Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  “How the hell do you make a sidecar?” I said gamely.

  “Brandy. Triple sec. Lemon juice.”

  “That’s obscene.”

  “There’s a really bad novel in which the hero wakes his wife every morning with a cocktail shaker full of sidecars. The book came out in 1929 just before the crash. The author never wrote another book.”

  “That was a piece of bad luck,” I said.

  I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me about my own writing. Was that what Jack was working up to, by mentioning unsuccessful novels? Had he turned cruel? Of course, he was a big reader. He read a novel a week—or used to. That had been a point of pride for him. Just as he went to the latest art exhibits and attended concerts. That was his idea of a New Yorker. Or used to be.

  “What are you working on these days?” he asked.

  “Ah, that,” I said, “we must save for another day.”

  After that Times review I became ill every time I thought of working on a new novel. I could feel my stomach start to sour, even to heave. I knew I’d get back to a novel at some point, but the next time, I thought, I’d do it in secret, under everyone else’s radar. I’d do it for myself. This time I’d have a real experience to write about. And when I wrote something, I’d ask myself if I liked it, whether I could improve it in any way. And if I was sure it met my standards after it sat in my drawer for a year or two, I’d show it to Alex and Jack, and my old editor—if he was still in business.

  I stood up and looked at my watch. “I have seventeen minutes to get to the train station.” I handed him my card and threw down a ten-dollar bill.

  “That’s too much!” he said.

  “Are you still at the Northern Review?” I asked, implying that if so he might not be able to afford the Oak Room.

  “No,” he said, “Newsweek.”

  “Books?”

  “Business.”

  “Big changes are afoot,” I said. “Let’s have lunch next week.”

  “And does Alex ever get into town?”

  “Never. We have two kids—a girl and a little boy.”

  “That was fast!”

  “But you’ll have to come out to Larchmont and see the crazy people and their overgrown estate,” I said, immediately regretting the word “estate” and making a face to indicate my irony.

  “Well. Who could say no to an invitation like that?”

  I rushed off, although I could easily have taken the six forty-seven and still made it home in time for dinner.

  I drove my little battered station car back to the house as usual. I’m sure the neighbors looked down on my ten-year-old Studebaker Hawk with the vestigial tail fins just as they abhorred our weed-filled lawns, fetid pond, garbage mulch. Of course, I was a hundred percent committed to letting nature engulf our grounds, though I recognized the burden we’d placed on our children’s frail shoulders. The neighbor kids shunned them as weirdos, and that cute, hateful Mary Beth next door would sing, “Shame, shame,” while stroking one index finger on the other. My poor little Margaret came home in tears every time.

  When I entered the front door, the kids made a rush for me, grabbing my legs and calling out, “Daddy, Daddy!” Baby Palmer didn’t look too sure what a daddy might be, though he was enthusiastic about the idea. He was always shaking his pudgy hands in the air, stepping awkwardly and drooling. I felt like the hunter who’s brought home a bloody Bambi to hack apart and parcel out to his greedy tribe. I loved their excitement, even if their mother had put them up to it.

  Alex came up to me in her soft, distracted way and without a word presented me with her sculpted cheek. I put an arm around her waist—but gently, gently. Alex had become so fragile that I was afraid of breaking one of her ribs. I was proud of her slenderness when I compared her to the neighbors, women as plump and ponderous as Clydesdale mares, yet I feared the slightest wind could blow her away.

  I doubted she even bothered to eat during the day. At night she drank two large vodka martinis straight up and well chilled, with a twist, then played with her dinner. Tonight it was vegetarian moussaka, extremely healthy like everything we ate. Alex’s moussaka almost tasted like real food. In the city, I cheated at lunchtime. I ate a secret steak or, my favorite, liver and bacon with greasy onions.

  Often Alex could taste the carnage on my lips and would say, “It’s your life.”

  Our house had been built by a Finnish architect in the thirties, and the walls were curving horizontal blond boards, highly varnished, steamed and bent into nautical shapes, not a sharp corner anywhere, and lots of original Barcelona chairs, which all needed their leather straps tightened a notch. The windows were small rectangles placed high, like squashed portholes. Alex was playing an LP of Finlandia. I guess she was in a Finnish mood. Margaret was in a Marimekko dress.

