Jack Holmes and His Friend (21 page)

He wondered if they really were fucking. If so, he should be happy for them, especially since he’d brought them together.

Why had Alex said that Will liked it that Jack was in love with him? Had the two of them joked about it, with Alex curled up in Will’s scrawny arms?

That night Billy cooked dinner for Jack, but Jack felt stifled and antagonistic the minute he walked through the door. He was wearing boots that were hard to remove, and he sat down and said, “Pull my boots off,” and stuck a leg out.

With his back to Jack, Billy sat astride his extended leg and pulled at the boot until Jack, impatient, pushed Billy’s back with his other foot, sending him toppling over with the boot in his hands. Billy got up with a very dark look on his face.

Refusing to apologize, Jack called out, “What about the other boot?”

“I’m going to get the meal on the table.”

Jack knew that he was being disgusting, but bullying Billy
aroused him—and he hoped Billy would notice his tumescent crotch. He’d wrestled the other boot off on his own by the time Billy called him to the table.

He also knew that he was expected to say how good the meal was. Billy kept his eyes lowered and his face devoid of expression. He wouldn’t forgive Jack until he apologized, but a black anger had taken hold of Jack, and he kept flashing on scenes of striking Billy, or kicking him, or pointing at his little-boy dick and laughing at it. Billy hadn’t done anything wrong. All he’d done was to prepare another delicious dinner and serve a very good red wine. But even so Jack was mad at him, as he used to be as a child when forced to leave a kids’ party and ride home in the backseat of the Cadillac with his drunken parents.

Part II

1.

“Jack?” I said, stepping toward him, afraid I’d made a mistake. I stuck out my hand. We were both in front of the Museum of Modern Art. He’d just come out, and I was heading in.

“Hell, yes—Will! Will Wright!” and Jack lit up like a jack-o’-lantern with a crazy grin.

It was a cold, dark January day, and I calculated that eight or nine years had gone by. I said, “You must be thirty-two by now, right? Like me.”

Jack grinned and put a warning finger to his lips, but he was still smiling all around his finger.

We laughed and he said, “Do you have time for a drink?”

I looked at my watch, pretending to be juggling important appointments in my head, then shrugged and said, “Sure, why not? We could walk up to the Plaza and have a drink at the Oak Room. But I only have time for a quickie.”

Jack said that sounded good.

It seemed strange that he was so happy to see me, and I said so.

“You’d think we were long-lost brothers,” I said.

“We are! How’s Alex?”

“She’s great. We live out in Larchmont now.”

“And you’re commuting?”

I shrugged my shoulders as if I knew I’d become a cliché, but I couldn’t help adding, “We’re happy out there,” and even to my own ears my voice sounded serene.

“Hunting foxes out there?”

“No, never,” I said. “Alex believes fervently in the prevention of cruelty to animals. We have twenty acres, even a stream and a pool, and the neighbors are pissed off because we refuse to do anything to control the so-called groundhog problem.”

I looked at Jack and could see he was a bit perplexed but also impressed by the size of our property.

“You might think we were crazy people. We don’t cut the grass or burn wasp hives or keep the pond from seeping or set traps for the raccoons or drive away stray dogs or kill ants or spray for mosquitoes. I guess most people would think that the house was abandoned, though of course inside Alex has decorated it with her wonderful taste, just as you’d suspect.”

“What about termites?”

I laughed and said, “You caught us there. Alex and I had the whole house bagged and gassed, though we went through torments of self-reproach about it. But you don’t want to hear about our …”

I left the sentence unfinished, and Jack rushed in with “You mean your Baha’i convictions?” and we both laughed in several ripples of hilarity. He’d always had a way of leaping ahead into a parallel world of fantasy.

Once we’d sat down at a table and ordered our drinks, I had an excuse to look him over more thoroughly. He’d definitely acquired a few lines. He’d also lost a few pounds, whereas I’d gained ten. He looked somehow shinier. His nose and jaw jutted
out fractionally further, and his glance was more complicated and worldly. He was wearing a burnt-lemon cologne—that was new. He was sitting upright, but everything in him seemed to be leaning toward me. I was happy to see him.

I said, “We’ve missed you.”

“We? Do you have your feelings in a joint account?”

