In One Person

by John Irving

  "That's what Richard says," I told her.

  "Listen to Richard," Mrs. Hadley said. "He's a sweet man."

  It would be years later, when I had this thought: In a small, less-than-first-rate boarding school, there were various indications of the adult world--some truly sensitive and good-hearted grown-ups who were trying to make the adult world more comprehensible and more bearable for young people, while there were also those dinosaurs of an inflexible rectitude (the Dr. Graus and the Dr. Harlows) and the tirelessly intractable homophobes men of their ilk and generation have spawned.

  "How did Dr. Grau really die?" I asked Mrs. Hadley.

  The story they'd told us boys--Dr. Harlow had told us, in morning meeting--was that Grau had slipped and fallen in the quadrangle one winter night. The paths were icy; the old Austrian must have hit his head. Dr. Harlow did not say that Herr Doktor Grau actually froze to death--I believe that "hypothermia" was the term Dr. Harlow used.

  The boys who were on the kitchen crew found the body in the morning. One of them said that Grau's face was as white as the snow, and another boy told us that the old Austrian's eyes were open, but a third boy said the dead man's eyes were closed; there was agreement among the kitchen boys that Dr. Grau's Tyrolean hat (with a greasy-looking pheasant feather) was discovered at some distance from the body.

  "Grau was drunk," Martha Hadley told me. "There'd been a faculty dinner party in one of the dorms. Grau probably did slip and fall--he may have hit his head, but he was definitely drunk. He was passed out in the snow all night! He froze."

  Dr. Grau, like no small number of the faculty at Favorite River, had applied for a job at the academy because of the nearby skiing, but old Grau hadn't skied for years. Dr. Grau was terribly fat; he said he could still ski very well, but he admitted that, when he fell down, he couldn't get up--not without taking his skis off first. (I used to imagine Grau fallen on the slope, flailing to release his bindings, shouting "infantile sexual tendencies" in English and German.)

  I'd chosen German for my language requirement at Favorite River, but only because I'd been assured that there were three other German teachers at the academy; I never had to be taught by Herr Doktor Grau. The other German teachers were also Austrians--two of them skiers. My favorite, Fraulein Bauer, was the only nonskier.

  As I was leaving Mrs. Hadley's office, I suddenly remembered what Fraulein Bauer had told me; I made many grammatical mistakes in German, and the word-order business gave me fits, but my pronunciation was perfect. There was no German word I couldn't pronounce. Yet when I told Martha Hadley this news, she seemed barely interested--if at all. "It's psychological, Billy. You can say anything, in the sense that you're able to say it. But you either won't say a word, because it triggers something, or--"

  I interrupted her. "It triggers something sexual, you mean," I said.

  "Maybe," said Mrs. Hadley; she shrugged. She seemed barely interested in the sexual part of my pronunciation problems, as if sexual speculation (of any kind) was in a category as uninteresting to her as my excellent pronunciation in German. I had an Austrian accent, naturally.

  "I think you're as angry at your mother as she is at you," Martha Hadley told me. "At times, Billy, I think you're too angry to speak."

  "Oh."

  I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was Atkins, still staring at Mrs. Hadley's watch; I was surprised he didn't trip on the stairs. "It hasn't been thirty minutes yet," Atkins reported.

  "I'm leaving--you can go in," I told him, but Atkins had paused on the stairs, one step away from the third floor. I passed him as I headed down the stairs.

  The stairwell was wide; I must have been close to the ground floor when I heard Mrs. Hadley say, "Please come in."

  "But it hasn't been thirty minutes. It's not . . ." Atkins didn't (or couldn't) finish his thought.

  "It's not what?" I heard Martha Hadley ask him. I remember pausing on the stairs. "I know you can say it," she said gently to him. "You're wearing a tie--you can say tie, can't you?"

  "It's not . . . tie," Atkins managed.

  "Now say mmm--like when you eat something good," Mrs. Hadley told him.

  "I can't!" Atkins blurted out.

  "Please come in," Mrs. Hadley said again.

  "It's not tie--mmm!" Atkins struggled to say.

