“España,” I said quietly to myself, as I was helping Elaine up those three flights of stairs in Bancroft Hall; it’s a good thing I didn’t have to get her as far as her bedroom, which was on the frigging fifth floor.
As we were navigating the third-floor dormitory hall, I must have softly said “España” again—not so softly, I guess, because Elaine heard me.
“I’m a little worried about what kind of blow job an España is, exactly. It’s not rough stuff, is it, Billy?” Elaine asked me.
There was a boy in his pajamas in the hall—such a little boy, and he had his toothbrush in his hand. From his frightened expression, he obviously didn’t know who Elaine and I were; he’d also clearly heard what Elaine had asked about the España blow job.
“We’re just fooling around,” I told the small boy. “There’s not going to be any rough stuff. There’s not going to be a blow job!” I said to Elaine and the boy in pajamas. (With his toothbrush, he’d reminded me of Trowbridge, of course.)
“Trowbridge is dead. Did you know Trowbridge? He was killed in Vietnam,” I told Elaine.
“I didn’t know any Trowbridge,” Elaine said; like me, Elaine couldn’t stop staring at the young boy in pajamas. “You’re crying, Billy—please stop crying,” Elaine said. We were leaning on each other when I managed to open the door to silent Richard’s apartment. “Don’t worry about him crying—his mom just died. He’ll be all right,” Elaine said to the boy holding his toothbrush. But I had seen Trowbridge standing there, and perhaps I foresaw that there were more casualties coming; maybe I’d imagined all the body-counting in the not-too-distant future.
“Billy, Billy—please stop crying,” Elaine was saying. “What did you mean? ‘There’s not going to be a blow job!’ Do you think I’m bluffing? You know me, Billy—I’ve stopped bluffing. I don’t bluff anymore, Billy,” she babbled on.
“My father is alive. He’s living in Spain, and he’s happy. That’s all I know, Elaine,” I told her. “My dad, Franny Dean, is living in Spain—España.” But that was as far as I got.
Elaine had slipped off her coat as we’d stumbled through Richard and my mother’s living room; she’d kicked off her shoes and her skirt, upon entering my bedroom, and she was struggling to unbutton the buttons on her blouse when—on another level of half-consciousness—Elaine saw the bed of my adolescent years and dove for it, or she somehow managed to throw herself on it.
By the time I knelt next to her on the bed, I could see that Elaine had completely passed out; she was limp and unmoving as I took off her blouse and unclasped her rather uncomfortable-looking necklace. I put her to bed in her bra and panties, and went about the usual business of getting into the small bed beside her.
“España,” I whispered in the dark.
“You’ll show me, right?” Elaine said in her sleep.
I fell asleep thinking about why I had never tried to find my father. A part of me had rationalized this: If he’s curious about me, let him find me, I’d thought. But in truth I had a fabulous father; my stepfather, Richard Abbott, was the best thing that ever happened to me. (My mom had never been happy, but Richard was the best thing that ever happened to her, too; my mother must have been happy with Richard.) Maybe I’d never tried to find Franny Dean because finding him would have made me feel I was betraying Richard.
“What’s up with you, Jacques Kittredge?” the Racquet Man had written; of course I fell asleep thinking about that, too.
Chapter 12
A WORLD OF EPILOGUES
Do epidemics herald their own arrivals, or do they generally arrive unannounced? I had two warnings; at the time, they seemed merely coincidental—I didn’t heed them.
It was a few weeks after my mother’s death before Richard Abbott began to speak again. He continued to teach his classes at the academy—albeit by rote, Richard had even managed to direct a play—but he had nothing personal to say to those of us who loved him.
It was April of that same year (’78) when Elaine told me that Richard had spoken to her mother. I called Mrs. Hadley immediately after I got off the phone with Elaine.
“I know Richard’s going to call you, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Just don’t expect him to be quite his old self.”
“How is he?” I asked her.
“I’m trying to say this carefully,” Mrs. Hadley said. “I don’t want to blame Shakespeare, but there’s such a thing as too much graveyard humor—if you ask me.”
