Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  “Let’s not go overboard,” I said. “I like my job, even if it is pointless. I’ve made it very profitable, and I’m the first Wright in two generations to earn any money. If I gave it up to write novels—”

  “But who knows, you might earn money with your novels,” she protested.

  “Not likely,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t like living off your father’s money.”

  “But if we sold the house—”

  “You’d hate it, Alex. I know how important it is to you to live surrounded by nature.”

  A long silence ensued and then she said, “You’re right,” her voice very faint. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I liked keeping Alex in the country so that I could get away from time to time.

  That night, as I tried to get to sleep, I replayed in my mind everything I’d done with Pia. I’d been waiting all day for this moment. Idea for story: Sex is real for a man only when he can masturbate later and reclaim the images for his imagination. Develop into bigger point about the imagination and its dangers.

  And it was true: I’d been carrying around with me the possibility of reliving last night as if it were a gift that someone had given me on an important occasion, but that I hadn’t been allowed to open yet. I could taste her throat as she thrust her head back while my hands kneaded her plush buttocks. I inched deeper inside her, or I lay on my back and she sat on me, her hair curtaining her glittering smile, and she groaned with something between pleasure and pain, “God, that’s so damn good!” Alex never admitted to any earthly pleasure, to anything that made her gasp; Alex was a mystic of love, whereas Pia was a blues singer of lust. Idea for story: naive white man thinks of all orgasmic women as Negro until he meets Italian heiress.

  Since I didn’t know where Pia was in Washington or how to reach her, I called Jack, and was amazed to find him at home.

  “Where on earth are you?” he asked. “If I sound weird, it’s because I’m drunk. Someone at the magazine roped me into a horrible drinks party—”

  “How could that be so horrible?”

  “But it was!” he insisted with a laugh.

  Unsure of his degree of irony, I said, “Did you forget to eat?”

  “Oh, I ate: four olives,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “In a Lackawanna Days Inn.”

  “Is this a cry for help? Did you think you were dialing the suicide hotline?”

  He told me that he’d been to Albany the week before for his work and that it was surely just as appalling. We were both enjoying playing New Yorkers shocked by the provinces.

  “So: that Pia of yours!” I said.

  Jack laughed and said, “Was she good in the sack? Be advised: I’ll be asking her the same question about you.”

  I said, “I’m sure she’s the most passionate woman I’ve ever known.”

  “Maybe it’s not her nature. Maybe you just turn her on.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “when you’re with another man, does your greatest pleasure come from exciting him?”

  “I don’t think we’re that altruistic,” he said. I could hear him reflecting. “Of course, it’s nice to get good reviews, especially if the guy spreads the word to other possible victims. But no, I think we’re more selfish.”

  “See,” I said excitedly, “it’s so damn thrilling to watch a lady become an animal in your arms, to hear her growling, to see her head whipping from side to side.”

  “Men don’t lose control like that,” Jack said, almost sourly, as if he were questioning my bragging. Or was he envious? Did he wish he could produce that effect? Or did he still dream of my fucking him? “But even if they did start growling, I think that would freak me out. I don’t like them even to talk. Gay men say the dumbest things, all about hot balls and hungry holes.”

  I found myself wincing, not wanting the specifics. An embarrassing silence settled in like a sudden cold front ending a warm spring day.

  Then, on a different note, he asked, “Are you going to continue seeing Pia?”

  I almost wanted to tell him that I might not if I could find the time to jerk off three times a day but that otherwise I couldn’t see how I would stop obsessing about her.

  “I want to,” I said. “She’s a wonderful woman. By the way, you don’t know how I could get in touch with her today, do you?”

  “Try her at home.”

  “But she’s in Washington.”

  “No, she’s not. I just spoke with her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe her trip was called off,” he added quickly as if he’d made a faux pas.

  “I wouldn’t want to look as if I were testing what she’d told me. Or give her the feeling we’d been discussing her and that’s how I knew she was at home.”

