In One Person

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In One Person Page 47

by John Winslow Irving


  “You’ve taught me a lot,” was all I could tell him. “I didn’t stop loving you, Larry, just because I stopped being your lover. I still love you.”

  “More overkill, Bill,” was all Larry said; he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even look at Elaine, and I knew how fond he was of her—and of her writing.

  “I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman,” Elaine had told me about Mrs. Kittredge. “I will never be as close to anyone again.”

  “How intimate?” I’d asked her; she’d not answered me.

  “It’s his mother who marked me!” Elaine had cried, about that aforementioned awful woman. “It’s her I’ll never forget!”

  “Marked you how?” I’d asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and we had done our adagio thing; we’d just held each other, saying nothing—doing our slowly, softly, gently routine. That was how we’d lived together in San Francisco, for what amounted to almost all of 1985.

  A lot of people left where they were living in the middle of the AIDS crisis; many of us moved somewhere else, hoping it would be better—but it wasn’t. There was no harm in trying; at least living together didn’t harm Elaine and me—it just didn’t work out for us to be lovers. “If that part were ever going to work,” Martha Hadley would tell us, but only after we’d ended the experiment, “I think it would have clicked when you were kids—not in your forties.”

  Mrs. Hadley had a point, as always, but Elaine and I didn’t entirely have a bad year together. I kept the photograph of Kittredge and Delacorte in dresses and lipstick as a bookmark in whatever book I was reading, and I left the particular book lying around in the usual places—on the night table on my side of the bed; on the kitchen countertop, next to the coffeemaker; in the small, crowded bathroom, where it would be in Elaine’s way. Well, Elaine’s eyesight was awful.

  It took almost a year for Elaine to see that photo; she came out of the bathroom, naked—she was holding the picture in one hand, and the book I’d been reading in the other. She had her glasses on, and she threw the book at me!

  “Why didn’t you just show it to me, Billy? I knew it was Delacorte, months ago,” Elaine told me. “As for the other kid, I just thought he was a girl!”

  “Quid pro quo,” I said to my dearest friend. “You’ve got something to tell me, too—don’t you?”

  It’s easy to see, with hindsight, how it might have gone better for us in San Francisco if we’d just told each other what we knew about Kittredge when we’d first heard about it, but you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.

  The photograph of Kittredge as a girl did not make him look—as his mother had allegedly described him to Elaine—like a “sickly little boy”; he (or that pretty girl in the picture) didn’t look like a child who had “no confidence,” as Mrs. Kittredge had supposedly told Elaine. Kittredge didn’t look like a kid who was “picked on by the other children, especially by the boys,” or so (I’d been told) that awful woman had said.

  “Mrs. Kittredge said that to you, right?” I asked Elaine.

  “Not exactly,” Elaine mumbled.

  It had been even harder for me to believe that Kittredge “was once intimidated by girls,” not to mention that Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son so that he would gain confidence—not that I’d ever completely believed this had happened, as I reminded Elaine.

  “It happened, Billy,” Elaine said softly. “I just didn’t like the reason—I changed the reason it happened.”

  I told Elaine about Kittredge stealing Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes; I told her what Delacorte had breathlessly cried, just before he died. Delacorte had clearly meant Kittredge—“he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!”

  “I didn’t want you to like him or forgive him, Billy,” Elaine told me. “I hated him for the way he just handed me over to his mother; I didn’t want you to pity him, or have sympathy for him. I wanted you to hate him, too.”

  “I do hate him, Elaine,” I told her.

  “Yes, but that’s not all you feel for him—I know,” she told me.

  Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge’s part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident—even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a girl. His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter—if not usually from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman—that would surely bring him to his senses!

  How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid—that is, the “right” way—and we’ll never so much as imagine having sex with another man!

  “You should have told me,” I said to Elaine.

  “You should have shown me the photograph, Billy.”

  “Yes, I should have—we both ‘should have.’”

  Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him—and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge as a woman.

  “A pretty one, too, I’ll bet,” Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the beautiful word.

  It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds—not to mention the as a woman part—staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.

  “Just don’t call Larry—not yet,” Elaine said.

  But I did call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. “I’ll find you a place to stay in New York,” I told Elaine. “If I can’t find two places in New York, I’ll try living in Vermont—you know, I’ll just try it.”

  “Your house has no furniture in it, Billy,” Elaine pointed out.

  “Ah, well . . .”

  That was when I called Larry.

  “I just have a cold—it’s nothing, Bill,” Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn’t a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about Pneumocystis pneumonia, and the fever.

  “What’s your T-cell count?” I asked him. “When were you going to tell me? Don’t bullshit me, Larry!”

  “Please come home, Bill—you and Elaine. Please, both of you, come home,” Larry said. (Just that—not a long speech—and he was out of breath.)

  Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street—just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet—or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry’s poetry patrons—the patroness, as I thought of her—had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it—we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)

  When Elaine and I moved in—to help the live-in nurse look after Larry—it was not the same as living “together”; we were done with that experiment. Larry’s house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleep-in nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day—in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn’t write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.

  Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he’d been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the
same man I’d admired when I first met him—in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn’t hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn’t walk or even stand, and he was incontinent—about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) “It’s my penis, again, Bill,” Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.

  “Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry,” Elaine would chime in.

  “Oh, I know—have you ever heard anything quite like it?” Larry would exclaim. “Please say it, Bill—give us the plural!”

  For Larry, I would do it—well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. “Penith-zizzes,” I said—always quietly, at first.

  “What? I can’t hear you,” Larry would say.

  “Louder, Billy,” Elaine said.

  “Penith-zizzes!” I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in—all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. “Penith-zizzes!”

  One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep. “What’s wrong?” the young nurse asked. (There he was, in his pajamas.)

  “We’re saying ‘penises’ in another language,” Larry explained. “Bill is teaching us.” But it was Larry who taught me.

  As I said once to Elaine: “I’ll tell you who my teachers were—the ones who meant the most to me. Larry, of course, but also Richard Abbott, and—maybe the most important of all, or at the most important time—your mother.”

  Lawrence Upton died in December of ’86; he was sixty-eight. (It’s hard to believe, but Larry was almost the same age I am now!) He lived for a year in hospice care, in that house on West Tenth Street. He died on Elaine’s shift, but she came and woke me up; that was the deal Elaine and I had made with each other, because we’d both wanted to be there when Larry died. As Larry had said about Russell, the night Russell died in Larry’s arms: “He weighed nothing.”

  The night Larry died, both Elaine and I lay beside him and cradled him in our arms. The morphine was playing tricks on Larry; who knows how consciously (or not) Larry said what he said to Elaine and me? “It’s my penis again,” Larry told us. “And again, and again, and again—it’s always my penis, isn’t it?”

  Elaine sang him a song, and he died when she was still singing.

  “That’s a beautiful song,” I told her. “Who wrote it? What’s it called?”

  “Felix Mendelssohn wrote it,” Elaine said. “Never mind what it’s called. If you ever die on me, Billy, you’ll hear it again. I’ll tell you then what it’s called.”

  THERE WERE A COUPLE of years when Elaine and I rattled around in that too-grand town house Larry had left us. Elaine had a vapid, nondescript boyfriend, whom I disliked for the sole reason that he wasn’t substantial enough for her. His name was Raymond, and he burned his toast almost every morning, setting off the frigging smoke detector.

  I was on Elaine’s shit list for much of that time, because I was seeing a transsexual who kept urging Elaine to wear sexier-looking clothes; Elaine wasn’t inclined to “sexier-looking.”

  “Elwood has bigger boobs than I have—everybody has,” Elaine said to me. Elaine purposely called my transsexual friend Elwood, or Woody. My transsexual friend called herself El. Soon everyone would be using the transgender word; my friends told me I should use it, too—not to mention those terribly correct young people giving me the hairy eyeball because I continued to say “transsexual” when I was supposed to say “transgender.”

