by Edmund White
“What New York Times? Never heard of that fuckin’ rag. Used it once to wipe my ass, but it wasn’t much good even for that.”
“Okay, that’s the kind of talk I like. I’ll be down in an hour.”
It was only six. “Perfect,” Jack said.
Will brought a bottle of very good Bordeaux that he said had been “floating around” his sister’s house. He looked pale and hollow eyed and unshaved, and Jack suspected a direct question would make him shatter. Jack didn’t touch him or look at him. He’d read that autistic children feel attacked by direct eye contact, and he decided to treat Will with therapeutic avoidance. He had also decided to take Rebekkah at her word and do nothing but stick a lemon in the chicken and pour some olive oil over it—and shove it in a medium oven for an hour. He was already sautéing the potatoes slowly in butter.
“That smells good,” Will said, his lips almost blue, his long nose bluer, his eyes the dull, faded blue of old denim. He looked like someone on his first day up after surgery. Jack had hidden his copy of the Sunday Times in the bedroom closet and could think of no good reason Will would go in there.
Jack turned on the TV while he puttered around setting the table and looking after their drinks. “Try these potato chips, Will. They’re amazingly good. Do you know Lay’s?”
“Can’t say I do, my boy,” Will said with heroic chipperness.
“What is it with this ‘my boy’ stuff, Will?” Jack’s instincts told him it would be bracing to challenge Will about something, but something completely trivial, certainly non-literary.
But everything led back to books. Will said, “I guess it’s like Gatsby saying ‘Old Boy’ to everyone.”
“No, no,” Jack said with some urgency, “it’s much better.” He stopped short and realized he’d almost suggested that Will was a better writer than Fitzgerald.
They watched TV while they sipped their scotch and ate potato chips. Several times Will said, “Damn! These chips are really good,” and Jack nodded sagely. He was beginning to wonder if he’d be able to get the dinner on the table, but he was sure Will would just laugh if he dropped or burned it. He’d already burned the potatoes, though they tasted good, and Will said, “They’re caramelized, Old Boy, caramelized,” holding up a didactic finger, and for the rest of the evening he used Gatsby’s irritating “Old Boy” and managed to work “caramelized” into the conversation several times.
At last Jack got the chicken, which he split in half, onto a platter. Will looked at the charred carcass and the burned potatoes and peas and said, “Are you sure you’re not a heterosexual man? This looks like a meal prepared by an incontestably heterosexual man.” He was having trouble enunciating “incontestably” and “heterosexual” and had to back up and try them several times over.
By the time they were finally seated, two thirds of the scotch was gone and Jack had opened the wine. The TV was blaring in the background (it was What’s My Line?, and Bennett Cerf was saying something droll and looking dapper in his tux). Will had stabbed an incinerated chicken wing and was waving it in Jack’s face: “This is the best damn straight cock I’ve ever eaten.”
“Have some more wine,” Jack said. “You must never eat straight coq without vin.”
They both thought that was so funny that they laughed until they were spraying bits of wine-soaked chicken.
“Unless it’s caramelized,” Will shouted, rising halfway up out of his chair with such violence that it tipped over. “Unless it’s caramelized heterosex—historo—heterosexu—oh fuck! It’s inedible unless it’s caramelized.”
“Even gay cock has to be caramelized,” Jack said solemnly, as he stood to fill their wineglasses.
Will clicked his heels and offered a toast: “To straight and gay cock, au vin or au caramel, may it always be juicy!”
Jack raised his glass, calling out, “Hear, hear, juicy!”
They both settled down heavily. They were looking very serious and formal.
By the time they finished pushing their burned “cock” around their plates, What’s My Line? was coming to an end. Frank Sinatra was on, and he was supposed to identify the mystery guest, but he couldn’t. Finally it was revealed that the guest was his new wife, the child bride Mia Farrow.
“Frankie!” Will shouted reproachfully. “It’s your own fuckin’ wife, Frankie, Old Boy! Your very own!” He stood up, as aggrieved as a baseball fan toward the umpire.
