10

Jack and Laura were packed and Jack had located a temporary apartment for them in Chicago. Their New York place was almost empty. The moving van would pick up the remaining things in the morning.

Jack had talked Page into a last night’s outing. “You can’t let me go without a send-off, old buddy,” he said. Privately, he hoped he could help with whatever was troubling the young Pringles. It was probably a typical newlywed complaint, but Jack pretended at first that he didn’t know anything was amiss.

He met Page at a quiet little bar in Jack’s neighborhood. Both of them were early. Jack was surprised at Page’s appearance. He was wearing the right sort of clothes: the style-conscious young-executive sort. His shirt was hand-tailored, his shoes were new. And yet he looked neglected and unpressed.

“You look like I did when I was drinking myself to death,” Jack said humorously.

“How?” Page said, anxious to get the first drink down and the second one ordered.

“Seedy,” Jack told him.

“Thanks.” Page gulped over the hot whiskey.

Jack ordered a glass of milk and Page’s eyebrows soared, “Jesus, are you still on the wagon?” he croaked, clearing his burning throat.

“More or less. Mostly more,” Jack grinned.

“Jack! You’re my friend. Get drunk with me, for God’s sake.” He looked so dismayed, with his face in lines and a button loose and his eyes lost and troubled, that Jack, against his better judgment, ordered a shot of Scotch.

“I do this out of sheer misguided brotherly love,” he told Page. “Laura will probably divorce me when she finds out, but if it’s that serious....”

“It’s that serious.”

Jack waited for him to pick up the cue and tell him his problems. He knew how to listen sympathetically to people, because he cared about them. He was really interested, even in the dreariest dilemmas.

“I can’t talk about it,” Page said, putting the second drink away and signaling for the third.

“Well then, what the hell am I doing sitting here getting drunk with you?” Jack demanded to know.

“Shut up and drink,” Page said solemnly.

“It’ll take all night to get drunk on this stuff,” Jack said. “You could down ten shots in a row and be sober as a pole. Why don’t we go up to my place?”

“And slobber over your lovely wife?” Page objected.

“She isn’t home,” Jack said. She was, in fact, down in the Village saying good-by to a few close friends.

“She isn’t? Let’s go.” The drinks seemed slightly stronger to Page than Jack’s description—perhaps because he took down four or five in less than ten minutes and they landed in an empty stomach.

Jack eyed him critically. “Can you stand up?” he kidded.

“Certainly, if you promise not to watch.”

They headed outside and the fresh air steadied Page. He was glad to go with Jack. He had no wish to display his misery in a public bar. At the same time he yearned to get high, to relax with an old friend who wouldn’t judge him; muddle himself up and think about something besides Sunny Pringle, his wife who was not his wife: his beautiful, bewitching, seductive, adorable sister. But the liquor was just so much acid eating up his little tin inhibitions. The higher he got the more he thought of her; the more tempted he was to confess himself for the sake of the comfort Jack would give him.

* * *

The Manns’s apartment was bare except for packing boxes full of books and the built-in kitchen appliances. Jack and Page settled, with two glasses and a bottle, in the kitchen.

Page wouldn’t talk about the thing for a while. He had given himself strict orders, while he was still sober, not to mention it at all, not even to this oldest and best of his friends. Not that Jack would ever use it against him. But having revealed the thing once he might do it again, and the more people who knew, the shakier Page’s future.

But as the evening wore on and the level in the whiskey bottle sank, the urge for admission came over him again. It had all been stopped up inside him for the past lonely, worried weeks. He wanted another viewpoint, help, somebody to tell him what to do. Above all, he needed someone to tell him he was right.

Jack was almost too easy to talk to. If you were sad he cheered you up, if you were wrong he righted you, if you were happy he lived it up with you. He was the one who had seen, even before Page himself, what a rare and wonderful girl Sunny was.

Page put a friendly arm around him. “Jack, what would I do without you?” he said in an unusual show of affection, brought on by straight Scotch.

“Why, you’d go straight to hell, old buddy. What else?” Jack grinned. “Fill your glass?”

Page handed it over. “What did you say was the name of that drink?” he asked, aware that his tongue was stumbling around in his mouth, like a mole lost in the daylight.

“‘Jack’s Damnedest,’” Jack said. “Never fails.”

“What’s in it?” Page studied the glass suspiciously.

“Ten parts whiskey,” Jack said.

“Ten parts whiskey to what?”

“To your health.”

Page smelled it doubtfully.

“Man, you don’t smell the stuff, you drink it,” Jack said.