  The French au pair girl, Ghislaine, who was not supposed to smoke but always smelled of Gitanes, came in to scoop up her charges, a tilted smile scarcely rhyming with her sad eyes. I couldn’t help looking at her firm, ample hips rolling under her dress, but I immediately glanced away. She refused to eat just Alex’s vegetarian dishes. Every other dinner was some savory recipe she prepared for herself—shrimp curry or a chicken breast in a cream-and-calvados sauce.

  “You’ll never guess who I ran into today,” I said.

  “Herr Pogner?” Alex asked, naming her old piano teacher.

  “No. Jack. Jack Holmes.”

  Alex broke into a big smile, but something guarded instantly came into her eyes, as if she were seeing a favorite dog that had once bitten her. “How did he look?”

  “Very sleek,” I said. “He’s even thinner, and his clothes were very conservative and nice—believe it or not, even his shoes. He had on some Peel shoes.”

  “Copying you, I guess. Is he terribly prosperous?”

  “I don’t really know. He’s working for Newsweek in the business section.”

  “I guess they get good investment tips,” she said, looking skeptically at a dark bit of eggplant on the end of her fork. “Did he ask about me?”

  “Yes, right away. I told him about Larchmont and the children. He seemed most impressed by the size of our property.”

  “I hope you didn’t scare him off by talking about our reversion to nature.”

  “I did mention it. I was in search of neutral topics.”

  “Neutral! I’m afraid it makes us sound terribly controversial.” She smiled with her old love of combat. “He was my friend, but I guess it was you he was in love with. Did you see more signs of unrequited passion?”

  “Oh Alex, I wouldn’t notice something like that.”

  She rang the little bell next to her, and Emily, the cook, came in to clear. Emily was a comfortable middle-aged woman who felt like an aunt; she didn’t wear a uniform, and she made no fuss over how she served.

  “You’re too macho to recognize if another man loves you?”

  Her saying that in front of staff made me wince.

  I rubbed my forehead and brought my hand down over my eyes and said, “Gosh, I’m tired.”

  I remembered always fearing that other people would see me with Jack and think I was queer. We could have a quick lunch together, and that was okay, but dinner—a quiet dinner between two men—was definitely wandering into the pink zone. Maybe it had to do with the way I was raised, but I was always afraid of lingering over a theater review or even admitting I wrote fiction. I suppose if my third-form English master at Portsmouth Abbey hadn’t praised my writing, I would never have taken fiction up. But he was also the football coach. I didn’t want to arouse suspicions of any sort; I didn’t want to be “unusual.” I preferred to be invisible. I’m a born observer, or want to be, and good observers are always invisible, in my opinion. Eventually it had seemed elegantly masculine to be a writer, like Fitzgerald, though I laid off the booze. All those writers back then—Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett—were drunks. And macho.

  “So what else did he say?” Alex asked, drumming her fine hands on
the tabletop. It was a game with her, this insistence, but I liked it. I preferred it to the recent bouts of melancholy that swept over her most evenings. Alex’s melancholy, fleeting as it might be, took all her energy—hers and mine. I could see that if I invited Jack out here (but would he ever come?), it would give Alex something to focus on rather than treating a sick groundhog or exploring the moral dilemma of hurting basement mold.

  We went into the living room, which had a Finnish couch designed by Saarinen and a thick woven rug, extended like a flap on the floor, that could be pulled up over one’s knees against the polar cold. We sat on the couch together and left the rug on the floor. I made us each a sidecar, since Jack had mentioned it and I was curious. I found the recipe in my bar guide.

  Alex said, “This could trigger a full-scale diabetic attack.” We were looking up at the windows, against which leafless bushes were pressed like beggars outside a church. Alex drank her sidecar, which astonished me, since she never had anything else beyond her two vodka martinis and one glass of wine. I poured out a second one for her. “Too watery?” I asked.

  “No, perfect,” she said. “It’s the lemon I like.”

