I looked at Larry, who I know was bursting with something to say; in an entirely different way from Tom Atkins—who had routinely overreacted to the vagina word, or to even the passing thought of a vagina—Larry could be counted on for a vagina reaction. “Don’t,” I said quietly to him, across the dinner table, because I could always tell when Larry was struggling to restrain himself; his eyes opened very wide and his nostrils flared.
But now it was the Korean girls who’d failed to understand. “A what?” Dong Hee had said.
“She hates, now loves, her what?” Su Min asked.
It was Fumi’s turn to snicker; the Japanese boy had put the peacock-turkey misunderstanding behind him—the lonely-looking young man obviously knew what a vagina was.
“You know, a vagina,” Elaine said softly to the Korean girls, but Su Min and Dong Hee had never heard the word—and no one at the dinner table knew the Korean for it.
“My goodness—it’s where babies come from,” Mrs. Hadley tried to explain, but she looked suddenly stricken (perhaps recalling Elaine’s abortions).
“It’s where everything happens—you know, down there,” Elaine said to the Korean girls, but Elaine didn’t do anything when she said “down there”; she didn’t point or gesture, or indicate anything specifically.
“Well, it’s not where everything happens—I beg to differ,” Larry said, smiling; I knew he was just getting started.
“Oh, I’m so sorry—I’ve had too much to drink, and I forgot there were young people here!” Helena blurted out.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” Uncle Bob told Gerry’s new girlfriend; I could tell Bob liked Helena, who was not at all similar to a long list of Gerry’s previous girlfriends. “These kids are from another country, another culture; the things we talk about in this country are not necessarily topics for conversation in Korea,” the Racquet Man painfully explained.
“Oh, crap!” Gerry cried. “Just try another fucking word!” Gerry turned to Su Min and Dong Hee, who were still very much in the dark as far as the vagina word was concerned. “It’s a twat, a snatch, a quim, a pussy, a muff, a honeypot—it’s a cunt, for Christ’s sake!” Gerry cried, the cunt word making Elaine (and even Larry) flinch.
“They get it, Gerry—please,” Uncle Bob said.
Indeed, the Korean girls had turned the color of a clean sheet of unlined paper; the Japanese kid had kept up, for the most part, although both “muff” and “honeypot” had surprised him.
“Is there a picture of it somewhere, Bill—if not in the encyclopedia?” Larry asked mischievously.
“Before I forget it, Bill,” Richard Abbott interjected—I could tell Richard was tactfully trying to drop the vagina subject—“what about the Mossberg?”
“The what?” Fumi asked, in a frightened voice; if the muff and honeypot vulgarisms for vagina had thrown him, the Japanese boy had never heard the Mossberg word before.
“What about it?” I asked Richard.
“Shall we auction it off with the furniture, Bill? You don’t want to keep that old carbine, do you?”
“I’ll hang on to the Mossberg, Richard,” I told him. “I’ll keep the ammunition, too—if I ever live here, it makes sense to have a varmint gun around.”
“You’re in town, Billy,” Uncle Bob pointed out, about the River Street house. “You’re not supposed to shoot in town—not even varmints.”
“Grandpa Harry loved that gun,” I said.
“He loved his wife’s clothes, too, Billy,” Elaine said. “Are you going to keep her clothes around?”
“I don’t see you becoming a deer hunter, Bill,” Richard Abbott said. “Even if you do decide to live here.” But I wanted that Mossberg .30-30—they could all see that.
“What do you want a gun for, Bill?” Larry asked me.
“I know you’re not opposed to trying to keep a secret, Billy,” Elaine told me. “You’re just not any good at keeping secrets.”
Elaine had not kept many secrets from me, but if she had a secret, she knew how to keep it; I could never very successfully keep a secret, even when I wanted to keep one.
I could see that Elaine knew why I wanted to hang on to that Mossberg .30-30. Larry knew, too; he was looking at me with a hurt expression—as if he were saying (without actually saying it), “How can you conceive of not letting me take care of you—how can you not die in my arms, if you’re ever dying? How can you even imagine sneaking off and shooting yourself, if you get sick?” (That’s what Larry’s look said, without the words.)
Elaine was giving me the same hurt look as Larry.
“Whatever you want, Bill,” Richard Abbott said; Richard looked hurt, too—even Mrs. Hadley seemed disappointed in me.
Only Gerry and Helena had stopped paying attention; they were touching each other under the table. The vagina conversation seemed to have distracted them from what remained of our Thanksgiving dinner. The Korean girls were once more whispering in Korean; the lonely-looking Fumi was writing something down in a notebook not much bigger than the palm of his hand. (Maybe the Mossberg word, so he could use it in the next all-male dormitory conversation—such as, “I would really like to get into her Mossberg.”)