  "That's good--that's better, anyway. Please come in now," Martha Hadley told him, and I continued down the stairs and out of the music building, where I'd also heard snippets of songs, choral voices, and a second-floor segment of stringed instruments, and (on the ground floor) another in-progress piano practice. But my thoughts were entirely on what a loser and an idiot Atkins was--he couldn't pronounce the time word! What a fool!

  I was halfway across the quad, where Grau had died, when I thought that the hatred of homosexuals was perfectly in tune with my thinking. I couldn't pronounce penises, yet here I was feeling utterly superior to a boy who couldn't manage to say time.

  I remember thinking that, for the rest of my life, I would need to find more people like Martha Hadley, and surround myself with them, but that there would always be other people who would hate and revile me--or even try to cause me physical harm. This thought was as bracing as the winter air that killed Dr. Grau. It was a lot to absorb from one appointment with a sympathetic voice-and-singing teacher--this in addition to my disturbing awareness of Mrs. Hadley as a dominant personality, and that something to do with her dominance appealed to me sexually. Or was there something about her dominance that didn't appeal to me? (It only then occurred to me that maybe I wanted to be like Mrs. Hadley--that is, sexually--not be with her.)

  Maybe Martha Hadley was a hippie ahead of her time; the hippie word was not in use in 1960. At that time, I'd heard next to no mention of the gay word; it was a little-used word in the Favorite River Academy community. Maybe "gay" was too friendly a word for Favorite River--at least it was too neutral a word for all those homo-hating boys. I did know what "gay" meant, of course--it just wasn't said much, in my limited circles--but, as sexually inexperienced as I was, I'd given scant consideration to what was meant by "dominant" and "submissive" in the seemingly unattainable world of gay sex.

  NOT THAT MANY YEARS later, when I was living with Larry--of the men and women I've tried to live with, I lasted with Larry the longest--he liked to make fun of me by telling everyone how "shocked" I was at the way he picked me up in that gay coffeehouse, which was such a mysterious place, in Vienna.

  This was my junior year abroad. Two years of college German--not to mention my studying the language at Favorite River Academy--had prepared me for a year in a German-speaking country. These same two college years of living in New York City had both prepared me and not prepared me for how underground a gay coffeehouse in Vienna would be in that academic year of 1963-64. At that time, the gay bars in New York were being shut down; the New York World's Fair was in '64, and it was the mayor's intention to clean up the city for the tourists. One New York bar, Julius', remained open the whole time--there may have been others--but even at Julius', the men at the bar weren't permitted to touch one another.

  I'm not saying Vienna was more underground than New York at that time; the situation was similar. But in that place where Larry picked me up, there was some touching among the men--permitted or not. I just remember it was Larry who shocked me, not Vienna.

  "Are you a top or a bottom, beautiful Bill?" Larry had asked me. (I was shocked, but not by the question.)

  "A top," I answered, without hesitation.

  "Really!" Larry said, either genuinely surprised or feigning surprise; with Larry, this was often hard to tell. "You look like a bottom to me," he said, and after a pause--such a long pause that I'd thought he was going to ask someone else to go home with him--he added, "Come on, Bill, let's leave now."

  I was shocked, all right, but only because I was a college student, and Larry was my professor. This was the Institut fur Europaische Studien in Vienna--das Institut, the students called it. We were Americ
ans, from all over, but our faculty was a mixed bag: some Americans (Larry was by far the best-known among them), one wonderful and eccentric Englishman, and various Austrians from the faculty at the University of Vienna.

  In those days, the Institute for European Studies was on that end of the Wollzeile nearest the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz and the Stubenring. The students complained about how far das Institut was from the university; many of our students (the ones with better German) took additional courses at the University of Vienna. Not me; I wasn't interested in more courses. I'd gone to college in New York because I wanted to be in New York; I was studying abroad in Vienna to be in Vienna. I didn't care how near to or far from the university I was.

  My German was good enough to get me hired at an excellent restaurant on the Weihburggasse--near the opposite end of the Karntnerstrasse from the opera. It was called Zufall ("Coincidence"), and I got the job both because I had worked as a waiter in New York and because, shortly after I arrived in Vienna, I learned that the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall had been fired.

