by Edmund White
As I started to doze off, I thought about Pia, and for some reason I pictured her very tan in Capri, wriggling out of her swimsuit and revealing two milk white globes fore and two aft.
I wondered again if Jack was up to some mischief, bringing that woman into our house. After all, he’d introduced me to Alex. Now did he think it was time for me to have a mistress? Would he be watching me and Pia over the partition of the crapper?
Idea for novel: queer finds mistress for beloved straight man.
I was tempted to get out of bed and jot it down at the risk of disturbing Alex’s very light sleep. But then I realized I could never tackle that subject. A married man can’t write autobiographical novels, not if they’re based on the truth.
2.
A week later Jack called me at the office and invited me to dinner. He said Pia was coming and some Italian friends of hers—it was a last-minute thing for that very evening, otherwise he would have insisted that Alex come in. He was going to call her before long anyway and lure her into town for a leisurely lunch.
We talked long enough for a worry to hatch in my brain. I lowered my voice and said, “Jack? Do me a favor? When you talk to Alex, say it was just the two of us—would that be okay? She gets jealous so easily.”
I called Alex and told her that I had to work late and that then, if possible, I might grab a bite with Jack—and that I was going to stay over at the Princeton Club.
“But you don’t even have a toothbrush or a clean shirt,” Alex objected.
“My girl has already run over to the Brothers,” I said, warbling the “Brothers,” as I always did to get a laugh out of her. But this time she didn’t recall the witticism, if that’s what it was. It was just a silly way of saying the name.
“The what?”
“Brooks Brothers. She bought me some hose and boxers and a shirt and picked up some toiletries at the drugstore.”
“Well, all right, then,” Alex said dubiously.
Was she envious or jealous? Was she reluctant to share Jack with me, or worried I might hold him again? Or did she fear that I might meet up with Pia and hold her?
“Have fun,” she said with sudden briskness, “and if you think of it, call me before you go to sleep.”
I promised I would. I knew calling her wasn’t as optional as she made it sound.
Jack wanted to meet at a place in Midtown called the Monkey Bar and then eat a steak somewhere. While I was waiting for him, I listened to a new song, “Treat Her like a Lady,” and it made me smile though I hated pop music. Then I thought about how half the fun of straight life, normal life, was the difference between men and women. It was fun to treat a woman like a lady, buy her things, pay for her, protect her—and women, if they were smart, treated a man like a man, and not necessarily like a gentleman. Poor gay men, who didn’t have anything like those reciprocal roles. They didn’t have partners who wore diamond earrings and bracelets and needed to be zipped up and led across the dance floor in a gown. Their partners didn’t touch expensive perfume to pulse points or wear nylons and garter belts. When Jack arrived, I asked him what he thought about all this.
He said, “We idealize some men—the boy next door, the athlete, the golden boy—but we make them into something we wish we’d been, whereas you don’t want to be a lady.”
“No,” I said, nodding and smiling, “we don’t.”
“Of course, there are gay transvestites,” Jack said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but you still have the problem of the hairy butthole. After I pulled off all of those silky nothings, if I was faced with an asshole black with hair—sorry! That would make me lose it.” I told him how much I liked the song.
He said, “I’m not sure you understand that song.”
“Really?”
“It’s about how you can fuck lots of women if you treat them like ladies, if you open doors for them and pay for things. It’s about seducing women, not about liking them.”
I preferred my own interpretation even if it was wrong.
Jack smiled and said, “Do you like this bar?”
“I sure do. I never knew it was here. Look, there’s Pia!”
I thought that even if her asshole were Armenian with hair, I’d want to lie down with her.
After we’d settled in and chitchatted about the pneumatic drills tearing up Fifty-sixth Street, Jack suddenly said, “Will thinks two gay men are too similar to have much fun.”
I blushed—I could feel my face heating up—but I said, “I was listening to that song ‘Treat Her like a Lady,’ and I was thinking there’d be no thrill in treating a guy like a guy.”
