Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  “So there you are at midnight in a Park Avenue apartment drinking whiskey with a lovely bird, and she’s telling you all about her sex life.”

  “She’s not exactly a bird; she’s really very human, Will, a bit of a lady, and just a bit brittle.”

  “And with one of those upper-class Brearley drawls, I bet.”

  “She did go to Brearley but later to Barnard, which was sort of a surprise to me. If you squeezed her too hard, you could break off a part.”

  “You mean she’s bony?”

  “She’s slender, but she has a very nice figure. While I was there she slipped into a rose satin peignoir—what do you call them? A housecoat? No, that sounds frumpy.”

  “A hostess something-or-other.”

  “That sounds right. She wears her hair up off her neck. And she has a long, slender neck and beautiful features. I’m sure she puts her lipstick on with a brush. She just happened to have a lobster dip in the fridge, and she put it in a crystal bowl, the kind of bowl you’d receive at a bridal shower. You know, most of the people we know in New York, their apartments are dirty and cramped and smell funny and have rotting linoleum on the floor, and your aunt Wilma would be horrified. But Alexandra has a proper grown-up apartment on a high floor with a view, and I’m sure she has a maid.”

  “Did she sit very close to you?”

  “As a matter of fact she did.”

  “You fucker,” Will said, grinning, a word that was extremely uncharacteristic of Will but that Jack thought might come out when he was with other Princetonians. They were all terrible drinkers and very rough.

  Suddenly Jack felt that his sad condition as a homosexual, which had quickly begun to pall, had taken a turn for Will toward something more amusing.

  “It’s not fair,” Will said. “You and your girls are meeting all these superior people, and I’m stuck with my sister’s B-list failures, her fallout from failing to land a husband.”

  “Maybe I’ll introduce you to Alexandra.”

  “No, she sounds like a pill with her hostess gown and ill-fitting contacts and her highborn breakable bones. No, I like a nice horsey woman with a good seat and chilblains.”

  “I don’t think we do chilblains in America,” Jack observed. “I’m not even sure what they are.”

  Jack was so afraid of falling into the slovenliness of depression that at home he washed every dish with a lab technician’s precision as soon as he used it. He ran the sweeper every day, as if he were living as a mannequin in a display, a store window, featuring home furnishings.

  Sleep overcame him like a fatality. He could never remember his dreams because he was always awakened by an alarm clock, and the bother of turning it off banished his nocturnal thoughts. But he did walk around during the day certain that his dreams had been dense with incident, metallic and crowded, almost as if they were the plate that printers etched in ink to stamp out cartoons, those miniaturized panels hectic with action and dialogue bubbles.

  Will kept finding reasons to see Jack. Every time they were together, they had to talk about Alexandra, though often as not Will was openly dismissive of her. “You and your rich girls,” he would growl. “You are a snob, after all, Jack Holmes.”

  “My rich girls?”

  “Yeah, what about the blonde from Kennebunkport you sloughed off?”

  Jack resented this tactic. Will clearly wanted to pump Jack for information, but he pretended it was Jack who was seducing Alex, a subtle way of turning him back into a heterosexual while casting him as a libertine. Very flattering. After Will’s little maneuver, Jack was no longer a spooky Liberace; no, he was back to being a regular guy but a dashing villain this time.

  Jack wanted to talk to his shrink nonstop about Will, as one prospector might consult with another over the slightest gleam in the ground, even of fool’s gold. But Dr. Adams seemed bored with Jack’s “symptomatic acting-out,” which she sneered at. Her attitude hurt his feelings. Whereas Jack thought of his love for Will as the one noble feeling of his life, Dr. Adams treated it as playpen stuff, as if two baby boys had thought it great fun to smear each other with their caca. Not only did she consider them to be dirty infants; she also conjured up the image of infantile egotism.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Jack said. “I love Will.”

