Jack Holmes and His Friend (36 page)

“Do you have a new lover?”

“Yes.”

“How long has he been … in your life?”

“I met him four months ago, but we’ve only been together for two months. I started loving him two months ago.”

“I take it he’s not American.”

“English. He’s English. But he lives in Rome, and we speak in Italian. Mostly.”

“He must be an exceptional person.”

“Average,” she said. “He’s average. Though not to me.”

“So he’s average,” I said. “That’s nice.”

“He’s exceptional in the way he loves me,” she said bitterly. “He loves me passionately.”

She said that word forcefully since she knew I’d mock it in my mind.

“A passionate Englishman? Now there’s something new. And is he the one who gave us crabs?”

I could hear Pia making an exasperated sound, and then she hung up on me.

I knew that if I went over there with tears in my eyes, she’d go to bed with me again. Then I could go check in to a hotel right away, do the second A-200 treatment, wait two hours, wash it off, and go home.

I called Jack back and talked it over with him. He said, “Would you want her back? If she agreed to drop Oliver and come back to you like before, would you want her back?”

“If she’d agree to be faithful to me. If there’d be no syphilitic panties or crab lice.”

“She was planning to shadow you on your Serengeti photo safari.”

“What?” I asked.

I couldn’t grasp what Jack had just said, no matter how slowly I replayed his words.

“She’d already signed up for that safari through the Serengeti that you and Alex are planning to take in January. She was going to pretend it was just a wonderful coincidence.”

“That would have ruined the whole trip for me,” I said. “Not to mention for Alex.”

“I think that was the idea,” Jack said. “She was jealous you were inviting Alex on such a glamorous trip. She used to ask me if you were still sleeping with Alex. I said I didn’t know but yes, probably, once in a while.”

“You said that?”

“Honestly I don’t know what you do with Alex. But Pia was indignant that you might be having sex with her. She said, ‘Is there anything more revolting than married men who still sleep with their wives?’ ”

“That sounds like Evelyn Waugh dialogue,” I said, and I thought that if I’d kept a notebook, I would have written that one down.

I was angry. At Pia for hanging up on me. For taking a new lover, Oliver Average. And I was angry with Jack because he’d known Oliver’s name all along, though at first he’d pretended not to. He’d obviously been Pia’s confidant through every twist and turn. Did he encourage her to drop me? And how long was he going to wait before telling me about her utterly moronic little Serengeti scheme?

I felt ridiculously petty, worrying about Pia’s affair with an average Englishman who was about as “cultured” as a petri dish. Bringing crabs back to the marriage bed. Yes, Pia was a woman and I, a man, but we might as well have been gay men for all the bitchiness and shallowness and venereal filth we were wallowing in.

I took the train back to Larchmont and sat next to a workman eating a hot dog reeking of near-meat and mustard.

6.

Pia moved back to Rome, and we never once spoke to each other before she left.

Jack said, “That shows what bad heterosexual values you both have.”

“How so?”

“Straight people, as soon as they’ve broken up, it’s off with their heads.”

“And gays?”

“We stay friends. Why invest so much energy and time in another person and then just cut him out of your life forever? That’s the nasty, brutish way straights behave.”

“But it doesn’t mean anything to you gay guys—it’s all just a joke for you.”

“Not a joke,” Jack insisted. “We’ve invested so much—”

“Invested! But you’re defending your investments like a dry goods merchant.”

“And why do you straights gladly throw over everything you’ve achieved?”

“Love,” I said, “isn’t an achievement. It’s like a sonata. Once you’ve finished playing it, nothing remains. Not even sounds in the air.”

“There are marks on the page someone else can follow,” he said.

My words made me feel melancholy. I recognized how insubstantial my love for Pia had been. Maybe it hadn’t even been love, since it had contained a large admixture of scorn and lust. But we had made love so many times. She’d cooked pasta dishes for me. We’d showered together; she’d told me about her grandfather and his dog in Brescia. She’d described Baronessa Toni’s little house in San Francisco on Russian Hill. I still remembered the younger man from Bergamo whom she’d installed in Sardinia. As a novelist I had ingested every detail with real zest. I told myself that perhaps she’d never known a novelist up close before; Pia had mistaken my professional curiosity for loving interest. Silly and snobbish as she was, nevertheless she’d fired my imagination as no one had ever done before.

