Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  It didn’t feel like the warm glove of the cunt. It was tighter at the entrance but loose and balloony inside, once past the ring (wasn’t anus the Latin word for “ring”?). I loved that she was giving me this other orifice; now I’d had all three. Maybe it was bringing her pleasure only in the form of submission. She’d submitted her asshole to me; I was in the hole that gave birth every day to a turd. Now everything was dirtier, grittier, far from the rose water of romantic sex that Alex concocted and purveyed. Nor was Pia just enduring it; she was shoving her ass back on my dick, eager for more.

  We lay beside each other and shared a Kent. “Don’t you want to come?”

  “No,” she said, laughing, “I’m like a Greek girl who preserves her virginity by offering her croup to men.” She excused herself, and I imagined her sitting on the toilet shitting out my babies. It was repulsive and thrilling and I felt a new intimacy between us. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was feeling, but it included exhilaration.

  We saw Francesco twice more over the next two weeks before he returned to Venice, and now that I understood how and why he was funny, I laughed like hell over his antics. He decided that all men, as they got older, resembled lesbians with their cropped hair and fat faces and sagging tits, and so he was going to prepare for that inevitable role by studying lesbians and doing dykeish things like making scenes in public, drinking beer, and buddying up to workingmen in positions of authority—cops, train conductors. He was also going to buy a cat and exchange cat pictures with lesbians. I had no idea whether they really did those things, but I went along with the joke.

  We invited Jack on one of the evenings, and the way he responded astonished me.

  We were in Little Italy, which Francesco called the Attic of Naples. He loved the souvenir stores and even picked up a Mussolini ashtray. “Un tesoro,” he said, “a great treasure!”

  He loved the sugary zeppole a vendor was selling and the “ancient Roman” decor of a restaurant complete with plastic busts of emperors and plastic Doric columns pressed against a printed vinyl mural of Vesuvius erupting.

  “This was the way Naples was right after the war,” said Francesco. “Oh, how they fleeced the conquering American soldiers, especially the sweet, trusting Negroes, who brought everyone such joy with their burnt honey skin and huge pink hands and their dancing—their dancing! It is so cruel, the American racism—why do you mistreat the poor Negro? The Negro loves Italy and the Italian boys and women. But Little Italy, even the espresso with its zest of lemon! No one has drunk coffee like this in Italy since 1900 in Palermo. Little Italy is like Pompeii, all of the Italian past so frozen in time.”

  As we sat in a café and ate creamy pastries, Jack laughed with real delight at everything Francesco said. Sitting next to Francesco, I could see him sweating and clenching his hands and licking his lips, and I thought about how much work it must be to be the life of the party, even if the party was just three or four friends. I was reminded of the time in church choir back in Charlottesville when I was standing next to a professional opera singer, a baritone, who’d been hired for Easter mass. At least a gallon of sweat poured off him, and his lungs filled audibly like the bellows of the pipe organ beside us.

  Jack didn’t need to distance himself. He and Francesco might have belonged to different species, though I was sure that Francesco, like Jack, had only straight friends—but then again, what did I know of Jack’s nocturnal life? All I knew was that he never arrived at the office before eleven, which meant that he could go to bed at two A.M. and still get enough sleep. What did he do during those hours from eleven to two? He didn’t watch television, though he was a reader.

  What most impressed me was Jack’s ease with the Italians, all three of them. He even knew a few expressions in Italian, including magari (“Would that it might be so”), so much more efficient than its English translation. I’d only just now learned that one from Pia, who used it all the time, even when she was speaking English.

  I could see that Francesco didn’t much like Jack. One clown doesn’t like another unless they’ve worked out a routine together. Though really, Jack wasn’t a clown. He never talked about his homosexuality in a group. He could tell jokes, and he certainly was pleasant and “light” in the way these people prized—Pia had even told me once that “lightness” was a patrician trait. But Jack didn’t indulge in self-parody or confession. His “material” was never autobiographical. Nor did he prepare a whole “act” for each evening the way Francesco did. And unlike Francesco, he was never willing to appear grotesque. Jack did not seem to feel any affinity with other gay men unless he desired them.

