Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  3.

  Although I’d eaten at Brasserie in the Seagram Building lots of times, I’d only once been to the other restaurant in the building, the Four Seasons, when a rich friend of my sister Elaine’s was paying. I think it was Elaine’s birthday.

  I left my coat downstairs, on the street level, and hurried up the carpeted stairs to the big dining room on its two levels. The ceilings were high, the napery dazzling, the windows hung with long, fine gold chains echoed by the chandeliers, and I imagined that this sort of luminous spareness, this sort of muted splendor, could only be bought dear.

  “You’re the first to arrive,” said the maître d’hôtel. “Would you prefer to wait at the bar or the table?”

  “The table,” I said. I started to offer an explanation, but I didn’t have one. He led me down the hall to Siberia, I supposed, for social outcasts or unknowns, past the superb Picasso tapestry and into the Pool Room with its budding trees in tubs. It was still light outside. This might be exile, I thought, but it’s attractive as hell. Jack had made the reservation—didn’t he have the requisite clout to get us into the Grill Room? Or did he think a Pool Room table would be more romantic? Or more private? I wondered if Pia knew all these codes.

  I sat for ten minutes feeling that anxious boredom I always experience when something exciting is about to happen. I remembered all the time growing up when I’d been underdressed and red with acne in places far less grand than this one. Now I felt half-sure of myself. No holes in my stockings. Brand-new button-down shirt, the collar unfrayed, the blue unfaded. My shoes were handmade and English. My nails clipped evenly and clean, my ears properly reamed, my face finally all one color and that a pale Norman white with only a few interesting acne scars.

  And there she was in a candy-striped silk dress, red and beige, following the maître d’ at a rapid pace, her feet in very high heels, also beige, and the look on her face slightly foolish, foolishly happy. I rose to greet her and then subsided as the maître d’ pushed her chair in. She shone like an ingot in the banklike majesty of this room; the light outside had just faded, and the gold bead curtains came to life, strafed by the electric lights projected up onto them.

  “It seems funny just to say hi in this room,” I said. “It feels like we should be hammering out the Treaty of Versailles or something.”

  “Where is Jack?” she asked. “I thought I’d be late.”

  We ordered Gibsons, and they arrived in very large, pale, frosted glasses as if they were snowflowers flown in from the north pole. She looked around nervously; she must have known more people than I did, and soon I was sledding down a jealousy path faster and faster. I asked her what she did with her days.

  “I am actually very busy with my hemophilia, my charity. We have a big dinner-dance we’re planning for June, and I hope you and Alex will buy a table. It will be at the Pierre and very lovely, and I promise to put amusing people at your table. And then, you know I promised to help Jack with his apartment, and he decided the Indian prints we bought are too banal and he wants something more sumptuous, so I’ve ordered him some silk from Zurich—Zumsteg, the same factory that made the fabric in my dress.”

  “Let me feel it,” I said, and looking her right in the eye, I rubbed her sleeve between my thumb and forefinger. Her jabbering dried like saliva on her lips, and she looked at me with eyes big with terror or maybe desire. Usually I was incapable of breaking through the social automatisms, but tonight I understood that I had to be direct.

  “I’m a little afraid of you,” she said, and I appreciated her gravity, even her courage to admit her fear.

  “I’m a very nice man.”

  “Jack says you’re cagey.”

  “Thanks for that, Jack.”

  “I don’t want to stir up any trouble. What he said was that you play with your cards very close to your chest.”

  “What cards? You know everything there is to know about me—one wife, two children, a silly job, good shoes, a fascination with you. All my cards are on the table. But if I am holding a few to my chest you might as well put your head on it so you can see them.” This line suddenly seemed so laborious that I almost burst out laughing. Everything verbal about seduction—the compliments, the sweet talk—seemed so stiff and absurd, though I knew that certain women (was Pia one of them?) considered this approach to be “romantic.” What I preferred was the blunt honesty of the body, the way two different bodies took their time learning each other’s ways. Wetness or hardness—no way to deny the body’s interests.