I didn’t know what Martha Hadley meant; I just waited for Richard to call. I think it was May before I finally heard from him, and Richard just started right in—as if we’d never been out of touch.
Given his grief, I would have guessed that Richard hadn’t had the time or inclination to read my third novel, but he’d read it. “The same old themes, but better done—the pleas for tolerance never grow tiresome, Bill. Of course, everyone is intolerant of something or someone. Do you know what you’re intolerant of, Bill?” Richard asked me.
“What would that be, Richard?”
“You’re intolerant of intolerance—aren’t you, Bill?”
“Isn’t that a good thing to be intolerant of?” I asked him.
“And you are proud of your intolerance, too, Bill!” Richard cried. “You have a most justifiable anger at intolerance—at intolerance of sexual differences, especially. God knows, I would never say you’re not entitled to your anger, Bill.”
“God knows,” I said cautiously. I couldn’t quite see where Richard was going.
“As forgiving as you are of sexual differences—and rightly so, Bill!—you’re not always so forgiving, are you?” Richard asked.
“Ah, well . . .” I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I’d heard it before. Richard had told me that I’d not been standing in my mother’s shoes in 1942, when I was born; he’d said I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him—it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.
“As Portia says: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ Act four, scene one—but I know it’s not your favorite Shakespeare, Bill,” Richard Abbott said.
Yes, we’d fought about The Merchant of Venice in the classroom—eighteen years ago. It was one of the few Shakespeare plays we’d read in class that Richard had not directed onstage. “It’s a comedy—a romantic comedy—but with an unfunny part,” Richard had said. He meant Shylock—Shakespeare’s incontrovertible prejudice against Jews.
I took Shylock’s side. Portia’s speech about “mercy” was vapid, Christian hypocrisy; it was Christianity at its most superior-sounding and most saccharine. Whereas Shylock has a point: The hatred of him has taught him to hate. Rightly so!
“I am a Jew,” Shylock says—act 3, scene 1. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” I love that speech! But Richard didn’t want to be reminded that I’d always been on Shylock’s side.
“Your mom is dead, Bill. Have you no feelings for your mother?” Richard asked me.
“No feelings,” I repeated. I was remembering her hatred of homosexuals—her rejection of me, not only because I looked like my father but also because I had something of his weird (and unwelcome) sexual orientation.
“How does Shylock put it?” I asked Richard Abbott. (I knew perfectly well how Shylock put it, and Richard had long understood how I’d embraced this.)
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Shylock asks. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
“Okay, Bill—I know, I know. You’re a pound-of-flesh kind of guy,” Richard said.
“‘And if you wrong us,’” I said, quoting Shylock, “‘shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.’ And what did they do to Shylock, Richard?” I asked. “They forced him to become a fucking Christian!”
“It’s a difficult play, Bill—that’s why I’ve not put it onstage,” Richard said. “I�
��m not sure it’s suitable for kids in a secondary school.”
“How are you doing, Richard?” I asked him, hoping to change the subject.
“I remember that boy who was ready to rewrite Shakespeare—that boy who was so sure the epilogue to The Tempest was extraneous,” Richard said.
“I remember that boy, too,” I told him. “I was wrong about that epilogue.”
“If you live long enough, Bill—it’s a world of epilogues,” Richard Abbott said.
That was the first warning I paid no attention to. Richard was only twelve years older than I was; that’s not such a big difference—not when Richard was forty-eight and I was thirty-six. We seemed almost like contemporaries in 1978. I’d been only thirteen when Richard had taken me to get my first library card—that evening when we both met Miss Frost. At twenty-five, Richard Abbott had seemed so debonair to me—and so authoritative.