  We talked about Jack late into the night. She was unusually gleeful, almost as if she’d fallen asleep for a hundred years and awoken hungry. Alex was always available to me and the children, abundantly so, but too often she was afraid to go out. Emily, in fact, had started to order the groceries and have them delivered, though on weekends Alex would accompany me to the yacht club if I drove. She was still a beautiful woman with her lustrous hair and exquisite features and her dramatically slender body, but when older couples (most of our club’s members were at least twenty years older than us) came by to exchange a few bibulous words, she had a tight, rat-a-tat way of gasping, “Yes, yes, really, absolutely, yes,” in reply, and when they’d gone off she’d say to me, “Extraordinary what passes for conversation out here.” It made her irritable and angry that other people would just naturally assume she wanted to talk about fertilizers and insecticides.

  “Don’t they know that I’m not in favor of anything that ends in “cide”? Fratricide? Herbicide? Fungicide?”

  We’d gradually worked our way through most of the smart set in the vicinity. The problem was the women, who had a way of assuming aloud that we hadn’t noticed what was happening to our garden. Mrs. Callisher would write out on a slip of paper the name of her gardener. If we tried to sit out in the gazebo with them and drink our cocktails, the ladies would slap mosquitoes and say, “Couldn’t we at least put out a torch? Funny, we don’t have mosquitoes.” And once when we walked past the seething, scummy pond, Mrs. Erlich wrinkled her little nose and said, “No swans? But you know they just love to gobble down mosquitoes.” Alex couldn’t let such remarks slip by.

  I might have been tempted to say something pacifying, but she was ever alert to the first sign of insult or betrayal on my part. Of course, she enjoyed making a great game of it, yet she was capable of calling out, “Traitor! Horrible traitor!” with an ambiguously icy smile.

  Ghislaine brought in the children all fragrant and rosy from their bath.

  Palmer was warm and smiling in his pajamas, and for the first time I saw a glint of red in his brown hair, and I wondered what genetic vagary had produced it.

  “Da!” he said, glancing up, searching for words, but then, when we all looked at him, he lost his nerve and giggled and tried to wriggle around in Ghislaine’s arms. I thought what a lucky little bastard he was pressing his face into her breasts.

  My Margaret, sober and reproachful, held a book she wanted her mommy to read her, but I said to her, “You can read perfectly well, Peg. Mommy and Daddy are having an important talk. Read your book for half an hour, then turn off your light because you have a big day tomorrow, dressage—”

  “And jazz dancing at two,” Alex chimed in. “Angel, don’t plague Mummy now.” And I thought that I’d have hated a mother who called herself “Mummy.”

  When we were alone again, we ended by pulling the heavy Saarinen rug over our knees. We drank a second batch of sidecars. Alex reminded me that we’d both have dreadful hangovers, though she seemed to have shed her melancholy. I’d heard someone at the office say of a friend that he was “clinically depressed,” and I sometimes wondered if this applied to Alex too.

  I turned on the standing floor lamp made of thin cedar slats, and the light it cast warmed the room up as if it were one of those old tile corner stoves you find in Austria. Outside, a feral cat, puffed up and suddenly four feet long, tiptoed to the sliding glass door and looked in at us with tawny eyes and made a horrible screech, leading Alex to say, like the headmistress of a girls’ school, “Language, ladies. Language!” and we laughed harder than we had in months—and this unaccustomed sound must have frightened Margaret, who came creeping up to the threshold, sucking her thumb and asking, “Mummy? What’s wrong?”

  Alex turned and looked at her in a stunned way. I wondered if Peggy had ever seen her mother drunk before. “Nothing is wrong, my angel,” she said. “Mummy and Daddy are having a playdate.”

  “Can grown-ups play?”

  “They certainly can, can’t they, Daddy?”

  I mumbled in affectionate agreement. I hated it when my wife called me Daddy. In sex, all right, but not in front of the children.

  Margaret lowered her head and looked up through her eyebrows at these two strangers, her parents.

