Jack Holmes and His Friend (31 page)

“Giacchino? You had sex with him?” said Pia. “I did too but much later.”

“Now he’s boringly straight,” Francesco said, “and would kill me if he knew I was telling you this. When we were kids he loved to fuck me, and with no emotion. But I loved him. I was so hurt when I was thirteen and Giacchino came home from school and I tried to start something with him and he called me a
froscio
.” He clarified for me: “A faggot.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, sitting on the floor between two towers of mink pillows. I had to put a hand over one eye to see. “Does anyone sheerish—sheerioushly believe in bisexuality?”

“Yes, of course,” Pia said. She was lying across her bed on her stomach. She’d changed into a silk burnoose. “Everyone is bisexual. That was established by Freud.”

“Established! What would he know?” Jack said. He was seated in a proper straight-back chair but appeared, in his dignified way, to be listing to one side. “Anyway, women are always flirting with lesbianism, and no one holds it against them. Straight men find it a turn-on, right, Will?”

“Yes,” I conceded.

Pia said, “You can always tell the lesbian porn that’s meant for men. At the last moment a man steps in and saves the day with his big penis and screws the women.”

“It’s true that straight men fantasize about lesbians,” I said.

“That’s why men like lesbian porn,” Jack said.

I’d noticed before that Jack often said “men” when he meant straight men.

Toward dawn I stumbled back to the Pierre, realizing that the others were going to continue drinking. When I got up to my room, the lights were on and Alex, still fully dressed, was asleep in my bed, looking very tan.

5.

I ran into the bathroom and gargled mouthwash and brushed my hair and splashed cold water on my face, but by then she was awake.

“Where have you been?” she asked. She was still half asleep. “I was going to surprise you. We came back a day early.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her face. “Oh, I must smell disgusting. I got drunk with Jack. If I’d only known—”

“But not at his place, right? Because he didn’t pick up when I phoned.”

“No, you’re right. We were with some friends of his.”

“The hotel was nice about letting me in. They said you aren’t here very often.”

“That’s because I sneak past them and don’t eat the chocolates they put on the pillow and make my own bed—”

“You do?” She was sitting up now. “Why would you make your own bed?” She yawned and politely covered her mouth.

“You know I have a phobia about hotels. I don’t like the idea of sleeping on beds that other people have touched.”

“We should get a little apartment of our own.” Alex stretched. “I was so worried. Are you really that drunk?”

“I must smell like a distillery. Hey, welcome back! I know,
why don’t we both get cleaned up and go over to the Edwardian Room for eggs Benedict?”

“That’s a good idea.” Looking around, she said, “I fell asleep with all the lights on. I kept thinking you’d come back and it would be such a lovely surprise. Or at least a surprise.”

She stood and looked at herself in the full-length mirror to see how badly her skirt was creased.

“It is, it’s a wonderful surprise,” I said.

She smiled a pinched little smile. She had a perfect tan, but her crow’s-feet looked deeper, though I was sure that she’d been wearing her sunglasses every day in St. Barts, and that every night she’d been applying hundred-dollar creams to her face.

When I took my shower after Alex, I glanced down at my body, which looked scrawnier than before, though I was acquiring a roll of booze fat around the middle. As a teen I’d learned to stop touching my testicles lest I lower the one all the more, but now I found myself washing my genitals thoroughly. I gargled in the shower stream. A melody flitted through my brain, but I couldn’t summon up the words. I felt so confused. I just stood there after I got out of the shower, not drying myself.

I was at a crossroads without a map. I checked the mirror but could hardly meet my own eye. My cheekbones were pushing their way out of my face, as if they were knuckles—two fists!—under a white sheet, a very thin sheet that could easily be torn.

Once we were seated in sturdy upholstered chairs in the Edwardian Room, I began to feel decent again. I wondered if anyone looking at us envied us: a fine young couple, obviously well-heeled, in love but in a kindly, almost unconscious way.