  At that moment a waiter came up and said I was wanted on the phone. I excused myself as Pia said, “It must be Jack.”

  I spoke with him from the bar in the Grill Room. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Fine. So what do I tell her?”

  “That my car broke down in Narragansett as I was driving back from Providence.”

  “And listen. Just send me your hotel bill for tonight. And Jack?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re the greatest.”

  “That I already knew.”

  If Pia ever figured out the fast one we’d pulled on her, she’d have plenty of proof of my caginess.

  “Narragansett?” Pia exclaimed. “You Americans have such funny place names.”

  “In honor of the Indians we stole the land from and killed. In Australia all the names are Aboriginal for the same reason—Wagga Wagga or Goonengerry. Are you disappointed he’s not coming?”

  “I see Jack all the time. But it does put us in a rather compromising position,” she said with a laugh in her voice. She touched my knee under the table, and my cock broke its bonds and stood up, in spite of all the tight, dark good tailoring.

  I kept wondering how I was going to introduce the subject of Jack’s apartment. Could I say, “Jack is staying in Narragansett tonight while his Aston Martin is being repaired. You could show me the changes you’re planning on making to his apartment. I have a bottomless appetite for home-decorating hints.”

  But it was too soon. First I wanted to get another bottle of Montrachet down her throat.

  At a certain point Pia stopped eating and started chain-smoking. Cigarettes seemed to make her more discerning, if silence, pursed lips, and narrowed eyes indicated discernment. In truth I didn’t understand any of her signals. I was flying blind.

  I remembered a blunt Romanian girl I’d dated in college who would say, “You’ve gotten fat,” or “I no longer love you,” or would slam a door I’d just opened for her. That Romanian had completely shaken me; until then I’d always hidden behind my good manners.

  Pia was much closer to my world, but she had her own European approach, even if she was only half continental and on the privileged edge of the spectrum. But she had touched me under the table.

  When I started to order the second bottle, she said, “I don’t think we really need that. We’ve already stopped eating,” and I remembered the strange European notion that wine was a food.

  “Do you want dessert?” I asked.

  And she went “Tsk-tsk” and window-wipered her index finger from right to left—that irritating European way of saying no. I knew that they didn’t mean anything by it, that to them it didn’t come across as pedantic or parental. But as a good American I was still ruffled by it.

  “Check, please,” I said to the waiter.

  “No coffee?”

  “Just a check.”

  When we were on the street, I said, “I have a key to Jack’s place. Why don’t we stop by? I want to see the changes you’re making.”

  “Will he be there?”

  “Not until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I can only picture him in Narragansett in a tepee with a peace pipe eating buffalo meat.” And she nattered on without ever clearly saying she’d come with me or she wouldn’t. When the doorman saw us, he said, “Good evening. I’m not sure Mr. Holmes—”

  “No, Henry,” she said, “he won’t be back until tomorrow, but I wanted to show something to this
gentleman. We have keys.”

  The apartment was immaculate but had the slightly sour smell of ripening garbage left too long in the can. It also looked forlorn before all the little indirect lights were switched on and the terrace doors flung open.

  I made us martinis. It took a moment for me to put my hands on all the ingredients and the shaker. When I came into the living room, there she was in that silk dress that had taken on a new life under all the cunning little lights she’d switched on.

  I sat beside her and was very conscious of our clothes—of mine disguising the hairy beast underneath and my problematic testicles, one so much lower than the other that the boys in the locker room had dubbed me Won Hung Low; of hers lending such a lovely radiance to her cinched-in waist, mediating between her full, breathing breasts and her even fuller hips, which also seemed as if they were breathing invisibly.

  I pictured Jack up here putting the moves on his boys, but they probably just tore each other’s clothes off while standing in the doorway, undoing each other’s familiar belts, pulling off each other’s familiar shirts and underpants and socks, the easygoing camaraderie of undressing another man, but how dull. How lacking in mystery. Whereas here I was confronted with a woman, and me having known only a dozen in my whole life, compared to Jack’s hundreds of men and where was the delight in a man? Nor could another man give you anything but low-level tedious companionship. I pictured two men sitting at a table facing out with a chair between them, looking for some entertainment, some third person: a woman.

