Free Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

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 ofthe 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.”
    Rebekkah’s eyes widened. She loved Alice, but found her hunting prints bizarre and her family stories even more exotic. Now she looked eagerly at Jack to make sure that he too was registering Alice’s latest tossed-off effrontery.
    Will seemed strangely vague or even evasive in responding to Alice’s questions about Elaine. “Is she enjoying New York?” Alice asked. “I don’t see how she can if you compare that thing, that disgusting town house, with that beautiful house your parents built her out behind their place.”
    “What’s the little house called?” Rebekkah asked Alice while winking at Jack.
    “Called?” Alice asked. “I keep forgetting none of you has ever been down to Virginia. Elaine’s house is called the Rookery.”
    “Yeah, ’cause the builders really rooked Dad, har, har,” Will said. “Well, she likes New York fine, but it’s the children I worry about.” Everyone assumed New York was bad for children.
    Two days later Alice said, “There’s something strange going on. Elaine is giving a big splashy man-trap party, and Will doesn’t even seem to know about it. She told me he’s not really living at her place.”
    Did this mean that Will had a lover? And was the lover male or female? Was that why Will had moved to New York, to lead a secret life? The scion of Charlottesville would never have any privacy back home.
    Jack didn’t know what to do with his new suspicions. Mythologizing Will’s affair (if that’s what it was) served the function of taming it, of making it less shocking to poor Jack (he thought of himself suddenly as poor, as bereft). He could see no way of tackling the subject directly with Will (“Hey, Will, who are you living with these days?”). Jack would have been willing to run the risk of seeming vulgar to Will if he’d thought a blunt question might work, but he was afraid Will would greet it with one of his thin-lipped smiles and total silence.
    Was it a black woman? A married woman—a friend of the family? A beautiful young aunt? A retarded cousin? A common whore? A freckled teenage boy from Appalachia?
    Fascinating to think about, but Jack felt … betrayed. Yes, he’d assumed that he and Will were both … bachelors. That they were both lonely and bereft. That they really had no one but each other, that they were buddies … almost exclusively.
    For a day he avoided Will at the office and said that hecouldn’t join him for lunch at Larré’s, the French restaurant in the East Fifties where Will liked to eat brains with capers and where Jack would order sweetbreads with fries. It was a great place, three big rooms crowded with smallish tables for two, decked out in red-and-white-checked tablecloths and topped with baskets of crusty bread, and the prix fixe was only $1.50 or $1.75 if you took both a cheese course and a dessert. He and Will ate there almost every