Jack Holmes and His Friend (22 page)

“So what else did he say?” Alex asked, drumming her fine hands on the tabletop. It was a game with her, this insistence, but I liked it. I preferred it to the recent bouts of melancholy that swept over her most evenings. Alex’s melancholy, fleeting as it might be, took all her energy—hers and mine. I could see that if I invited Jack out here (but would he ever come?), it would give Alex something to focus on rather than treating a sick groundhog or exploring the moral dilemma of hurting basement mold.

We went into the living room, which had a Finnish couch designed by Saarinen and a thick woven rug, extended like a flap on the floor, that could be pulled up over one’s knees against the polar cold. We sat on the couch together and left the rug on the floor. I made us each a sidecar, since Jack had mentioned it and I was curious. I found the recipe in my bar guide.

Alex said, “This could trigger a full-scale diabetic attack.” We were looking up at the windows, against which leafless bushes were pressed like beggars outside a church. Alex drank her sidecar, which astonished me, since she never had anything else beyond her two vodka martinis and one glass of wine. I poured out a second one for her. “Too watery?” I asked.

“No, perfect,” she said. “It’s the lemon I like.”

We talked about Jack late into the night. She was unusually gleeful, almost as if she’d fallen asleep for a hundred years and awoken hungry. Alex was always available to me and the children, abundantly so, but too often she was afraid to go out. Emily, in fact, had started to order the groceries and have them delivered, though on weekends Alex would accompany me to the yacht club if I drove. She was still a beautiful woman with her lustrous hair and exquisite features and her dramatically slender body, but when older couples (most of our club’s members were at least twenty years older than us) came by to exchange a few
bibulous words, she had a tight, rat-a-tat way of gasping, “Yes, yes, really, absolutely, yes,” in reply, and when they’d gone off she’d say to me, “Extraordinary what passes for conversation out here.” It made her irritable and angry that other people would just naturally assume she wanted to talk about fertilizers and insecticides.

“Don’t they know that I’m not in favor of anything that ends in “cide”? Fratricide? Herbicide? Fungicide?”

We’d gradually worked our way through most of the smart set in the vicinity. The problem was the women, who had a way of assuming aloud that we hadn’t noticed what was happening to our garden. Mrs. Callisher would write out on a slip of paper the name of her gardener. If we tried to sit out in the gazebo with them and drink our cocktails, the ladies would slap mosquitoes and say, “Couldn’t we at least put out a torch? Funny, we don’t have mosquitoes.” And once when we walked past the seething, scummy pond, Mrs. Erlich wrinkled her little nose and said, “No swans? But you know they just love to gobble down mosquitoes.” Alex couldn’t let such remarks slip by.

I might have been tempted to say something pacifying, but she was ever alert to the first sign of insult or betrayal on my part. Of course, she enjoyed making a great game of it, yet she was capable of calling out, “Traitor! Horrible traitor!” with an ambiguously icy smile.

Ghislaine brought in the children all fragrant and rosy from their bath.

Palmer was warm and smiling in his pajamas, and for the first time I saw a glint of red in his brown hair, and I wondered what genetic vagary had produced it.

“Da!” he said, glancing up, searching for words, but then, when we all looked at him, he lost his nerve and giggled and tried to
wriggle around in Ghislaine’s arms. I thought what a lucky little bastard he was pressing his face into her breasts.

My Margaret, sober and reproachful, held a book she wanted her mommy to read her, but I said to her, “You can read perfectly well, Peg. Mommy and Daddy are having an important talk. Read your book for half an hour, then turn off your light because you have a big day tomorrow, dressage—”

“And jazz dancing at two,” Alex chimed in. “Angel, don’t plague Mummy now.” And I thought that I’d have hated a mother who called herself “Mummy.”

When we were alone again, we ended by pulling the heavy Saarinen rug over our knees. We drank a second batch of sidecars. Alex reminded me that we’d both have dreadful hangovers, though she seemed to have shed her melancholy. I’d heard someone at the office say of a friend that he was “clinically depressed,” and I sometimes wondered if this applied to Alex too.

