by Edmund White
They were walking back to the drinks table, which was set up near the paddock. “Boring? No, I just feel foolish because I’m not wearing the right clothes.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s just a Virginia thing—no one from elsewhere would dream of owning these weird jackets. Why would they? They’re ugly as shit.” Will lit two cigarettes and handed one to Jack, something he’d never done before. In the strong overhead light Will’s gunshot eyes were lost in shadow, but he was obviously looking closely at Jack. “I’m just grateful you came down here so we can look at the freak show together.”
Jack felt a surge of joy race through his body, and he was afraid his cheeks might be turning red. “I don’t think of it as a freak show. It’s a noble old tradition. I’m only afraid of looking out of place.”
“Don’t worry about that. Remember, you’re with me, and blood don’t get any bluer than mine.” Will laughed at his own absurdity, but Jack felt that Will’s words were like a heavy wool cape draped over his shoulders protecting him from the cold.
Will had on the right plaid jacket, but a faded hand-me-down one, which suited him and seemed all the more traditional. He guided Jack around and introduced him not as a school friend nor as a friend from work; he’d just say, “Furlong, this is Jack,” and he wouldn’t give any further talking points to his friends.
That evening they had dinner with Will’s family. They were nine at the table, and Pinky brought out a platter of sloppy joes but on a heavy nineteenth-century salver. There was also a Rice-A-Roni pilaf served in a large silver bowl on which cherubs chased each other around the lip. Most of the conversation was about fetching the butter dish or the applesauce. Jack had no idea what sort of wine they were drinking, since it was presented in an amber glass ewer inserted into a silver sleeve, but he was sure it was a cheap one, maybe even a local one.
Will’s father said grace before they began to eat. Something brief and impersonal, not at all like the long, improvised to-do lists Jack’s Baptist relatives liked to impose on the deity (“And may little Billy be successful in his 4-H contest later today, O Lord”). Here the meal seemed like a giant jigsaw puzzle that had to be swiftly put together, then taken apart with no time at all to contemplate the final pattern. No, it was all just coming and going, this meal.
Jack kept thinking how lucky he’d been not to be born into a big, powerful family with traditions and expectations. He, Jack, had had nothing to rebel against except brute force and lunatic excess, whereas Will had to dodge through the minefield of his mother’s strategic silences and his father’s withering smiles. Will’s mother, as she was dishing up the chocolate pudding, said, “Will, you should be a little nicer to Taffy. She’s pining over you.”
“Taffy Ladew? You can’t be serious. That girl is an albino and has an IQ of 70.”
Elaine said, “Mother, Will isn’t interested in girls. At least not currently.”
Will said, “Why, sure I am. And I have a lot to offer them with the five dollars I currently have in the bank, my eleven square feet of habitation ripe with old banana peels on the floor, my serious acne problem, my unpublished novel, a beginner’s job in publishing, and no prospects. What girl wouldn’t leap at the chance to date me?”
Will’s mother said unsmilingly, “Not all girls are materialistic, Will. You have a fine mind and a sterling character.”
Will made a face and said, “And those merits will get you a one-way subway ride in New York City.”
Will’s father said, rather primly, “You may have just put your finger on what’s wrong with New York. Who wants an after-dinner drink? Thank you, dear, for the lovely meal,” and Will Sr. stood up and sauntered off.
Neither of Will’s parents treated Jack with any perceptible warmth. They didn’t ask him questions or tease him or collude with him; they weren’t seductive, as Jack’s parents had been with his friends, behavior that had made it impossible for Jack to complain about his mother and father. Jack’s parents used to systematically make conquests of the boys he brought home from school, though later, after the guests had departed, they ridiculed them in shockingly precise ways (“Such sensual little hands that Tommy has”).
Will’s parents, by contrast, were refreshingly cool and content to maintain their distance as parents and hosts. Jack thought that Will Sr. was more handsome than his son, more poised and elegant and sorted. If Will Jr. became more and more like his father over time, that would be all to the good.