  In that way he was different from me. I liked women, all women. Certainly more than men. I’d always preferred my sisters to my brothers. I had never liked other men to touch me, and a sport like wrestling, a month’s worth of it in high school gym class, gave me the creeps.

  I realized that all women charmed me, even the stupid or loud ones. Even lesbians. I once saw a lesbian couple at a Greenwich Village party, and I found them touching—the way the more masculine one hovered over the more feminine one, who was a splashier dresser. There they were: The “butch,” as Jack called them, wore a baggy black turtleneck and green corduroy trousers and had cropped hair but also simple gold hoops through her pretty ears, to prove she had a right to the ladies’ room. She was bringing a drink to her “femme,” who was considerably older, with blond hair and bangle bracelets and a low-cut blouse to reveal a scrawny chest. They were sweet. There was so much love circulating between them. Jack told me that this was common—a baby butch and an aging femme. I wanted to watch them making love, the chubby butch’s buttocks ruched with cellulite, the femme rickety and skeletal and playing shy. Their physical flaws made them all the more beautiful in my eyes, especially the calm radiating from the butch’s face. I felt that I understood them, that I could help them out even as I acknowledged that their relationship was designed to keep me and all other men away.

  Jack didn’t dote on gay—or even straight—men in the way that I doted on women. Nor did he seem indifferent or even cool to women, as I thought gay men must be. I guessed I had gotten that wrong. But wouldn’t a gay man see a woman as a rival? Or try to tame her by turning her into a sister, the way competitive women did with each other? Yet there wasn’t a trace of any of that in Jack. He was clear about his lack of sexual desire for women, but he was fully alive to their physical appeal. He’d say, “Catch the rack on that one,” or “Her butt wiggles faster than a hummingbird’s wings.” Once I asked him how it was that he noticed those attractions, and he said, “It’s my vice. I look for the sexual possibilities in everyone I meet, young or old, male or female.”

  Pia told me that she always felt very close to Jack physically, that he often took her hand at the movies or walked with an arm around her waist or a hand on her shoulder, almost like a proprietary Latin who is proud to lay even the slightest claim on a beautiful woman in public.

  “We once slept together,” she said. “It was late. We’d watched a movie on TV together, and we’d drunk two bottles of wine. I said he might as well stay over, and he nodded and stripped down to his underwear and held me all night, but it was just brother-sister.”

  “Was this—recently? Since I’ve known you?”

  “Geloso!” she laughed, tapping the end of my nose with a playful fingertip. “No,” she went on vaguely, “it was long ago. But in the middle of the night I woke up to feel him poking my hip with his huge cazzo; even though he was asleep, he probably imagined I was a handsome ragazzo.”

  “Hey,” I said feebly, “that rhymes. Cazzo, ragazzo.” I was wondering why she was suddenly being so Italian …

  So Jack’s got a big dick, I thought, and she noticed it. Women say they don’t care about dick size, but that’s obviously rubbish.

  “Oh, what the hey,” she said.

  Seeing Jack among the Europeans forced me to reevaluate him. He clearly felt completely at ease with “social” people n
ow. In the early sixties, when I’d met him, I’d thought of his queerness as a deformity, a scandal, something akin to a heroin addiction or pedophilia or membership in the Communist Party. I’d liked Jack in spite of this, but since I’d known it could get him fired, I’d been determined to keep it a secret. I covered for him if anyone at the office quizzed me about who he was dating. Almost no one did, because Jack was extremely discreet. I thought I was a generous soul for taking on board a fag friend, obviously a liability to me and a permanent danger to himself.

