Jack Holmes and His Friend (16 page)

Jack liked the dripless white candles screwed into the big wall sconces, which she’d bought as good copies of English antiques from James Robinson, the silversmith off Fifth Avenue. He liked the mother-of-pearl box of French cigarettes and the silver lighter with the green felt bottom as heavy as a curling stone. He liked the yellow and pale purple freesias smelling of oranges in the silver bowl and the expensive food from a caterer on the corner.

She smiled at him, her starry smile reminiscent of glamorous Hollywood studio portraits from the twenties. Her teeth were so white they were almost blue. She’d clap her hands and say, “What fun!” though he wasn’t sure she was enjoying herself. Jack felt that by himself he wasn’t sufficiently entertaining to carry a whole evening. He made a fine backup singer, but not a soloist. Alexandra had always wanted a brother, she said, but now that she had one she still seemed unfulfilled. Jack felt the same way; perhaps it was inevitable that Will would join them one evening soon, though Alexandra proclaimed stubbornly that she disliked nothing more than another eligible male on the make.

“That’s what’s so great about … us,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her that to say “you” would have sounded too curatorial. “Us” sounded better, more polite. “We don’t want anything from each other but insight and affection—we’re like saints, entirely disinterested. Don’t you think we’re saintly, Jack?”

“I know you’re a saint to feed me smoked salmon on toast points with sour cream on your best Spode.”

She made him listen to a new record. She’d just learned the twist and wanted to teach it to him. But her specialty was sipping
champagne in Waterford crystal filled from the iced bottle in the big bucket. Then she would curl up beside him and tell him about her latest love.

“He’s a
Life
reporter—Jim Eisner?—a really big reporter. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of him. He’s done some very dangerous assignments. One about organized crime in Philadelphia. They’re already making a movie about it. And it’s coming out as a book. Seriously, you’ve never heard of Jim Eisner?”

“No, and I bet you’ve never heard of my last forty-two boyfriends either.”

“You’re too funny,” she said, insisting that his numerous exploits were comical exaggeration. “But have you ever been in love?” Here her beautiful brow wrinkled with kindly concern.

“Yes, I’ve told you—with Will. Hopeless love, since he’d sooner sleep with a polecat.”

“Be serious.” She curled her shoulder-length hair around her finger, which was freighted with enough diamonds to suggest polygamy. “Why can’t this—this Will of yours—I hate the name Will. It sounds like the punch line in a cockney joke. But why can’t this Will of yours be a little more considerate and show you some warmth, some tenderness? I mean, come on, for heaven’s sake, would it matter so much to him to let you hold him for a moment?”

“I’d only want him to hold me if it did matter to him.”

She lowered her pretty head in deference to his logic. “Yes,” she nearly whispered, “I can see that.” She thought about it for a moment.

“Could you hold another girl who was in love with you?” Jack asked.

Alexandra had been mistily contemplating a scene of brotherly
love, a tableau right off the battlefield, but now, faced with heaving breasts and the moist warmth of another woman’s body, she shuddered. “Hardly,” she said. But then she thought about it and cocked her head to one side. “But I say why not? If it would mean so much to her, and if she were my dearest friend—I just hope I wouldn’t get the giggles.”

“The giggles would spoil everything.”

Alexandra cleared away the dishes and the large old silver forks that had just three tines each and brought out a bowl of
mousse au chocolat
, which had probably started life in several minuscule white cartons from the caterer downstairs.

Now Alex had an objection: “But it’s not the same thing, some big squishy woman with tears gumming her eyelashes—and a man in love. Men are … upright and forthright—”

“And right?” Jack looked at her intently.

“You’re mocking me,” Alexandra wailed.

“No, I happen to agree with you entirely.” But he did not subscribe to her cult of noble, sensitive masculinity.

Taking a new approach, Alexandra said, “So what’s so great about your Will?”

“He’s a fine novelist, among other things,” Jack lied.

“Gotcha!” Alexandra fluted, jumping up. “You told me yourself, Jack Holmes, that he’s never shown you word one.”

