Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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