  Now everything had changed. Jack was no longer a faggot; he was gay. European aristocrats found him and his kind amusing. Befriending a gay was like knowing a Negro—you didn’t want too many, but one was chic. Jack had become so confident, and he’d become even more polished. He was so attentive; he laughed so merrily, though he was never sycophantic. Most of all he had the relentless energy I’d always associated with “social” people. He’ll end up as the president of the Bachelors’ Cotillion, I thought.

  On our Little Italy night we all went back to Pia’s place and got drunk. We were nearly sick drinking bourbon and began to talk about sex. Someone had said that Americans talk about money so they won’t have to talk about sex, and Europeans talk about sex so they won’t have to talk about money. That night everyone’s money secrets were safe. We kept passing the bottle, and Francesco began describing his “affair” with his older brother when Francesco was eleven and his brother was fifteen.

  “Giacchino? You had sex with him?” said Pia. “I did too but much later.”

  “Now he’s boringly straight,” Francesco said, “and would kill me if he knew I was telling you this. When we were kids he loved to fuck me, and with no emotion. But I loved him. I was so hurt when I was thirteen and Giacchino came home from school and I tried to start something with him and he called me a froscio.” He clarified for me: “A faggot.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, sitting on the floor between two towers of mink pillows. I had to put a hand over one eye to see. “Does anyone sheerish—sheerioushly believe in bisexuality?”

  “Yes, of course,” Pia said. She was lying across her bed on her stomach. She’d changed into a silk burnoose. “Everyone is bisexual. That was established by Freud.”

  “Established! What would he know?” Jack said. He was seated in a proper straight-back chair but appeared, in his dignified way, to be listing to one side. “Anyway, women are always flirting with lesbianism, and no one holds it against them. Straight men find it a turn-on, right, Will?”

  “Yes,” I conceded.

  Pia said, “You can always tell the lesbian porn that’s meant for men. At the last moment a man steps in and saves the day with his big penis and screws the women.”

  “It’s true that straight men fantasize about lesbians,” I said.

  “That’s why men like lesbian porn,” Jack said.

  I’d noticed before that Jack often said “men” when he meant straight men.

  Toward dawn I stumbled back to the Pierre, realizing that the others were going to continue drinking. When I got up to my room, the lights were on and Alex, still fully dressed, was asleep in my bed, looking very tan.

  5.

  I ran into the bathroom and gargled mouthwash and brushed my hair and splashed cold water on my face, but by then she was awake.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. She was still half asleep. “I was going to surprise you. We came back a day early.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her face. “Oh, I must smell disgusting. I got drunk with Jack. If I’d only known—”

  “But not at his place, right? Because he didn’t pick up when I phoned.”

  “No, you’re right. We were with some friends of his.”

  “The hotel was nice about letting me in. They said you aren’t here very often.”

  “That’s because I sneak past them and don’t eat the chocolates they put on the pillow and make my own bed—”

  “You do?” She was sitting up now. “Why would you make your own bed?” She yawned and politely covered her mouth.

  “You know I have a phobia about hotels. I don’t like the idea of sleeping on beds that other people have touched.”

  “We should get a little apartment of our own.” Alex stretched. “I was so worried. Are you really that drunk?”

  “I must smell like a distillery. Hey, welcome back! I know, why don’t we both get cleaned up and go over to the Edwardian Room for eggs Benedict?”

  “That’s a good idea.” Looking around, she said, “I fell asleep with all the lights on. I kept thinking you’d come back and it would be such a lovely surprise. Or at least a surprise.”

  She stood and looked at herself in the full-length mirror to see how badly her skirt was creased.

  “It is, it’s a wonderful surprise,” I said.

  She smiled a pinched little smile. She had a perfect tan, but her crow’s-feet looked deeper, though I was sure that she’d been wearing her sunglasses every day in St. Barts, and that every night she’d been applying hundred-dollar creams to her face.

