by Edmund White
And again, this time without all those daiquiris and the exhilaration of Alice’s spoon dance, Jack delved into all this hot, coiled muscularity; he even stood up and walked around the small room with his cock in Peter and Peter’s powerful legs wrapped around his waist.
Later, as they were both dozing off, Jack said, “Call me an ignorant philistine, but it was terrific seeing you up there dancing tonight.”
“For me,” Peter whispered, “you’ve been nothing but a pain in the butt. Exactly what I like most in the world.”
It seemed only half an hour later when the phone rang. The company manager told Peter to be downstairs in twenty-five minutes.
Jack took the train since he wasn’t quite ready to brave the stares of all those dancers. He wasn’t prepared to sit there while all those girls, those ballerinas, looked at him and saw Peter’s lover, Peter’s queer lover. The other boys, the company fags, might smirk and exchange looks. But the girls—that was a test Jack didn’t want to subject himself to. Being with Peter alone and being with Peter in public were two different things.
Something told Jack that a nondancer could never fit into that world. Peter said they were all so competitive, and even as he was in front of the curtain receiving an ovation, he could hear a bitch in the chorus whispering, “Did you see how he started traveling downstage when he was doing his turns?” Another queen chimed in, “And what about that nelly port de bras? The broken wrist, the wilting fingertips, the shoulders like an anorectic Vogue model?”
The dancers were like members of holy orders—no outsider could ever breach the walls isolating them, their dedication, their single-mindedness. They’d chosen to deform their bodies and give up the world all in the name of a career that could last at best fifteen years. How could someone like Jack ever understand their sacrifices? For Jack, Peter was a problem not because he was effeminate but because he was a dancer.
6.
There was a two-week period when Peter wasn’t touring. The company was back in New York and, aside from a class or two, Peter had nothing to do. He’d drop by Jack’s apartment in the early evening and lie down on the floor, which was covered with tatami mats. Jack would undress him, undo the elastic bandages around one knee and both feet. He’d wash Peter’s feet and legs in warm water and soap, then get him to roll facedown on a towel. Jack had bought some patchouli-scented oil, and he’d slowly, patiently massage the kinks out of Peter’s short, wide feet with the high insteps and blunt toes and square-cut nails. His feet felt alert and sensitive, as if they were the bodily organs that could see, read.
Jack then went to Peter’s shoulders and sat astride his small, muscular waist and rubbery buttocks. He worked his fingers into Peter’s shoulders and with his thumbs pushed the tension up his spine toward his neck.
“Too hard, Jack Holmes,” Peter complained. “That hurts.”
When Jack relented and scribbled whispery, feathery cursive letters across Peter’s white, spongy skin, he said, “Too light, Jack Holmes. That doesn’t hurt enough.”
Jack moved down to his lower back, which joined his tailbone in a more intricate way than usual, and dug deep with his thumbs. Then Jack’s big, octave-and-a-half hands fanned out over Peter’s high buttocks and molded them into Silly Putty shapes. But from time to time Jack was forced to stop and sit back and look at what God and the individual will and institutional discipline had wrought. He remembered that a philosophy professor in Ann Arbor had said that vision was the most spiritual sense and smelling the most animal; Jack went back and forth from gazing at Peter’s ass with angelic indifference to spreading his cheeks and grazing his hole with his thumb and bringing it up to his nose with canine rapture. He thought that this blend of patchouli and boy mud was the most intoxicating scent, the true smell of modernity. Jack knew nothing about hippies, incense, or drugs, but he suspected that dozens of skinny, bearded guys on the Lower East Side were stretching out their male friends at this very moment, burning doss sticks and working their thumbs into unwashed curry-chutes. He could picture the imprint of an oily body on the bedticking thrown onto the floor … the smell of the sixties: ass and incense.
Jack told himself that he wasn’t really gay. He was just lonely. Besides, Peter would be on tour at the end of this two-week period, and then they wouldn’t see each other again for six months. Anyway, Jack was only catching up with all those hippie polymorphs out there on the Lower East Side, the free spirits he envied and feared. Anyway, it felt like being with a girl because Peter insisted on the role he was to play, and besides, he didn’t want Jack to touch his dick. Truth be told, Peter was more feminine than Hillary and a more traditional woman than Rebekkah. And when Peter had his sex change, he’d be even more in character, wouldn’t he? And Jack would find him/her even more alluring, wouldn’t he?
