Jack Holmes and His Friend (28 page)

“And the marriage?”

“It broke his heart, but I said no, which I often regret. I gave him the house. He was sweet—”

“But another bore?”

“At least he was
un bon coup
.”

I felt reassured. I was neither a golf bore nor a clerk bore. I wasn’t a hairless blond, but I was presentable enough. I was a published author with an enchanting wife whom it would be fun for Pia to wean me away from.

I wasn’t sure I could trust Pia to be discreet. If she was deliberately “careless” and allowed Alex to find out about our affair, that might serve her purposes if she wanted me to herself. But if she was afraid of being considered a home wrecker—we had three friends in common—then she might have a stake in preserving our secret. Or maybe she liked the idea of an intrigue with me but prized her independence. Or maybe the thought of having a rival excited her. Or maybe she was just vamping with me until she located another young hairless blond, one with more money and conversation this time around.

One day she asked me, “Does most of your money come from Alex’s family?”

The question didn’t seem loaded, but I wondered if she was investigating how free I was to choose a new woman.

We were in Brooklyn, walking along the Promenade. The sky was dark and twisted and packed with clouds. The November rain had finally let up, and we’d emerged out of another obscure restaurant. It was Italian and had candles in Chianti bottles and black-and-white photos of mafiosi at christenings. We’d chosen Brooklyn Heights because no one we knew was likely to go there. No one ever went to Brooklyn; it might as well have been Akron.

“Her father bought the house,” I said, “and is always settling
more money on her to avoid inheritance taxes. It doesn’t amount to much because you can only give up to five thousand a year. And she does own income-producing property somewhere, the usual cattle ranch or orange grove. But I earn money. I make a decent amount from my boring annual reports business, not that any salary is ever real money. I have no inheritance coming or prospects like that. Nothing. No investments. I spend everything I make on taxes and staff and the children—all those dance lessons add up.”

Pia seemed even more passionate when we went back to her studio that afternoon, as if my very averageness as a father and salary man acted on her as an aphrodisiac. Or maybe she thought we’d shared valuable secrets. Sometimes she accused me of being cold and too reserved.

I’d figured out that my company nearly ran itself, especially in the period before the earnings reports were released and the disappointing results had to be disguised with palliative pictures and words. I was free to spend almost half a day with Pia three afternoons a week. Love likes to illustrate itself among friends and strangers and to mark its festivals with ceremonies—and none of that could we do. We were confined to bad curries and to hours of sunlight on the bed beside the three neat piles of mink pillows on the floor and the Moroccan platter of cheeses going steadily off.

I wondered if Alex suspected anything. She complained that she could never reach me at the office. I reminded her that I called on clients most afternoons and even played squash with them but was almost always at my desk in the morning. She teased me for getting flabby despite the squash. When I missed two events at Palmer’s school, she was hurt, but it seemed to
make her happy when I encouraged her to plan for us to go on a Serengeti camera safari later in the winter.

Jack had come up with the inspired idea of inviting friends—all straight, I noticed—twice a month to cocktails at the bar in one of the big, cool, cavernous rooms in the Museum of Natural History. It wasn’t a party he’d had to arrange with the museum. Anyone was free to drink in the early evening at the little bar next to the dioramas of tigers in the bush. There’d be as few as twelve or as many as twenty people looking unusually vulnerable in the dim light.

Twice Alex took the train in to attend these odd parties; on each occasion Jack invited her out to dinner at Ruskay’s over on Columbus Avenue. She’d come home full of news and more animated than I’d seen her in weeks.

“He has such interesting friends,” she told me at breakfast. “His old college roommate was there, Howard, who’s self-mocking and shy, with eyes as startled looking as Charles Trenet’s. He told me about how he’d been such a slob in college that Jack had drawn a line down the center of their room with pink chalk, and how they’d listen to Prokofiev day in and day out. Alice and Rebekkah were there but also lots of new friends, an old guy from the magazine with teeth missing and a red nose. He’s publishing something about Mother Goose. And there were other people too, a girl with too much makeup, real thick pancake, who kept vanishing and coming back, and then I found out she was a go-go girl in a nearby bar, but actually a film major at NYU whose thesis is a twenty-minute movie of Jack in the altogether—so we’ll finally get to see what his tushy looks like.”

