Jack Holmes and His Friend (40 page)

“Bummer,” Rupert said.

Will sat up and grinned at Rupert. “This is one greedy little guy you got here, Jack.”

“And what did you do?” Jack said.

“Of course, I was the most uptight, but I was so high I was staring in through the doorway as if the others were little mechanical Santa’s helpers in a Christmas window at Lord and Taylor. And I was still trying to make conversation with Amy, who’s this senior at Sarah Lawrence. We were actually talking about Günter Grass—”

“Major author,” Rupert allowed.

“And then, Will?”

“She made the first move. She slumped to the floor and put
her hand on my leg, and I took that for an invitation. She pulled me into the other room, though I could feel my erection melting. I was spooked by Loafer Lite and Wyatt.”

“So,” Rupert intoned, “you’re homophobic?”

“And how are you, Rupert, at eating out pussy?” Will blithely asked him.

Rupert made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon.

“Stick to the story,” Jack said.

“Listen to you, Miss Boss,” Rupert said, which made Jack frown mightily.

“Did you … interact with any of the other women?” Jack asked.

“I couldn’t resist Beatrice, and she did seem receptive—she was receptive, lying back on the bed with her legs spread. But Amy’s the one I really like.”

The doorbell rang, and Will slipped out and closed Jack’s door behind him. Jack and Rupert could hear a girl’s voice in the hallway, and then before long she and Will must have gone into Will’s room because everything was silent.

“So we should give Will a demonstration of the delightful things two men can do together,” Rupert said.

“He’d love that,” Jack said, and he folded this silly, serious young man into his arms.

During the next two weeks Jack’s apartment was transformed. He who was used to solitude and to taking his meals alone now never knew who would be there—Rupert or Will or Amy or all of them at once. It felt like college. Jack brought home twice as many groceries as usual and had the cleaning woman in an
extra time each week. His heart no longer pounded from loneliness as he approached his own door in the evening; if the apartment was empty, it wouldn’t be for long.

Sometimes he was annoyed if dirty dishes were left in the sink or if an ashtray hadn’t been emptied. But Will was good about buying bottles of whiskey and champagne and bags of potato chips; Amy kept two bouquets of fresh flowers going. Rupert did nothing but push-ups, or “press-ups,” as he called them. Maybe that was enough as his contribution to his host’s happiness.

At first Amy was elusive and no more than a laugh tinkling behind a door or a slender shade streaking into the bathroom, a hand pouring a glass of orange juice by the light of the open fridge. By the third day, though, Will had introduced her properly. Amy was tall and extremely warm. She touched Jack and Rupert on the arm or shoulder when she talked to them—a nice change, Jack thought, from those women who were wary of gay men or convinced that gay men hated them.

Rupert wanted to know right away what she was majoring in (French) and who her favorite French author was (Gide). “Wasn’t he a bit of a homo himself?” Rupert asked.

“Was he ever! And the one time he slept with a woman—and it wasn’t his wife—he sired a child, a daughter. His wife was furious. His wife was his cousin. When he ran off with his best friend’s teenage son, his wife was so ticked off she burned all of Gide’s letters to her, the perfect revenge, since he considered those hundreds of letters to be his finest writing.”

Rupert was more beautiful than Amy, Jack thought. Did Will see Rupert as an older version of Palmer?

Amy had a large mouth, appealing at age twenty-one, but one that Jack thought would be grotesque by age forty. She had a straightforward relish in telling her Gidean tale that frightened
Jack. He wondered if she could be capable of great unconscious cruelty, or rather unable to see it as anything other than a pretext for a spicy anecdote.

And what had happened to Will’s wife? Was Alex burning all his letters now? He was changing his shirt every day—had he bought new ones?

The first time Jack and Will were alone, Jack asked him.

“I called Alex,” Will said, “and told her that I was having a midlife crisis early and that I was staying with you in town for the next few weeks. By the way, I should be paying half your rent.”

“Okay,” Jack said automatically. “But how did Alex react?”

“She pretended to be understanding, then called me at work in tears and asked me if I wanted a divorce.”

“Do you?”

“For Chrissake, I just want a holiday from my life.”

“Would you ever consent to inviting Alex along to one of your wife-swapping parties?”

“Are you crazy?” Will asked. “I’m never going to another one. I’m just happy I met Amy.”

