Jack Holmes and His Friend (41 page)

Once Amy defected, Jack had less of a reason to barricade himself in his room with Rupert. He spent more and more time with Will, and even Rupert could see he was besotted with his old friend. Rupert knew the words to “My Old Flame” and often sang them to infuriate Jack. Jack maintained his rule of not fraternizing with Rupert on the job.

As a result Jack and Rupert spent less and less time together, except in bed, and even there they were less and less compatible. Rupert was tired of being buggered nightly, as he put it, and wanted to dominate Jack at least once in a while. Most of the young men who circulated through Jack’s apartment were so awed by Jack’s penis, so insecure about their own dimensions, and so overwhelmed by Jack’s sexual authority that they submitted to him with passionate enthusiasm.

But none had been permitted to hang around long enough to feel restless in that role. At first Rupert gloried in all the attentions that Jack lavished on his body, and what might have appeared to be passivity he experienced as narcissism richly gratified. But as the weeks wore on and Jack became much less tender but no less lusty, Rupert rebelled. Again he said he wanted to fuck Jack.

“Don’t be absurd,” Jack said. “Look at our age difference! Even the visual would be ridiculous. Pretty Boy Mounts Old Goat. Ganymede with Average Meat Rogers the Hung Eagle!”

“The truth isn’t all in the captions,” Rupert said. “At first I was overwhelmed by … It. But now I’ve regained my confidence, and I want to be the eagle at least one night out of three and try my wings.”

“That’s grotesque,” Jack said. “Shut up and assume the position.”

This kind of rough talk had always worked in the past with other men. Rupert, however, was offended and got up and dressed. “I do have my own apartment,” he said.

“That dirty little room in Brooklyn? You’re not comfortable there. Stay here and we’ll jerk off together.”

“I can do that alone.” Rupert was pulling on his sweater. “We need a break. You’re living in an earlier decade—in love with a straight man, closeted at work, rigidly macho in bed.”

“That’s cruel of you—to take the things I’ve confided in you and turn them against me.”

“So … but you haven’t told me these things; I’ve observed them.”

For so many years Jack had known nothing but men who worshipped him as Priapus, and he was astounded by someone who sought the active role, especially such a flaxen-haired, plush-bottomed little guy, someone so mouthwateringly fuckable. Now Jack understood why so often you met older gay couples who were looking to put together a threesome with someone passive. They might have started out fighting to get to the bottom, but mostly because whoever played the bottom didn’t usually have performance anxiety. When the anxiety eventually melted away, in the affirmation of a secure, long-lasting relationship, a latent male urge to dominate rose to the surface.

If Will had moved out too, Jack might have mourned Rupert, but since now it was just Jack and Will, Jack was free to give all his attention to his friend. Rupert found a new job as a cultural reporter for the
Christian Science Monitor
. Will asked Jack where they’d gone wrong with their young lovers.

“Young people change entirely every six months,” Jack said. “Every brain cell is replaced twice a year. Our only mistake was to become too involved with them.”

Will seemed more inclined than previously to listen to Jack’s opinions. In the past Will had been not only straight but also married. Now they were both single and on the prowl.

“My rule before Rupert,” Jack said, “was never to see anyone more than three times, no matter how well it was going. Mind you, that’s harder for a straight guy to pull off, to maintain a strict statute of limitations, since women want to date before they put out and want to marry as soon as they start fucking. It will be even worse now that you’re ostensibly single.”

“How do you enforce that rule of yours?”

“You say any malarkey, make any promise, in order to bed them. Then after three dates, no matter how hot the sex is or how simpatico the talk—crunch!”

And Jack mimed a guillotine blade falling.

“Ouch,” Will said, delighted, “you’re cruel.”

“You have to be cruel if you want to be a libertine. They were right in the eighteenth century when they—”

“Is that what we are: libertines?”

“It’s what I am,” Jack said, “and what you aspire to be.”

“What would be my first step toward full membership?”

“You’d return to your orgy club.”

Will’s eyes tightened, then he smiled.

Curiously, Will hadn’t quizzed Jack about his lunch with Alex, nor did he speak of her often. Was he really that indifferent? Or did he feel so responsible for his family that his truancy didn’t bear talking about?

