by Edmund White
I was fumbling around in my mind for some blessed isle, sun-swept and tropical, in the cold sea of so many calculations and fears and memories. I needed to meet her as one brown body to another on a white sand beach.
And then she opened her legs a fraction and closed her eyes and touched her breast, and I could feel myself getting harder.
When it was all over and we were back in our bedroom, Alex nibbled my ear and whispered that she was glad we’d fulfilled our conjugal duties. That was how she put it and we both laughed. We talked about taking a vacation, just the two of us, in the Bahamas, where she’d often traveled as a girl. Just as we were drifting off, Alex brought up Jack’s name, and I asked, “Were you ever in love with him?”
“No, right away I found out he was homosexual,” she said. “It was like he’d entered a whole new category.”
“Sister?”
“There’s nothing feminine about Jack … that I know of. No, he’s more like a little brother who’s unhappy. Or ill. An unhappy little brother who’s convalescing.”
“But before that, before you knew?”
Alex yawned and placed her warm cheek on my chest and an arm around my waist. “Will, how flattering. I do think you might be a little bit jealous.”
“Answer!”
“He is sexy. But you—I found you so maddening that I knew right away I was falling for you. Besides, even though you’re an old Catholic and a foxhunter, I figured out we were cast from the same mold. Not that Jack isn’t perfectly sortable, but—”
“You’re babbling,” I said, impatient with her constant gallicisms. “Go to sleep.”
And she did, still twitching with little social smiles and a deprecating lifting of her eyebrows.
The next morning she fluttered about the children, preparing my macrobiotic snack for work (seaweed, pickled radish, and a clump of cold brown rice), but suddenly she cast me a long mauve look and blushed, and I could see she was thinking of last night. Even Ghislaine looked a little less voluptuous moving about under her dress.
What struck me was that all of this sensuality had been declared under the banner of Jack’s reentry into our life. Was he a lord of misrule capable of spreading vice and excitement as he rode his pard and smeared grapes across his face? Or was Alex just lonely, isolated in the ever-shrinking corner she was painting herself into, the lunatic of Laurel Lane?
I invited Jack out to Larchmont the following Saturday. I told him when and where the train departed from Grand Central, but I also offered to drive in and chauffeur him to and fro. I knew how cowardly New Yorkers could be about venturing into exurbia. But Jack accepted readily enough and asked if he could bring a woman friend along.
“Sure,” I said, flummoxed for a second by this complication.
In a nice recovery I added, “Warn her that we’re major back-to-nature loons and the house is foundering in its own ooze. And tell her that everything on her kiln-fired dish will be arranged according to its yangness.”
Jack’s friend was called Pia, and I guessed she was Italian, though she had no accent. She had long straight hair through which the tips of her pale ears peeped, and she smelled nicely of vanilla—almost as if she’d dabbed her wrists with pure vanilla extract, the way the maids would do back in Virginia before church. She had a small Cupid’s bow mouth and dramatic blue eyes that seemed strangely flat and swimming. When she smiled, her lip would curl up at one corner to reveal her eyetooth, and her huge eyes would swim from one side to the other. She had a small, straight nose and a ready laugh, though usually she didn’t seem to have quite caught the joke. Her breasts looked as if they’d been very small and high in adolescence but were filling out nicely in the fullness of time. I was taken by her, but I hid it by looking at Jack most of the time and treating Alex with extra attention, almost as if she were a convalescent.
We had two martinis each in the blond bentwood living room seated on the sagging Barcelona chairs. It was early February, so there was nothing to tempt us outside for long, though we did make a quick circuit around the dolphin fountain and the sundial and past the overgrown path down to the frozen pool. Luckily everything was dead for the winter, and we weren’t confronted by anything too feral and scary. It was getting dark. I’d built a fire inside, and it looked good after the desolation of the garden.
Ghislaine brought in the children, who made the rounds and kissed the four adults on each cheek. “Enchanting,” Pia whispered, smiling at Alex with complicity.