  “You’re being complicated. Call her.”

  After work I’d eaten a hamburger steak and mashed potatoes under a blanket of gravy. I felt sick and wished I had a quart bottle of seltzer, but I was too tired to dress and drive to a 7-Eleven.

  I sat on the toilet and leaned forward with my arms on my knees and strained, but nothing happened. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I supposed that no man in history had ever thought his own face looked dishonest. Maybe by definition that was impossible to think. But I wondered if someone studying me—a man? a woman? probably a man—would say I had a shifty face.

  I went back to the bed and lay down, looking at the telephone as if it might ring.

  I felt strange about having discussed sex with Jack. We’d never done that before. It seemed odd that he, a faggot, should be so much more experienced than a normal guy like me, but was it real experience? Men and women played for keeps, for babies, for money, and they let the law govern their union and disunion. God and nature had made their bodies fit together. But what permanence or public acknowledgment could two fairies count on? Two barren boys cornholing each other; must hurt like hell, I thought. They can’t go anywhere as a couple unless they don’t mind flaunting their fancy ways. I guess now they wouldn’t get fired for being gay. Or would they? But people must still treat them as freaks; why are they so affected, with their sibilance and shrill laughter and swooping intonations, their clothes too tight, too bright?

  Not that Jack was like that. I suspected that many female staffers at Newsweek must be pining over him. Was he perverse enough to fool them deliberately? How many more years could he get away with this masquerade before people demanded that he marry? Maybe he would come clean, but could he on the job?

  I decided not to try Pia. It took all my resolve and sense of strategy; I kept looking at the neatly printed card she’d given me with what she called her “private number” on it. How many numbers did she have, for chrissake?

  I called Jack again and told him he shouldn’t mention to Pia that he’d told me she hadn’t gone to D.C.

  “You’ve got it bad,” Jack drawled. “This is beginning to feel like high school.”

  “You can say that,” I snapped, “because you don’t care about anyone that much.”

  “Are you sure of that?” he asked, with a trace of asperity. Then he sighed and said, “Maybe you’re right.”

  At last I got to sleep and had long dreams in which Pia or a near-Pia teased me, denied me sex while permitting me to touch her stomach. We were in an old-fashioned sleeping car with sooty dark green serge upholstery and soft blue night-lights beside the net hammock where I’d stowed my wool sweater and toiletries. When I awakened, I’d worked myself halfway out of my pajama bottoms and was pressing a hot, sticky erection into the bare mattress.

  Back in New York I dropped into the office. The Lackawanna pictures had already been developed. I looked at the slides on the light table with a magnifying glass. They were exactly what I wanted.

  When I called Pia at three, I didn’t mention Washington at all, in case she was aware that I knew she hadn’t been there. She asked me if I could come by for a quick drink.

  Her apartment was just a studio in a white brick high-rise on Third Avenue in
the Seventies, but she’d obviously decorated it with care so it could be photographed by shelter magazines. She was a “stylist,” it turned out, someone who could locate and rent absolutely anything for professional photographers. She’d managed to hire an animal trainer and get two grown deer up slippery stairs to a photographer’s studio on Fifth Avenue across from the Forty-second Street Library. She’d assembled on a single school playground the thirty-two prizes to be awarded in a contest—everything from a Cuisinart to a Piper Cub. She’d had to have the plane’s wings removed to maneuver it on a truck bed through the streets.

  Her apartment had a double bed that also served as a couch, piled high with thirty pillows in mink covers. There was a profusion of smelly, camera-ready cheeses and hothouse fruits artfully arranged on a round, blue-and-white Moroccan platter. There were two delicate white chairs with a blue Isis on the back folding a wing over her own standing body, arrayed in a gown with vertical pleats; the chairs looked as if they were remnants from a 1930s Cleopatra film. The sunlight created a wide, brilliant band hectic with dust motes.