“Hey!” Peter said. “Are you drifting off?”
“What?”
“Are you falling asleep on the job?”
In response Jack rolled Peter over to reveal the solid erection the boy had been hatching. Against Peter’s protests, Jack applied an extra dollop of oil to the problem and worked with it for a long time.
Maybe things weren’t so clear. Then again, maybe anyone, male or female, straight or gay, would want to play with this exquisite body.
But Jack resolved he’d start dating girls again.
By the fourth evening Jack was fed up with Peter. He complained all the time about Mr. Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, the resident choreographer. They weren’t treating him with the requisite deference. They hadn’t scheduled any new ballets for him during the next season. Even the two big ballets he’d starred in for several seasons were being programmed less frequently—an outrage, considering how much the public adored him. The two bosses both kept complaining that he, Peter, was too effeminate, not in his actual performances but in the way he took his bows, the way he exulted in the applause he inspired. Of course, it was ludicrous for the men to complain; it was obvious that they were jealous, they who were losing their hair and thickening in the waist no matter how many classes they gave or took. They were standing in Peter’s way, and he wasn’t going to tolerate it! A dancer had only so many good years, and he couldn’t lose a single one. Mr. Joffrey had never found his own niche in the dance world. He wasn’t Balanchine and he wasn’t Robbins and he wasn’t Cunningham—he wasn’t anything distinctive, just an inept manager with a mildly talented choreographer. Even doddering old Martha Graham, gesturing from her couch as Phaedra—even she was more real than Joffrey. “She’ll be remembered, mark my words,” Peter exclaimed, “but Mr. Joffrey will be forgotten. He’s done nothing original. Of course, if he’d build the company around me, he might have a chance at immortality.”
Hour after hour, Peter raved about how invaluable he was and what a fool Joffrey was for not recognizing his genius. Jack was certain that Peter must be mistaken, that no dancer, no matter how talented, could be indispensable. Performers received that adulation, but they couldn’t ensure the continuity—not even Nijinsky had turned out to be all that valuable, and he’d been the most famous dancer of the century.
Jack stopped listening. He wanted to get his hands on Peter to calm him down.
After Jack would massage Peter, he’d fuck him in six or seven different positions that Peter would suggest or even dictate. Peter treated the spurts of Jack’s semen in the same way that he received applause—he threw his head back, lowered his eyelids, pursed his lips, and drank it all in as the homage of Jack’s ardor. “Only you, Jack Holmes, only you,” he’d murmur, as if only Jack owned the right size screwdriver to open this particular control box.
Jack would cook him a burger or make a chicken salad, serve him iced tea or orange juice, though there was always something wrong—the tea might overstimulate or constipate him, the juice was too acidic, the burger too carnivorous, the chicken choked with hormones. “I’ll have to teach you to eat healthy,” Peter said. “I eat lots of steamed vegetables and brown rice, and I arrange
it all on the plate according to the principles of yang and yin.”
“Oh sure,” Jack said. “I’ll run right out and do that. I went to a macrobiotic restaurant on Fifty-fifth off Sixth—the waitress was the biggest grouch in New York, and no wonder: she was starving!”
Peter laughed, like a child who’s made a big dog bark. “Seriously,” he said, “you’ll feel a lot lighter, more airborne.”
“I leave flying to you, Peter. I just want to stoke the old furnace.”
Suddenly Jack realized he’d heard Will call eating “stoking the old furnace” more than once. Jack wondered if he was impersonating Will’s mild heartiness with Peter in a parody of preppy masculinity. Did Peter bring out the manly in him? Or did Peter’s diva combination of young woman and magic child demand an equal but opposite charade of understated macho wryness?
Or was Jack so in love with Will that when he missed him he became him?
