by Edmund White
“Yes,” Jack said, looking away. “I realized I’m in love with you and that it’s an illness and it’s getting worse and our friendship isn’t going anywhere.”
Will crossed his legs protectively and glanced at the magazine on his desk. “What? Are you joking? What are you saying?” He drew a deep breath, as if absorbing bad news. Then he said, “I’m so sorry if I’ve done anything to cause you any pain or to lead you on, if that doesn’t sound too high school.” Will sketched in a nervous smile but immediately canceled it in deference to Jack’s disease. Jack noticed Will didn’t deny that their relationship wasn’t going anywhere, whatever that meant.
“Well, I’m going to be late if I don’t step on the gas,” Jack said. “Maybe we can talk about all of this later.” He noticed how Will’s face froze. “If you want to. Maybe you don’t want to.”
Will waved imaginary bees away from his face and said, “No, no, I want to, I want to,” which sounded sort of Jewish to Jack’s ears. Jack thought, We’re all so unused to expressing our feelings that we end up sounding like Woody Allen or Molly Goldberg. She’s our only model for passionate utterance. He felt sorry for Will, so cornered, obviously wishing it would all just go away.
“Want to have dinner around eight, down in the Village? Maybe Monte’s?” Jack asked. He was hurting inside. Somehow he’d expected a miracle, that Will would say, “I love you too, and we will live together our whole lives.” Until now Jack had been able to nurse his illusions; now he had to deal with the facts. In his fantasies he’d been playing with clouds; now he had to pick up solid boxes with sharp corners. Reality felt like a pitiful comedown.
“Sounds like a plan,” Will said, his eye feverishly scanning the article spread out before him, his hands tense on the armrests of his chair.
When Jack walked into the nearly empty restaurant, he saw that Will hadn’t arrived yet, even though Jack himself was fifteen minutes late. Jack was starting his second manhattan when Will came flying in.
After he’d made his apologies and ordered a martini, Will said, “Well, how did it go? Did he make you lie down on the couch?”
“No, it’s a woman, tall, with hooded eyes. She smokes Kents and has fat legs that are sort of served up to you by her Barcalounger.”
“A Barcalounger!” Will exclaimed. “Upholstered in avocado green leatherette?”
“You got it in one.”
“African art?”
“Bingo.” Jack laughed. “I didn’t realize you’d been psychoanalyzed.”
“I dated a Jewish girl in Charlottesville whose mother was some sort of seedy Jungian who actually talked about the anima and the animus over dinner. I thought they were two different kinds of enema.”
“The enemas are saved for the second date.”
They both sighed at the same moment and consulted the menu, though they knew it by heart. Will ordered the fish and Jack the cannelloni.
Jack kept thinking that he could just as easily burst out laughing and shout, “April Fools!” and wheel in a giant cake from which girls in pasties and bikinis would pop out, that he could tap Will on the chest and say, “Fooled you! Man, you should’ve seen your face. You were practically sobbing with sympathy for the best friend turned cocksucker, but you were shitting bricks too, thinking, fuck! Am I going to have to go all pious for weeks on end nursing this lisping pansy out of his closet when I’d just as soon nail the bitch shut?”
Suddenly Jack had to admit how arbitrary (if violent) and changeable his feelings were, velvet robes with lots of Velcro that could be patted shut or ripped open.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think I’m just making all of this up.”
Will was being very polite and respectful of the sickness, the big fag sickness that had replaced his best buddy, his office sidekick. “It’s all new to me,” Will said. “I even found myself combing my hair just before I walked in here tonight, wanting—but not really!—wanting to make sure you still found me attractive. I never felt like a sex object before. Now I know how girls must feel. It seemed so crazy with all the handsome studs out there that you’d go and pick shy, pimply Will. I question your taste! But this”—and here Will looked at him steadily and let his smile fade, fearing he was fishing for compliments—“is not about me for once. It’s about you, Jack.” And a faint frown of sympathy creased his forehead. He looked mortified by his own badinage about such a grave subject. Or maybe he feared he’d made a misstep by turning Jack’s love into sexual desire; maybe Will hoped it was all very ethereal and spiritual—no cocksucking, just hand-holding.
