Jack Holmes and His Friend (30 page)

She’s a moron and promiscuous out of boredom; just watch, one day she’ll toss my way a cute little venereal disease to take home to my wife! I know it’s the cheese going off—the Pont-I’Évêque—but I can’t help associating the smell with her body, some yeast infection. Look at the company she keeps—a skinny, peroxided faggot probably nursing his own dose of the clap in that “beautiful” anus of his.

I took a deep breath and got ready for bed. I had Thomas
Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
. I’d been putting off reading it for ages. I was afraid it would make me so jittery with envy (reviews had all been ecstatic) that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I wanted something elevated in my life, something beyond my sexual obsession with this dunce and her court jester and depressed brother.

I would have called Alex down in St. Barts, but it was too late; she’d said they were living by the sun, the only sensible thing to do. I missed her and a sense of decency in my life. I missed Palmer and Peg. I felt so tenderly toward them and could picture them sleeping peacefully beside the beach and the water.

I wrestled with my sheets and I thought, No matter how luxurious a hotel is, there’s no getting around the fact that other people have slept on these mattresses and rubbed themselves with these towels. I hated the dirt and expense of a hotel and longed for my nature-nut wife and our impeccable linens and health food meals.

I strummed my way through a few pages of Pynchon. Here was something about bananas—everyone making drinks and meals out of nothing but bananas. This Pynchon was wild! So intelligent and funny and original. Not in a million years would I have chosen someone like Francesco to spend an evening with. Then again, it seemed these Europeans loved to be amused more than anything else, as if boredom were stalking them night and day, the dreaded ennui. For them a gay man was as amusing as a dwarf was for a king. Francesco, despite his protestations of poverty, was probably a
baronino
like all the rest of them. He could be funny and outrageous, being one of them. He was probably always inventing some new bit of comedy. Tonight it was his “beauty” and his “
plastique
.” And my sensitivity to those because
I was an “artist.” That must have meant that Pia had told him I was a writer. Guess that counts more over there than it does here, I thought. Authors. Aristocratic faggots. All a way of staying amused in this dull world while advertising one’s own exclusivity in taste and rank. Those people will never read Pynchon, even if he’s translated. Too much work …

I asked myself, do I despise Pia?

I wished she weren’t so vapid, so certain she was fascinating.

I turned over and over in my bed and finally made myself a scotch on the rocks from the minibar and smoked a Kent while watching part of a western on TV.

The phone rang.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s me. I’m down in the lobby. Can I come up?”

“Sure. It’s room 1142.”

“I don’t have any panties on.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, afraid someone might hear—was the house phone next to the main desk? “Good, very good,” I said. “Come on up.”

I rushed to brush my teeth and hair. A moment later she was rolling her knuckles against my door in a muted knock. When I opened it, she had on a raincoat though it wasn’t raining, and she was wearing a subdued smile.

I pulled her in, closed the door, embraced her for a long time, and then, still kissing her, pulled up the raincoat and placed a hand on her bare, firm ass and rubbed a finger against her asshole. I was so excited. I wanted to sodomize her, though I hadn’t done that to anyone more than two or three times in my life. Two times.

She knew what I wanted and apparently wasn’t afraid of it. She pulled my penis out of the opening in my pajama bottoms and
turned around and rubbed her ass against it. We clawed our clothes off, and she knelt on all fours athwart the bed, saying, “A little lubricant might help.”

I could think of nothing beyond a miniature bottle of magnolia body oil that the hotel provided, and I rushed into the bathroom to get it.

“Now go slow,” she said.

I slathered some oil on her hole and worked a finger in. With my other hand I reached around and played with the nipple on that side.

“Yes,” she said.

I was afraid that if getting in her became hard going or fecal I’d wilt, but the whole situation excited me. After I was in about an inch, she gasped and reached back and waved a blind hand in alarm. In a moment, though, the crisis had passed and she pushed back, saying, “Oh Will,” and I went in nicely.

