Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  Suddenly Jack realized he was getting nowhere with his life. Will was writing a novel, he had a girl, he knew important people in New York through his family. He had designs on the Northern Review—and he was probably interviewing for better jobs elsewhere. Will was so damn secretive.

  Jack had sleepwalked his way through boarding school and college, but here, in the working world, you had to grapple and climb or go peeling down the mountain. By nature he wanted to pass unnoticed, but that wasn’t recommended. Jack loved anonymity—it allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. But in the working world, even to lead a little, private life, an inconspicuous life, you had to struggle and stick your elbows into other guys’ ribs.

  The next morning Will came into Jack’s cubicle and sat on the floor hugging his knees. “How’s it going?” he asked, looking at the frayed cuff of his khakis.

  “Fine,” Jack said.

  “So who was the buhd?” Will asked, using the new Cockney import, “bird.”

  “Hillary? Oh, just an old friend. We used to date … before she filled out.” The truth was she’d been forty pounds heavier back then.

  “Fine piece of womanflesh,” Will said, waxing the points of an invisible mustache.

  “And your Lucy?”

  “Her name is actually Luce. French. But she’s not. Just a pal of my little sister. Pretty pathetic, huh? Raiding the Brownie pack?”

  Jack thought he was the one who was pathetic, mooning over a secretive straight man who wasn’t even all that attractive. Sometimes Jack thought that he and Will should live together, that he, Jack, should make Will dinner and suck his cock every night, that he should listen to Will’s novel once a week and praise him every time, that he should keep a low profile at work and push Will ahead—and that he should recognize that at most he’d get two good years out of Will before the young author met the right girl: witty, nearly virginal, rich, fragile, feisty on the surface but essentially yielding.

  Yes, just two years with Will, that’s all he’d ever ask for from the gods. He knew he’d never be able to mention their affair to anyone, not even to Will. But if he could nurture Will’s self-confidence, his talent, bring him pleasure, build him up, worship him! Yes, he’d worship Will’s body, never expect anything more than an occasional hand tousling his hair … Just to know that Will would come bounding in the door, whistling, and sit down to dinner and eat with all the unquestioning sense of privilege of a real man, just as he’d stretch out on his bed and pretend to be asleep and let Jack measure all known distances from the milliarium aureum: that was Jack’s dream.

  It wasn’t that he was queer; he just loved Will.

  If that was Jack’s fantasy, so deep and seductive that he could drift far, far away from shore on its current, his oars shipped, these days more often he jerked awake from it and its narcotic powers and realized he had to pull free of Will’s spell, find someone new, someone loving and giving and sweet—a girl or, why not, even a boy. He’d botched things with Hillary and he was courting a straight guy—how pathetic was that?

  Alice had a big party on a Saturday night in March, and Jack welcomed the occasion to meet someone new. He always thought that the natural result of a party would be encountering a new lover, though it had never happened yet. More than a hundred people came, even Mingus, even Will, who arrived with his beautiful sister Elaine. Alice had paid for three barrels of oysters to be trucked up from Delaware along with a professional oysterman, a shucker. She had also hired a bartender to make daiquiris, nothing but daiquiris. The guests, almost all under twenty-five, got drunk right away. They seemed flattered or at least stunned that Alice had gone to so much bother and expense for them; it wasn’t the usual bring-your-own-bottle party on the cheap. The furniture was shoved to the walls, and soon dancers were stomping on the floor so hard it seemed to be buckling. Alice, who knew about parties, had invited the downstairs neighbors and promised them that such a rout would be only a once-a-decade affair.

  Will stood along the sidelines clapping and encouraging the dancers, though Jack thought he must be hating every moment of it, especially the pop music. What had he done all those years at all those hundreds of debutante parties he’d attended? Then again, Will recognized socializing as a necessary if regrettable part of life and must have developed his own strategies for dealing with it. Anyway, the Lester Lanin music at deb parties was so bland as to be inoffensive. And maybe Will was hoping Alice would fix him up with some easygoing Greenwich Village babe. Will, like his father, no doubt, thought that all Village women were “loose.”

