Jack Holmes and His Friend (3 page)

And then, from one day to the next, the campus was suddenly empty. Ann Arbor changed from a busy town into a sleepy village—and Jack had no plans. Some kids he knew said they were moving to New York, it would be a ball. He’d applied to Harvard again and been accepted again, into a Ph.D. program in oriental art. His favorite Michigan prof, a German named Max Loehr, had been hired away by Harvard and was urging Jack to follow him and do some “important work” on the evolution of
the Buddha image, from Gandhara to Sui and Tang China. But Jack’s father still refused to help out with the tuition to a communist university.

During the eerily quiet late-May days in Ann Arbor, Jack realized he didn’t have any real friends. Sure, Hillary liked him, but she’d gone off to Kennebunkport for a summer of sailing, and she hadn’t exactly invited him to join her. She’d never really trusted him (it sounded weird to say, but it was true) after she’d touched his dick. Jack was convinced that her fear of his size was behind her aversion; he wasn’t just being paranoid. Paul had moved to New York for the summer to paint. He said he wanted to meet the older painters who still hung out at the Cedar Tavern—there’d even been an article about them in
Life
. Jack thought it sounded pretty cliché if it had made it all the way to
Life
. In the autumn, Paul was going to study painting at Yale, though he said he was ashamed to admit it, as though a real painter wouldn’t take instruction. Paul said an authentic artist needed nothing but some scotch, hardship, solitude, and a good woman tiptoeing around cooking his meals. But Paul wasn’t as sure of himself as he let on; he needed Yale’s seal of approval.

“Besides,” he said, “it’s a really radical department now. The most radical in the country. Motherwell teaches there, I think, and Cy Twombly, and some other real bebop talents.” Paul liked bebop jazz, and had extended the word to mean avant-garde and something as urban as traffic.

Then Paul was gone, with his mystery and pained, out-of sync smile and his big paintings, which after much dithering he took off the stretchers and rolled up and shipped home in sturdy mailing tubes.

Jack wandered into Paul’s empty room and sat on his bed
with the bare, stained mattress. Without Paul filling it up, without Wendy’s apologetic smiles, her ripeness and shame, without the baseball players’ blinding white uniforms burning over into the green grass, without the cooked smell of espresso, without the bar of cobalt blue slashed across Paul’s ribs like a tribal marking, the room seemed small and lifeless and as dingy as the cast-aside torn underpants in the corner. Would Paul even bother with underpants at Yale?

2.

Two girls Jack knew from the middle room of the Student Union moved to New York and rented a big apartment on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. They said Jack could live with them for as long as he liked. He thought it was a disturbing sign of how “safe” they must imagine he was that it never occurred to them that his presence would hurt their reputations. Of course, they were bohemian girls and thought differently about these things.

One of them was Alice, who was from an old Southern family, though there was nothing of the debutante about her. She bit her nails and wore slacks and never put makeup on and drank a lot of scotch in the evenings. She did, however, like to hunt and fish, and she even owned a hunting lodge somewhere in Virginia. Her own family and its history fascinated her, and she spoke of making a documentary about it. She must have had an income because she never had a job, though she always seemed to have plenty to do. She sometimes helped out a well-known lesbian Broadway producer, maybe with money or finding investors. Strangers assumed that Alice was a lesbian but she wasn’t; she slept with famous writers and jazz musicians, though she never discussed her partners and dreaded all publicity.

Jack was impressed that New York was a place where you could casually say that your boss was a lesbian and no one would blink or ask for more details.

Alice’s friend and roommate, Rebekkah, had been conceived in the Village, as she liked to say, if raised in Brooklyn. She was the best writer to come out of the University of Michigan in recent years, but she preferred to be an actress. She and Alice rented a loft on Bleecker Street where they presented evenings of improvisational theater. They also had the idea of doing plays by some of Alice’s famous writers, both the novelists and the poets. Rebekkah was wonderfully warm and kind and original; Jack could never predict what she was going to say next. She’d been raised by atheists and socialists, and she was an only child. Her mother was extremely girlish and as impulsive as Rebekkah, bubbling over with laughter so much that sometimes her words got lost in the hilarity. She wore her graying hair in a braid down one shoulder with Indian feathers stuck in it. Rebekkah was like that too, though her humor, unlike her mother’s, was based on surprised indignation—about horrible right-wing politics and crazy American religious superstition and general bad taste in the arts. She’d widen her eyes as she talked about some new enormity.

