Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  My parents were coming up to Larchmont to stay with the children while we were away. My mother had learned not to criticize the wildness that surrounded us. Like any old person, if seventy-two was old, she had her own ideas, and when she heard the raccoons marching about on the roof and tearing up the shingles, she was alarmed. She’d spent most of her life as a gardener taming the very excesses Alex indulged. Nor, as a horsewoman, did she believe that giving in to animals was kind. Children and horses longed for a tight rein, she assured me, but there was nothing she could say to Alex. She loved Peggy and Palmer, and after their fashion they loved her. Though they’d picked up from Alex that my mother was sweet but old-fashioned (considered a bad thing).

  Alex could tell I was disheartened, and she was very patient and thoughtful with me. She had Ghislaine prepare a steak au poivre for my father though no red meat had ever been cooked in our house before and very little chicken or fish.

  I wondered how Alex explained my moodiness to herself until the day when she heard me sigh and she grabbed my hand and said, with sympathy, “I can just imagine, Will, how difficult it must be to write fiction. I read somewhere that it’s a pure act of speculation.”

  I thought, She imagines I’ve started a new novel. I realized right away that the symptoms of artistic frustration mimicked those of unhappiness in love, and I lowered my head and smiled as if she were right and it was all too painful to discuss. It occurred to me that I’d learned so much about sex and love and Europe from Pia—maybe I could start a new novel soon. But then I worried that Alex would recognize Pia in my pages. Christ! A novelist shouldn’t have to worry about domestic suspicions.

  Alex was a perfect traveler. Unlike most beautiful women, every morning she was ready to go in a few minutes, she applied no makeup except a trace of lipstick and sunscreen, and her clothes were few and functional and wash-and-wear. Of course, she always looked impeccable. Neither of us was much of a photographer. Alex said, “I’d rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots,” and I had to agree with her. She was awed by the first herd of elands we saw coursing through the tall grasses. She grabbed my hand, and when at last she looked at me, she had tears in her eyes and a dazzled smile on her lips.

  The other travelers were at least twenty years older than us, and they made a fuss over us. We were once again the enviable young couple, the American aristocrats with our soft voices, good manners, and slender bodies, and not those Larchmont crazies who’d let their grounds go to seed. I allowed as to how I’d published a novel, and the people from Cleveland I’d confided in told the others, and soon their nicknames for us were Scott and Zelda. We tried to ignore the warnings those names suggested of alcoholic defeat and madness and to enjoy their more glamorous associations.

  The trip was just what I needed. I stopped expecting Pia’s phone calls or letters. Every day was a mild challenge and a distraction and left me no time to brood over my faithless mistress. Nor were the stiff-jointed, big-butted ladies in our safari possible objects of desire.

  Alex and I became much, much closer. We were no longer Czar Nicholas and Alexandra, the anxious parents hovering over our sickly son. Now we were playful; we got into a pillow fight. We even had a wrestling-tickling match that ended excitingly. Maybe because the other members of the safari saw us as so princely, so adorable, we tried to live up to their perceptions. Alex looked smart in her dark safari suit with the long-waisted, carefully tailored jacket sporting huge external pockets she was careful to keep empty and flat. She bought an absurdly colonial pith helmet that everyone admired, though its associations made the progressive Cleveland lady uneasy. Alex was relaxed and warm with the black servants and remembered their names and little things they confided in her. And at the end of the safari she made me take photos of her and everyone else, white and black, and we tipped the staff handsomely.

  “Who do you miss the most?” Alex asked as we were driven to the airport.

  “The children,” I said. “And Jack.”

  “Jack? Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He and I have gotten way beyond his old infatuation with me. After all, neither of us is exactly a boy anymore. We’re middle-aged men. But I think all that passion Jack once felt for me helped. It got me to overcome my usual reserve—I am reserved, right?”

  “Check,” she said with a smile.

  “And it brought us closer. Who do you miss the most?”

  “The children,” she said. “My mother, though she drives me bats. Ghislaine a little bit. The house. I miss the house almost as if it were a person. But it all feels like a burden. I mean, a real responsibility. I feel ridiculous saying that to you, Mr. Sweetie, you work so hard, but—”

  “No, no,” I hastened to say, “you’re the one with the real responsibilities.”

  During the long plane trip back to New York after our transfer in London, I thought about Jack. The truth was, the pangs I’d felt after Pia had dropped me had made me sympathize with what he’d probably gone through over me. I thought about how every person obsesseed over the moments in his life when he was the rejected one, but could scarcely remember when he had done the rejecting.

  I also thought about Alex. We’d had great sex that one time after the pillow fight, since a little sweat and laughter and adolescent grabbing had sufficed to move Alex out of the moonlight of romantic love and into the knockabout afternoon of adolescent pleasure.

  But even those romantic nights were more tolerable in Africa than they’d been for years. When I held Alex or ran my hands over her exquisite body, I thought, My girl, my girl. With Pia every expression of affection had been trailed by guilt and shame, like those sumptuous colors that painters use that are composed of coffee grounds and soot. Now with Alex, once again, I felt I was doing what I was supposed to do, make love to my wife. It was a pleasure that was also a duty.