  Will waved at Jack exaggeratedly, crouching a bit and with a hand shading his eyes as if they were very far away from each other, hallooing across a valley, and not just ten or twelve feet apart. Maybe he wanted to mime an unbridgeable gulf and not have his chances for meeting a girl jinxed by a clingy office pal.

  Alice had recently bought two ten-foot-long carved wooden spoons from Africa. When the crowd became so drunk that no one could stand up straight, Alice and a round-faced young man in a pink shirt with puffy pirate sleeves and with long sideburns that almost met at the chin began to do a “spoon dance.” They held the long, heavy spoons at waist height and dueled each other. The music and chatter were so deafening that Jack could scarcely hear the hollow chock-chock of the colliding spoons. Alice was squinting fiercely. She took everything seriously, even the duel.

  When the dance was over, Jack saw that Will had disappeared. Jack assumed he might have wandered off to the bathroom or for a daiquiri refill, but when Will didn’t reappear after fifteen minutes, Jack made a tour of the whole apartment and even checked out the partygoers sitting in the stairwell. Jack was upset that he couldn’t actually feel Will’s precise location through some sort of heat detector; Jack thought of his whole being as attuned to his prey.

  Alice never lost her impassivity, but as she came welling up through the crowd, Jack could see how pleased she was.

  “Great party,” he said.

  She said, “It does seem okay. I’ve got someone here for you to meet,” and only now did Jack see that she was followed by a small, smiley guy who looked to be no more than eighteen. “Jack, this is Peter. Peter’s a famous ballet dancer.” She then let herself be led away by the oyster shucker, who was exhausted and said he needed a break.

  “Well, hello,” Peter said in a deep voice as husky as an older actress’s. He had an urchin’s face with big eyes, sad beyond his years, pale afterimages of freckles scattered across his wide Tatar cheekbones, big, everted lips, a button nose, and bangs that he’d fashioned by pressing an uneven thatch down across his forehead—a haircut that if properly combed would be neat, classic, the anonymous helmet of a member of the corps.

  Jack was puzzled as to why Alice thought they’d like each other. How could Jack find anything in common with a ballet dancer, a boy who could just as easily have been a girl if he hadn’t had such heavily muscled legs—the very legs the word “thews” was invented to name, right?

  “You’re a very sexy man,” the creature said to him, looking up at him and tilting his head to one side. “Very tall. I like tall men. Tall women dancers are the bane of my existence. That’s why Mr. Joffrey has done so many solos for me. I can’t dance with anyone because I’m so little.” He laughed. “Not all over.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m not little all over.”

  Jack blushed and then was angry that he’d been made to feel awkward and said flat out, “I can see you have overdeveloped thews, for instance.”

  Peter blinked dramatically, dyed black eyelashes sweeping over enlarged pupils. “Oh. I’m sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you were gay.”

  “It’s too loud in here,” Jack said. “Wanna go down to the street and get some fresh air?”

  Peter blinked again, the equivalent of inching open a fan and then snapping it shut. “Sure,” he said huskily.

  Fueled by a dozen daiquiris and three oysters, Jack flew down the stairs ahead of Peter,
aware of the creature’s eyes on his shoulders, making them broader and more muscular. Cornelia was dark and empty, though up at the corner West Fourth Street was streaming with light. Suddenly Jack grabbed Peter by his surprisingly small hot hand and yanked him into a doorway. Jack systematically undid the big buttons on Peter’s peacoat, opened it, ran his hands over Peter’s slender body, and pulled him in for a long, deep kiss. Their teeth, hard and wet, collided, and tongues took turns flowing into and out of each other’s mouths. One of Jack’s hands drifted down to Peter’s butt, as prominent and horizontal as a shelf.

  “What?” Peter gasped.

  “I said—oh, nothing.” He felt tongue-tied with urgency.

  Peter ran his hand over Jack’s erection through his trousers and said, “You should ensure this thing for two million.”