How far from the truth! I watched Alex as she talked, her manner alternating between shyness and pugnaciousness, with an accent drilled into her so many years ago by Brearley, clipped
but never loud or irritating, her vowels in the process of swimming away from American nasal tones, bound for the elegant farther shores of English “Received Pronunciation,” the sacred “RP” coveted by her mother and her friends, though never so thoroughly adopted as to seem un-American. She had on fake pearl earrings as large and shiny as her eyes, as if a surrealist had added extra eyes to her ears.

She was telling me vacation tales about the adorable things Margaret and Palmer had done. Palmer had admired a black swimming instructor at the club, with his powerful chest, blinding smile, and close-cropped head. Margaret had said that she couldn’t understand him and had asked Alex if he was speaking English.

“I assured her he was—are you listening to me? I know how a mother’s stories can be tedious.”

“Not to the father,” I said. “The father is just so happy to see his wife and hear about his brood.” It sounded strangely distancing for me to call myself “the father.”

“Will,” she said. She looked apologetic but also almost defiant—it was a complex look that I couldn’t quite decipher. “Tell me. Are you and Jack lovers?”

I laughed in surprise, and I think that, literally, for the first time in my life, my jaw dropped. “Jack? And me?”

She lowered her lids and looked through her lashes with a sort of pained sympathy.

“You can tell me anything, you know. I just need to know.”

“Are you crazy, Alex? I’ve never had sex with a man, not even when I was twelve. You don’t honestly think—why would you think something like that? You know that I can’t even bear for a man to touch me.”

“You did hold him that time.”

“You think you’re so understanding, but you keep harping on that. It was … an act of generosity on my part! Against all my inclinations. I should never have—”

“Then you’re not having an affair?”

“No,” I said, signaling the waiter for more coffee. Suddenly a strategy occurred to me. “Are you?”

“Me? With whom, pray tell?”

“Does that mean you would if you could?”

“No, it just means you’ve lost your mind, Will.”

“That’s how I feel about your questions. I mean, I could suspect the young black swimming teacher if I wanted to. You were just now praising his body and smile and skills …”

She pressed her fingertips to her temples, and I saw tears come to her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” I said. “I must still be sort of drunk, and this screwdriver isn’t helping.”

She said, “Have I been foolish to trust you? There’s something so … tacky about infidelity. I was never happy with any other man before you, Will, but now I’m afraid I’ve let my guard down. We’ve been so happy these ten years, and now I feel like I’m going to be hurt. How could I have been so foolish?”

She asked it as a genuine question.

I didn’t know what to say. Finally I said, “Did you drive in?”

She stared at me with tears still in her eyes and said, “Yes. Why?”

“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’ll check out of the hotel and cancel my appointments at the office. I want to be with you and the children.”

“You see, I believed you when you said that you adored me, that I was too good for you, that you never dreamed you could
get a beauty like me. What a joke! Now I see what a complacent idiot I was.”

She turned her spoon over on its stomach and looked critically at her bloated reflection in its humped back.

“Have I lost my looks? Men don’t really like superior women anyway, do they? They prefer cheap girls. Have you found a cheap little slut who gets drunk with you and squeals with delight—a little pig?”

I looked at her in partially feigned bewilderment and wondered how good I was at lying.

“Alex!”

She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. I scrawled a signature in the air, calling for the check.

We walked in silence the short distance to the Pierre. Even at this early hour the streets were thronged. It was a gray, chilly day. “Not much of a homecoming for you,” I said.

“Why do you—”

“The weather,” I said impatiently, to push aside a more serious interpretation of my words. I thought this terrible tension in my shoulders would not go away until we talked it out.

In the car, once we were out of Manhattan and over the Brooklyn Bridge, we began to talk. I was glad I was driving; my wife’s little Triumph was a stick shift, which gave me something to do and feel competent about. In the suburbs the leafless treetops slid past overhead like hands flayed to reveal their veins in an anatomy class. Alex kept fiddling with the heater.

“So, what’s she like?” she asked jauntily.

“Who?” I asked.

“Your mistress.”

“Love the old-fashioned word,” I said, “but sorry, I don’t have a mistress.”

“A girlfriend, then. Let me guess: mid-twenties, an office worker, pretty, a bit overweight, a touch vulgar, but that’s what makes her sexy.”

