You’re not a lover till you blab about it. From earliest memory I’ve been excited and lonely, like a membrane that needs a caress during lovemaking, one caress and then another. I met Jack at a forum in April 1981; we exchanged eyes during the presentation while his arm draped around the back of the empty chair next to him as though it were a boyfriend. He cocked his head and a two-day growth outlined a high delicate cheek; my life was bereft of that contour. During intermission my face lit up but he bounded past and wrapped a man in a bear hug that rocked them back and forth. Jack was short but he expanded, surrounding this man whose face, pinned against Jack’s shoulder, suffused with pleasure and embarrassment. Jack’s friend was suddenly famous. His struggle to disappear made him the center of attention; he didn’t know what to do with his eyes and he tottered back a little when Jack released him.
I leaned against a door, thumbs hooked in my belt loops and forefingers starting two paths that converged in my crotch. I thought, “Now I’m really alone.” The combined effect was supposed to register as passionate narrowed eyes clicking toward Jack on flamenco heels: Jack nodded and I parlayed tension into a few sentences about the forum. He replied, “The Right correctly feels we threaten its unconscious life.”
I said, “My flat’s a few blocks away.”
Jack looked past me, smiling into the crowd. “Let’s read the Divine Comedy together out loud.”
“Jack, we hardly know each other—how about some TV and then sex?” We settled on a walk.
The next day he knocked at three-thirty but it was still spring weather. Yellow sunlight fell on his face; I touched the indentation above his lip, breathless. We took Lily, a big dreamy dog who lived the walk so keenly it became hers. I concentrated on Jack: Prep school and Harvard accounted for my pleasurable fear and his overalls and red chamois shirt; I knew others who used poverty for depth. In New York he worked in a famous theater troupe: “We pissed on stage and took our clothes off.” My libido rushed forward to claim that information. I guessed forty by the skin on his hands. I talked brilliantly; he must be a good director, I thought, if he can enlarge people this way.
Lily checked resumes too—inhaled them from hubcaps and the corners of buildings, from strangers who stooped to admire her blond tail and ruff, her apricot ears. She scouted bones and delicious dabs of filth, slyly eyed children’s ice cream cones, frankly implored construction workers in orange hats who sat on the sidewalk crosslegged behind their open lunchboxes; she searched their faces, trying to locate an invitation, eyes misting before the giant concept (fragrance) of chicken and ham.
“You’d be a fool to pass me up, Jack.”
Jack’s features attempted a graceful bow off his face. He was small, slender, barrel chested, descended from French Jews. He looked like a sparrow, glossy black curls the color of raisins, bright black eyes and for a beak the small blade of a pocket knife, the likeness enhanced by a tendency to bounce on his toes. Or his face resembled a maraschino cherry, full of refined pep. I was so attracted I was bursting with news, personal news to launch intimacy—to put my hand where his body caught and softened the denim, for that to be a destination—so I recited my catalogue of ships: “Two Blacks, one Puerto Rican, two Irish Catholics (one of them went on to S/M—he’d always said ‘You can do whatever you want to me’—wasn’t I already doing everything I wanted? Later he appeared with black eyes, etc.—he had great legs), one German Catholic, two WASPS (one was Episcopalian, the other from Los Angeles), one Japanese- German, one Marxist Art Historian, one Chinese, one Italian and three little Jews. Jack, I always had a soft spot for little Jews with big noses, maybe because of my first lover; I loved Andy so intensely I wondered if I would be scarred. When he left the apartment I gathered up his cigarette butts and smoked them even though I didn’t smoke. During puberty I kept hoping my nose would grow big. Everyone else in my neighborhood had a big nose.”
Jack’s eyes twinkled. “You can’t depend on those biological clocks—don’t stop trying, Bob—you may still get one.”