“Don’t,” Larry said quietly to me, as I’d earlier said across the table to him.
“You should see Herm Hoyt while you’re in town, Billy,” Uncle Bob was saying—a welcome change of subject, or so I first imagined. “I know the coach would love to have a word with you.”
“What about?” I asked Bob, with badly faked indifference, but the Racquet Man was busy; he was pouring himself another beer.
Robert Fremont, my uncle Bob, was sixty-seven. He was retiring next year, but he’d told me that he would continue to volunteer his services to Alumni Affairs, and particularly continue to contribute to the academy’s alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. Whatever one thought of Uncle Bob’s “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”—well, what can I say?—his enthusiasm for tracking down the school’s most elusive alums made him very popular with folks in Alumni Affairs.
“What would Coach Hoyt like to have a word with me about?” I tried asking Uncle Bob again.
“I think you gotta ask him yourself, Billy,” the ever-genial Racquet Man said. “You know Herm—he can be a kind of protective fella when it comes to talking about his wrestlers.”
“Oh.”
Maybe not a welcome change of subject, I thought.
IN ANOTHER TOWN, AT a later time, the Facility—“for assisted living, and beyond”—would probably have been named the Pines, or (in Vermont) the Maples. But you have to remember the place was conceived and constructed by Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman; ironically, neither of them would die there.
Someone had just died there, on that Thanksgiving weekend when I went to visit Herm Hoyt. A shrouded body was bound to a gurney, which an elderly, severe-looking nurse was standing guard over in the parking lot. “You’re neither the person nor the vehicle I’m waitin’ for,” she told me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s gonna snow, too,” the old nurse said. “Then I’ll have to wheel him back inside.”
I tried to change the subject from the deceased to the reason for my visit, but—First Sister being the small town it was—the nurse already knew who I was visiting. “The coach is expectin’ ya,” she said. When she’d told me how to find Herm’s room, she added: “You don’t look much like a wrestler.” When I told her who I was, she said: “Oh, I knew your mother and your aunt—and your grandfather, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You’re the writer,” she added, with her eyes focused on the ash-end of her cigarette. I realized that she’d wheeled the body outside because she was a smoker.
I was forty-two that year; I judged the nurse to be at least as old as my aunt Muriel would have been—in the latter half of her sixties. I agreed that I was “the writer,” but before I could leave her in the parking lot, the nurse said: “You were a Favorite River boy, wer
en’t ya?”
“Yes, I was—’61,” I said. I could see her scrutinizing me now; of course she would have heard everything about me and Miss Frost—everyone of a certain age had heard all about that.
“Then I guess ya knew this fella,” the old nurse said; she passed her hand over the body bound to the gurney, but she touched nothing. “I’m guessin’ he’s waitin’ in more ways than one!” the nurse said, exhaling an astonishing plume of cigarette smoke. She was wearing a ski parka and an old ski hat, but no gloves—the gloves would have interfered with her cigarette. It was just starting to snow—some scattered flakes were falling, not nearly enough to have accumulated on the body on the gurney.
“He’s waitin’ for that idiot kid from the funeral home, and he’s waitin’ in whatchamacallit!” the nurse exclaimed.
“Do you mean purgatory?” I asked her.
“Yes, I do—what is that, anyway?” she asked me. “You’re the writer.”
“But I don’t believe in purgatory, or all the rest of it—” I started to say.
“I’m not askin’ ya to believe in it,” she said. “I’m askin’ ya what it is!”
“An intermediate state, after death—” I started to answer her, but she wouldn’t let me finish.
“Like Almighty God is decidin’ whether to send this fella to the Underworld or the Great Upstairs—isn’t that supposed to be what’s goin’ on there?” the nurse asked me.
“Kind of,” I said. I had a limited recollection of what purgatory was for—for some kind of expiatory purification, if I remembered correctly. The soul, in that aforementioned intermediate state after death, was expected to atone for something—or so I guessed, without ever saying it. “Who is it?” I asked the old nurse; as she had done, I moved my hand safely above the body on the gurney. The nurse narrowed her eyes as she looked at me; it might have been the smoke.
“Dr. Harlow—you remember him, don’tcha? I’m guessin’ it won’t take the Almighty too long to decide about him!” the old nurse said.
I just smiled and left her to wait for the hearse in the parking lot. I didn’t believe that Dr. Harlow could ever atone enough; I believed he was already in the Underworld, where he belonged. I hoped that the Great Upstairs had no room for Dr. Harlow—he who had been so absolute about my affliction.
Herm Hoyt told me that Dr. Harlow had moved to Florida after he’d retired. But when he got sick—he’d had prostate cancer; it had metastasized, as that cancer does, to bone—Dr. Harlow had asked to come back to First Sister. He’d wanted to spend his last days in the Facility. “I can’t figure out why, Billy,” Coach Hoyt said. “Nobody here ever liked him.” (Dr. Harlow had died at age seventy-nine; I hadn’t seen the bald-headed owl-fucker since he’d been a man in his fifties.)
