Jack Holmes and His Friend

by Edmund White

  “No one bothered me, but I decided to watch, overcame my squeamishness, and picked up a couple of pointers. Straight men don’t get the chance to learn technique by observing other men unless it’s in porno or an orgy, and I’ve never had the stomach for porn.”

  “Did you have a rematch with Beatrice?”

  “Did I ever! But she’s so popular that I had to be assertive to get my turn with her.”

  “Glad you went?”

  “And how, though of course, an evening of pure pleasure is always melancholy. But I’ll have lots of mental movies to replay for nights to come.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “Wyatt. He’s a hell of a nice guy, really. When it was very late and even Beatrice had fallen asleep but right there next to us, he and I were sitting around in our underwear, out of our gourds, jabbering like crazy. He told me all about life in Lubbock, Texas, and his father the doctor, and how when his father told his mother that he was keeping another woman on the side, his mother said, ‘That’s okay, sugar, jus’ buy me a mink.’ And the son of a bitch did!”

  “I’d come to the next orgy,” Jack said, “since I’m built like a horse, but I wouldn’t really get excited over the little ladies.”

  And you, Will, would be intensely embarrassed, Jack thought but didn’t say.

  “Like a horse, huh?” Almost involuntarily Will stood and headed for the door. “You and Wyatt could compete in the size department. I’m off to bed. Thank god tomorrow’s Saturday and I can sleep in.”

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” Jack said, but Will didn’t hear him.

  Will turned off the light and closed the door behind him. Jack was so excited that he jerked off twice, though the second time he was only half hard and sore.

  3.

  Alex called Jack at work on Monday.

  “I don’t think I can go on like this. I twisted my ankle just getting out of the car, no good reason, and now I’m on crutches and my foot is all bound up in an elastic bandage, and I can’t drive because I have a stick shift and it’s my right foot, and Margaret has started mocking me, and yesterday when I told her she couldn’t take flamenco classes until she got her grades up, and besides she was a little tubby for Spanish dance, she put both her hands on the dinner table and got halfway up out of her chair and stared me right in the eye and said, ‘I hate you!’ ”

  “No, no,” Jack protested.

  “That’s exactly what she said. ‘I hate you.’ She looked like a gargoyle. Her face was hideous. Of course, I should never have said that about her being tubby. Poor little Palmer was so upset that Ghislaine had to take him off for a walk, but there are some paths here that are so overgrown they’re impassable. I feel like taking a chain saw to the whole thing.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “The garden and the house … and the children. Palmer has turned into a sort of drag queen. He’s always in my clothes. I want a vacation from my life too, which hasn’t really worked out, has it? I was so smug. I thought, my husband might not have made Ivy, but that was okay; he was a modest, soft-spoken, true-blue knight, a knight of the Round Table, and I his Guinevere …”

  At this point Jack could sense a smile creeping into her voice before disappearing again behind a mountain of self-pity.

  “We’ve run out of money, or rather I had to call my mother to get Daddy to put some money in my account—and so I had to tell Mummy the whole sad story, and I was so ashamed and she was so alarmed, and she made Will’s defection sound even worse than it is or at least more definite. Daddy called in his highest dudgeon and wants us to get a lawyer. He is a lawyer, so that’s his solution to every—I should get a lawyer and have him sort of—it would freak Will out.”

  She paused, then went on. “I guess I’m calling to tell him I’m on crutches and my daughter hates me and my son is a transvestite and I’m going somewhere, maybe Rio, for a vacation from my life, and if Will cares about the children, he’d better do something about them, because they are no longer my responsibility.”

  “Sure.”

  “He won’t return my calls.”

  And she hung up.

  Jack thought that Will’s children were going to end up having the sort of precarious childhood that he, Jack, had had. Everything had looked so ideal for Palmer and Peggy, with the nanny and the private school and the beautiful rich parents, but chaos was always lurking just behind these arrangements like the flooding ocean just beyond the seawall and the houses raised prudently on stilts and the dunes intelligently replanted in grass.

