Jack Holmes and His Friend (35 page)

Pia rolled her eyes, but my question was half serious.

“Aïda’s going to be the flower girl,” she said. “The wedding will be up here. Actually, in Bar Harbor. That’s where they’re holding the wedding.”

We spent an evening with them. Beatrice was less scatterbrained than Pia, and I couldn’t tell if she much liked Pia. She knew a lot about politics and had an eight-track of “Bella Ciao” that she’d turn up and sing along to—in that hoarse voice of hers, I imagined, even in her car as she sped through the city. Singing the communist partisan song without a trace of a smile.

Wyatt didn’t have a Texas accent, though he did wear the most beautifully tooled boots I’d ever seen and jeans and a Saville Row dark blue blazer. He was light and cheerful in the regulation high-society manner and made no shadows, unlike me. He was extremely polite, almost as if he were the duke, and insisted that I go through a door first—and he touched my shoulder frequently with his huge hand as he guided me around and asked me lots of questions but not nosy ones. Maybe because I hoped to impress Wyatt, I told him I’d published a novel. “That’s terrific,” he said. “I’d like to write something someday.”

Unlike most people, he didn’t ask me if I’d had a bestseller or a movie sale. He was too sophisticated for that, I supposed. And I was impressed when he went on to confide in me by saying, “But I don’t have the courage to write. Or the talent. That’s the biggest problem—no talent.”

“You should write about the life you live,” I said. “Most writers are schoolteachers living in little provincial towns. You live with a duchess in New York.”

“I’m just a simple boy from Lubbock.”

He looked up with a grin from the cocktails he was mixing.

“Sure,” I said, “but you also know about Tuscany and Wall Street.”

“People don’t want to read about privileged lives,” he said and sighed.

I thought of a new reason to hate Catholicism. It had robbed me of sophisticated, sensual adventures I might have written about. Wyatt was probably a Baptist, such a stupid religion that it must have been all too easy for him to shed. There were no Baptist Dantes or Michelangelos or Palestrinas. Catholicism retained all the authority of its great art, even the contemporary work of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor, of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was hard to throw over a religion that had been defined by such geniuses.

Later I asked Pia if Wyatt and Beatrice disapproved of my being a married man, and she replied, “Since there is no divorce in Italy, everyone is married to the wrong person. It’s a fact of life.”

But even though she said that, I felt that something had changed for her. Maybe after seeing Beatrice’s happiness, she could imagine getting married herself to some big, “attractive” man. I felt she was on the lookout for someone more suitable than me. Maybe she’d thought she was too old to marry, yet Beatrice had proved that a woman in her late thirties was still viable. Pia was fond of me, even still in love with me, but she was no longer picturing a future with me.

When we said good-bye as I headed off for several days with
Alex and the children, she still got tears in her eyes, but now she looked away and tried to hide them, no longer using them as emotional blackmail. Before, she had liked it when I’d talked dirty to her on the phone. She’d giggle, and I could hear her breathing more heavily. Now she changed the subject, as if she found my obscenities obscene.

Nor did she respond as she once had to my silly love-talk. If I called her Honey Bunch or Puddnin’ Pie or La Mia Pizza Margherita, she seemed exasperated. One day I said to her, “You don’t like me to sweet-talk you anymore or to dirty-talk you.”

And she said, “Are you only now realizing that things have changed between us?”

I didn’t dare ask her how they’d changed, or if she’d found someone new, because I was afraid of the answer. I couldn’t offer her marriage or even a sleepover date. I gave her an old jade necklace, but she looked embarrassed and begged me to take it back, to give it to someone more “suitable.” For once she didn’t even sound bitter at this allusion to Alex. If she had found someone new, how long would it take her to tell me? Maybe the new man had to extricate himself from another marriage. There were no eligible bachelors—straight ones—in their late thirties or older. There were a few widowers, but they were an actuarial rarity and were snapped up instantly. Some men her age got divorced, but usually only for younger women. A real hard-core bachelor of forty was obviously suffering from a dangerous personality disorder.

