In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  “Ha!” Atkins cried. “That’s a good question, Peter! What do you say to that, Bill?” There was a convulsion of coughing then, and more violent gasping; the boy ran to his dad and helped him put the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth, but the oxygen was ineffective. Atkins’s lungs weren’t functioning properly—he couldn’t draw enough air to help himself.

  “Is this a test, Tom?” I asked my old friend. “What do you want from me?”

  Peter Atkins just stood there, watching us. He helped his father pull the oxygen mask away from his mouth. “When you’re dying, everything is a test, Bill. You’ll see,” Tom said; with his son’s help, Atkins was putting the oxygen mask back in place, but he suddenly stopped the seemingly pointless process.

  “It’s a made-up story, Peter,” I told the boy. “The unhappy woman who poisons herself—even her feet are made up. It’s make-believe—the monster’s face in the darkness, too. It’s all imagined,” I said.

  “But this isn’t ‘imagined,’ is it?” the boy asked me. “My mom and my dad are dying—that isn’t imagined, is it?”

  “No,” I told him. “You can always find me, Peter,” I suddenly said to the boy. “I’ll be available to you—I promise.”

  “There!” Peter cried—not to me, to his dad. “I got him to say it! Does that make you happy? It doesn’t make me happy!” the boy cried.

  “Peter!” his mom was calling. “Let your father rest! Peter?”

  “I’m coming!” the boy called; he ran out of the room.

  Tom Atkins had closed his eyes again. “Let me know when we’re alone, Bill,” he gasped; he held the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose, but I could tell that—as little as the oxygen helped—he wanted it.

  “We’re alone,” I told Atkins.

  “I’ve seen him,” Tom whispered hoarsely. “He’s not at all who we thought he was—he’s more like us than we ever imagined. He’s beautiful, Bill!”

  “Who’s beautiful—who’s more like us than we ever imagined, Tom?” I asked, but I knew that the subject had changed; there’d been only one person Tom and I had always spoken of with fear and secrecy, with love and hatred.

  “You know who, Bill—I’ve seen him,” Atkins whispered.

  “Kittredge?” I whispered back.

  Atkins covered his mouth and nose with the oxygen mask; he was nodding yes, but it hurt him to move his head and he was making a torturous endeavor just to breathe.

  “Kittredge is gay?” I asked Tom Atkins, but this stimulated a prolonged coughing fit, which was followed by a self-contradictory nodding and shaking of his head. With my help, Atkins lifted the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose—albeit briefly.

  “Kittredge looks exactly like his mother!” Atkins gasped; then he was back on the mask, making the most horrible sucking sounds. I didn’t want to agitate him more than my presence already had. Atkins had closed his eyes again, though his face was frozen in more of a grimace than a smile, when I heard Elaine calling me.

  I found Elaine with Mrs. Atkins and the children in the kitchen. “He shouldn’t be on the oxygen if no one’s watching him—not for long, anyway,” Sue Atkins said when she saw me.

  “No, Mom—that’s not quite what Charles says,” Peter corrected her. “We just have to keep checking the tank.”

  “For God’s sake, Peter—please stop criticizing me!” Mrs. Atkins cried; this made her breathless. “That old tank is probably empty! Oxygen doesn’t really help him!” She coughed and coughed.

  “Charles shouldn’t allow the oxygen tank to be empty!” the boy said indignantly. “Daddy doesn’t know the oxygen doesn’t help him—sometimes he thinks it helps.”

  “I hate Charles,” the girl, Emily, said.

  “Don’t hate Charles, Emily—we need Charles,” Sue Atkins said, trying to catch her breath.

  I looked at Elaine; I felt truly lost. It surprised me that Emily was sitting next to Elaine on a couch facing the kitchen TV, which was off; the girl was curled up beside Elaine, who had her arm around the thirteen-year-old’s shoulders.

  “Tom believes in your character, Bill,” Mrs. Atkins said to me (as if my character had been under discussion for hours). “Tom hasn’t known you for twenty years, yet he believes he can judge your character by the novels you write.”

  “Which are made up, which are make-believe—right?” Peter asked me.

  “Please don’t, Peter,” Sue Atkins said tiredly, still struggling to suppress that not-so-innocent cough.

  “That’s right, Peter,” I said.

  “All this time, I thought Tom was seeing him,” Sue Atkins said to Elaine, pointing at me. “But Tom must have been seeing that other guy—the one you were all so crazy about.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said to Mrs. Atkins. “Tom told me he had ‘seen’ him—not that he ‘was seeing’ him. There’s a difference.”

  “Well, what do I know? I’m just the wife,” Sue Atkins said.

  “Do you mean Kittredge, Billy—is that who she means?” Elaine asked me.

  “Yes, that’s his name—Kittredge. I think Tom was in love with him—I guess you all were,” Mrs. Atkins said. She was a little feverish, or maybe it was the drugs she was taking—I couldn’t tell. I knew the Bactrim had given poor Tom a rash; I didn’t know where. I had only a vague idea of what other side effects were possible with Bactrim. I just knew that Sue Atkins had Pneumocystis pneumonia, so she was probably taking Bactrim and she definitely had a fever.

