Jack Holmes and His Friend (6 page)

Jack started getting hard as he studied these young men with their oiled biceps and posing straps, leaning on Greek columns. They all looked like they were sucking in their tummies, and their duck’s ass haircuts didn’t exactly go with the classical shields and spears.

“You’re fabulous,” Edward whispered as, fully clothed, he sank to the crawl space between the couch and the coffee table; the table was covered with dark green Morocco leather. Jack felt Edward tugging at his belt buckle and fly; he didn’t know whether he, Jack, should scooch his pants down or just pretend to be asleep or unaware of this balding blond kneeling at his feet. Like everything in New York, it was a question of etiquette.
Finally Jack compromised by closing his eyes and throwing his head back as if dozing but lifting his buttocks so Edward could wriggle his trousers down to below his knees.

Yes, now that’s more like it, Jack thought, as Edward went to work. He felt it was incredibly kind and self-sacrificing that Edward hadn’t undressed and seemed to expect nothing in return. Hardly seemed fair. And frankly Jack was curious about what was going on in Edward’s pants.

In the end, Edward, who had a permanent tan, big, drooping blue eyes, a chipped incisor, and very full lips, swallowed it all and pulled himself together, then stood and said, “Holy moly.” He got up, sat back in a big wing chair, and lit a cigarette. Jack looked around and Edward said, “Over there,” indicating a small door flush with the wall. The tiny bathroom was covered with gold leaf wallpaper. On the toilet top was placed a wicker tray holding twenty bottles of cologne, including one that had white pebbles sunk in the pale brown liquid.

When Jack reemerged, Edward didn’t get up. He extended a hand and a white calling card. “Here’s my number if you ever want a repeat. I have to tell you, I was in heaven!” He was smoking, and the apartment smelled of Kools.

Jack put his jacket back on and mumbled, “Yeah, great,” but down on the street he threw the card away.

He was here in this vast city where the soft hand of anonymity effaced all individual difference. He was free to surrender his nether half to Edward George Grant, EGG on his crotch, or to sleep with Rebekkah, who had pecked him coolly on the cheek just once since their champagne orgy the afternoon he landed the job. The city swallowed every anecdote and digested it; nothing got remembered or even noticed. Not that Jack minded. He thought he liked it that way. He decided he wasn’t going to let
another man blow him; that was too easy, much simpler than seducing a woman and just as pleasurable. It could become addictive. Of course, with a woman you could have a real relationship conducted in the sunlight, whereas this homo thing was just slithering around in the shadows.

4.

After six months in New York, Jack realized that most of the people he knew there were from the University of Michigan. He’d found a one-bedroom apartment of his own on Thirteenth Street, west of Eighth Avenue, but he still took most of his meals with Rebekkah and Alice. They shared expenses. Jack did the dishwashing since he really didn’t know how to cook. For the first time in his life, he realized, he was putting on a bit of weight—they ate a lot of pasta and went to cheap Italian restaurants like Monte’s on MacDougal Street. He decided to walk to work and cut out desserts, and he slimmed down quickly. If he made the slightest effort, the fat melted off him.

The beat movement was just winding down and the hippies were emerging, but Jack didn’t feel connected to either group, though he liked his bohemian girls. They teased him for not being “hip,” which was the new vogue word. Once he let himself in and heard Alice asking Rebekkah, “Isn’t he a queer? Not that I care.”

Rebekkah said, “Take it from me he’s not queer. I mean, he wailed on my body.” Jack thought it made him sound like a trumpet player. “But maybe he’s bi.”

“Oh, come
on
,” Alice said. “Is anyone bi?”

“People think you are,” Rebekkah blurted out.

Complete silence on Alice’s side. Rebekkah had probably hurt her. Alice had a way of squinting as if not the light but the life around her was too strong and needed to be filtered. Yes, she had her way of squinting and frowning, slow to perceive the point of someone’s conversation. Then she’d say, not loudly but emphatically, “Huh!” and pour herself another drink. She looked like a young, not particularly female version of one of the founding fathers—Jefferson or Washington, say. Rebekkah claimed she’d once had a long conversation on the phone with Alice before realizing that Alice was talking to her while being fucked by a famous older author.