“And that interests you?”

“Oh, just try to tell me, Will Wright, that you’re utterly indifferent to it.”

“I imagine he’s hairless and has flat muscles.”

“But he’s going to the gym now and like all those gay men has giant shoulders but skinny legs.”

“Any sign of a mustache yet?”

“He’ll never be a clone, I fear. But I forgot to tell you, the go-go girl is hysterically in love with Jack, and he thinks the whole movie thing is just a ruse to get his pants off.”

“Maybe she’ll convert him. After all, he had sex with women in college.”

“He told me that he likes the way women feel more than the way men feel but that visually he prefers men, and that he likes women more than men but can only fall in love with men.”

I was struck by how proud Alex was to have secured this information, what she treasured as “specifics.”

She said, almost wistfully, “But I wonder if he’s ever been in love with anyone beside you. If he’d ask me, I could give him specifics about you that would break the spell right away.”

“What would you say?” I was smiling, but I could feel a surge of adrenaline run through me.

“I’d say that you’re very forgetful about the little things but positively regal about the big ones. That your nipples are more sensitive than mine—”

“Don’t you dare tell him that.”

“That you’re really an old-fashioned man out of an Arrow shirt ad: noble and patriotic and pious and gentle as a lamb unless provoked and then fierce as a lion.”

“I’m not all that pious. Would you describe me as a homebody?” I asked her, thinking of Pia’s companion from Bergamo.

“Yes, of course, and when my mother asked me how I managed to keep you despite all of my failings and eccentricities and the predatory babes prancing about New York, I said we were the perfect match and always had been.”

I thought for a while and then said, “I wonder if any of us would know what we’re living through if we didn’t at some point have to describe our lives to our friends.”

“Do you suspect Jack of influencing me?”

“No, no! Never! You’re being so female. I was just speaking generally.”

“As a novelist. Oh Will, I wish you’d start writing again.”

“No one’s exactly waiting for my next literary offering.”

I attended Jack’s next cocktail event and had dinner with him. Alex had some meeting in Larchmont to protect the deer even though they were destroying everyone’s gardens. I met and chatted with the guy who was converting Mother Goose into French homonyms.

I thought, Here we all are paying taxes and raising our vulnerable children and submitting to erotic temptations that may ruin everything and hoping to end this wretched war in Vietnam—and this jackass is wasting all his waking energy on French spellings of English fairy tales. What world is he living in? I was polite and he was unstoppable.

I met the pole dancer too, and I asked her if she had other film projects in mind for after she finished with Jack, and I could see from her confusion that she was a true obsessive who’d never imagined even for one single tiny second anything after Jack.

I talked to a stylish English redhead who wrote about dance for a magazine and had, as I finally noticed, a glass eye, too blue
and crystalline to be convincing, though she’d trained her long auburn hair to sweep over it. She had a short, dark lover, a novelist stymied in his career and festering with resentment; I didn’t mention my own failed novel.

At last Jack and I were alone at Ruskay’s. “So these are your friends now?” I asked, as if determined to be tolerant toward this new cheesy world we were inhabiting. “They’re all interesting.”

“Are they?” Jack asked. “To me it’s a rather depressing choice between solitude, which I enjoy only if it’s broken from time to time, and—what was I saying? Oh, right. Solitude—or all this totally predictable chatter. I’m not especially intelligent, but I think I recognize intelligence when I see it. It’s mainly a matter of surprise. Smart people say surprising things. They’re not always in character.”

“Whereas the pole dancer—”

“Who? Oh yeah, her name is Sammy.”

“Sammy,” I said, “can be counted on to talk about nothing but you.”

“Did she really do that?”

“She’s cute, in good shape from all that pole dancing. You should give her a whirl.”

“I don’t think I could get it up. Our tastes become narrower and deeper with time, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“Narrower in that now I only like men, but deeper in that now I like Negroes and Orientals and up to forty and down to twenty and workingmen.”

“Workingmen?”

