by Edmund White
Jack realized that the gay men in the Village with their black pegged pants and tight shirts excited him because he knew how easily they could be unwrapped.
It was too silly to subscribe to an uptown-downtown polarity, though. Both Will and Alex lived uptown—was it all right for heterosexuals to be more connubial than sexual?
Jack now came to see Will as untouchable. It was so clear from his book that he worshipped Woman—not a White Goddess but a debutante in a shirtdress. Will was no longer that guy sitting around with no date and bad skin; now he was a distinguished young author with a pedigree. Town and Country was planning a story on Will with a photo of him posing on a horse in front of the family house. Will still dropped by Jack’s cubicle but kept consulting his watch. His schedule seemed very full. An uncle had just bought Will a membership at the Racquet and Tennis Club, and Will would amble over there three nights out of five to play squash with old prep school friends.
Alex called Jack the next morning at work. She’d stayed up all night reading and liked the book and wanted to meet Will. “Of course you misheard ten things out of twelve, Jack Holmes, but that’s not Will’s fault; old Will caught my essence. I think I come across as highly desirable and racée, half Holy Virgin and half mad deb.” She laughed at herself and so did Jack, mostly out of relief.
“You really didn’t mind being used?”
“Not at all,” Alexandra said, musing. “I think he understood me—well, if not understood at least grasped me.”
A distinction without a difference, Jack thought.
“I mean,” she said, “he does seem to grasp the way my mind works—it’s really extraordinary. He doesn’t seem that perceptive about other women.”
Jack was dying to mock her, but he didn’t dare; he was so pleased she’d forgiven him.
“Of course,” she said, her voice darkening, “a happy outcome doesn’t pardon the appalling breach of confidentiality.”
“You should be a lawyer,” Jack said.
“Luckily for you I’m not.”
They agreed that Jack would bring Will by for a drink. Alex started dithering: “Do you think we should meet in a public place?”
“Are you afraid he won’t like your apartment?”
Alex was indignant. “No, Jack, I’m afraid I won’t like him. If we meet in a bar, I can always slip away. I’ll keep my hat on.”
“Hat?” Jack asked, astounded.
“Yes, Jack, I have hats. Veils too.”
Will seemed mildly contemptuous of a possible meeting. “Warn her I’m not going to write another book about her. And that Tavel is a work of fiction.”
Jack hated the pretentious sound of “a work.”
Will did agree reluctantly to a drink for the very next afternoon. Alex seemed equally annoyed at the prospect (“He’s certainly keen,” she said), but finally gave in.
That night Jack got rid of his adoring trick by saying, “I’m afraid I have a very jealous lover who’s a violent Puerto Rican. If I tried to see you again, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. Pedro is coming back to town in the morning. Be sure you don’t even say hi to me on the street if you see me with a big Latin ex-Marine.”
Once the frightened trick had scurried off, Jack was free to worry himself sleepless over Will and Alexandra. As he tossed and turned, he kept playing out scenes between them. They snapped at each other, and Jack had to fill the silences. They stared at each other with entranced smiles, and Jack had to let himself out. Or they both made horrible brittle small talk.
Very, very late, after he’d drunk half a bottle of Jim Beam, Jack imagined them making love—Alexandra with her slender hips, nacreous collarbones, immaculate neck, breasts as small and high as those of a Lucas Cranach Eve; Will with his brown hair that turned auburn in the sunlight, his pale blue eyes so deeply set in their sockets that they looked black, his big nose and his rough skin, so at odds with his delicately modeled face that in the end he resembled an Adonis badly damaged by the elements.
Jack thought of Will’s smile, so slow to dawn and so slow to fade that it always seemed unsettling.
How would they kiss? Would she abandon herself to desire, or would she have that slightly lost, even frightened look she sometimes wore when the conversation had outpaced her—until she could catch up by finding some new pretext for indignation? Will would be gallant, but how gentlemanly could you be pushing a stiff one between a girl’s open legs? Or did Jack think that because he had already been corrupted by the brutality of gay life?
