by Edmund White
“You did good, my friend, real good.”
I called Alex and told her about the emergency meeting at Norris Inc. and asked her to come in and meet me there.
“Darling,” she said, “tonight? I just can’t. Palmer’s had another asthma attack.”
“Poor little guy.”
“And he didn’t have a single attack during our vacation, but today he got really sick at school. The teacher called me in a panic, and Ghislaine and I rushed over there. He was blue.”
“Where’s he now?”
“He’s here. He’s okay. I brought him home.”
“You did the right thing,” I said. “I think we have to order all new rugs for his room. I was reading about dust motes and asthma. Call Bloomingdale’s and order—”
“I know,” she said. “I read the same article. And I’ve turned off the central heating and built a fire in his room.”
“You’ve got your hands full. I’ll have Helen call Bloomingdale’s and order all that stuff. And sweetheart?”
“Yes?”
“I’ll be home as soon as possible tonight.”
“Will,” she said. Then I think she didn’t dare risk saying anything else for a bit. After a pause she said, “It was really bad, Will. I’d forgotten how the problem, during an attack, is not breathing in but breathing out. He’d gasp and then just not release it. People die from asthma, you know. He fell asleep on my lap, and I just sat there with first one mask on his face for forty minutes and then the other for an hour. Now he’s all right, but it scared him. It scared me. I’ve got a nebulizer ready to go right beside his bed. Dr. Baggy’s been here.”
That was what the children called the family physician, because he carried a big doctor’s bag and made house calls. “Good,” I said. “What did he tell you?”
“He said he’ll outgrow it by age twelve. That most children do.”
Palmer’s attack tapped me on the shoulder and awakened me from the spell Pia had cast over me. The next day I went into a church near my office and confessed for the first time in two years. From the sound of his voice, the priest was old and frail. I was confessing to adultery, but I didn’t think he was hearing me properly. All he told me to say, before sending me on my way, was four Our Fathers. Afterward I knelt in a side chapel and prayed. I said the Our Fathers.
I couldn’t think what to say to the Holy Mother, but I asked her to intercede for me and for Palmer, and then I said the rosary without having any beads in my hand. I just said the words, and though my mind wandered, I felt satisfied that I’d performed a genuine act of contrition.
It all felt absurdly medieval as I came out onto Fifth Avenue and was suddenly studying the display windows at Saks, full of winter vacation fashions. I remembered that the Hindus—or was it the Buddhists?—taught that a man should lead an ordinary life as a merchant and a father, but that as old age approached he should become a monk and meditate and fast and give up the world and even his family and sex. I thought that sounded better than golfing, watching TV, and square-dancing in a retirement community or indulging in octogenarian dating, but would I have the courage to give up everything?
Father Bernard had never thought I had a real vocation back in second form when I was toying with the idea of becoming a priest. My father urged me to pursue it. No doubt Dad was attracted to the idea of a free education for me, poor man, overwhelmed as he must have been with the expenses of educating us all, though he was also pious enough. He probably wanted to give one child to the church.
It was a gray, rainy day, but the parading flotillas of umbrellas simplified the human landscape into great abstract shapes. I feared, though, that one umbrella would tip back to reveal Pia’s restless eyes, slate blue in the lowering weather. I felt that the Holy Mother might just grant me the courage not to phone Pia, at least for a while (I was already temporizing with my vow). But I doubted I could resist Pia if I actually saw her. The fact that an ugly boil had just erupted at the base of my neck, above my shoulder but mercifully hidden by my shirt collar, also made me want to conceal my body from Pia’s view, from any woman’s except Alex’s. I almost said to myself, I have nothing to hide from Alex, but I knew that wasn’t true. I had nothing to hide from her but my sins.
That night Palmer had another attack despite the changes we’d made to his room and the substitution of a log fire for central heating. Ghislaine seemed especially distraught. Almost as if she were responsible. I suspected that her nerves were on edge from fasting. I even said to her, as if her emaciated face weren’t dramatically obvious, “Aren’t you losing a bit of weight, Ghislaine?”
She smiled happily and nodded.
“I mean, too much weight?”
“Oh, you Americans have such different ideas about … le poids idéal.”
I said, “I’d let up on the dieting for now if I were you.”
She sniffed a contemptuous laugh at my suggestion.
Little Palmer slept in my arms in the dark while I held first one mask and then the other to his face. I could hear the faint hiss from the tank. Peggy was off in her room, but I caught the sound of her post-homework radio mumbling to itself. She was probably getting in a long phone call to one of the two girls she confided in. Alex had thrown something medicinal on the logs; it smelled like sage and made me think of a ranch outside Santa Fe where I’d camped for a month as a kid. A dude ranch. Such a happy period! I had been intimidated by the other boys until it turned out that I was one of the few who really knew how to ride.
I said a little silent prayer to St. Jude that Palmer would grow out of his asthma soon and that he could have a normal, athletic boy’s life. Alex had said a month ago that she thought he might be gay, which had infuriated me. She was always saying irresponsible shit like that.
“He’s six years old, Alex. No one’s gay at six.”
“That’s not what Jack says. He claims he was attracted to a waiter when he was five. He can remember it distinctly.”