Page drank. “You know, sometimes I feel like I can tell you just about anything,” he said. “Women don’t understand some things.”

“Well, let’s have it,” Jack said. “No, wait, let me guess. Sunny can’t cook?”

“Oh, hell, she can cook anything.” Page made a sweeping gesture and tumbled an ice tray to the floor.

“She squeezes the toothpaste from the top and you squeeze from the bottom? That’s Laura’s specialty. Ought to be worth a trip to Reno.”

Page wrapped both hands around his glass. “Guess again, Counselor.”

“Well, there’s only one other problem we haven’t examined. You don’t get along in bed?”

Page found himself laughing, knowing it was the liquor that tickled him, and trying to stop. Jack slapped him on the back.

“Maybe you’d better tell me,” Jack said. “I’m not doing so well.”

“I only wish it were all as simple as sex,” Page sighed.

“Simple be damned. That’s an art.”

Page finished the drink and stared slowly up the wall behind Jack’s head, unable to look squarely at him. He felt the words coming up in his throat, and he had nothing left to fight them with. It was wrong, it was grossly unfair to Sunny. And yet he felt safe with Jack, who had had an earful of Page’s escapades over the years and never betrayed him.

Page was so bewildered that his thinking apparatus had ground to a halt. The whiskey made it a cinch to surrender. He needed help and Jack was there to give it.

“I don’t know how to say it,” he began. “It’s so ugly. So humiliating and queer. It’s impossible, Jack, no kidding. But it really happened.”

Jack stared at this odd introduction. “The whole world’s a little queer, Page,” he reassured him. But he was thinking, Jesus don’t tell me Sunny’s gay. He knew Page wasn’t but he was never as sharp about the girls.

“Help me,” Page said. “I’ve got to tell somebody.”

“Is it about Sunny?” Jack asked.

“About both of us. You see, we ... we’re....” Page looked at him very hard and suddenly lost his nerve. “I’m adopted,” he told his shoes, retreating.

“So?”

The liquor whirled in Page’s head and his heart ached and he knew, as well as he knew his real name, that Sunny was thinking of him at that moment.

“So Sunny is my sister.” He had to force the words out and his voice boomed unnaturally from the effort.

Jack was stunned almost the way Page himself had been when he first heard it. But before he could answer, offer his sympathy, Page bent his head into his hands and sobbed, knocking over the whiskey glass at his feet. A lone ice cube skidded out.

Jack left him alone for several minutes before he put a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Your sister?” he echoed. “Are you sure?”

“You think I’m kidding? About a thing like this?” Page stood up like a shot to dramatize his words, stood there wavering, trying to stabilize himself.

“You, of all people,” Jack said, dazed.

“Why do you say it that way?” He flushed the truth out of Jack, who was too shaken up for white lies.

“You hate everything like this, everything that isn’t normal and ordinary,” Jack said. “This must have been unbearable. My God.”

Page was offended. “I don’t like abnormality, no,” he declared still trying to balance himself.

“Sit down, boy, sit down,” Jack said, giving Page’s hand a tug and toppling him back onto his packing box. “And I suppose you think this is completely abnormal?”

“Well, what do you think it is? Clean, wholesome fun?” Page demanded.

Jack got up and filled their glasses again. “I guess I just think it’s an accident,” he said. “You can’t very well blame anybody for it.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Page answered. “Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I know nobody planned to marry us off knowing we were brother and sister. But it could have been avoided, if my real parents had kept me. If the doctor had told Dad who I was. If my step-parents had kept it to themselves when they found out.”

“That wouldn’t have been strictly moral, would it?”

“No. But at least I wouldn’t have had to—” Page stopped, ashamed, and let Jack finish for him. “You wouldn’t have had to face it,” Jack said, sitting down with their fresh drinks. “I guess there’s something in that.”

“Remember when Sunny and I were going together in college? You used to tell us we were like an old married couple. We even looked alike.” Page laughed sadly.

“I remember. But I never thought....” Jack put his drink down between his feet. “You know something, Page? I think you and Sunny could make a go of it ... provided you keep quiet about it.”

“That wouldn’t be strictly moral, Jackson,” Page said, throwing Jack’s words back at him.

“I’m not so sure this is any time to be moral,” Jack said, rolling some whiskey thoughtfully around in his mouth.

“You can’t be moral on a part-time basis. It’s a condition, like being alive,” Page objected. “You have principles to live by. You can’t chuck them overboard at the first crisis.”

“Some things are more important than principles, old buddy.”

