Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

Jack said, “Gays don’t understand competition. They’re either giving up in advance or devious and murderous.”

  Rupert would burst into Jack’s office at work and sit on the desk and sift through Jack’s drafts with idle curiosity, until Jack had to tell him in whispered fury that he must not visit him again during office hours.

  Rupert blinked hard and stood up as if stunned. “Why are you being so uptight?”

  “I’m uptight because journalists are a conservative, macho bunch, and the business slot is the most conservative of them all after sports. You can find other arty jobs all over town in the media, but there are very few business posts. I’ve worked hard for this one, and I don’t want to lose it because a cute little bitch parks her million-dollar ass on my desk.”

  Rupert went to the door with a grin at once flirtatious and humiliated and hurried away, tears in his eyes.

  When Jack left the apartment at ten in the morning, Will wasn’t usually even awake.

  One day Alex called Jack at the office. “Do I disturb you?” she said.

  Jack thought of saying he had a meeting, but he considered this conversation inevitable.

  “No. I’ll close my door. There. I’m all yours.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a scene. I just want to know how Will is, in your opinion, and what you think is motivating him.”

  Jack looked at the paper in his typewriter. He’d already filled half a page with copy about Chrysler’s new boss.

  “Will says he wants a holiday from his life.”

  “Do you think his life, his life with me and the children and the house, feels like work to him?”

  “I don’t think Will would ever let those words cross his mind, much less say them.”

  “I know, I know,” Alex conceded with a sigh. “He’s so Catholic and devoted, but maybe that’s the problem. Does he ever groan and sigh—but that’s not a fruitful line of inquiry—”

  The copyboy opened the door and, without even looking at Jack, slipped a page into his in-box.

  “We could meet for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Let’s do that too,” Alex said, “but I have to get this out over the phone because I’ll feel such a bore saying it all in person. I feel like a bore now.”

  “Nothing could be less boring,” Jack said in a serious tone. He looked at the page in his in-box. The editor was asking him to cut ten lines.

  “Does he have a new girlfriend?”

  Jack asked, “Haven’t you talked to him about this?”

  “I know you want to be loyal to Will, but you must be loyal to me too. We’re friends too.”

  “Yes, he is seeing a girl, but she’s only a college student, very sweet and—well, I don’t see how he could be in love with her. I don’t think he even takes her seriously.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Amy.”

  “And her family name?”

  “I don’t know. He only met her ten days ago. I think she’s only a small part of his smoke-pot-and-drop-out hippie days.”

  “You know he’s not going into work?”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Suspected? Doesn’t he talk all this over with you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I thought you were best friends.”

  “Two very reserved men, even if they’re best friends … besides, I have the feeling Will doesn’t want to put too fine a point on anything, not even his thoughts, as if by not choosing, not declaring his intentions, he can have everything he wants and not be stuck with anything definite.”

  “Has he mentioned how long he intends to stay with you?”

  “He said something about a month.”

  “A month more?”

  “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “You know me, Jack. I always want to do the noble thing but not give in too easily. I see other women whose husbands are straying—Larchmont is full of them—and they make a terrible stink, call up the other woman and denounce her as a home-wrecking cunt, sob to their husband and call their mother-in-law and get drunk and barge into the office shrieking. Not my style.”

  “No. I can’t see you doing that.”

  They both laughed politely.

  “But on the other hand I don’t want to be a wimp and give up too easily.”

  “You really love him?”

  “Yes. He’s lovable. As you know better than anyone. Does it bother you to see him with Amy?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. Let me think this out. I owe you the truth. Okay: I like having him close at hand, under my roof. I’m not jealous when I see him with Amy, maybe just because she could be his daughter and he doesn’t pay attention when she talks. I have a sort of beau these days too, cute and young, and he sleeps over.”

  “All four of you! Very cozy.”

  “I think I took up with Rupert because I felt I was falling in love with Will all over again, and I couldn’t bear that.”

  “Will is such a professional charmer.”

  Jack said, “I don’t blame him. It was just my own … neediness, I guess.”

  “He’s not the easiest person to be in love with, is he?” Alex said. “I mean, he’s not terribly giving.”

  “Though he tries,” Jack said.

  “He tries.”

  They met the next day for lunch way east at a little French restaurant. It had a sloping skylight half covered with dirty snow. The restaurant was packed, but the maître d’, forewarned by Jack, seated them at a table with no neighbors and not in a banquette. Alex ordered a cheese quiche and a green salad—the only vegetarian dishes on the menu.

  “It’s very hard lying to the children,” she said. “They think their father is off on a long business trip. But this absence after the safari—ça fait beaucoup.”

  “Do you talk to him?”

  “Every other day, I suppose. He’s very hail-fellow-well-met, of course: very Princeton. I try to have some perspective. I’ve been working for a charity for children in Cambodia, and compared to what they face—malnutrition, prostitution, physical mutilation—most of them are orphans—well, a marital squabble in Larchmont complete with cooks and nannies …”

  “Yes, I see, but that doesn’t make it any less tormenting to you.”

  Alex actually laughed and said, “Slightly less tormenting. I mean, luxury can be a consolation.”

