Jack Holmes and His Friend (25 page)

We chatted for a while about our work, then later (perhaps I was feeling an excess of Catholic guilt) I suddenly turned hostile. “Tell me something, Jack, m’boy, why are you doing all this?”

“Playing the pimp? I don’t have the slightest idea. It can’t possibly do me any good, and it could turn into a disaster in at least three ways.”

I felt as if Jack and I were playing chess. He’d just taken my queen. He couldn’t have come up with a quicker, surer way to puncture my suspicions and make me feel that he was the one doing me a favor. Suddenly I saw myself as an ingrate.

“Alex would never forgive me if she caught wind of this.”

“Why would she ever know?” I asked. “I’d be the last person—”

“And then your own guilt might turn you against me. You’d either resent me because Pia wouldn’t respond to you—”

“Did she say anything about not responding?”

“You’d resent me even more if it did work out. How can all this possibly end well?”

“When did you become so wise?” I asked bitterly. He just exhaled. “No, seriously,” I said. I didn’t want to say, it sounds as if you’ve had a lot of experience enabling adulterers.

What he said was, “I’m seeing a new shrink now, and she
pointed out to me that I have this neurotic way of getting involved with a certain straight couple.”

“What does your shrink think it means?”

“She thinks it’s oedipal, though she doesn’t like that word.”

I hoisted myself up above the conversation, rotated it fifteen degrees, and said, “How could a certain straight friend help you out—help to reduce your stress level?”

I could almost hear Jack blinking as he thought that one over. “I guess by not telling me what happens later between you and Pia. I’ll set it up for you, but keep me out of it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’ll need keys to your apartment. I don’t want to take her to a hotel—too sordid.”

“Too dangerous, you mean,” he said.

The whole conversation left me feeling exhausted, as if I’d been sleepwalking for hours across a girder twenty stories up. Now I awoke with a start, looked down, and panicked.

The next day I called Jack and gave him three free dates he could try out on Pia. He sounded dry and grimly efficient, as if he’d resolved to relieve himself of this painful duty as quickly as possible. Later in the day he phoned back to say that we all had a date at seven on the sixteenth at the Four Seasons. I calculated that a dinner with decent wine would set me back a small fortune. I was careful not to voice anything but the deepest gratitude. I was excited by the thought of sleeping with Pia, so much so that I couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of saying, “Look, Jack, if it makes you feel awkward, then let’s just drop the whole thing.”

On the commuter train out of Grand Central that night, I sat next to two loudmouths who were eating greasy sausages and onions, and the smell overpowered me, but I kept slipping through an air lock into a private embrace with Pia, my hand inching up her skirt and feeling the tops of her nylons and the
smoother, cooler texture of her skin above. Then, as my hand slid along the inside of her thighs …

Her perfumed, long-limbed presence in the train was my refuge. I didn’t work up a whole scenario. It was just a deep kiss here and then a glance into her large eyes there and the feeling of her hands all over me as she ordered me to lie perfectly still and not respond in any way except with one part of my body, involuntarily. And then I started to doze off as the train lurched and stopped and even crawled backward for a few minutes, and I thought, It’s a gift when something magical steps into actual time.

3.

Although I’d eaten at Brasserie in the Seagram Building lots of times, I’d only once been to the other restaurant in the building, the Four Seasons, when a rich friend of my sister Elaine’s was paying. I think it was Elaine’s birthday.

I left my coat downstairs, on the street level, and hurried up the carpeted stairs to the big dining room on its two levels. The ceilings were high, the napery dazzling, the windows hung with long, fine gold chains echoed by the chandeliers, and I imagined that this sort of luminous spareness, this sort of muted splendor, could only be bought dear.

“You’re the first to arrive,” said the maître d’hôtel. “Would you prefer to wait at the bar or the table?”

“The table,” I said. I started to offer an explanation, but I didn’t have one. He led me down the hall to Siberia, I supposed, for social outcasts or unknowns, past the superb Picasso tapestry and into the Pool Room with its budding trees in tubs. It was still light outside. This might be exile, I thought, but it’s attractive as hell. Jack had made the reservation—didn’t he have the requisite clout to get us into the Grill Room? Or did he think a Pool Room table would be more romantic? Or more private? I wondered if Pia knew all these codes.