Of course, Pia was the enchantment I was staring at in the short bursts of attention I’d permit myself.
Alex was absorbed by Jack. She was leaping up and kissing him on the forehead every other minute, and I thought, Idea for story: a straight man pretends to be gay so husbands will trust him with their wives. Then I remembered I’d accused Jack of employing that strategy years ago, when he’d first met Alex. She held his hands and leaned back and said, “Let me look at you! You’re thinner.”
“So are you.”
“You have more character in your face.”
“Lines. I’m more lined. Whereas you—”
“Lines.”
“Not at all. You look even younger. How amazing you’ve kept your figure after two babies.”
She laughed and said, “Luckily for you I’m dressed. You wouldn’t believe my battle-scarred body. A real horror show.”
Pia said, “I love your house. It’s enchanting.”
The dinner wasn’t too horrible. It was roasted root vegetables with a tahini sauce. There was lots of sugary California red wine, which Pia treated as a complete novelty, albeit an enchanting one. For dessert there was a compote of dried fruit cooked in sherry with a cinnamon stick.
“You guys are very back-to-nature, huh?” Jack asked boisterously. “You make me feel sooty and urban, like an old fluorescent light tube.”
We all laughed. I wondered if they were planning to spend the night or take the late train back. If they stayed, would I get a chance to tuck Pia in? I sort of resented Jack for inadvertently casting this temptation in my path, or was he actively trying to test our marriage, which was complete with adorable children and conspicuous mosses on the old manse?
At a certain point Jack said, “How did you guys ever get the money together to buy this place? Twenty-five acres in Larchmont! That must have cost a cool million.”
I sipped my iced Kahlua and said, “What’s that Robert Frost poem, ‘Provide, Provide’?”
But Jack couldn’t hear my discreet warning, or in any event he refused to back off.
“No,” he kept on, “I mean, who paid for this layout?”
Alex said with elegant simplicity, “My father. Didn’t you know he was rich? Remember how I used to collect Ching vases?”
“Yeah. I do,” Jack conceded. “So what?”
“Those things don’t come cheap. How many girls do you know with a whole breakfront stuffed with Ch’ienlung?”
“That was awfully nice of your dad,” Jack said, but the conversation left me feeling bruised, and I wondered if that had been Jack’s intention. Had Jack just assumed I couldn’t have paid for the place? He wasn’t done yet. “You never did say, Will, what you do for a living now.”
“I write annual reports for corporations. They’re too paralyzed by bureaucracy to write them for themselves, so I have a freelance business—”
“But what are they?” Pia asked, sounding fastidious, as if she’d found a mouse paw in the compote.
Before I could answer, Jack said, “They’re these glossy pamphlets sent to the stockholders explaining why the company’s losses are a good thing. I get them at Newsweek all the time. The law forces companies to make a full disclosure, but these four-color photos and carefully worded bromides are designed to throw dust in everyone’s eyes.”
Alex, the little traitor, laughed the loudest and said, “Is that what you do, Will? I never really understood till now. It’s all a big deception?”
Still trying to be jaunty, I asked, “H
ow else do you think I pay for all the dried apricots and cinnamon sticks we consume?”
Pia said, “No one in my family works and they never have, unless collecting rents can be called work. Oh: or making wine.”
“Where is your family from?” Alex asked.
“Chianti,” Pia said. “I love hearing about the jobs real people have in America.”
“You have no accent,” I said. “Were you educated in the States?”
“Yes,” Pia said, “at Smith.”
“Smith?” Alex exclaimed. “I wanted to go there, but I was too dumb to get in, so I went to Cornell.”
They talked about their schools and then about Tuscany and how enchanting it was. Pia confessed that her mother was American and she’d grown up bilingual. I was dying to ask her what her enchanting little American forebears had done for money.
Alex grabbed Jack’s hand and said, “But this is such fun! Can’t you stay over? We can give you adjoining bedrooms and even new toothbrushes, and we can have a wonderful brunch in the morning and smoke Gitanes. Please say you will!”