“Women like to treat a guy like a guy,” Pia said, with a slow, sweet smile, looking ecumenically back and forth between Jack and me.
I thought, If we had an affair, what would be in it for her? I asked, “What is it that women like to do for guys, precisely?”
A man at the next table kept saying “fortunately” over and over again, and for some reason that made me remember choir practice and the priest striking a tuning fork and holding it up to give us our pitch. I held the fork once, and it felt cold and surprisingly heavy in my hand.
“I can’t speak for all women,” Pia said, “but my idea of feminism is that women should help men into their coats. Light their cigarettes. Not all the time but often, you know?”
I thought that sounded like a pretty dim idea of feminism. I could just hear Alex snorting with outrage. But who was I to question such mild militancy?
Jack had moved into a bigger apartment not far from the Monkey Bar, and he invited us over for a cold supper. He’d made a whole salmon with a dill mayonnaise, and he started us out with a vichyssoise soup, which Pia claimed was an American invention and not at all French, despite the name.
“Look at this goddamned terrace!” I said, walking out onto it.
“Yes,” Jack said, “I was lucky to find this tiny penthouse. It’s just two rooms. But it has the terrace, and I’m going to put trees in tubs out here in another two or three weeks, when it finally warms up.”
“Did you have all these drawers and doors mirrored?” Pia asked. It seemed she’d never been here before. Which meant that Jack had invited her just for my sake.
“Yes,” he said, “I found a real craftsman.” Though he’d mentioned Italian friends of Pia’s, I noticed there were just three place settings.
As Jack was warming up a baguette in the oven, Pia stepped out onto the terrace and I joined her; like me she was gripping the rail and bending over slightly to look down. There wasn’t much to see except a car nosing down Sixty-sixth and over to the right a water tower positioned on top of a lower building. I was intensely aware of Pia’s body, and I was tempted to scoot closer and touch hips. The more romantic thing would be to touch her hand. We could check in to a hotel together—the Plaza, maybe. Except we might see people we knew there. Better a smaller hotel with less traffic, more tourists.
Just then she turned and leaned with her back against the rail, crossing her arms. “Did you see the first forsythia today?”
“Yes, coming in on the train. A promise of spring, though a pretty feeble one.” I thought, I’m supposed to be a writer and talk like that.
“Let’s look at the other side of the terrace.” And she started to walk toward it, turning her head to smile back at me. She’s moving us out of Jack’s view so I can kiss her, I thought. If we do go to a hotel, shall I use my real name and make it Mr. and Mrs. Wright? I might have to use a credit card—it would have to match.
As I looked at her in the softer light of the southern terrace, I thought, She really is beautiful! That small perfect nose like baked bisque and that low voice full of laughter though she’s not a funny person and then those ears peeking out through her straight hair and those big flat eyes constantly moving. Her mouth seemed tiny—and suddenly it dawned on me that she was a Major Beauty, that she could be a movie star or a model, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to wake up to her star po
wer. I’d seen right off in Larchmont that she was attractive, but that her beauty could be considered mythic had come to me slowly, almost as if I’d needed to talk myself into it or hear someone else exclaim over it and Jack hadn’t. Jack had played everything very low-key.
Was Jack a sort of Iago hoping to make me—no, that didn’t make sense. I wasn’t any sort of Othello. Did he want Pia to sleep with me and then give him all the details later? Tell him if I was a good fuck? I wasn’t sure if I was good in bed. We weren’t like homos, learning technique from each other. And I was so inexperienced with women, and Alex was so romantic that she’d never wanted to break the spell by saying, “More to the left,” or “Harder,” or “Slower.” I wasn’t sure I could picture Pia telling Jack, “It’s small to medium, gets nice and hard, like a blackjack, and he’s better than most white guys at cunnilingus. His feet smell like an attic that’s never been aired.” Hell, she was too kind to tattle.