  I was put off by the mink, the cheese, the dust, and Pia’s own ripeness in the harem pants she was wearing. Her bottom was big and jiggly, and the strip of bare flesh between the pants and her beaded bodice looked clammy.

  Or that’s what some other Will would have said, an imbecile invulnerable to her.

  Did Jack look at women with the weary indifference of a eunuch? I couldn’t, since even if Pia came across as so much less distinguished than my wife and even if I had contempt for her, that scorn was linked to my desire. I’d come to respect Alex too much to desire her.

  It hadn’t always been that way. When I’d first met Alex, I’d been passionate about her and revered her. I was a Charlottesville boy, spotty and naive, enflamed with dreams of glory. And she was a New York debutante, with her fragile beauty, her fine porcelain, her satin hostess gown, and a freezer full of crab claws. She had her adorable cross-eyed way of disputing everything I said, beating fragile fists against my chest while laughing at herself and insisting she was serious.

  Pia and I sat on the couch-bed with its raw-silk spread, the lines of white silk alternating with beige wool stripes: the upscale bedouin look. We chattered about this and that, carefully avoiding any mention of Washington or Lackawanna, and sipped our cocktails. I couldn’t stop nibbling on the cold lemon peel, relishing its bitterness. We were treating with airy indifference the fact that I had to catch the six forty and it was already five twenty.

  “It’s nice,” I said, “that you can keep your big window uncurtained and no one can look in, you’re so high up.”

  “Another drink?” she asked, and I stood up with her and put our glasses down on the sill and took her in my arms. Until now the distance between us had been a form of suffering, not that holding her eased the pain completely. On the margins I noted that she and her mink pelts were vulgar, but between the margins the wide column of reality that I was perusing was compelling—compelling me to pull her closer, to kiss her with a need that was irredeemable. Talking about how “nice” her uncurtained window was sounded to my ears like a madman’s little rhyme before he threw himself off a bridge. The air was crackling with the big banner of drama. My life had become dramatic.

  We saw each other whenever we could snatch a free moment, usually an hour at lunchtime, though I preferred to spend the night with her after she’d elaborately stripped her bed of the mink pillows and stacked them in three neat piles on the parquet. I learned that she liked caviar, and I’d bring it over in little jars from Caviarteria on Madison Avenue, though she scolded me for being so extravagant. She was a rich girl used to frugality. Once she prepared the caviar in what she called the “Russian manner,” with small boiled potatoes, sour cream, and melted butter. She showed me how to make an incision in a peeled potato, then fill it with the caviar and other ingredients and eat it in a single bite. We ended up feeding these potatoes to each other.

  I don’t think she worked much as a stylist, though like every rich lady in New York she felt obliged to have a job. Of course, she also had her charities. She thought my indifference to these was maddening, though she liked men too much to be a feminist about it. It seemed to be my fate to inspire mock feminist indignation in unbelievably sweet women.

  Pia told me that her mother, Toni, was a debutante from Sacramento. I was surprised that the people out there bothered with “society”—I thought of the women as riding around in convertibles the whole time with scarves tied over their hair. At St. Moritz on a ski holiday Toni met an Italian baronino who’d rebelled against his family in Brescia and was working as a waiter in Barcelona. Some of his rich childhood friends, it turned out, were paying for his St. Moritz sojourn. Later Pia wondered if his friends hadn’t been staking him on a bet that he’d meet someone precisely like Toni.

  Toni and Alessandro were very happy for a while with her money and his hand-kissing charm. She’d been brought up in a very Protestant way, taught to keep her expenses down, live modestly, and contribute most of her income to disease-related causes, but Sandro, as a Catholic, felt no such scruples. He knew about pleasure and how to secure it for himself and confer it on Toni and several other women.

  “So you see,” Pia said, “I have a double heritage. The famous American puritanism and the voluptuousness of Italy. It’s all rather fascinating, don’t you think?”

  I leaned over her to kiss her lips. “I’m afraid not much of the puritanism rubbed off.”

