News from the World by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

sidewalk where I had paused for a moment. “This neighborhood is a scandal, such wickedness,” one had said to the other. “It is true,” the other agreed.
    She laughed outright. “You see, they agree with me,” she said.
    Jack had spoken to me about his father’s death when Jack was eleven and how he had felt a secret relief. I gathered his father had been a severe man, locked into himself with his own key. Jack’s uncle, his father’s only sibling, was a distinguished anthropologist at a Southern university who had gradually distanced himself from his family until they no longer even exchanged holiday cards. Jack himself had attended the University of Iowa but only for his freshman year. “I didn’t find it friendly,” he told me once. I wondered if there had been some murky episode to account for his having left the school.
    June and I talked for a while and parted amiably enough, aware, each of us, that there was more than met the eye in the other. I returned to my apartment thinking about Jack and how he made his way in the world, making clothes or decorating apartments. His jobs were irregular. He worked occasionally for a dress designer or a store where tailoring was done. Sometimes he was employed by a decorating firm and sent on special jobs to outlying parts of the city that involved a lot of riding on subways and buses. He never complained about his long and tedious trips. He seemed to accept it all as his destiny.
    Jack and I grew ever more intimate. He was fond of my children and they were fond of him. When I began to go out with Martin a few years after I had moved into the apartment house, he liked Jack, too.
    What I had sensed, fleetingly, as a child with four uncles, three of whom were homosexual, had become plain as I grew older. There is as much diversity among homosexual people—in some instances, more—as there is among other people.

    One autumn afternoon as I stepped down from the bus I took from work, I saw Jack walking toward me on Central Park West, his nose covered with bandages taped to his cheeks. He smiled painfully as he told me his tale. There had been a young man in the park who had encouraged Jack to follow him into a grove of trees. When they were inside it, the young man had turned quickly and hit Jack in the face, breaking his nose, then had run away laughing loudly.
    Jack shrugged at my exclamation of shock. “I made a mistake that time,” he said, without apparent resentment.
    What he had done, and suffered as a consequence, made me shiver in a sudden awareness of the wantonness of sexual life. As I stared at his wounded face, I recognized how the wish for sensual pleasure can be accompanied by peril. Strange beasts shamble out of the self’s essential solitude.
    He had brief fits of anger, usually set off by the sounds of a loud radio in one of his neighbors’ apartments. He would go to the neighbor’s door, bang on it violently—to be heard above the din, he explained to me—and when someone opened the door to stare at him questioningly, he’d say quietly through clenched teeth, “So sorry to bother you but would you be so kind as to lower the volume on your goddamned fucking machine?” and then turn on his heel and walk away. Usually this worked, but a few tenants, insulted by his ferocity, would only turn up the volume on their radios or record players.
    At some point he acquired an Airedale that he named Kelly. He seemed to love the dog with an intensity that slid easily into rage. He called it “discipline” to me, yet the blows he gave across her back taught her only fear. When I protested, he admitted he was sometimes cruel to her. He tried to excuse his actions by saying it only happened when she was too slow to obey him. I asked him if he would treat a human being so violently. He looked at me helplessly, bewildered by his own behavior.
    After a few months he gave the dog away