“Jack, I try. I answered a sex ad from the Advocate. The guy wrote ‘For Love’ and went on to describe himself as a small Jewish dancer. What could be nicer? When we met, he turned out to be a converted Jew. His nose was Portuguese from Salinas but he learned Hebrew and lived in Israel and he choreographed ballets based on Jewish legends like the Dybbuk. He had great turn-out during orgasm. I think we made each other nervous. I would say, ‘There’s a Jew in this bed!’ And we wouldn’t know if I meant a fallen Jew (me) or a believing Jew (him) or a real Jew (me) or a fake Jew (him). When he dumped me I wanted to sue for false advertising.”
I opened up in Jack a territory named Bob; I anticipated in me a sister city named Jack. He replied, “I want a Black lover—that’s one reason I attended the forum.” He submitted this obstacle to our romance with the cheerful heartlessness of a folk tale. At once I was tired of my past and where it led me—a boring melancholy that trained me to be good at death. I’d exhausted my possibilities and nothing new started up; I could see why people kill themselves. My jurist’s voice countered. It’s not a big deal, and I had to agree: my writing’s okay, friends, teaching. Writing, sex, money, friends—as we walked along I felt a vague guilt—I hadn’t done justice to my experience. I wanted to trade on it, shabby currency. The way I told these stories exhausted me and I saw my lovers as a form of stasis. To make it more lifelike, I’d gladly have given a statue the past and the sarcasm.
A jay chided, aggressive. The aroma of wild fennel, a lure. A sportscar drove by, an impulse. Lily chased a cat, fun. We stepped off the curb. Our elbows touched, a hinge. Pieces of fog hung in a tree, perception. We walked across some grass— pastoral—and talked about the past—pastoral-historical. When we passed La Victoria the sky was parquetry of beaten gold. Our walk tired me out with its little steps; I wanted to take one giant step across town and into Jack.
“I’m sorry my list is so short, I was with Ed (Japanese- German) for eight years.” Identity seemed remote as the village our grandmothers came from. Ethnicity, storytelling—my lovers sounded like so many flavors, strawberry, lemon, lime . . .“How about you Jack?”
“What about me?”
“Tell me where you’ve been, who you’ve seen, how they looked and what they said.”
“I had two lovers, one for six months, the other for a year.”
“Two?”
“That’s it.”
“Two brief loves in a man of forty.”
“I’m thirty-four and I never met the right individual.”
“You seem to know everyone.”
If Jack described the other, I can’t remember; something about a playwright or a producer, a nice guy. I only remember Joe-Toe. “Joe-Toe is an actor who left a few months ago for New York, which to an actor equals breathing. What an actor means to New York is more like another sneeze for which someone may or may not bless you. I gave him the name Joe-Toe when I was teaching him to pronounce Giotto in a play I directed. He takes baths hot enough to make steam.” He rubbed (meditatively?) his two-day growth and his eyes relaxed on the distance. I figured they were still involved.
“Is he handsome?”
“Not really, he’s funny looking.” Spoken with a lover’s pride, I thought.
The buildings we passed were mostly nineteenth-century gingerbread and they understood each other in a cozy and irrelevant way that excluded their inhabitants and faltered before the existential glamor of a tract house or highrise. Jack lived in one of those bleak Victorian slag heaps around General Hospital, but the old staircase with redwood wainscoting remained and each landing had a lamp of hammered brass and stained glass. The first two were lit against the twilight but Jack’s landing was dark. He hunted for his key, then knocked. Jack’s roommate opened. Lily exploded into a blur of huffing and wagging and shot past him into the flat. She made a beeline down the hall and into a room where some finches cried out in alarm and bashed themselves again and again against the bars on the far side of their world, their voices piping a bright feeble terror. They had dark blue tails, red bills, baby blue sides and they gave off an odor of sage.