  Months went by like that—the whole summer and part of the fall.

  I didn’t know if Alex suspected. Luckily we’d had sex only rarely during the preceding two years, so in all likelihood she wouldn’t notice any diminished desire on my part. What increased was my tenderness and gratitude toward her. I pretended to myself that she did know about my affair with Pia and that she countenanced it because it brought me pleasure. In a cockeyed way I thought of the excitement and unpredictability of my affair with Pia—its passion and the moodiness it inspired—as compensation for the novels I wasn’t writing, a rough transcript of the feelings I might have summoned up as a solitary creator before the empty page.

  Pia and I couldn’t go out to restaurants often for fear of being seen, though I’d discovered a disgusting Indian place upstairs on Forty-ninth Street where no one we knew would dare to eat. We drank sweet pomegranate cocktails and ate crushed-kitty curries and oily puri and desserts of coiled doggie-do pastry dissolving in clouded honey. Usually we had the place to ourselves, and we’d recline on pillows and watch a cockroach investigate the corner of a dusty windowsill.

  Slowly I learned bits and pieces about her life. She was older than me, drifting about somewhere in her mid-thirties. She’d studied international relations in D.C. (I don’t think she ever told me the name of the school). I thought she’d told us she’d gone to Smith. Lying always surprised me but I didn’t much care. She praised American campus life and hands-on teaching and preferred that to the big-city impersonality of European universities.

  She said, “I tried the Sorbonne and La Sapienza in Rome, both laughable.”

  She seemed ashamed to admit it, but her mother had ended up buying off Alessandro.

  “He pretended that as a Catholic he had scruples about divorce. He even has a genuine saint in his family, a 1920s doctor who saved the life of a Jewish child in Liverpool—one of his miracles—and instantly baptized him, which of course enraged the child’s parents. Maybe he’s just a Blessed. And we have another Blessed, Lucia Crocifissa—I love these names, aren’t they delicious?”

  So much conspicuous piety in his bloodlines, I gathered, made it difficult for Sandro to accept the sin and humiliation of divorce for less than two million dollars, a Maserati, and a modern villa near Borgo San Sepolcro.

  “A scoundrel,” I said, but Pia looked hurt and tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I didn’t tell you all that so that you could mock my father,” she said.

  “What am
I supposed to say?” I asked in consternation. “Probably nothing, huh?”

  “It’s just that my father is a dear poetic man, a Don Juan, perhaps—but then, we of all people shouldn’t be too quick to condemn him. Now he lives with a thoroughly elegant Italian mistress, a countess with a whole floor of a Renaissance palace on the most beautiful street in Europe, Via Garibaldi in Genoa. It’s like the Grand Canal but straightened out and without the water. He’s such a snob, Sandro, that he loves his countess and their Luca Giordano paintings and their two maids tiptoeing around and even the three corgis.”

  “Well, in that case,” I said, as if I’d just been enlightened.

  Her mother had a house in the South of France, in Menton, but she seemed to know almost no one there and spent most of her time in San Francisco, where she was still “Baronessa Toni.” She attended the opera and was active in a charity devoted to rape victims all over the world. Pia admired her mother but found her frugality a bit ridiculous.

  “She’s the sort of woman who might serve ten lamb chops to ten people with a teaspoon each of commercial mint jelly, and this from a woman who’s eaten at the best tables in Italy and France.”

  “But what about you?” I asked. “You interest me more than they do.”

  “I do?” she asked, and she blushed for the first and only time I’d ever observed. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

  “Who was your first lover?”

  I don’t think that was the sort of question she’d had in mind, but she said, “It was a lifeguard at Laguna. I don’t know who we were visiting down there. Nor can I imagine how I escaped everyone’s supervision to run off with him.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. He must have been seventeen. He had a white stripe painted down his nose and a superbly tanned hairless body, a black Speedo with a white-and-red cross on the side, and—well, his attraction to me was obvious. Let’s say he filled out his Speedo nicely.”