Once Alex telephoned in a panic because Palmer was gasping
with such urgency that she feared he might die. Will called for a Larchmont ambulance and rushed out in a taxi to the hospital, where he met Alex and Palmer in the emergency room. Will didn’t come back to Manhattan for two days, but when he returned it was with suitcases full of his clothes.

Will’s mother called and apparently was very severe with her son. She told him that he was guilty of criminal negligence and couldn’t reproach his wife with a single fault.

That evening Will drank almost a fifth of scotch in glass after glass that he poured and swallowed rapidly. “ ‘Not a single fault,’ she said. And I had to agree with her.” Will poured Jack a drink. “Alex is perfect but not the usual icy perfection you see so often in our world. She’s a good guy too.”

“Did your mother ask you what was driving you apart?”

“Oh, hell yes, she kept hammering away at that. She wondered if I was sleeping with you, and I told her”—here Will interrupted himself, calmed his indignation, and nearly whispered—“no. Then she wondered if I was ashamed to take Alex’s family money, and I said, ‘Mother, I’m a Wright, and we’ve been living off women for centuries.’ That, actually, made her laugh. Then she asked me if my business was failing.”

“Is it?”

“It’s not exactly in brilliant health. She asked me if there was another woman. I said that there had been, but that was over. Like a good novelist I simplified my two affairs into one.”

“Did she ever ask you for your own thoughts about your midlife crisis?”

“All I could say—all I could think, to be honest—is that I’m bored with my life to a nearly terminal degree, that I hate my work because it’s so demeaning and trivial, that I don’t think
it’s fair that Alex had a few affairs before we married, but I just had those sordid tussles in the backseat of my Ford, that I feel my novel failed because I hadn’t experienced anything, and that now I want to catch up while I’m still sort of young and sort of vigorous.”

“You said all that?”

“I thought it all and said half.”

Jack moved over next to Will on the couch and said, “I wish you’d repeat all that to Alex. I think she’d understand everything and even sympathize with most of it. She wants you to write. She can’t bear the possibility that she and the children have made you give it up.”

Will was now very drunk. He looked at Jack strangely (or was it admiringly?) and said, “You figure people out quick, Jack. You’re never at a loss. Why is that? Is it because you’ve been shrunk?”

“I’m not even sure it’s true.”

“Hell yes, it’s true,” Will said vehemently. “Want to hear my theory?”

“Sure.”

“I think gay guys are surrounded by enemies. Not really, but anyone could turn on you. So you gotta be alert. You can’t ever let your guard down. So you get real good at figuring people out. Other people. You pick up on every little signal no matter how faint. Whereas we straight guys are just smiling all the time from ear to ear like, ‘What? Me worry?’ ”

Five days later Will went to another orgy, and when he returned home at three in the morning, Jack snapped on the light in his bedroom so that Will would feel free to come in. He did, very stoned, smiling broadly, his limbs so loose that he reminded
Jack of pulled taffy. He looked handsome under the harsh overhead light, which made his deep-set eyes disappear and turned his hair into glowing filaments.

“How was it?” Jack asked.

“Great! Lots of people, maybe twenty. Almost all the women were really attractive, and the two that weren’t—what do the French say?—had a certain charm.”

“Did you participate?”

Will sat down on the edge of Jack’s bed.

“God, you sound prim. Yes, I ‘participated’ with three ladies. Good ones, lusty ones.”

“And the cocks-and-balls problem?”

“No one bothered me, but I decided to watch, overcame my squeamishness, and picked up a couple of pointers. Straight men don’t get the chance to learn technique by observing other men unless it’s in porno or an orgy, and I’ve never had the stomach for porn.”

“Did you have a rematch with Beatrice?”

“Did I ever! But she’s so popular that I had to be assertive to get my turn with her.”

“Glad you went?”

“And how, though of course, an evening of pure pleasure is always melancholy. But I’ll have lots of mental movies to replay for nights to come.”

“Did you talk to anyone?”