Will’s father now sat in the drawing room in front of a portrait of himself as a younger man.
Lying in his uncomfortable four-poster bed that night, Jack thought that with such a family baying behind him and nipping at his heels, Will could never vanish or throw the others off his scent. Jack had been surprised that Will’s mother had been urging him to pursue Taffy Ladew, whose family was famous for gardens worthy of Versailles and nearly as extensive and varied. Her ambition to find Will a rich wife seemed out of character. Of course Will couldn’t ever experiment with homosex, even if he happened to belong to the 3 percent of the population who liked that sort of thing. No, Will would be reviled if he so much as married a delicate blonde heiress who was a Protestant, for chrissakes. Something Will Sr. had said had revealed that New York publishing was already considered daring enough, given that the young Will could have entered the failing family law practice.
Jack had always thought of himself as an extra in an opera, as an indistinguishable part of the crowd scene, but his passion for Will had singled him out, drawn him forward from the hooded ranks, shone a spotlight on his upraised face. In his own eyes, at least, he was now a lead if not a star, and he didn’t like the attention.
But now he understood better than at any time previously how much pressure Will’s family exerted on him. Jack placed all his own queer hopes of seducing Will on Will’s destiny as a novelist. Because Will’s art required him to study his world and himself, to map out his foibles and sound its shallows, he had every reason to be as original in his life as in his writing. Will’s idol, Thomas Pynchon, had studied New York by looking up from its sewers, and he had mixed comic book riffs into the reasonable strains of urban realism. Wasn’t Will under an obligation to be just as odd and original, just as strange?
But did Will have any talent? It was just a prejudice, but Jack thought that Will would be more forthright about his writing if he knew he was good, and if he were good, he’d know he was. Were there really any mute, unsung Miltons? Milton himself had become famous very young, hadn’t he, as much for his beauty as for his Latin verses. Jack felt that both he and Will were betting everything on Will’s talent. If his novel was a success, Will would be free of his family. If he was free of his family and Virginia and Catholicism, Will might realize he loved Jack as much as Jack loved him.
In a dream, Jack floated up out of his bed and met Will in the bathroom between their rooms. They embraced—in fact Will was surprisingly the more ardent one, digging a sharp finger into Jack’s back and streaking a slimy tongue, like a snail’s pseudopod, down Jack’s long neck.
He woke up to hear someone outside calling Will’s name. When Jack went to the window, he could see it was Will’s mother in jodhpurs and a tight jacket and a matching hat tied under her chin. Will threw open his window and called down, “What is it, Mother? I was sleeping.”
“Leander wants to say hello,” she said. It took a moment for Jack to realize that Leander was the horse.
“Well, hello to you, Leander. Now I’m going to grab a few more z’s.”
“You could ride the Puckster if you wanted.”
“We’ll see, Mother.”
Jack realized he’d observed no other contact between mother and son except for the misguided prompt about Taffy. They were both shy and needed to move the horses as chessmen in their game.
Will went off to the hunt ball that evening, but Jack had said that he hated dances and didn’t have a tux and preferred watching TV at home and relaxing with the childre
n, who all cheered. They’d taken a liking to Jack, who played silly games with them and was even willing to be the fox they hunted. At one point Jack caught little Teddy streaking baby Phoebe’s forehead with a bead of sweat that had fallen from Jack’s face. “What are you doing?” Jack asked.
“I’m blooding her.”
“Bleeding her?”
“No, silly. I’m blooding her.”
When Jack looked up at Elaine, she sighed and said, “It’s another grotesque ritual from the wonderful world of fox killing. The first time a child goes on a hunt, they daub him or her with the fox’s blood, Lord knows why. It’s called ‘blooding.’ Marks them for life as a moron.” Elaine laughed. “People don’t do it much anymore. It’s dying out. You’re going to tell everyone in New York about your weekend with the savages.”
“Do you think foxhunting should be outlawed?” Jack asked her.
