Jack Holmes and His Friend (26 page)

“Just at myself. As for you, I marvel at you.”

She said, “I’m so happy.”

“Me too,” I whispered. And I thought, The married man has every motive in the world to keep it simple. He’s luckiest when there’s little past, no future, an absolute and abundant present.

But then, maybe Pia is truly sophisticated, not longing for a
one-and-only full-time relationship. Maybe she’s a sybarite in search of wine, men, and song.

Or maybe she’s a romantic who loves me in some humble, simple way and would never dream of demanding anything, of disturbing my marriage.

Or maybe she’s Jack’s puppet and will repeat back to him every insignificant detail about me. That idea made me shudder.

At last we were both out of our clothes. I had one black stocking dangling from my right foot, which made it look seriously white, like some appalling English potted meat newly pried out of the can. She had indentations in her smooth, soft skin where the waistband of her panties had been cinching her in. But otherwise she now looked less like a girl and more like a woman, almost as if in nudity she’d gone up a full size. Her shoulders were firm and sloping; her breasts sagged a bit under their own weight; her pubic hair was also longer and thicker than I’d anticipated. Sort of shaggy with age.

But her feet were superb, sensitive and fresh, her ankles fine, her legs wrapped around with long, sheathed muscles. Her breasts reminded me of anemones for some reason—maybe because the aureoles were big and dark, and the surrounding petals were soft and relaxed and drooping, radiating out from so much dark intensity.

I ran my hands over her, over every inch of her, as if I were blind and needed to memorize her body since I couldn’t see it, though I could see it, and did. I wondered if her eyes would look more normal, less arresting, if they were seen upside down. Had her eyes been inverted? Was that the trick of their beauty?

When my hand gently entered her she was wet and warm, and that wetness seemed to me like a form of mercy, the
expression of generosity and goodness. Idea for story: men make so many crude cunt jokes because they love it too much, just as the worst English swear word used to be “bloody,” which means “by our lady,” the holy person we most revere.

After it was all over we fell asleep, and then I woke up at three in the morning, dry mouthed. I moved slightly away to be out of the path of Pia’s sour breath. Her breasts and her belly and even her chin looked larger and too relaxed from this angle, as if she’d gained yet another ten pounds in her sleep. I even resented that she was here, presuming to share a mattress with me, and the words “loose morals” drifted past the center of my mind, though not for long enough to be introspected.

But when the alarm went off, she was already bathed and dressed and scented and made up and mounted on her high heels and brisk and affectionate. She left a cup of coffee (black, not the way I liked it) beside the bed and kissed me on the forehead and said, “Now I must vanish. I have to pack to go to Washington on the noon train, but I’ll be back at the weekend. Here’s my private number.” She put her card next to the cup. My mind cantered satirically around the locution “at the weekend,” which I supposed must be an anglicism. Yet I was grateful because she hadn’t pressed me for a rematch.

After Pia had gone, I showered and shaved and put on the fresh shirt I’d brought in my briefcase. I wrote Jack a note: “Mission accomplished. Thanks for the hospitality. You are a hell of a good friend. The apartment is looking swell.” Actually his apartment looked garish and busy and dusty in the sunlight.

I tried to collect my thoughts: It’s true that a gay friend is different, maybe better, because he’s not a rival. He’s not part of the whole dismal system. He’s not one more pussy-whipped
churchgoer who’s learned to keep his head, the big head and the little one, in check. Everyone thinks gay guys are sissies and mama’s boys, but they’re actually people who’ve chosen their sexuality over all the comforts of home. They’re bravely obsessional—but at a price. This apartment, sure, it’s impressive, but it’s not comfortable and it’s sort of dirty—it lacks a woman’s touch. I’m sure Jack brings men back here in industrial quantities, and why not? He’s still young, and he exudes a strong sensuality that is almost like body odor, though he has no smell. He reeks of sex—you can see it in his eyes. He never looks at people above the waist, nor can he follow the thread of the usual conversation about property values and the new school bill. Jack doesn’t look at men or women as neighbors and colleagues or beleaguered fellow parents. For him, their suits or dresses are just the thinnest tissue to be lifted off or torn away like the clothes on paper dolls. Once he said to me that he thought it was ridiculous that some people were turned on by cowboy hats or motorcycle jackets or peasant blouses. “For me,” he said, “clothes are erotic only when they’re shed. I don’t give a damn what people are wearing so long as they end up naked.”