I touched her hand, and she looked at me with her slight avatar of a smile and her large, flat eyes, endlessly swimming. She had a trick of bowing her head so she could glance up at me. I was so afraid I’d mistaken her friendliness for flirtation that I scarcely knew what to do now, so I put my hands on her elbows and pulled her toward me and kissed her on the forehead. I said, “This terrace demands a kiss, even an avuncular one.”
She said, with her slow, lopsided smile, and in her low voice, “It certainly does. Let’s see if Jack needs any help.” She took my hand and led me back in as if we were little friends.
As it turned out, I was at the Princeton Club by an early hour and able to call Alex with a clear conscience. The next day I phoned Jack from the office to thank him and to feel around about what Pia thought about me.
Jack said, “You like her.”
“Why do you say that?” I swallowed. “Yes, very much.”
“She’s a great kid,” he said, and I thought that for him she was probably nothing more than a kid, that he hadn’t noticed her small mouth and her big, full breasts, that he’d not seen her hips sliding under that skirt as she walked ahead of us, hips that begged to be grabbed. To him she was like a car to a nondriver, but to me she promised the open road. But then I remembered Jack always noticed sexual details in both men and women.
“Yeah,” I said, “a great kid.” In his mouth the words had sounded breezy; in mine, tragic.
Then he said, “But wouldn’t Alex be pissed if you flirted with her?” Was he taunting me or was he really innocent, the possibility of a flirtation only an afterthought for him instead of at the very heart of his dark design?
I laughed and said, “She would be, but luckily it was all just playful, just something to get the old blood flowing.” Jack had once made fun of my “imperturbable jauntiness.” I guessed this was a case in point. “I told her it was just the two of us. But did … Pia say anything about me?” I hated sounding pathetic.
“She thinks you’re very nice,” Jack said with maddening sunniness.
I waited for him to go on, then said in a low growl, “Details, details!”
“I don’t think she said anything else.”
I was so shocked that I blurted out, “What on earth do you two talk about?”
Jack laughed insultingly, then added after a pause, “Is that a serious question?”
“Yes,” I gurgled nearly inaudibly.
“My apartment. She’s helped me a lot, though last night was the first time she’d seen it. She was the one who got the Indian print pillows, and she has an expert framer, pricey.”
“Okay, okay, very funny,” I said. “When you invited us together, did you consult with her first? And wasn’t she coming with friends?”
“I’m not a matchmaker, Will.” He went very quiet, then said, as if it were a brand-new idea, “Do you want me to set you up with Pia?”
I should have just gasped “Yes,” but I became pointlessly cagey: “How would you do that, Jack?”
“I could make a date with both of you and then call the restaurant to say I couldn’t make it, and then you’d be on your own with her.”
“Not too swift,” I said admiringly.
“So should I do it?” he asked.
I was grateful to him but also suspicious. And I resented the way he was pressuring me. “Let me think it over,” I said.
He responded with a dubious, mocking little murmur, though I might have imagined the mockery.
On the way home that night I bought Alex a perfect white-jade Buddha at C. T. Loo’s on Fifty-seventh Street, which set me back five hundred dollars. She was flabbergasted and oddly worried, since I hadn’t given her anything that extravagant in years. “But Will,” she said, standing so close that her eyes kept shifting back and forth from my right eye to my left. “What a dream angel you are,” she said tonelessly.
“You’re my dream angel,” I whispered into her ear. “I was thinking about you all day,” I lied, “and I remembered that Jack used to visit Loo and almost worked for him and that his gallery was on Fifty-seventh and Madison on some high-up floor, and I found it easily, and of course everything was out of my range, but this Buddha seemed so perfect and it’s eighteenth century, which is kind of your period, isn’t it?”
“It’s ex-quisite,” she said, with the emphasis on the “ex,” which her mother had taught her.
