Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  I held my head in my hands and looked down into the blue-mirrored tabletop: scary view of monster nostrils. “The real problem,” I said, “is that women always want to marry, and you can do that only once at a time. It sounds vain, but hundreds of women would like to be Mrs. Will L. Wright.”

  “What does the ‘L’ stand for?”

  “Luckinbill, but few women want to have a one-night stand or even a one-year stand with Will Luckinbill.”

  “I think Pia is enjoying it.”

  “She is?”

  “She likes how you lie with half your weight on her, almost in a trance, then like a lion spotting an eland spring into action and kiss her neck and face and almost bite her mouth.”

  “She said all that?”

  “She likes those trances and unannounced attacks. No one ever did that before, she said.”

  “But what about you?” I asked Jack. “Both women ignore your needs and your … reality as a man. Do you ever feel they’re treating you like some eunuch?”

  “A eunuch? Funny question.”

  I started meeting Jack for drinks more often, as if I hoped to justify my adultery in his eyes—which was pointless, since he didn’t disapprove. I did. The more fascinated I became with Pia, the guiltier I felt.

  I’d never really understood sex before. Of course I’d jerked off a lot, but I’d never looked at hard-core pornography, too fastidious to buy anything other than Playboy. And when I masturbated I wasn’t creative. I didn’t invent new scenes. I just replayed those special few experiences I’d known in real life. I didn’t choose this method; it was my temperament—a curious lack of imagination in someone who still considered himself a novelist. Because I’d only ever rewound my own tapes, I’d never explored anything kinky or even purely sensual, stripped of sentiment.

  Now, with Pia, the prologue and the coda might be romantic, but everything in between was complete perversion. She was permitted to hold my cock at the base like a throttled child, and to lick the head with thorough care, almost (to change the image) as if it were a doll’s head that she was painting with her tongue, determined to cover every last centimeter. I was free to explore her anus with my tongue while fingering her vagina as she rocked her body back and forth feverishly against my mouth. Neither of us knew these movements in advance. They weren’t consecrated by habit. They were invented on the spot as a way of scratching what itched.

  But what was freest was the aftermath, when we’d lie athwart her big bed in the sunlight, feeling the warmed air rise from the vents, my head on her belly or between her breasts. She’d said that her young blond from Bergamo had liked to spend the mornings between her breasts, and I could understand his predilection. I’d often get hungry and poke at the photogenic cheeses and fruits on the Moroccan plate. Her mink pillows glistened; I wondered if she kept them oiled. I also wondered why she didn’t trim her bush, she who shaved her legs and plucked her eyebrows. Maybe no one had ever advised her on bush length. Finally I trimmed it with fingernail scissors, pretending it was some kinky fetish that excited me. There was an essentialist in me that didn’t like the idea that I’d intervened and altered her toward a look I preferred. I had to squint morally and pretend that nature had trimmed her that way.

  I’d read in a book about monkeys that the primate nervous system was slow to be turned on and even slower to switch off. If so, Pia was a super-primate in that she took forever to respond but once aroused could never calm down. I’d get tired and want to sleep but she would still be rubbing against me and panting. The next day at my desk, I’d spring a boner thinking about her plunging her arm down between her full thighs and fucking her own wrist and I’d call her.

  Once Alex asked me why I smelled so strongly of a flowery perfume.

  “Jasmine,” she said. “It smells like jasmine at night.”

  I said, “Beth”—the name of my girl—“is wearing that new trendy perfume Sympathy for the Devil, and we’re all complaining. It’s giving us all headaches.”

  After that I asked Pia not to wear her jasmine perfume. She became cross and wouldn’t say anything over lunch. At last, when we were alone and I was kissing her mouth and her large nipples, she muttered, “Will, it’s really too inhibiting, all these rules and restrictions.”

  Idea for story: The married man has nothing to gain by arguing his case with his mistress or arguing at all. The most he can hope for is a benign sidestepping of any controversy.