  For once Jack didn’t resent the person commenting on his dick—maybe because Peter’s own body was even more extraordinary. Jack had read in a review of Viva Vivaldi! in the Times about how Peter could kick the back of his head, how the ballet was a duel between him and another, bigger male dancer.

  “You take my breath away,” Peter growled. “I was afraid you were straight.”

  “I am, sort of,” Jack said.

  “That’s okay,” Peter said, “because I’m sort of a girl.”

  “Let’s go back to my place. It’s not too far.”

  “You sure move fast.”

  “C’mon,” Jack said, pulling Peter along by the hand, “you’re not that much of a girl. You’ve got a hard-on. I could feel it through your clothes. And my dad used to say that a hard dick has no conscience.”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute.” Peter stopped short in the middle of West Fourth amid the flowing crowds. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Oh, Mr. Steinmetz,” a teenage girl with turnout and a ponytail said, coming up to him. “I just want you to know how … magical you are. How you’ve changed my life and given me the courage to face all the challenges I’m having as a young dancer.”

  “Thank you,” Peter said, patting her hand. “Thank you for telling me that. It means so much to me.”

  When they were alone again, Peter smiled faintly as they hurried across Sheridan Square, as if that stranger’s praise had given him the necessary reassurance to run off with Jack.

  “My name is Jack Holmes,” Jack said, putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder, “and I’m just a humble journalist and that’s all I want to be. I think you’re cute as hell, but I’ve only had sex with one other male—”

  “Who said we’re having sex?”

  Jack stopped again and felt a drunk momentum continue to whirl him around. He looked down into Peter’s face. “You know we’re going to.”

  Peter shrugged and smiled and said, “Okay, Jack Holmes.”

  Maybe it was the daiquiris or just slipping free of the chains of pointless love, but Jack felt more like an animal than ever before. Once they were home, he found he liked biting Peter’s lips and putting a finger in his stinky little hole crushed between those powerful buttocks. He liked weighing Peter’s balls in his right hand like dice. He liked branding Peter’s hairless tummy with the searing length of his penis. He liked sitting on the edge of the bed and scooping Peter onto his lap, facing him, the boy’s head dreaming on his shoulder, Peter’s calves grasping Jack’s waist, that little scabbard slowly expanding to swallow the whole sword. Because he’d only ever dated women (and not too many of them), Jack was used to saying he was in love (to feeling he was in love) every time he kissed someone deeply or undressed her. Now he started to whisper words of love, but when he felt Peter squatting on his dick and bouncing up and down on it, the whole flimsy bamboo scaffolding of sentiment fell away to reveal the imposing dome of pure desire. If it would turn out to be necessary to utter sweet nothings in order to recapture this moment, in order for them to sweat their way through to another athletic orgasm, then Jack would say the needed words, but he didn’t feel them, he didn’t want to love Peter, he just wanted to fuck this perfect butt.

  Later, they were lying in bed and smoking. “Why are we smoking?” Jack asked. “Aren’t you an athlete?”

  “All dancers smoke,” said Peter.

  “Why?” Jack asked.

  “Maybe to stay thin, it’s partly that, but it’s more to tempt the devil on the same principle that a woman with a perfect face might put a jewel in a nostril.”

  He drew on his cigarette and tapped its glowing ash into an enameled dish. Jack stroked his back. Peter’s skin was pale and spongy, flesh that had been wrapped in sweat clothes year after year. He started talking about how he was planning to have his sex changed.

  Jack asked him why he wanted to do that.

  “I’m too small to have all the juicy male roles, and anyway, ‘Ballet is woman,’ as Mr. Balanchine said. If I became a female, I’d be able to jump higher than any woman alive. I can already do toe work—I taught myself.”

  “Toe work?”

  “Toe dancing. Men don’t dance on their toes; only women do. And I’d be the right height as a woman.”

  “And what about sex?” Jack asked.

  “You’d still like me if I were a girl? Maybe even more.”

  “But you’d probably get shyer and more delicate and want me to marry you if you were a girl. I wouldn’t like that as much. Right now you’re a wild man. I don’t know much about men. Are all men like that, hell bound for pleasure, so frank and passionate?”