  As I sat next to Pia I was quickly enveloped by her wonderful light perfume. She was showing me the new Zumsteg silk covers for the pillows, now that the Indian prints had been banished—and our lips touched and I don’t know, was it her touch and scent and warmth that made the room lurch slightly or was it the wine and martinis?

  This is where I start all over, I thought. I thought that almost ten years of marital fidelity had been criminal and a mistake, a sacrifice to some pointless, cowardly ideal, and I appreciated Pia’s roundness, her springiness, the richness of flesh compared to Alex’s gauntness, Alex’s punishing hip bones and the three horizontal bones like a military decoration between her small breasts, and I suddenly hated Catholicism. The coward’s excuse. The lazy man’s alibi. I could hear music, as if my life were now an old-fashioned Technicolor musical. As I swarmed over Pia and my hands bunched and smoothed the silk almost satin, I thought of Rodin’s The Kiss, a man as hard as marble, a woman fluid as a wave. Idea for story: a man misses out on the one authentic moment of his life because he’s too busy comparing it to old works of art, mostly kitsch. I chuckled at my own thought, and Pia pushed me gently away. “What? Were you laughing at me?”

  “Just at myself. As for you, I marvel at you.”

  She said, “I’m so happy.”

  “Me too,” I whispered. And I thought, The married man has every motive in the world to keep it simple. He’s luckiest when there’s little past, no future, an absolute and abundant present.

  But then, maybe Pia is truly sophisticated, not longing for a one-and-only full-time relationship. Maybe she’s a sybarite in search of wine, men, and song.

  Or maybe she’s a romantic who loves me in some humble, simple way and would never dream of demanding anything, of disturbing my marriage.

  Or maybe she’s Jack’s puppet and will repeat back to him every insignificant detail about me. That idea made me shudder.

  At last we were both out of our clothes. I had one black stocking dangling from my right foot, which made it look seriously white, like some appalling English potted meat newly pried out of the can. She had indentations in her smooth, soft skin where the waistband of her panties had been cinching her in. But otherwise she now looked less like a girl and more like a woman, almost as if in nudity she’d gone up a full size. Her shoulders were firm and sloping; her breasts sagged a bit under their own weight; her pubic hair was also longer and thicker than I’d anticipated. Sort of shaggy with age.

  But her feet were superb, sensitive and fresh, her ankles fine, her legs wrapped around with long, sheathed muscles. Her breasts reminded me of anemones for some reason—maybe because the aureoles were big and dark, and the surrounding petals were soft and relaxed and drooping, radiating out from so much dark intensity.

  I ran my hands over her, over every inch of her, as if I were blind and needed to memorize her body since I couldn’t see it, though I could see it, and did. I wondered if her eyes would look more normal, less arresting, if they were seen upside down. Had her eyes been inverted? Was that the trick of their beauty?

  When my hand gently entered her she was wet and warm, and that wetness seemed to me like a form of mercy, the expression of generosity and goodness. Idea for story: men make so many crude cunt jokes because they love it too much, just as the worst English swear word used to be “bloody,” which means “by our lady,” the holy person we most revere.

  After it was all over we fell asleep, and then I woke up at three in the morning, dry mouthed. I moved slightly away to be out of the path of Pia’s sour breath. Her breasts and her belly and even her chin looked larger and too relaxed from this angle, as if she’d gained yet another ten pounds in her sleep. I even resented that she was here, presuming to share a mattress with me, and the words “loose morals” drifted past the center of my mind, though not for long enough to be introspected.

  But when the alarm went off, she was already bathed and dressed and scented and made up and mounted on her high heels and brisk and affectionate. She left a cup of coffee (black, not the way I liked it) beside the bed and kissed me on the forehead and said, “Now I must vanish. I have to pack to go to Washington on the noon train, but I’ll be back at the weekend. Here’s my private number.” She put her card next to the cup. My mind cantered satirically around the locution “at the weekend,” which I supposed must be an anglicism. Yet I was grateful because she hadn’t pressed me for a rematch.