This possibility made him turn away, disgusted, from Peter, who was sprawling naked on Jack’s tatami mat. Suddenly everything about this man-boy-girl seemed obscene—his overdeveloped ass with its powerful grip, his drag queen delusions of grandeur, his skinny white torso punctuated by just a pair of black dots like a blank page inscribed with nothing but two periods, a double finality so at odds with so much potential. Peter’s big, pouty lips, his husky voice, the slightly doctored color and wave of his hair, his unappeased narcissism—he was a walking, leaping, undulating formula for unhappiness.
Jack preferred Will’s cold, uncaressed body, vague and pale and almost inert inside his baggy clothes. Surely Will hadn’t connected with—or even visited—most of the corners of his body, as if it were a religious cult fallen into disuse, its shrines allowed to go to seed. One night, back in the fall, Will was joking about a girl who had wanted to go down on him. He had chided her out of it, saying, “I wouldn’t if I were you. You never know what you’re going to find down there.” Will went on to compare his crotch to the floor of his workroom, with its sedimentation of food and food wrappers, dirty socks, abandoned underwear, old newspapers, and mud tracked in by his expensive shoes. Will had his three suits and his blazer (with the old gold fox-head buttons) dry-cleaned regularly, and his father’s fragile, monogrammed shirts with the fraying collars washed and pressed by the French cleaners on Lexington near his sister Elaine’s rented town house, and he polished his shoes himself and rinsed out his baggy boxer shorts and long lisle stockings. But otherwise, everything in his room, he said, was filthy, mostly organic, slowly decomposing into topsoil. The miracle was that Will could turn himself out so impeccably every morning.
Of course, when Will said, “You never know what you’re going to find down there,” Jack was soon obsessing about exactly what one would discover, the tangled pubic hair, a mousy brown, then the balls, the size of quail eggs, riding high and close in a sac matted with shorter, coarser hairs woven into a merkin so thick that no flesh could be seen through it, then a smallish, circumcised suburban penis, the kind he associated with the shower room at boarding school, and finally the hair running down his inner thighs and shading off into ordinary, sun-bleached leg hair, again the very hair that reminded him of high school basketball players sitting on the sidelines, their silky shorts hiked up and their elbows resting on their knees. At the time, Jack figured, his fear of being caught staring had inhibited him; he hadn’t realized back in high school how he was glorying in all those long, hairy, muscled legs with the hair leading the eye up to their hidden treasure.
Jack preferred Will’s inaccessibility to Peter’s constant presence. Jack preferred daydreaming about the life he might lead with Will to having a real affair with Peter. He liked to imagine what Will’s body would feel like and how it might respond rather than to know all too well how Peter’s functioned. Real sex was too meaty, too medical, as if sex plunged you into all those pulsing, sweating systems, the nerves and valves and secretions, whereas imaginary sex remained speculative, spiritual, sepulchral.
He stopped answering Peter’s calls and even, one evening, his exasperated ringing of the doorbell, and soon enough the Joffrey was off on another national tour. It occurred to Jack that it might have been kinder if he’d simply admitted to Peter that he was in love with another man, a real man, and that he, Jack, was just another fag. Such a confession would have shocked Peter, as if he’d been sleeping with a female. Jack had heard Peter explain that he couldn’t possibly go to bed with another dancer (“And do what?” he’d demanded. “Bump pussies?”). Peter wasn’t even sure he could accept macho men who didn’t at least occasionally have sex with women.
Or maybe Jack had finally rid himself of homosexuality, and he was back to mooning over an unobtainable straight guy. Maybe Will’s function was to be unobtainable, to allow Jack a bit of same-sex yearning without the danger of real cock-and-balls encounters. Jack had hated waking up with Peter. An empty bed every morning was Jack’s proof that he hadn’t chosen his sexuality yet, that he was a blank slate.
In his soul Jack had returned to Will. For him the silent reversion felt momentous, though he was sure Will hadn’t even noticed it. That wasn’t quite fair; Will was a novelist and observed, if not everything, at least whatever fell within his purview. For Will had once explained, in the pretentious way he adopted whenever he talked about his art, that novelists see no more than the man in the street unless it fits into the narrow range of their sensibilities: “It’s as if a camera were rigged to click only at one particular intensity of light and no other.”
