Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  Jack felt that he lived in a rough-and-ready world of men, these piggy men who pushed each other aside to get what they wanted, whereas Will, like all straight men, had been half feminized by his participation in the world of women. Women were hurt easily. They wanted romance and believed in fidelity, even lifelong fidelity. When women cried, straight men backed down right away and did what they wanted. If a gay man cried, his partner laughed and walked away in disgust. Straight men were easily intimidated by women’s moods and whims, whereas gay guys thought emotional women were annoying and emotional men silly. Put that way, it seemed as if Jack believed that gay men were tougher and more masculine than their house broken straight counterparts. That wasn’t exactly accurate. In straight life, since women were so busy round the clock playing themselves, men were nudged into opposite and reciprocal male roles. The more women wept, the more their husbands resembled Indian braves in their silence and stoicism. The only gender gay men dealt with was the same, not the opposite, and if gay men sounded shriller or more hysterical or more voluble than heterosexual braves, it was because gay guys played squaws, braves, and berdaches all at once. Gays shunned women, but the feminine came back in their gestures and intonations, the return of the repressed. Nevertheless, Jack never doubted that gay life was more bruising than straight life and that men did not coddle or play up to one another the way women (when they weren’t having a fit) had been trained to indulge straight men.

  Jack thought of Will as an amateur at living.

  From little things Will said, Jack picked up that Will suspected he was milking Pia and even Alex for details about Will’s anatomy and amatory style, but it wasn’t true. Mooning over Will had cost him so dear ten years earlier that Jack instinctively steered clear. Anyway, Pia volunteered much too much information, completely unprompted.

  “He’s so stuffy. I finally got him to let me lick his bottom, which he loved once he unclenched his buttocks and I had a little access. He wriggled and moaned like a girl when you tongue her labia, but he’s so squeamish he wouldn’t kiss me after my mouth had been down there. He’s gentle, too gentle, but it must be said, he has great staying power, though his verge is only half the length of yours, Jack—I remember it perfectly well, your monster, the night you assaulted me in your sleep. You’ve made the silly choice to pursue boys in order to show how interesting you can be, but the minute you’re off guard and fall asleep, you start dry humping the girls. The oddest thing is that Will has no smell at all! I’ve never encountered that before.”

  “And me?” Jack asked. “Do I have a smell?”

  “Yes, you smell like, how do you say, muscade?”

  “I smell like nutmeg?”

  Pia nodded gravely, as if it were an unpleasant odor.

  When Pia met Oliver, her Englishman in Rome, she told Jack all about him.

  “He’s an average man,” she said, “but he adores me and is willing to leave his partner for me, even though that woman is very fragile.”

  “Suicidal?” Jack asked merrily.

  “Probably,” Pia said.

  They both whooped with incredulous laughter, and Jack said, “We’re terrible people.”

  “Yes,” Pia concurred with a shiver of delight. “What the hey! I look at Beatrice and Wyatt, and I think it’s not fair Will won’t let me wear my perfume or spend a whole night with him, and he’s still sleeping with that back-to-nature bitch with her skinny body, and now he’s going to take her to the Serengeti.”

  Jack kept saying, “Don’t look to me for an answer!”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s my best friend, and Alex is an old friend, and—”

  “Old?” Pia said. “Yes, she admits to being two years older than Will, but I’m sure she must be at least a decade older.”

  “Oh Pia.”

  “No, look at her crow’s-feet and the what-do-you-call-them? The marionette lines beside her mouth. That is an old, old woman.”

  When the crab lice entered the picture, Pia chortled.

  “Good!” she said to Jack over the phone. “Now his old lady will have a whole new herd of wild animals to feel compassionate about. I wonder if she will go against her own philosophy and terminate the poor louses.”

  “Lice. Did Oliver give them to you?”

  “Heavens, no. Poor Oliver, he’s so terribly British. He’d die with shame. No, I must have got them from that black delivery boy from Bloomie’s.”

  “Do you just go to bed with everybody?”

