Jack Holmes and His Friend (4 page)

A week later he had a brief meeting with an old Austrian who had carefully brushed gray hair like wings under which the egg of his baldness was nesting, a crisp white shirt and a plain maroon silk tie, and a box of Dunhills beside him, which he was carefully working his way through. Karl Gephardt had been managing editor of
Look
—or was it
Life
—for years and now was heading up the
Northern Review
staff of twenty. He treated his present job as if it were a hobby, some sort of genteel reenactment on his lawn of a real battle he’d once conducted as a general. He glanced at Jack’s résumé and said, “I called the great Max Loehr about you, and he said you were a nice enough boy, a bright boy, hardworking, with a good visual memory. A little recessive, easily forgotten.”

Jack was stunned that his character, which felt like Play-Doh in his own hands, could be firmed up into such a tidy biscuit. He thought “nice enough” sounded dismissive, and Gephardt had said it in a singsong voice. And forgotten? Did people forget him as soon as he left the room? Or could they forget him even as he was sitting right there?

“He is a great man, Dr. Loehr,” Jack said. He thought Gephardt’s half-condescending reference to Loehr might be a trap and decided his own devotion would stand in attractive contrast to Gephardt’s blasé attitude. But the whole idea that a fate—his fate—could be decided by a phone call disturbed him.

“You’ll be hearing from us. Or rather”—and Gephardt let his half-moon glasses fall on their chain to his chest with dramatic donnishness—“I suppose you’ll be evaluated by our two dear ladies in Personnel.”

Jack realized he was being dismissed. He stood up awkwardly. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Gephardt.”

“No, no, call me Karl. We’re all informal here” (a patent lie). “I’m not a professor.” And suddenly Jack realized that these well-dressed, worldly editors scorned academics. He didn’t know whether the news was good or bad. Maybe he’d just passed a stage, but there were probably many more to go.

The two dear ladies in Personnel were in their fifties and worked for the parent company, not the
Northern Review
. They’d been sitting in the same small office, with its dust and snake plants, for thirty years. Every surface was covered with files. They wore hats perched incongruously above their wide, bloated faces, like flowers taped to livestock. Their hair looked so processed that Jack suspected it was glued to the hats.

“Jack? Right. Jack. Now Jack, we’re getting ourselves together. Where’s my bag, Helen?” “Oh, for chrissake, I don’t know where your bag is, Betty! Why would I know where yours is if I can’t even find my own damn bag? Okay, let’s get this show on the road. Pronto, pronto. Let’s just get out the damn door.” “Do you have your ciggies, Helen? Your company checkbook? Someone’s got to pay for this goddamn meal, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me.”

Jack felt invisible around these women. He was used to older women not really noticing him, though the other day a well-dressed woman in her forties had tried to pick him up in Riverside Park. He hadn’t been interested, but he’d liked the signal that he was now an adult man. The lady had said, “Do you know anything about TV aerials? Oh, I wonder if you’d look at mine.” He wasn’t sure Helen and Betty even knew who he was exactly.

Pleasing them seemed like such an indirect way of landing a job, but he put on his best manners and held the door for them.
They had a taxi waiting for them on Forty-eighth Street, just west of Sixth, a very busy street. Amazingly, the cab conveyed them just two blocks, to a dim, old-fashioned Italian restaurant with a marble fountain playing feebly under red and blue spotlights, murals of Vesuvius on the wall, and a bald waiter with a dyed mustache and a much-laundered but still stained napkin draped over his arm. He showed them to their table. “The usual, signore?”

The usual turned out to be two double martinis, ice-cold and entirely ignorant of vermouth and served for some reason in Jack Daniels tumblers. Jack settled for a single martini. Within a matter of seconds, he felt his lips thickening and turning to rubber, his sense of balance lurching dramatically to the left, his thoughts coming loose and floating free. A chance word would trigger a joke in Jack’s mind that would make him smile, even laugh—not that the dear ladies noticed.

“Okay, Jack, I guess you’ll want a second martini and then some Chianti with your meal. That’s red wine. It’s what Italians drink. Good, though a little weak, and sour. Spaghetti or veal chop? A side of spaghetti comes with the chop if you’re hungry. Helen and I just split a Caesar salad. Got a ciggy for me, Helen? I forgot mine. I’m not sure how you can smoke those Kents, but better than nothing, though that’s what they taste like: nothing.”