  I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

  It suffices to say that the late eighties were a time of transition for Elaine and me, though some people apparently had nothing better to do than update the frigging gender language. It was a trying two years, and the financial effort to own and maintain that house on West Tenth Street—including the killer taxes—put a strain on our relationship.

  One evening, Elaine told me the story that she was sure she’d spotted Charles, poor Tom’s nurse, in a room at St. Vincent’s. (I’d stopped hearing from Charles.) Elaine had peered into a doorway—she was looking for someone else—and there was this shriveled former bodybuilder, his wrinkled and ruined tattoos hanging illegibly from the stretched and sagging skin of his once-powerful arms.

  “Charles?” Elaine had said from the doorway, but the man had roared like an animal at her; Elaine had been too frightened to go inside the room.

  I was pretty sure I knew who it was—not Charles—but I went to St. Vincent’s to see for myself. It was the winter of ’88; I’d not been inside that last-stop hospital since Delacorte had died and Mrs. Delacorte had injected herself with his blood. I went one more time—just to be certain that the roaring animal Elaine had seen wasn’t Charles.

  It was that terrifying bouncer from the Mineshaft, of course—the one they called Mephistopheles. He roared at me, too. I never set foot in St. Vincent’s again. (Hello, Charles—if you’re out there. If you’re not, I’m sorry.)

  That same winter, one night when I was out with El, I was told another story. “I just heard about this girl—you know, she was like me but a little older,” El said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I think you knew her—she went to Toronto,” El said.

  “Oh, you must mean Donna,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” El said.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “She’s not doing too well—that’s what I heard,” El told me.

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t say she was sick,” El said. “I just heard she’s not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone special to you, huh? I heard that, too.”

  I didn’t do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders,” Bob said.

  No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El’s story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: “I’m going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I’m going to try living in it.”

  “Sure, Billy—I understand,” Elaine said. “This is too much house for us, anyway—we should sell it.”

  That clown Raymond just sat there, eating his burned toast. (As Elaine would say later, Raymond was probably wondering where he was going to live next; he must have known it wouldn’t be with Elaine.)

  I said good-bye to El—either that same day or the next one. She wasn’t very understanding about it.

  I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. “Tell Richard I’m going to try it,” I told her.

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, Billy—Richard and I would love it if you were living here,” Martha Hadley said.

  That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.

  “It’s about Big Al, Billy,” Bob said. “This isn’t an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in The River Bulletin, but I gotta run the unedited version by you.”

  It was February 1990 in First Sister—colder than a witch’s tit, as we say in Vermont.

  Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she’d died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar—she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth—Bob didn’t have all the details.

  “What’s ‘a bunch,’ Bob—how many airmen wer
e there?” I asked him.

  “Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the airmen word—that’s all I can tell you, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

  “Young guys, right? Four of them? Were there four of them, Bob?” I asked him.

  “Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy—if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I’m just guessing about their ages,” Uncle Bob told me.

  Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.

  All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as “serious.” But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command “disciplined” its own, but Bob admitted that he didn’t truly understand how the “legal stuff” (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to why four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who—in their eyes—may or may not have been acceptable as a woman.

  My guess, and Bob’s, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship—or just a previous meeting—with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the intercrural sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only “by reputation”; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a real woman—it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes—it might have been only that, too.)

  Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent—as Coach Hoyt had predicted—that Big Al would never back down from a fight.

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

  Later, Bob and I agreed we were glad that Herm Hoyt hadn’t lived to hear about it. I called Elaine in New York that night. She had her own small place in Chelsea, just a little northwest of the West Village and due north of the Meatpacking District. I told Elaine about Miss Frost, and I asked her to sing me that Mendelssohn song—the one she’d said she was saving for me, the same one she’d sung for Larry.

 

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