Both girls pursued and collected celebrity writers. Back in Ann Arbor they’d attended readings as far away as Toledo. They counted their outing successful if one of them “bagged” a published writer. Alice, despite her horsey manner, had the most luck. She bagged the young author of a cult novel about a tiny horse with wings, which Jack thought was pretty fey, though most readers loved it, apparently. Everyone in Ann Arbor, including Jack, was impressed that a real writer with a movie option had moved in with Alice. One night the young author read a new story out loud to them. They all said it was excellent.

In New York, Alice also had a fling with a Nobel Prize–winning intellectual. She reported that he had a problem with premature ejaculation. Once Jack told her that he’d met someone who was writing a long biographical piece about the man; this person would love to talk to Alice. She cocked her head to one side and said with a frosty smile, “Over my dead body.”

Their biggest catch was Charles Mingus. He was the one they both most respected, considering him a genius in every domain—as a jazz composer and a bassist and a bandleader.
They had met him back in Detroit one night after a concert. He liked the girls, he had said, because they were English-major cats and would know how to edit the shit out of his big sprawling memoir.

In New York they saw him frequently and sometimes worked with him deep into the night in his studio above the Bleecker Street Cinema. Jack had little to do with him and was surprised one night when Charlie recognized him on the street in front of the Bleecker Street Tavern and said, “Man, I wanna fuck you.”

“What?” Jack asked.

“Man, I’m sick of chicks. Man, this chick just—” and he was off on a tirade about all the wrongs that had been done him by women.

Jack wasn’t famous and didn’t want to be. What would fame mean—that more people would single him out for unwanted attention? No, what Jack wanted, he decided, was a buddy. He’d never really had friends of either sex, though he imagined the two girls were as close as he’d come so far. Of course, they typecast him as super-WASP, even though Alice was much closer to the real thing than he’d ever be. Either you were off everyone’s radar and flying solo, undetectable, or you registered with them and suffered the consequences—you became a character, a type, which was fine except it felt limiting. What he wanted and needed was a buddy, a guy his own age, a masculine guy who didn’t look at you penetratingly and size you up. A buddy who would share with you his interest in books or old movies or fine sports writing. Yeah, you’d catch sight of your buddy out of the corner of your eye as the two of you headed out into the night, collars turned up against the cold and shoulders bumping. Someone who didn’t stare at you and who could watch TV with you
and make just the occasional wry comment while nursing a beer. Someone who made you feel like a minor adjective, not a major noun.

Jack went to Europe for ten days to work on a story on Dubrovnik. He was scouting for Gephardt despite Harriet’s protests (“Okay, name me one great Yugoslav photographer, one, please, one who’s living now”). Just before he left, he recommended to Gephardt that he hire this great guy, Will Wright, whom in fact he, Jack, didn’t know. Will was Alice’s next-door neighbor in Virginia and wanted a job in publishing. Alice said, “Oh, Will is great—tall, sort of handsome, ambitious. You’ll like him. At least you won’t be embarrassed you recommended him. He majored in English and wants to be a novelist.”

When Jack came back from Dubrovnik, Will was already working at the
Northern Review
. He was in the next cubicle. The first things Jack noticed about him were his bad skin, his great height, his red nose and blue eyes, his light, joking manner, and his expensive shoes, which were beautifully polished like a fine old piece of furniture.

“Hey, Jack? Great to see you again,” Will said, winking, shaking his hand but with a funny smile on his lips.

“Yeah, terrific to see you again, Will.”

They decided to have lunch in the new little vest-pocket park east of Fifth. You could order a Coke and a hot dog there and sit on a stone bench and look at the other office workers.

After they got their hot dogs, Will said, “I can’t thank you enough for getting me this job. They must like you a lot, since they took me on right away.”

“Well, Princeton,” Jack said. “You did go to—”

“You’d be surprised how little that counts.”

“Seems to me everyone I meet in publishing went to Yale or Princeton.”

“I guess there are some old-boy connections. Those schools should be good for something.”

“I got accepted to Harvard twice and Princeton once and Haverford, but my dad was strapped for cash.” Jack decided that sounded more plausible than the bitter truth.

“Michigan is supposed to be great,” Will said agreeably.