She was happy now that she’d overcome her fear that something was seriously wrong. I could see that she’d been waiting for me to deliver the terrible news (I’ve gone bankrupt, I have cancer, the albatross is extinct), but when it hadn’t materialized, she’d begun to weigh her gift fondly in her hand.
The following week she said she was taking the children to St. Barts with her mother. It was their spring vacation. Did I want to come along? I said that this was the exact moment when Union Carbide had scheduled photography of its Scranton plant for the annual report, and I’d have to be there—not that the photographer would regard me as anything but a nuisance. “It’s the client who needs to see me—reassurance, feet on the ground,” I said, as if I were citing overly familiar facts that only merited shorthand.
I called Jack and asked him if he could implement Plan A. “You know,” I said, “where you stand us up, Pia and me, in a restaurant.”
We chatted for a while about our work, then later (perhaps I was feeling an excess of Catholic guilt) I suddenly turned hostile. “Tell me something, Jack, m’boy, why are you doing all this?”
“Playing the pimp? I don’t have the slightest idea. It can’t possibly do me any good, and it could turn into a disaster in at least three ways.”
I felt as if Jack and I were playing chess. He’d just taken my queen. He couldn’t have come up with a quicker, surer way to puncture my suspicions and make me feel that he was the one doing me a favor. Suddenly I saw myself as an ingrate.
“Alex would never forgive me if she caught wind of this.”
“Why would she ever know?” I asked. “I’d be the last person—”
“And then your own guilt might turn you against me. You’d either resent me because Pia wouldn’t respond to you—”
“Did she say anything about not responding?”
“You’d resent me even more if it did work out. How can all this possibly end well?”
“When did you become so wise?” I asked bitterly. He just exhaled. “No, seriously,” I said. I didn’t want to say, it sounds as if you’ve had a lot of experience enabling adulterers.
What he said was, “I’m seeing a new shrink now, and she pointed out to me that I have this neurotic way of getting involved with a certain straight couple.”
“What does your shrink think it means?”
“She thinks it’s oedipal, though she doesn’t like that word.”
I hoisted myself up above the conversation, rotated it fifteen degrees, and said, “How could a certain straight friend help you out—help to reduce your stress level?”
I could almost hear Jack blinking as he thought that one over. “I guess
by not telling me what happens later between you and Pia. I’ll set it up for you, but keep me out of it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ll need keys to your apartment. I don’t want to take her to a hotel—too sordid.”
“Too dangerous, you mean,” he said.
The whole conversation left me feeling exhausted, as if I’d been sleepwalking for hours across a girder twenty stories up. Now I awoke with a start, looked down, and panicked.
The next day I called Jack and gave him three free dates he could try out on Pia. He sounded dry and grimly efficient, as if he’d resolved to relieve himself of this painful duty as quickly as possible. Later in the day he phoned back to say that we all had a date at seven on the sixteenth at the Four Seasons. I calculated that a dinner with decent wine would set me back a small fortune. I was careful not to voice anything but the deepest gratitude. I was excited by the thought of sleeping with Pia, so much so that I couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of saying, “Look, Jack, if it makes you feel awkward, then let’s just drop the whole thing.”
On the commuter train out of Grand Central that night, I sat next to two loudmouths who were eating greasy sausages and onions, and the smell overpowered me, but I kept slipping through an air lock into a private embrace with Pia, my hand inching up her skirt and feeling the tops of her nylons and the smoother, cooler texture of her skin above. Then, as my hand slid along the inside of her thighs …
Her perfumed, long-limbed presence in the train was my refuge. I didn’t work up a whole scenario. It was just a deep kiss here and then a glance into her large eyes there and the feeling of her hands all over me as she ordered me to lie perfectly still and not respond in any way except with one part of my body, involuntarily. And then I started to doze off as the train lurched and stopped and even crawled backward for a few minutes, and I thought, It’s a gift when something magical steps into actual time.