Jack Holmes and His Friend (17 page)

Jack wondered who could’ve written such a silly review—probably a girl, he thought. Definitely a female French major. Someone who liked Will’s photo, heavily retouched to eliminate the acne scars. She was probably hoping for a date. Jack checked a Boris Vian novel out from the Donnelly library at lunchtime, but when Will saw it on his desk in the afternoon, he picked it up carelessly, thrummed it, and put it down. He said, “Never read the guy.” Which couldn’t have been true since, as Jack discovered, in the Vian novel there was also a flower that wilted in sympathy with the heroine.

Jack couldn’t deny that he’d found Will’s book trivial and thin, but he wondered if he’d failed to register its appeal. Whimsy wasn’t something Jack could pick out in a lineup. It seemed as if
The Truth About Sergeant Tavel
might be a literary event, and now Jack couldn’t help looking at Will as somebody up-and-coming. He wasn’t the same Will. Some of the journalists who dropped by the offices of the
Northern Review
had published books of reportage, but no one recognized their names. Journalists weren’t real writers. They had no aura. They weren’t going to be picked out as signals from the background noise. But Will? He might become a contender, someone who would be singled out by the media to speak for a whole generation.

Maybe talent was simply a knack for stealing well, and Jack knew this thief too intimately.

“I’m going to give a copy of your book to Alexandra,” Jack said.

Will put up an anguished hand and then let it drop, as if he recognized he could do nothing now to shape the career of his book. “Do you think that’s wise?”

“She may blame my big mouth, since you’ve obviously taken a lot from her life, from what I’ve told you about her.”

“She’ll be flattered. Do you think she’s intelligent enough to get it? But sure, we can’t choose our readers.”

Jack was slightly shocked by Will’s use of “we.” Not regal so much as a collective pronoun for all writers, the ones who counted.

“I think she’ll be amused by how you’ve idealized her and made her into someone so innocent.”

Will’s lip actually curled. “She’s not innocent?”

They were speaking nearly in whispers because the walls of Jack’s office cubicle didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. “I don’t think I told you about her affairs—I’m so glad I didn’t tell you.”

With a trace of irritation Will said, “I wasn’t exactly taking dictation from you, buddy. You have heard of the imagination?”

“Of course, I know you transformed everything.” Jack looked to see how his ridiculous exaggeration was going over. Will had transformed very little about Alexandra, in fact. Many of the things he’d said, quoting her, he had obviously transcribed verbatim.

“But she’s not innocent?” Will asked again. He was unusually impatient for the answer.

Oh, Jack thought. Her innocence …

“You can tell me now,” Will said. “I’m not going to base another character on her. Has she had many lovers?”

“I should introduce you two. She’s seen too much of life and you too little,” Jack said. “You’d be perfect for each other. You’re afraid of adventures and she’s tired of hers.”

“She is?” Will asked. “She told you that? Specifics! Okay, she’s a big slut—really big?”

“ ‘Slut’ is not a word in my vocabulary,” Jack said. “At least not in discussing a woman.”

Will frowned as a big faggy shadow suddenly flapped past overhead. “You’re no fun,” he said. He’d been sitting on the edge of Jack’s desk, but now he pushed off and headed to the doorway. Since his good review this morning, he had become cooler and more elegant in his movements, as if he were just dropping in on the working world. He had a new way of tilting his head back as if a photographer had instructed him on how to catch the overhead light. Will was being someone else, a pianist in a 1930s
Vogue
photo, his mouth beautifully carved.

As soon as Jack was back home that evening, he stripped down to his boxer shorts, made a vodka and tonic, sprawled on the couch, and called Alexandra. While he talked to her, he reached into his shorts and cupped his balls. “Well, you’ll never guess what happened today.”

“I give up,” she said.

“Will got a starred review in Kirkus.”

“Is that the one critics read? That’s terrific! Bravo, Will.”

“It is terrific.”

“But you don’t really like the book much?”

“If you ever repeat that …”

Jack sipped his drink—the tonic and lime made him feel marooned in the tropics. The freedom to sprawl and grope himself while chatting with Alexandra was the best argument in favor of the telephone. In a face-to-face conversation he felt too monitored, but on the phone he could roll his eyes, stick out his tongue, nurse his penis into half an erection while his voice remained obediently sympathetic and encouraging.