  During the children’s fall break Alex flew with them back to St. Barts. She said it would help Margaret get over her lingering cold. I said I was going to stay in New York at the Pierre for the ten days they were away, since it would be too much of a downer commuting to an empty house. That way the staff would have a little break as well. Ghislaine could return to France for a holiday. My life in town gave me more opportunities to be with Pia, which mollified her for a while. And enabled me to know her better; my feelings for her deepened. I wasn’t sure they would, but they did.

  We had dinner with her brother Alfredo, who was severely depressed. He’d been a broker addicted to work and amphetamines. One day he came to and was sitting at a booth in Rikers Coffee Shop on Sheridan Square, and he realized that it was Tuesday evening and he’d lost four days, including two workdays.

  He talked about it freely with an assumed AA joviality.

  “You’re so funny about all this, Alfredo,” I said.

  “We’re always laughing in AA,” he said with a trace of an Italian accent. “Right across the hall are the people in Al-Anon, the wives and children of drunks. They’re all crying and we’re all laughing.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Pia merrily.

  “Terrible,” Alfredo concurred.

  A long silence set in. I started asking him questions worthy of a Virginia hostess.

  “So who’s your favorite Italian pop singer?”

  “Milva,” he said, which didn’t get us very far.

  “What’s your favorite kind of pasta?”

  “Pesto Genovese. That’s the kind with green beans, potatoes, and pesto, served on these little twisted pasta spirals called trofie.”

  Another silence.

  Then I asked, “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be?”

  “They say Bali is nice,” he said mournfully, adding, “though too many Australians, I’ve heard.”

  I got up to go to the men’s room; when I came back a moment later, Pia and Alfredo were in the middle of a vigorous conversation and I realized that my hostessy questions had had a chilling effect. I subsided into silence and studied Alfredo, who had what I took to be the patient earnestness of an addict on the mend. I’d never met anyone in recovery, though plenty of my relatives in Virginia were slaves to what an old aunt of mine had called John Barleycorn. Part of me thought it could all be done with willpower. I was surprised that an Italian would espouse AA, which was so American in its belief in the group and in redemption.

  He was a coarser version of Pia, with lower eyebrows, a much bigger nose, and dumpling ears that made me think he’d been a wrestler in school—his left ear was particularly swollen. He had glimmers of Pia’s charm, but sobriety had chastened him, nearly extinguishing his vivacity.

  “That will come back,” Pia said when we were alone. “You were wonderful, pure genius asking about Milva. He’s usually so shy; you got him to talk, and it was absolutely extraordinary. I guess I hadn’t realized how kind you are. You must be a wonderful father.”

  Her comment about my role as a father made her sad, which rubbed up against her appreciation of my kindness. She took my arm.

  We spent an evening with Alfredo and a friend of his from Venice, Francesco. I surmised from sad stories about his defeats with women that Alfredo wasn’t gay, but this Francesco was flamboyantly so. We went to a good Italian restaurant in the East Fifties, and Francesco laughed and joked and talked dirty for hours, like a professional entertainer. At one point he threw breadsticks at us all. The American diners
looked horrified, but the Italian waiters laughed.

  “Do you admire my figure, Will?” he asked, standing up. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers, exposing his midriff, and pointed to the right side and the left.

  “Do you find it lovely?” he asked. “Touch. You have the right to touch it.”

  Alfredo said, “You exaggerate, Francesco. The poor man doesn’t like men; he likes women.”

  “You all say that, but the gentleman is a novelist.”

  “Yes,” Alfredo conceded.

  “So that means he likes everything beautiful. He’s an artist who admires beauty? I am correct?”

  I caved in and touched his stomach, murmuring, “Lovely.”

  “There!” Francesco said. “You see, Alfredo? Pia? You are terrible, your disdain for my beauty. But you are not artists. Will is an artist.”

  He turned his chair toward me to exclude them, put his hand on his jaw, and propped his elbow up on the table. He said in a confidential voice, “Let’s ignore them. They are philistines. I’m sad to say it, I’ve known them all my life, but I’ve been unable to improve them. They are rich and aristocrats but not very cultured, while I am a poor teacher living in just one room, but I exercise and take the sun and keep my hairs very blond and iron my own clothes and I know how to pose beautifully, no?”