  “Did you see this coming?”

  “He was staying away one or two nights a week. When I went to St. Barts, he extended his stay at the Pierre by quite a bit despite his hotel phobia.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “The hotel phobia …”

  Alex said, “He knows I’m here with you and thinks it’s a good thing. He says he knows I’m the one who needs a friend.”

  Jack liked Alex so much. He’d always admired her, and now he enjoyed sitting across from her in this chic little restaurant that smelled so good—the smell of Alex’s quiche and his own navarin with the small pieces of lamb and the little green peas and potatoes chopped fine, all in a smooth mahogany sauce. The table lamps under yellow shades and the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables on a central table joined forces to war against the gloomy day. He liked the way Alex was wearing a black skirt and a cardigan sweater and around her neck a shiny gold cerulean scarf.

  “Is that scarf Indian?”

  “It’s sort of cheap, but I think it’s pretty.” She looked down at it with a derisive smile. “By the way, I saw you the other night at that benefit dinner for Skowhegan. I wanted to get over to kiss you, but I never found the right moment. You were at the very best table, Jack Holmes, right next to Alice Tully.”

  “She’s a sweetie,” Jack said. Then, out of the blue, he asked, “If you could save the life of a child or a dog, which would it be?”

  “Is this a trick question?” Alex asked. “Both. I’m sure both. Or whichever one I knew better.”

  “So length of association counts?”
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br />   She said, suddenly serious, “It counts for a lot.” She thought for a moment. “I thought gay men were usually closer to the wife than to the husband.”

  Jack felt awkward and said, “You and I are plenty close.”

  He felt afraid, but of what exactly? Was he guilty about sheltering Will during his vacation from life—from Alex? Or was he afraid Will would run off to some Mexican beach town with Amy and sleep his life away with her in a double hammock and eat tortillas and drink tequila and never be heard from again? Alex would fall apart and start drinking too, and her children would be sent off to her mother’s house to live. Jack was afraid that he would end up alone and their cartel of friendship would break down into its individual entities, that their molecule would revert back to freely circling rogue atoms.

  Amy’s mother, who was only four or five years older than Will, cleverly took her off to Europe for a three-month trip. At first Amy sent Will letters, then postcards, then nothing. She and her mother, who was an art historian in Washington, settled in Paris, where they were taken up by the museum crowd. Amy fell for a young French curator of Kufic script and Islamic manuscripts, who wasn’t an Arab or even a Muslim. She decided to do the big, cattle-car Sorbonne course on French civilization, and every day she attended language classes as well. She bought black clothes and avoided the sun and had her hair cut like a boy’s. Soon she’d moved in with Cyril, though by that time Will had lost interest in her and stopped writing her back.

  Once Amy defected, Jack had less of a reason to barricade himself in his room with Rupert. He spent more and more time with Will, and even Rupert could see he was besotted with his old friend. Rupert knew the words to “My Old Flame” and often sang them to infuriate Jack. Jack maintained his rule of not fraternizing with Rupert on the job.

  As a result Jack and Rupert spent less and less time together, except in bed, and even there they were less and less compatible. Rupert was tired of being buggered nightly, as he put it, and wanted to dominate Jack at least once in a while. Most of the young men who circulated through Jack’s apartment were so awed by Jack’s penis, so insecure about their own dimensions, and so overwhelmed by Jack’s sexual authority that they submitted to him with passionate enthusiasm.

  But none had been permitted to hang around long enough to feel restless in that role. At first Rupert gloried in all the attentions that Jack lavished on his body, and what might have appeared to be passivity he experienced as narcissism richly gratified. But as the weeks wore on and Jack became much less tender but no less lusty, Rupert rebelled. Again he said he wanted to fuck Jack.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Jack said. “Look at our age difference! Even the visual would be ridiculous. Pretty Boy Mounts Old Goat. Ganymede with Average Meat Rogers the Hung Eagle!”

  “The truth isn’t all in the captions,” Rupert said. “At first I was overwhelmed by … It. But now I’ve regained my confidence, and I want to be the eagle at least one night out of three and try my wings.”

  “That’s grotesque,” Jack said. “Shut up and assume the position.”

  This kind of rough talk had always worked in the past with other men. Rupert, however, was offended and got up and dressed. “I do have my own apartment,” he said.

  “That dirty little room in Brooklyn? You’re not comfortable there. Stay here and we’ll jerk off together.”

  “I can do that alone.” Rupert was pulling on his sweater. “We need a break. You’re living in an earlier decade—in love with a straight man, closeted at work, rigidly macho in bed.”

  “That’s cruel of you—to take the things I’ve confided in you and turn them against me.”

  “So … but you haven’t told me these things; I’ve observed them.”

  For so many years Jack had known nothing but men who worshipped him as Priapus, and he was astounded by someone who sought the active role, especially such a flaxen-haired, plush-bottomed little guy, someone so mouthwateringly fuckable. Now Jack understood why so often you met older gay couples who were looking to put together a threesome with someone passive. They might have started out fighting to get to the bottom, but mostly because whoever played the bottom didn’t usually have performance anxiety. When the anxiety eventually melted away, in the affirmation of a secure, long-lasting relationship, a latent male urge to dominate rose to the surface.