I was still smarting from the revelation about who’d paid for our house and how mendacious and pointless my job was, but Pia looked ever more enchanting now that her little ears were standing completely clear of her straight hair and she was speaking a bit less guardedly with that rough alto cast to her voice. She was friendly and sweet, and she knew how to smile encouragingly at a man and nod him into affirmation.
Pia said, “But you must have a very charged day tomorrow with the children, I can imagine, and maybe it would be best, Jack …” But she didn’t finish the sentence. She was too much of a real woman to impose her will on Jack. I thought it was such a phony foreignism to say “charged” instead of “full” or “crowded,” but at the same time I didn’t care. I was completely under Pia’s spell. I almost pitied her for wanting to be interesting since we weren’t.
“Yes, Will,” Jack said, “if you could drive us to the station, we could make the eleven ten. Next time! We’ll spend the night the next time.” He looked at Alex fondly, saying, “Remember how you used to wear that red silk—what do you call them?—hostess gown? I thought you were the height of sophistication.”
Alex socked him in the arm. “And now? You cad!”
When I came back from the station, Alex was very excited and running around the house. She was listening to a Mozart sonata LP very softly because she’d read that Mozart helped you digest.
“That was such fun!” she said, and she kissed me on the cheek timidly and awkwardly, since that was a demonstration she never made, not just like that, swooping down out of nowhere; a peck. She didn’t peck. Though come to think of it, she’d been pecking Jack all evening.
“Yes. So do you think Jack has changed?” I asked.
I was wondering if she would want to have sex after our revelries of the week before; I was wondering whether I would. Part of me longed to sleep in a different room, pretend I had a cold, so I could jerk off thinking about Pia.
Alex said, “He’s more sure of himself, don’t you think? I wonder why he brought that girl out here with her not-quite-convincing continental ways—anyway, Jack doesn’t like girls, does he? And Jack used to say he was just an ordinary Midwesterner, but why is he always escorting these social tarts around? I think secretly he’s a snob.”
“You sound jealous.”
Alex started to protest. In fact, the vein on her forehead was throbbing visibly as it did when she was about to blow a gasket—but then she caught herself and smiled. That was her most endearing quality, this trick of catching herself in mid-mood.
“You’re right,” she said. “I guess I want to be his only friend.”
In bed we talked more about Jack for a while.
“And Pia,” she said. “Does that mean ‘pious’ in Italian? Isn’t that Ingrid Bergman’s daughter’s name?”
I said, “I suppose it’s just another Italian name, but it does sound awfully tacky and Sicilian.”
“Yes,” Alex said, “but Pia was Ingrid Bergman’s legitimate child—the Swedish one.”
I said, “I thought she was pleasant and pretty.”
“Oh-ho!” Alex said, sitting up in bed then as if she were a detective and she’d just uncovered a clue. She subsided back and said, in a high voice, really the voice of Palmer, “Why did Jack drop you? All those years ago? I mean, I know you said it was because you rebuffed his advances, but was that—”
“Rebuffed his advances? God, Alex, you make me sound like a Victorian prude. Anyway, I dropped him.”
She was in her white silk pajamas without a collar, and she looked as luminous as a sad Picasso child.
“You dropped him? Why? I never dared ask you for the details.”
I laughed quietly and turned off the light.
“Keep the light on. I like to look at you when you’re lying.”
“Yes, my dear, but we’re in bed to sleep.”
“But you still haven’t told me.”
“After we’d talked it over again and again, his obsession with me, and I thought everything was settled, I was in the crapper at work reading the paper, and suddenly, for no reason, I looked up, which no one ever does, and there was Jack above the partition, looking down at me.”
“How could he be—”
“He was obviously standing on the toilet seat in the adjoining stall and getting his jollies by looking down at my crotch.”
“Astounding! He was masturbating? How did that make you feel?”
“Not good.” And I thought about what I’d felt. “Like a sex object. Feminists are always whimpering about being objectified—”
“Will, I’m a feminist.”