  He struck an absurd pose, standing and wrapping one arm around his chest. He squeezed his legs together and pursed his lips and crossed his eyes.

  He said, “Do you admire my plastique, Will? Do you understand its beauty? I’ve based it on a basso-rilievo by Luini. My idea is to base my plastique on the sculpture of the Rinascimento. You’re sensitive, you are too good for these terrible people. Tell me, is Pia a good lover? I mean, in the bed? Or is she like one of our Italian tagliatelle: no flavor, no sauce?”

  He was thrilled with his own question, and he turned to Pia, jabbed a finger at her, stuck out his tongue, and said, “No sauce!”

  Turning back to me, he declared in a low voice, “No sauce she has no sauce at all.”

  Now he returned to his main project: me.

  “Will, you have tried the limp tagliatello, you have seen the beauty of my plastique in the Luini style”—and again he pursed his lips and crossed his eyes—“and now you should choose the lovely Venetian blond over the dull woman of Brescia. Yes, Pia is from Brescia, where the very poorest, dullest peasants live, very, very sad, they have no folk songs, no dances, no pretty costumes, they just—how you say?—ploe?”

  “Plow,” said Pia.

  “Thank you, darling. They just ploe and look at the earth and wear terrible dark clothes, whereas we Venetians are dancing on our beautiful gondolas wearing rich tissues—”

  “Fabrics,” coached Alfredo helpfully.

  “I am a professor of English!” Francesco announced indignantly. “How dare you correct me? ‘Tissue’ is perfectly correct, Mr. Native Speaker, no?”

  “Well,” I said, “it depends.”

  “But we are losing the points!” Francesco exclaimed. “We were talking of my beauty and my plastique”—again the pursed mouth and this time a hand frozen in midair—“and our cheerful gondolas and lovely folk songs and it’s a question, Will, if you choose my beauty or this dull woman with no culture.”

  Shit, I thought, is this going to go on all evening?

  But I realized that Europeans, at least the aristocrats, saw gays as entertaining and funny, and certainly Pia and Alfredo were urging Francesco on.

  He’d just arrived from the Veneto, and he left us early because he was jet-lagged.

  They said, “Isn’t he adorable? We love our Francesco. He always keeps us laughing. How dull our Septembers in Venice would have been without him.”

  “Yeah, he’s funny,” I said, “if a bit extreme.”

  “Extreme?” Pia asked, suddenly hostile.

  Alfredo said, “That’s what we love about him.”

  “Yes, Francesco is adorable,” Pia insisted. “We really should introduce him to Jack.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “But why ever not?”

  “Jack doesn’t like flaming queens,” I said.

  “Queen!” Pia exclaimed. “How boorish. Francesco isn’t a type any more than you are a public schoolboy. I’m sure Jack would find him amusing, but let’s not squabble.”

  She changed the subject and, perhaps for the sake of Alfredo’s morale, for the rest of the evening seemed genuinely cheerful. But she didn’t invite me back home with her.

  I’d assumed she was enamored of me, and somehow I hadn’t imagined she might choose or not choose to be with me. I headed back to the Pierre.

  Though my room was small, it was on a high floor looking down Fifth Avenue, with its lights starting and stopping traffic. Wounded by Pia’s rejection, I tore the back of my trousers lurching past an overly ornate chair. I kicked the chair over. How dare she banish me after I said something obvious about her effeminate friend? Of course he’s a screaming queen, I fumed—I’d learned that one from Jack. Judging from Jack’s museum cocktail parties, he didn’t have any gay friends. In all these years, I’d never met another gay man through Jack.

  I thought, He’s right. He just uses them for sex, which is what I should do—sleep with women, then toss them aside. Why have dangerous, family-threatening affairs with fleshy women who never say an interesting word, who’ve never read a book beyond Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the sole source of her ideas? If I make her listen to a Ravel piano concerto, she says, “It’s dreamy.” She misses all the wit and dynamism and asperity.

