Jack Holmes and His Friend (7 page)

“Hey, boys,” Herschel said in his syrupy Southern accent. “Don’t you two look cozy? You’re inseparable, aren’t you? Not that I’m insinuating anything.”

“Will Wright here. I don’t think we’ve met.” Will spoke in his heartiest manner and didn’t stand up but stretched out a hand to Herschel, who produced a little boneless pullet of a hand and introduced himself nearly inaudibly. “Find a chair. Have a drink.”

“Oh, now I remember,” Herschel said, stirring his scotch and single cube with an index finger he kept licking. “Jack, you’re the one who brought Will here, right? You’re old friends, I gather.”

“Well, old acquaintances,” Jack said.

“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” Will said, clowning. “I thought we were best friends.”

Even though it was a joke, the simple statement made Jack feel some sort of sunburst of joy inside, and he looked away lest his eyes betray the excess of feeling.

“I’ll leave you girls to it,” Herschel said, getting up. “This gal has to shake a leg. I’ve got a ticket to
She Loves Me
.” He looked at Will. “I just love musicals. I identify with the waitress in
The Most Happy Fella
. Good night, Jacky babe.” He hobbled out, singing, “Oh my feet, my poor, poor feet.”

As soon as Herschel had vanished, Will said, “Wow! He’s a live wire.”

“Yes,” Jack said, “he’s in the Art Department,” as if that explained everything.

“He’s very funny,” Will pronounced. “A live wire in a place of burned-out circuitry.”

“Gee,” Jack said, teasing him, “how eloquent! You must be a writer.”

“Like you, like everyone here,” Will said wearily.

“We’re journalists. You’re a writer. A novelist.”

“I’m an unpublished writer. We’re a dime a dozen in this city.”

“Yeah,” Jack protested, “but every published author was once an unpublished tyro.” He could sense that his pulse was accelerating, which it sometimes did when he was trying out a bit of assuaging flattery. It never worked on his father, who remained superbly indifferent to the opinion of other people. Jack couldn’t tell if it was working on Will.

A silence set in, and Will toasted Jack with a paper cup of scotch and an ironic smile. Jack worried that Will might assume he and that creepy Herschel were close, which was obviously what Herschel, the little troublemaker, had been trying to suggest. Jack said—not trusting his words since he felt the burning whiskey playing rope tricks behind his solar plexus—“I never spent five minutes with Herschel. He gives me the willies.”

“Oh no,” Will said, hearty again, “he’s great fun. A real character.”

Jack had heard other blue bloods seem to endorse but actually damn people they labeled as “characters.” He knew how to read Will’s comments. Of course, other rich people could be characters too, but that was different. They had their eccentricities, their rages and passions, the way the Greek gods did—human feelings writ large—but a character like Herschel was more of a zoological specimen: amusing, but not a candidate for friendship.

“I guess he wants us to think he’s queer,” Jack ventured.

“Oh no,” Will said emphatically. “It’s just an act, and a damn funny one too.”

“You don’t think he’s sort of … perverted?” Jack asked. It was for some reason important to him that Will admit that Herschel was not like them, was in a class apart.

“You know him better than I do,” Will said maddeningly.

One Friday in late November, Jack was heading out for an early lunch when suddenly people all around him began to cry and cling to each other. Nothing organized, and not involving everyone. But here and there people were looking up as if expecting an invasion. Or as if God had suddenly appeared in the sky in a gray swirl of robes and with a lifted hand like Michelangelo’s deity. The isolation of all these thousands of strangers marching down the sidewalks had suddenly come to an end. Mourners grabbed each other and sobbed. “The president is dead,” someone said in a quiet voice beside him. “See?” And the person pointed to a headline traveling in lights around the Time-Life Building. Yes, there it was. The president had been shot in Dallas. Damn fool Texans, Jack thought, and now what? Were they sure? Was it a Communist? Cuban? Or some damn Klansman? What will become of us all? he thought.