When I thought of her in Rome with the half-hard average Brit and his parasite hordes, I found myself tossing and turning like St. Lawrence on his grill.

When I was honest with myself, I admitted that if I could have her back only on the condition that I marry her, I no longer wanted her, not at that price. I loved my children and my wife, even our funny Finnish house and the gardens gone wild. I admired Alex, her physical fragility and her moral strength. I loved Alex as the mother of my children. I loved her as this famous rich beauty I’d somehow captured …

But then I thought of the sunlight flooding Pia’s big room like honey filling a comb and I felt deprived—of her body, her physical generosity—and I wondered if I’d ever find such a sensual woman again. Here I was, getting on in my thirties, and my best years as a man, as a body, were slipping by. I hadn’t succeeded as a novelist. I wasn’t a church or community leader. I was a
faithless husband. I had no real friends except Jack. I only skimmed the latest novels, and then only those by writers I judged to be my rivals, which was absurd, since my novel had sold only 952 copies and had long been out of print. I’d detected a look of pity on Wyatt’s face when I’d told him I was a novelist, though he’d pretended to be envious. His imagination and intellectual energy were going into making him richer, searching out new areas of investment, discovering which corporations had resourceful leaders—god, I sounded like one of my own brochures. Fiction, obviously, no longer attracted first-rate minds except Pynchon or Woiwode or that Frenchman, Le Clézio. The best minds, I supposed, were going into physics or math or business.

And then, returning like the piano solo in a concerto after a vigorous tutti, came the thought of Pia wriggling out of her harem pants, which made her look so hippy, her big, firm breasts with their large black aureoles already swinging free, and I wondered if I were the sort of weak, confused man who couldn’t recognize a good thing when he had it. Would Wyatt have realized right away that with Pia (or Beatrice, still better, since she was more intelligent) he had his thumb on the very pulse of life, that this was the heartbeat, steady and strong, that would sustain him for years, and that he’d be foolish and in a sense lazy not to throw everything and everyone over for her? Were cock and cunt the most important things in life? The big, red, slippery heart of a couple? Should everything else be sacrificed to keep a well-suited pussy and penis happily throbbing together? If this genital couple, huge and smoking, sat happily on a throne, didn’t it dwarf and overshadow everything else—house, children, money, marriage, friendship, even love?

The very physicality of her white body thrown back on
those gleaming, oiled mink pillows, that fur so alive and pagan and luxurious all around her, now seemed to me as appealing as it had once been intermittently disgusting. I thought of my long-limbed, pale body with the scanty patch of sandy hair on my hard chest, my big hip bones jutting up above my hard, blue-white stomach, a desolate moonlit mesa ringing a desert, my aristocratic feet with the big toe shorter than its neighbors; I could see the shambling, underloved, boarding school body, this quixotic sadness next to the ripe loveliness of my Dulcinea’s curves and clefts.

I jerked off, and then as I wiped up I thought that Pia wasn’t so special.

Suddenly I had a lot of extra time. I was more attentive to Alex, and she and I planned our safari carefully. Of course, most of the arrangements were handled by the travel company, but there were a few options left for us to dither over. Alex always chose the more expensive accommodations. It was just a reflex with her, though she wasn’t extravagant by nature and was anything but showy in her tastes.

My parents were coming up to Larchmont to stay with the children while we were away. My mother had learned not to criticize the wildness that surrounded us. Like any old person, if seventy-two was old, she had her own ideas, and when she heard the raccoons marching about on the roof and tearing up the shingles, she was alarmed. She’d spent most of her life as a gardener taming the very excesses Alex indulged. Nor, as a horsewoman, did she believe that giving in to animals was kind. Children and horses longed for a tight rein, she assured me, but there was
nothing she could say to Alex. She loved Peggy and Palmer, and after their fashion they loved her. Though they’d picked up from Alex that my mother was sweet but old-fashioned (considered a bad thing).