“Dr. Adams—she’s a Viennese Jew, but her name is Adams for some reason—thinks the ‘object choice problem’—that’s you—is just a symptom of a deeper problem.”
“Which is what?” Will asked, a bit indignant. “Deeper than me? How could that be? Like bed-wetting? Thumb-sucking?”
“Boy, you really hate shrinks, don’t you? Almost as much as pop music.”
“I just see them as con men and not based in science. What they believe can’t be verified or disproved.”
“What would you do if you had a real problem? I guess you have your priests for that.”
Will’s eyes widened with the slight shock of hearing his religion dismissed or even mentioned. He shrugged and said, “I can’t even imagine facing something like this.”
Without thinking, Jack shot back, “Oh really? You can’t even imagine it? I thought novelists were good at imagining things.”
Will closed his eyes and let thirty seconds trickle by. “There are plenty of freaky things in my life, but homosexuality—” He broke off as the waiter came by to replenish the breadbasket, which they’d nervously emptied as hungry young men will do.
“Plenty of freaky things?” Jack asked, surprised by his own sarcasm. “Like your preference for Ravel over Debussy?”
“That’s funny,” Will said, not smiling.
After the waiter brought their food, Jack said, “Isn’t it nice that the waiters here are real lifetime waiters, not actors and singers and dancers? These guys have a certain dignity.”
“Why is that nice?” Will asked. “You sound like my father. He’d agree with you that it was nice someone was trapped in a dead-end job.”
A long silence settled over them. At last Will asked, “How do you want me to act?”
Several answers raced up to Jack’s lips, but all of them implied that Will might someday love him. “No, you’re fine,” Jack said. “You’ve said nothing wrong. In fact you’re being understanding.”
“I should hope so!” Will said with mild indignation.
But then neither of them knew what form that understanding should take, and Jack, deciding to laugh it off, said, “What about your preference for Ravel? I was working up an article idea at the office, and I found out that Debussy had one of the first colostomies and Ravel wore face powder, rice powder in fact. Do you think he was a homo?”
Will winced at the word, recognizing that Jack had just flipped him a verbal bird. “Absolutely nothing is known about Ravel’s sex life. He was tiny and lived in a doll’s house and had a hundred ties made by Proust’s haberdasher and—‘That’s all, folks!’ ” he called out, singing the cartoon tag.
“We’re exhausted by our erudition,” Jack said. “Are you any good at thinking up story ideas?”
“There’s the rub,” Will said, neglecting his food as if Jack’s neuroses had killed his appetite. “The other day Gephardt said that the only good story ideas come from the staff. That freelance writers never think of anything exciting or new, though they can be led to water. But when we do come up with something, it gets killed. Harriet brings out her files and says we’re being precipitous. And didn’t Horizon just do their own four-page foldout on that very subject?”
“Frustrating,” Jack said.
They stuck close to office gossip for the rest of the evening, but as they chatted a terrible sadness rang inside Jack’s head. He realized that until now nothing had been spelle
d out. Until recently he and Will had never so much as mentioned the word “homosexuality,” and Jack had been able to make bargains with a God he didn’t believe in about an impossibility he couldn’t name. The idea that a month earlier he would have been satisfied with “just” two years of making meat loaf for Will and sucking his cock every night now seemed not only pathetic but close to insane. He’d built this fantasy out of air and set it on sand; it was the wishing equivalent to paranoia, only yearning replaced suspicion.