It’s strange that his way, the sexual way, would be considered a secondary route; in Larchmont the high road is social, economic, stable, and if all the good couples had their way, we’d soon stop wriggling and oscillating altogether and condense into a single hard point of stasis.

Jack’s not that way. He’s a dirty boy, and he understands other dirty boys and girls. Is Pia a dirty girl? She was pretty extreme for a first date—but then, what do I know? She’s definitely in the fast lane, and I’m in the parking lot. She licked my balls.

But what do these people do when they get older, old? We’ll have our children and our grandchildren, but what will they have? Snapshots of former loves? Old party favors? Then again, is a grandchild really such a consolation? Doesn’t a grandson by his very existence define his grandfather as a superfluous man?

4.

That day I commissioned an experienced commercial photographer to take large, almost abstract pictures of a chemical process at a client’s plant in Lackawanna. I rushed up there on a puddle jumper, then rented a car. No one needed me, but my presence kept costs down. I’d worked out a successful formula for these annual reports—especially for ailing behemoths in the chemical industry. I wrote short, upbeat paragraphs of nearly cryptic generalities to be printed beside blazing out-of-focus photos of molten reds and rolled-out yellows. The disappointing actuarial report could be slipped in, in agate type, after a whole book of glossy photos and clichés about the future.

I called Alex that evening from my highway motel, which I preferred to the old hotel downtown, where the curtains smelled of coal.

She told me the children’s news: Palmer had gotten a
mention très bien
in Kindergarten French, and Margaret was learning in ballet how to do a full curtsy, and she was now going around bowing to the dogs and staff.

I told Alex that these accomplishments seemed surreal in a Lackawanna motel where the outside traffic noise was punctuated only by the thumping of the ice machine.

“My poor angel,” she said. “I hate to think of you up there alone. So bleak. Monsieur should have his comforts! Where did we go wrong in planning our lives? Should we sell our house, buy a little brownstone in Greenwich Village? I heard of one for just fifty thousand dollars, I guess because New York is so dangerous. But then you could retire and write your novels. Or we could live cheaply in Paris. That would be such a thrilling opportunity for the children. Margaret’s already perfected her curtsy. And Palmer can say ‘Bonjour, comment allez-vous?’ ”

“Let’s not go overboard,” I said. “I like my job, even if it is pointless. I’ve made it very profitable, and I’m the first Wright in two generations to earn any money. If I gave it up to write novels—”

“But who knows, you might earn money with your novels,” she protested.

“Not likely,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t like living off your father’s money.”

“But if we sold the house—”

“You’d hate it, Alex. I know how important it is to you to live surrounded by nature.”

A long silence ensued and then she said, “You’re right,” her voice very faint. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I liked keeping Alex in the country so that I could get away from time to time.

That night, as I tried to get to sleep, I replayed in my mind everything I’d done with Pia. I’d been waiting all day for this moment. Idea for story: Sex is real for a man only when he can masturbate later and reclaim the images for his imagination. Develop into bigger point about the imagination and its dangers.

And it was true: I’d been carrying around with me the possibility of reliving last night as if it were a gift that someone had given me on an important occasion, but that I hadn’t been allowed to open yet. I could taste her throat as she thrust her head back while my hands kneaded her plush buttocks. I inched deeper inside her, or I lay on my back and she sat on me, her hair curtaining her glittering smile, and she groaned with something between pleasure and pain, “God, that’s so damn good!” Alex never admitted to any earthly pleasure, to anything that made her gasp; Alex was a mystic of love, whereas Pia was a blues singer of lust. Idea for story: naive white man thinks of all orgasmic women as Negro until he meets Italian heiress.

Since I didn’t know where Pia was in Washington or how to reach her, I called Jack, and was amazed to find him at home.

