Jack Holmes and His Friend (34 page)

“Puritan? Puritan Catholic? How fucked up is that?” I wondered if I sounded like a tough Hemingway guy.

I called her the next day. She was cool but cordial and said she could have lunch with me two days hence, but only for an hour between other appointments, and it might have to be in that little pasta joint on the corner of Seventy-third and Second. I gladly accepted her conditions.

When we finally saw each other, the restaurant was mercifully empty, the waiter sleepy, the sun shining, and neither of us could stop smiling. We were sitting in a glassed-in café on the sidewalk that had been tacked onto the gloomy main room. We
had tortellini alla nonna, a dish with peas and mushrooms in a heavy cream sauce. If we’d been prudent, we would have asked for a table in back, but I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. She had on a white blouse cinched in by a thick black belt and a long denim skirt. I knew she must be wearing a bra, but her breasts seemed to follow fully every movement she made, no matter how slight.

I did mentally rehearse an excuse I could use with a friend: “Look who I ran into!”

I asked Pia about her brother and for any news of Francesco. She seemed touched by my asking after both men and lit up, saying, “Alfredo is okay. And Francesco—well, you know, he’s so delightfully crazy. But Jack is really the one I’m worried about.”

“Oh? Why?”

“You haven’t noticed anything?”

“No, but I’m not terribly observant.”

“He’s so lonely. Why doesn’t he have a lover?”

“If you ask me, he enjoys being a free spirit. He loves sexual adventures.”

“Then he could find a boyfriend who is equally … adventurous. Promiscuous. But he needs the human warmth. A constant companion. The intimacy, no?”

I said, “I guess we all do.”

“Really?” She pushed her hair back almost defiantly behind one ear.

“I do,” I said. “Do you?”

“Of course,” she said. Then, distancing herself, she added, “In principle we all need warmth.”

I looked at her so intensely that she lowered her eyes.

“But you know Jack so much better than I do,” I said.

She said, “Have you ever noticed how he never talks about
his parents or his childhood? Americans always talk about their childhood. They find little stupid traumas to complain about. Europeans never do that—we’re much too private, and why bore other people? Everyone had a bad childhood, anyway. Everyone except dull normals, who are to be pitied. Americans aren’t really friends until they’ve exchanged incest confessions or a dramatic story of Papa’s refusal to come to the horse show the day you won your first blue ribbon.”

I laughed, happy merely to listen to her voice, to watch her as she rattled on. I felt that her breasts were performing under her blouse just for me.

“But Jack never talks about anything that happened before boarding school. And he loved his school, unlike most rich American boys, who complain that they were banished to boarding school by selfish, superficial parents.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “He’s never volunteered a word about his childhood.”

“And have you actually ever asked him anything about it?” she said, looking over the tops of imaginary glasses, though I refused to be scolded.

“I didn’t dare,” I said.

“You can be cold, Will.”

“How so?”

“I’ve learned the hard way.”

“I can also be very affectionate. Once I have my priorities straight.”

“Are they straight now?”

I nodded and looked at her, pouring as much warmth as I could into my eyes. But they were so deep-set that I wondered if she could read them.

On our way out she glanced at my crotch and saw my erection. She looked uncomfortable and confused, but then she caught my eye and smiled—a startled smile of embarrassment, pure reaction, and then she melted into a conspiratorial little grin.

“Oh, what the hey,” she said half grudgingly.

She took my hand and led me back to her apartment building. We went in silence. I didn’t remind her of the afternoon appointment she’d pretended to have.

Once I was inside her, I felt my brain unscrambling. I was so happy to be with her—I’d really thought it would never happen again—that I kept standing aside mentally and trying to memorize everything we were doing. I observed my right hand on her left breast and my left hand circling her waist and cinching her up more tightly against me. I was glorying in her full, wet mouth, which still tasted of the creamy pasta and bitter espresso. We’d thrown ourselves across the bed, and she’d swept the thirty little pillows to the floor. The sunlight was hot, and we both stretched and untangled in it in a slow photosynthesis of pleasure and desire.

