Jack Holmes and His Friend (2 page)

By the time he was a junior, he was living in a little room in the back of an old wood house. He shared a bathroom with two other guys, but that seemed no hardship to him, used to group living as he was. One of the guys on his floor was a painting student who never smiled, or if he did, it was out of sync and came long after everyone else had finished. Then he’d concede a pained smile with just half of his mouth, as if he’d figured out that that was what human beings did and he should join them and make an effort.

His name was Paul, and two or three times he invited Jack into his room for a cup of espresso, which he brewed in an Italian pot on his hot plate.

“Hey, neat,” Jack said, intrigued by so much rumbling to produce the merest black sludge, and added, “I really like these big baseball players.” He nodded toward a canvas so large it would take careful maneuvering to get it out the side entrance and down the fire escape. Some patches were detailed and realistic (a player’s face, another’s mitt), but the rest was in soft focus and drowned in circumambient color—a wash of green exceeding the stadium grounds and floating over into the surround, a blue sky leaking down onto the stands.

“Really?” Paul asked, lifting one eyebrow. But his delayed twitch of a smile showed he was pleased.

Paul’s off-kilter responses made Jack uneasy. Jack didn’t like complexity. Maybe because his childhood had been so stormy that now he longed for peaceful moral weather and the first hint of turbulence would cause him to flee south.

And yet he found Paul appealing—his long, hairless body, pale as pie dough, crimped here and there to bulge up as a big nose, a narrow, downturned mouth, an outsize, restless Adam’s apple. He had no hair under his arms, which Jack knew because Paul painted bare-chested, often wearing nothing but his Jockey shorts, which looked two sizes too small, too tight and dubiously yellow; the elastic on one leg was broken and dangling down like some scary nodule formerly alive. His nipples were ridiculously small and dark: Nordic berries stunted by the cold. His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup. Wendy, his broad-hipped girlfriend, bursting out of her faded jeans and jiggling recklessly around in her University of Michigan sweatshirt, her glossy black ponytail perched on one shoulder like an expensive pet, was always smiling guiltily. She knew that her plentiful body amused, but might potentially offend, her austere lover. Everyone teased Wendy and everyone loved her, as if she were a prehistoric fertility symbol found one day among the tea things. But Paul often seemed pained, as much by Jack’s calculated nice-guy blandness as by Wendy’s alternating exuberance and sheepishness. Just by being quiet and staring at them hard, Paul could provoke self-conscious reactions in his friends.

Jack imagined that by the time Paul was forty he’d be sour and closed off, but since now he was just twenty he was still curious and still strangely underrehearsed for his life. He didn’t know quite yet how he worked or what he wanted.

One day Paul invited Jack in for a cup of tea; he was painting in the nude. Jack was seated on a folding chair that Paul had cushioned with newspapers to protect Jack’s clothes.

Jack felt uneasy, he couldn’t say why. For chrissake, he hadn’t set this deal up. Of course, maybe it was the way bohemians thought, or didn’t think—it didn’t mean a thing to them, clothes
optional … he was certain his face was bright red. Paul would be sure to notice and laugh at him for being so square. Yes—that’s what it was: a test for Jack that Jack was flunking.

Paul said, as he handed him the cup, “Maybe you’d pose for me one day. I couldn’t pay you much—maybe two bucks an hour.”

“Yeah. Maybe. My schedule—”

“Okay, okay,” Paul said, smiling sarcastically as if Jack had admitted some sort of defeat.

That night, as he lay in his narrow bed, which was too short for his lanky body, Jack turned so often that eventually his feet were hanging out in the cold. Finally he had to sleep on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest. He slowly rubbed one foot against the other for warmth. He resented Paul for putting him in the same derisory category as big-ass Wendy. It would be so easy to fall into thinking that Paul was somehow superior with his stinting smiles, his cool arrogance, the cobalt blue diagonal of paint across his ribs, his loping walk, tucked-in buttocks, scrotum as red and veined as an autumn leaf in the rain, and the penis as big and dark as a bloodsucker when you suddenly notice it in horror and salt it and pull it off.

After that Jack avoided Paul, except he would sometimes hear Wendy laughing, mid-sex. Her laughter rang through two doors and her ecstasy aroused him. He could imagine her writhing on his own cot, spilling over the margins, her arms rising, turning her round melons into long gourds, full at the bottom and narrow at the top. Paul’s hips were only half the breadth of Wendy’s. Jack had noticed the difference. Jack became so horny that he ended up jerking off while picturing them, Paul’s buttocks dimpling as he thrust, Wendy exulting as she held an invisible tambourine in each hand.