“Sort of,” I said, irritated for a second. I was going to add, “That’s what being half of a couple means,” but instead asked, “What about you?”

“You mean, am I still going ahead with that funny queer thing I do?”

I thought he was being too tart if he hoped to renew our friendship.

“No,” I said, deliberately not smiling, “I just wondered if you were single or not.”

Jack laughed and sat back in his chair. I’d seated him so that he’d be looking out on the horses and carriages on the other side of Central Park South.

“Sometimes I can make something last six or eight weeks,” he said. “Eight weeks. That’s my longest marriage.”

I tried to look sympathetic. “But why is that?”

“But, Will,” he said, “I like it that way.” He smiled mysteriously and added, “I’m a libertine.”

That struck me as such a strange thing to say—he seemed almost to glow with the announcement—that I looked around, half hoping to see a friend whom I could call over in order to change the subject. Still, while it was true that everyone assumed that being half of a stable couple was a great thing, maybe it wasn’t always. Or for everyone. Jack didn’t seem worried about being alone for Christmas—wasn’t that what everyone said, though most people were miserable being with their families over the
holidays. Maybe he did worry and this was just bravado, pretending to be a libertine.

“Did you know this used to be a sort of gay bar?” Jack said.

“The Oak Room?”

“Originally it was a men-only bar, and even when women could come, they seldom did. It was for men in suits who wanted other men in suits. I used to come here by myself, and older men in suits would tell the bartender to offer me a drink.” He laughed. “It was for men who liked sidecars.”

“How the hell do you make a sidecar?” I said gamely.

“Brandy. Triple sec. Lemon juice.”

“That’s obscene.”

“There’s a really bad novel in which the hero wakes his wife every morning with a cocktail shaker full of sidecars. The book came out in 1929 just before the crash. The author never wrote another book.”

“That was a piece of bad luck,” I said.

I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me about my own writing. Was that what Jack was working up to, by mentioning unsuccessful novels? Had he turned cruel? Of course, he was a big reader. He read a novel a week—or used to. That had been a point of pride for him. Just as he went to the latest art exhibits and attended concerts. That was his idea of a New Yorker. Or used to be.

“What are you working on these days?” he asked.

“Ah, that,” I said, “we must save for another day.”

After that
Times
review I became ill every time I thought of working on a new novel. I could feel my stomach start to sour, even to heave. I knew I’d get back to a novel at some point, but the next time, I thought, I’d do it in secret, under everyone else’s radar. I’d do it for myself. This time I’d have a real experience
to write about. And when I wrote something, I’d ask myself if I liked it, whether I could improve it in any way. And if I was sure it met my standards after it sat in my drawer for a year or two, I’d show it to Alex and Jack, and my old editor—if he was still in business.

I stood up and looked at my watch. “I have seventeen minutes to get to the train station.” I handed him my card and threw down a ten-dollar bill.

“That’s too much!” he said.

“Are you still at the
Northern Review
?” I asked, implying that if so he might not be able to afford the Oak Room.

“No,” he said, “
Newsweek
.”

“Books?”

“Business.”

“Big changes are afoot,” I said. “Let’s have lunch next week.”

“And does Alex ever get into town?”

“Never. We have two kids—a girl and a little boy.”

“That was fast!”

“But you’ll have to come out to Larchmont and see the crazy people and their overgrown estate,” I said, immediately regretting the word “estate” and making a face to indicate my irony.

“Well. Who could say no to an invitation like that?”

I rushed off, although I could easily have taken the six forty-seven and still made it home in time for dinner.

I drove my little battered station car back to the house as usual. I’m sure the neighbors looked down on my ten-year-old Studebaker Hawk with the vestigial tail fins just as they abhorred our weed-filled lawns, fetid pond, garbage mulch. Of course, I was a hundred percent committed to letting nature engulf our grounds,
though I recognized the burden we’d placed on our children’s frail shoulders. The neighbor kids shunned them as weirdos, and that cute, hateful Mary Beth next door would sing, “Shame, shame,” while stroking one index finger on the other. My poor little Margaret came home in tears every time.