  Mrs. Atkins seemed numb, as if she were barely aware that her children, Emily and Peter, were right there with us—in the kitchen.

  “Hey—it’s just me!” a man’s voice called from the vestibule. The girl, Emily, screamed—but she didn’t detach herself from Elaine’s encompassing arm.

  “It’s just Charles, Emily,” her brother, Peter, said.

  “I know it’s Charles—I hate him,” Emily said.

  “Stop it, both of you,” their mother said.

  “Who’s Kittredge?” Peter Atkins asked.

  “I would like to know who he is, too,” Sue Atkins said. “God’s gift to men and women, I guess.”

  “What did Tom say about Kittredge, Billy?” Elaine asked me. I’d been hoping to have this conversation on the train, where we would be alone—or not to have it, ever.

  “Tom said he had seen Kittredge—that’s all,” I told Elaine. But I knew that wasn’t all. I didn’t know what Atkins had meant—that Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was; that Kittredge was more like us than we ever imagined.

  That poor Tom thought Kittredge was beautiful—well, that I had no trouble imagining. But Atkins had seemed to indicate that Kittredge was and wasn’t gay; according to Tom, Kittredge looked exactly like his mother! (I wasn’t about to tell Elaine that!) How could Kittredge look exactly like Mrs. Kittredge? I was wondering.

  Emily screamed. It must be Charles, the nurse, I thought, but no—it was Jacques, the dog. The old Lab was standing there, in the kitchen.

  “It’s just Jacques, Emily—he’s a dog, not a man,” Peter said disdainfully to his sister, but the girl wouldn’t stop screaming.

  “Leave her alone, Peter. Jacques is a male dog—maybe that did it,” Mrs. Atkins said. But when Emily didn’t or couldn’t stop screaming, Sue Atkins said to Elaine and me: “Well, it is unusual to see Jacques anywhere but at Tom’s bedside. Since Tom got sick, that dog won’t leave him. We have to drag Jacques outside to pee!”

  “We have to offer Jacques a treat just to get him to come to the kitchen and eat,” Peter Atkins was explaining, while his sister went on screaming.

  “Imagine a Lab you have to force to eat!” Sue Atkins said; she suddenly looked again at the old dog and started screaming. Now Emily and Mrs. Atkins were both screaming.

  “It must be Tom, Billy—something’s happened,” Elaine said, over the screaming. Either Peter Atkins heard her, or he’d figured it out by himself—he was clearly a smart boy.

  “Daddy!” the boy called, b
ut his mother grabbed him and clutched him to her.

  “Wait for Charles, Peter—Charles is with him,” Mrs. Atkins managed to say, though her shortness of breath had worsened. Jacques (the Labrador) sat there, just breathing.

  Elaine and I chose not to “wait for Charles.” We left the kitchen and ran along the downstairs hall to the now-open door to Tom’s onetime study. (Jacques, who—for a hesitant second—seemed of a mind to follow us, stayed behind on the kitchen floor. The old dog must have known that his master had departed.) Elaine and I entered the transformed room, where we saw Charles bent over the body on the hospital bed, which the nurse had elevated to ease his task. Charles kept his head down; he did not look up at Elaine and me, though it was clear to us both that the nurse knew we were there.

  I was horribly reminded of a man I’d seen a few times at the Mineshaft, that S&M club on Washington Street—at Little West Twelfth, in the Meatpacking District. (Larry would tell me the club was closed by the city’s Department of Health, but that wouldn’t be till ’85—four years after AIDS first appeared—which was when Elaine and I were conducting our experiment in living together in San Francisco.) The Mineshaft had a lot of disquieting action going on: There was a sling, for fist-fucking, suspended from the ceiling; there was a whole wall of glory holes; there was a room with a bathtub, where men were pissed on.

  The man Charles closely resembled was a tattooed muscleman with ivory-pale skin; he had a shaved-bald head, with a black patch of whiskers on the point of his chin, and two diamond-stud earrings. He wore a black leather vest and a jockstrap, and a well-shined pair of motorcycle boots, and his job at the Mineshaft was to dispatch people who needed dispatching. He was called Mephistopheles; on his nights “off” from the Mineshaft, he would hang out at a gay black bar called Keller’s. I think Keller’s was on West Street, on the corner of Barrow, near the Christopher Street pier, but I never went there—no white guys I knew did. (The story I’d heard at the Mineshaft was that Mephistopheles went to Keller’s to fuck black guys, or to pick fights with them, and it didn’t matter to Mephistopheles which he did; the fucking and the fighting were all the same to him, which was no doubt why he fit right in at an S&M joint like the Mineshaft.)

  Yet the male nurse, who was attending so carefully to my dead friend, was not that same Mephistopheles—nor were the ministrations Charles made to poor Tom’s remains of a deviant or sexual nature. Charles was fussing over the Hickman catheter dangling from Atkins’s unmoving chest.