“And is Amy happy?”

“Doesn’t she seem happy to you?”

Jack noticed that Will and Amy went through a lot of scotch. Rupert reported that he’d had a long, cozy chat with Amy, and she’d admitted that she’d just dropped out of Sarah Lawrence for the semester. She had gone to the dean the previous week, told him she was having emotional problems, and shown him the letter her psychiatrist had written for the occasion.

“So she thinks she’s learning a lot about life and literature from Will, more than she’d ever learn at school.”

“Life and literature,” Jack exclaimed, “two things Will knows
nothing about! He never reads except to thrum through a novel by someone he conceives of as the competition.”

Rupert said, “Isn’t it strange how heterosexuals see competition and rivals everywhere? Meanwhile, gays never play team sports, although we’re good at running, tennis, swimming.”

Jack said, “Gays don’t understand competition. They’re either giving up in advance or devious and murderous.”

Rupert would burst into Jack’s office at work and sit on the desk and sift through Jack’s drafts with idle curiosity, until Jack had to tell him in whispered fury that he must not visit him again during office hours.

Rupert blinked hard and stood up as if stunned. “Why are you being so uptight?”

“I’m uptight because journalists are a conservative, macho bunch, and the business slot is the most conservative of them all after sports. You can find other arty jobs all over town in the media, but there are very few business posts. I’ve worked hard for this one, and I don’t want to lose it because a cute little bitch parks her million-dollar ass on my desk.”

Rupert went to the door with a grin at once flirtatious and humiliated and hurried away, tears in his eyes.

When Jack left the apartment at ten in the morning, Will wasn’t usually even awake.

One day Alex called Jack at the office. “Do I disturb you?” she said.

Jack thought of saying he had a meeting, but he considered this conversation inevitable.

“No. I’ll close my door. There. I’m all yours.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a scene. I just want to
know how Will is, in your opinion, and what you think is motivating him.”

Jack looked at the paper in his typewriter. He’d already filled half a page with copy about Chrysler’s new boss.

“Will says he wants a holiday from his life.”

“Do you think his life, his life with me and the children and the house, feels like work to him?”

“I don’t think Will would ever let those words cross his mind, much less say them.”

“I know, I know,” Alex conceded with a sigh. “He’s so Catholic and devoted, but maybe that’s the problem. Does he ever groan and sigh—but that’s not a fruitful line of inquiry—”

The copyboy opened the door and, without even looking at Jack, slipped a page into his in-box.

“We could meet for lunch tomorrow.”

“Let’s do that too,” Alex said, “but I have to get this out over the phone because I’ll feel such a bore saying it all in person. I feel like a bore now.”

“Nothing could be less boring,” Jack said in a serious tone. He looked at the page in his in-box. The editor was asking him to cut ten lines.

“Does he have a new girlfriend?”

Jack asked, “Haven’t you talked to him about this?”

“I know you want to be loyal to Will, but you must be loyal to me too. We’re friends too.”

“Yes, he is seeing a girl, but she’s only a college student, very sweet and—well, I don’t see how he could be in love with her. I don’t think he even takes her seriously.”

“What’s her name?”

“Amy.”

“And her family name?”

“I don’t know. He only met her ten days ago. I think she’s only a small part of his smoke-pot-and-drop-out hippie days.”

“You know he’s not going into work?”

“I suspected as much.”

“Suspected? Doesn’t he talk all this over with you?”

“No, not at all.”

“I thought you were best friends.”

“Two very reserved men, even if they’re best friends … besides, I have the feeling Will doesn’t want to put too fine a point on anything, not even his thoughts, as if by not choosing, not declaring his intentions, he can have everything he wants and not be stuck with anything definite.”

“Has he mentioned how long he intends to stay with you?”

“He said something about a month.”

“A month more?”

“Alex?”

“Yes?”

“How are you holding up?”

“You know me, Jack. I always want to do the noble thing but not give in too easily. I see other women whose husbands are straying—Larchmont is full of them—and they make a terrible stink, call up the other woman and denounce her as a home-wrecking cunt, sob to their husband and call their mother-in-law and get drunk and barge into the office shrieking. Not my style.”

“No. I can’t see you doing that.”

They both laughed politely.

“But on the other hand I don’t want to be a wimp and give up too easily.”

“You really love him?”