“So tell me some things about you real quick so I can sound convincing when Gephardt questions me. By the way, what about those ladies in Personnel?” Suddenly Jack worried he was starting to sound gossipy and “fun” like Herschel.

“Original,” Will said. “Highly original.”

They shared a smile and a lifted eyebrow.

“Okay,” Will said, suddenly planting his long, fine-boned hands on his knees. “My father is a lawyer. There are five kids in my family—I’m the second. We live in a big house, but we don’t have any money. We’re Catholics. I went to Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island. Benedictines. Lots of Latin and theology. I played lacrosse, rather clumsily. Then Princeton. I was in Ivy, my dad’s eating club. I’ve never been engaged to be married.”

Although Will seemed jokey-humble, almost apologetic, Jack thought it was a sign of how blue his blood was that he sort of assumed that Jack would catch his references. “My parents couldn’t possibly afford all that,” Will went on, “what with our big family, but two of my uncles helped out with tuition.”

Suddenly it struck Jack that Will was confiding a lot of information. Of course, most of it was to substantiate their alibi, but some, surely, was reckless considering they’d just met. Maybe Will needed a buddy too—not just in New York, where he was
a newcomer, but in life. Will and Jack shared one eccentricity: they both liked to read new fiction. Even though their incomes were small, they would actually buy a new hardcover novel once a month. They would also go check out recent novels from the public library across from the Museum of Modern Art. Jack had simply gotten it into his head that he should be “civilized” and keep up with trends in most of the arts, whereas Will had a professional reason to read new novels. Jack remembered that Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton.

That night, as he was tossing on his bed, Jack wondered if old Gephardt had hired Will so quickly because he preferred him to Jack. Of course, Will had that foxhunting Princeton luster, and he was a bit taller (six feet two to Jack’s six), and his shoes were expensive. Not that either Will or Jack was exactly an extrovert.

The next day at the office, when the coffee wagon came around in the afternoon, three or four of the nicer editors stood around in Will’s cubicle. They were all talking, for some reason, about the plan to move the Whitney Museum uptown and whether it would draw as many people at that location, separated from the Museum of Modern Art. Will was sprawled on his chair, one leg thrown over its arm, his dress shirt looking so pale blue that it seemed transparent, the initials picked out in dark blue thread above his heart. He was positively glowing with interest and amusement, and he kept showing his perfect white teeth in deferential smiles. Jack wondered if he’d mistaken Will’s affability for friendliness.

Jack decided that as a person Will was a host, if that meant he liked to receive people, listen to them, encourage them, though he maintained his cool distance. Of course, maybe Jack was
wrong, but to him Will appeared to be more comfortable in a group than one-on-one.

That night Jack fell asleep on his new tan couch as soon as he got home. When he woke up at eleven he decided to go to a joint over on West Fourth where he could eat a burger and have a couple of beers. He’d slept through the dinner hour with his girls, and he decided he’d call them and explain tomorrow. Sitting at the crowded bar, he couldn’t help listening to two puffy execs still in their suits; they’d clearly been drinking steadily since six. Most people seemed so inane, Jack thought, loudmouths with absolutely no idea that conversation should be interesting.

Will was obviously refined, careful, completely democratic, though not really, Jack wagered, not in his heart of hearts. He’d been raised to think he was superior but not show it. Jack thought of most Catholics as Irish or Italian immigrants, but of course there were those Catholic English aristocrats who had followed Lord Baltimore to America, though Will’s family were Virginians. Was Will descended from English Catholics? He had the tall, narrow head and the eyes meant for a visor and the profile intended to be looked at against a gold banner. Jack suddenly wondered if Will was wearing some of his father’s dress shirts. They looked old, with their long, pointy collars; Jack would have to examine the initials more carefully.

The next day Jack and Will were drinking scotch together out of Will’s flask. It was after hours and they were alone. It was a cold wintry night and below them the city was all lit up. Neither of their cubicles had a window, but just across the hall was a big office with two windows, and Jack was drawn to the glittering glamour of the towers and streets outside. Black, Starr
and Frost was the name of a jeweler on Fifth Avenue, and it rhymed in Jack’s mind with this hard urban beauty, this motionless nocturnal amusement park, its rides all frozen and deserted but still lit up. Just for the conspicuous consumption of electricity, Manhattan couldn’t be beat.