“Firemen. Not that they’re easy to bag.”

“Is that how you think of seduction: as bagging?”

“It’s just a word, Will. The truth is that I’m absurdly romantic. Each time I kiss a man, I wonder if this could be the one. On the subway I’ll look at a stranger and wonder if he could be Mr. Right.”

I said, “Then why are you single?”

I was looking around, and I realized that Ruskay’s was a gay restaurant. The waiters were all gay, as were half of the customers. The mirror-topped tables were gay, and so was the ubiquitous smell of the Windex used to wipe them. The old-fashioned tile floors, the dramatic lighting, the whoops of laughter almost instantly suppressed into terribly amused hissing—it all seemed extremely gay, down to the men in formfitting T-shirts despite the cold outside, and I hoped none of my clients would see me.

“Why am I single?” Jack said. “I blame our whole cruising ritual. You pick up a guy at a bar and bring him home without saying much and then fuck him and light up a cigarette, then tell your coming-out story, exchange numbers, and that’s that. For someone to catch my attention, I’d have to meet him at work and wonder if he was gay and only gradually get to know him, and all the confidences would be exchanged slowly and reluctantly, and then at last we’d have some sort of clumsy sex, and it would be his first time—well, you get the picture.”

For a moment I feared he was talking about our early friendship.

I said, “Good luck with that,” and realized how insipid I sounded, how clinically cheerful. Jack came across as so worldly, so blasé and thoroughly at home in gay life. When had this transition taken place? In the years we hadn’t seen each other, I guessed. The whole world was becoming more tolerant and progressive,
and even stodgy Jack had been caught up in the general drift toward the left.

What I wanted to talk about was Alex and Pia, but Jack beat me to it.

“I think Alex suspects something but probably not another woman. She just can’t imagine another woman. She thinks of you as shy and true-blue.”

“If not a woman, then what?” I asked, alarmed.

“Gambling debts? A failing business? Your spying for the Soviet Union?”

“Did you make all that up?”

Jack smiled. He was eating an avocado salad without much appetite. Too many museum cocktails, I suspected. “I just made it up,” he said. “But she does think you’re preoccupied. She says you wake up during the night and pad down to the kitchen and drink a glass of milk, which you never used to do.”

“I’m not worried; my life seems too good to be true.” I shifted gears. “Do you remember when you asked me how Pia was in bed? Did you ever ask her about me? What’d she say?”

“She said you were a high school sophomore in the best and worst senses of the word.”

I opened my hands in what I thought of as a very funny Jewish way. “And? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re clumsy and—”

“No staying power?”

“She didn’t say that.” Jack pushed his uneaten avocado slivers under a lettuce leaf. “No, just that you’re all over her in some sweet high school way, the lovemaking equivalent of saying, ‘Oh boy! Oh boy!’ ”

“Is that bad?”

“Better than falling asleep,” he said, playing it to the hilt.

“What’s the bad part?”

“There isn’t any,” he said. “She adores you. Maybe that will prove to be the bad part.”

“I wonder why she adores me.”

“Why do we all? I hear everything about you from both women—Alex especially praises you for being so fidel, as she puts it.”

I thought about the whole situation for a moment.

“The two women confide in you, and you can see all the discrepancies in their accounts.” I felt trapped and irritated but couldn’t justify my feelings. “I only get to sleep with them—and perhaps Alex tells you we don’t make love very often.”

“She would never confide anything like that,” he said. “Anyway, she’s very romantic and pretty paranoid.”

“Then what’s your take on all this?”

“The stakes are high,” Jack said. “If it were two men, everyone would expect them to cheat and break up after six months. Two months is my maximum. Anyway, nobody much cares about men’s affairs. There are no children, no car pools, no you-do-the-lawn-work-and-I’ll-cook sort of thing.”

“Jesus, why is heterosexuality so fucked up?” I asked.

“I read something about eggs being dear and sperm cheap that was supposed to explain everything, but I forget what it means.”

“Wait, wait!” I said. “I think it means that since a woman produces so few eggs, and once one is fertilized she’s out of commission for a year, say, whereas men produce schools of minnows—but that’s just stating the obvious.”