  She chuckled silently while exhaling smoke from her Kent. She even had the insolence to settle still farther back in the avocado Barcalounger, as if the tedium of Jack’s “circular thinking” deserved nothing more than this horizontal position. Jack had read that Muslims feel that an insult is intended if one shows them the sole of one’s foot; he suddenly sympathized with this premise. He resented the axonometric view of the soles on Dr. Adams’s nearly orthopedic black shoes and of her overflowing ankles in their dark brown nylons. “You’re right. I don’t take too seriously this love of yours.”

  “Your contempt feels very castrating to me,” Jack said. He wished she were a more traditional, noncommittal Freudian; he’d found her through Rebekkah, and now he thought she was too obviously opinionated.

  “Oh, come on, Jack, don’t use a technical term you don’t understand. Why not just say you’re pissed off at me for not playing along with your obsession?”

  “Or pissed off that you label my finest feelings an obsession.”

  Dr. Adams let an expensive two-minute silence roll by; were it not for the continuing smoke signals, he might have thought she was dozing. Finally she said in a soft voice, “I think you have yet to discover your finest feelings.”

  Because she seemed to be beckoning him toward a happier future, Jack burst into tears. Dr. Adams came rising up to vertical in her chair for the occasion. She nudged a box of Kleenex toward him. He wondered bitterly if she ordered the Kleenex by the gross.

  “I’m afraid our time is up,” she said. She blinked in her prehistoric-saurian way, then actually stood, as if she feared he wouldn’t make his exit quickly enough. That she could stand on her back two legs seemed to Jack like an important advance in evolution, one he admired.

  The worst of it was that the natural person for him to complain to about Dr. Adams was Will himself, who considered all shrinks to be charlatans.

  At the next session Jack told her about a long dream he’d had that had left his cortex feeling stained and flooded. “I’d come back to the Northern Review after many years away, and even the old people on the staff were too young to have ever known me, though two of them had heard of me. Someone—maybe it was me—had killed two young men, and they were locked into a beachside office. I mean, it was forty feet from the sea, but it was also somehow an office. There was a part of the dream where I was so happy because I was working on a slightly scandalous article about Alexander Graham Bell’s granddaughter. Then I was back with the two dead bodies, both floating in sort of rubber layettes but beginning to stink anyway.”

  Dr. Adams lowered herself in her bathysphere, the better to be laved in the waters of the unconscious. When she reemerged, her mouth smoking, she said, “I think the two young dead men in this dream are you and Will. It’s your younger, neurotic selves who are dying off to be replaced by—who knows? It’s a hopeful dream.”

  “It is? It left me feeling guilty and scared.”

  “Those are screen feelings,” Dr. Adams said, exhaling with authority. “They conceal the optimism you’re feeling.”

  “Very effectively,” Jack said. “Couldn’t you just as easily say those are my homosexual feelings I want to kill off?”

  Dr. Adams looked him in the eye. “That is what I am saying, Jack. I’m afraid our time is up.”

  Jack felt angry and said, “I’m afraid your time is up. I’m quitting.”

  Dr. Adams turned her mouth down in a circumflex of indifference and exposed her palms as if she could do nothing more about his foolishness.

  “I suppose you think I’m resisting or something.”

  “You said the word, not I,” said Dr. Adams, once again forced to stand, like an English m
onarch dismissing an African prince who hasn’t quite grasped that his audience is over. Standing turned out to be the most dismissive act in her repertory of protocol.

  Without Dr. Adams, Jack felt even lonelier, even crazy, though he had no respect for her. One night weeks ago he’d stuck his head into a gay bar in the West Village filled with horrible old men and their beers and cigarettes and show tunes; he headed there now. After six beers he sidled up to a chalky white young man with a Frankenstein haircut. He was dressed all wrong, like someone from Oshkosh, which Jack found endearing. His tragic approach to his own possibilities didn’t include tenderness toward a fellow sufferer, but in spite of himself he was smiling at this guy’s funny clothes and haircut. It helped that he had a farmworker’s physique, which would have been attractive no matter how it was attired.

