Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  And Jack would—what? Sit and listen to the furniture creak? Jerk off while whispering Will’s name? Will was such an unlikely object of affection, so chaste and cagey and … opaque, really.

  It was like falling in love with Grover Cleveland.

  Was he letting himself fall in love with Will all over again? Why? Because Will was unobtainable? Or because Will was a real man, if masculine reality was measured by a refusal to touch half the human race? Will was a bad habit it seemed he’d never get over. Jack felt like one of those courtiers who back up when leaving the king’s presence.

  He could see from the way Will talked about Pia that he could be cold and vengeful. He felt that he and Will had to do something big and decisive before long, or else they’d just fritter the rest of their lives away. The gods had been good to them: they still had their health and young faces and lusty bodies; Will was rich and Jack was comfortable. But if they didn’t watch out, they’d become dim and devious in their desires, mediocre in their accomplishments. He laughed at himself and stood up, sheathed in his unfamiliar pajamas. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  As he was going to sleep, he remembered asking Will if there was nothing about Pia he recalled fondly.

  Will had become irate against the poor woman all over again. But then he’d caught himself, slumped, thought it over, and smiled. He said, “She was a good egg. She never once refused me. She gave me complete access to her pussy, even during those painful periods of hers.”

  “That didn’t put you off: the blood?”

  “No.”

  2.

  Jack met a gay trainee at work so close to his ideal—young, blond, Canadian, preppy, intelligent—that he couldn’t resist breaking his rule never to date a colleague. He asked Rupert out to dinner.

  Rupert was a curious combination of intellectual nerd and little sex god. He did a hundred sit-ups and a hundred push-ups every morning. His stomach was as segmented as a bar of white chocolate. He had flossy blond hair under his arms. His lips were full and, endearingly, he wore braces, which made him self-conscious. He had straight pale hair. He had a hooked nose.

  His body was as slippery and cool as water and, like water, it flowed all around Jack. Rupert’s feet were unblemished, with anklebones so snug and unobtrusive that Jack could imagine an entire Japanese religious cult based on their worship.

  His buttocks could have served as flotation devices. They were “buoyant with youth,” as Jack described them to Will, whose face froze when he was forced to take on board this unwelcome information, though Jack could see that Will liked Rupert well enough. Around Will, Rupert had a surprisingly deep voice and a less surprisingly ingratiating manner.

  In the bedroom Rupert was not so masculine. If Jack praised his buns, Rupert would half faint and put one hand behind his head and languidly point his elbow to the ceiling like a Michelangelo slave. “Really? You really like them?” he’d ask and touch his ass; now his deep tones sounded more like Marlene Dietrich’s. He wasn’t being droll or parodying a beautiful woman but glorying in this role that Jack was conferring on him and that corresponded neatly to his inner girl. It was no more playacting than learning to be a boy was for a boy.

  He was a trainee in the book-reviewing department, which meant he looked through the dozens of galleys that flooded into the office every day and came up with a list of six or seven every week for the three staff reviewers to consider. Rupert would write a short, savvy account.

  “Another incantatory, meaningless piece of dreck by Mlle. Duras. A book that takes longer to read than it took her to write. It appears to be about a sailboat in the Atlantic and the usual adultery on the high seas, but who could tell what’s really happening under the layers of alcoholic prose?”

  At first Rupert, fresh from his Humanities 6 course at Harvard, had tended to compare everything to Samson Agonistes, but right away he caught on that that wasn’t cool. The writers of reference should be Oates, Roth, Bellow, and Updike, not Euripides and Milton.

  When Rupert responded to a question, he would pause for so long that Jack would fear he hadn’t heard it. At last Rupert would say, “So …”

  He’d studied philosophy and now kept making pronouncements with what Jack considered to be an adorable sententiousness. The boy was quite an original.

  Jack broke his rule and gave Rupert a key to the apartment.