It didn’t feel like the warm glove of the cunt. It was tighter at the entrance but loose and balloony inside, once past the ring (wasn’t
anus
the Latin word for “ring”?). I loved that she was giving me this other orifice; now I’d had all three. Maybe it was bringing her pleasure only in the form of submission. She’d submitted her asshole to me; I was in the hole that gave birth every day to a turd. Now everything was dirtier, grittier, far from the rose water of romantic sex that Alex concocted and purveyed. Nor was Pia just enduring it; she was shoving her ass back on my dick, eager for more.

We lay beside each other and shared a Kent. “Don’t you want to come?”

“No,” she said, laughing, “I’m like a Greek girl who preserves her virginity by offering her croup to men.” She excused herself,
and I imagined her sitting on the toilet shitting out my babies. It was repulsive and thrilling and I felt a new intimacy between us. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was feeling, but it included exhilaration.

We saw Francesco twice more over the next two weeks before he returned to Venice, and now that I understood how and why he was funny, I laughed like hell over his antics. He decided that all men, as they got older, resembled lesbians with their cropped hair and fat faces and sagging tits, and so he was going to prepare for that inevitable role by studying lesbians and doing dykeish things like making scenes in public, drinking beer, and buddying up to workingmen in positions of authority—cops, train conductors. He was also going to buy a cat and exchange cat pictures with lesbians. I had no idea whether they really did those things, but I went along with the joke.

We invited Jack on one of the evenings, and the way he responded astonished me.

We were in Little Italy, which Francesco called the Attic of Naples. He loved the souvenir stores and even picked up a Mussolini ashtray. “
Un tesoro
,” he said, “a great treasure!”

He loved the sugary zeppole a vendor was selling and the “ancient Roman” decor of a restaurant complete with plastic busts of emperors and plastic Doric columns pressed against a printed vinyl mural of Vesuvius erupting.

“This was the way Naples was right after the war,” said Francesco. “Oh, how they fleeced the conquering American soldiers, especially the sweet, trusting Negroes, who brought everyone such joy with their burnt honey skin and huge pink hands and their dancing—their dancing! It is so cruel, the American racism—why do you mistreat the poor Negro? The Negro loves Italy and the Italian boys and women. But Little Italy, even the espresso
with its zest of lemon! No one has drunk coffee like this in Italy since 1900 in Palermo. Little Italy is like Pompeii, all of the Italian past so frozen in time.”

As we sat in a café and ate creamy pastries, Jack laughed with real delight at everything Francesco said. Sitting next to Francesco, I could see him sweating and clenching his hands and licking his lips, and I thought about how much work it must be to be the life of the party, even if the party was just three or four friends. I was reminded of the time in church choir back in Charlottesville when I was standing next to a professional opera singer, a baritone, who’d been hired for Easter mass. At least a gallon of sweat poured off him, and his lungs filled audibly like the bellows of the pipe organ beside us.

Jack didn’t need to distance himself. He and Francesco might have belonged to different species, though I was sure that Francesco, like Jack, had only straight friends—but then again, what did I know of Jack’s nocturnal life? All I knew was that he never arrived at the office before eleven, which meant that he could go to bed at two A.M. and still get enough sleep. What did he do during those hours from eleven to two? He didn’t watch television, though he was a reader.

What most impressed me was Jack’s ease with the Italians, all three of them. He even knew a few expressions in Italian, including
magari
(“Would that it might be so”), so much more efficient than its English translation. I’d only just now learned that one from Pia, who used it all the time, even when she was speaking English.

I could see that Francesco didn’t much like Jack. One clown doesn’t like another unless they’ve worked out a routine together. Though really, Jack wasn’t a clown. He never talked about his homosexuality in a group. He could tell jokes, and he certainly
was pleasant and “light” in the way these people prized—Pia had even told me once that “lightness” was a patrician trait. But Jack didn’t indulge in self-parody or confession. His “material” was never autobiographical. Nor did he prepare a whole “act” for each evening the way Francesco did. And unlike Francesco, he was never willing to appear grotesque. Jack did not seem to feel any affinity with other gay men unless he desired them.

In that way he was different from me. I liked women, all women. Certainly more than men. I’d always preferred my sisters to my brothers. I had never liked other men to touch me, and a sport like wrestling, a month’s worth of it in high school gym class, gave me the creeps.

