Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  He woke up at four in the morning feeling dehydrated and unbearably horny. Maybe it was the thirst joined to the horniness, but when he started jerking off, all he could think about was sucking Will’s cock. He’d never sucked a cock. He wished he’d paid more attention to what that Edward guy had been doing to him. Maybe he should go back and take lessons. How sick is that, Jack said to himself over and over again. He had a fistful of come that he licked away like a cat—he was too tired to get up to find a tissue. He decided that the bizarre events of the day had pushed him too far, into this dangerous territory. He promised himself he’d never again jerk off over Will (or any other guy). New York was doing weird things to him.

  5.

  The next evening at dinner, Alice asked Jack how Will was doing at work.

  “He’s very bright, isn’t he?” Jack said.

  “Is he really?” Alice said. “He went to good schools and has read—well, not a lot but in a very selective way. He reads all the new novels, since that’s what he wants to write. Of course, he’s terribly competitive.”

  Jack nodded, but he hadn’t thought of that. He wondered what else Alice had noticed. What else people back in Virginia said about Will. “Is he a big one for the women?” Jack asked, using a turn of phrase that sounded as unnatural to his own ears as his desire to elicit this sort of information.

  “Oh, I think there were two or three fragile-looking debutantes,” Alice said. She was smoking and drinking scotch. “But you know, with his bad skin he’s always been shy.”

  “Do you think that’s such a big deal?”

  “You never had acne, I can see,” Alice said. “But his was very bad, and he had it all over his back, big boils of it behind his ears and on his neck.”

  “Yeah,” said Rebekkah, chiming in. “Jack Holmes has beautiful soft skin. Perfect skin any girl would envy.” She said it with such kindness that there was nothing knowing or leering about her remark. She was the kindest girl in the world.

  “Anyway,” Alice said, narrowing her eyes, “why don’t you invite Will to dinner with us? He must be lonely living with his sister Elaine and her two kids in that shabby town house. Tell him it won’t be anything special, just our usual squat and gobble.” Although Alice could be easily offended by other people’s vulgarities (she often winced in conversations), she nevertheless enjoyed her own coarse expressions, not so much dirty as rustic.

  “Tomorrow?” Jack asked a bit too eagerly.

  “For instance,” Alice drawled, looking away, even squinting at the little black-and-white television flickering in the next room.

  “What is she like, this sister?”

  “Elaine?” Alice drawled with a certain lofty amusement, as if it were absurd that someone didn’t already know everything about her. “She’s a beauty but has gotten rather broad in the beam. Where Will is timid, she is brash, really a heroine out of a swashbuckler. You will be impressed by how beautiful she is. And her little boy and girl are great kids. But she’s penniless. Her handsome, do-nothing husband abandoned her for some trailer trash.” Alice spit out the word “trash” and laughed, Jack imagined, not out of real vehemence but out of a schoolgirl defiance at saying such a thing at all. Her squinting eyes widened to reveal their fine Chippendale blue. “I suppose poor Ronald couldn’t cope with the whole Wright clan, so he preferred Doreen from Hot Springs. Anyway, Elaine is penniless and she’s come to New York and rented a run-down town house at a terribly impressive address in the East Sixties off Park, and her whole idea is to flirt and entertain like Scarlett O’Hara after the war and land a rich and social husband.” Like all people in what they called “high society” back in Ann Arbor, Alice said “social” (and she very rarely pronounced the word) to mean someone of the right sort.

  Jack drank in all these details about Will. “Has Elaine found anyone? Surely she wouldn’t marry just for money.”

  “He would have to be presentable,” Alice said matter-of-factly.

  “Not a Jew,” Rebekkah chimed in, pulling a comically long face.

  “Hold on,” Alice said, chortling and lifting a nearly transparent hand in protest. “There’s a nice Mr. Shapiro in Virginia who goes everywhere, who keeps horses. That’s the way in: horses!” She laughed as if she held the whole hunt world in contempt, but she didn’t. “Of course, Harold Shapiro is well dressed and has a wonderful house near ours and a great trainer.”