  Once Jack came in and found a little old crone with thick glasses and a hooked nose bent over a book, her nose almost touching the page. Jack drew back in alarm—but the crone turned out to be Rupert without his contacts in and without his head thrown back in his usual triumphant posture.

  The transformation from butt-boy to witch was so dramatic that ever after Jack found something factitious about Rupert’s beauty.

  Rupert was polite and wanted to talk over Jack’s business stories, especially the ones he was writing just then. Did the Republicans have a point in calling for more deregulation? Were Carter’s economics shaped by his agrarian past? Was Japan really going to outstrip the United States in GNP? How soon? Would the Japanese soon rule the world?

  Rupert, so entirely naked and pneumatic in his twenty-second year, would lie with his head resting on his open hand, which was pressed palm down on Jack’s chest. Jack would wind up his economic explanation and listen for Rupert’s light emery board snore, but no, Rupert was awake, blinking against Jack’s chest, and at last would say, “So …,” and give a good summary of Jack’s points and throw in a fresh question.

  If his conversational style was grave when treating real subjects, it was silly when the topic was gay life. Rupert had just discovered how to camp, and in a giggly voice that would crack from baritone to soprano, he’d refer to Will as Miss Will or Wilhemina, then fall about laughing. Or he’d switch the genders of their colleagues at work. Once he even referred to himself as Miss Me. He talked wildly about throwing over his Newsweek job and becoming a go-go boy in a gay bar and even bought silver Mylar panties that he modeled for Jack, who got an erection, though he thought they were in deplorable taste. Suddenly Jack had a new insight into how straight guys could find baby-dolls both grating and exciting.

  Ever since he’d seen Rupert as a crone, Jack had been less enthralled by the boy’s beauty. Nevertheless, one evening Rupert pulled on a tight pair of black briefs and marched bare-chested out of the bedroom to the kitchen for a glass of milk, and Jack registered how perfect he was, starting with his feet. Jack remembered from his study of the Buddha image that in the very beginning it had been forbidden to show the Buddha, so he had been represented by an empty seat under the bo tree or by footprints. Yes, these feet could be made to stand in for a deity, and Jack liked to feel them pressed against his chest while he looked down into the boy’s face and fucked him. But why did Rupert playact the “sublime” so much during sex?

  Once he overheard Rupert giggling on the phone as he rumbled along in his unlikely bass voice, gossiping with his roommate (a girl) back in Brooklyn about how exciting it was to date an older man and be “penetrated” by him—which he said with donnish humor. Jack thought that the role he played with Rupert was as easy to put on as old loafers, whereas the one he’d have to assume with Will if he could seduce him would be as precarious and deforming as high heels.

  Rupert was at a loss about how to be gay, and his alternating outbursts of camp and gravity, of “Whee!” and “So …,” did nothing to work toward the excluded middle: feeling natural as a man who loved a man. Maybe introspective straight guys, and he’d have to ask Will, were just as confused about how to love a woman, how to knead their sentiments into their sexuality and roll it all out into a continuous surface that didn’t tear apart.

  But no matter how confused Rupert might be about identity, he was very competent on presentation. He looked like an Olympic diver in his black briefs as he crossed the living room and headed for the kitchen. Jack could hear Will talking to Rupert—he must have let himself in. Oh god, Rupert was being polite and C
anadian standing there half naked, his speech slushy because of his braces. He could hear Rupert saying, “Pardon? Oh! I see! So …” And Jack could imagine him bobbing forward like a weather bird, his superb body so active even in its poise. He was at once so goofy and so formal.

  Jack was proud of having Rupert out there, rare as a silver rose, interrogating Will about his evening. Then suddenly he leapt up out of bed in his boxer shorts and ran out and said, “Did I hear the word ‘orgy’?”

  Will smiled, his mouth blurry and red from kissing. “Yep. I had me some good orgy.”

  “Will, you’re completely stoned,” Jack said. “Come into my room and let’s debrief!”