On his way home alone during this first balmy night of April, Jack walked up West Fourth Street past Village apartments glowing with lights in a delightful hodgepodge that looked like the set for act two of La Bohème. Curtains billowed in third-floor windows. Naked trees were beginning to think about getting ready for whatever was supposed to happen next. The street curved on the diagonal and confusingly cut across other numbered streets (he was on the corner of West Fourth and West Eleventh). A few people in sweaters or windbreakers were sitting on stoops. Coffee shops and restaurants were open for business, but no one much seemed to care or to be around, the excited opening notes wouldn’t be played for another three minutes and the chorus was still putting on costumes and makeup. The set was half lit with work lights but not yet dressed with people.
Jack’s heart pounded as it usually did as he drew nearer his own apartment, but now it was worse, as if someone had taken away a holy medal he wore around his neck, his St. Will! A medal against the demon of loneliness and the dragon of self-hatred. He wondered what he’d think ten years from now. Was this just a foolish schoolboy crush, foolish because he was already twenty-two, an age when many guys were married and the father of a first kid? Would he now find a girl, affectionate and pretty? He knew that was what Will wished for him.
He pictured Herschel’s knowing winks at work, the way he had once said of Will, “Your boyfriend’s waiting for you down in the lobby.”
Herschel had told him that half of the men and a third of the women on their floor, the eleventh, had made a pass at him. One day Herschel had arrived at work with a horrible black eye that was turning yellow at the edges and covered half his face; a bone in his cheek had been shattered as well. Herschel said, “Hubby don’t like Baby sharing his dainty around.”
“God, Herschel, you could lose your eye,” Jack said. He hadn’t even known until then that Herschel had a “hubby.”
“Oh well, honey, I’ve still got another eye.”
And Jack recognized that Herschel took himself no more seriously than that, that he thought of himself as an ephemeral fated to pivot gorgeously around for a season and then dry up and die. For his part, Jack didn’t know what he was, what kind of plant or animal. When he was unhappy, sometimes he would contemplate suicide, but just as surely he would have jumped out of the path of a speeding car on his way to his death. He had his teeth cleaned twice a year, he went to the doctor for his annual checkup, his reflexes were hammered, his heart auscultated—and all for what? So that he could enjoy his misery in perfect health?
Now he felt more alone than ever. Now he knew that his feelings baffled and sickened Will. For months and months Jack had battened off hopes and dreams; now he had nothing to feed his imagination and he was truly solitary. No future; failed dreams in the past; and the present empty. At home he lay down on the corduroy couch. Everything in his apartment—the blue water jug, the heavy oak sideboard from the Salvation Army, the shiny, recently installed parquet floor and the Swedish area rug, the copy of an Eames chair that had cost him a month’s salary—all these things nauseated him because they stank of his own personality, which he no longer liked. Everything represented a choice he’d made: the wrong choice. All his choices were wrong.
He’d never fainted in his life, but he wondered if this was the way it felt—a nerveless squalor and collapse, the last of your vital energies dripping from your feet and hands, your bones so soft they might tear like wet paper.
He lay there in the darkness for a long time. He looked at his watch, which required a major investment of energy, and saw that it was just midnight. He thought he should get up, clean his house, do push-ups, study Spanish from that new book that guaranteed mastery in twenty lessons—but then it came to him that his only reason for improving himself was to please Will, as if he were a Victorian girl who was acquiring all the polite accomplishments.
For the next week he made himself get to work on time, book up his evenings, do his jumping jacks and push-ups, keep his apartment tidy. He knew he couldn’t indulge his despair even for an hour or the perpetual-motion machine would freeze; he’d never escape the stasis of depression.
The real challenge was seeing Will at the office. In the staff meeting, that Monday morning at ten, Jack cleverly drew Mary-Beth the copy editor into a conversation about the vacation in the Canaries she’d just returned from, so that it would seem only natural that he’d take the chair next to hers rather than his usual place beside Will. When his eyes grazed Will’s during the meeting, he raised his palm and waved, but he suspected that his face gave him away—not its expression, which he was carefully regulating, but its age, after the weekend he’d endured. He was so sure that he was pale and hollowed out by all the thousands of square centimeters of duration he’d been subjected to that he wanted to run to the bathroom mirror to study the change wrought by passing time and somehow rub it off. He’d been put in a time machine, not one that had transported him to a different decade but one that had aged him. Jack had experienced everything, or at least much too much. His own suffering must be laughably obvious; Will must be saying to himself, “Look what the cat dragged in.”