I felt that my days with Pia were numbered, I who had been so confident just a few weeks previously, so sure that she might last me for a good decade.

We continued to make love two or three times a week, but
we were both less excited, which made the act seem tiresome and vaguely sordid. Twice she said she had a headache, and once she pleaded her period, though surely it wasn’t the right time of the month for that. (I was highly aware of the timetable for her periods because they were always so painful and copious, and she often took to her bed looking sallow and exhausted.) Once she winced when I licked her nipples, and I wondered if “he” had been working them over the night before.

One day she said, “This is embarrassing, and please don’t think I’d be angry, I’m much too realistic for that”—realism she considered to be a supreme European virtue—“but do you have those … little bugs?
Pidocchi?
”

We looked up the word in the dictionary to make sure she meant “crabs.” I told her I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, and if we had them, she must have given them to me.

“Let’s not hand out blame,” she said. “That is childish. We must be realistic and … scientific about this. You can get them from a public toilet seat. There are many ways to get them.”

“I hope I haven’t infected Alex,” I said. “Do I have to shave all my pubic hair off? Burn our underclothes and sheets?”

Pia laughed. She tried to stifle her laugh and clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was as if a dysentery of merriment had doubled her up, and suddenly she excreted a big laugh that left her weak and twisting in her chair. “A bonfire in Larchmont,” she screamed, “and you hairless as a newborn.” And I hated her then and never wanted to see her again. She’d brought this infestation into our household.

I went to a gay doctor in the East Sixties whom Jack recommended, who handled gays and their horrors. The waiting room was filled with men whose hair color owed nothing to nature. Their clothes were designed to make them look twenty
years younger if seen from a distance and from behind. Two guys were chatting about their Fire Island houses, which they were about to “open” (these guys obviously thought of their beach shacks as manors where the chandeliers were bagged and the furniture was draped in Holland cloth). The others were all quiet, leafing through homo magazines like
After Dark
, with their pictures of young male dancers and the latest “brilliant” clothes designer who’d combined black leather and black lace. For the most part the patients didn’t talk to each other or even look at each other. It reminded me of the one time I’d gone to a Virginia cathouse. Everyone there was embarrassed and had silently agreed not to acknowledge the others.

The doctor, a beefy man with muscles and a Jewish name and a handlebar mustache and a lisp though his voice was pitched low, listened to my spiel and then said, “Come into the other room, undress down to your underwear, sit there.”

He put on a headband with a mirror and a light, and he looked in my ears and throat and had me cough while he fingered my balls. He then knelt and rooted around in my pubic bush, especially at the beltline and then in the area where my balls and cock emerged out of my pelvis (“Blood-rich,” he murmured). Finally he stood up and threw away his gloves.

“Yep, you’ve got ’em.”

He disposed of the paper covering on the examination table.

“Here’s a prescription for A-200. You put it on every hair from your neck down to your toes, including your toes if they’re hairy. Get it into your crack too. Leave it on for two hours, then wash it off with soap and water.”

“What about my wife?”

“Were you intimate with her recently?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No,” I said, “but we do sleep in the same bed.”

“You might just get away with saying nothing,” he said. “Tell her the sheets feel scratchy to you for some reason and ask her if you can change them, pillowcases too. And put on fresh underwear and socks and shirt—everything!—and wash the old ones normally but in extra-hot water if possible.”

“Is that it?”

“The eggs take a week to hatch, so do it again in seven days, the A-200. That should do it. If you see your wife scratching, then you’ve got to tell her.”

“Is there any lie I could tell her?”

“Were you in a crummy motel recently?”

“Yes! That’s perfect,” I said, surprised at how perspicacious he was. I even forgave him the gratuitous testicle-grope-and-cough.

The next evening Alex went to the Metropolitan Opera with her mother to see
Tosca
and stayed over in Manhattan. I took advantage of her absence to spill some coffee on our sheets as an alibi and strip our bed and make it up fresh myself. I did the treatment and sat on the toilet seat naked the entire two hours, reading, then showered and scrubbed the toilet seat down with a cleaning spray. I threw my underclothes in with the regular dirty clothes.