“If you’re talking about love, you’re wrong. Love has to be moral too, Jack.”

“Love has its own morality, doesn’t it?”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it means you and Sunny have to work something out so you can go on living together. Because you love each other too much to live apart.”

“That thing would eat us alive, Jack.”

“I doubt it.”

Jack’s calm, rational attitude angered Page. “You make it sound like a little misunderstanding between friends,” he said. “Some trifle we can just smooth over if we give it the old college try.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Jack said. “I guess I don’t shock so easily, Page. I’m used to odd balls in my life.” It was as close as Jack had ever come to revealing his homosexuality to Page.

He got up and went to the book-loaded cartons in the living room. Page could hear him pottering around, skimming pages.

“I want to read you something,” Jack called. “Just remembered it. Ever hear of Lord Byron?”

“Sure. English 231. The girls called him Gorgeous George.”

Jack found his book and blew dust off the top. He brought it back to the kitchen and sat down by Page again. “Lord Byron was in love with a lady named Augusta Leigh,” Jack said.

“So what?”

“So he wrote her a very beautiful poem.”

“Spare me the literature,” Page said.

“I’ll just read you a couple of lines. Listen.” He marked the words with his finger and read: “‘For thee, my own sweet sister—’”

“Whose sister?” Page flared.

“Byron’s. Augusta.”

“He was in love with his sister?”

“Didn’t they teach you anything in English 231, old buddy?”

“Well, I don’t want to hear about Byron’s troubles,” Page grumbled. “He’s dead.”

Jack ignored him. “‘For thee, my own sweet sister,/ In thy heart/ I know myself secure, as thou in mine;/ We were and are beings who never each other can resign.’”

Page hiccoughed. “The poor broad was in love with him, too?”

“‘It is the same, together or apart,/ From life’s commencement to its slow decline/ We are entwined—’”

“Jack, for God’s sake, this is very painful—”

“‘—Let death come slow or fast,/ The tie which bound the first endures the last.’”

“Oh, Jesus! You mean they were stuck with each other?”

“Well, they weren’t married, but they always loved each other,” Jack said, closing the book. “They settled for making love whenever they could. And they had a daughter.”

“An idiot?”

“Now where in hell did you get that medieval idea?” Jack said.

“Was she an idiot?”

“No, she was a normal girl. Why, Page? Is Sunny pregnant?”

Page nodded.

After a moment Jack said quietly, “I should think you’d have to stay with her now.”

“Jack, if Laura were your honest-to-God sister, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “But I wouldn’t let her go.”

“You’d keep her? As your wife?”

“Not as my cook and bottle washer, that’s for sure.”

“You’re as bad as Sunny,” Page complained. “You two would make a lovely pair.”

“I’ve always thought so,” Jack said sardonically.

Page stood up again. “Knock it off,” he said, and took a swipe at Jack that nearly staggered Page back to the floor. Jack lowered him onto his packing box again and Page tried to control himself. “Forgive me, Jack, I didn’t mean it,” he said, humiliated. “It’s the whiskey.”

“Forget it.”

“No, I want you to know,” Page protested with drunken urgency. “I’m sick of myself. I can hardly bear to think of it. I know we were innocent when we got married. But that only makes it seem worse. More sinister, more tragic. We were so damn happy. And now—the contrast is torture. I can’t have her back and just because I can’t, I want her so much I get crazy with it. Did you ever want anybody that much?” He was clutching Jack’s lapels, talking straight into his face.

“Yes, I did,” Jack said without flinching. But he didn’t describe the kind of love that tore him up that way.

“No, you didn’t, you couldn’t have. Nobody ever did.”

“You mean,” Jack said, “nobody ever suffered as much as you did. Or as long or as hard.”

But Page was too drunk and too desolate to hear the parody of self-pity in Jack’s voice. “That’s it,” he said. “And to have to think of yourself as—as good as queer, on top of everything else—”

“Oh, nuts,” Jack said. “No one knows about it but you and Sunny.”

“And the doc, and my step-parents. And now you,” Page said, suddenly resenting Jack. “And for every one of us who knows, I get sick to my stomach.”

“You mean if nobody knew you’d feel swell about it?”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“You’re so damn mixed-up right now you don’t make sense,” Jack said, speaking steadily with firm hands on Page’s shoulders that helped to quiet him. “Am I right?”

“I guess.” Page said.

“Just because a man is different from the rest doesn’t make him contemptible, Page,” Jack said.

“Just miserable.”

“Depends on how strong he is. How much of a man. These things happen to people and they have to learn to live with them. The better they face them, the stronger and finer they are in the end.”