“Jack’s weird,” I said. “Anyway, don’t even think something like that—you’ll make it come true.”
“I don’t believe in censoring my thoughts,” she said. “Palmer wears my clothes. He’s very sensitive, a loner, a poetic child—”
“You’ve got everything backward, dear. Palmer is sensitive because he’s sick, he’s had to cope with a terrible affliction. And yet the minute he outgrows it—”
“If he outgrows it,” Alex chimed in. “Proust was asthmatic. And gay.”
“How can you be so sure Proust was gay? Christ, I hate that word. Anyway, there’s no connection.”
Alex said, “It’s all right for your best friend to be gay but not your son.”
“Why wish that on the poor little mutt?” I asked. “Seriously, isn’t life hard enough?”
I wondered if with a woman’s instinct she’d picked up on something I had overlooked. Mothers know things about their own children. Was I hastening him toward homosexuality by holding him so tenderly? Yet it was impossible to get tough with the poor little bugger. Her clothes? He was wearing his mother’s clothes. All kids played dress-up.
There was no way to predict what sort of world he’d inherit. Would the Russians rule supreme? Was America on the wane? This comfortable life that Alex’s money had provided for us, would it be swept away by some new cataclysm like the Cuban Revolution? Would my son Palmer outgrow his asthma, or be a sickly little czarevitch slaughtered by the brutes of his generation and the next?
I was determined to conserve and increase Alex’s fortune, not for us but for our children. We wouldn’t spoil them or extinguish their spirit of enterprise. We wouldn’t tell them that they were rich now. But I’d buy them properties in Canada, in Australia, in France, so that no matter where a revolution broke out, they’d still have some place to go.
Oddly, a tremendous lassitude came over me as I thought that there was no way to protect a child from every eventuality.
Once again I was seeing Jack constantly and talking to hi
m on the phone once or twice a day. I’d never really had a close male friend before Jack. With other men, straight men, I knew I had to rib them about their jobs, their drinking, their women, and any little eccentricity or vanity. One guy at work started lifting weights and wearing his shirts tapered. We never let up on him. He admitted that he was expecting women to flirt with him now that he’d gotten in shape, but as he told us red-faced a month later, after many drinks, his only true admirers were homos at the gym. He couldn’t change into his shorts in the locker room without first wrapping a towel around his waist because these two persistent fairies kept buzzing around him, hoping for a peep at his peter.
“Let ’em see it,” we drunkenly shouted. “Then they’ll lose interest!”
“Fuck you!” he bellowed. “I’d never shake them. Not after they saw what a real man was made of.”
It didn’t end there. We started calling him Real Man or Peter Peep, even in front of the girls in the office, which of course only infuriated him.
With Jack there was nothing of that heavy teasing. He never wore a cool smirk while I spoke to him, nor, when I confessed a weakness or doubt, did he hitch up his pants and say, “Oh yeah?” He wasn’t competitive. He said that baseball was the most boring game known to man and that he preferred soccer, where the men were cuter and more scantily clad, though the scores were disappointingly low. There were so few safe ritual male topics available to us that we ended up saying things that were real and personal.
Jack never brought up Pia’s name, but one day at last I mentioned her.
He said, “I had her on the phone all morning. She’s very, very unhappy. I’m afraid she doesn’t say very flattering things about you—she thinks you’re cold and cagey and an emotional pygmy. But she did admit she’s hopelessly in love with you.”
“An emotional pygmy,” I said. “And this is the person I opened myself up to? She knows more about me than anyone on earth—my confessor, my wife, you—and I’m still an emotional pygmy? What does she think you are—a sentimental giant?”
“Don’t get mad at me,” said Jack. “I didn’t say it.”
“Did you back me up?”
“I didn’t have to. Her tongue may lash at you, but her heart defends you.”
I thought about it and said, “I feel so sorry for her. And I miss her.”
“Oh? I imagined your marriage was going through a rebirth.”
“It never needed to be reborn,” I said irritably. “Well, Alex needed to be reassured. And now I’m always, always with her.”
“And your sex life?”
I felt I could either draw the usual veil over my marriage and its secrets or divulge them, so that my friendship with Jack could move to a newer, deeper level. I told him we should meet for a drink at the Shamrock, the Irish bar downstairs from my office.
As we sat there in our booth and drank our draft beers, an old fat guy in a dirty apron removed an aluminum tray of corned beef and gray cabbage from its bath of heated water. Everything stank of cabbage, which made me think of boarding school.
“Alex and I don’t really have much of a sex life,” I said. “The day she and the kids came back from St. Barts, we had great, intense sex, nothing fancy, just intense and full of feeling. It was like having the best conversation imaginable with no effort, no performance anxiety—isn’t that what they call your fears of squirting too soon or not getting it up? But no, nothing like that. It was like giving her my heart and having her take it and put it inside her chest. That simple.”
I sipped my beer and looked at the perpetual waterfall of the Miller High Life sign on the wall. The mirror over the bar was losing its silver backing in patches that resembled countries—on the right was France, and that downward smudge over there was England. The melancholy morality of place that discouraged rather than invited travel—that was the phrase that bubbled through my brain.