  After Pia had gone, I showered and shaved and put on the fresh shirt I’d brought in my briefcase. I wrote Jack a note: “Mission accomplished. Thanks for the hospitality. You are a hell of a good friend. The apartment is looking swell.” Actually his apartment looked garish and busy and dusty in the sunlight.

  I tried to collect my thoughts: It’s true that a gay friend is different, maybe better, because he’s not a rival. He’s not part of the whole dismal system. He’s not one more pussy-whipped churchgoer who’s learned to keep his head, the big head and the little one, in check. Everyone thinks gay guys are sissies and mama’s boys, but they’re actually people who’ve chosen their sexuality over all the comforts of home. They’re bravely obsessional—but at a price. This apartment, sure, it’s impressive, but it’s not comfortable and it’s sort of dirty—it lacks a woman’s touch. I’m sure Jack brings men back here in industrial quantities, and why not? He’s still young, and he exudes a strong sensuality that is almost like body odor, though he has no smell. He reeks of sex—you can see it in his eyes. He never looks at people above the waist, nor can he follow the thread of the usual conversation about property values and the new school bill. Jack doesn’t look at men or women as neighbors and colleagues or beleaguered fellow parents. For him, their suits or dresses are just the thinnest tissue to be lifted off or torn away like the clothes on paper dolls. Once he said to me that he thought it was ridiculous that some people were turned on by cowboy hats or motorcycle jackets or peasant blouses. “For me,” he said, “clothes are erotic only when they’re shed. I don’t give a damn what people are wearing so long as they end up naked.”

  It’s strange that his way, the sexual way, would be considered a secondary route; in Larchmont the high road is social, economic, stable, and if all the good couples had their way, we’d soon stop wriggling and oscillating altogether and condense into a single hard point of stasis.

  Jack’s not that way. He’s a dirty boy, and he understands other dirty boys and girls. Is Pia a dirty girl? She was pretty extreme for a
first date—but then, what do I know? She’s definitely in the fast lane, and I’m in the parking lot. She licked my balls.

  But what do these people do when they get older, old? We’ll have our children and our grandchildren, but what will they have? Snapshots of former loves? Old party favors? Then again, is a grandchild really such a consolation? Doesn’t a grandson by his very existence define his grandfather as a superfluous man?

  4.

  That day I commissioned an experienced commercial photographer to take large, almost abstract pictures of a chemical process at a client’s plant in Lackawanna. I rushed up there on a puddle jumper, then rented a car. No one needed me, but my presence kept costs down. I’d worked out a successful formula for these annual reports—especially for ailing behemoths in the chemical industry. I wrote short, upbeat paragraphs of nearly cryptic generalities to be printed beside blazing out-of-focus photos of molten reds and rolled-out yellows. The disappointing actuarial report could be slipped in, in agate type, after a whole book of glossy photos and clichés about the future.

  I called Alex that evening from my highway motel, which I preferred to the old hotel downtown, where the curtains smelled of coal.

  She told me the children’s news: Palmer had gotten a mention très bien in Kindergarten French, and Margaret was learning in ballet how to do a full curtsy, and she was now going around bowing to the dogs and staff.

  I told Alex that these accomplishments seemed surreal in a Lackawanna motel where the outside traffic noise was punctuated only by the thumping of the ice machine.

  “My poor angel,” she said. “I hate to think of you up there alone. So bleak. Monsieur should have his comforts! Where did we go wrong in planning our lives? Should we sell our house, buy a little brownstone in Greenwich Village? I heard of one for just fifty thousand dollars, I guess because New York is so dangerous. But then you could retire and write your novels. Or we could live cheaply in Paris. That would be such a thrilling opportunity for the children. Margaret’s already perfected her curtsy. And Palmer can say ‘Bonjour, comment allez-vous?’ ”