Jack rubbed his eyes, his lying eyes. “Pathetic, isn’t it? I’m so in love I’m ready to attribute all the virtues to him.” He felt he’d broken through a membrane he might better have left intact. He was acting as if he could lament how “pathetic” he was in a normal, jokey voice, rather than bemoaning it. He’d never before treated his sickness this conversationally.

Alexandra subsided into a small armchair upholstered in a
dull gold fabric. “It’s always that way. We fall in love for no particular reason, certainly no good reason, and then we invent sterling qualities that are supposed to justify our passion.”

Jack liked this philosophical approach—it seemed so French to insist on the irrationality of the passions in epigrams that posited abstract truths.

Will quizzed him closely following every one of his evenings with Alexandra. “Man, she’s in love with you! I’m going to pretend to be homosexual—it drives the girls wild! It’s like that play by Wycherley where the guy pretends to be a eunuch so that other men will trust their wives with him.”

Jack smiled painfully. “Homosexual as capon? Is that the flattering comparison you’re searching for?”

Will frowned. “But you know what I mean. You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty neat explanation of your success.”

“Not my beauty and natural charm?” Jack said. “I told her you were a great novelist—now I have proof of your imagination.”

“Speaking of proof—” Will pulled out of his desk drawer a manila envelope containing what was obviously a slender volume. “Look at this when you’re alone. I don’t want people around here yammering about it.”

When he was safely back in his cubicle, Jack opened the envelope. There it was—Will’s novel.
The Truth About Sergeant Tavel
. How typical of secretive Will to spring it on him this way. No talk about an agent representing him or an editor buying it or anything about those long lunches at the Algonquin, nothing about the proposed cover, the cover copy, the sales campaign and book tour plans—nothing. Jack could remember that on certain days Will had worn a dark blue suit and tab shirt and an unstained silk tie and of course his London shoes, the black ones—those must have been his book business days.

Jack resented Will’s spiritual stinginess. Couldn’t he have shared all or some of these steps? Alexandra had guessed the truth—she had said that Will was an emotional miser. Did he wish to keep things to himself as long as possible out of fear of failing? Or did he think that like Prince Hal he would soon be dropping all of his old, inferior friends?

Jack flipped through the book sacrilegiously and even read the last five pages first. He felt as unnatural in this first, terribly important encounter as someone being introduced to his future in-laws. He wanted to like the book, he needed to like it, he’d be expected to say he liked it, and any hesitation on his part would be detected and magnified. Jack’s enthusiasm was guaranteed but not certain, and it certainly wouldn’t be spontaneous.

Something about the manufacturing of the book felt flimsy, cheap; the paper would turn yellow and shatter in ten years. The cover was a cartoon, one of the first Jack had ever seen associated with a serious novel, which made it seem a bid for whatever was argotic and contemporary. But in fact it was poorly drawn, the colors dull, the printed letters toothless: no bite. Jack could already see the piles and piles of remainders in a store.

Jack wanted it to be good, the novel, because, as he thought, it emanates from my Will, my cold husband, my enigmatic friend. I need it to be good because Will must be talented, intelligent, to justify my devotion and his mysterious confidence in himself. I want it to be bad because Will has disappointed me and now he must pay.

Nor could Jack imagine anything written by someone he knew being good.

He was terrified he wouldn’t be able to judge it. He dithered over it, turning it this way and that, unable to see the picture for the puzzle parts. He caught every third word, as if it were in
a new language. As he read it, he saw people from real life materializing behind the shadowy characters like known faces popping into county fair cutouts, two smiling, freckled kids sticking their heads into the holes above the stern farmer and his wife in
American Gothic.
Or he overheard something he himself had once said, something that he’d gotten wrong—and that Will would have recycled because the error had caught in the filaments of his mind.
The Truth About Sergeant Tavel
was a patchwork of rehashed stories, filched readings from other books, speculations of the what-if sort, and improvisations in reverse. Then there were the fantasy elements. The young hero, named Hero, had a cat named Intrepid who hopped up into windows or descended into basements, slipped onto the subway and followed a villain through municipal sewers—and reported everything to Hero by typing it all out with his paws on Hero’s new electric typewriter. Hero had learned to leave a blank page in the machine at night and the motor running. When Intrepid returned from his investigations, he could file his report instantly—and many of these hilarious feline screeds made their way into the novel.