“Wyatt. He’s a hell of a nice guy, really. When it was very late and even Beatrice had fallen asleep but right there next to us, he and I were sitting around in our underwear, out of our gourds, jabbering like crazy. He told me all about life in Lubbock, Texas, and his father the doctor, and how when his father
told his mother that he was keeping another woman on the side, his mother said, ‘That’s okay, sugar, jus’ buy me a mink.’ And the son of a bitch did!”

“I’d come to the next orgy,” Jack said, “since I’m built like a horse, but I wouldn’t really get excited over the little ladies.”

And you, Will, would be intensely embarrassed, Jack thought but didn’t say.

“Like a horse, huh?” Almost involuntarily Will stood and headed for the door. “You and Wyatt could compete in the size department. I’m off to bed. Thank god tomorrow’s Saturday and I can sleep in.”

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Jack said, but Will didn’t hear him.

Will turned off the light and closed the door behind him. Jack was so excited that he jerked off twice, though the second time he was only half hard and sore.

3.

Alex called Jack at work on Monday.

“I don’t think I can go on like this. I twisted my ankle just getting out of the car, no good reason, and now I’m on crutches and my foot is all bound up in an elastic bandage, and I can’t drive because I have a stick shift and it’s my right foot, and Margaret has started mocking me, and yesterday when I told her she couldn’t take flamenco classes until she got her grades up, and besides she was a little tubby for Spanish dance, she put both her hands on the dinner table and got halfway up out of her chair and stared me right in the eye and said, ‘I hate you!’ ”

“No, no,” Jack protested.

“That’s exactly what she said. ‘I hate you.’ She looked like a gargoyle. Her face was hideous. Of course, I should never have said that about her being tubby. Poor little Palmer was so upset that Ghislaine had to take him off for a walk, but there are some paths here that are so overgrown they’re impassable. I feel like taking a chain saw to the whole thing.”

“The whole thing?”

“The garden and the house … and the children. Palmer has turned into a sort of drag queen. He’s always in my clothes. I want a vacation from my life too, which hasn’t really worked out, has
it? I was so smug. I thought, my husband might not have made Ivy, but that was okay; he was a modest, soft-spoken, true-blue knight, a knight of the Round Table, and I his Guinevere …”

At this point Jack could sense a smile creeping into her voice before disappearing again behind a mountain of self-pity.

“We’ve run out of money, or rather I had to call my mother to get Daddy to put some money in my account—and so I had to tell Mummy the whole sad story, and I was so ashamed and she was so alarmed, and she made Will’s defection sound even worse than it is or at least more definite. Daddy called in his highest dudgeon and wants us to get a lawyer. He is a lawyer, so that’s his solution to
every
—I should get a lawyer and have him sort of—it would freak Will out.”

She paused, then went on. “I guess I’m calling to tell him I’m on crutches and my daughter hates me and my son is a transvestite and I’m going somewhere, maybe Rio, for a vacation from my life, and if Will cares about the children, he’d better do something about them, because they are no longer my responsibility.”

“Sure.”

“He won’t return my calls.”

And she hung up.

Jack thought that Will’s children were going to end up having the sort of precarious childhood that he, Jack, had had. Everything had looked so ideal for Palmer and Peggy, with the nanny and the private school and the beautiful rich parents, but chaos was always lurking just behind these arrangements like the flooding ocean just beyond the seawall and the houses raised prudently on stilts and the dunes intelligently replanted in grass.

Although Alex had sounded mostly sad and discouraged, just
before she’d hung up the surf had risen above the wall. She’d been sputtering with rage.

Not telling Will at all was a thought that crossed Jack’s mind, but he knew that the instant Alex caught Will on the phone, they’d put their heads together and they’d detect Jack’s treachery in a minute, and they might even sacrifice Jack’s friendship on the altar of their renewed love. And what would happen to the children?

As Jack walked crosstown to his apartment, he dodged one person after another. No one stepped aside to accommodate him. If he didn’t flinch they’d run smack into him. He said to himself that living in New York was no better than residing in the Grand Bazaar—everything for sale and everyone a merchant. No trees. No fountains. Only slivers of sky. Throngs of people all shoving each other out of the way.

When he saw Will that night, he reported everything Alex had said in a neutral voice. He didn’t want to interpret her words.