  “Yes, I do. I have very long days. And I’m not an American puritan. Besides, he was a charming young man. Very creative. Very.”

  “No doubt.” Then Jack added, “I’m the same way. I go to bed with almost everyone.”

  After Will returned from Africa, Pia phoned Jack one morning so early that he was still in bed.

  “It’s three in the afternoon here in Rome,” she said, “and I’m about to have a siesta. It’s time you woke up.”

  She asked him if Will and Alex had fought in the Serengeti. “I’m sure,” she said, “by the end of those two weeks they were swinging from branches and hurling coconuts and caca at each other and devouring each other’s louses.”

  “Lice,” Jack said. “No, it seems to have gone well. How’s Rome?”

  “Jack, I’m so much in love. No, not with poor Oliver, who’s never had the gumption to leave his unhappy woman. No, I’ve met a very gallant Sicilian prince whose title goes back to the Normans and who’s a culture counselor for his village, though he lives in Rome, and he plays the saxophone like a Negro and he’s extremely gallant.”

  “Married?”

  “Everyone’s married in Italy, but his wife is a tiny little black raisin who lives in Sicily and was almost destroyed by the earthquake but is somehow hanging on. He even has a Breton name, Gaetano.”

  She kept probing to find out how much Will missed her and how deeply he’d suffered over her defection.

  “Don’t tell him it’s over with Oliver. Better to let him think I’m flourishing with one man than surviving with two. Do you think Will wants me back?”

  “Now? I’m not sure. But he certainly missed you at first, and his ego took quite a battering.”

  “Good! My ego too.”

  Jack wondered how long it would be before Pia was back in New York stalking Will. He decided to say nothing to him about her call. Jack got a big raise and rented a two-bedroom apartment two floors down in the same building. He was giving up the terrace but gaining much more space at an only slightly higher rent. Will asked him why he needed the extra bedroom.

  “For you,” Jack said. “In case you get drunk and want to stay over. You’ve told me about your hotel phobia, your horror of sleeping on a bed soaked through with—”

  “Stop!” Will exclaimed, trying to laugh off his genuine fear. “It makes me queasy just to think of those dirty beds and sheets and towels dripping microbes, all that stained luxury.”

  Jack said, “I am buying a new bed and sheets and towels and consecrating them to you. No one will ever share them.”

  They were drinking at Jack’s new place.

  “You’re so thoughtful. Am I thoughtful?”

  “You’re observant,” Jack said, “which is even rarer.”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t see Pia’s change of heart coming at all. I think as soon as she started hanging out with Beatrice and Wyatt, she envied them. She suddenly didn’t want to be a backstreet wife. Did she seriously think I’d leave Alex for her?”

  “Didn’t you ever consider it? I can imagine that it at least crossed your mind.”

  “Why would I do that to poor Alex or little Palmer? Or prissy old Margaret? And my mother would have a cow. She can almost accept that I don’t go to mass and that the children are practically pagans, but she could never tolerate another divorce in the family.”

  Will had taken off his shoes and was getting drunk. Jack liked it that Will was opening up so much and scratching his leg and smiling foolishly. Sometime
s when Jack came home from work to this new apartment, he would wonder if he should buy a cat to take the chill off his solitude.

  Now he had Will here sprawling on the couch and talking freely. In moving, Jack had gotten rid of most of Pia’s pillows and fabrics and other decorative touches; Will felt more comfortable, free of all reminders of her presence.

  One sleety Tuesday evening in February Will called and asked if he could come by.

  “Of course,” Jack said. “You can even stay over. I wish you would. I had your sheets and towels washed so they wouldn’t be stiff.”

  “Okay,” Will said simply. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  After he hung up, Jack dashed about adjusting the lights and slipping into jeans and a sweater and carrying his dishes to the sink and setting out a new bottle of Scotch.