I sat for ten minutes feeling that anxious boredom I always experience when something exciting is about to happen. I remembered all the time growing up when I’d been underdressed and red with acne in places far less grand than this one. Now I felt half-sure of myself. No holes in my stockings. Brand-new button-down shirt, the collar unfrayed, the blue unfaded. My shoes were handmade and English. My nails clipped evenly and clean, my ears properly reamed, my face finally all one color and that a pale Norman white with only a few interesting acne scars.

And there she was in a candy-striped silk dress, red and beige, following the maître d’ at a rapid pace, her feet in very high heels, also beige, and the look on her face slightly foolish, foolishly happy. I rose to greet her and then subsided as the maître d’ pushed her chair in. She shone like an ingot in the banklike majesty of this room; the light outside had just faded, and the gold bead curtains came to life, strafed by the electric lights projected up onto them.

“It seems funny just to say hi in this room,” I said. “It feels like we should be hammering out the Treaty of Versailles or something.”

“Where is Jack?” she asked. “I thought I’d be late.”

We ordered Gibsons, and they arrived in very large, pale, frosted glasses as if they were snowflowers flown in from the north pole. She looked around nervously; she must have known more people than I did, and soon I was sledding down a jealousy path faster and faster. I asked her what she did with her days.

“I am actually very busy with my hemophilia, my charity. We have a big dinner-dance we’re planning for June, and I hope you and Alex will buy a table. It will be at the Pierre and very lovely, and I promise to put amusing people at your table. And then, you know I promised to help Jack with his apartment, and
he decided the Indian prints we bought are too banal and he wants something more sumptuous, so I’ve ordered him some silk from Zurich—Zumsteg, the same factory that made the fabric in my dress.”

“Let me feel it,” I said, and looking her right in the eye, I rubbed her sleeve between my thumb and forefinger. Her jabbering dried like saliva on her lips, and she looked at me with eyes big with terror or maybe desire. Usually I was incapable of breaking through the social automatisms, but tonight I understood that I had to be direct.

“I’m a little afraid of you,” she said, and I appreciated her gravity, even her courage to admit her fear.

“I’m a very nice man.”

“Jack says you’re cagey.”

“Thanks for that, Jack.”

“I don’t want to stir up any trouble. What he said was that you play with your cards very close to your chest.”

“What cards? You know everything there is to know about me—one wife, two children, a silly job, good shoes, a fascination with you. All my cards are on the table. But if I am holding a few to my chest you might as well put your head on it so you can see them.” This line suddenly seemed so laborious that I almost burst out laughing. Everything verbal about seduction—the compliments, the sweet talk—seemed so stiff and absurd, though I knew that certain women (was Pia one of them?) considered this approach to be “romantic.” What I preferred was the blunt honesty of the body, the way two different bodies took their time learning each other’s ways. Wetness or hardness—no way to deny the body’s interests.

At that moment a waiter came up and said I was wanted on the phone. I excused myself as Pia said, “It must be Jack.”

I spoke with him from the bar in the Grill Room. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Fine. So what do I tell her?”

“That my car broke down in Narragansett as I was driving back from Providence.”

“And listen. Just send me your hotel bill for tonight. And Jack?”

“Yes?”

“You’re the greatest.”

“That I already knew.”

If Pia ever figured out the fast one we’d pulled on her, she’d have plenty of proof of my caginess.

“Narragansett?” Pia exclaimed. “You Americans have such funny place names.”

“In honor of the Indians we stole the land from and killed. In Australia all the names are Aboriginal for the same reason—Wagga Wagga or Goonengerry. Are you disappointed he’s not coming?”

“I see Jack all the time. But it does put us in a rather compromising position,” she said with a laugh in her voice. She touched my knee under the table, and my cock broke its bonds and stood up, in spite of all the tight, dark good tailoring.

I kept wondering how I was going to introduce the subject of Jack’s apartment. Could I say, “Jack is staying in Narragansett tonight while his Aston Martin is being repaired. You could show me the changes you’re planning on making to his apartment. I have a bottomless appetite for home-decorating hints.”