Jack wondered where all this would lead. He turned off the floor lamp and in the quaking bluish-white light projected by the television screen sat next to Will on the couch. Following his policy of no touching or eye contact, which he’d established a decade ago at the beginning of this evening, Jack stayed in his corner and looked at the screen. But then Bennett Cerf, who was the head of Random House, started to talk about a new best-selling book, and Will scooted way back and covered his eyes with his hand. Jack got up and switched the channel to the late news and sat back down beside Will. After a moment’s silence, Will started groaning as if stung and turned his head away and shook silently. Jack sat forward and put a hand on Will’s shoulder and said, “It’s so damn unfair. It was probably some damn grad student who’s never read anything but Spenser and Milton.”
In a clotted voice trembling with anger, Will said, “I feel so humiliated. It’s right there for everyone to read. And—sorry, Jack—it sounds so faggy to be whimsical and fey—I mean, ‘fey’ is a way of saying fairyish, right?”
“Don’t forget that it’s just one person’s opinion, a person you probably wouldn’t even cross the room to speak to.”
“Yeah, but people read the Times like it’s holy writ,” and he started to shake some more, his back shuddering with soundless sobs. Jack wasn’t sure if he’d said “holy writ” or “as though it’s,” because his words were stifled by his hand.
Jack patted him in what he hoped was the least sexual and most veterinarian way possible. But maybe Will would interpret any touch—no, he was suffering, for god’s sake, he needed succor, it was the least Jack could do. Jack put an arm around Will, who suddenly stood up and exposed a terrible face of pain. It was as if he’d slammed into a waffle iron—his face was mottled and pale but crisscrossed with red lines, and his blue eyes almost seemed to be leaking diluted blue tears. “Don’t you see, Jack, how humiliating it is? No one in this fuckin’ culture wants you to succeed. They want you to be as lame and pitiable as they are.” He was chopping the air with both hands.
Will poured himself more whiskey and knocked it back. “If you make it, then they’re all bowing and scraping around you, they can’t wait to befriend you. But on your way up, if they can possibly knock you down, they will.”
In one cold corner of his mind Jack hated all this talk about “them” and what “they” do or don’t do to “you.” He thought that everything, including fame, was a lot chancier than Will’s theories suggested. But what he said was, “I think it’s great you’re feeling this so deeply, Will. It shows you’re a real winner, a fighter. The average guy would just slink off, defeated. But you’re really indignant. That’s so healthy.” He wondered how that would go down. He was practicing what an old teacher had called “moral sculpture,” where you praise someone for virtues he hasn’t yet secured.
Will looked at him with a glimmer of hope and said, “Maybe.”
Jack decided to build on his success. “No, you’re a champ, and when you’ve written another two or three books and won the fuckin’ Pulitzer and become a household name, no one will remember this tiny setback.”
Will looked at the TV with a strange interest, but he was just lost in thought. He said, without glancing at Jack, “Maybe. If I get that far. If I can survive this humiliation.” Now Will slumped back on the couch; the word “humiliation” seemed to have undone him. He sagged under the weight of the word; it was twice his bulk, and it sat down on him and smothered him.
Now Jack had all the lights off, and he guided Will, holding on to his elbow, through the dark
rooms to the big white bed, as if Will were an invalid. He put Will on the bed and unlaced his beautiful Church shoes and took them off. He had a hole in one black stocking, and a huge yellow-nailed toe was protruding, as lethal as an ostrich’s spur.
Jack put Will’s feet on his lap and massaged them. He worked vigorously, as if it were a well-known cure for a bad Sunday Times review. He pressed his thumbs into the insteps. He worked the inner side of each foot from the heel to the big toe. Without removing the delicate lisle stockings, he pulled and stretched and cracked and limbered up each toe. Will had thrown an arm back over his eyes. Jack couldn’t help checking Will’s crotch to see if the massage was exciting him, if not consciously at least autonomically, but no, nothing was stirring or stiffening there.