Underlying everything was a pure, almost childlike love between Hero and Trumpetta. Yes, it must be Alexandra. He even caught several things that Alex had said to him that Will had copied verbatim. Gosh, Jack thought, I’m going to be in big trouble with her!

A large morning glory vine twined among the bars to their bedroom window and produced more and more blue blossoms that clamored full-throated in the first hours of the day and shriveled to sticky, umbilical sheaths in the afternoon—except that as Trumpetta became ill with some highly aesthetic wasting disease, the plant died. The desperate Hero saw his beloved condemned in the death of the morning glory. Intrepid wrote a
final eulogy to Trumpetta, a letter that was strangely spelled but deeply felt, and then the cat vanished into the lower depths of the great, rustling city.

“But it’s nothing,” Jack said out loud to himself when he finished the book at four in the morning. “Sentimental horseshit.” He got up and stretched and realized he’d missed the closing of the bars and only drunks would still be out cruising the streets. He was slightly panicked, but he dismissed the idea of an empty bed and a night without sex as a minor inconvenience. He made himself a meal of toast and scrambled eggs.

The book was tepid, gooey-sweet. Jack resented it and faintly scorned Will: To think I was in love with someone so insipid. I imagined that under all that reticence scalding seas of feeling were bubbling, that Will would be able to express in print all the passion he was too shy to show. At last the drab geode would be cracked open to expose its crystal teeth.

Damn! Jack thought. What would he say to Will? The problem was a social one, the challenge of how to hide his disappointment. If he faked enthusiasm, Will would detect the falseness right away. Nor would even the most outrageous praise come close to the ecstasy the poor young author was anticipating. Even if Jack had been genuinely delighted, some sort of problem would still have existed. And Will would have sniffed out the slightest hesitation, the smallest nuance of criticism. Nothing short of a Nobel Prize would satisfy Will. Jack had nothing genuine to go on.

Jack was sitting in his underpants on a dining room chair. He’d turned off his reading light, and now the only illumination in the room was the faint blue of the approaching dawn seeping through the filmy curtains. He had such conflicting thoughts. In one way he felt free at last of Will the Loser, the witless
writer; it wasn’t that Will had been unable to shape his feelings in the book, but rather that he didn’t seem to have any feelings to draw on. A second later Will’s flop made Jack feel protective toward him. Would Will be able to weather the failure of his book? Would he feel crushed and even bleaker than usual? Jack knew that Will had been talking about a second novel—would he go forward with it now? Would anyone want to publish it? Would Will’s art have come and gone in a single night?

Of course Jack wondered if he might be wrong; maybe the book was good and sound—no, not brilliant, no one could say it was brilliant, it was a feeble thing, barely alive. Jack blamed Will’s canniness, his way of playing with his cards close to his chest. Old Will thought he was so shrewd to hide in the margins of life, never to show a strong emotion, always to insist on his amateur status, to hold up his hands as he backed away. Will was the cunning loser with his bland caginess, his refusal to take a stand.

Jack was surprised by the anger pouring off him.

As it turned out, Will was satisfied by Jack’s unconvincing enthusiasm since that very morning he had received a delirious Kirkus pre-pub review: “This charming fairy tale is as whimsical as a Boris Vian novel and as contemporary as Pynchon’s latest. A morning glory becomes a startling symbol of the life force. A heroine, Trumpetta, faces a stylish death but languishes beautifully in her final moments—she is one of the finest and least forgettable female characters in recent memory. Love has never been as tender and childlike—or as grown-up. Good for all ages and library collections. No obscenity.”

Will handed it to Jack and pretended to be annoyed with it. “I’m not sure I like a pastel word like ‘whimsical,’ but at least my character is unforgettable and the review is starred.”

Jack made a nice recovery: “So few reviews are starred. Yours is the only starred novel in this issue, isn’t it? Look, it is the only one. They should have said ‘brilliant’ ten times, all caps, but ‘contemporary’ and ‘grown-up’ aren’t too shabby. Nor is ‘least forgettable.’ ”