In fact, that afternoon Will came by his office cubicle during the three o’clock coffee break. Sal, with his coffee wagon, was doing his usual booming business, stationed beside the service elevator. Jack heard him ask, “Hey, Will, how come you never buy a coffee and a sweet roll in the morning anymore? Got some babe who’s making you a champagne breakfast? You don’t need to answer that one. That dreamy look in your eyes—the whole story’s right there.”
Will clearly realized that Jack must have heard Sal. He mumbled, “I’m back staying with my sister, the only dame who can put up with me. But sure, Sal, have it your way—a knockout starlet is running out every morning to the bakery on the corner for me.” The whole little scene with Sal was deeply embarrassing. To Sal, because he knew how to tease while keeping it light and general, and here things had taken a confessional nosedive. To Jack, because he didn’t want to play the jealous lover, even if he was jealous and in love. To Will, because his tossed-off witticism had become such a clunker.
Now Will was here and he wanted to go out for a drink after work. Jack said sure. He almost added, “Like old times.”
When they were settled in a booth at the Irish bar downstairs, they talked about today’s story conference. Then Jack said, “I’ve been meeting such interesting people.”
Will said, “Really? Like who?”
“Well, the girls have been inviting new people to dinner every night. We’ve decided we’re already stale at age twenty-two. So the plan is to invite someone new every night to join us for our horrible spaghetti dinners. If they come back, we know it’s not for the cuisine.”
“But like who?” Will insisted.
“Well, Rebekkah is working at the New York Review of Books. She invited one of the debs from work. Most of the girls who work there are named Alexandra or Poppy, and their fathers own Squaw Valley or something, though you’re never told that directly.”
“So you met Alexandra Newton?”
“Yeah, do you know her?”
“I’ve seen her picture on the society page. What’s she like?”
“She’s a native New Yorker, but she’d never been on the subway before last night when I took her on one. I was taking her home. She lives on Sixty-fourth off Park.”
“What else? Is she nice?”
“I’m tempted to say she’s very well brought up, but I guess that’
s not something surprising that you people would notice about each other.”
“You people!” Will growled.
“She’s tall, very lean, wears what I’d call party clothes, all pale colors and taffeta that crackles when she moves. Her contacts don’t fit her very well, and after we went up to her place for a drink, she eventually emerged from the bathroom in big black Steve Allen glasses.”
Will clutched his chest as if the thought of a thin debutante in glasses was the ultimate arrow to his heart. “She had you up for drinks! You lucky SOB! How late did you stay?”
“Till midnight. She had a great bottle of scotch.”
“What was her place like?”
“One bedroom. Everything matched. Light colors. Persian carpets—even they were light colors.”
“You’re practically engaged! Man, you know how to move.”
But Jack wasn’t ready to be hustled along into heterosexuality. “I told her I have homosexual … tendencies.”
“You did? After how much booze?”
Was Will wounded that he, Jack, had confided during a first meeting with a total stranger the things he had taken a year to tell Will? Or did he fear that it could get around in smart circles that he, Will, had a queer crony? Knowing that someone was queer could place him at your mercy and, if you blabbed about it, could cost him his job. It was just as incriminating to be a fag’s friend.
Jack realized that his own indiscretion could get him fired.
“How does that work?” Will asked.
“What?”
“If you tell a pretty girl you’re queer, does she trust you more? Hey—good seduction technique, Holmes.”
“Stiff price to pay, though, don’t you think?” Jack asked, amused in a slightly disgusted way that Will’s own longings had upstaged any compassion he might have felt for his best buddy.
“So this Alexandra—did she match stories with you?”
“You mean, one of her men for one of mine? If she did, I’m not at liberty to tell you. Everything we said was confidential. We trust each other.”