When I entered the front door, the kids made a rush for me, grabbing my legs and calling out, “Daddy, Daddy!” Baby Palmer didn’t look too sure what a daddy might be, though he was enthusiastic about the idea. He was always shaking his pudgy hands in the air, stepping awkwardly and drooling. I felt like the hunter who’s brought home a bloody Bambi to hack apart and parcel out to his greedy tribe. I loved their excitement, even if their mother had put them up to it.

Alex came up to me in her soft, distracted way and without a word presented me with her sculpted cheek. I put an arm around her waist—but gently, gently. Alex had become so fragile that I was afraid of breaking one of her ribs. I was proud of her slenderness when I compared her to the neighbors, women as plump and ponderous as Clydesdale mares, yet I feared the slightest wind could blow her away.

I doubted she even bothered to eat during the day. At night she drank two large vodka martinis straight up and well chilled, with a twist, then played with her dinner. Tonight it was vegetarian moussaka, extremely healthy like everything we ate. Alex’s moussaka almost tasted like real food. In the city, I cheated at lunchtime. I ate a secret steak or, my favorite, liver and bacon with greasy onions.

Often Alex could taste the carnage on my lips and would say, “It’s your life.”

Our house had been built by a Finnish architect in the thirties, and the walls were curving horizontal blond boards, highly
varnished, steamed and bent into nautical shapes, not a sharp corner anywhere, and lots of original Barcelona chairs, which all needed their leather straps tightened a notch. The windows were small rectangles placed high, like squashed portholes. Alex was playing an LP of
Finlandia
. I guess she was in a Finnish mood. Margaret was in a Marimekko dress.

The French au pair girl, Ghislaine, who was not supposed to smoke but always smelled of Gitanes, came in to scoop up her charges, a tilted smile scarcely rhyming with her sad eyes. I couldn’t help looking at her firm, ample hips rolling under her dress, but I immediately glanced away. She refused to eat just Alex’s vegetarian dishes. Every other dinner was some savory recipe she prepared for herself—shrimp curry or a chicken breast in a cream-and-calvados sauce.

“You’ll never guess who I ran into today,” I said.

“Herr Pogner?” Alex asked, naming her old piano teacher.

“No. Jack. Jack Holmes.”

Alex broke into a big smile, but something guarded instantly came into her eyes, as if she were seeing a favorite dog that had once bitten her. “How did he look?”

“Very sleek,” I said. “He’s even thinner, and his clothes were very conservative and nice—believe it or not, even his shoes. He had on some Peel shoes.”

“Copying you, I guess. Is he terribly prosperous?”

“I don’t really know. He’s working for
Newsweek
in the business section.”

“I guess they get good investment tips,” she said, looking skeptically at a dark bit of eggplant on the end of her fork. “Did he ask about me?”

“Yes, right away. I told him about Larchmont and the children. He seemed most impressed by the size of our property.”

“I hope you didn’t scare him off by talking about our reversion to nature.”

“I did mention it. I was in search of neutral topics.”

“Neutral! I’m afraid it makes us sound terribly controversial.” She smiled with her old love of combat. “He was my friend, but I guess it was you he was in love with. Did you see more signs of unrequited passion?”

“Oh Alex, I wouldn’t notice something like that.”

She rang the little bell next to her, and Emily, the cook, came in to clear. Emily was a comfortable middle-aged woman who felt like an aunt; she didn’t wear a uniform, and she made no fuss over how she served.

“You’re too macho to recognize if another man loves you?”

Her saying that in front of staff made me wince.

I rubbed my forehead and brought my hand down over my eyes and said, “Gosh, I’m tired.”

I remembered always fearing that other people would see me with Jack and think I was queer. We could have a quick lunch together, and that was okay, but dinner—a quiet dinner between two men—was definitely wandering into the pink zone. Maybe it had to do with the way I was raised, but I was always afraid of lingering over a theater review or even admitting I wrote fiction. I suppose if my third-form English master at Portsmouth Abbey hadn’t praised my writing, I would never have taken fiction up. But he was also the football coach. I didn’t want to arouse suspicions of any sort; I didn’t want to be “unusual.” I preferred to be invisible. I’m a born observer, or want to be, and good observers are always invisible, in my opinion. Eventually it had seemed elegantly masculine to be a writer, like Fitzgerald, though I laid off the booze. All those writers back then—Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett—were drunks. And macho.