by John Irving
"She's got more than one move, doesn't she?" I asked him.
"Yeah, but Al's not gettin' any younger," Coach Hoyt told me. "You best get home, Billy--there's enough light to see by."
I thanked him; I made my way across the absolutely empty Favorite River campus. I wanted to see Elaine, and hug her and kiss her, but I didn't think that would be our future. I had a summer ahead of me to explore the much-ballyhooed sexual everything with Tom Atkins, but I liked boys and girls; I knew Atkins couldn't provide me with everything.
Was I enough of a romantic to believe Miss Frost knew this about me? Did I believe she was the first person to understand that no one person could ever give me everything?
Yes, probably. After all, I was only nineteen--a bisexual boy with a pretty good duck-under. It was just one move, and I was no wrestler, but you can learn a lot from good teachers.
Chapter 11
ESPANA
"You should wait, William," Miss Frost had said. "The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing--even devastating--consequences."
"I'll wait to read it until then," I'd told her.
Is it any wonder that this was the novel I took with me to Europe in the summer of 1961, when I was traveling with Tom?
I'd just begun reading Madame Bovary when Atkins asked me, "Who is she, Bill?" In his tone of voice, and by the pitiful-looking way poor Tom was biting his lower lip, I perceived that he was jealous of Emma Bovary. I hadn't yet met the woman! (I was still reading about the oafish Charles.)
I even shared with Atkins that passage about Charles's father encouraging the boy to "take great swigs of rum and to shout insults at religious processions." (A promising upbringing, I'd oh-so-wrongly concluded.) But when I read poor Tom that defining observation of Charles--"the audacity of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct"--I could see how hurtful this was. It would not be the last time I underestimated Atkins's inferiority complex. After that first time, I couldn't read Madame Bovary to myself; I was permitted to read that novel only if I read every word of it aloud to Tom Atkins.
Granted: Not every new reader of Madame Bovary takes away from that novel a distrust (bordering on hatred) of monogamy, but my contempt of monogamy was born in the summer of '61. To be fair to Flaubert, it was poor Tom's craven need for monogamy that I loathed.
What an awful way to read that wonderful novel--out loud to Tom Atkins, who feared infidelity even as the first sexual adventure of his young life was just getting started! The aversion Atkins felt for Emma's adultery was akin to his gag reflex at the vagina word; yet well before Emma's descent into infidelity, poor Tom was revolted by her--the description of "her satin slippers, with their soles yellowed from the beeswax on the dance-floor" disgusted him.
"Who cares about that sickening woman's feet?" Atkins cried.
Of course it was Emma's heart that Flaubert was exposing--"contact with the rich had left it smeared with something that would never fade away."
"Like the beeswax on her slippers--don't you see?" I asked poor Tom.
"Emma is nauseating," Atkins replied. What I soon found nauseating was Tom's conviction that having sex with me was the only remedy for how he'd "suffered" while listening to Madame Bovary.
"Then let me read it to myself!" I begged him. But, in that case, I would have been guilty of neglecting him--worse, I would have been choosing Emma's company over his!
And so I read aloud to Atkins--"she was filled with lust, with rage, with hatred"--while he writhed; it was as if I were torturing him.
When I read aloud that part where Emma is so enjoying the very idea of having her first lover--"as if a second puberty had come upon her"--I believed that Atkins was going to throw up in our bed. (I thought Flaubert would have appreciated the irony that poor Tom and I were in France at the time, and there was no toilet in our room at the pension--only a bidet.)
While Atkins went on vomiting in the bidet, I considered how the infidelity that poor Tom truly feared--namely, mine--was thrilling to me. With the accidental assistance of Madame Bovary, I see now why I added monogamy to the list of distasteful things I associated with the exclusively heterosexual life, but--more accurately--it was Tom Atkins who was to blame. Here we were, in Europe--experiencing the sexual everything that Miss Frost had so protectively withheld from me--and Atkins was already agonizing over the eventuality of my leaving him (perhaps, but not necessarily, for someone else).
While Atkins was barfing in that bidet in France, I kept reading aloud to him about Emma Bovary. "She summoned the heroines from the books she had read, and the lyric host of these unchaste women began their chorus in her memory, sister-voices, enticing her." (Don't you just love that?)
Okay, it was cruel--how I raised my voice with that bit about the "unchaste women"--but Atkins was noisily retching, and I wanted to be heard over the running water in the bidet.