“You mean, live with incest and be healthy,” Page said.

“I mean live with Sunny and be happy. And let the rest go to hell. You don’t need to climb on a soapbox in Bughouse Square and explain that your wife is also your sister. You don’t have to get yourself punished in public to make your marriage permissible. You’ll only lose everything that way,” Jack told him. “Some things have to be kept secret if you want to make it in this world.”

“You’re telling me to do what Sunny wants me to do: keep it quiet and go on as if it hadn’t happened.”

“Keep it quiet, yes, but for God’s sake, don’t go on as if it hadn’t happened. Face it. Between yourselves. Adjust to it the best you can and don’t let it defeat you.”

“Jack,” Page said uncertainly. “How can you respect me, knowing about it?”

“Am I talking as if I didn’t?”

“No, but—”

“Page, listen. Learn something about charity. You respect me, don’t you?”

“You know how much I think of you, Jack. I couldn’t sit here and tell this to anyone else in the world.”

“Well, would it make a difference to you if Laura were my sister and we were still married? Would you shove my teeth down my throat and turn me over to the cops if you found out such a thing about me?”

“I can’t say I’d admire you for it,” Page said. “But I wouldn’t meddle, if you wanted things that way. But hell, Jack, there’s nothing wrong with you. You can’t possibly know how it feels—”

“I know exactly how it feels. What if I told you I’ve been as misfit and miserable with my problems as you ever were with yours?”

“My God, Laura isn’t—” Page began.

But Jack stopped him with a wry smile. “No, she’s not my sister. It’s me. I’m gay, Page.” He hadn’t planned to say it, but when it came out, it came simply and generously. It was a brave risk to speak like that to Page Pringle, who couldn’t watch a man do a hula in fun without condemning him. It might cost Jack a valued friendship. But he was hoping it would comfort Page instead; show him with a shock that you could be different from the pack and survive. Better than that: live a good life, love a good wife, and enjoy the respect you deserved.

“Gay?” Page repeated doubtfully. “You mean ... a homo?” The word tasted even worse to him than ‘incest’. It smacked of pretty boys cruising the streets in ridiculously tight pants.

Jack nodded, letting his hands fall away from Page’s shoulders. In almost the same gesture Page released Jack with a shudder and they sat looking at each other. Page was acutely embarrassed. Self-conscious and clumsy and drunk, he fumbled for a way out. “Well, that must make things dull for Laura,” he said, forgetting even that Jack and Laura had a child. Jack didn’t smile.

After a few minutes of mortified silence Page stood up, steadying himself with a hand on the kitchen counter. “I’d better go,” he said, afraid to say more. The thing revolted him and yet he was ashamed to feel that way. He wasn’t too drunk or too callous to realize what a sacrifice Jack had made for him. And yet he felt remorse that Jack had thought it necessary.

Jack rose and followed him, handing him his cigarettes and coat as he reached the front door.

“I’m sorry you told me, Jack,” Page said quietly.

“I can see that.”

“Sort of ironical, isn’t it?” Page said, not sure if he were joking or trying to hurt his friend.

“What’s ironical?”

“Your name. Mann.” Page began to laugh against his will.

“Laura doesn’t think so,” Jack answered. He had himself under tight control. But he knew now he had forfeited Page’s friendship. Tired and profoundly disappointed, he felt a sudden pity and scorn for Page; pity and regret for himself.

“I should have known you couldn’t grow and learn a little,” he told Page. “You can’t see any parallel between us. You can’t see how my problem lets me understand yours. You only see that I’m queer—your word, by the way. And suddenly I’m not like you any more and you want to wipe me off like so much mud on your hands.

“Well, go on. I only wish to God Sunny had gotten the man she deserves and not her chicken brother.”

Page paused in the doorway, insulted and shocked. “You hate me for having the strength to leave her, to do what I know is right,” he said. “You hate me because I’m a normal male. And if I weren’t so drunk—”

“Yeah, well, you are that drunk, Brother Pringle. Go home and sober up.”

Page lunged at him but Jack ducked, grabbed Page, spun him out the door, and let him blunder noisily into the wall across the corridor. Page stood there dizzily, searching for his equilibrium like a man trying to find his shadow; turning around and around with increasing frustration.

Jack shut the door and leaned against it, exhausted. He felt like crying, the way he had when he was a kid and too small to defend himself. He had learned a lot about fighting since then. But when something like this happened, he felt vulnerable, as if he and not Page had had the worst of it.