  Will looked very handsome when he came in, with his hair black and wet and curling over his forehead. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and he’d turned his overcoat collar up. His long nose looked almost blue. Jack, who bullied his tricks, knew that he became practically servile around Will. Not that Will noticed. And not that Jack was quick to agree with Will, though he did stick close to Will’s interests. When they had settled in, Jack said, “What’s up?”

  “You must promise not to tell anyone else. It’s a top secret deal, even if it will be very hard to conceal from other people, it’s that juicy.”

  “You know I’m discreet.”

  Will raised an eyebrow, which Jack duly noted.

  “I had dinner with Beatrice and Wyatt at their apartment. They know this great soul food place in Harlem for barbecue takeout with greens and corn bread and creamy potato salad.”

  “Who else was with you?”

  “It was just the three of us. They were very attentive and friendly.”

  “I wonder what they want.”

  “Wait, wait,” Will said. “They were both very casually dressed. She in dark slacks and a white halter top, he in jeans and a polo shirt, even though it’s so cold out. They were both barefoot. Their apartment is very toasty, plus they’d made a fire.”

  “Were they trying to seduce you?”

  “Wait, wait. Wyatt had found a copy of my novel and read it, and he told me it was exactly the sort of thing he’d write if he had the imagination and intelligence. Then the duchess said she was going to send the book to Einaudi in Italy. She knows an editor there, and she’s convinced that my sort of ‘existential fantasy,’ as she called it, would appeal to sophisticated Italians.”

  “I’m glad they’re taking you so seriously,” Jack said.

  “Wait, wait,” Will said, “you were right the first time. They asked me if I’d like to attend an orgy they’re … throwing next Friday.”

  “An orgy?”

  “Yes, this will be their third one. The first two were great successes, they said. They said a ‘sex party,’ actually. They’ve been recruiting people very, very carefully.”

  “Did you accept?”

  “You can imagine I wanted to know about the cocks-and-balls problem. But Wyatt assured me that the men didn’t play with each other, that only one of the seven men swings both ways. That’s how they put it. I said, ‘Call me square, but I don’t want to swing on any condition.’ They appeared to be surprised and even disappointed. That bitch Pia had told them you and I were sometime lovers.”

  “And are you tempted to go?” Jack asked.

  “The idea of several women including Beatrice all naked and available at the same time seems irresistible.” Will suddenly became lost in thought and then said, as if he’d had a revelation, “Huh. It just occurred to me that Wyatt might be the one bisexual. I guess they would’ve tried me out tonight if I hadn’t brought up the cocks-and-balls problem. Even so, Beatrice held me tight at the door the way a guy might hold a girl, and she kissed me for a long time with lots of tongue.”

  “While Wyatt looked on?”

  “He seemed pretty cool about it all.”

  A silence installed itself in the room. Finally Will gulped some more whiskey and said, “I guess I’ll go to the sex party. As Pia the moron would say, ‘What the hey.’ ”

  “I’m jealous!” Jack announced. “You’re going to be screwing all those people.”

  “Hold on now, you’re always bragging about those saunas and backroom bars you go to and how that one time you lured five people back to your place. And we straight men—we don’t have that sort of luck. We have to buy women drinks and date them and tell them how lovely they are, and how they’re our true soul mate.”

  Jack said, “Do you think women really like sex?”

  “Some do,” Will said. “Black women do, I think.”

  “And white women?”

  “I think their motors are slow to turn over. They need drinks and kisses and kindness and a totally safe environment …”

  “And then?”

  “And then they get so much more excited than we do. Once the motor is roaring along, they can’t turn it off. One woman told me that they need all that buildup because it’s so hard to open yourself up, to be penetrated by another person—but maybe you know something about that?”

  Jack laughed. “Don’t look so embarrassed. This is a really interesting conversation, don’t you agree?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t know much about being penetrated. I’ve only been fucked five times in my life.”

  “But why? Aren’t you guys supposed to like that?”

  “I don’t want to get used to it. Now it just hurts. I guess it’s like smoking. After you stop hating it, you become addicted to it.”