  My girl, I thought.

  Once I even said, “My girl,” and Alex winked at me. I hadn’t remembered she knew how to wink. In Africa we had to be very quiet about our lovemaking since our cabins on stilts in the savanna had such thin walls, which we shared with several other couples. That need for silence made the long naked sessions in the lamplight all the more thrilling, as if someone had turned off the audio.

  Once we were home, I expected to feel rejuvenated and purposeful and, well, not resigned but committed to my real life. Alex and I had figured out a new marriage enhancement. She would come into the city once a week, and we’d have dinner with someone or just each other and catch a play or a concert or a performance of the New York City Ballet.

  We liked the ballet so much that some “social” friends Alex had known since her debutante days, Max and Sofia Phipps, persuaded us to become Friends of the Ballet at the rate of two thousand dollars a year. In return we were allowed to attend rehearsals and opening night parties.

  Jack was duly impressed. “Max Phipps! He’s the grandson of the museum Phipps, and they have a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum.”

  I said, “If I ever lose my standing with you, Jack, I see how I can regain it. A big apartment at a good address. But seriously, they’re very nice, quiet people, passionate about the arts. He’s tall and broad shouldered and has a red bottlebrush mustache, and she’s beautiful and fun and very animated. They have a real love match of a marriage.”

  “What sort of work does he do?”

  “He runs the family foundation.”

  “See?”

  Jack kept pumping me for details about Max and Sofia, and it occurred to me that after a certain age homosexuals replaced sex with social ambitions.

  Part III

  1.

  Jack had never been in love with anyone except Will. He felt embarrassed about his passion for Will and winced when he remembered it. It seemed so self-hating and childish. Although Jack had no interest in gay liberation, which struck him as raucous and led by shaggy-haired leftists with smelly feet, nevertheless the move
ment had made him see how “unliberated” he’d been to fall for a straight man.

  Jack started seeing yet another woman shrink. She thought his homosexuality was just a “symptom” of a deeper conflict. She wouldn’t discuss his sex life at all, but once she said it was his “unsuccessful” attempt to administer therapy to himself. She said it might be more “fruitful” if he stopped “acting out” altogether.

  “You mean you want me to stop having sex?”

  “It’s only a suggestion. But do you understand my logic?”

  “I understand it, but I don’t accept it,” Jack said grimly.

  “It’s true,” she said upon reflection, “compulsive behavior is hard to give up. Then again, you might have a few feelings if you stopped administering your own therapy to yourself.”

  “You don’t think I have any feelings?”

  The possibility of emotional sterility haunted Jack for weeks to come. He thought it was cruel of Dr. Sauer to have hinted at that, especially since she’d resorted to it only as a way to make her point.

  He couldn’t argue against her “logic” since he had no alternative theory of the personality on tap. But he knew he didn’t want a fifty-year-old woman to tell him to become celibate.

  At the same time he had to admit that sex for him was more an addiction than an art. In the late afternoon, as his workday started to wind down, he’d plot out that evening’s activities.

  He had several fuck buddies he could line up at short notice—if one wasn’t available, then another would be. They were all good, reliable sex partners and nice guys he took an interest in. If they got the sex out of the way first, they could have a chatty little dinner somewhere and call it an early evening. The only drawback was that Jack liked to have a few drinks and smoke a joint and even take a quaalude before having sex, especially with someone who was a bit dull because overly familiar, and those preparations made it hard for him to sit up straight at the table and hold a conversation.

  Marijuana really was his favorite aphrodisiac. He never smoked it for fun, in order to groove on a television program or song or to go for a walk. In fact, he never went for a walk with no goal, any more than he ever watched a movie alone, stoned or not. Marijuana sensitized his whole body and especially his lips and nipples. Without pot he scarcely felt someone’s kisses or embraces, and his mind wandered. With it he heard soaring mental music, his skin was a snare drum, and every other part of his body resonated when touched like a skylight under a pelting rain.

  But more important, the drug made him fantasize about covering someone, penetrating him, treasuring him. Jack’s cranium cracked open, and the airborne seeds of these desires sprouted and overflowed. A second later, without any decision on his part, he’d passed over from desire to act. His inhibitions melted away. He stopped trying to read his partner’s desires and simply imposed his own. If it occurred to him to turn around and park his anus on the guy’s mouth, he did so without hesitating—and rarely did the guy push him away.

  Most men fed off the violence and specificity of Jack’s desires. Jack realized he’d never experienced anything quite as exciting as what they were going through.

  Sometimes men would ask him if he was ever the passive partner, but he would say, “With a cock like mine nobody wants to fuck me.”

  He knew that at the local gay bar, where he played pool, he had a reputation for being hung. With an asset in gold like his dick, it was hard for him to get serious about bodybuilding. He still wore the same size jeans and T-shirts that he had in high school. People didn’t much care, especially if they’d been tipped off about the dimensions of his penis. In the steam room men stared and sometimes, as they leaned forward on the tile bench and gaped, literally drooled.

  He’d lied to Will once when he’d said that he blamed the unvarying rituals of cruising for his failure to develop a relationship that was lasting. What he hadn’t admitted was that he’d designed it that way, worked out these terms of impermanence with great care.