The next day at the office I talked to Jack on the phone.

“All gone?” he asked.

“Yep! I can’t thank you enough.”

“Don’t forget the second treatment.”

“Are you kidding? Of course I won’t.”

“I talked to Dr. Siegal, and he thought you were sexy.”

“Yeah, he made me cough for crabs.”

“He said, ‘A real man at last.’ He was ready to go down on you, though he said one of your balls—”

“He told you that?”

“So it’s true. Not much confidentiality on the gay circuit.”

Despite Dr. Siegal’s big mouth I was still glad I hadn’t seen my regular physician.

“Hey, Jack?”

“Yes?”

“This is between us, but I don’t really want to have sex with Pia again.”

“Why? Because of the cootie-bugs?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t she do the treatment too?”

“She claims she did, but what if she gets reinfected by her paramour?”

“Her what?”

“By whoever infected her the last time.”

Jack was silent.

I said, “Do you know who the guy is?”

“Don’t do this to me,” Jack said.

“Well? Do you?”

When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I promise I won’t mention it to her.” I thought about it while he paused, and I added, “I guess I don’t really have to know. Is it anyone we know?”

“No.”

“Does he love Pia? Will he take care of her?”

“He’s living with a woman he’s been with for the last six years, but he promises to leave her. Apparently, though, the other woman is very fragile, even suicidal.”

“Most married men say that,” I mumbled ruefully, then spoke more loudly and distinctly. “I never said anything like that. I never said I’d leave Alex for her.”

A moment ticked by.

Then I said, “Is he American? Italian?”

“He’s English but lives in Rome.”

“Is he rich?”

“No. Average. He teaches English to Italian businessmen.”

Disappointed that my rival was so ordinary, I said, “What age?”

“I don’t know him. Fifties, I think.”

“Can they still keep it up at age fifty?” I asked, hostile but also genuinely curious.

“I don’t have much experience with men in that age range. But yes, they can. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“It’s not real hard.”

“Poor Pia,” I said. “And the guy obviously keeps very elegant company.”

“Because of the crabs?”

“Yeah,” I said, then added, “Even the elite can get cootie-bugs.”

And when that got a laugh out of him, I laughed—and there we were, laughing like kids, egging each other on. I felt a strange relief, and finally I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

“He teaches English to Italian businessmen,” I said matter-of-factly, “and around his crotch he’s got a regular conga line of insects going, tiny marimbas in their paws and espadrilles drumming through his pubes. Is that correct?”

“Essentially correct,” Jack said. “You’ve sussed that one out.”

Americans had just started using that anglicism, “sussing out” one thing or the other.

“Hey, Jack, you know what all this makes me think of?”

“What?”

“When I was a teenager,” I said, “I brought a girl home for the weekend. Tina. I remember her name was Tina. That was a very big deal for me, to invite a girl home. I hadn’t slept with her yet, but I was hoping to. She was put in her own room—one of my sisters doubled up with another one of my sisters and let Tina use her room. Then in the morning my mother came in and sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘Will, that girl isn’t clean. I looked at her panties, and they were stained. She has a venereal disease.’

“ ‘Mother!’ I said, whispering my indignation.

“ ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I am not that naive. I can see she has gonorrhea. She’s not clean, Will.’ Of course, after that I didn’t touch her.”

“Do you think she really could tell?” Jack asked. “Do girls get a drip that would stain their panties?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I said.

“Do you think your mother just wanted to scare you off premarital sex?”

“No,” I said and chuckled, “I think she really believed there was a danger.”

Jack said, “Now, guys secrete something. The front of your underpants gets stiff from it, and it stings like hell to piss.”

“This is the grossest conversation we’ve ever had,” I said. “Anyway, I have now become completely turned off by Pia.”

A week went by before Pia called to say she was going to Rome.

“For long?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, then added, “Yes, for a long time. I like America, but I’m fed up with Americans.”

“Can I ask you a question, Pia?”

“Yes, ask me anything you want.”