“I have to admit I was surprised by the girl’s enthusiasm—”

“The girl! Aren’t those reviews unsigned? How do you know a girl wrote it?” Alex demanded.

“I don’t.”

“Aha! You just assumed that girls burble with absurd enthusiasm, especially over a young man’s first novel.”

“Well?”

“Jack Holmes, you’ve really gone too far this time.” She laughed and pretended to be shocked. Half-humorous exasperation was her favorite mode.

“Are you wearing your dark red silk robe?” he asked.

“Yes, and I’m drinking tea from that beautiful cup you gave me and how dare you change the subject.” But she inhaled a little laugh just to prove she was half-teasing him. “I won’t ask what you’re wearing—I’m easily shocked.”

Jack said, “Will seemed happy and calmer than I’ve ever seen him. Alexandra, I have a terrible confession to make.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, her voice still merry and indignant. “What now?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to recognize certain … elements of your life in Will’s heroine.”

“What!” A real indignation overtook the mock one. “Why would I—are you saying—how dare you, Jack Holmes! You mean to say that you fed that man all my secrets for his wretched book, that you ran from my side and seconds later started tattling to that iceberg about the most intimate details of my life that I entrusted you with in a sacred act of friendship, don’t sweat it, I don’t really care.”

Jack swallowed and laughed a little laugh. “I’ll bring it over right now.”

He could hear her rustling around in the background. He
resented her—and then realized he resented anyone who made him feel guilty.

He could hear her breathing, then there was the sound of porcelain on porcelain. “You can leave the effing thing with the doorman.” She hung up.

Alexandra had become one of his very closest friends (Fuckin’ rich bitch! an angry, guilty part of his mind shouted), and he couldn’t bear to think he’d betrayed her (East Side cunt!). Until this very moment he hadn’t understood how thoroughly he’d pimped out her secrets to hungry Will—Will had used them both.

As he walked from the subway stop on Lexington over to Alexandra’s building, he said out loud, “How oedipal!” and someone looked at him strangely. Were Will and Alex his parents?

All the time he’d been listening to Alex’s confidences and been relaying them to an indifferent-seeming but actually greedy Will had felt as emotional as his childhood love for his impossible, elusive parents. A shrink would have a field day, he thought. Maybe I’m hoping to bring these attractive new parents together, but this time with me, the beloved son, as the crucial intermediary.

What if Alex liked the book and married Will and they adopted Jack as their sweet, exasperating son?

“It’s not such a big deal,” he said out loud. “Fuck them.” Suddenly he had to face the possibility that he’d lose—he’d lost—her friendship and perhaps Will’s. He still had Alice and Rebekkah as friends, his black-stockinged girls with their wit and talent. Suddenly he despised Alex’s china and satin hostess gown, even her expensive thinness (only a diet of caviar and celery and daily dressage lessons could keep you that thin).

When he arrived at Alex’s address, there she was sitting near
the front door looking minuscule and very white, like a sprig of baby’s breath. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail to reveal tiny marsupial ears and the blue veins visibly ticking at her temples. She was wearing carefully ironed jeans and spool heels. Jack pushed past the elderly doorman, dripping Ruritanian braid from his epaulets, and put the manila envelope in her hands.

“Here he is,” Alex said, “the traitor.”

Jack thought of ten different things to say but finally muttered, “Call me when you’ve read it.”

“I’ll walk you to the corner,” she said, and he thought that in spite of it all she really was a nice girl.

Did the doorman think they were having a lovers’ quarrel and that’s why she hadn’t kissed him and they were both so solemn? As they left the building, she took his hand and whispered, “Louse!”

It was a cool, rainy night. “You’ll get wet,” Jack said.

“I don’t care,” Alex replied, “grouch, grouch.”

“We’re doing our own sound effects now?”

Their good-bye at the corner was almost shy; that she’d come down to greet him already suggested a reconciliation.

As he walked along by himself, he decided he was glad he didn’t live up here on the East Side with its banks behind colonial facades and its show windows full of evening dresses and over each doorway a faded green canopy smelling of mildewed canvas. And everyone seemed so sexless and grown-up. No sleazy Village homos; even the ones up here wore chinos and crew necks knotted over their shoulders. And penny loafers without socks and beige windbreakers.