  He’d had so many men fall in love with him that he’d had to become cautious. It wasn’t just that he was well-endowed. After all, he was a journalist at a famous national newsweekly, and he had a nice apartment and was good-looking and wore clothes well. He was soft-spoken and quick to laugh. He’d taught himself to cook a few simple meals. Of course he read or at least consulted all the new business books, but he also read at least one ambitious novel a month.

  He had three big green plants on an étagère near his front window and remembered to water them. Once a week a cleaning lady came in for half a day. She told him he was unusually tidy for a man.

  Because he wrote about business, friends assumed that he cultivated his own portfolio, but being without a partner and children left him with little motivation to build wealth. He set aside a small part of his monthly salary in a retirement fund, though thinking about retirement when he was only in his late thirties depressed him. He needed nearly his whole salary to live comfortably in New York. He ate out five nights a week and spent a small fortune on vodka tonics at the pickup bars.

  He was always expecting his real life to begin in another year or two. He hadn’t worked out the details, but he vaguely hoped that suddenly he’d be doing different, better work and living in another city far away with new, superior people, even a perfect lover. Strangely enough, when he pictured that lover, he was an older man, not his type at all but someone who might be a lively companion. When he wasn’t in heat or bored or afraid to be alone, he deplored his relentless sex drive. He started to do volunteer work for St. Luke’s in the Village; they provided free shelter for the local bums, but they needed someone to stay awake and supervise the men lest they steal from one another. One night every two weeks Jack would sit on top of a ladder and survey the loud, sleeping men, or he’d patrol the aisles between the beds. He thought he was no better than they were, except that his addiction was more or less compatible with holding down a job.

  He liked the idea of volunteering and doing charity work. He enjoyed going to benefits for the church. He recognized that he had a natural gift for getting along with old rich ladies. He thought they were cute, and even a very grand doyenne of society never intimidated him. He started beaming the minute they began talking together, and he would touch her elbow or even her waist. A few drew back in horror, but most of them liked his physical warmth. He could be very soothing. No one quite knew who he was, but he fell into that vague category of “extra men,” those creatures with good manners, nice clothes, respectable jobs, and no obvious moral flaws. They could be counted on to fill out a table or cut in at a dance. Husbands trusted their wives to them for a night out at the opera or an outing to the Village in search of antiques. Everyone assumed that most of the extra men above a certain age were gay or pathologically single, but no one wanted to talk about these drawbacks too openly. For one thing, it was very agreeable for a sexagenarian lady to have a handsome, well-groomed younger man flirt with her—why dispel that pleasant mystery?

  Jack felt safe in society. One charity led to others. He liked the way evening clothes stylized his presence; dressed like that he looked neither rich nor poor, neither East Coast nor Midwest, neither scion nor employee. Social people were mainly interested in one another and more narrowly in one another’s schedules. Where were they going next? Where had they just been? Venice in September, Gstaad in December, New York in the spring, Maine in the summer—it was a constant circulation through the world’s veins and always a safe topic of conversation. The movies were the other safe topic.

  Jack made no effort to keep up. He was quick to admit he was just a journalist—but that was interesting too, wasn’t it? the older women wanted to know. He’d always appealed to social people; they’d always assumed he was one of them. Some critics said that friendships with them never went anywhere, never grew deeper and stronger, but Jack welcomed this very blandness, or rather formality. He supposed that if picture researchers at a magazine twenty years from now tried to ide
ntify the guests in a group shot of a charity event, he’d be labeled “unknown man.” He liked it like that.

  Little old ladies actually excited a curiosity and tenderness and affection in him. When he saw one at the opera bravely mounting the red-carpeted stairs, he’d break out into a smile. His other youngish male friends would think he was nuts when he whispered, “Isn’t she a cute little lady?” They’d draw loony circles in the air next to their ears.

  He liked to go to bed in the nude, and before he fell asleep he would run his hands over his body, all the parts that other men neglected in their feverish fixation on his cock. He’d stroke his buttocks and the insides of his thighs and his stomach. Since he had so many partners, he seldom felt the urge to masturbate, but if he did he would pull down his shades and seal his curtains shut and turn on a bright light and slather himself in baby oil and look at his erect penis in a mirror as if it belonged to someone else or was someone else. He’d stop along the way to fondle his testicles.

  Once in a while he’d turn off the lights, lie down, throw his head back, and surrender to a long reverie about an ideal youngster he’d never met except in previous sessions. This person had a sense of humor. Jack always began with hearing the low, warm laugh in his imagination. He was smaller than Jack, his body temperature half a degree higher—and, yes, he was blond, that was right, with a beautiful nape and a long tan back. He wore glasses, but they were a prop as disposable as a starlet’s in a 1940s film. The kid felt comfortable lying just to one side and half on top of Jack.

  Jack would call Will during the day from time to time, but they had an unspoken agreement to hang up quickly if they had too much work to do or a conference looming. Jack almost never phoned Will at home, but he was glad when Will called him in the evening. Of course, Will, who for so long was obsessed with Pia, couldn’t discuss her when he was in Larchmont, so he found little reason to telephone Jack.