I turned on the standing floor lamp made of thin cedar slats, and the light it cast warmed the room up as if it were one of those old tile corner stoves you find in Austria. Outside, a feral cat, puffed up and suddenly four feet long, tiptoed to the sliding glass door and looked in at us with tawny eyes and made a horrible screech, leading Alex to say, like the headmistress of a girls’ school, “Language, ladies. Language!” and we laughed harder than we had in months—and this unaccustomed sound must have frightened Margaret, who came creeping up to the threshold, sucking her thumb and asking, “Mummy? What’s wrong?”

Alex turned and looked at her in a stunned way. I wondered if Peggy had ever seen her mother drunk before. “Nothing is wrong, my angel,” she said. “Mummy and Daddy are having a playdate.”

“Can grown-ups play?”

“They certainly can, can’t they, Daddy?”

I mumbled in affectionate agreement. I hated it when my wife called me Daddy. In sex, all right, but not in front of the children.

Margaret lowered her head and looked up through her eyebrows at these two strangers, her parents.

At the mention of “playdate” I’d felt a stirring in my groin, and now I stood and turned my back to Alex and adjusted myself. Ever since little Palmer had started having asthma attacks in the middle of the night, we’d been keeping him in the room next to ours, and we were always listening for his gasps. When they came, violently and unpredictably, neither of us could ever fall back into very deep sleep. Of course, it was hell on our sex life, which I’d about given up on—though tonight, with sidecars and Alex’s enthusiasm over our renewed contact with Jack, I sensed she was feeling expansive, maybe amorous.

Once Margaret had been sent off, still sucking her thumb (despite Ghislaine’s warning that she’d get buckteeth,
dents de lapin
, that way), I said that we should go up to my study and listen to a new record I’d just bought. Alex nodded and put her arm around my waist.

Upstairs we sat on the long leather couch, and I served us each a glass of cold seltzer water from the little fridge. We made our way through the LP without talking, Alex rhythmically advancing her chin in some curious Watusi way, the deb’s idea of how to get in the groove. It was some pop music that I despised but that I knew would please Alex.

I’d closed the heavy door to my study, blocking out the sounds from the rest of the house. Ghislaine was still awake monitoring Palmer’s breathing. I’d succumbed to my usual resentment of
Alex’s nature worship, since surely a dusty, wild garden full of plant pollen and animal dander wasn’t recommended for an asthmatic child, but that last sidecar had helped me to bank the fires of irritation.

I’d turned on one dim light, and we began to kiss in earnest. I undid Alex’s Corfam belt—never leather!—and tugged her shantung trousers open. There was a creaking up above—a raccoon? a man on the roof? We also had a rule that there would be no locks on doors anywhere in the house, but this time, determined, I jumped up and propped a chair against the door to ensure our privacy.

It had been so long since I’d made love to Alex, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. Of course, men, especially workingmen, the ones I’d known during summer jobs back in college, were constantly complaining that they didn’t get enough pussy. They pretended that all they liked was to eat pussy. That was the running gag all summer as I was loading trucks in Raleigh. Blacks and whites—they had that one thing in common. “Will, you still pumping that ol’ dick in that ol’ cooze? The bitches don’t like that shit, they think that’s bogue. They want you to have some good eats. You got to get down there and eat out that pussy. Watch my tongue. They want it flickin’. Just think you’s the devil-serpent himself, flickin’ into Eve’s sweet little pussy, that weren’t no apple. Or think you’re an eel sliding into a nice little clamshell. Just open it up—see, watch my tongue, flickin’-like.” They would fall down with laughter at me and my queasy smile as they went into a chorus of “Sh-sh.” They got out that first consonant sound, the susurrus both a general assent and a way for each man to declare his distance—“What’s this shit? These guys are too. Fucking. Much.”

Oddly, I wondered if Jack would have thought it was a
turn-on, all those real guys slapping each other on the back and bragging about their oral sex skills.

And I held Alex’s face between my hands and kissed her lips gently, gently.

Over the years I’d learned how to curb my appetites and bathe every horny move in romance, as if it were a gear shifting in a reservoir of oil. I whispered her name in her ear. It had been so long, but I remembered she liked this, and she did breathe faster and she arched her back. Slowly, thoughtfully, I undid the buttons of her blouse as if patiently meditating on home truths. I lifted her blouse off and with a practiced hand squeezed together the hooks of her bra. Her lovely breasts, released from so much expensive uplift, tumbled warmly into my hands. I rubbed my grizzly face against them and she said, “Oh Will,” and I knew I was home free.