Jack found some respite from his erotic reveries in his work.
He enjoyed Chinese art history and was proud that he knew so many details about it, though admittedly only about a few selected moments in the full four thousand years. He knew a lot about ancient bronzes and how they had been cast using the lost wax technique, and about all those dragons and clouds and meanders. He knew all about “scholar painting” and how it had been done as a form of protest against the Mongol conquerors. The lightning-scarred tree was the heroic, resistant scholar himself. Jack was good on Sung landscape painting, and the use of “negative space,” and the size relationship on three scales (heaven, mountain, man). He liked Ching academic painting, which appealed to no one else. What he didn’t like was memorizing thousands of Chinese characters. But even that rote act drowned out the noise in his head. He’d made hundreds of flash cards (with the Chinese character and pronunciation on one side and the English meaning on the other), and he strummed through them at the Union when he was alone. People looked at him with curiosity when he “played solitaire” with his cards. Chinese art history enhanced his mystery, which suited Jack.

His father said he wouldn’t let him graduate if he didn’t take courses in typing and public speaking. Jack was a horrible public speaker, so shy that his teacher said he was “cold” and not likely to persuade anyone of anything. In their evaluations the other students said he was “snooty” or “aloof.”

Wendy had a friend named Hillary, whom she introduced to Jack. They met in late April of Jack’s senior year. Like Wendy, she was big-hipped and had long hair, and wore jeans and had precise, little-girl features emerging from her big, round face.

Jack liked it that she was hefty. She wasn’t jiggly fat or cold-lard fat; she was firm and athletic, quick to climb over a fence and race down a meadow to the river. She loved to jump into
her little red MG convertible with the bird’s-eye maple dashboard and powerful motor, its tires spitting gravel out behind them. She was tough, with her clean-scrubbed face, black, un-plucked eyebrows, and hands rough from washing and polishing her roadster or currying her horse back home on weekends. But she could also open up like a tropical flower, a sticky-petaled pink hibiscus—at least that was how he pictured all this articulated floral wetness he was exploring with his fingers and couldn’t see in the dark.

They were so happy rolling around at night in the long sweet-grass, heavy with dew and smelling of bush clover. Jack gloried in his own maleness when he was lying on top of Hillary. It sounded fatuous, but he liked his own broad rower’s shoulders and narrow torero hips and princely waist—he was a prince when he sprawled above Hillary. Was that abnormal, he wondered, to picture oneself, to glory in oneself? Did the average guy delight in the girl more than in himself? Most of the time he didn’t have such a flattering image of himself. He saw himself rather as a friendly collie of a guy: big, toothy smile; trusting, warm eyes; a sort of abashed look when called on to do tricks—to shake hands, say. He called it his “good-guy look.” (But then why did that teacher say he was a cold speaker? Had the teacher misinterpreted Jack’s shyness?) Then again, some friends did complain that he was “reserved” and even “secretive.”

Jack was just a little afraid of women, truth be told, unless they were pals or sisters and there was no physical deal beyond sitting back-to-back like bookends on a hay wagon, or sleeping in a two-person pile in the backseat of a dark car during the long trip back from a concert at Fisher Hall. Women liked him. He was often a little brother, sometimes a big brother; if there had been older women around, he would’ve been a good nephew
type. He didn’t talk to them about their hair or clothes, nothing beyond “You look really nice, Cindy.” He wasn’t a professional smoothie, though in the frat house he had a reputation as an “ass man,” a seducer’s standing based on nothing except rumors about his big cock and that time he’d been caught necking with Hillary in the back stairwell of the frat house, both of them seriously drunk on Drambuie.

With Hillary, though, he was completely at ease. She didn’t want to go all the way, and she’d told him that. He remembered: They were walking along past all the sorority and fraternity mansions, but it was a Tuesday afternoon, and no other pedestrians were visible. Without looking at him, she said, “Jack, I’ve got something to tell you. Do you know what spasmophilia is?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Well, I’ve got it. And that’s what makes sex a problem for me.”

“Really? Don’t worry—”

“It’s a panic attack, but it means the vagina clamps shut. My shrink says it’s a form of hysteria, and when I say I feel perfectly calm, he says it’s either the feeling of hysteria and panic
or
the actual spasms, not both. Your body is tightening up, he says, so you won’t feel any panic, like conscious panic.”

