David, after his tryst with Joey, is determined to appear as not gay as possible, even going so far as to bully his friend Joey. His relationship with Jacques is not dissimilar. He seems to detest Jacques outwardly expressed and near-shameless homosexuality. However, he tolerates it for his own benefit: he looks to Jacques for money. Jacques, however, seems like more a vehicle for David’s own self-loathing, his feelings becoming a projection of the inner disgust he feels for himself.
David claims that he uses his knowledge about Jacques’s sexuality to his advantage, financially. Where Jacques has actual money, David cognizance of Jacques’s life serves him in a more symbolic way. He says, “There was, in this tolerance of mine, a fund, by no means meagre, of malicious knowledge” (28). That malicious knowledge, is his awareness of Jacques’s relationships and movements between boys, romantically. Not just that he has them with boys, but his desperation for them. It would embarrass Jacques to admit it, and David pretends a faithfulness to the secret, asking only for money in exchange for silence. But David has similar affairs. He also pursues boys, taking them back, into the dark. Where does David find the energy to pretend, as he does, that he in Jacques are not nearly identical? His hatred for Jacques must be nearly at war with his hatred for himself.
Of hatred, David equates it to lust and the aftermath of sex with a man, or boy as he calls them. David says, “Jacques’s vaunted affection for me was involved with desire, the desire, in fact, to be rid of me, to be able, soon, to despise me as he now despised that army of boys who had come, without love, to his bed” (28). Essentially, David is claiming that Jacques desires him physically, but knows that there is no love between them. Jacques biggest regret, he tells David later on, is that he has had plenty of physical relationships, but none with any real connection. This connects back to what David is saying here about Jacques despising them: he despise them for not being his true love, or even just a love. Jacques is attracted to David and would bed him, but there is no chance of a relationship. It is also a chance for Jacques to have some other control over David, to get above him, so to speak. David operates with this constant, slow-burning judgment for all the gayness around him, and for Jacques to get him into bed would be to triumph over David’s criticisms. These are David’s words, his descriptions of it, and his appraisal of the situation is a man despising the boys he has slept with. That, surely, means more about David than Jacques.
Boys, he calls them. They are not men, though they are surely old enough to be lawfully men. It’s not a comment on their age, but more like a devaluing of their position in the negotiations, in the social order. David calls it “an auction block,” the way they offer themselves to the highest bidder, often Jacques (28). On Jacques desire for him, David says, “I pretended not to see, although I exploited it, the lust not quite sleeping in his bright, bitter eyes and, by means of the rough, male candor with which I conveyed to him his case was hopeless, I compelled him, endlessly, to hope” (28). His words indicate that he posits the “male” above the “boy.” He does something similar with Joey, bullying him as an outward expression of male dominance. He says this is “rough, male candor,” an interesting phrase. Candor is being truthful, and to make it rough is to make it blunt, frank. Sure, David does not need to have any interest, romantically, in Jacques simply because they are both gay; that would be absurd. But this “male” candor, is as if it is not “male” but “heterosexual.” David is surely not heterosexual, but he consistently denies it, even as he stands in an underground gay bar. And not only does he deny it, but he hates that he needs to deny it, to himself, and to those around him. When he finds someone of interest, like Giovanni, still he denies it, even as the sit and eat oysters, even as they flirt at the bar, even as they climb into a taxi together, until finally, they are in bed together.
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