We’d gone so long without sex that our reciprocal forms of timidity, I feared, had nearly paralyzed us. When, bored at work, I thought of Alex, I would remember her pain during childbirth, the guilt I’d felt about imposing that pain upon her, and I would remember our many vigils beside Palmer’s bed as he gasped and turned blue and we reached for the inhaler and prayed. After that first attack we’d banned animals from the house and had an exterminator in to make sure there were no cockroaches, since research suggested they could trigger asthma somehow. But I’d found no way to convince Alex to control the garden; its wildness had taken on an Edenic significance for her.

Now I had her down to her panties with my finger inside her. Unhelpfully, the record had come to an end, and I was afraid the silence would sober her up or set her to listening for distant gasps.

I was fumbling around in my mind for some blessed isle, sun-swept and tropical, in the cold sea of so many calculations
and fears and memories. I needed to meet her as one brown body to another on a white sand beach.

And then she opened her legs a fraction and closed her eyes and touched her breast, and I could feel myself getting harder.

When it was all over and we were back in our bedroom, Alex nibbled my ear and whispered that she was glad we’d fulfilled our conjugal duties. That was how she put it and we both laughed. We talked about taking a vacation, just the two of us, in the Bahamas, where she’d often traveled as a girl. Just as we were drifting off, Alex brought up Jack’s name, and I asked, “Were you ever in love with him?”

“No, right away I found out he was homosexual,” she said. “It was like he’d entered a whole new category.”

“Sister?”

“There’s nothing feminine about Jack … that I know of. No, he’s more like a little brother who’s unhappy. Or ill. An unhappy little brother who’s convalescing.”

“But before that, before you knew?”

Alex yawned and placed her warm cheek on my chest and an arm around my waist. “Will, how flattering. I do think you might be a little bit jealous.”

“Answer!”

“He is sexy. But you—I found you so maddening that I knew right away I was falling for you. Besides, even though you’re an old Catholic and a foxhunter, I figured out we were cast from the same mold. Not that Jack isn’t perfectly
sortable
, but—”

“You’re babbling,” I said, impatient with her constant gallicisms. “Go to sleep.”

And she did, still twitching with little social smiles and a deprecating lifting of her eyebrows.

The next morning she fluttered about the children, preparing
my macrobiotic snack for work (seaweed, pickled radish, and a clump of cold brown rice), but suddenly she cast me a long mauve look and blushed, and I could see she was thinking of last night. Even Ghislaine looked a little less voluptuous moving about under her dress.

What struck me was that all of this sensuality had been declared under the banner of Jack’s reentry into our life. Was he a lord of misrule capable of spreading vice and excitement as he rode his pard and smeared grapes across his face? Or was Alex just lonely, isolated in the ever-shrinking corner she was painting herself into, the lunatic of Laurel Lane?

I invited Jack out to Larchmont the following Saturday. I told him when and where the train departed from Grand Central, but I also offered to drive in and chauffeur him to and fro. I knew how cowardly New Yorkers could be about venturing into exurbia. But Jack accepted readily enough and asked if he could bring a woman friend along.

“Sure,” I said, flummoxed for a second by this complication.

In a nice recovery I added, “Warn her that we’re major back-to-nature loons and the house is foundering in its own ooze. And tell her that everything on her kiln-fired dish will be arranged according to its yangness.”

Jack’s friend was called Pia, and I guessed she was Italian, though she had no accent. She had long straight hair through which the tips of her pale ears peeped, and she smelled nicely of vanilla—almost as if she’d dabbed her wrists with pure vanilla extract, the way the maids would do back in Virginia before church. She had a small Cupid’s bow mouth and dramatic blue eyes that seemed strangely flat and swimming. When she smiled,
her lip would curl up at one corner to reveal her eyetooth, and her huge eyes would swim from one side to the other. She had a small, straight nose and a ready laugh, though usually she didn’t seem to have quite caught the joke. Her breasts looked as if they’d been very small and high in adolescence but were filling out nicely in the fullness of time. I was taken by her, but I hid it by looking at Jack most of the time and treating Alex with extra attention, almost as if she were a convalescent.