She scrutinized him calmly and said the word “conscious” as if it were a technical term, possibly beyond Jack’s grasp.

“Gosh, that’s fascinating. Isn’t it amazing how—”

“My vagina clamps shut. My regular doctor, not my shrink, says it’s a lack of calcium or sleep. He talks about”—and here she shrieked with laughter—“my neuro-vegetative functions! But it all comes down to a clamped vagina.”

“Far be it from me—”

“Maybe I should take Miltown. Have you read that new Robert Lowell poem that begins, ‘Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed’? Very trendy, right? Is that your idea of poetry?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t gotten much farther than Wallace Stevens. I’d never read him, and I took his poems to sit on the crapper and I couldn’t get off it, I was so excited, and like a crazy person I kept saying out loud, ‘This is it! Oh boy, this is it!’”

Hillary laughed so hard she had to stop right there on Washtenaw and hold on to Jack’s shoulder. Someone driving past might have thought she was sobbing or having a panic attack.

“But the joke was on me,” Jack said, “because at last I thought I had found pure poetry, poetry that didn’t mean anything. I found it right there in the crapper, like ‘Eureka!’ Right? You could say it was abstract expressionist poetry, and I was sitting right there in my stall bouncing up and down—”

“Stop!” Hillary begged him. “You’re killing me! Bouncing? No,” she wailed.

“It wasn’t until two days later that my English prof cleared up the confusion. That fuckin’” —and Jack lowered his voice to say the obscenity: he never swore— “that fuckin’ Wallace Stevens, it turns out, means too much, all this metaphysical gobbledygook, though his language is as inscrutable as a nursery rhyme.”

They both drew a deep breath and trudged along through the warm, humid day as the occasional car glided up and shimmered, and they felt they were walking in a glue trap and not making any progress. A huge squirrel ran up to them, then scuttled up a tree. Jack was somehow relieved that Hillary had a medical problem that prevented them from rushing into things. They felt very
becalmed, almost extinguished. Jack was proud of how funny he’d been about Wallace Stevens.

After that, it was understood that when they were alone and had drunk a few beers, they could kiss and kiss, and Jack could pull up her shirt and unsnap her bra and fondle and lick Hillary’s big, extremely sensitive breasts and lightly circle her nipples. Once in a while, if the chemistry was right, he might unbutton her jeans and pull aside her silky, lace-trimmed panties and insert a finger into that liquid warmth, presumably so likely to clamp shut over his knuckles, though at the moment open and welcoming.

One time, she ran her hand wonderingly across his erection, which was safely shut in behind his Skivvies and khakis. She said, half reproachful and half admiring, “Jack, that’s awfully big, you know. I mean, it’s huge.”

Jack suspected it was on the big end of the spectrum. Other guys stared at him in the showers sometimes, and he guessed they were slightly shocked or intrigued. His fraternity brothers had made it part of his myth. Now Hillary was saying, “Even without the spasmophilia, I’d be afraid to take all that. Maybe an older woman would like it, an experienced woman.”

“C’mon,” Jack complained, blushing in the dark, “moving right along …”

Later that night, when he was alone again, he turned on the lights while he was jacking off and actually looked at the damn thing. He could see that it was impressive in proportion to the rest of his body.

Hillary’s comment drove him slightly batty. He’d been nice about her spasmophilia, even shrugged it off, as if it were fine by him. He’d started clowning about Wallace Stevens in the crapper
just to change the subject, but later she’d treated him like some kind of freak. He decided he’d just keep it out of sight, like some smelly, overgrown truant forced to stand in the corner facing the wall. Or the retarded kid kept back a year in fifth grade. That’s how he’d treat his dick.

With some graduation money an uncle had sent him, Jack bought a case of champagne and had a party in his minuscule room. Paul opened up his room as well, and Wendy made some “finger food,” as she called the little crustless sandwiches. Though Paul pretended complete indifference to the opinion of other students, Jack noticed he’d propped up four huge canvases—the baseball images and a version of Larry Rivers’s
Washington Crossing the Delaware
, which itself was a copy, wasn’t it? Howard, his old roommate, came and shook all over with silent laughter and said satirical things so mild as to be good-natured. Hillary, who’d learned flamenco in Málaga the previous summer, snapped her fingers, drummed her boots, and looked stylishly angry until the downstairs neighbor complained and said that plaster dust was sifting down all over his furniture, and everyone quieted down immediately.