  At the mention of “playdate” I’d felt a stirring in my groin, and now I stood and turned my back to Alex and adjusted myself. Ever since little Palmer had started having asthma attacks in the middle of the night, we’d been keeping him in the room next to ours, and we were always listening for his gasps. When they came, violently and unpredictably, neither of us could ever fall back into very deep sleep. Of course, it was hell on our sex life, which I’d about given up on—though tonight, with sidecars and Alex’s enthusiasm over our renewed contact with Jack, I sensed she was feeling expansive, maybe amorous.

  Once Margaret had been sent off, still sucking her thumb (despite Ghislaine’s warning that she’d get buckteeth, dents de lapin, that way), I said that we should go up to my study and listen to a new record I’d just bought. Alex nodded and put her arm around my waist.

  Upstairs we sat on the long leather couch, and I served us each a glass of cold seltzer water from the little fridge. We made our way through the LP without talking, Alex rhythmically advancing her chin in some curious Watusi way, the deb’s idea of how to get in the groove. It was some pop music that I despised but that I knew would please Alex.

  I’d closed the heavy door to my study, blocking out the sounds from the rest of the house. Ghislaine was still awake monitoring Palmer’s breathing. I’d succumbed to my usual resentment of Alex’s nature worship, since surely a dusty, wild garden full of plant pollen and animal dander wasn’t recommended for an asthmatic child, but that last sidecar had helped me to bank the fires of irritation.

  I’d turned on one dim light, and we began to kiss in earnest. I undid Alex’s Corfam belt—never leather!—and tugged her shantung trousers open. There was a creaking up above—a raccoon? a man on the roof? We also had a rule that there would be no locks on doors anywhere in the house, but this time, determined, I jumped up and propped a chair against the door to ensure our privacy.

  It had been so long since I’d made love to Alex, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. Of course, men, especially workingmen, the ones I’d known during summer jobs back in college, were constantly complaining that they didn’t get enough pussy. They pretended that all they liked was to eat pussy. That was the running gag all summer as I was loading trucks in Raleigh. Blacks and whites—they had that one thing in common. “Will, you still pumping that ol’ dick in that ol’ cooze? The bitches don’t like that shit, they think that’s bogue. They want you to have some good eats. You got to get down there and eat out that pussy. Watch my tongue. They want it flickin’. Just think you’s the devil-serpen
t himself, flickin’ into Eve’s sweet little pussy, that weren’t no apple. Or think you’re an eel sliding into a nice little clamshell. Just open it up—see, watch my tongue, flickin’-like.” They would fall down with laughter at me and my queasy smile as they went into a chorus of “Sh-sh.” They got out that first consonant sound, the susurrus both a general assent and a way for each man to declare his distance—“What’s this shit? These guys are too. Fucking. Much.”

  Oddly, I wondered if Jack would have thought it was a turn-on, all those real guys slapping each other on the back and bragging about their oral sex skills.

  And I held Alex’s face between my hands and kissed her lips gently, gently.

  Over the years I’d learned how to curb my appetites and bathe every horny move in romance, as if it were a gear shifting in a reservoir of oil. I whispered her name in her ear. It had been so long, but I remembered she liked this, and she did breathe faster and she arched her back. Slowly, thoughtfully, I undid the buttons of her blouse as if patiently meditating on home truths. I lifted her blouse off and with a practiced hand squeezed together the hooks of her bra. Her lovely breasts, released from so much expensive uplift, tumbled warmly into my hands. I rubbed my grizzly face against them and she said, “Oh Will,” and I knew I was home free.

  We’d gone so long without sex that our reciprocal forms of timidity, I feared, had nearly paralyzed us. When, bored at work, I thought of Alex, I would remember her pain during childbirth, the guilt I’d felt about imposing that pain upon her, and I would remember our many vigils beside Palmer’s bed as he gasped and turned blue and we reached for the inhaler and prayed. After that first attack we’d banned animals from the house and had an exterminator in to make sure there were no cockroaches, since research suggested they could trigger asthma somehow. But I’d found no way to convince Alex to control the garden; its wildness had taken on an Edenic significance for her.

  Now I had her down to her panties with my finger inside her. Unhelpfully, the record had come to an end, and I was afraid the silence would sober her up or set her to listening for distant gasps.