Before she could answer, Will came in wearing black tie, about to head out for the ball. “Oh, look at His Serene Elegantissimo,” Elaine said.
“Yes,” Will said, “I’ll make the most elegant shadows in the darkest corner.”
“Promise me,” Elaine said, “that you’ll ask Taffy to dance just once, just once, Will.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said, “but I don’t socialize with albino feebs.”
“She has thirty-seven million dollars,” Elaine said. “If you add her millions to her IQ, it brings her nicely up into the normal range.”
“Just because you’re a fortune hunter, there’s no reason to assume—” Will said, but Elaine beat the air with her hand and anxiously hushed him, glancing significantly at the children.
“Okay, I’m off,” Will said. Framed by the wide doorway, he looked like a celebrity photo out of the past, a black-and-white Weegee of a Biddle or an Astor. Jack thought that this weekend had stolen Will from him, made him less of an individual and more of a personage, less a close-up and more just another face in a dynastic lineup.
After he’d gone and Jack had rough-housed with the children for half an hour, Elaine said, sipping on her cigarette, “You two boys are such good friends!”
“Well, we met at work.”
“You got Will his job. He’s so grateful to you.”
“I didn’t even know Will then; it was just a favor I was doing for Alice. Why didn’t she come down for the races?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Not her sort of thing. Alice is such a free spirit! Of course, she’s making her documentary about us all. Maybe next year she’ll get around to shooting the race. You must come back next year. I can see how close you and Will are.”
“I’m devoted to Will,” Jack said, as if to defend his friend’s honor, “but I’m only one of Will’s many acquaintances.”
“Much more than that. Will is such a loner. He’s one of the rare people I know who genuinely prefer their own company, but with you—”
“It’s almost as if he’s alone?” Jack asked, laughing at the revelation.
“Possibly,” she conceded. “Because with true soul mates we experience no conflict. We’re completely at peace.”
Jack couldn’t tell if she was mocking him by speaking in such a serious way. The whole discussion made him uneasy. Did she suspect they were both queers and feel that her duty as a sister and a Catholic was to intervene, to get her brother out of the clutches of this fiend-friend? Or did the queer option intrigue her? Perhaps now that, as a divorcée, she was a pariah (unless the pope could be bribed to annul her marriage), she was looking for allies in her rebellion against piety. After all, despite her efforts to protect her children’s innocence, she was celebrated among her friends for her candor about seeking a rich second husband. Would she consider a homosexual to be a fellow rebel against conformity?
Jack didn’t think he was a nonconformist; he simply loved Will. If he could have magically turned himself into a girl whom Will would want to marry, he’d have done it without hesitation. He’d have converted to Catholicism, become a woman, borne Will’s many children, shopped for dresses at Peck and Peck, learned to cook Rice-A-Roni—where was the rebellion in any of that? Not that Jack was interested in being a woman. He’d never daydreamed about a sex change. He didn’t secretly experiment with makeup or window-shop for dresses or fold his towel into a turban and study his steamy reflection in the mirror, the way Peter did. He liked women and had more female friends than male, but if the price of marrying Will had been banishing all other women from the face of the earth, he would gladly have paid it.
“Are you going to wait up for Will?” Elaine asked as she prepared to go back to the Rookery. She gave him a sweet, confiding smile.
“Wait up!?” Jack exclaimed, as if the very notion were absurd, though he’d been planning on it. “I’m off now to grab some z’s.” He realized as he said it how pathetic he was to deny Will with an expression right out of his mouth.
In bed Jack beat off thinking about Will’s naked body. He thought about the scar from the boil on his neck and about his strong legs and deflated, charmless butt. Jack was careful not to get any come on Will’s mother’s sheets.
On the train back to New York the cars were steeped in cigarette smoke, and no one had washed the toilets in a century. Jack had to piss over lava layers of other people’s shit ranging from yellow to black. Wet cigarette butts were crushed out in the sink. The paper doilies used as headrests on the seats were soiled and dangling lopsidedly. The train would creep into a field, then squeal to a stop and sit there for twenty minutes, creaking strangely before inching backward for another ten minutes.