The next day Will canceled their drink; he was going to be interviewed by the Roanoke Times.
Alexandra laughed. “I just feel sorry for you, Jack. You’ve lost your little friend to fame.” She didn’t like the sound of that and added, “It will all die down soon, and he’ll be back.”
What amazed Jack was that a book as bad as Tavel could be such a success.
Suddenly free that evening, Jack went directly from work to Julius’. He knew he looked good in his suit. The padding made his shoulders immense. His legs in the dark wool looked endlessly long as he sat on the high barstool. His five o’clock shadow was dramatized by his white shirt collar, as he could see in the cracked mirror over the bar. He fell in with two men in their fifties who kept buying him gin and tonics but wanted him to try stingers (Jack knew how incapacitating they could be). Jack liked the attention, one man on each side, both of them interested in every word that fell from his lips. One of them, Hubert, had an iodine-colored tan and very white, very new teeth. Later, when he pictured Hubert, Jack wondered if his lips were that pink naturally. He had lots of short curly hairs springing up where his shirt collar opened. The hairs were both bronze and white but very thick, and around Hubert’s lips Jack could see hair like bronze filings coming in—it would hurt to be kissed by him. The other man was taller and slender and had a disobedient comb-over that kept relaxing and pouring down his pale face. His name was Bud. They were Bud and Hubert—inseparable, apparently, but definitely not lovers. At least, they were leaning in too carnivorously over Jack to be lovers, weren’t they, and anyway, could two men that old possibly love each other?
Bud and Hubert finally got Jack onto stingers, and this next part wasn’t too clear, but Jack was stumbling through dark streets between them laughing so hard it hurt his spine and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t vomit and then they were inside and Bud and Hubert were clawing at his belt and muttering to each other (“Easy does it, get the dick out”) and Jack couldn’t make the room stop turning but when he did both men were sprawled on the floor at his feet, sharing a big red dick that they were throttling.
When it was all over, they washed him down with a hot cloth, brewed him strong black coffee, and helped him buckle back up.
“So tell us, Bob—it’s Bob, right?” Hubert asked.
“Yes, it’s Bob,” Jack said.
“What do you do in life?”
“Auto repairs.”
“That’s pretty macho stuff,” Bud threw in. “We won’t ask you where, don’t worry.”
Jack compressed his lips gratefully.
Hubert asked Jack if he was gay or bisexual or straight. Jack said he was bisexual, but unfortunately he’d fallen in love with a straight man.
Hubert wiped his bristling upper lip, as if he had a wet mustache. With a little smile he asked, “Where’s the problem?” He looked as if he had a wonderful secret.
“The problem?” Jack exclaimed. “I’d say there’s a big problem when you’re in love with a straight guy.”
Hubert said, “Depends.”
“Depends on what?” Jack demanded.
“Would you suck his cock?”
“Night and day.”
Hubert opened his hands to demonstrate the obviousness of his next words: “Then all you need to do is get him off somewhere on a vacation, ideally in a country where the women are heavily veiled. Then you get him very drunk and in a dark room, and you go down on him. I know a straight Italian lawyer who
lives near here, and he gets horny—these straight guys do get horny, you know, and women are so slow and expensive. This lawyer stretches out on his bed, fully dressed, and we both get drunk. I sit on the bed near his feet. Never touch him. Then he pretends to fall asleep, quite a good actor, though he raises his ass so I can scoot his trousers down. Then I kneel on the floor beside him. And when it’s over, I use the tissues he’s thoughtfully put on the night table—what’s wrong?”
Jack was afraid he’d be sick. “Nothing,” he said.
Bud spoke up. “I agree with you, Bob. Straight men are the greatest. They’re real men, for one thing, and it excites me to think I’m sucking dick that’s been in pussy.”
“Guess I’ll be pushing off,” Jack said. “Need to sleep before I go to work on all those cars. Got a real doozy—a Mercedes bent in half.”
“You have damn smooth hands for a workingman,” Bud said sourly. “But wait! Sit back down.”