  If Will had moved out too, Jack might have mourned Rupert, but since now it was just Jack and Will, Jack was free to give all his attention to his friend. Rupert found a new job as a cultural reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Will asked Jack where they’d gone wrong with their young lovers.

  “Young people change entirely every six months,” Jack said. “Every brain cell is replaced twice a year. Our only mistake was to become too involved with them.”

  Will seemed more inclined than previously to listen to Jack’s opinions. In the past Will had been not only straight but also married. Now they were both single and on the prowl.

  “My rule before Rupert,” Jack said, “was never to see anyone more than three times, no matter how well it was going. Mind you, that’s harder for a straight guy to pull off, to maintain a strict statute of limitations, since women want to date before they put out and want to marry as soon as they start fucking. It will be even worse now that you’re ostensibly single.”

  “How do you enforce that rule of yours?”

  “You say any malarkey, make any promise, in order to bed them. Then after three dates, no matter how hot the sex is or how simpatico the talk—crunch!”

  And Jack mimed a guillotine blade falling.

  “Ouch,” Will said, delighted, “you’re cruel.”

  “You have to be cruel if you want to be a libertine. They were right in the eighteenth century when they—”

  “Is that what we are: libertines?”

  “It’s what I am,” Jack said, “and what you aspire to be.”

  “What would be my first step toward full membership?”

  “You’d return to your orgy club.”

  Will’s eyes tightened, then he smiled.

  Curiously, Will hadn’t quizzed Jack about his lunch with Alex, nor did he speak of her often. Was he really that indifferent? Or did he feel so responsible for his family that his truancy didn’t bear talking about?

  Once Alex telephoned in a panic because Palmer was gasping with such urgency that she feared he might die. Will called for a Larchmont ambulance and rushed out in a taxi to the hospital, where he met Alex and Palmer in the emergency room. Will didn’t come back to Manhattan for two days, but when he returned it was with suitcases full of his clothes.

  Will’s mother called and apparently was very severe with her son. She told him that he was guilty of criminal negligence and couldn’t reproach his wife with a single fault.

  That evening Will drank almost a fifth of scotch in glass after glass that he poured and swallowed rapidly. “ ‘Not a single fault,’ she said. And I had to agree with her.” Will poured Jack a drink. “Alex is perfect but not the usual icy perfection you see so often in our world. She’s a good guy too.”

  “Did your mother ask you what was driving you apart?”

  “Oh, hell yes, she kept hammering away at that. She wondered if I was sleeping with you, and I told her”—here Will interrupted himself, calmed his indignation, and nearly whispered—“no. Then she wondered if I was ashamed to take Alex’s family money, and I said, ‘Mother, I’m a Wright, and we’ve been living off women for centuries.’ That, actually, made her laugh. Then she asked me if my business was failing.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s not exactly in brilliant health. She asked me if there was another woman. I said that there had been, but that was over. Like a good novelist I simplified my two affairs into one.”

  “Did she ever ask you for your own thoughts about your midlife crisis?”

  “All I could say—all I could think, to be honest—is that I’m bored with my life to a nearly terminal degree, that I hate
my work because it’s so demeaning and trivial, that I don’t think it’s fair that Alex had a few affairs before we married, but I just had those sordid tussles in the backseat of my Ford, that I feel my novel failed because I hadn’t experienced anything, and that now I want to catch up while I’m still sort of young and sort of vigorous.”

  “You said all that?”

  “I thought it all and said half.”

  Jack moved over next to Will on the couch and said, “I wish you’d repeat all that to Alex. I think she’d understand everything and even sympathize with most of it. She wants you to write. She can’t bear the possibility that she and the children have made you give it up.”

  Will was now very drunk. He looked at Jack strangely (or was it admiringly?) and said, “You figure people out quick, Jack. You’re never at a loss. Why is that? Is it because you’ve been shrunk?”

  “I’m not even sure it’s true.”

  “Hell yes, it’s true,” Will said vehemently. “Want to hear my theory?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think gay guys are surrounded by enemies. Not really, but anyone could turn on you. So you gotta be alert. You can’t ever let your guard down. So you get real good at figuring people out. Other people. You pick up on every little signal no matter how faint. Whereas we straight guys are just smiling all the time from ear to ear like, ‘What? Me worry?’ ”

  Five days later Will went to another orgy, and when he returned home at three in the morning, Jack snapped on the light in his bedroom so that Will would feel free to come in. He did, very stoned, smiling broadly, his limbs so loose that he reminded Jack of pulled taffy. He looked handsome under the harsh overhead light, which made his deep-set eyes disappear and turned his hair into glowing filaments.

  “How was it?” Jack asked.

  “Great! Lots of people, maybe twenty. Almost all the women were really attractive, and the two that weren’t—what do the French say?—had a certain charm.”

  “Did you participate?”

  Will sat down on the edge of Jack’s bed.

  “God, you sound prim. Yes, I ‘participated’ with three ladies. Good ones, lusty ones.”

  “And the cocks-and-balls problem?”