“Yes. He’s lovable. As you know better than anyone. Does it bother you to see him with Amy?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Let me think this out. I owe you the truth. Okay: I like having him close at hand, under my roof. I’m not jealous when I see him with Amy, maybe just because she could be his daughter and he doesn’t pay attention when she talks. I have a sort of beau these days too, cute and young, and he sleeps over.”

“All four of you! Very cozy.”

“I think I took up with Rupert because I felt I was falling in love with Will all over again, and I couldn’t bear that.”

“Will is such a professional charmer.”

Jack said, “I don’t blame him. It was just my own … neediness, I guess.”

“He’s not the easiest person to be in love with, is he?” Alex said. “I mean, he’s not terribly giving.”

“Though he tries,” Jack said.

“He tries.”

They met the next day for lunch way east at a little French restaurant. It had a sloping skylight half covered with dirty snow. The restaurant was packed, but the maître d’, forewarned by Jack, seated them at a table with no neighbors and not in a banquette. Alex ordered a cheese quiche and a green salad—the only vegetarian dishes on the menu.

“It’s very hard lying to the children,” she said. “They think their father is off on a long business trip. But this absence after the safari—
ça fait beaucoup.
”

“Do you talk to him?”

“Every other day, I suppose. He’s very hail-fellow-well-met, of course: very Princeton. I try to have some perspective. I’ve
been working for a charity for children in Cambodia, and compared to what they face—malnutrition, prostitution, physical mutilation—most of them are orphans—well, a marital squabble in Larchmont complete with cooks and nannies …”

“Yes, I see, but that doesn’t make it any less tormenting to you.”

Alex actually laughed and said, “Slightly less tormenting. I mean, luxury can be a consolation.”

“Did you see this coming?”

“He was staying away one or two nights a week. When I went to St. Barts, he extended his stay at the Pierre by quite a bit despite his hotel phobia.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “The hotel phobia …”

Alex said, “He knows I’m here with you and thinks it’s a good thing. He says he knows I’m the one who needs a friend.”

Jack liked Alex so much. He’d always admired her, and now he enjoyed sitting across from her in this chic little restaurant that smelled so good—the smell of Alex’s quiche and his own navarin with the small pieces of lamb and the little green peas and potatoes chopped fine, all in a smooth mahogany sauce. The table lamps under yellow shades and the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables on a central table joined forces to war against the gloomy day. He liked the way Alex was wearing a black skirt and a cardigan sweater and around her neck a shiny gold cerulean scarf.

“Is that scarf Indian?”

“It’s sort of cheap, but I think it’s pretty.” She looked down at it with a derisive smile. “By the way, I saw you the other night at that benefit dinner for Skowhegan. I wanted to get over to kiss you, but I never found the right moment. You were at the very best table, Jack Holmes, right next to Alice Tully.”

“She’s a sweetie,” Jack said. Then, out of the blue, he asked, “If you could save the life of a child or a dog, which would it be?”

“Is this a trick question?” Alex asked. “Both. I’m sure both. Or whichever one I knew better.”

“So length of association counts?”

She said, suddenly serious, “It counts for a lot.” She thought for a moment. “I thought gay men were usually closer to the wife than to the husband.”

Jack felt awkward and said, “You and I are plenty close.”

He felt afraid, but of what exactly? Was he guilty about sheltering Will during his vacation from life—from Alex? Or was he afraid Will would run off to some Mexican beach town with Amy and sleep his life away with her in a double hammock and eat tortillas and drink tequila and never be heard from again? Alex would fall apart and start drinking too, and her children would be sent off to her mother’s house to live. Jack was afraid that he would end up alone and their cartel of friendship would break down into its individual entities, that their molecule would revert back to freely circling rogue atoms.

Amy’s mother, who was only four or five years older than Will, cleverly took her off to Europe for a three-month trip. At first Amy sent Will letters, then postcards, then nothing. She and her mother, who was an art historian in Washington, settled in Paris, where they were taken up by the museum crowd. Amy fell for a young French curator of Kufic script and Islamic manuscripts, who wasn’t an Arab or even a Muslim. She decided to do the big, cattle-car Sorbonne course on French civilization, and every day she attended language classes as well. She bought black clothes and avoided the sun and had her hair cut like a boy’s. Soon she’d
moved in with Cyril, though by that time Will had lost interest in her and stopped writing her back.