And people everywhere looked around as if they knew they’d all remember this exact moment forever. Jack had been only five when the war had come to an end. Now was the first adult moment in his life that felt historical. Yes, history was being made. He wanted to be with Will. He couldn’t think of anyone closer to him, pathetic as that sounded. When Jack got back to the office, he was sure Will would be on the phone with his sister, with whom he lived, or with his parents, his father in his office or his mother at home. Family members were no doubt reaching out to each other “all across the land,” as
pundits were probably writing right now, but maybe Will hadn’t heard yet, unlikely as that might seem in the media capital of the country, in a building full of journalists; Will could be oblivious to his surroundings.

Jack had no desire to call his parents. They’d be puzzled that he had made the effort and wonder what he wanted. He’d go over all this with his girls tonight at dinner, but he didn’t need them to share this moment with him. They weren’t witnesses to his life. He wouldn’t be able to acknowledge the gravity of the occasion with them.

He wondered how he had let Will attain this hold over him so quickly, especially since Will had given no signs he wanted to be intimate.

He found Will at his desk, his head on his arms and his back shaking under his paper-thin pale blue shirt. Jack touched his shoulder and said, “Wanna go out for a drink?”

“I sure as hell do,” Will said.

They never came back to the office that day. They got filthy drunk at the Irish pub downstairs, where some of the local cops were working up their conspiracy theories. Will and Jack kept saying, “Can you believe it?” Every once in a while the bartender would turn up the sound on the nonstop news.

Will said, “I know it’s stupid to say, but as a Catholic … I mean, the guy was our first Catholic president.” He got them two more boilermakers—beers with shots of whiskey on the side. “I just feel so shitty. Don’t wanna sound melodramatic, but he was our first cool president, right? Maybe Lincoln was smart, but he was a nerd, right? Jack Kennedy was cool.”

Jack felt mostly indifferent after the initial shock, but he decided to play along with Will’s mood. Jack knew he was acting like a chick letting her man take the emotional lead, but it
would be too brutal to declare how little he cared. What surprised him was how close Will obviously felt to the throne. Will acted as if he were that Texas governor who’d also been wounded. Or as if Kennedy were his cousin.

Late at night, when they weren’t talking much and they both looked sleepy, Will suddenly said, “Wanna hear something weird?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad was one of the guys in the hunt club to vote against the Kennedys joining us. Dad thinks they’re kind of pushy. And the old man was a bootlegger. How snooty is that?”

“Yeah,” Jack said leadenly, though somewhere in his innermost mind this information blazed like a vein of silver he could mine later.

“And here we are crying into our beers about a guy we wouldn’t even let hunt with us.”

“How fucked up is that?” Jack asked.

Will nodded in sodden agreement. “Pretty damn pathetic.”

At home later that night (he’d barely managed to get in the door, he was so drunk, and he lost one of his contacts while trying to remove it), he was pissing when he thought, Damn! At first I felt Will was strange because he imagined he was as good as Jack Kennedy, but now I guess the Wrights think they’re even better.

In bed, the room kept rising and falling like the horizon line seen from a ship in a storm. Up … it would go up! And then suddenly plunge down. Jack said to himself, I’m glad Kennedy died because it meant Will and I got to spend our first evening together.

He woke up at four in the morning feeling dehydrated and unbearably horny. Maybe it was the thirst joined to the horniness,
but when he started jerking off, all he could think about was sucking Will’s cock. He’d never sucked a cock. He wished he’d paid more attention to what that Edward guy had been doing to him. Maybe he should go back and take lessons. How sick is that, Jack said to himself over and over again. He had a fistful of come that he licked away like a cat—he was too tired to get up to find a tissue. He decided that the bizarre events of the day had pushed him too far, into this dangerous territory. He promised himself he’d never again jerk off over Will (or any other guy). New York was doing weird things to him.

5.

The next evening at dinner, Alice asked Jack how Will was doing at work.

“He’s very bright, isn’t he?” Jack said.

“Is he really?” Alice said. “He went to good schools and has read—well, not a lot but in a very selective way. He reads all the new novels, since that’s what he wants to write. Of course, he’s terribly competitive.”

Jack nodded, but he hadn’t thought of that. He wondered what else Alice had noticed. What else people back in Virginia said about Will. “Is he a big one for the women?” Jack asked, using a turn of phrase that sounded as unnatural to his own ears as his desire to elicit this sort of information.

“Oh, I think there were two or three fragile-looking debutantes,” Alice said. She was smoking and drinking scotch. “But you know, with his bad skin he’s always been shy.”