Jack was surprised by such vehemence. Until now Bud had seemed the softie.
“You see,” Bud said, “I’ve been going down to the Dominican Republic for fifteen years. I own a successful janitorial-supply outfit in Westchester—it almost runs itself. So I’ve got the money and time to fly down to my house in the D.R.” He took a breath. “I live there with my caretaker, Guillermo, whom I call my husband. We’ve been together for fifteen years. He lives next door to me with his wife and kids, and when I’m down there he spends one night with her and one night with me. And Chichita never makes any trouble.”
“I guess,” Jack said, “she knows which side her tortilla is oiled on.”
Bud looked offended but then decided to laugh it off. He even slapped his leg and gasped, “Tortilla! That’s a gem! I agree with you there’s nothing like a big hard straight cock. I don’t just suck my husband. He fucks me a lot. Chichita and I are both very happy senoritas with our husband’s uncut penis.”
“It’s been great, fellows,” Jack said, heading for the door.
“No repeats? Won’t you give us your phone number?”
Jack had to hold one eye shut, but he wrote out his number with the last two digits reversed. “It’s been real,” he said as he stumbled out.
At home he stood under the shower for a long time and made it hotter than was comfortable. He even washed out his mouth with soap.
At work the next day his face was clammy and his hands were cold. He nearly fell asleep on the toilet. When he came back to his desk, he put his head down.
That night he lay on his couch, drank a quart of water, and jerked off three times. Hangovers made him horny. And now he had new mental pictures to feed his imagination: Will sleeping but lifting his pelvis up obligingly for Jack to lower his trousers. Jack could feel the stiff blessedness between his lips, not that Jack ever got the chance to practice fellatio. The minute guys saw his dick, they jumped on it. If he ever sucked Will, he would have to remind himself that it wasn’t the Holy Sacrament. He’d told Will that gay guys sucked dick much better than girls, who looked at cock warily, as if it were a dangerous fish bone. He’d have to make it pleasurable for Will. Fat chance.
Jack almost wished Bud and Hubert hadn’t told him about their “straight trade” (that’s what it was called). He’d sort of laid to rest the fantasy of living with and loving Will. God knew he’d never had the least encouragement from Will himself, and Will’s novel revealed that he didn’t have the slightest impulse of tenderness toward another man. In fiction, Will’s love was chivalric and absolute.
When Jack complained to the girls about how difficult Will and Alex were being about meeting, Alice said, “Just give Will Alex’s number. I’d get out of it if I were you.”
Jack nodded solemnly, which hid the lost feeling her words inspired in him. It almost hurt to think that Will and Alex could get along without him. Of course, he knew he would be dealt out right away.
Finally, the following Tuesday both Will and Alexandra were able to clear a moment in their schedules for each other. Jack walked with Will through the light drizzle to her building. They went up Fifth Avenue through the New York of nannies and doormen and well-dressed white men with raincoats and umbrellas that stylized them into the interchangeable figures in an architectural model scattered about for scale. The stoplights bled onto the uneven wet macadam, huge vowels of color pronounced out of the gathering darkness.
Alexandra wasn’t wearing a hat, but she was in a black wool dress with red stripes across the shoulders and down the long sleeves all the way to her delicate wrists. No jewelry anywhere. No rings or bracelets. Just a touch of lipstick. Despite her going-to-concert dress, she’d put on her semi-humorous swashbuckling manner: “So, Will, tell me what you’ll have to drink. I assume you drink—you are a Princeton man, right?” She was already halfway to the drinks cart.
Will had slumped to the couch without hesitation, no polite middle-class dithering for him. He said, “Got some scotch?”
“Sure,” she said. She was being very jaunty. “Rocks? Soda?”
“Straight up,” he said.
“And you, Jack?”
She’d put out some hors d’oeuvres. There was a stack of three small linen napkins. They’d been meticulously ironed. Will was fiddling with one now and looking at it. “Who gave you these?” he asked.
“No one,” she said, still smiling but a bit defiantly. She gave them their drinks. “I bought them.”