I caught Lily’s neck and Jack held her rump—then he told the birds to sing for me, as though they were canaries! Lily’s eyes rolled back in voluptuousness and she licked her chops with a moist pink tongue. We dragged her away, closed the door and outside that door she remained, titillated, absorbed, her downcast eyes conveying an impression of unseeing abstraction. Later, when I passed her on my way to the toilet, she turned away from my caress, unwilling to be distracted. Jack’s roommate was a British law student studying for the Boards. He immediately vanished but his anxious smiles and incomplete gestures permeated the flat. Jack went into the kitchen to pour us wine. The kitchen was yellow—its cheerfulness more an academic point. The color said “Life is Great” but was contradicted by shabby cupboards, weary linoleum, chipped dishes and cookbooks shelved too high for use. I explored his bedroom.
It was on the sunset side. Two windows spilled amber light onto four walls of books, a bed, a beige chenille bedspread, a small hill of brown corduroy pillows, and a drafting table with a high stool. The room smelled like chocolate, a sweet smell of books. I explored further: an analytical spirit asserted itself in the face of Jack’s bed and the oblivion I intended to enjoy there. Self-preservation advised me to act fast, but there was nothing in the papers on his drafting table except for his handwriting. It was amazingly sleek and deliberate as set type: the y’s descended and the r’s ascended, flags and pennants. I could love that. I couldn’t understand how he earned a living. From an envelope I learned his name was John. Jack was a nickname. I relished it: Jack is so flat, like a flat rock or a landing strip between the flights a sentence can make. I could love that. I was against his boots, they supplied a false amount of height to his small frame and made him bottom heavy. He had only overalls, the good pair and the bad pair. He covered his bulletin board with quotations and the heads of friends. His hair parted at the back. Soft clear voice. His eyes twinkled when he smiled because they scrunched up, gathering their liquid onto a smaller surface. Herbal toothpaste. A file cabinet. Small hands and feet. I figured that would stand me in good stead. I figured he would teach me and encourage me and smooth out my hysteria and distress. His library appealed to me as a source of great potential energy. The books stood two deep, shelved with a free hand—mighty classics and plenty of books I’d never heard of sped up my heart with their flirtatious glances. Then they lost their individual contents and became comprehension and speed. My throat tightened with a pang for the new life. I felt seasick. Many of the books I opened were signed by the authors and inscribed with a friendly note to Jack; in all of them Jack had circled passages. I love intelligence and eagerly fetishized Jack’s; I half-reclined like a starlet. He returned with a glass in each hand and sang to the books, “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it.” He was addressing civilization.
“What do you trust?”
“Not who but what? Jack, I trust gossip.”
Jack sat next to me; he looked worried, said, “Gossip is crude.” I reasoned that the depth he missed in a single story could be found collectively in a hundred. He cocked his head, attentive, so I became interesting. “The people who know your story are as important as the plot. Gossip registers the difference between a story one person knows and everyone knows, between one person’s story and everyone’s. Or it’s a mythology, gods and goddesses, a community and a future.”
Jack took my hand. That was exciting. I finally stopped smiling, let desire bewilder and reorganize us. He asked, “What do you mean by community?”
“Ecstatic sexuality.”
“Whew.”
Sex was the reply to any question. Jack was problematic but great potential; he saw our relationship as the development of raw material. “Let’s do exercises together.” “Let’s study conversational French.” Svengali dives into Trilby’s mouth, draws back astonished and cries, Your palate is like the vault of a cathedral! I wanted my soul thrilled—Jack was the man for the job. He talked freely and openly on every topic (but himself), displaying technique and an acquaintance not only with the world’s knowledge but with its wisdom, which he circled. Jack swirled a purple crescent at the bottom of his glass, a sliver of wine slid down his throat, tannic. I wanted to follow. It would be a light comedy to pair myself again, the witty gravitational weights and balances of the twin star a couple makes. Still, I ached for Jack to engulf me and rewrite my life in bolder script. The tenderness I felt for him would chart out that impulse. There wasn’t a single sentence that equaled the tenderness I intended Jack to bear me: only shared gestures over a period of time could express it.