“But then?” Jack said.
“First,” I said, “I want you to understand how … great our sex was, and I hate that word ‘sex.’ It makes it sound like some other form of activity, like dancing, whereas actually it’s … a form of communication, like talking, though you’re not quite sure what she’s trying to tell you.” I’d just said that; I was repeating myself like an idiot.
“Unless he tells you,” Jack said, “in so many words.”
“But then it’s just talking dirty, the way Pia does.”
“Oh, she does, does she? The naughty girl.”
I regretted that I’d said anything. Now it was all going to be turned into gossip. We were all about to become “amusing.” Idea for story: great love affair is turned into a smutty anecdote.
“Anyway,” I said, not smiling, soldiering on as we started our second beer, “as soon as they were back, Palmer had an asthma attack at school.”
“How horrible,” Jack said.
“It is horrible. It’s like this.” And I wheezed slowly for him and bugged my eyes out. The bartender looked over, blinked a couple of times, then looked away.
“At school they had him put a towel over his head and lean over a sink and inhale steam, which does sometimes help. We got him to the hospital, and they gave him oxygen. Steroids help a lot too. We have a nebulizer with cortisone. It’s a new treatment. But steroids can also stunt a child’s growth. Of course, we have a humidifier in every room Palmer uses.”
“I see what you’re driving at,” Jack said with real sympathy. “It takes over your whole life.” I knew he was making an effort to understand a parent’s anxiety. He was free of anything like that.
“It ruins your sex life.”
“I see.” Jack reached across and patted my hand. I realized we hadn’t touched since we’d become friends again. I appreciated his warmth—it was spontaneous. He told me about Alice and Rebekkah. Alice seemed to be spending more and more time in her fishing cabin drinking, though when she came to town she was still the best company.
“No one in Charlottesville liked her documentary about the hunt, but those people are impossible—they crave publicity and denounce it at the same time.”
“And Rebekkah?”
“She’s married to a man who seldom speaks and is virtually a hermit. But she’s sweeter and smarter than ever.”
The next day we met for lunch, sitting outside in the small park between our offices.
Jack said, “I’ve been reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Do you like him?”
“Very much.”
“What surprised me,” Jack said, “was how refined it all is. From his reputation you’d think he’d write like a thug, but instead he’s a sort of dandy.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But what’s all this stuff about physical courage? Is that a straight-guy thing?”
I thought about it for a second. “Guess so. If a thief broke into our house, I’d want to be able to protect Alex and the kids.”
“Do you really think about that?”
“It’s not an obsession. But you don’t?”
“I got held up in the street once, and my apartment’s been burgled twice, and I just shrugged. I guess that’s another real difference. We’re not too violent. I know some gay men who are taking karate classes because they’re sick of being harassed in the streets. But that’s not my style. I’d rather just take a taxi to the door of wherever I’m going.”
I went into Scribner’s one afternoon and bought a copy of The Sun Also Rises. While there, I also bought a book of isometric exercises, a routine I could do in my office without having to buy dumbbells or work up a sweat. I started doing them every day.
I’d lean against the wall and press into it or place my palms on my desk and push. I did facial isometrics, making grotesque faces like hooking my index fingers into the corners of my mouth and stretching it wide while trying to squeeze it shut at the same time. Or I placed the back of my tongue against the roof of my mouth and tilted my head back as far as it would go to stretch the neck muscles. It dawned on me that I was gettin
g ready to see Pia again.
One day at lunch I said, “How’s Pia doing? Is she still in the country?”
A little exasperated, Jack replied, “She lives here, Will. She’s a New Yorker.”
“But she is very jet-set. She thinks nothing of going to Venice or Capri or Saint-Tropez for a birthday party.”
“But she lives here. She’s an American citizen. She pays taxes here.”
I nodded. “Has she found someone new?”
“She says you were never her type. That you’re an American puritan without feelings and that her next love she hopes will be Jewish and have feelings.”
I rubbed my forehead and muttered, “Christ.” I smiled, since this meant that she was still thinking about me. “I’m Catholic and I have plenty of feelings.”
“She says you’re not a hairy-chested, sweaty, suffering Italian Catholic but some kind of cold Northern—”
“Puritan? Puritan Catholic? How fucked up is that?” I wondered if I sounded like a tough Hemingway guy.
I called her the next day. She was cool but cordial and said she could have lunch with me two days hence, but only for an hour between other appointments, and it might have to be in that little pasta joint on the corner of Seventy-third and Second. I gladly accepted her conditions.
When we finally saw each other, the restaurant was mercifully empty, the waiter sleepy, the sun shining, and neither of us could stop smiling. We were sitting in a glassed-in café on the sidewalk that had been tacked onto the gloomy main room. We had tortellini alla nonna, a dish with peas and mushrooms in a heavy cream sauce. If we’d been prudent, we would have asked for a table in back, but I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. She had on a white blouse cinched in by a thick black belt and a long denim skirt. I knew she must be wearing a bra, but her breasts seemed to follow fully every movement she made, no matter how slight.
I did mentally rehearse an excuse I could use with a friend: “Look who I ran into!”