The only way not to go crazy in a train is to treat it as a Christian penance, Will said. His eyes looked very small and poached through his wraparound sunglasses, which gave an incongruously contemporary look to his long Gothic face, more suited to a visor than to tinted plastic.
“And did you ever dance with the famous Taffy?” Jack asked. The violent lurching of the train had caused Jack’s right knee to touch Will’s left; neither of them pulled apart.
“You can’t imagine what an abortion she is,” Will said. “The whole ball was a collection of freaks—I tried to see it through your eyes, as if you’d gone. Reedy eighteen-year-old boys pushing matrons of eighty around the floor. Some of the extra men so immature they were playing tag in the cloakroom. And the food—as if all any dish required to be gourmet was a gooey white sauce.”
Jack turned his body slightly toward Will’s and put a hand on Will’s thigh, then twisted his head away in an agony of laughter and said, “Stop! You’re killing me.”
Will levered his long body out of the seat and lurched off to the filthy toilet—surely, Jack thought, just an excuse to pull free, since he had peed only ten minutes before, and sure enough, on his return Will sprawled across the empty seats on the other side of the aisle and said he was going to try to sleep a bit. He rolled up his gabardine coat as a pillow.
Jack felt cruelly rebuffed and decided that soon he would come clean with Will, but he wasn’t quite sure how he would do it. At the next stop two old ladies got on. Their Southern voices sounded sweet and musical as they talked to each other in the seats just ahead. They spoke so softly that Jack couldn’t distinguish words. They were so near that Jack wouldn’t be able to talk privately with Will. He thought of his grandmother and her two sisters, whom he’d known just after the war when he was only six or seven, visiting out in East Texas. He could remember a room with the shades drawn, a room crowded by the big soft bed under its chenille bedspread. Little Jack sat on the bed in short pants and a carefully ironed white shirt, smiling and looking up at the three old ladies, all big and white and pillowy with huge naked breasts marked by veins.
He’d never seen his own mother naked, and he was surprised by these huge breasts. “Jack, aren’t you too old to be looking at ladies’ boozies?” his grandmother asked, laughing. One aunt ruffled his hair, and the other suggested he run out and play. He’d never thought of his grandmother as a woman be
fore—more as a matron with a firm, molded mono-bosom and a diamond brooch and a low, Southern twang than as a woman with soft white breasts like warm dachshunds in constant motion, dogs with huge brown noses. The room where the three ladies were dressing smelled sweet from the clouds of powder they were dusting each other with. Half clothed, their bodies looked fat and pendent and puffy. He could see them, moving about on their stiff legs, reflected in the freestanding full-length mirror, the glass tilted slightly upward and held in a carved oak frame stained black. Their room felt secretive and girlish, and though his grandmother had always doted on him, he now saw her as a stranger, a member of a gleeful, secret sorority.
He liked these two old women ahead of him on the train and thought he’d been too hasty in wanting to trade in the whole female race for a chance to marry Will. He looked out as the train passed a corrugated-metal shed, rusting in the weak sunlight, and his eyes filled with tears. He glanced quickly over at Will’s sprawled body, his hands folded over his chest like those of a tomb effigy, but he was certain Will wasn’t really sleeping.
The next day at the office he left promptly at five. Will said, “Where are you going in such a rush?”
Jack said, “I have an appointment with a psychotherapist.”
“What? A what? I didn’t know you were seeing a shrink.”
“It’s my first … session.”
“Why on earth—was Virginia too much for you? Did we drive you around the bend?”
“Yes, in a sense,” Jack said without a smile. From where he was standing, just outside Will’s cubicle, Will looked as if he were a character in a play, a very realistic contemporary one about New York life. Jack felt so tired; he was middle-aged spiritually.
Will looked up at him through his eyebrows, the same seductive look he’d used on his pretty young date at El Faro. “Are you serious?”