At thirty-six, I didn’t find anyone “authoritative”—not even Larry, not anymore. Grandpa Harry, while he was steadfastly good-hearted, was slipping into strangeness; even to me (a pillar of tolerance, as I saw myself), Harry’s eccentricities had been more acceptable onstage. Not even Mrs. Hadley was the authority she once seemed, and while I listened to my best friend, Elaine, who knew me so well, I increasingly took Elaine’s advice with a grain of salt. (After all, Elaine wasn’t any better—or more reliable—in relationships than I was.) I suppose if I’d heard from Miss Frost—even at the know-it-all age of thirty-six—I might still have found her authoritative, but I didn’t hear from her.
I did, albeit cautiously, heed Herm Hoyt’s advice: The next time I encountered Arthur, that wrestler who was my age and also ran around the reservoir in Central Park, I asked him if I was still welcome to practice my less-than-beginner-level wrestling skills at the New York Athletic Club—that is, now that Arthur understood I was a bisexual man in need of improving my self-defense, and not a real wrestler.
Poor Arthur. He was one of those well-intentioned straight guys who wouldn’t have dreamed of being cruel—or even remotely unkind—to gays. Arthur was a liberal, open-minded New Yorker; he not only prided himself on being fair—he was exceedingly fair—but he agonized over what was “right.” I could see him suffering over how “wrong” it would be not to invite me to his wrestling club, just because I was—well, as Uncle Bob would say, a little light in the loafers.
My very existence as a bisexual was not welcomed by my gay friends; they either refused to believe that I really liked women, or they felt I was somehow dishonest (or hedging my bets) about being gay. To most straight men—even a prince among them, which Arthur truly was—a bisexual man was simply a gay guy. The only part about being bi that even registered with straight men was the gay part. That was what Arthur would be up against when he talked about me to his pals at the wrestling club.
This was the end of the freewheeling seventies; while acceptance of sexual differences wasn’t necessarily the norm, such acceptance was almost normal in New York—in liberal circles, such acceptance was expected. But I felt responsible for the spot I’d put Arthur in; I had no knowledge of the tight-assed elements in the New York Athletic Club, in those days when the venerable old institution was an all-male bastion.
I have no idea what Arthur had to go through just to get me a guest pass, or an athletic pass, to the NYAC. (Like my final draft classification, or reclassification, I’m not sure what my stupid pass to the New York Athletic Club was called.)
“Are you crazy, Billy?” Elaine asked me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? That place is notoriously anti-everything. It’s anti-Semitic, it’s anti-black.”
“It is?” I asked her. “How do you know?”
“It’s anti-women—I fucking know that!” Elaine had said. “It’s an Irish Catholic boys’ club, Billy—just the Catholic part ought to have you running for the hills.”
“I think you would like Arthur,” I told Elaine. “He’s a good guy—he really is.”
“I suppose he’s married,” Elaine said with a sigh.
Come to think of it, I had seen a wedding ring on Arthur’s left hand. I never fooled around with married men—with married women, sometimes, but not with married men. I was bisexual, but I was long over being conflicted. I couldn’t stand how conflicted married men were—that is, when they were also interested in gay guys. And according to Larry, all married men were disappointing lovers.
“Why?” I’d asked him.
“They’re freaks about gentleness—they must have learned to be gentle from their pushy wives. Those men have no idea how boring ‘gentle’ is,” Larry told me.
“I don’t think ‘gentle’ is always boring,” I said.
“Please pardon me, dear Bill,” Larry had said, with that characteristically condescending wave of his hand. “I’d forgotten you were steadfastly a top.”
I really liked Larry, more and more, as a friend. I had even grown to like how he teased me. We’d both been reading the memoir of a noted actor—“a noted bi,” Larry called him.
The actor claimed that, all his life, he had “fancied” older women and younger men. “As you might imagine,” the noted actor wrote, “when I was younger, there were many older women who were available. Now that I’m older—well, of course, there are many more available younger men.”
“I don’t see my life as that neat,” I said to Larry. “I don’t imagine being bi will ever seem exactly well rounded.”
“Dear Bill,” Larry said—in that way he had, as if he were writing me an important letter. “The man is an actor—he isn’t bi, he’s gay. No wonder—now that he’s older—there are many more younger men around! Those older women were the only women he felt safe with!”
“That’s not my profile, Larry,” I told him.