At last Will moved toward the center of the double bed and said, “Come here.” When Jack was lying down beside him, Will pulled him into his arms and positioned Jack’s head on his chest. “There,” Will said. Jack could smell the stuff Will used for his acne, and the burning-wood smell of scotch. “You’re a good friend, Jack.”
“Thanks,” Jack said in such a small voice that he barely recognized it. Hearing it made him feel all the more childlike.
They lay there like that for five minutes, and then Will got up, went to the bathroom to pee, put his shoes and jacket back on, and then kissed Jack on the forehead and walked out the front door. Jack went into the bathroom and looked at the unflushed urine in the bowl. When he lay down, he didn’t think this evening had been the start of something but rather the end.
7.
Alex said over the phone, “I think Will likes that you’re in love with him. Maybe it scares him too, but he’s such a big neglected kid that he needs the attention.”
“But how did you know?”
“You told me. Or at least it’s always been obvious to me.”
“Oh.”
Then with friendly exasperation she said, “It’s not a bad thing, Jack.”
“It’s not bad for one guy to like another?”
“Heavens, no. When is love ever a bad thing?”
“Let me think: between a man and a child? A mother and a son? A man and a sheep?”
“But that’s perversion,” she wailed.
“My point exactly,” Jack said, and they shared a few more dry laughs before she hung up, saying she had somewhere to go.
Will seemed to be avoiding Jack at the office. Sometimes he’d sneak a little smile in his direction, but without stopping to talk to him.
When Jack spoke to her on the phone every day, more and more Alex seemed to be steering the conversation away from the subject of Will. One evening he called her from a pay phone and said, “I’m on the corner, Alex. I might just pop up.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Okay.”
“I’m in the shower.”
“You’re on the phone and in the shower? That could be fatal.”
Of course, he was offended, and she could hear it in his voice.
Finally she said, “I’m with someone right now.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Will is here.”
“What? What did you say? Will is … Most people don’t answer the phone, Alex, when they’re in flagrante delicto.”
But she was already fluting “Bye” in that breathy little-girl voice that upper-class women affected only when signing off.
He wondered if they really were fucking. If so, he should be happy for them, especially since he’d brought them together.
Why had Alex said that Will liked it that Jack was in love with him? Had the two of them joked about it, with Alex curled up in Will’s scrawny arms?
That night Billy cooked dinner for Jack, but Jack felt stifled and antagonistic the minute he walked through the door. He was wearing boots that were hard to remove, and he sat down and said, “Pull my boots off,” and stuck a leg out.
With his back to Jack, Billy sat astride his extended leg and pulled at the boot until Jack, impatient, pushed Billy’s back with his other foot, sending him toppling over with the boot in his hands. Billy got up with a very dark look on his face.
Refusing to apologize, Jack called out, “What about the other boot?”
“I’m going to get the meal on the table.”
Jack knew that he was being disgusting, but bullying Billy aroused him—and he hoped Billy would notice his tumescent crotch. He’d wrestled the other boot off on his own by the time Billy called him to the table.
He also knew that he was expected to say how good the meal was. Billy kept his eyes lowered and his face devoid of expression. He wouldn’t forgive Jack until he apologized, but a black anger had taken hold of Jack, and he kept flashing on scenes of striking Billy, or kicking him, or pointing at his little-boy dick and laughing at it. Billy hadn’t done anything wrong. All he’d done was to prepare another delicious dinner and serve a very good red wine. But even so Jack was mad at him, as he used to be as a child when forced to leave a kids’ party and ride home in the backseat of the Cadillac with his drunken parents.
Part II
1.
“Jack?” I said, stepping toward him, afraid I’d made a mistake. I stuck out my hand. We were both in front of the Museum of Modern Art. He’d just come out, and I was heading in.
“Hell, yes—Will! Will Wright!” and Jack lit up like a jack-o’-lantern with a crazy grin.