  She’s a moron and promiscuous out of boredom; just watch, one day she’ll toss my way a cute little venereal disease to take home to my wife! I know it’s the cheese going off—the Pont-I’Évêque—but I can’t help associating the smell with her body, some yeast infection. Look at the company she keeps—a skinny, peroxided faggot probably nursing his own dose of the clap in that “beautiful” anus of his.

  I took a deep breath and got ready for bed. I had Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d been putting off reading it for ages. I was afraid it would make me so jittery with envy (reviews had all been ecstatic) that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I wanted something elevated in my life, something beyond my sexual obsession with this dunce and her court jester and depressed brother.

  I would have called Alex down in St. Barts, but it was too late; she’d said they were living by the sun, the only sensible thing to do. I missed her and a sense of decency in my life. I missed Palmer and Peg. I felt so tenderly toward them and could picture them sleeping peacefully beside the beach and the water.

  I wrestled with my sheets and I thought, No matter how luxurious a hotel is, there’s no getting around the fact that other people have slept on these mattresses and rubbed themselves with these towels. I hated the dirt and expense of a hotel and longed for my nature-nut wife and our impeccable linens and health food meals.

  I strummed my way through a few pages of Pynchon. Here was something about bananas—everyone making drinks and meals out of nothing but bananas. This Pynchon was wild! So intelligent and funny and original. Not in a million years would I have chosen someone like Francesco to spend an evening with. Then again, it seemed these Europeans loved to be amused more than anything else, as if boredom were stalking them night and day, the dreaded ennui. For them a gay man was as amusing as a dwarf was for a king. Francesco, despite his protestations of poverty, was probably a baronino like all the rest of them. He could be funny and outrageous, being one of them. He was probably always inventing some new bit of comedy. Tonight it was his “beauty” and his “plastique.” And my sensitivity to those because I was an “artist.” That must have meant that Pia had told him I was a writer. Guess that counts more over there than it does here, I thought. Authors. Aristocratic faggots. All a way of staying amused in this dull world while advertising one’s own exclusivity in taste and rank. Those people will never read Pynchon, even if he’s transl
ated. Too much work …

  I asked myself, do I despise Pia?

  I wished she weren’t so vapid, so certain she was fascinating.

  I turned over and over in my bed and finally made myself a scotch on the rocks from the minibar and smoked a Kent while watching part of a western on TV.

  The phone rang.

  “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. I’m down in the lobby. Can I come up?”

  “Sure. It’s room 1142.”

  “I don’t have any panties on.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, afraid someone might hear—was the house phone next to the main desk? “Good, very good,” I said. “Come on up.”

  I rushed to brush my teeth and hair. A moment later she was rolling her knuckles against my door in a muted knock. When I opened it, she had on a raincoat though it wasn’t raining, and she was wearing a subdued smile.

  I pulled her in, closed the door, embraced her for a long time, and then, still kissing her, pulled up the raincoat and placed a hand on her bare, firm ass and rubbed a finger against her asshole. I was so excited. I wanted to sodomize her, though I hadn’t done that to anyone more than two or three times in my life. Two times.

  She knew what I wanted and apparently wasn’t afraid of it. She pulled my penis out of the opening in my pajama bottoms and turned around and rubbed her ass against it. We clawed our clothes off, and she knelt on all fours athwart the bed, saying, “A little lubricant might help.”

  I could think of nothing beyond a miniature bottle of magnolia body oil that the hotel provided, and I rushed into the bathroom to get it.

  “Now go slow,” she said.

  I slathered some oil on her hole and worked a finger in. With my other hand I reached around and played with the nipple on that side.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I was afraid that if getting in her became hard going or fecal I’d wilt, but the whole situation excited me. After I was in about an inch, she gasped and reached back and waved a blind hand in alarm. In a moment, though, the crisis had passed and she pushed back, saying, “Oh Will,” and I went in nicely.