump Jack for information, but he pretended it was Jack who was seducing Alex, a subtle way of turning him back into a heterosexual while casting him as a libertine. Very flattering. After Will’s little maneuver, Jack was no longer a spooky Liberace; no, he was back to being a regular guy but a dashing villain this time.

Jack wanted to talk to his shrink nonstop about Will, as one prospector might consult with another over the slightest gleam in the ground, even of fool’s gold. But Dr. Adams seemed bored with Jack’s “symptomatic acting-out,” which she sneered at. Her attitude hurt his feelings. Whereas Jack thought of his love for Will as the one noble feeling of his life, Dr. Adams treated it as playpen stuff, as if two baby boys had thought it great fun
to smear each other with their caca. Not only did she consider them to be dirty infants; she also conjured up the image of infantile egotism.

“I don’t think you understand,” Jack said. “I love Will.”

She chuckled silently while exhaling smoke from her Kent. She even had the insolence to settle still farther back in the avocado Barcalounger, as if the tedium of Jack’s “circular thinking” deserved nothing more than this horizontal position. Jack had read that Muslims feel that an insult is intended if one shows them the sole of one’s foot; he suddenly sympathized with this premise. He resented the axonometric view of the soles on Dr. Adams’s nearly orthopedic black shoes and of her overflowing ankles in their dark brown nylons. “You’re right. I don’t take too seriously this love of yours.”

“Your contempt feels very castrating to me,” Jack said. He wished she were a more traditional, noncommittal Freudian; he’d found her through Rebekkah, and now he thought she was too obviously opinionated.

“Oh, come on, Jack, don’t use a technical term you don’t understand. Why not just say you’re pissed off at me for not playing along with your obsession?”

“Or pissed off that you label my finest feelings an obsession.”

Dr. Adams let an expensive two-minute silence roll by; were it not for the continuing smoke signals, he might have thought she was dozing. Finally she said in a soft voice, “I think you have yet to discover your finest feelings.”

Because she seemed to be beckoning him toward a happier future, Jack burst into tears. Dr. Adams came rising up to vertical in her chair for the occasion. She nudged a box of Kleenex toward him. He wondered bitterly if she ordered the Kleenex by the gross.

“I’m afraid our time is up,” she said. She blinked in her prehistoric-saurian way, then actually stood, as if she feared he wouldn’t make his exit quickly enough. That she could stand on her back two legs seemed to Jack like an important advance in evolution, one he admired.

The worst of it was that the natural person for him to complain to about Dr. Adams was Will himself, who considered all shrinks to be charlatans.

At the next session Jack told her about a long dream he’d had that had left his cortex feeling stained and flooded. “I’d come back to the
Northern Review
after many years away, and even the old people on the staff were too young to have ever known me, though two of them had heard of me. Someone—maybe it was me—had killed two young men, and they were locked into a beachside office. I mean, it was forty feet from the sea, but it was also somehow an office. There was a part of the dream where I was so happy because I was working on a slightly scandalous article about Alexander Graham Bell’s granddaughter. Then I was back with the two dead bodies, both floating in sort of rubber layettes but beginning to stink anyway.”

Dr. Adams lowered herself in her bathysphere, the better to be laved in the waters of the unconscious. When she reemerged, her mouth smoking, she said, “I think the two young dead men in this dream are you and Will. It’s your younger, neurotic selves who are dying off to be replaced by—who knows? It’s a hopeful dream.”

“It is? It left me feeling guilty and scared.”

“Those are screen feelings,” Dr. Adams said, exhaling with authority. “They conceal the optimism you’re feeling.”

“Very effectively,” Jack said. “Couldn’t you just as easily say those are my homosexual feelings I want to kill off?”

Dr. Adams looked him in the eye. “That is what I am saying, Jack. I’m afraid our time is up.”

Jack felt angry and said, “I’m afraid your time is up. I’m quitting.”

Dr. Adams turned her mouth down in a circumflex of indifference and exposed her palms as if she could do nothing more about his foolishness.