  When I took my shower after Alex, I glanced down at my body, which looked scrawnier than before, though I was acquiring a roll of booze fat around the middle. As a teen I’d learned to stop touching my testicles lest I lower the one all the more, but now I found myself washing my genitals thoroughly. I gargled in the shower stream. A melody flitted through my brain, but I couldn’t summon up the words. I felt so confused. I just stood there after I got out of the shower, not drying myself.

  I was at a crossroads without a map. I checked the mirror but could hardly meet my own eye. My cheekbones were pushing their way out of my face, as if they were knuckles—two fists!—under a white sheet, a very thin sheet that could easily be torn.

  Once we were seated in sturdy upholstered chairs in the Edwardian Room, I began to feel decent again. I wondered if anyone looking at us envied us: a fine young couple, obviously well-heeled, in love but in a kindly, almost unconscious way.

  How far from the truth! I watched Alex as she talked, her manner alternating between shyness and pugnaciousness, with an accent drilled into her so many years ago by Brearley, clipped but never loud or irritating, her vowels in the process of swimming away from American nasal tones, bound for the elegant farther shores of English “Received Pronunciation,” the sacred “RP” coveted by her mother and her friends, though never so thoroughly adopted as to seem un-American. She had on fake pearl earrings as large and shiny as her eyes, as if a surrealist had added extra eyes to her ears.

  She was telling me vacation tales about the adorable things Margaret and Palmer had done. Palmer had admired a black swimming instructor at the club, with his powerful chest, blinding smile, and close-cropped head. Margaret had said that she couldn’t understand him and had asked Alex if he was speaking English.

  “I assured her he was—are you listening to me? I know how a mother’s stories can be tedious.”

  “Not to the father,” I said. “The father is just so happy to see his wife and hear about his brood.” It sounded strangely distancing for me to call myself “the father.”

  “Will,” she said. She looked apologetic but also almost defiant—it was a complex look that I couldn’t quite decipher. “Tell me. Are you and Jack lovers?”

  I laughed in surprise, and I think that, literally, for the first time in my life, my jaw dropped. “Jack? And me?”

  She lowered her lids and looked through her lashes with a sort of pained sympathy.

  “You can tell me anything, you know. I just need to know.”

  “Are you crazy, Alex? I’ve never had sex with a man, not even when I was twelve. You don’t honestly think—why would you think something like that? You know that I can’t even bear for a man to touch me.”

  “You did hold him that time.”

  “You think you’re so understanding, but you keep harping on that. It was … an act of generosity on my part! Against all my inclinations. I shou
ld never have—”

  “Then you’re not having an affair?”

  “No,” I said, signaling the waiter for more coffee. Suddenly a strategy occurred to me. “Are you?”

  “Me? With whom, pray tell?”

  “Does that mean you would if you could?”

  “No, it just means you’ve lost your mind, Will.”

  “That’s how I feel about your questions. I mean, I could suspect the young black swimming teacher if I wanted to. You were just now praising his body and smile and skills …”

  She pressed her fingertips to her temples, and I saw tears come to her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” I said. “I must still be sort of drunk, and this screwdriver isn’t helping.”

  She said, “Have I been foolish to trust you? There’s something so … tacky about infidelity. I was never happy with any other man before you, Will, but now I’m afraid I’ve let my guard down. We’ve been so happy these ten years, and now I feel like I’m going to be hurt. How could I have been so foolish?”

  She asked it as a genuine question.

  I didn’t know what to say. Finally I said, “Did you drive in?”

  She stared at me with tears still in her eyes and said, “Yes. Why?”

  “Let’s go home,” I said. “I’ll check out of the hotel and cancel my appointments at the office. I want to be with you and the children.”

  “You see, I believed you when you said that you adored me, that I was too good for you, that you never dreamed you could get a beauty like me. What a joke! Now I see what a complacent idiot I was.”

  She turned her spoon over on its stomach and looked critically at her bloated reflection in its humped back.

  “Have I lost my looks? Men don’t really like superior women anyway, do they? They prefer cheap girls. Have you found a cheap little slut who gets drunk with you and squeals with delight—a little pig?”