  “Does he wear one of those red jackets? A Jew in a red hunting jacket?” Rebekkah asked, adding in a dramatic aside, “My poor people, so far from the shtetl.”

  “A red what?” Alice demanded, squinting even more fiercely. “Oh, a pink jacket. But yes, you’re right, they’re red. The first tailor of hunting garb was a Mr. Pink or something.” Since she’d started working on her documentary, Alice had become more informed about her world, which in the past she’d always taken for granted.

  That night, alone, Jack lay on his short, tan corduroy rep couch, hanging off both ends of it, and laughed at himself. He thought, I’m fascinated by all these details about the Wrights, but only because I have a crush on Will.

  Will did come to dinner the next night, and he smoked two cigarettes (the first time Jack had ever seen him smoking). He held them fastidiously and a bit awkwardly, as if they were chopsticks. He sprawled with one long leg draped over the edge of the leather armchair bought from the Salvation Army and combined casualness with shyness. Jack was able to confirm that Will wore garters to hold up his long black lisle stockings. He and Alice sparred. “Okay, Will,” she said, “you owe me one. I got you your job.”

  “Oh?” Will drawled. “For some reason I thought it was Jack.”

  “A mere technicality,” she said. “You owe me.”

  “Then to be fair I should find you a job,” he said, “but for some reason I don’t think of you as a working girl.”

  “I’m going to make a documentary.”

  “I guess that counts as work. About what?”

  “The hunt.”

  “Where?”

  “Duh—our hunt.”

  “Hope you leave us out.”

  She laughed. “Of course I will. Movies are supposed to be interesting.”

  Rebekkah’s eyes widened. She loved Alice, but found her hunting prints bizarre and her family stories even more exotic. Now she looked eagerly at Jack to make sure that he too was registering Alice’s latest tossed-off effrontery.

  Will seemed strangely vague or even evasive in responding to Alice’s questions about Elaine. “Is she enjoying New York?” Alice asked. “I don’t see how she can if you compare that thing, that disgusting town house, with that beautiful house your parents built her out behind their place.”

  “What’s the little house called?” Rebekkah asked Alice while winking at Jack.

  “Called?” Alice asked. “I keep forgetting none of you has ever been down to Virginia. Elaine’s house is called the Rookery.”

  “Yeah, ’cause the builders really rooked Dad, har, har,” Will said. “Well, she likes New York fine, but it’s the children I worry about.” Everyone assumed New York was bad for children.

  Two days later Alice said, “There’s something strange going on. Elaine is giving a big splashy man-trap party, and Will doesn’t even seem to know about it. She told me he’s not really living at her place.”

  Did this mean that Will had a lover? And was the lover male or female? Was that why Will had moved to New York, to lead a secret life? The scion of Charlottesville would never have any privacy back home.

  Jack didn’t know what to do with his new suspicions. Mythologizing Will’s affair (if that’s what it was) served the function of taming it, of making it less shocking to poor Jack (he thought of himself suddenly as poor, as bereft). He could see no way of tackling the subject directly with Will (“Hey, Will, who are you living with these days?”). Jack would have been willing to run the risk of seeming vulgar to Will if he’d thought a blunt question might work, but he was afraid Will would greet it
with one of his thin-lipped smiles and total silence.

  Was it a black woman? A married woman—a friend of the family? A beautiful young aunt? A retarded cousin? A common whore? A freckled teenage boy from Appalachia?

  Fascinating to think about, but Jack felt … betrayed. Yes, he’d assumed that he and Will were both … bachelors. That they were both lonely and bereft. That they really had no one but each other, that they were buddies … almost exclusively.

  For a day he avoided Will at the office and said that he couldn’t join him for lunch at Larré’s, the French restaurant in the East Fifties where Will liked to eat brains with capers and where Jack would order sweetbreads with fries. It was a great place, three big rooms crowded with smallish tables for two, decked out in red-and-white-checked tablecloths and topped with baskets of crusty bread, and the prix fixe was only $1.50 or $1.75 if you took both a cheese course and a dessert. He and Will ate there almost every day and then would check out an art show on Fifty-seventh Street at Betty Parsons or Green’s (upstairs just west of Fifth Avenue) or across the street at Sidney Janis. Or they’d grab a salad at the Museum of Modern Art cafeteria and sit in the garden, looking at Matisse’s female bathers or the delicate, adipose bronze woman by Gaston Lachaise, standing on tiptoe. The sound of the fountain and the distant hum of traffic through the latticework fence lulled them into a mood both urban and bucolic. Soaring buildings on every side looked down on the garden, but the trees were leafy and the lunch crowd, mostly women, seemed unaware of all those voyeurs up above looking down at them through leaves.