I realized that all women charmed me, even the stupid or loud ones. Even lesbians. I once saw a lesbian couple at a Greenwich Village party, and I found them touching—the way the more masculine one hovered over the more feminine one, who was a splashier dresser. There they were: The “butch,” as Jack called them, wore a baggy black turtleneck and green corduroy trousers and had cropped hair but also simple gold hoops through her pretty ears, to prove she had a right to the ladies’ room. She was bringing a drink to her “femme,” who was considerably older, with blond hair and bangle bracelets and a low-cut blouse to reveal a scrawny chest. They were sweet. There was so much love circulating between them. Jack told me that this was common—a baby butch and an aging femme. I wanted to watch them making love, the chubby butch’s buttocks ruched with cellulite, the femme rickety and skeletal and playing shy. Their physical flaws made them all the more beautiful in my eyes, especially the calm radiating from the butch’s face. I felt that I understood them, that I could help them out even as I acknowledged that
their relationship was designed to keep me and all other men away.

Jack didn’t dote on gay—or even straight—men in the way that I doted on women. Nor did he seem indifferent or even cool to women, as I thought gay men must be. I guessed I had gotten that wrong. But wouldn’t a gay man see a woman as a rival? Or try to tame her by turning her into a sister, the way competitive women did with each other? Yet there wasn’t a trace of any of that in Jack. He was clear about his lack of sexual desire for women, but he was fully alive to their physical appeal. He’d say, “Catch the rack on that one,” or “Her butt wiggles faster than a hummingbird’s wings.” Once I asked him how it was that he noticed those attractions, and he said, “It’s my vice. I look for the sexual possibilities in everyone I meet, young or old, male or female.”

Pia told me that she always felt very close to Jack physically, that he often took her hand at the movies or walked with an arm around her waist or a hand on her shoulder, almost like a proprietary Latin who is proud to lay even the slightest claim on a beautiful woman in public.

“We once slept together,” she said. “It was late. We’d watched a movie on TV together, and we’d drunk two bottles of wine. I said he might as well stay over, and he nodded and stripped down to his underwear and held me all night, but it was just brother-sister.”

“Was this—recently? Since I’ve known you?”

“
Geloso!
” she laughed, tapping the end of my nose with a playful fingertip. “No,” she went on vaguely, “it was long ago. But in the middle of the night I woke up to feel him poking my hip with his huge
cazzo
; even though he was asleep, he probably imagined I was a handsome
ragazzo
.”

“Hey,” I said feebly, “that rhymes.
Cazzo
,
ragazzo
.” I was wondering why she was suddenly being so Italian …

So Jack’s got a big dick, I thought, and she noticed it. Women say they don’t care about dick size, but that’s obviously rubbish.

“Oh, what the hey,” she said.

Seeing Jack among the Europeans forced me to reevaluate him. He clearly felt completely at ease with “social” people now. In the early sixties, when I’d met him, I’d thought of his queerness as a deformity, a scandal, something akin to a heroin addiction or pedophilia or membership in the Communist Party. I’d liked Jack in spite of this, but since I’d known it could get him fired, I’d been determined to keep it a secret. I covered for him if anyone at the office quizzed me about who he was dating. Almost no one did, because Jack was extremely discreet. I thought I was a generous soul for taking on board a fag friend, obviously a liability to me and a permanent danger to himself.

Now everything had changed. Jack was no longer a faggot; he was gay. European aristocrats found him and his kind amusing. Befriending a gay was like knowing a Negro—you didn’t want too many, but one was chic. Jack had become so confident, and he’d become even more polished. He was so attentive; he laughed so merrily, though he was never sycophantic. Most of all he had the relentless energy I’d always associated with “social” people. He’ll end up as the president of the Bachelors’ Cotillion, I thought.

On our Little Italy night we all went back to Pia’s place and got drunk. We were nearly sick drinking bourbon and began to talk about sex. Someone had said that Americans talk about
money so they won’t have to talk about sex, and Europeans talk about sex so they won’t have to talk about money. That night everyone’s money secrets were safe. We kept passing the bottle, and Francesco began describing his “affair” with his older brother when Francesco was eleven and his brother was fifteen.