  I'd heard the story in that mysterious gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse--one of those side streets off the Graben. The Kaffee Kafig, it was called--the "Coffee Cage." During the day, it appeared to be mostly a student hangout; there were girls there, too--in fact, it was daytime when a girl told me that the waiter at Zufall had been fired. But after dark, the older men showed up at the Kaffee Kafig, and there weren't any girls around. That was how it was the night I ran into Larry, and he popped the top-or-bottom question.

  That first fall term at the Institute, I was not one of Larry's students. He was teaching the plays of Sophocles. Larry was a poet, and I wanted to be a novelist--I thought I was done with theater, and I didn't write poems. But I knew that Larry was a respected writer, and I'd asked him if he would consider offering a writing course--in either the winter or the spring term, in '64.

  "Oh, God--not a creative writing class!" Larry said. "I know--don't tell me. One day, creative writing will be taught everywhere!"

  "I just wanted to be able to show my writing to another writer," I told him. "I'm not a poet," I admitted. "I'm a fiction writer. I understand if you're not interested." I was walking away--I was trying to look hurt--when he stopped me.

  "Wait, wait--what is your name, young fiction writer?" Larry asked. "I do read fiction," he told me.

  I told him my name--I said "Bill," because Miss Frost owned the William name. (I would publish my novels under the name William Abbott, but I let no one else call me William.)

  "Well, Bill--let me think about it," Larry said. I knew then that he was gay, and everything else he was thinking, but I wouldn't become his student until January 1964, when he offered a creative writing course at the Institute in the winter term.

  Larry was the already-distinguished poet--Lawrence Upton, to his colleagues and students, but his gay friends (and a coterie of lady admirers) called him Larry. By then, I'd been with a few older men--I'd not lived with them, but they'd been my lovers--and I knew who I was when it came to the top-or-bottom business.

  It was not the crudeness of Larry's top-or-bottom question that shocked me; even his first-time students knew that Lawrence Upton was a famous snob who could also be notoriously crass. It was simply that my teacher, who was such a renowned literary figure, had hit on me--that shocked me. But that was never how Larry told the story, and there was no contradicting him.

  According to Larry, he hadn't asked me if I was a top or a bottom. "In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say 'top' and 'bottom'--we said 'pitcher' and 'catcher,' though of course you Vermonters might have been prescient," Larry said, "or so far ahead of the rest of us that you were already asking, 'Plus or minus?' while we less-progressive types were still stuck with the pitcher-or-catcher question, which soon would become the top-or-bottom question. Just not in the sixties, dear Bill. In Vienna, when I picked you up, I know I asked you if you were a pitcher or a catcher."

  Then, turning from me to our friends--his friends, for the most part; both in Vienna and later, back in New York, most of Larry's friends were older than I was--Larry would say, "Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound."

  Then, turning back to me--just me, as if we were alone--Larry would say, "Yet you insist on anachronisms, dear Bill--in the sixties, the top and bottom words are anachronisms."

  That was Larry; that was how he talked--he was always right. I learned not to argue about the smaller stuff. I would say, "Yes, Professor," because if I'd said he was mistaken, that he had absolutely used the top and bottom words, Larry would have made another crack about my being from Vermont, or he would have shot the breeze about my saying I was a pitcher when, all along, I'd looked like a catcher to him. (Didn't everyone think I looked like a catcher? Larry would usually ask his friends.)

  The poet Lawrence Upton was of that generation of older gay men who basically believed that most gay men were bottoms, no matter what they said--or that those of us who said we were tops would eventually be bottoms. Since Larry and I met in Vienna, our enduring disagreement concerning exactly what was said on our first "date" was further clouded by what many Europeans felt in the sixties, and still feel today--namely, that we Americans make entirely too much of the top-or-bottom business. The Europeans have always believed we were too rigid about these distinctions, as if everyone gay is either one or the other--as some young, cocksure types tell me nowadays.