  Jack usually stayed out so late at night and drank so much that the next day he felt exhausted and depressed—unless he was with Will. His baseline was depression, best expressed by his pale, drained complexion and the dark circles under his eyes. He would come home from work and fall asleep, but soon enough he’d wake up, beset by an irresistible desire to go out. He was like Tristan, who can’t die because the philter keeps jolting him back into wakeful desire. Jack, what was Jack looking for as he walked the cold streets, felt the snow tattooing his face, cruised people who were nothing but creeping, sexless bundles of hoods, hats, coats, boots, slowly trudging across piles of snow tossed back by snowplows? Even this Muscovite weather didn’t dampen Jack’s lust.

  He was so tormented by the question of Will’s lover that one night he decided he would follow him at an inconspicuous distance—but the next afternoon, just as he’d decided that Will was a bloodless monster, someone who’d probably not even noticed that Jack had been avoiding him, Will came into his office and said, bluntly, studying him with those blue eyes, “Are you avoiding me?”

  “I heard you’re living with someone and you never even told me about it.”

  “That’s because you’d tell Alice, and she’d tell Elaine, who’d tell everyone in the whole wide world.”

  “Don’t you know yet,” Jack asked, “that I can keep a secret?”

  “All right,” Will said, touching his own chest, then his stomach, as if in such a critical moment he had to make sure he was still all there. “Let’s go have a quiet drink someplace, if any place quiet exists in this wretched city.”

  Jack was frightened about what would ensue, but he was also grateful to Will for having said something direct. As they rode the elevator down, they stayed silent even though they were the only ones in it at this hour, listening to a Muzak version of “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” played by the Mantovani Strings, but so softly that the music sounded more like a memory than a melody. They smiled at each other nervously once when their glances crossed. On the way out on the ground floor Will’s hand touched Jack’s waist.

  “Okay,” Will said, after their drinks had come and they were seated at a highly polished wood table at the back of the Irish bar, which stank of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. “So what’s wrong?”

  Jack was looking at the black-and-white picture someone had put up of Kennedy with his sad eyes. “Okay, well, I heard from Alice, who heard from Elaine, that you’re not really living with her.”

  Will laughed. “I’ve got an even bigger secret, one you’d never guess.”

  “Yes? I mean, I wouldn’t?”

  “I’m living alone. I found a little room without a kitchen, though it does have a sink and I can take a maid’s bath in it. I’m writing, like a crazy man. I’ve almost finished the first draft and the Dial Press—not the whole press, a fellow over there—is interested, sort of, and—well, I should have told you, but it works for me having a secret. It feels very private. Maybe for men like us who’ve lived in dormitories for the last ten years, you know—”

  “Of course I know,” Jack said, “and I really like my little apartment,” though in fact he didn’t; his heart started pounding from the fear of being alone as soon as he came out of the subway each night and was a block away from his front door. “I know, or at least I can imagine, how exciting it must be to write your first book.”

  “Try my third. I’ve already written two novels that were so shitty agents and editors couldn’t stay awake reading them, but now I’m really on to something.”

  “Great,” Jack murmured, and he meant it, relieved that Will wasn’t having an affair and that he was far more committed to his novel than to any woman. He’d met that young cult novelist in Ann Arbor, Alice’s lover, the one who had written the “classic” about the tiny winged horse (already out of print), and he’d seen how seriously everyone had taken that guy, and how solemnly the novelist had taken himself when he’d read them his new story. Fiction was obviously the way to go, not quite as sacred as poetry but a damn sight more visible and profitable. Jack loved new novels and was glad Will was writing one.