But it was too soon. First I wanted to get another bottle of Montrachet down her throat.

At a certain point Pia stopped eating and started chain-smoking. Cigarettes seemed to make her more discerning, if silence,
pursed lips, and narrowed eyes indicated discernment. In truth I didn’t understand any of her signals. I was flying blind.

I remembered a blunt Romanian girl I’d dated in college who would say, “You’ve gotten fat,” or “I no longer love you,” or would slam a door I’d just opened for her. That Romanian had completely shaken me; until then I’d always hidden behind my good manners.

Pia was much closer to my world, but she had her own European approach, even if she was only half continental and on the privileged edge of the spectrum. But she had touched me under the table.

When I started to order the second bottle, she said, “I don’t think we really need that. We’ve already stopped eating,” and I remembered the strange European notion that wine was a food.

“Do you want dessert?” I asked.

And she went “Tsk-tsk” and window-wipered her index finger from right to left—that irritating European way of saying no. I knew that they didn’t mean anything by it, that to them it didn’t come across as pedantic or parental. But as a good American I was still ruffled by it.

“Check, please,” I said to the waiter.

“No coffee?”

“Just a check.”

When we were on the street, I said, “I have a key to Jack’s place. Why don’t we stop by? I want to see the changes you’re making.”

“Will he be there?”

“Not until tomorrow afternoon.”

“I can only picture him in Narragansett in a tepee with a peace pipe eating buffalo meat.” And she nattered on without ever clearly saying she’d come with me or she wouldn’t. When the
doorman saw us, he said, “Good evening. I’m not sure Mr. Holmes—”

“No, Henry,” she said, “he won’t be back until tomorrow, but I wanted to show something to this gentleman. We have keys.”

The apartment was immaculate but had the slightly sour smell of ripening garbage left too long in the can. It also looked forlorn before all the little indirect lights were switched on and the terrace doors flung open.

I made us martinis. It took a moment for me to put my hands on all the ingredients and the shaker. When I came into the living room, there she was in that silk dress that had taken on a new life under all the cunning little lights she’d switched on.

I sat beside her and was very conscious of our clothes—of mine disguising the hairy beast underneath and my problematic testicles, one so much lower than the other that the boys in the locker room had dubbed me Won Hung Low; of hers lending such a lovely radiance to her cinched-in waist, mediating between her full, breathing breasts and her even fuller hips, which also seemed as if they were breathing invisibly.

I pictured Jack up here putting the moves on his boys, but they probably just tore each other’s clothes off while standing in the doorway, undoing each other’s familiar belts, pulling off each other’s familiar shirts and underpants and socks, the easygoing camaraderie of undressing another man, but how dull. How lacking in mystery. Whereas here I was confronted with a woman, and me having known only a dozen in my whole life, compared to Jack’s hundreds of men and where was the delight in a man? Nor could another man give you anything but low-level tedious companionship. I pictured two men sitting at a
table facing out with a chair between them, looking for some entertainment, some third person: a woman.

As I sat next to Pia I was quickly enveloped by her wonderful light perfume. She was showing me the new Zumsteg silk covers for the pillows, now that the Indian prints had been banished—and our lips touched and I don’t know, was it her touch and scent and warmth that made the room lurch slightly or was it the wine and martinis?

This is where I start all over, I thought. I thought that almost ten years of marital fidelity had been criminal and a mistake, a sacrifice to some pointless, cowardly ideal, and I appreciated Pia’s roundness, her springiness, the richness of flesh compared to Alex’s gauntness, Alex’s punishing hip bones and the three horizontal bones like a military decoration between her small breasts, and I suddenly hated Catholicism. The coward’s excuse. The lazy man’s alibi. I could hear music, as if my life were now an old-fashioned Technicolor musical. As I swarmed over Pia and my hands bunched and smoothed the silk almost satin, I thought of Rodin’s
The Kiss
, a man as hard as marble, a woman fluid as a wave. Idea for story: a man misses out on the one authentic moment of his life because he’s too busy comparing it to old works of art, mostly kitsch. I chuckled at my own thought, and Pia pushed me gently away. “What? Were you laughing at me?”