  Although Alex had sounded mostly sad and discouraged, just before she’d hung up the surf had risen above the wall. She’d been sputtering with rage.

  Not telling Will at all was a thought that crossed Jack’s mind, but he knew that the instant Alex caught Will on the phone, they’d put their heads together and they’d detect Jack’s treachery in a minute, and they might even sacrifice Jack’s friendship on the altar of their renewed love. And what would happen to the children?

  As Jack walked crosstown to his apartment, he dodged one person after another. No one stepped aside to accommodate him. If he didn’t flinch they’d run smack into him. He said to himself that living in New York was no better than residing in the Grand Bazaar—everything for sale and everyone a merchant. No trees. No fountains. Only slivers of sky. Throngs of people all shoving each other out of the way.

  When he saw Will that night, he reported everything Alex had said in a neutral voice. He didn’t want to interpret her words.

  Will said nothing, but he winced and feinted and punched the air as if he were shadowboxing. “Damn!” he said, and turned to look Jack in the eye, as if he’d had a revelation. Then he repeated, “Damn!” as though that word clarified everything.

  Jack could see that Will was drinking colossal amounts from the empties that lined the kitchen floor. Obviously Will was someone who’d always had people to pick up after him; he probably assumed that trash disappeared on its own.

  One morning when Jack arrived late, at eleven, to his office, Alex was already sitting in the chair facing his desk. She was wearing a dark suit with a Louis XVI knot of pale gold and dark gold on the lapel—a 1940s clip. She stood and embraced him.

  He said, “Alex, you’ve been drinking.”

  She said, “I was just so happy to see you, so I started celebrating early.”

  Then she buried her face in her hands, and he saw that her nails were dirty.

  When she looked up again she said, “I hate you, Jack. You’ve stolen my husband away from me. I hope you rot in hell.”

  She got up and seemed to be concentrating on not weaving as she opened the door and stumbled down the corridor toward the elevator. She still had an Ace bandage around her foot from her injury.

  Jack thought, To hell with both of them! I don’t give a shit about either of them. They’re not friends, they don’t care about me, and they never have. I never sucked Will’s cock—hell, I’ve never even seen his flabby body naked. Now he’s too old and I don’t care. What did I do? I’ve done nothing to wreck their frigid, unworkable marriage. My only mistake was introducing them to each other. No wonder their kid is asthmatic with a smothering mother and a father who’s only good at disappearing. No wonder Margaret hates her iceberg mother.

  I know Will thinks I introduced the worm into the apple when I brought Pia out to Larchmont. Actually I invited her to go with me as protection. I didn’t want to be their little capon they could coo over, the sensitive, sad, sweet little faggot they could pity. I wanted to bring a fascinating, sexy, European woman into their little suburban House of Usher—and if she wrecked their marriage, she just had to give a little push to a structure already hollowed out and ready to topple.

  And I didn’t, honestly didn’t, give Will shelter because I wanted—oh, come on, Jack, face it: you did want him to live with you, if only for a month, if only for a week. You love him, though he’s as stiff as a scarecrow and about as human. He’s a talentless wr
iter. I’ve done a little snooping around, and I know his business is about to go under. He’s turning into a drunk; he’s a heartless father and a faithless husband married to a maniac.

  But I do love him. He’s as attached to me in his way as I am to him. We belong together. We could grow into two old libertines together, beauty patches on our zinc-oxided cheeks, pitiless in destroying young lives, as devoted to each other as two alligators dozing in the mud.

  When Jack told him about Alex’s terrifying visit to his office, Will said, “This time she’s gone too far.” And Will called the house and got Ghislaine on the phone. She said that Madame was un peu folle and that she cried all the time but hadn’t abandoned them yet.

  Will told her to hold on, that he’d be back soon—he was sitting right next to Jack, and Jack was able to piece together the whole conversation from Will’s end.