  “You’ve already been in contact with agents?”

  “Yes,” Will said, “a preppy lesbian Alice met playing tennis. Poor Alice, they all assume she’s a dyke too, but she’s really just a bossy straight girl.” Jack was always surprised by the casual way the girls (and now Will) referred to dykes and fags, as if it were just a dubious variation of human sexuality rather than a vice and a mental illness (or a sin for a Catholic like Will). Jack felt that for all their joking around, they wouldn’t want to spend time with a clearly identified homosexual (who would?); they simply liked to laugh about the disease, clowning that was apparently the height of sophistication. Of course, Jack, who’d let Edward suck his cock, was much more compromised than any of them. And it was all because his cock was so big that it seemed almost inevitable it would end up in some homosexual’s mouth, just as a naturally fast runner would end up a track star. “Prey” wasn’t quite the word, he knew. He hadn’t resisted Edward in any way and, truth be told, he’d gone out that night without any underwear. But maybe he’d just been horny. Jack didn’t like to think about it, though it was always shadowing his thoughts like a marauder.

  “What’s the idea behind your novel?” Jack asked, knowing he might be obtruding.

  “The idea?” Will asked. Then he smiled. “I guess writers don’t think like that. They stick pretty close to their inspiration like a divining rod over water. And then when it’s all over they make up some bullshit to tell the press, or the curious, about the ‘theme’ or whatever.”

  Jack had never heard Will utter a single pretentious word before, but perhaps only because the topics that had come up (the hunt, schools, jobs, friends) were all ones in which he’d been carefully drilled by his snobbish parents to sound as modest as possible. Writing fiction was an altogether new subject, his own, not a family theme, and while discussing it, Will was free to indulge a young male’s egotism. Whereas Will usually sounded self-deprecating in the best aristocratic fashion, when it came to his “art” he was starting to sound pompous in the usual naïve American way.

  “Is that all you’re going to say for now?” Jack asked. He hoped that Will would see he was pulling his leg.

  “I don’t really know much more,” Will said, “that’s paraphrasable. I could say that my book is inf
luenced by Thomas Pynchon’s V. in that it has fantasy mixed in with classic storytelling, but my book is more tender, even sentimental, about love and beautiful young women in crisp summer dresses—maybe that’s my Fitzgerald side. Oh god, I hope it adds up to more than Pynchon plus Gatsby.”

  “Even those two elements,” Jack said, “just those two elements sound great. That’s what originality is. A slight variation or a new combination. At least that’s what I think.” Jack felt tears spring to his eyes as they did whenever he tried to sweet-talk someone.

  “The minute it gets accepted, I’ll let you read it,” Will said. “You’ll be my first reader.”

  Jack thought that sounded like a feeble consolation. In the next few weeks he came to think of Will’s novel as a sort of rival and as one he couldn’t compete with. Would Will become famous and drop all his old friends? Would he become a “catch” and attract rich and celebrated women? Would he quit the Northern Review?

  Will was constantly taking notes in a small book that fit into an inside jacket pocket and was bound in red morocco with his name stamped inside in small gold type, the pages pale blue and Bible thin, the sort of “appointment book” that preppies always managed to have. Now that Jack knew about the novel-in-progress, Will didn’t hesitate to scrawl things even in the midst of a conversation. Jack would wonder if something he’d said or done had been noteworthy.

  Jack had no desire to write fiction. It meant taking yourself too seriously; there was no denying a novelist was some sort of indefatigable monologist. You had to believe that what you thought was worth saying; you had to possess the confidence to impose yourself on everyone, for hours and hours, even days.

  He mentioned that once to Will on their way back from the Museum of Modern Art, or rather the library across the street, where they’d gone to renew their books. Will was reading a “nifty” novel by a young French writer their age called Le Clézio. Jack was reading a book about Ezra Pound and his circle. Jack said he didn’t want to die stupid. It was a freakishly warm day for February, marked by turbulent gray clouds crossing and re-crossing the sky, like a flotilla of warships on parade. A strangely warm wind smelling of ozone and clean rain (though no rain was in sight) eddied around them and disturbed Jack with its promise of elsewhere.