  Larry--who was a bottom, if I ever knew one--could be both petulant and coy about how misunderstood he was. "I'm more versatile than you are!" he once said to me, in tears. "You may say you also like women, or you pretend that you do, but I'm not the truly inflexible one in this relationship!"

  By the late seventies, in New York, when we were still seeing each other but no longer living together--Larry called the seventies the "Blissful Age of Promiscuity"--you could only be absolutely sure of someone's sexual role in those overobvious leather bars, where a hankie in the back left pocket meant you were a top, and a hankie in the back right pocket signified that you were a bottom. A blue hankie was for fucking, a red one was for fist-fucking--well, what does it matter anymore? There was also that utterly annoying signal concerning where you clipped your keys--to the belt loop to the right or left of the belt buckle on your jeans. In New York, I paid no attention to where I clipped my keys; I was always getting hit on by some signal-conscious top, and I was a top! (It could be irritating.)

  Even in the late seventies, almost a decade after gay liberation, the older gays--I mean not only older than me but also older than Larry--would complain about the top-or-bottom advertising. ("Why do you guys want to take all the mystery away? Isn't the mystery an exciting part of sex?")

  I liked to look like a gay boy--or enough like one to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted the girls and women to wonder about me--to make them look twice at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine in my appearance. ("Are you trying to look toppish tonight?" Larry once asked me. Yes, maybe I was.)

  I remembered, when we were rehearsing The Tempest, how Richard had said that Ariel's gender was "mutable"; he'd said the sex of angels was mutable, too.

  "Director's choice?" Kittredge had asked Richard, about Ariel's mutability.

  I suppose I was trying to look sexually mutable, to capture something of Ariel's unresolved sexuality. I knew I was small but good-looking. I could also be invisible when I wanted to be--like Ariel, I could be "an airy Spirit." There is no one way to look bisexual, but that was the look I sought.

  Larry liked to make fun of me for having what he called a "Utopian notion of androgyny"; for his generation, I think that so-called liberated gays were no longer supposed to be "sissies." I know that Larry thought I looked (and dressed) like a sissy--that was probably why I looked like a bottom to him, not a top.

  But I saw myse
lf as an almost regular guy; by "regular," I mean only that I was never into leather or the bullshit hankie code. In New York--as in most cities, through the seventies--there was a lot of street cruising. Then, and now, I liked the androgynous look--nor were androgynous and androgyny ever words that gave me pronunciation problems.

  "You're a pretty boy, Bill," Larry often said to me, "but don't think you can stay ultra-thin forever. Don't imagine that you can dress like a razor blade, or even in drag, and have any real effect on the macho codes you're rebelling against. You won't change what real men are like, nor will you ever be one!"

  "Yes, Professor," was all I usually said.

  In the fabulous seventies, when I picked up a guy, or I let myself be picked up, there was always that moment when my hand got hold of his butt; if he liked to be fucked, he would start moaning and writhing around--just to let me know I'd hit the magic spot. But if he turned out to be a top, we would settle for a super-fast 69 and call it a night; sometimes, this would turn into a super-rough 69. (The "macho codes," as Larry called them, might prevail. My "Utopian notion of androgyny" might not.)

  It was Larry's formidable jealousy that eventually drove me away from him; even when you're as young as I was, there's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love. When Larry thought I'd been with someone else, he would try to touch my asshole--to feel if I was wet, or at least lubricated. "I'm a top, remember?" I used to tell him. "You should be sniffing my cock instead." But Larry's jealousy was insanely illogical; even knowing me as well as he did, he actually believed I was capable of being a bottom with someone else.

  When I met Larry in Vienna, he was making himself a student of opera there--the opera was why he'd come. The opera was partly why I'd chosen Vienna, too. After all, Miss Frost had made me a devoted reader of nineteenth-century novels. The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!

  Lawrence Upton was a well-established poet, but he'd always wanted to write a libretto. ("After all, Bill, I know how to rhyme.") Larry had this wish to write a gay opera. He was very strict with himself as a poet; maybe he imagined he could be more relaxed as a librettist. He may have wanted to write a gay opera, but Lawrence Upton never wrote an openly gay poem--that used to piss me off, more than a little.