When he arrived, Jack had only six hundred and fifty dollars, and after he’d given Alice seventy-five for his room, he was down in the five hundreds. He lived on waffles and sandwiches and the occasional banana. Sometimes the girls would cook up a big pot of spaghetti, which Jack didn’t mind eating cold right out of the fridge. He didn’t really think about food much, though sometimes he’d feel light-headed after walking too many hours without eating.

There was something about New York that made him want
to walk all the time, even if summer was hard upon him, and Jack would sometimes come home to Cornelia Street soaked through with sweat, which was odd since he rarely perspired. With its tall buildings wavering in the heat and the blasts of dirty air blown up through the grates by deafening subway trains, New York sometimes felt like a rusting but still functioning factory built by a giant. The streets were rough and patched, and even late at night men in helmets and orange reflector vests drilled under flimsy little tents or popped their heads up out of open manholes like groundhogs.

Armies of shabby vagrants were on the march in the late afternoons, and the very old rooted through garbage cans and fished out discarded newspapers, a supercilious expression on their faces, as if this whole activity were beneath them and they weren’t accustomed to it. It was a sort of snooty I-wonder-what-we-have-here expression they were wearing. He’d never seen poor people in such numbers before, especially not vagrants wearing shabby jackets and torn ties, as if just a few weeks ago they’d been respectable office workers—or men like his father.

Jack thought maybe the whole idea of skyscrapers was a bad one. At rush hour the stacked buildings dumped too many people on the streets and into the subways. At night the buildings were empty, and block after block was deserted. Then he felt like a lone cowboy riding through a deserted but dangerous Monument Valley. The lights on all the floors were dark—or occasionally they’d be left lit to form a giant cross. A few old drunks would suddenly move and seem to smolder slightly in a dark doorway like hot ash.

Sometimes Jack would wander through a pack of gays, all sibilance and jingling and prancing, as if Santa’s reindeer had been watered with champagne and gone plunging off course.
Or he’d pass a solitary handsome stranger in jeans who stared at Jack—of course Jack would look away instantly. Most of the gays seemed to be over on Christopher Street.

Here on Cornelia, almost everyone was Italian or bohemian. At the end of the block, on Bleecker, there were pastry shops filled with soggy cannoli and hard, week-old butter cookies, or they had little newsstands selling pink sports papers from Italy, or there were dimly lit pizza parlors, or there was the looming somber bulk of Our Lady of Pompeii. At the other end of this block on Bleecker, at Seventh Avenue, was a butcher with un-skinned rabbits dangling on hooks in the window, or scalped goat heads, all teeth and eyes. And always, late at night, another drunk was hectoring the dark. More than once Jack saw a rat sneak across the street. If you stood in the right place, you could look over the crouched rooftops of Greenwich Village and see the spires of Midtown illuminated behind swirling clouds of pollution. As the summer wore on, New York seemed more and more deserted, dirty, tropical. He wondered if the city would pick up once the cold weather returned. Would there once again be people in suits and pale blue shirtdresses? Here, in the Village, all was quiet. But over on the avenues, muted cars were honking and fire engines were wailing. Jack never actually saw a fire, but it sounded as if some part of the city was always in flames.

He didn’t think he could parlay Chinese art history into a job, though Max Loehr offered to get him an interview with a dealer, C. T. Loo, on Fifty-seventh Street. But Jack wanted to be a journalist; at least that sounded kind of cool. He went to an employment agent, a woman who had half a dozen pencils piercing her bun and a little dirty office bathed in cigarette smoke. Her ashtray was the size of a dinner plate and nearly filled with stubs, crumpled or prostrate or still smoldering like an elite guard
dying or dead on the battlefield, Zouave fatalities in their stained white tunics.