  The next morning Will came into Jack’s room in just his underwear.

  “Can I show you something?”

  “What?”

  “Look.” And, unbelievably, he pulled down his underpants and showed Jack his penis and a drop of white pus gathering at the slit.

  “And the front of my underpants is stiff—see? And it burns like hell to piss.”

  “You’ve got the clap,” Jack said. “Don’t worry. Go to the doctor and he’ll give you a big shot of penicillin, and by tomorrow it will be gone.”

  “But how on earth?”

  “One of your little ladies from the orgy, no doubt. Unless there’s someone you haven’t mentioned.”

  “No, no, there’s no one else. But this is disgusting.”

  Will went off to wash his hands with soap.

  “It’s the spoils of gallantry,” Jack called after him, “the white badge of courage. Today, my son, you are a man.” He waited for Will to come back.

  “Has it ever happened to you?”

  “Three times. But only three times out of three thousand fucks.”

  “And syphilis?”

  “Do you have a chancre on your penis? A sore? I didn’t see one. In any event Dr. Siegal will run a routine blood test for the syph. And if you have it, the penicillin for the clap will probably produce a Herxheimer reaction.”

  “A what?”

  “You’ll run a sudden fever and sweat and get the shakes overnight. By tomorrow it will all be gone.”

  “Have you had that one?”

  “Just once.”

  When Will had gone to shower before heading off to the doctor’s office, Jack lay back and closed his eyes and thought, So I’ve finally seen it. I might have even been able to take it into my hand. It looked warm, resting like a wounded Tristan, suffering but still royal. It was like that one time I saw my father’s dick. What do the Freudians call the little one’s glimpse of the parents going at it? The primal scene. Today, this was my primal scene and all accomplished with a breathtaking simplicity and directness, like a star athlete showing his swollen balls to the man who has spent a hundred sleepless nights coveting him: “Hey, Coach, look at this. What the hell’s going on? Is this a football injury or what?” “Come a little closer. I gotta take a closer look at it.” If Will hadn’t been in a medical panic, he would never have shown me his dick. Nice shape. Looks like the circumcision was botched, with that extra dewlap of flesh hanging down on one side. Milk white skin with that ropy blue vein rushing down the shaft. Neither big nor little. Just big enough to satisfy anyone. Long straight hairs disguising its full size; it looks like one of those mad medieval Japanese heroines in the movies with their pale faces drowned in hair pushed forward.

  When Jack came home from work, he found Will smoking, something he almost never did, though Amy had filled the place with her smoke. Will sat on the couch with his tie at half-mast but hadn’t taken off his suit jacket. He had a tumbler half full in front of him.

  “What did he say?”

  “You’d better come in and sit down for this one.”

  “What is it?” Jack asked, thinking the doctor had found a suspicious lump, there would have to be tests—and Jack could scarcely bear the idea of any harm coming to Will. Before a word was said, Jack had resolved to take care of him, to see him through.

  Will said that there had been a rapid inspection and a swab dipped in the discharge and streaked across a slide that Siegal had examined then and there.

  “He said it was the clap, and he took a blood sample for a Wassermann test—that’s for syphilis, right? And then he slapped my butt hard and gave me a big penicillin shot, big enough for a horse. Only a gay doctor would dare to slap a guy’s ass like that, but it worked. I didn’t even feel the needle going in.”

  “So where’s the problem?” Jack asked, about to run off to piss.

  “Come right back.”

  What could it be, Jack wondered as he urinated, other than something much more dire to do with Will’s health.

  When he came back in, Will didn’t even look up. He was concentrating on his cigarette as if he didn’t recognize it, as if someone had just put this strange object between his fingers.

  “I’m all ears,” Jack said, flashing a smile that got no response.

  “He told me about this new disease they call—here. I wrote it down.”

  He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket.

  “GRID—gay-related immune deficiency. He said fifty men have already died of it and many more are sick. So far they’re all gay, but the doc thinks it’s going to spread and affect whole populations—and millions of straight people too. It’s sexually transmitted.”