“Do you think that’s such a big deal?”

“You never had acne, I can see,” Alice said. “But his was very bad, and he had it all over his back, big boils of it behind his ears and on his neck.”

“Yeah,” said Rebekkah, chiming in. “Jack Holmes has beautiful soft skin. Perfect skin any girl would envy.” She said it with
such kindness that there was nothing knowing or leering about her remark. She was the kindest girl in the world.

“Anyway,” Alice said, narrowing her eyes, “why don’t you invite Will to dinner with us? He must be lonely living with his sister Elaine and her two kids in that shabby town house. Tell him it won’t be anything special, just our usual squat and gobble.” Although Alice could be easily offended by other people’s vulgarities (she often winced in conversations), she nevertheless enjoyed her own coarse expressions, not so much dirty as rustic.

“Tomorrow?” Jack asked a bit too eagerly.

“For instance,” Alice drawled, looking away, even squinting at the little black-and-white television flickering in the next room.

“What is she like, this sister?”

“Elaine?” Alice drawled with a certain lofty amusement, as if it were absurd that someone didn’t already know everything about her. “She’s a beauty but has gotten rather broad in the beam. Where Will is timid, she is brash, really a heroine out of a swashbuckler. You will be impressed by how beautiful she is. And her little boy and girl are great kids. But she’s penniless. Her handsome, do-nothing husband abandoned her for some trailer trash.” Alice spit out the word “trash” and laughed, Jack imagined, not out of real vehemence but out of a schoolgirl defiance at saying such a thing at all. Her squinting eyes widened to reveal their fine Chippendale blue. “I suppose poor Ronald couldn’t cope with the whole Wright clan, so he preferred Doreen from Hot Springs. Anyway, Elaine is penniless and she’s come to New York and rented a run-down town house at a terribly impressive address in the East Sixties off Park, and her whole idea is to flirt and entertain like Scarlett O’Hara after the war and land a rich and social husband.” Like all people in what they called “high society” back in Ann Arbor, Alice said “social”
(and she very rarely pronounced the word) to mean someone of the right sort.

Jack drank in all these details about Will. “Has Elaine found anyone? Surely she wouldn’t marry just for money.”

“He would have to be presentable,” Alice said matter-of-factly.

“Not a Jew,” Rebekkah chimed in, pulling a comically long face.

“Hold on,” Alice said, chortling and lifting a nearly transparent hand in protest. “There’s a nice Mr. Shapiro in Virginia who goes everywhere, who keeps horses. That’s the way in: horses!” She laughed as if she held the whole hunt world in contempt, but she didn’t. “Of course, Harold Shapiro is well dressed and has a wonderful house near ours and a great trainer.”

“Does he wear one of those red jackets? A Jew in a red hunting jacket?” Rebekkah asked, adding in a dramatic aside, “My poor people, so far from the shtetl.”

“A red what?” Alice demanded, squinting even more fiercely. “Oh, a pink jacket. But yes, you’re right, they’re red. The first tailor of hunting garb was a Mr. Pink or something.” Since she’d started working on her documentary, Alice had become more informed about her world, which in the past she’d always taken for granted.

That night, alone, Jack lay on his short, tan corduroy rep couch, hanging off both ends of it, and laughed at himself. He thought, I’m fascinated by all these details about the Wrights, but only because I have a crush on Will.

Will did come to dinner the next night, and he smoked two cigarettes (the first time Jack had ever seen him smoking). He held them fastidiously and a bit awkwardly, as if they were chopsticks. He sprawled with one long leg draped over the edge of
the leather armchair bought from the Salvation Army and combined casualness with shyness. Jack was able to confirm that Will wore garters to hold up his long black lisle stockings. He and Alice sparred. “Okay, Will,” she said, “you owe me one. I got you your job.”

“Oh?” Will drawled. “For some reason I thought it was Jack.”

“A mere technicality,” she said. “You owe me.”

“Then to be fair I should find you a job,” he said, “but for some reason I don’t think of you as a working girl.”

“I’m going to make a documentary.”

“I guess that counts as work. About what?”

“The hunt.”

“Where?”

“Duh—our hunt.”

“Hope you leave us out.”

She laughed. “Of course I will. Movies are supposed to be interesting.”