“So am I,” I said, deflating her objection. “I mean, you have a friend, and he’s read your book and shared your shitty review and knows you’re in love with Alex, and you’ve gotten drunk together, and talked about God, and death, and art—and then you catch him looking at your dick over the crapper-stall wall, and this guy is supposed to be your buddy …”
“Not very elegant, I admit.”
“It’s not just inelegant, it’s a betrayal. It’s why regular guys don’t like fags—they’re always trying to sneak a feel or stare at you in the locker room. I’ve never had that many buddies, not really close ones, but I can see the point of buddies—you’re just two guys standing side by side looking out at the world. But if the other guy is on the make in whatever way, it doesn’t matter which way—for instance, if he wants to get into your club or hobnob with your friends or get you to buy insurance—then the whole thing is off.”
“Disinterested as the saints.”
“What?”
Alex could be irritating with her cryptic remarks.
“You expect friends to be disinterested,” she said. “To have no hidden motives.”
“Don’t you?”
“I suppose that’s another way we’re alike—I don’t have many friends,” she said.
“Men friends. You have men friends.”
“Oh well, before my marriage. You’re my friend. Our children are my friends. Animals are my friends.”
“Anyway, you don’t want to have your best buddy suddenly leering at your privates in the middle of the day. At work. He didn’t even have the good grace to tackle me drunk and late at night.”
“But he didn’t tackle you, Will. He was hoping you’d never notice.” She sighed and turned on her side toward me and stroked my face with the back of her hand. “It’s really rather sweet, Jack lusting after you, so hopeless since you like women.”
“It’s true I’ve always liked women, admired them. Men just don’t interest me.”
“But maybe,” Alex said, yawning, “that’s why you like Jack. Because he was always accommodating himself to you. Yearning for you, just as a woman might—I’m not saying he’s effeminate. There’s nothing effeminate about Jack Holmes.”
“That makes it sound as if I only want to be adored.”
“Then put it this way. An ordinary heterosexual man wouldn’t make a huge, huge effort to become friends with you, and you certainly wouldn’t try. When boys are teenagers it’s easy, being on the same sports team or in the same eating club, but after that …”
“So you think I can only be friends with a fag?”
“I don’t like that word, Will. It’s like ‘nigger’ or ‘Yid.’ Really, it is. But yes, you need someone to make all the effort because you’re off on your own cloud.”
“I’m too shy.” I could admit I was shy.
“So what happened that day? Did you shake your fist up at Jack?”
“The awful thing is that the crapper scene happened after I got my horrible Times review, after we got drunk together and I gave him a hug for a moment—”
“You what!”
“Remember how bummed out—”
“You held him?”
“Yes, he had me to dinner that night the review—”
“Well, then, of course he thinks he can take liberties with you, if you held him.”
I was suddenly angry at Alex’s screwy reasoning.
She said, “Stop smoldering, Will.”
She rubbed her delicate fingertips into her temples, some sort of yoga trick she did when she was tensing up.
I started again, in such a low, soft voice that she glanced at me in puzzlement. “I was being nice to him, Alex. I knew that would make his day, and besides, he’d been very kind to me.”
She got up and stuck a finger into the plant on the sill, I suppose to see if it needed water. Then she went into the bathroom to wash her hands and—yes, she was brushing her hair again in that maddeningly vigorous way of hers.
When she returned she said, “Anyway, tonight was a wonderful evening, and I’m glad we’re friends with Jack again—and of course you were a giant sweetie to hold him that one time. I was just startled: it’s so out of character. But it’s to be encouraged, dear.”
I just wanted to sleep now. Alex had this way of reacting priggishly at first to something, then doing an about-face and endorsing it, especially if doing so made her look broad-minded. She’d object to taking ghetto kids into our Larchmont Country Day, and then she’d campaign for it while quietly transferring our own children to the local Montessori, saying it was because she liked their “philosophy of education” more. She always wanted to look liberal, since in her own mind she was on the barricades as Miss Liberty, the bare-breasted one, in that French painting.