  “Poor Tommy—it’s not my job to remove the Hickman,” the nurse explained to Elaine and me. “The undertaker will pull it out. You see, there’s a cuff—it’s like a Velcro collar, around the tube—just inside the point where it enters the skin. Tommy’s cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That’s what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn’t fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a very firm jerk, and out it comes,” Charles told us; Elaine looked away.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have left Tom alone,” I told the nurse.

  “Lots of people want to die alone,” the nurse said. “I know Tommy wanted to see you—I know he had something to say. I’ll bet he said it, right?” Charles asked me. He looked up at me and smiled. He was a strong, good-looking man with a crew cut and one silver earring—in the upper, cartilaginous part of his left ear. He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled, Charles looked nothing at all like the man I knew as Mephistopheles—a Mineshaft thug-enforcer.

  “Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say,” I told Charles. “He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter.”

  “Yes, well—good luck with that. I’m guessing that’ll be up to Peter!” Charles said. (I’d not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)

  “No, no, no!” we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.

  Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.

  “It didn’t seem that the oxygen was working,” I said to Charles.

  “It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it’s diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels—hence into your body,” the nurse explained.

  “Tom’s hands were so cold,” Elaine said.

  “Tommy didn’t want the ventilator,” Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins’s mouth. “I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him,” Charles said.

  “And Mrs. Atkins—her cough,” I said. “It’s just going to get worse, right?”

  “It’s a dry cough—sometimes it’s no cough. People make too much of the cough. It’s the shortness of breath that gets worse,” the nurse told me. “Tommy just ran out of breath,” Charles said.

  “Charles—we want to see him!” Mrs. Atkins was calling.

  “No, no, no,” Peter kept crying.

  “I hate you, Charles!” Emily shouted from the kitchen.

  “I know you do, honey!” Charles called back. “Just give me a second—all of you!”

  I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. “I underestimated him,” I said to Elaine.

  “Don’t cry now, Billy,” Elaine told me.

  I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me—or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed—but he was merely trying to give me his business card. “Call me, William Abbott—let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to.”

  “If he wants to,” I repeated, taking the nurse’s card.

  Usually, when anyone addressed me as “William Abbott,” I could tell the person was a reader—or that he (or she) at least knew I was “the writer.” But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn’t tell about the reader part.

  “Charles!” Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.

  Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can’t say that Tom Atkins looked “peaceful,” but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.

  “No, no, no,” his darling boy was crying—softer now.

  Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. “Oh, it’s you, Jacques,” the nurse said. “It’s okay—you can come in. Come on.”

  Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?

  In the doorway, the old dog stood—uncertain of his next arthritic step.

  “Come on, boy,” Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master’s former study. Charles lifted one of Tom’s cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.

  There were other presences in the doorway—soon to be in the small room with us—and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom’s bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. “How nice to have met you, finally,” the dying woman said. “Do stay in touch.” Like Tom’s father, twenty years ago, she didn’t shake my hand.

  The boy, Peter, didn’t once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he’d sat—expecting nothing—in the kitchen.

  All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn’t quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we’d asked to wait. (To my surprise, we’d been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we’d been there half our
lives.)

  “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.

  “What happens to the duck, Billy?” Elaine repeated—loudly enough, this time, so that I could hear her.

  Okay, so this is another epilogue, I was thinking.

  “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” Prospero says—act 4, scene 1. At one time, I’d actually imagined that The Tempest could and should end there.

  How does Prospero begin the epilogue? I was trying to remember. Of course Richard Abbott would know, but even when Elaine and I got back to New York, I knew I didn’t want to call Richard. (I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Hadley about Atkins.)

  “First line of the epilogue to The Tempest,” I said, as casually as I could, to Elaine in that funereal taxi. “You know—the end, spoken by Prospero. How’s it begin?”

  “‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,’” Elaine recited. “Is that the bit you mean, Billy?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” I told my dearest friend. That was exactly how I felt—o’erthrown.

  “Okay, okay,” Elaine said, putting her arms around me. “You can cry now, Billy—we both can. Okay, okay.”

  I was trying not to think of that line in Madame Bovary—Atkins had absolutely hated it. You know, that moment after Emma has given herself to the undeserving Rodolphe—when she feels her heart beating, “and the blood flowing in her body like a river of milk.” How that image had disgusted Tom Atkins!

  Yet, as hard as it was for me to imagine—having seen the ninety-something pounds of Atkins as he lay dying, and his doomed wife, whose blood was no “river of milk” in her diseased body—Tom and Sue Atkins must have felt that way, at least once or twice.

  “YOU’RE NOT SAYING THAT Tom Atkins told you Kittredge was gay—you’re not telling me that, are you?” Elaine asked me on the train, as I knew she would.

  “No, I’m not telling you that—in fact, Tom both nodded and shook his head at the gay word. Atkins simply wasn’t clear. Tom didn’t exactly say what Kittredge is or was, only that he’d ‘seen’ him, and that Kittredge was ‘beautiful.’ And there was something else: Tom said Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was, Elaine—I don’t know more,” I told her.