It was a cold, dark January day, and I calculated that eight or nine years had gone by. I said, “You must be thirty-two by now, right? Like me.”
Jack grinned and put a warning finger to his lips, but he was still smiling all around his finger.
We laughed and he said, “Do you have time for a drink?”
I looked at my watch, pretending to be juggling important appointments in my head, then shrugged and said, “Sure, why not? We could walk up to the Plaza and have a drink at the Oak Room. But I only have time for a quickie.”
Jack said that sounded good.
It seemed strange that he was so happy to see me, and I said so.
“You’d think we were long-lost brothers,” I said.
“We are! How’s Alex?”
“She’s great. We live out in Larchmont now.”
“And you’re commuting?”
I shrugged my shoulders as if I knew I’d become a cliché, but I couldn’t help adding, “We’re happy out there,” and even to my own ears my voice sounded serene.
“Hunting foxes out there?”
“No, never,” I said. “Alex believes fervently in the prevention of cruelty to animals. We have twenty acres, even a stream and a pool, and the neighbors are pissed off because we refuse to do anything to control the so-called groundhog problem.”
I looked at Jack and could see he was a bit perplexed but also impressed by the size of our property.
“You might think we were crazy people. We don’t cut the grass or burn wasp hives or keep the pond from seeping or set traps for the raccoons or drive away stray dogs or kill ants or spray for mosquitoes. I guess most people would think that the house was abandoned, though of course inside Alex has decorated it with her wonderful taste, just as you’d suspect.”
“What about termites?”
I laughed and said, “You caught us there. Alex and I had the whole house bagged and gassed, though we went through torments of self-reproach about it. But you don’t want to hear about our …”
I left the sentence unfinished, and Jack rushed in with “You mean your Baha’i convictions?” and we both laughed in several ripples of hilarity. He’d always had a way of leaping ahead into a parallel world of fantasy.
Once we’d sat down at a table and ordered our drinks, I had an excuse to look him over more thoroughly. He’d definitely acquired a few lines. He’d also lost a few pounds, whereas I’d gained ten. He looked somehow shinier. His nose and jaw jutted out fractionally further, and his glance was more complicated and worldly. He was wearing a burnt-lemon cologne—that was new. He was sitting u
pright, but everything in him seemed to be leaning toward me. I was happy to see him.
I said, “We’ve missed you.”
“We? Do you have your feelings in a joint account?”
“Sort of,” I said, irritated for a second. I was going to add, “That’s what being half of a couple means,” but instead asked, “What about you?”
“You mean, am I still going ahead with that funny queer thing I do?”
I thought he was being too tart if he hoped to renew our friendship.
“No,” I said, deliberately not smiling, “I just wondered if you were single or not.”
Jack laughed and sat back in his chair. I’d seated him so that he’d be looking out on the horses and carriages on the other side of Central Park South.
“Sometimes I can make something last six or eight weeks,” he said. “Eight weeks. That’s my longest marriage.”
I tried to look sympathetic. “But why is that?”
“But, Will,” he said, “I like it that way.” He smiled mysteriously and added, “I’m a libertine.”
That struck me as such a strange thing to say—he seemed almost to glow with the announcement—that I looked around, half hoping to see a friend whom I could call over in order to change the subject. Still, while it was true that everyone assumed that being half of a stable couple was a great thing, maybe it wasn’t always. Or for everyone. Jack didn’t seem worried about being alone for Christmas—wasn’t that what everyone said, though most people were miserable being with their families over the holidays. Maybe he did worry and this was just bravado, pretending to be a libertine.
“Did you know this used to be a sort of gay bar?” Jack said.
“The Oak Room?”
“Originally it was a men-only bar, and even when women could come, they seldom did. It was for men in suits who wanted other men in suits. I used to come here by myself, and older men in suits would tell the bartender to offer me a drink.” He laughed. “It was for men who liked sidecars.”