  Jack began to pick up a different man almost every night. He’d come home from work and fall into a dreamless sleep, then wake up, grab a sandwich, and head out onto the streets. Sometimes he’d have dinner with the girls, especially if one of them had invited a new, interesting guest, but he’d always duck out early.

  Two years ago the mayor had closed all but two of the bars in the Village, but that meant men were more likely to strike a deal with each other on Greenwich Avenue or Christopher Street or even one of the quiet, dark streets, like Bank or Charles. Jack could remember how thronged the West Village streets had been when he’d first arrived in the city; that had undoubtedly been one of the reasons.

  Usually he was eager to get it all over with as quickly as possible. The minute he came, everything would seem so disgusting and unnatural—the hairy ass, the stubble on the chin, the penis that looked dark and shiny despite the white body, almost as if the penis belonged to a different race or was a vegetable rather than part of a mammal—and Jack would be sickened by how ashamed he felt. He longed for a trapdoor beside the bed into which he could push his trick.

  Jack found something wrong with almost every man. The guy either lisped or had rules about not touching his hair or a crusty bottom or an undescended testicle or aureoles as big and dark as a slice of liverwurst or back and shoulder hair or neglected dental hygiene or a blue fear of being seen by someone he knew in the street … not one queer seemed normal or jolly.

  It occurred to Jack that he was having all these adventures but they scarcely seemed credible even to him, since he had no one to share them with. He had no confidant and didn’t know if he wanted one. Will would have been sickened by the details and seen their accumulation as proof that Jack was making no effort to get well. On the contrary, he was only sinking deeper into vice. Alexandra was sympathetic but only to the sole triste fact of his malady; she wouldn’t want to know that he was exacerbating it, that his homosexuality was something he was practicing and not merely enduring.

  The worst of it was that Jack never felt any affection for his so-called partners. He never wanted to crack a joke with one of them or cook him a midnight hamburger. He wouldn’t have lent one ten dollars. He could afford to have chilly, inflexible principles where there was no affection.

  Once at Alice’s he was introduced to a young man he’d already slept with, but Jack and the guy were both expert in pretending they were meeting for the first time.

  To his surprise, the guy was charming and funny and self-deprecating. Jack could remember almost nothing about him from their encounter, though they’d met just five or six weeks previously. In how many other cases had he poked a man for plumpness or doneness or scorned him for an ugly birthmark or failed to notice his wit or expertise about tapestries?

  At least once a week Alexandra would invite Jack to dinner at her apartment. Always it was just the two of them. Jack suspected that she needed a friend and that, for her, friends (whom she didn’t really understand) must be on as intimate a footing as lovers (whom she knew a lot about). She didn’t feel comfortable around other women. They bored her just a bit and they envied her, which made them hard to tease, Alex’s preferred manner. She could tease in a vigorous way so at odds with her delicate looks, or she could argue like a lawyer, one finger raised. She was smart and combative but always with a smile, even a readiness to laugh at herself when the words came spilling out of her too rapidly and, frustrated, she insisted, “You have no idea what you’re talking about!” though she appeared to be the one who was confused.

  Jack liked the dripless white candles screwed into the big wall sconces, which she’d bought as good copies of English antiques from James Robinson, the silversmith off Fifth Avenue. He liked the mother-of-pearl box of French cigarettes and the silver lighter with the green felt bottom as heavy as a curling stone. He liked the yellow and pale purple freesias smelling of oranges in the silver bowl and the expensive food from a caterer on the corner.

  She smiled at him, her starry smile reminiscent of glamorous Hollywood studio portraits from the twenties. Her teeth were so white they were almost blue. She’d clap her hands and say, “What fun!” though he wasn’t sure she was enjoying herself. Jack felt that by himself he wasn’t sufficiently entertaining to carry a whole evening. He made a fine backup singer, but not a soloist. Alexandra had always wanted a brother, she said, but now that she had one she still seemed unfulfilled. Jack felt the same way; perhaps it was inevitable that Will would join them one evening soon, though Alexandra proclaimed stubbornly that she disliked nothing more than another eligible male on the make.