Now Jack began to pretend he was behind in his work and to stay late at the office and wait for Will in order to grab a bite with him. Now he started quizzing Will about the novel and made him renew his promise that he, Jack, would be the first reader.
“And so you shall be, my boy,” Will said. “The moment it’s sold.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Jack said, not sure what that expression meant; he hoped it solemnized a promise.
Will invited Jack to go down to Virginia for the point-to-point races. Jack started to make jokes about “dead pieces of animals glued to walls,” but he noticed that those jokes were only funny if they came from an insider; all outsiders who dared to criticize the hunt were considered boorish at worst, irrelevant at least.
They arrived late. The yardman, Cicero, met Jack and Will and Elaine and her children at the train station and drove them out to Upperville in the family’s decrepit, dark blue town car; the interior was carpeted with dog hairs and someone’s cast-aside cashmere sweater worn through at the elbows. No one in the main house was still awake; Pinky, the black maid, was setting “Miz” Elaine’s little house to rights. Pinky looked bone tired and merely mimed a welcome by slapping her knees and bending over to kiss Elaine’s children, Teddy and Phoebe. “Give me some sugar,” she murmured to Teddy, who pushed her aside. He was tired and irritable. Phoebe behaved with an eerie perfection. Her platinum blonde pageboy held back with a royal blue ribbon was impeccable, and she presented her pink cheek to be pecked by the maid.
In the big house only one dim lamp (a polychrome Chinese bull) was turned on under its café crème lamp shade, dangling fringe and scorched by a bulb on one side. A marble clock ticked expensively beside the capacious wing armchair Will had flopped down in; the clock showed a cherub, finger to his lips, just starting to draw a marble curtain across the clockface. It must have been made for a bedroom long ago, Jack figured. He didn’t want to comment on the family’s things. He’d once heard Will criticize someone who’d asked too many questions of that sort.
Jack took the matching chair, and they both sipped Johnny Walker from the bottle Jack had brought down as a “house gift.” They didn’t say much. Jack had to keep remembering that this was Will’s childhood home, as familiar to him as the back of his hand. For Will there was nothing here that was challenging or unknown.
It was an early-nineteenth-century house painted white but peeling. It was at the end of a mile-long lane, straight as the part
in Will’s hair. There must have been fifteen or sixteen rooms, and as Jack strolled through the reception rooms, he saw they were full of hunting prints and images of foxes—everything from eighteenth-century fox heads cast in bronze to dime-store knick-knacks of foxes trotting across crudely painted green grass. The value or quality didn’t seem to matter, just the image of the totemic animal. The wallpaper in the library looked very old and hand-painted, like that in the White House; it showed scenes of the hunt, the women sidesaddle in full skirts, the men in red or black coats, and their mounts surrounded by twenty hounds or more. The paper was sun-faded in one corner.
In every room there were bouquets of wildflowers in silver vases. Big armchairs in worn chintz were drawn up to the cold fireplaces. The glass panes in the windows were tinted violet and were so old they’d warped. The glass was thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom, a reminder that glass is a slow liquid that flows downward over a century or two. In the dining room the big oval table and the ten spindly chairs and the inlaid sideboard resting on tapering legs were all an oxblood mahogany polished so often that you could see where the veneer was wearing thin. The whole house, it seemed, was maintained by Pinky (who cooked and cleaned) and her husband, Cicero. They were as black and shiny as eggplants and seldom spoke and never smiled. Will said that Pinky’s great-grandparents had been slaves right here at Greenmount. He didn’t seem ashamed of it, rather the contrary. Out back was Elaine’s pretty little house, the Rookery, which her father had built her after her divorce. Jack helped her carry her bags in.
At the paddock the next morning Jack could feel small hands of tension digging into his shoulders. His neck was getting stiff, and he bobbed his head to limber it up. He was tense because he didn’t know any of these people and they, of course, knew each other. He was tense because there were all sorts of rituals and uniforms that he didn’t understand or possess, and that clearly counted a lot to the participants. Will put a hand on Jack’s near shoulder and said, “I hope these people aren’t boring you too much. They’re real grind-asses, aren’t they?”