“Where on earth are you?” he asked. “If I sound weird, it’s because I’m drunk. Someone at the magazine roped me into a horrible drinks party—”

“How could that be so horrible?”

“But it was!” he insisted with a laugh.

Unsure of his degree of irony, I said, “Did you forget to eat?”

“Oh, I ate: four olives,” he said. “Where are you?”

“In a Lackawanna Days Inn.”

“Is this a cry for help? Did you think you were dialing the suicide hotline?”

He told me that he’d been to Albany the week before for his work and that it was surely just as appalling. We were both enjoying playing New Yorkers shocked by the provinces.

“So: that Pia of yours!” I said.

Jack laughed and said, “Was she good in the sack? Be advised: I’ll be asking her the same question about you.”

I said, “I’m sure she’s the most passionate woman I’ve ever known.”

“Maybe it’s not her nature. Maybe you just turn her on.”

“Tell me,” I said, “when you’re with another man, does your greatest pleasure come from exciting him?”

“I don’t think we’re that altruistic,” he said. I could hear him reflecting. “Of course, it’s nice to get good reviews, especially if the guy spreads the word to other possible victims. But no, I think we’re more selfish.”

“See,” I said excitedly, “it’s so damn thrilling to watch a lady become an animal in your arms, to hear her growling, to see her head whipping from side to side.”

“Men don’t lose control like that,” Jack said, almost sourly, as if he were questioning my bragging. Or was he envious? Did he wish he could produce that effect? Or did he still dream of my fucking him? “But even if they did start growling, I think that would freak me out. I don’t like them even to talk. Gay men say the dumbest things, all about hot balls and hungry holes.”

I found myself wincing, not wanting the specifics. An embarrassing silence settled in like a sudden cold front ending a warm spring day.

Then, on a different note, he asked, “Are you going to continue seeing Pia?”

I almost wanted to tell him that I might not if I could find the time to jerk off three times a day but that otherwise I couldn’t see how I would stop obsessing about her.

“I want to,” I said. “She’s a wonderful woman. By the way, you don’t know how I could get in touch with her today, do you?”

“Try her at home.”

“But she’s in Washington.”

“No, she’s not. I just spoke with her.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe her trip was called off,” he added quickly as if he’d made a faux pas.

“I wouldn’t want to look as if I were testing what she’d told me. Or give her the feeling we’d been discussing her and that’s how I knew she was at home.”

“You’re being complicated. Call her.”

After work I’d eaten a hamburger steak and mashed potatoes under a blanket of gravy. I felt sick and wished I had a quart bottle of seltzer, but I was too tired to dress and drive to a 7-Eleven.

I sat on the toilet and leaned forward with my arms on my knees and strained, but nothing happened. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I supposed that no man in history had ever thought his own face looked dishonest. Maybe by definition that was impossible to think. But I wondered if someone studying me—a man? a woman? probably a man—would say I had a shifty face.

I went back to the bed and lay down, looking at the telephone as if it might ring.

I felt strange about having discussed sex with Jack. We’d never done that before. It seemed odd that he, a faggot, should be so much more experienced than a normal guy like me, but was it real experience? Men and women played for keeps, for babies, for money, and they let the law govern their union and disunion. God and nature had made their bodies fit together. But what permanence or public acknowledgment could two fairies count on? Two barren boys cornholing each other; must hurt like hell, I thought. They can’t go anywhere as a couple unless they don’t mind flaunting their fancy ways. I guess now they wouldn’t get fired for being gay. Or would they? But people must still treat them as freaks; why are they so affected, with
their sibilance and shrill laughter and swooping intonations, their clothes too tight, too bright?

Not that Jack was like that. I suspected that many female staffers at
Newsweek
must be pining over him. Was he perverse enough to fool them deliberately? How many more years could he get away with this masquerade before people demanded that he marry? Maybe he would come clean, but could he on the job?

I decided not to try Pia. It took all my resolve and sense of strategy; I kept looking at the neatly printed card she’d given me with what she called her “private number” on it. How many numbers did she have, for chrissake?