By the time he’d finished his second martini, his spaghetti and red sauce—a big staring pile of it served with hot garlic bread—seemed unapproachable, and Jack just stirred it with his fork and hoped that with enough stirring it would somehow lose volume.

“Oh Christ,” said Betty, “you mean you don’t eat either? Or is it not what you’re used to eating back on the farm? You are a
Midwesterner, or Southerner, or something?” She pulled out Jack’s dossier and put on reading glasses and studied it to no avail, tilting her head back until her expression resembled a turtle’s, with bulging eyes, sad folds, and a small, dangerous mouth. She was obviously under the impression that all Midwesterners were right off the farm. After devoting some effort to paying, standing, and getting into the waiting taxi, the dear ladies headed back two blocks to their office. Jack wondered if they had cots somewhere under all those stacks and stacks of yellowing files; later he learned that they napped every afternoon at the infirmary before staggering out for a neighborhood happy hour and an early night of it in the smoke-soaked apartment they shared.

Just as he was about to close the taxi door on them, he heard his large, anesthetized mouth with a will of its own pronounce the words “Did I get the job?”

“Hold your horses, big boy, there are still a lot of forms to fill out and review,” Betty said. “Get used to big-city bureaucracy. But yeah, we’re going to take a chance on you. We like your … freshness. And you’re a good egg. Good drinker. Now we have to get back to work. I don’t know about you.”

She looked forward, unsmiling, while Helen lit a Kent and blinked through a blowback of smoke.

Jack walked down through Times Square, patting his back pocket repeatedly to make sure his wallet was still there, jostling his way through a crowd of scared-looking tourists, accosted by men wearing sandwich boards and drunks mumbling for handouts. Time seemed at first molasses thick, then turpentine thin. He could scarcely stay on the sidewalk, and other pedestrians came hurtling at him gleefully like bumper cars—and then he was home. He’d walked forty blocks without noticing. Still dressed up and with his shoes on, he fell asleep in a cold
sweat on the couch, smacking his dry lips and dreaming that a big woman out of Fellini was sitting on him, except he was a skinny nine-year-old boy.

He woke up when one of his roommates, Rebekkah, came home after her acting class. “You smell like a distillery, Jack Holmes.” She always used both his names, because she argued that Jack was too short to be a proper name. “Are you going to seed, Jack Holmes, drinking in the middle of the day?” She said it in her low voice but with a laugh distorting the words.

He stood up, drank some water, adjusted his shockingly prominent erection in his trousers (“Zowie!” Rebekkah murmured, looking at it), and said, “I think I’ve landed a job just by drinking martinis with two elderly lesbians.”

“What’s the job?”

“I told you about the
Northern Review
, right?”

“That reactionary rag? That anti–
New Masses
?”

“Hold on, hold on.” Jack raised his long, bony hands in the air and repressed Rebekkah’s radicalism. “You’re talking about my new place of employment.”

Rebekkah, who was short and gap-toothed, with black glossy hair and a lovely, womanly body and a manner that alternated between torpor and exhilaration, looked delighted suddenly. Perhaps his announcement had sunk in only now. “Your what?” She slapped her thighs through her blue skirt and nearly shouted, “Your
what
? You got a job? By drinking old lesbians under the table?” Her laughter bubbled up out of her as her eyes bulged with surprise. “Wait a minute, Jack Holmes. Start at the beginning.”

And he did. His personal style, cool and underplayed, was so at odds with Rebekkah’s dramatic manner that it was hard to make much progress in telling her the tale. She exclaimed over
every detail and found even the most ordinary things noteworthy or outrageous. “Two double martinis? Is that what you’re telling me, Jack Holmes? They drank two double martinis? Not two single …” And then her voice would trail off, she would gaze blankly to the right as if distracted or bored—and suddenly she’d rebound to her hilarious lament over the drinks, the two-block taxi ride, the vague way of telling him that he was hired.

“Are you sure you’re hired?”

“Well, no, I don’t know anything for sure. It’s as if the message was written in Braille and then half effaced.”

As he spoke, she repeated words and then suddenly erupted, shouting. “Braille!” and slapping the tabletop. Then she said, “I have a half bottle of very good French champagne. A half bottle for a maybe job.”

They drank it—it was still only three in the afternoon—and it occurred to Jack that it would be fun to lick Rebekkah’s body all over, and before he knew it, he was doing it. This must be how rapists operate, Jack said to himself. They pass directly from the thought to the act.