  “That’s what’s so great about … us,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her that to say “you” would have sounded too curatorial. “Us” sounded better, more polite. “We don’t want anything from each other but insight and affection—we’re like saints, entirely disinterested. Don’t you think we’re saintly, Jack?”

  “I know you’re a saint to feed me smoked salmon on toast points with sour cream on your best Spode.”

  She made him listen to a new record. She’d just learned the twist and wanted to teach it to him. But her specialty was sipping champagne in Waterford crystal filled from the iced bottle in the big bucket. Then she would curl up beside him and tell him about her latest love.

  “He’s a Life reporter—Jim Eisner?—a really big reporter. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of him. He’s done some very dangerous assignments. One about organized crime in Philadelphia. They’re already making a movie about it. And it’s coming out as a book. Seriously, you’ve never heard of Jim Eisner?”

  “No, and I bet you’ve never heard of my last forty-two boyfriends either.”

  “You’re too funny,” she said, insisting that his numerous exploits were comical exaggeration. “But have you ever been in love?” Here her beautiful brow wrinkled with kindly concern.

  “Yes, I’ve told you—with Will. Hopeless love, since he’d sooner sleep with a polecat.”

  “Be serious.” She curled her shoulder-length hair around her finger, which was freighted with enough diamonds to suggest polygamy. “Why can’t this—this Will of yours—I hate the name Will. It sounds like the punch line in a cockney joke. But why can’t this Will of yours be a little more considerate and show you some warmth, some tenderness? I mean, come on, for heaven’s sake, would it matter so much to him to let you hold him for a moment?”

  “I’d only want him to hold me if it did matter to him.”

  She lowered her pretty head in deference to his logic. “Yes,” she nearly whispered, “I can see that.” She thought about it for a moment.

  “Could you hold another girl who was in love with you?” Jack asked.

  Alexandra had been mistily contemplating a scene of brotherly love, a tableau right off the battlefield, but now, faced with heaving breasts and the moist warmth of another woman’s body, she shuddered. “Hardly,” she said. But then she thought about it and cocked her head to one side. “But I say why not? If it would mean so much to her, and if she were my dearest friend—I just hope I wouldn’t get the giggles.”

  “The giggles would spoil everything.”

  Alex
andra cleared away the dishes and the large old silver forks that had just three tines each and brought out a bowl of mousse au chocolat, which had probably started life in several minuscule white cartons from the caterer downstairs.

  Now Alex had an objection: “But it’s not the same thing, some big squishy woman with tears gumming her eyelashes—and a man in love. Men are … upright and forthright—”

  “And right?” Jack looked at her intently.

  “You’re mocking me,” Alexandra wailed.

  “No, I happen to agree with you entirely.” But he did not subscribe to her cult of noble, sensitive masculinity.

  Taking a new approach, Alexandra said, “So what’s so great about your Will?”

  “He’s a fine novelist, among other things,” Jack lied.

  “Gotcha!” Alexandra fluted, jumping up. “You told me yourself, Jack Holmes, that he’s never shown you word one.”

  Jack rubbed his eyes, his lying eyes. “Pathetic, isn’t it? I’m so in love I’m ready to attribute all the virtues to him.” He felt he’d broken through a membrane he might better have left intact. He was acting as if he could lament how “pathetic” he was in a normal, jokey voice, rather than bemoaning it. He’d never before treated his sickness this conversationally.

  Alexandra subsided into a small armchair upholstered in a dull gold fabric. “It’s always that way. We fall in love for no particular reason, certainly no good reason, and then we invent sterling qualities that are supposed to justify our passion.”

  Jack liked this philosophical approach—it seemed so French to insist on the irrationality of the passions in epigrams that posited abstract truths.

  Will quizzed him closely following every one of his evenings with Alexandra. “Man, she’s in love with you! I’m going to pretend to be homosexual—it drives the girls wild! It’s like that play by Wycherley where the guy pretends to be a eunuch so that other men will trust their wives with him.”

  Jack smiled painfully. “Homosexual as capon? Is that the flattering comparison you’re searching for?”