  Ordinarily, Jack knew, Will would have resisted an invitation to sit on a bed with two homosexuals in their underpants, but stoned as he was, he staggered off to Jack’s room grinning.

  “So how many people were there?” Jack asked calmly, as if the orgy had been an office mixer.

  “Eleven. Six women and five men. Everyone was between thirty and forty-five except for one woman, Amy, who was twenty-two, and she’s coming over later.”

  “Here?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, here.”

  “My age,” Rupert gurgled approvingly as he removed a microscopic pillow feather from his gleaming shoulder and smiled at it.

  “And how did it all … happen?” Jack asked.

  Will lay back on the bed with his hands behind his head, and from Jack’s angle all he could see was Will’s pointed chin sawing up and down as he spoke.

  “When I got there, they were all sitting around in that huge living room in front of the fire, talking. Two or three people arrived after me. Nothing indicated what was to come—no salacious remarks, no touching or naughty lip-licking. Nothing. The drinks were very strong, and enormous doobies were constantly circling the room. I’m sure they were sprayed with horse tranquilizer. The lights were low. Beatrice may be a communist, but she remains true to her aristocratic roots, and she had a very relaxed, natural way of introducing everyone by first name and giving us each an identifying tag. I was ‘Will, the novelist and publicist,’ which is correct enough.”

  “So everything was comme il faut,” Rupert said sententiously, though perhaps French came to his lips more naturally since he was Canadian, or so Jack preferred to think.

  When Rupert rested his hand on Jack’s leg, Jack made a face and waved him away—none of which was observed by Will, who was still staring at the ceiling and talking.

  It was strange, unprecedented, for Will to let down his guard this way and sprawl on a bed with two men—one in love with him. The whole tense, larger-than-life moment only worked if treated as a lighthearted improvisation, an after-hours dorm meeting in someone’s room with contraband chocolates and filched glasses of milk. Rupert was coolly lighting and passing funny cigarettes of his own devising. Now they were all three implicated in this midwinter mischief.

  “And what about your problem with cocks and balls?” Jack asked Will.

  “Oh, the good old cocks-and-balls problem.”

  “Where’s the problem?” Rupert shrugged prettily.

  “Beatrice and Wyatt slipped off to the bedroom, leaving the door open, and we could all see they were undressing each other right away and getting down to it. Another woman, a pretty Asian chick, was in there in a flash, inserting herself between them. Then one of the guys got up and began kneeling between Kim Chee’s legs and eating her out—”

  “That was her name?” Rupert asked.

  “No real names have been used in this article,” Will said. “Some guy who did seem a little light in the loafers started kissing Beatrice while fondling Wyatt’s humongous penis. Wyatt liked it and pushed the guy down to the floor, and Loafer Lite and Kim Chee took turns servicing him, but that was the only male-male funny business I witnessed.”

  “Bummer,” Rupert said.

  Will sat up and grinned at Rupert. “This is one greedy little guy you got here, Jack.”

  “And what did you do?” Jack said.

  “Of course, I was the most uptight, but I was so high I was staring in through the doorway as if the others were little mechanical Santa’s helpers in a Christmas window at Lord and Taylor. And I was still trying to make conversation with Amy, who’s this senior at Sarah Lawrence. We were actually talking about Günter Grass—”

  “Major author,” Rupert allowed.

  “And then, Will?”

  “She made the first move. She slumped to the floor and put her hand on my leg, and I took that for an invitation. She pulled me into the other room, though I could feel my erection melting. I was spooked by Loafer Lite and Wyatt.”

  “So,” Rupert intoned, “you’re homophobic?”

  “And how are you, Rupert, at eating out pussy?” Will blithely asked him.

  Rupert made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon.

  “Stick to the story,” Jack said.

  “Listen to you, Miss Boss,” Rupert said, which made Jack frown mightily.

  “Did you … interact with any of the other women?” Jack asked.

  “I couldn’t resist Beatrice, and she did seem receptive—she was receptive, lying back on the bed with her legs spread. But Amy’s the one I really like.”