She had her orgasm first, and her contralto moans and tear-filled eyes made me widen and tighten into a band of gleaming steel above her—I could feel my whole body taking on bulk and sheen. Her pelvic thrusts seemed involuntary and completely unstoppable, whereas I was poised above her in a hot, milled point of pure will. She was fucking my cock with her cunt. I wasn’t doing anything, just holding still. And then I finally collapsed beside her, my body jerking in the aftershocks. She’d never seen me twitch like that before. She half sat up in delight at the effect she’d produced and trailed her hand across my pelvis, which made me jackknife and wince.

Two minutes after it was all over, I started worrying—she was wearing that damn jasmine perfume again, and I realized I’d have to go to a barber shop in Grand Central and get the man to douse me in some cheap hair tonic, that clear blue stuff, which would disguise her perfume.

She’d bitten me on the neck, and when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I realized it would turn into a blue-brown hickey—luckily it was just below the shirt-collar level, but for the next four days I’d have to undress in the dark.

How childish, I thought. Does that mean she wants to lay a bigger, louder, more obvious claim on me?

To hell with her.

Before I left, she could see that I was angry. I looked at my watch and actually slapped my forehead and went rushing out with kisses and promises to be in touch soon and thanks for taking me back—“into the fold.” I literally said that. We both looked shocked and then laughed. Into the fold. Thank god we laughed.

I had the station barber give me a Mafia-style razor cut and drench me in cheap toilet water. Even he, looking at my hickey, winced, though he was an unflappable old man who held up the mirror for inspection without any sort of expression on his face. He gently powdered my neck and ears with a cloud of talc.

“That’s the worst haircut you’ve ever had, Will Wright,” Alex exclaimed, standing on tiptoe to kiss me. “You look like a corrections officer. And you smell like a cheap whorehouse.”

I held her face between my hands and said pensively, “Oh, I thought you only knew about the expensive kind.”

“Touché,” she whispered.

Her lips, unlike Pia’s, were thin, and her tongue made darting
motions that somehow years ago she’d decided I adored, just as I’d decided Alex loved glass paperweights with snow scenes inside them. I’d been bringing them home to her after every business trip when one day she came out with, “Actually I detest snow scenes.” I’d been hurt for a moment—and then laughed at the whole misunderstanding. I’d never had the courage to tell her I hated her little darting tongue motions.

During the next few days I’d be sitting in my office around three in the afternoon, usually after a two-martini lunch, and I’d reach down under my desk to rearrange my half-erection, and a black wheel of dots would start to turn before my eyes, and my mouth would fill up with saliva. I could see myself standing beside the bed Pia was lying on, where she was naked except for her pearls, one pearl in her mouth, her nails small and dark red. The minute the mood turned sexual, Pia would switch off her social smiles. She became heavy, logy, even sullen with sluttishness, unlike Alex, who, when she wasn’t grinning like a mother at her child’s piano recital, was narrowing her eyes and compressing her lips in what she imagined was a dreamy, romantic expression.

As I was phoning Pia to see if I could drop by, I thought, This could all work out. With any luck I could get a good ten years of sluttishness out of Pia, Alex none the wiser. After a decade of service I would renegotiate—by then Pia would be too old and fat and irritating. She certainly wasn’t becoming finer or less predictable, nor was she slimming down or toning up.

My own cynicism disgusted me. Even when I’d been at my horniest as a teenager, I’d never dreamed of mechanizing my pleasures. Maybe that was why I could never cook up new jerk-off fantasies, but could only replay the few exciting moments I’d already tasted in real life.

There was nothing systematic or abstract about my desires; they were linked to particular girls and particular moments, repeatable only in my memory. And maybe that’s why I treasured a woman’s responses to my ministrations, her writhing and thrashing about. Since I couldn’t dream up new delights, I had to dwell on those that experience had already afforded me.

I’d always been an idealist. I’d never been practical about guaranteeing myself a regular regimen of sex. To me each encounter was a miracle, a one-time thing. A unique and perfect surprise. To keep a sex partner on the side, ready and receptive, was like keeping a milk cow in the barn for the children’s meals, too heartless a convenience.