“Wait, wait!” Will said. He held the small napkin up taut between his hands as Exhibit A. “You actually set out one day and went to a … store and ordered gray … what is this—linen? Gray linen napkins with your own initials embroidered, right? Embroidered in red? You ordered the gray linen and red letters?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Alex said cheerfully, sitting on an armchair holding her drink in one hand and tugging her skirt down with the other. “Of course I ordered them, who else would order them? My mother? I went to Saks and ordered them with all my other linens.”
“Wait, wait!” Will exclaimed. “All your linens are gray and have your monogram in red? And you spend hours ironing them?”
“The maid irons them, Will. That’s what maids do. Of course my linens aren’t gray!” Alex said indignantly. Her cheeks flushed bright red. “My table linens are plain white—perhaps you’d like to see them? I suppose now that you’re a novelist, you have this insatiable Balzacian curiosity about domestic details.”
Jack admired the way she pronounced “Balzacian” to rhyme with “Alsatian.” For a moment he hadn’t recognized the word. He thought she was funny and impertinent to suggest that Will had only recently decided to set up shop as a novelist.
Jack noticed that his palms were sweating. He told himself that it was out of his hands now, that he should sit back and relax, and he tried to do just that. He crossed and recrossed his legs.
Will was still sprawling. He shook the little napkin. “How many of these do you have?”
“They’re called cocktail napkins, and I have thirty.”
“Thirty!” Will thundered. “You mean to say some nun—”
“Exactly, a nun, all that work is done by nuns. I see you’re very au courant about the arts of the table.”
Will pretended he hadn’t heard her. He went on with his own inquisition and his own form of wry indignation. “Some nun spent thirty days monogramming this hoard of napkins—”
“Wait a minute,” Alex said, jumping up and calling back from the kitchen. “It’s called a job, Will Wright, not a penance. I forgot you’re Catholic.”
“Oh? How did you know?”
“It’s all over your novel. No rational person could have written it.” She came back in with a smile and a silver bowl of cashews that she placed on the coffee table at an equal distance between Will and Jack.
“Ouch!” Will exclaimed, pretending he’d just burned himself on something hot; he shook his hand to cool it off. “That really hurt, Alexandra.”
“Of course your little friend Jack tells me ev
erything about you. Remember, the information flow goes in both directions.” She looked reproachfully at Jack. Then, by glancing down suddenly, she must have dislodged one of her troublesome contacts; for the next several moments she poked at her right eye and rolled it around behind a curtain of long hair.
At last it was back in place, but Will was still hammering on about the wretched cocktail napkins. “But why thirty of these things—is it part of a trousseau?”
Alex sat up very straight with her head held high. “Do you seriously imagine that women only do things in preparation for the great experience of their miserable lives: marriage?”
Will stared vacantly at her and then at some imaginary lint on his lapel, which he brushed off.
“Well?” Alex asked.
Will looked up as though he could barely focus on this topic. “You tell me,” he said vaguely.
Jack felt sick—this was going so badly! He couldn’t believe that neither of them was able to make more of an effort. For months Will had pumped Jack for information about Alex, and she’d seemed curious about him too, though in her much less insistent way. But now they were bickering like children. He’d assumed that at least they’d be civil.
When Alex started to refill their glasses, Jack pretended to be startled by how late it had become and rushed out, leaving a resentful-looking Will behind.
Later that night Alex phoned him. “That Will of yours!” she exclaimed, though there was also laughter in her tone.
“Oh god, I’m sorry,” Jack said, his voice cracking like a kid’s, “he’s not usually that bad.”
“I wonder,” Alex said. “He seemed to be perfectly in his element.”
Jack wasn’t quite sure what that meant. After all, he didn’t understand all their little turns of phrase and euphemisms. He was a false contender in their world of Auchinclosses and Astors, though they refused to believe him about his humble origins.
“By the way,” Alex said, “he’s a lot better-looking than you suggested.”
“Oh please,” Jack said, panicking, “please never say I described him as homely.”