I laid my tongue—my whole body—on his lower lip. We looked better without clothes. It was getting dark. We frenched for a while and then tipped backward onto the bed. I opened his hand and kissed his palm because my life seemed bereft of passion. Jack turned away—rightly I admitted. His hand slipped around my waist, a firmer pressure meant roll over, then it lightly skirted my ass. I didn’t dare feel that much pleasure. I changed the subject by taking his cock in my mouth, leaning over him, absorbed as though he were a difficult book. I liked his cock, it had the clear smell of cut grass and it was refined as his other features so I could take it in easily. Each time I drew my tongue along the shaft a discreet spasm crossed his face; suddenly he sat up and broke into pieces, faced all directions at once; I thought Jack was starting to cry. It filled me with wonder. His face dangled midair, features rotating separately like the parts of a mobile, then he literally pulled himself together, nose, ears, two eyes, mouth. He stretched out on top of me and whispered, “Put your hand on my lower back, lower, that’s it, now the other on the back of my lungs.” I rose to any of Jack’s occasions—I started to kid but he turned his head away and didn’t speak; he initiated a long silence whose mournfulness I shared but couldn’t interpret. I could have said, I love you. Jack’s weight was like agreement. Beneath my hands his breath became sharp and fast.
Although I like to pitch and catch, I just wanted Jack in me. Accepting my body and the world took that form. His cock kept alternating between stiff and flaccid, a weathervane constantly shifting as we framed and reframed our attraction. We eroticized a finely honed attention which challenged terms as soon as our bodies invented them, which addressed my sudden shifts of context and his mid-gesture costume changes. Instead of an oceanic welling with its always-in-the-future-until-it’s-in-the-past crescendo, we remained moment by moment; we aroused Choice, crowned Wit—a woman can curtsey, a man can remove the hat from his head with a grand gesture while bowing elaborately—Wit, Choice and the Particulars. Our attraction for each other expressed itself as a problem to be solved, a topiary maze, each new distinction a turn in the inquiry until the pleasure grew so intense I had to look away. I would call that first lovemaking dusky, we kept slipping through each other’s hands—hide and seek by moonlight—it was charming.
It charmed me. We ate, talked, showered, slept, more talk, more sleep, tomorrow, four or five nights a week, and for the first time since puberty my body was at rest. Jack simply converted without resistance or even a mood swing. When he called me up I felt like a contest winner. “It’s Jack. Want to go to dinner, a gallery, demo, movie, party, concert, café?”—whose worth we did or didn’t agree on but with the same understanding and pitch; or Jack said “great” and I said “stupid” but to Denise and Bruce I found myself saying, “a masterpiece.” I could grapple and I could surrender—that meant a lot to me. I pictured me at my full height and I intrigued and even aroused myself; teary and improvisational, I looked for developments that equaled my mood and waited to see what I would do next.
This concludes the first chapter of a love affair told with infinite safety from my house to yours, first person. From that beginning an image of Jack remains that continues to define tenderness for me. Two cups and two plates, blue and white, disappear along with the pine table and the kitchen and the hall and the living room when I turn off lights one by one as though I were dispensing with every part of my life except Jack, lit by the 60-watt next to my bed. Jack, already a legend, lies on his back, sheet up to his waist, hands clasped behind his head, nipples—whole notes—floating above his rib cage, a vertical line of black curls insisting on symmetry, arms with their perfect flex, arms making delicate wings. He’s hot—he’s calmly waiting to have sex: I climb up beside him, pull back the sheet and run my hand along his hip. Suddenly everything shifts, his thigh moves with my hand, his buttocks shift down and toward me voluptuously and at the same time he sighs as his hip tips sideways like an Indian god, his balls slip over each other and his cock slides across dark curls. I feel very grateful. His breath is stepped up, lips parted and already a bit swollen, chest expanded, skin smoothed out, nipples whirling like gyroscopes—I want to cup them in my hand—whatever I do they will continue in suspension and motion—lips, skin and nipples taking on their sexual meaning, his dark eyes lively, interested, interpretive.
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Glück; originally published in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York; this excerpt is courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Learn more about the book at https://www.nyrb.com/products/jack-the-modernist.