“Stop this, Alex. Seriously. Stop it. No such woman exists.”

“If it’s not Jack and not a vulgar younger woman, then who—”

I looked at Alex, a second too long for her taste, and she begged me to return my eyes to the road.

Finally she said, “Remember, my father is a lawyer, a highly successful lawyer, and I grew up in a household used to arguments and counterarguments.”

She seemed satisfied with herself, as if I’d been about to question her father’s competence.

“Alex,” I said, feeling her watching me, “I hate it when you get paranoid. Is this honestly how you want to pursue this?”

She shrugged and, after a pause, said in a little voice, “No. No. I want our perfect life back. Maybe you didn’t think it was so perfect.”

“Of course I thought—I think—it’s perfect. I love you.” I paused. “You love me.” I risked a glance. “We love each other.”

“For pity’s sake, Will, keep looking at the road. This road is dangerous; it curves so much.”

We sank into a silence that lasted until we pulled into our own long, long driveway, which Alex had designed to resemble a country road, with a grassy strip down the center. In this light, so weak but clear, our place seemed even more rustic, untamed. The long, dry grasses brushed against the bottom of the car. It began to rain.

“Look, Will—pheasants!”

And four big startled birds flapped noisily out of some high
weeds a hundred yards ahead. We both gasped and looked happily at each other and simultaneously lowered our windows, as if we needed to breathe in our cold native air. That sudden gasp breaking through her mournful, prickly silence promised a reconciliation, if not today, then soon. At least it was feasible.

When we pulled up to the house, Alex said, “Ghislaine is turning out to be anorectic. Don’t stare at her.”

“Of course I won’t stare.”

“No, no, I know you won’t. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but she just got back from Normandy, and her fiancé laughed at her for all the weight she’d put on in America, and now she’s taken draconian measures.”

“It is true that sugar is added to everything Americans eat,” I said blandly, grateful for this distraction.

“Not what we eat,” Alex said. “Maybe in our house the strawberries are sandier, but at least it’s all good honest organic produce. If Ghislaine would eat what we eat, she’d be slender but not skeletal.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling, taking her hand in mine, “you do look after us.”

Secretly I was relieved that Ghislaine would no longer be such a voluptuous temptation inside her loose-fitting dark dresses.

I’d forgotten that the children would be at school. The house seemed bizarrely quiet except for the drum of rain.

“It’s really raining now,” I said, “and I can hear that that gutter needs cleaning.”

“Yes,” Alex said with a smile, “your city slicker days are over. By the way, I ordered lots of groceries yesterday when we came back, including some lovely trout, which I can sauté, and Ghislaine is making some purée de pommes de terre with celeriac.
You know how she does that. Shall we eat in an hour? Emily is off today. I even have some nice Riesling.”

“Oh no,” I said, “no wine. I’m off booze for a week.”

“As you wish.”

Ghislaine emerged briefly to say hello on the way to the pharmacy. She’d become dramatically thinner within two weeks. Had she swallowed a tapeworm? She was bundled up in two layers of bulky sweaters. “We have a certain pill in France, an alterna—” she began.

“Alternative?” I asked.

“Yes—one of those—kind of medicine in France.
Homéopathique.
Do you have them? Twenty little pills you put under your tongue for a grippe?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said irritably, thinking, how could they be so superstitious?

“They’re called Oscillococcinum.”

“No,” I said, laughing, “I’m sure we have nothing like that.”

When Ghislaine came back from her fruitless search at the drugstore, we sat down to a salad, the fish, and the mashed potatoes. The neighbors were burning leaves, despite the damp, which had Alex in a rage because she’d given them a pamphlet and a lecture about the advantages of rot and mulch.

After lunch I went up for a nap, but I couldn’t sleep. I thought about how safe and secure I felt here, despite the sound of an animal scrabbling on the roof and the mournful hooting of not one but two owls in the garden, if such a wasteland could be called a garden. I got up and looked out at it in all of its frowsiness, its dun and sere and wild devastation. And I thought about how hard it would be to sell this place. It would take at least a year of plowing and replanting to make it look normal—and the deaths of hundreds of woodland creatures.