  He looked at Jack and added, “There’s no treatment.”

  “Oh, but there are always new horror shows like this—and if they’re sexual, the doctors exaggerate them to scare us. They all want us to be faithful to just one person—to have the same dull lives they lead.”

  “Why would a gay doctor take that stand, someone who looks like a rogue to me with his mustache and grabby hands?”

  They talked about it for hours. Will was completely shaken, maybe because the clap had already depressed him, maybe because he feared that this new disease would stalk him like the Stone Guest, taking revenge for all his excesses.

  When Jack awakened the next morning, Will had left with his suitcases.

  His note said, “I’ve gone back to Alex. I called her, and she said she’d take me back. I would suggest you find one person who’s clean and hunker down with him for the duration. Our libertine days are over.”

  Epilogue

  The day before Palmer’s seventeenth birthday, I told him I’d take him to Brooks Brothers to buy him two new sports jackets and four pairs of trousers. He wasn’t too thrilled since, as he said, those clothes weren’t stylish. That was the word he used, “stylish,” one of his mother’s words. I told him he should say, “What guys are wearing,” or “trendy,” but he just flicked his long blond forelock away from his head and stared off into space four inches to the right of my ear.

  I knew he was mad, but only because I was used to him. Anyone else would have said he was lost in thought.

  “Come on,” I said, “it’s your birthday,” and I put an arm around him and pulled him to me, which I never did. I never touched him. He seemed to like it in his embarrassed way, though it was sort of awkward since he was two inches taller than me, and I felt odd because he was so beautiful with his long straight hair and very full lips and his mother’s small nose and ears and his flame red cheeks. The color swam over his high cheekbones, gathered in his cheeks, and bled down toward his chin line, almost as if an actor applying theatrical makeup had overdone it so it would “read” in the top balcony. That Palmer’s features were so delicate and that he was often in a rage made him all the more striking, as if boiling water had just been poured into the finest bone china. It was translucent and it was steaming. Maybe he thought being hugged in public made him look like a little kid.

  He said, “My birthday, big deal.”

  When I glanced over at him, he gave me a shy grin
and actually leaned into me. We were in the shirt department on the main floor of Brooks, and an old lady customer looked at me with blazing eyes, probably indignant that I was hugging my underage lover. I was still good-looking, maybe more so than when I was younger, since my skin had gradually cleared up and my hair was coming in silver, so much better than its original mousy brown. I suppose we would have made a plausible couple, Palmer and I.

  “We can go anywhere you like,” I said. “You’re the one who has to wear the damn clothes.”

  Palmer’s face flushed an even darker red from the capillary crisis of having to express an opinion.

  “It’s okay, Dad, I’d like to buy some things here. I need them for dress-up occasions, and I don’t want to be too punked out at church or whatever. It’s just I’d like to eventually, you know, be able to get some, well, like Doc Martens boots and some camouflage shirts and safari stuff.”

  “I still have my safari clothes from the Serengeti.”

  “Dad!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Just as we were about to go up the carpeted staircase, Jack came down it, talking to a portly older man who was bald and had a radio announcer’s voice and had stopped on the stairs to make a point, which obviously required a raised eyebrow and the positioning in midair of stubby fingers freighted with gold seal rings.

  “Hey, Jack!” I said, after I realized he’d already seen me and there was no escaping.

  “Will! Is that you under all that—” Then he broke off, midjoke, and said, “And hey, is that you, Palmer? A regular young man. How many years is it since I saw you last?”

  I couldn’t help noticing how Jack, without showing an improper interest, was spontaneously drawn to my kid.

  Over the years I’d seen Jack’s picture on the society page from time to time, at some benefit or wedding, usually in the back row or dancing with some bigger, older matron. He’d finally become friends with our ballet friend Sofia Phipps, who spoke about him often and with great enthusiasm. She said that Jack was the most agreeable man about town, cultured and always serviable.