“I suppose you think I’m resisting or something.”

“You said the word, not I,” said Dr. Adams, once again forced to stand, like an English monarch dismissing an African prince who hasn’t quite grasped that his audience is over. Standing turned out to be the most dismissive act in her repertory of protocol.

Without Dr. Adams, Jack felt even lonelier, even crazy, though he had no respect for her. One night weeks ago he’d stuck his head into a gay bar in the West Village filled with horrible old men and their beers and cigarettes and show tunes; he headed there now. After six beers he sidled up to a chalky white young man with a Frankenstein haircut. He was dressed all wrong, like someone from Oshkosh, which Jack found endearing. His tragic approach to his own possibilities didn’t include tenderness toward a fellow sufferer, but in spite of himself he was smiling at this guy’s funny clothes and haircut. It helped that he had a farmworker’s physique, which would have been attractive no matter how it was attired.

Jack began to pick up a different man almost every night. He’d come home from work and fall into a dreamless sleep, then wake up, grab a sandwich, and head out onto the streets. Sometimes he’d have dinner with the girls, especially if one of them
had invited a new, interesting guest, but he’d always duck out early.

Two years ago the mayor had closed all but two of the bars in the Village, but that meant men were more likely to strike a deal with each other on Greenwich Avenue or Christopher Street or even one of the quiet, dark streets, like Bank or Charles. Jack could remember how thronged the West Village streets had been when he’d first arrived in the city; that had undoubtedly been one of the reasons.

Usually he was eager to get it all over with as quickly as possible. The minute he came, everything would seem so disgusting and unnatural—the hairy ass, the stubble on the chin, the penis that looked dark and shiny despite the white body, almost as if the penis belonged to a different race or was a vegetable rather than part of a mammal—and Jack would be sickened by how ashamed he felt. He longed for a trapdoor beside the bed into which he could push his trick.

Jack found something wrong with almost every man. The guy either lisped or had rules about not touching his hair or a crusty bottom or an undescended testicle or aureoles as big and dark as a slice of liverwurst or back and shoulder hair or neglected dental hygiene or a blue fear of being seen by someone he knew in the street … not one queer seemed normal or jolly.

It occurred to Jack that he was having all these adventures but they scarcely seemed credible even to him, since he had no one to share them with. He had no confidant and didn’t know if he wanted one. Will would have been sickened by the details and seen their accumulation as proof that Jack was making no effort to get well. On the contrary, he was only sinking deeper into vice. Alexandra was sympathetic but only to the sole triste fact of his malady; she wouldn’t want to know that he was
exacerbating it, that his homosexuality was something he was practicing and not merely enduring.

The worst of it was that Jack never felt any affection for his so-called partners. He never wanted to crack a joke with one of them or cook him a midnight hamburger. He wouldn’t have lent one ten dollars. He could afford to have chilly, inflexible principles where there was no affection.

Once at Alice’s he was introduced to a young man he’d already slept with, but Jack and the guy were both expert in pretending they were meeting for the first time.

To his surprise, the guy was charming and funny and self-deprecating. Jack could remember almost nothing about him from their encounter, though they’d met just five or six weeks previously. In how many other cases had he poked a man for plumpness or doneness or scorned him for an ugly birthmark or failed to notice his wit or expertise about tapestries?

At least once a week Alexandra would invite Jack to dinner at her apartment. Always it was just the two of them. Jack suspected that she needed a friend and that, for her, friends (whom she didn’t really understand) must be on as intimate a footing as lovers (whom she knew a lot about). She didn’t feel comfortable around other women. They bored her just a bit and they envied her, which made them hard to tease, Alex’s preferred manner. She could tease in a vigorous way so at odds with her delicate looks, or she could argue like a lawyer, one finger raised. She was smart and combative but always with a smile, even a readiness to laugh at herself when the words came spilling out of her too rapidly and, frustrated, she insisted, “You have no idea what
you’re talking about!” though she appeared to be the one who was confused.