Yet she was fully compliant—no spasmophilia here, just pure wet warmth and a reckless, unpredictable aggressiveness, as strange as her conversational alternation between glee and glumness. She sank a deep hickey into his neck—was that to mark her territory? She wriggled out of her skirt and lifted her blouse off without undoing the buttons except the top three. When she unclasped her brassiere, it liberated surprisingly mature breasts, with aubergine-colored aureoles and even a few pale hairs circling the nipples. She seemed to have some kind of harem-girl fantasy going on, because she danced two or three undulating steps before him, moving her pretty little feet with the high, smooth insteps and the bright red toenails. She lowered her eyes
as if the display were private, internal. She even knelt on the floor between his legs and spread them, as he sat on a straight-backed chair, and she licked his scrotum, including the space between his anus and balls, and then she held his erection in both her small hands and started licking up the veiny, rigid column.

She looked up at him as she licked, and then she said, “I don’t know about this giant, Jack Holmes. You’re going to stretch me out of shape before I find and marry my normal-sized little Jewish husband, when and if I ever find him.”

Jack could feel himself flushing with resentment and was aware of a snake of vexation coiling through his entrails.

“I know, I know,” he said, thinking, I didn’t start this. “I know it’s a problem.”

“A heavenly problem,” Rebekkah sighed, and she straddled his lap and introduced his cock into her vagina and slowly sat on it. He could see it inching in, and he thought this was the best feeling in the world, this muscular glove grabbing every last microsurface of his greedy dick.

When it was all over, the daylight outside was dimming and Rebekkah continued to sit on his lap, squeezing his ribs with her knees. Jack wondered if she’d want him to marry her—a thought so crazy he didn’t dare voice it, though that was what was circuiting through his mind. He’d been told that women always wanted to get married. When they heard Alice in the next room, Rebekkah led him by the hand to his own little room with the narrow bed, deftly gathering up their clothes from the floor in a single gesture.

They fell asleep, and when Jack woke up it was the next morning, and Rebekkah had written in lipstick on his mirror over the dresser, “What a guy!” and Jack, feeling priggish and ungrateful, wondered how he’d ever get it off. The phone rang
in the kitchen in the empty apartment. Naked, Jack rushed to answer it. It was Gephardt’s secretary asking in Briarcliff accents if he could wind up his affairs and start working the following Monday.

“Yes, I can. Uh—what time does the workday start?”

The secretary, Donna, laughed for a second as if the word “workday” shocked her or sounded a bit brutal. “Oh, ten or ten thirty, more or less. And by the way, Betty and Helen, the dear ladies, they want you to stop by sometime this week—sometime in the morning, I’d recommend—and fill out some more of their eternal forms.”

Jack didn’t have the vulgarity to ask how much he’d be paid. He was surprised to hear the dear ladies, who’d seemed to hold his fate in their hands, suddenly laughed off as the alcoholic fussbudgets they were.

3.

On Jack’s first day at the
Northern Review
he was overcaffeinated, overdressed, and under-instructed. He was given a desk in a cubicle next to a woman in her late forties, who’d been with the magazine all of her working life; until recently she and the whole operation had been in Boston. He thought she was probably a secret drinker since, as he quickly learned, she was irritable in the mornings and made a meal of opening her mail and reading open-submission ideas or even unsolicited articles sent in by unknown writers. She’d read a few lines, mumble, “Oh brother,” and then slap the offensive submission into her overflowing out-box.

“Pardon?” Jack asked with a smile, wondering if “pardon” sounded provincial.

“I said you never find a good story idea in the slush pile. I don’t know why that should be so. In twenty years of crawling through this sludge, you’d think one gem, oh Lord, just one gem. Is that too much to ask?”

Harriet wore baggy beige linen trousers and had teeth browned by tobacco, coffee, and red wine. She might’ve been attractive once, and she still had a hard-boiled elegance about her. She’d cornered the market at the
Northern Review
on art and
architecture stories. She had “files” on all her pet projects: if Jack brought her attention to an interesting art topic, she put him in his place right away by showing him that she’d already been maintaining a file for years on that and all related subjects. Or she’d say, “You seriously prefer Michaels to Gwathmey?” She had a way of wrinkling her nose to express a shade of doubt or scorn. Or, in a more benign mood, she’d say, “I’m glad you’re interested in contemporary architecture. God knows no one else around here is.”