Alex could tell I was disheartened, and she was very patient and thoughtful with me. She had Ghislaine prepare a steak au poivre for my father though no red meat had ever been cooked in our house before and very little chicken or fish.

I wondered how Alex explained my moodiness to herself until the day when she heard me sigh and she grabbed my hand and said, with sympathy, “I can just imagine, Will, how difficult it must be to write fiction. I read somewhere that it’s a pure act of speculation.”

I thought, She imagines I’ve started a new novel. I realized right away that the symptoms of artistic frustration mimicked those of unhappiness in love, and I lowered my head and smiled as if she were right and it was all too painful to discuss. It occurred to me that I’d learned so much about sex and love and Europe from Pia—maybe I could start a new novel soon. But then I worried that Alex would recognize Pia in my pages. Christ! A novelist shouldn’t have to worry about domestic suspicions.

Alex was a perfect traveler. Unlike most beautiful women, every morning she was ready to go in a few minutes, she applied no makeup except a trace of lipstick and sunscreen, and her clothes were few and functional and wash-and-wear. Of course, she always looked impeccable. Neither of us was much of a photographer. Alex said, “I’d rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots,” and I had to agree with her. She was awed by the first herd of elands we
saw coursing through the tall grasses. She grabbed my hand, and when at last she looked at me, she had tears in her eyes and a dazzled smile on her lips.

The other travelers were at least twenty years older than us, and they made a fuss over us. We were once again the enviable young couple, the American aristocrats with our soft voices, good manners, and slender bodies, and not those Larchmont crazies who’d let their grounds go to seed. I allowed as to how I’d published a novel, and the people from Cleveland I’d confided in told the others, and soon their nicknames for us were Scott and Zelda. We tried to ignore the warnings those names suggested of alcoholic defeat and madness and to enjoy their more glamorous associations.

The trip was just what I needed. I stopped expecting Pia’s phone calls or letters. Every day was a mild challenge and a distraction and left me no time to brood over my faithless mistress. Nor were the stiff-jointed, big-butted ladies in our safari possible objects of desire.

Alex and I became much, much closer. We were no longer Czar Nicholas and Alexandra, the anxious parents hovering over our sickly son. Now we were playful; we got into a pillow fight. We even had a wrestling-tickling match that ended excitingly. Maybe because the other members of the safari saw us as so princely, so adorable, we tried to live up to their perceptions. Alex looked smart in her dark safari suit with the long-waisted, carefully tailored jacket sporting huge external pockets she was careful to keep empty and flat. She bought an absurdly colonial pith helmet that everyone admired, though its associations made the progressive Cleveland lady uneasy. Alex was relaxed and warm with the black servants and remembered their names and
little things they confided in her. And at the end of the safari she made me take photos of her and everyone else, white and black, and we tipped the staff handsomely.

“Who do you miss the most?” Alex asked as we were driven to the airport.

“The children,” I said. “And Jack.”

“Jack? Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “He and I have gotten way beyond his old infatuation with me. After all, neither of us is exactly a boy anymore. We’re middle-aged men. But I think all that passion Jack once felt for me helped. It got me to overcome my usual reserve—I am reserved, right?”

“Check,” she said with a smile.

“And it brought us closer. Who do you miss the most?”

“The children,” she said. “My mother, though she drives me bats. Ghislaine a little bit. The house. I miss the house almost as if it were a person. But it all feels like a burden. I mean, a real responsibility. I feel ridiculous saying that to you, Mr. Sweetie, you work so hard, but—”

“No, no,” I hastened to say, “you’re the one with the real responsibilities.”

During the long plane trip back to New York after our transfer in London, I thought about Jack. The truth was, the pangs I’d felt after Pia had dropped me had made me sympathize with what he’d probably gone through over me. I thought about how every person obsesseed over the moments in his life when he was the rejected one, but could scarcely remember when he had done the rejecting.

I also thought about Alex. We’d had great sex that one time after the pillow fight, since a little sweat and laughter and
adolescent grabbing had sufficed to move Alex out of the moonlight of romantic love and into the knockabout afternoon of adolescent pleasure.