Jack realized that the gay men in the Village with their black
pegged pants and tight shirts excited him because he knew how easily they could be unwrapped.

It was too silly to subscribe to an uptown-downtown polarity, though. Both Will and Alex lived uptown—was it all right for heterosexuals to be more connubial than sexual?

Jack now came to see Will as untouchable. It was so clear from his book that he worshipped Woman—not a White Goddess but a debutante in a shirtdress. Will was no longer that guy sitting around with no date and bad skin; now he was a distinguished young author with a pedigree.
Town and Country
was planning a story on Will with a photo of him posing on a horse in front of the family house. Will still dropped by Jack’s cubicle but kept consulting his watch. His schedule seemed very full. An uncle had just bought Will a membership at the Racquet and Tennis Club, and Will would amble over there three nights out of five to play squash with old prep school friends.

Alex called Jack the next morning at work. She’d stayed up all night reading and liked the book and wanted to meet Will. “Of course you misheard ten things out of twelve, Jack Holmes, but that’s not Will’s fault; old Will caught my essence. I think I come across as highly desirable and
racée,
half Holy Virgin and half mad deb.” She laughed at herself and so did Jack, mostly out of relief.

“You really didn’t mind being used?”

“Not at all,” Alexandra said, musing. “I think he understood me—well, if not understood at least grasped me.”

A distinction without a difference, Jack thought.

“I mean,” she said, “he does seem to grasp the way my mind works—it’s really extraordinary. He doesn’t seem that perceptive about other women.”

Jack was dying to mock her, but he didn’t dare; he was so pleased she’d forgiven him.

“Of course,” she said, her voice darkening, “a happy outcome doesn’t pardon the appalling breach of confidentiality.”

“You should be a lawyer,” Jack said.

“Luckily for you I’m not.”

They agreed that Jack would bring Will by for a drink. Alex started dithering: “Do you think we should meet in a public place?”

“Are you afraid he won’t like your apartment?”

Alex was indignant. “No, Jack, I’m afraid I won’t like him. If we meet in a bar, I can always slip away. I’ll keep my hat on.”

“Hat?” Jack asked, astounded.

“Yes, Jack, I have hats. Veils too.”

Will seemed mildly contemptuous of a possible meeting. “Warn her I’m not going to write another book about her. And that
Tavel
is a work of fiction.”

Jack hated the pretentious sound of “a work.”

Will did agree reluctantly to a drink for the very next afternoon. Alex seemed equally annoyed at the prospect (“He’s certainly keen,” she said), but finally gave in.

That night Jack got rid of his adoring trick by saying, “I’m afraid I have a very jealous lover who’s a violent Puerto Rican. If I tried to see you again, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. Pedro is coming back to town in the morning. Be sure you don’t even say hi to me on the street if you see me with a big Latin ex-Marine.”

Once the frightened trick had scurried off, Jack was free to worry himself sleepless over Will and Alexandra. As he tossed and turned, he kept playing out scenes between them. They snapped at each other, and Jack had to fill the silences. They stared at
each other with entranced smiles, and Jack had to let himself out. Or they both made horrible brittle small talk.

Very, very late, after he’d drunk half a bottle of Jim Beam, Jack imagined them making love—Alexandra with her slender hips, nacreous collarbones, immaculate neck, breasts as small and high as those of a Lucas Cranach Eve; Will with his brown hair that turned auburn in the sunlight, his pale blue eyes so deeply set in their sockets that they looked black, his big nose and his rough skin, so at odds with his delicately modeled face that in the end he resembled an Adonis badly damaged by the elements.

Jack thought of Will’s smile, so slow to dawn and so slow to fade that it always seemed unsettling.

How would they kiss? Would she abandon herself to desire, or would she have that slightly lost, even frightened look she sometimes wore when the conversation had outpaced her—until she could catch up by finding some new pretext for indignation? Will would be gallant, but how gentlemanly could you be pushing a stiff one between a girl’s open legs? Or did Jack think that because he had already been corrupted by the brutality of gay life?