The agent, Shelly, sent him out on two appointments with magazines—one a men’s soft-core porn monthly and the other a trade publication for the refrigeration industry. Until now most of the adults Jack had dealt with had been teachers, people paid to praise and nurture promising youngsters. Suddenly he was up against busy, dismissive men who weren’t charmed by a candidate’s brightness but were coolly sizing up the possibility of working him hard for very little pay. He was no longer a poodle, but a mule. Neither man hired him.

The haphazardness of the adult world shocked him. At school, if you put in some effort, you got good marks and the ascent was even and never too steep. But here in New York, nothing was systematic. Your chances of being hired were determined by who you knew, what kind of first impression you made, your looks, your accent, your timing (they had just fired someone that morning!)—even whether or not you reminded the boss of himself or of his younger self.

“Hey, kid, you’re a go-getter, just like I was. I like that, kid,” some man had actually said to Howard, who’d landed a job in hospital management. Of course, it helped that Howard’s cousin attended the guy’s temple in the Five Towns.

Jack had lunch with Howard, who was sweet and reassuring, so far from his usual mockery that it unnerved Jack—was his case so desperate that even Howard had put aside his mild form of perpetual satire?

They met in the Carnegie Deli, where Howard explained to him what a knish was and—“You never even heard of brisket before? Well, order a hot brisket sandwich on a kaiser roll with mayo. You’ll like it, I guarantee it.”

Eventually Howard made him eat sweet little cherry rugelach for dessert. The funny thing was that Jack knew that Howard ate this stuff regularly, but after Ann Arbor Howard surely had to recognize its folkloric status; he could no longer recommend it naturally, but rather had to do so with curatorial pride. It was as if Jack, in another world, would have been obliged to serve a bowl of Rice Krispies to a Belarusian, and even draw attention to its subtle snap, crackle, and pop. But with this difference: Midwesterners finally knew that their culture was expanding, was winning out, whereas every other ethnos was in retreat. Yeah, but not here. Not in New York. New York was Jewish; Jews felt great about being Jewish in New York. Their humor was funny, their melancholy was funny, their food was tasty and almost comic. It seemed a worldly, cozy, urban culture, and next to it WASPs were pretty bleak and uninitiated.

“But if you get really desperate, you can always ask your parents for money, right?”

Jack just smiled in response and tried to make his eyes go blank.

Howard searched deep into his eyes and said, “Wrong?”

Jack’s smile grew broader.

“Okay, very wrong,” Howard said. “I don’t mean to go on about these differences, but really, you know, in Jewish families—okay, okay. I get it. WASP parents. No good. Bad. Very bad. Bad, bad WASPs.” And Howard pretended to spank the air in front of him.

Jack nodded vaguely. He was so vague that Howard wondered if he was actually light-headed from hunger.

“Look, I’m going to give you a three-hundred-dollar loan. I know, you’re too proud.”

“No, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not,” Jack said. Then, more
seriously, he said, “That would be a lifesaver, Howard. Are you sure you can afford it? I’ll pay you back as soon—”

“Sh-sh-sh,” Howard said, returning to his usual perkiness. “Just think of it as seed money.”

Jack’s main problem with job hunting was that the slightest rejection plunged him into three days of despair, followed by another two of apathy. He could lose a week if he didn’t watch it. He had read a self-help book called
How to Land That Big Job
(“Getting yourself employed IS your new job. You must set about it with all the professionalism and eagerness you will be bringing to your actual position”), but it had only depressed him all the more.

Howard asked him, “What would you do if you could wave a magic wand and have any job in the world? Let’s think big here.”

“I don’t know. I’d like to work on that hardcover quarterly, the
Northern Review
, the one with all the beautiful pictures.”

“Isn’t it a sort of history deal?”

And then, urged on by Howard, there he was on Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, on his way up to fill out an application form for the
Northern Review
, which had recently been bought by a publishing giant and moved from Boston to corporate headquarters here in Midtown. He always associated summer with shorts and T-shirts and lying on a beach in a swimsuit, but here he was walking in dress-up clothes across huge slabs of sunstruck sidewalk sparkling with mica and then being revolved into a cold, upended mausoleum and drawn up to the twenty-seventh-floor personnel office. He sat in the waiting room and checked off boxes and wrote a mini-essay about his broad interests and narrow expertise in Chinese art and his burning desire
to communicate with readers who were intelligent but uninformed.