Again I blamed the Catholic church. It had taught me that sin was a regular part of my life, that sex was a sin I had best contain. Now I contested everything about the Catholic solution, starting with the idea that “sex” was an identifiable unit of human and animal activity, rather than an abstract word flung over disparate feelings and motions with only a spurious unity, like a tarp thrown over junk in a rummage sale. That was “sex.” Every bit as unreal as “sin,” a linguistic or theological convenience.

I longed to be pagan, to intuit a god in every mountain, a nymph in every tree. I wanted my gods to be schemers, temperamental bullies ready to ignite and go up in flames. No better or wiser than human beings, just immortal and bigger and more powerful.

I despised Catholicism, but I’d been so thoroughly catechized that I still half crossed myself when I passed a church. I still felt abashed when Christmas came and went without my attending mass. When we traveled to Mexico one winter, I felt half envious and half ashamed as I watched the Aztec pilgrims crawl on their knees up the countless steps leading to a cathedral.
Behind the altar hung hundreds and hundreds of ex-votos—tin replicas of eyes, a leg, a soldier—to testify to the miraculous protection or cures attributed to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

My mother never reproached me for losing my faith, but her own piety filled me with a melancholy regret. She’d never defend or even discuss her religion, but she lived it, and nothing more needed to be said. I thought of all the pointless debates I’d heard over the years about God, the authority of the Bible, the likelihood of the afterlife. My mother’s inarguable faith trumped all those words. She had a good sense of humor and could see how greedy our local priest was for extra sweets. When someone brought up the question of purgatory and how many days one might be sentenced to spend in it, she would make the charming little gesture of brushing cobwebs out of her face. In fact, my mother’s smiling approbation of the foibles of our local priest and her tacit impatience with the fine points of dogma rendered her more benign in my eyes. “Your mother is a very good woman,” my father would say threateningly with a strange emphasis, as if he feared that her piety was too subtle and refined for me to grasp. My mother was so kind that once she said that she believed in hell because it was doctrinal, but she thought no one was in it.

Pia was Catholic, or rather papist. She saw the church as a political entity to be reckoned with, and she liked to say that there was no church in the world less spiritual or more imperial than St. Peter’s. When Jack asked her what she thought of the Pope’s policies on abortion and birth control and a celibate clergy and homosexuality, she just shrugged and said, “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t think up all that crap. They’re traditions. I thought you liked traditions, Jack. Aren’t you a traditional man?”

In response Jack widened his eyes and touched his chest and whispered stagily to an unseen observer, “Traditional? Me?”

Pia ran into a Roman friend, Beatrice, who was working as a New York correspondent for a communist newspaper. Beatrice was a duchess and a communist, the Red Duchess, they called her, but she lived grandly with a tall, polished Texan who Pia assured me spoke good Italian. He was named Wyatt, and he was a rich trader in commodities.

Pia said, “Beatrice and Wyatt are the perfect couple. They have her title and his money, and they’re both communists. Him not so much, but what the hey. I know you Americans can be alarmist about communism, but it’s really very chic, especially if the people are of the intelligentsia and chic.”

“What complete bullshit, Pia,” I said. She really was moronic sometimes. “So it’s ‘you Americans’ now, huh?” I asked.

“I’m happy for Beatrice,” Pia said, ignoring me. “She’s way up in her thirties, and I’m sure she thought she’d never find anyone. She had an affair with Angela’s assistant, a black boy much younger than her named Jake, and she even had a little girl with him called Aïda. But he was a real nobody and unreliable, ten years younger and poor. Wyatt loves Aïda, though he’s a Texan and you’d think he wouldn’t—they’re racist, right?”

I didn’t want to discuss it. I shrugged and shook my head.

“Yes, I’m sure they are,” she said. “But Wyatt’s not. He’s adorable and very enlightened and chic—a communist, as I said, not so frequent in Texas.”

“You’re right. Not so frequent in Texas.”

“I hope you’re not being sarcastic. Anyway, Wyatt is going to
marry Beatrice, and I’m so happy for her and Aïda. She needs some stability in her life, and with such an attractive man!”

In Pia’s private language, “attractive” usually meant rich.

I said, “I wonder if he’s going to invite Aïda back to Texas to meet his folks.”