But Herm Hoyt hadn’t asked to see me because he’d wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard from Miss Frost,” I said to her old wrestling coach. “Is she all right?”
“Funny—that’s what she wanted to know about you, Billy,” Herm said.
“You can tell her I’m all right,” I said quickly.
“I never asked her to tell me the sexual details—in fact, I would just as soon know nothin’ about that stuff, Billy,” the coach continued. “But she said there’s somethin’ you should know—so you won’t worry about her.”
“You should tell Miss Frost I’m a top,” I told him, “and I’ve been wearing condoms since ’68. Maybe she won’t worry too much about me, if she knows that,” I added.
“Jeez—I’m too old for more sexual details, Billy. Just let me finish what I started to say!” Herm said. He was ninety-one, not quite a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Herm had Parkinson’s, and Uncle Bob had told me that the coach was having difficulty with one of his medications; it was something Herm was supposed to take for his heart, or so Bob had thought. (The Parkinson’s was why Coach Hoyt had moved into the Facility in the first place.)
“I’m not even pretendin’ that I understand this, Billy, but here’s what Al wanted you to know—forgive me, what she wanted you to know. She doesn’t actually have sex,” Herm Hoyt told me. “She means not with anybody, Billy—she just doesn’t ever do it. She’s gone to a world of trouble to make herself a woman, but she doesn’t ever have sex—not with men or women, I’m tellin’ you, not ever. There’s somethin’ Greek about what she does—she said you knew all about it, Billy.”
“Intercrural,” I said to the old wrestling coach.
“That’s it—that’s what she called it!” Herm cried. “It’s nothin’ but rubbin’ your thing between the other fella’s thighs—it’s just rubbin’, isn’t it?” the wrestling coach asked me.
“I’m pretty sure you can’t get AIDS that way,” I told him.
“But she was always this way, Billy—that’s what she wants you to know,” Herm said. “She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger.”
“Pull the trigger,” I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as protecting me; I’d not once imagined that—for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously—she was also protecting herself.
“No penetratin’, no bein’ penetrated—just rubbin’,” Coach Hoyt repeated. “Al said—she said; I’m sorry, Billy—‘That’s as far as I can go, Herm. That’s all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can’t ever pull the trigger.’ That’s what she told me to tell you, Billy.”
“So she’s safe,” I said. “She really is all right, and she’s going to stay all right.”
“She’s sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, ‘she’s safe’—what do you mean, ‘she’s gonna stay all right’? Nobody stays all right, Billy! Gettin’ old isn’t safe!” Coach Hoyt exclaimed. “I’m just tellin’ you she doesn’t have AIDS. She didn’t want you worryin’ about her havin’ AIDS, Billy.”
“Oh.”
“Al Frost—sorry, Miss Frost to you—never did anything safe, Billy. Shit,” the old coach said, “she may look like a woman—I know she’s got the moves down pat—but she still thinks, if you can call it that, like a fuckin’ wrestler. It’s just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be wrestlin’, Billy—that’s not safe at all.”
Fucking wrestlers! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were finally talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging wrestling; they were all like that! It didn’t make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost wasn’t like other wrestlers; she’d put the wrestling behind her—at least that had been my impression.
“What are you saying, Herm?” I asked the old coach. “Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to wrestle him? Is she going to pick a fight?”
“Some guys aren’t gonna be satisfied with the rubbin’ part, are they?” Herm asked me. “She won’t pick a fight—she doesn’t pick fights, Billy—but I know Al. She’s not gonna back down from a fight—not if some dickhead who wanted more than a rubbin’ picks a fight with her.”
I didn’t want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the intercrural part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn’t—that she truly couldn’t—have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.
Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? “I just like to look the part,” Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn’t that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn’t that sound like she was satisfied with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.
“How’s that duck-under, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.
“Oh, I’ve been practicing,” I told him—kind of a white lie, wasn’t it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson’s, or one of the medications he was taking—the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.
We hugged each other good-bye; it was t
he last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders.” (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)
When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow’s shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. “Still waitin’,” she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. “I’ve decided not to wheel him back inside,” the nurse informed me. “He can’t feel the snow fallin’ on him.”
“I’ll tell you something about him,” I said to the old nurse. “He’s exactly the same now as he always was—dead certain.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow’s body. “I’m not quarrelin’ with you over language,” she told me. “You’re the writer.”
ONE SNOWY DECEMBER NIGHT after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park—exactly at that distant intersection—was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.
My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.
The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”—so to speak—and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)
In One Person Page 45