“But you’re still a young man!” Larry had cried. “Just wait, dear Bill—just wait.”
IT BECAME, OF COURSE, a source of both comedy and concern—with the women I saw and the gay men I knew—that I regularly attended wrestling practice at the NYAC. My gay friends refused to believe that I had next to no homoerotic interest in the wrestlers I met at the club, but my crushes on that kind of wrong person had been a phase for me, perhaps a part of the coming-out process. (Well, okay—a slowly passing, not-altogether-gone phase.) Straight men didn’t often attract me, at least not very much; that they could sense this, as Arthur did, had made it increasingly possible for me to have straight men for friends.
Yet Larry insisted that my wrestling practices were a kind of high-energy, risky cruising; Donna, my dear but easily offended transsexual friend, dismissed what she called my “duck-under fixation” as the cultivation of a death wish. (Soon after this pronouncement, Donna disappeared from New York—to be followed by reports that she’d been sighted in Toronto.)
As for the wrestlers at the New York Athletic Club, they were a mixed lot—in every respect, not only in how they treated me. My women friends, Elaine among them, believed that it was only a matter of time before I would be beaten to a pulp, but I was not once threatened (or deliberately hurt) at the NYAC.
The older guys generally ignored me; once someone cheerfully said, when we were introduced, “Oh, you’re the gay guy—right?” But he shook my hand and patted me on the back; later, he always smiled and said something friendly when we saw each other. We weren’t in the same weight-class. If he was avoiding contact with me—on the mat, I mean—I wouldn’t have known.
There was the occasional mass evacuation of the sauna, when I made an after-practice appearance there. I spoke to Arthur about it. “Maybe I should steer clear of the sauna—do you think?”
“That’s your call, Billy—that’s their problem, not yours,” Arthur said. (I was “Billy” to all the wrestlers.)
I decided, despite Arthur’s assurances, to stay out of the sauna. Practices were at seven in the evening; I became almost comfortable going to them. I was not called—at least not to my face—“the gay guy,” except for that one time. I was commonly r
eferred to as “the writer”; most of the wrestlers hadn’t read my sexually explicit novels—those pleas for tolerance of sexual differences, as Richard Abbott would continue to describe my books—but Arthur had read them. Like many men, he’d told me that his wife was my biggest fan.
I was always hearing that from men about the women in their lives—their wives, their girlfriends, their sisters, even their mothers, were my biggest fans. Women read fiction more than men do, I would guess.
I’d met Arthur’s wife. She was very nice; she truly read a lot of fiction, and I liked much of what she liked—as a reader, I mean. Her name was Ellen—one of those perky blondes with a pageboy cut and an absurdly small, thin-lipped mouth. She had the kind of stand-up boobs that belied an otherwise unisex look—boy, was she ever not my kind of girl! But she was genuinely sweet to me, and Arthur—bless his heart—was very married. There would be no introducing him to Elaine.
In fact, beyond having a beer in the NYAC tap room with Arthur, I did no socializing with the wrestlers I’d met at the club. The wrestling room was then on the fourth floor—at the opposite end of the hall from the boxing room. One of my frequent workout partners in the wrestling room—Jim Somebody (I forget his last name)—was also a boxer. All the wrestlers knew I’d had no competitive wrestling experience—that I was there for the self-defense aspect of the sport, period. In support of my self-defense, Jim took me down the hall to the boxing room; he tried to show me how to defend myself from being hit.
It was interesting: I never really learned how to throw a decent punch, but Jim taught me how to cover up—how not to get hit so hard. Occasionally, one of Jim’s punches would land a little harder than he’d intended; he always said he was sorry.
In the wrestling room, too, I took some occasional (albeit accidental) punishment—a split lip, a bloody nose, a jammed finger or thumb. Because I was concentrating so hard on various ways to set up (and conceal) my duck-under, I was banging heads a lot; you more or less have to bang heads if you like being in the collar-tie. Arthur inadvertently head-butted me, and I took a few stitches in the area of my right eyebrow.
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