  The doorbell rang, and Will slipped out and closed Jack’s door behind him. Jack and Rupert could hear a girl’s voice in the hallway, and then before long she and Will must have gone into Will’s room because everything was silent.

  “So we should give Will a demonstration of the delightful things two men can do together,” Rupert said.

  “He’d love that,” Jack said, and he folded this silly, serious young man into his arms.

  During the next two weeks Jack’s apartment was transformed. He who was used to solitude and to taking his meals alone now never knew who would be there—Rupert or Will or Amy or all of them at once. It felt like college. Jack brought home twice as many groceries as usual and had the cleaning woman in an extra time each week. His heart no longer pounded from loneliness as he approached his own door in the evening; if the apartment was empty, it wouldn’t be for long.

  Sometimes he was annoyed if dirty dishes were left in the sink or if an ashtray hadn’t been emptied. But Will was good about buying bottles of whiskey and champagne and bags of potato chips; Amy kept two bouquets of fresh flowers going. Rupert did nothing but push-ups, or “press-ups,” as he called them. Maybe that was enough as his contribution to his host’s happiness.

  At first Amy was elusive and no more than a laugh tinkling behind a door or a slender shade streaking into the bathroom, a hand pouring a glass of orange juice by the light of the open fridge. By the third day, though, Will had introduced her properly. Amy was tall and extremely warm. She touched Jack and Rupert on the arm or shoulder when she talked to them—a nice change, Jack thought, from those women who were wary of gay men or convinced that gay men hated them.

  Rupert wanted to know right away what she was majoring in (French) and who her favorite French author was (Gide). “Wasn’t he a bit of a homo himself?” Rupert asked.

  “Was he ever! And the one time he slept with a woman—and it wasn’t his wife—he sired a child, a daughter. His wife was furious. His wife was his cousin. When he ran off with his best friend’s teenage son, his wife was so ticked off she burned all of Gide’s letters to her, the perfect revenge, since he considered those hundreds of letters to be his finest writing.”

  Rupert was more beautiful than Amy, Jack thought. Did Will see Rupert as an older version of Palmer?

  Amy had a large mouth, appealing at age twenty-one, but one that Jack thought would be grotesque by age forty. She had a straightforward relish in telling her Gidean tale that frightened Jack. He wondered if she could be capable of great unconscious cruelty, or rather unable to see it as anything other than a pretext for a spicy anecdote.

  And what had happened to Will’s wife? Was Alex burning all his letters now? He was changing his shirt every day—had he bought new
ones?

  The first time Jack and Will were alone, Jack asked him.

  “I called Alex,” Will said, “and told her that I was having a midlife crisis early and that I was staying with you in town for the next few weeks. By the way, I should be paying half your rent.”

  “Okay,” Jack said automatically. “But how did Alex react?”

  “She pretended to be understanding, then called me at work in tears and asked me if I wanted a divorce.”

  “Do you?”

  “For Chrissake, I just want a holiday from my life.”

  “Would you ever consent to inviting Alex along to one of your wife-swapping parties?”

  “Are you crazy?” Will asked. “I’m never going to another one. I’m just happy I met Amy.”

  “And is Amy happy?”

  “Doesn’t she seem happy to you?”

  Jack noticed that Will and Amy went through a lot of scotch. Rupert reported that he’d had a long, cozy chat with Amy, and she’d admitted that she’d just dropped out of Sarah Lawrence for the semester. She had gone to the dean the previous week, told him she was having emotional problems, and shown him the letter her psychiatrist had written for the occasion.

  “So she thinks she’s learning a lot about life and literature from Will, more than she’d ever learn at school.”

  “Life and literature,” Jack exclaimed, “two things Will knows nothing about! He never reads except to thrum through a novel by someone he conceives of as the competition.”

  Rupert said, “Isn’t it strange how heterosexuals see competition and rivals everywhere? Meanwhile, gays never play team sports, although we’re good at running, tennis, swimming.”