  “Some men are big prisses. And a lot of gays would be afraid of your dick. If you went to a sauna they’d all follow you around, but then they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They’d throw it over one shoulder and burp it and weep.”

  Jack laughed at the image.

  Peter left at dawn because the company was taking a bus to Albany, where they’d be performing for three nights. At the door Peter said, “You’re the universal ball, Jack Holmes. Everyone at that party wanted you.”

  “They did?”

  “You really didn’t notice, did you? That’s nice.” He put on his gloves. “Modesty is nice in a man.”

  “But you can’t just go away like this.”

  “Catch a train up to Albany on Tuesday and spend the night with me and ride in the company bus back to New York with us.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel awkward?”

  Peter stood on tiptoe and made Jack bend down and kissed him on the nose. “I’d be proud, Jack Holmes. Not everyone has a young, straight, handsome beau.”

  “I’m not sure about the straight or the handsome, but thanks.”

  Jack went back to bed and looked at the tube of body lotion for dry elbow he’d used as a lubricant; Peter had laughed at his amateurishness. It smelled of gardenias, like Jack’s grandmother’s soap. For all his talk of changing his sex, Peter’s dick had been hard and energetic, pushing into Jack’s chest. Jack felt exhilarated—the “universal ball.” Did people really think of him like that? A man for everyone? He’d never felt so confident. Was it because Peter was as yielding and in need of protection as a girl but had all the boldness and strength of a boy?

  Jack could imagine awakening sexually and becoming obsessed with Peter’s ass, devoted to it and to him, but somehow he couldn’t picture Peter caring for anything much beyond his own career.

  Jack did take Tuesday afternoon off from work and flew up to Albany. During the intermission there were lots of girls aged eight to ten, all pacing the lobby and showing each other versions of new steps as they sipped their Cokes. Their mothers, standing off to one side, were dowdy and fat and dressed in aquamarine silk tops with sprays of glass and gold beads appliquéd across one breast; Jack thought they were probably more presentable in their ordinary work clothes. Albany felt very proletariat.

  Jack was full of anticipation as he went back to his seat. Peter was about to dance in Viva Vivaldi!, and Jack had the jitters, almost as if he were a stage mother too.

  He was astonished by Peter’s performance. He was at varying moments a
boy, a man, and a great lady—the grande dame came out when he took his bows, clutched the cellophane-wrapped roses to his breast, and pretended to search out individuals in the very top balcony. The Cuban dancer who shared the bill with him was so masculine he seemed to belong to another species.

  Peter wasn’t quite as happy to see him as Jack had expected, and over hamburgers at a diner, which was the only place still open at that hour (eleven), he seemed mildly curious about why Jack had come so far “for nothing,” as he put it bitterly.

  “Nothing? Man, that was one of the great performances.”

  “Get real, Jack,” Peter said. “You know nothing about it. How many shows have you sat through?”

  “Three. But I’ve seen tons on TV.”

  “Probably another three,” Peter drawled, “so we’re up to six—and anyway, you don’t know what you’re looking at.”

  Jack said, “You’re really good at accepting compliments. Anyway, call me an idiot, but you don’t have to be a lion to gasp over the lions at the circus.”

  Peter pretended to be vexed, but he couldn’t keep from smiling. “The circus! I just knew it.” After a silence he said, “I’m in a bad mood because Mr. Joffrey criticized me after the matinee for putting on feminine airs. He said the public doesn’t go for that shit—that’s exactly how he put it.” Jack didn’t know what to say. He thought, Peter is a paranoid prima donna.

  Back at the hotel Peter said he was exhausted and sore all over, and they’d all have to pile in the bus at six A.M. to arrive in the city by two.

  “I’m taking the seven o’clock train back,” Jack said.

  “You’re not riding with us?”

  “I’ve pushed myself on you enough,” Jack said, feeling cool behind his politeness.

  “Come over here.” Peter patted the edge of the bed beside him. Jack complied. Peter said, “Why don’t you kiss me?”