  Will crossed his legs. Obviously he’d just imagined it happening to him. He made a face. He said, “I fucked Pia in the ass once. She liked the degradation, but she said it made her feel like she had to go poopy.”

  “She was lying,” Jack said. “She loved it.”

  “Really? I wonder why she was afraid to tell me that.”

  “She was always afraid you’d think she was too kinky.”

  “I hate the way Europeans think that puritanism explains everything about America. Anyway, what they mean is prudish, not puritanical. There’s no reason to imagine that the puritans were that prudish. I’d like to write a pamphlet in praise of puritanism that would be handed out on every plane bound for America and would explain that it was the puritans who thought up universal free and compulsory education and prison reform and abolitionism.” He subsided, then added, “So she thought she was too kinky for me?”

  Jack said, “She was afraid of scaring you off.”

  “I was more turned off by her brain, which was the size of a golf ball.”

  “Maybe I’m stupid too, but I’ve always found her original and entertaining.”

  “Soon you’ll be praising her for being amusing. That’s what these bored Europeans like—so-called amusing people.”

  “Back to sex,” Jack said. “Ever get tired of being the aggressor? I mean, straight men have to be aggressive their whole lives with no letup, don’t they? It sounds so fatiguing.”

  “You are naive, Jack. Women can be aggressive. I may not have much experience, but I know three women who like to be on top. Pia liked to tie me up and sit on my dick. And I was powerless to resist. I knew a guy in college who claimed that his girlfriend would strap on a dildo and fuck him in the ass.”

  “I wonder if that guy is still straight. So you think women are just as sexual as men, even more so?”

  “They can have multiple orgasms—can guys have multiple orgasms?”

  “If they wait a while in between. Do you really believe in female orgasms?” Jack asked.

  “Hell, yes, I believe in them.” A big laugh erupted out of him.

  “Do you think highly sexed women are more masculine? After all, the sex hormone is the male hormone, right?”

  “You mean women with mustaches are hornier? That doesn’t sound right,” Will said.

  “Older women look more like men,” Jack sai
d, “and they’re the really horny ones.”

  “Yeah, the randy old bitches.”

  “Gay men hate baby-doll women in short nighties with pigtails and lollipops and high squeaky voices.”

  “Straight guys think they’re stupid as shit but get an automatic hard-on around them.”

  “Why?”

  Will got up and strode around the room impatiently.

  “Why? You’d think you were an anthropologist and I was a Zulu. After all, we straight people have nature on our side. Procreation.”

  “God?”

  “Why not? God, too, since I believe in Him.”

  “So you think Goldie Hawn’s appeal is God-given?”

  “You can make anything sound ridiculous, Jack. But yes, the whole point is making babies, so that’s why heterosexual men are more attracted to baby-dolls than to old cows. Young women are more fertile; their babies come out healthier.”

  Jack asked him what time he had to be up in the morning for work and set his own alarm for eight. In Will’s bathroom he laid out a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste he’d bought just for this emergency. He was careful not to lurk around to watch him undress. He said, “Sleep well,” and closed his bedroom door.

  He put on pajamas, which he never did. Was it in case Will barged into his room?

  Jack went to the window, pulled back the curtain, and sat looking out for a moment. The sleet had stopped. The clouds were very low and burning from underneath; they were like huge helium-filled silver balloons nosing their way around corners and bumping into dark buildings in which only every tenth or twentieth window was lit. No bare windows—they were all curtained. He wondered how many lonely people were in those closed rooms.

  He felt fussed by his drunken, seemingly breezy conversation with Will. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the cold windowpane. When he shut his eyes, time and space flowed around him.

  Something about Will’s presence in the other room confused him. For a night they were playing house. Tomorrow Jack would get up an hour earlier than usual and prepare coffee and toast and scrambled eggs and even set the table with dishes and silverware that he hoped would be up to Will’s standards of cleanliness. Will would rush off to work, and they wouldn’t even shake hands good-bye because they didn’t do that.