Tom and I were in Italy when Emma poisoned herself and died. (This was around the time I was compelled to keep looking at that prostitute with the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and poor Tom had noticed me looking at her.)
" 'Soon she was vomiting blood,' " I read aloud. By then, I thought I understood those things that Atkins disapproved of--even as they attracted me--but I'd not foreseen the vehemence with which Tom Atkins could disapprove. Atkins cheered when the end was near, and Emma Bovary was vomiting blood.
"Let me see if I understand you correctly, Tom," I said, pausing just before that moment when Emma starts screaming. "Your cheers indicate to me that Emma is getting what she deserves--is that what you're saying?"
"Well, Bill--of course she deserves it. Look what she's done! Look how she's behaved!" Atkins cried.
"She has married the dullest man in France, but because she fucks around, she deserves to die in agony--is that your point, Tom?" I asked him. "Emma Bovary is bored, Tom. Should she just stay bored--and by so doing earn the right to die peacefully, in her sleep?"
"You're bored, aren't you, Bill? You're bored with me, aren't you?" Atkins asked pitifully.
"Not everything is about us, Tom," I told him.
I would regret this conversation. Years later, when Tom Atkins was dying--at that time when there were so many righteous souls who believed poor Tom, and others like him, deserved to die--I regretted that I had embarrassed Atkins, or that I'd ever made him feel ashamed.
Tom Atkins was a good person; he was just an insecure guy and a cloying lover. He was one of those boys who'd always felt unloved, and he loaded up our summer relationship with unrealistic expectations. Atkins was manipulative and possessive, but only because he wanted me to be the love of his life. I think poor Tom was afraid he would always be unloved; he imagined he could force the search for the love of his life into a single summer of one-stop shopping.
As for my ideas about finding the love of my life, I was quite the opposite to Tom Atkins; that summer of '61, I was in no hurry to stop shopping--I'd just started!
Not that many pages further on in Madame Bovary, I would read aloud Emma's actual death scene, her final convulsion--upon hearing the blind man's tapping stick and his raucous singing. Emma dies imagining "the beggar's hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster."
Atkins was shaking with guilt and terror. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone, Bill!" poor Tom cried. "I didn't mean it--I didn't mean she deserved that, Bill!"
I remember holding him while he cried. Madame Bovary is not a horror story, but the novel had that effect on Tom Atkins. He was very fair-skinned, with freckles on his chest and back, and when he got upset and cried, his face flushed pink--as if someone had slapped him--and his freckles looked inflamed.
When I read on in Madame Bovary--that part where Charles finds Rodolphe's letter to Emma (Charles is so stupid, he tells himself that his unfaithful wife and Rodolphe must have loved each other "platonically")--Atkins was wincing, as if i
n pain. " 'Charles was not one of those men who like to get to the bottom of things,' " I continued, while poor Tom moaned.
"Oh, Bill--no, no, no! Please tell me I'm not one of those men like Charles. I do like to get to the bottom of things!" Atkins cried. "Oh, Bill--I honestly do, I do, I do!" He once more dissolved in tears--as he would again, when he was dying, when poor Tom indeed got to the bottom of things. (It was not the bottom that any of us saw coming.)
"Is there eternal darkness, Bill?" Atkins would one day ask me. "Is there a monster's face, waiting there?"
"No, no, Tom," I would try to assure him. "It's either just darkness--no monster, no anything--or it's very bright, truly the most amazing light, and there are lots of wonderful things to see."
"No monsters, either way--right, Bill?" poor Tom would ask me.
"That's right, Tom--no monsters, either way."
We were still in Italy, that summer of '61, when I got to the end of Madame Bovary; by then, Atkins was such a self-pitying wreck that I'd snuck into the WC and read the ending to myself. When it was time for the reading-aloud part, I skipped that paragraph about the autopsy on Charles--that horrifying bit when they open him up and find nothing. I didn't want to deal with poor Tom's distress at the nothing word. ("How could there have been nothing, Bill?" I imagined Atkins asking.)
Maybe it was the fault of the paragraph I omitted from my reading, but Tom Atkins wasn't content with the ending of Madame Bovary.
"It's just not very satisfying," Atkins complained.
"How about a blow job, Tom?" I asked him. "I'll show you satisfying."
"I was being serious, Bill," Atkins told me peevishly.
"So was I, Tom--so was I," I said.
After that summer, it wasn't a surprise to either of us that we went our separate ways. It was easier, for a while, to maintain a limited but cordial correspondence than to see each other. I wouldn't hear from Atkins for a couple of our college years; I guessed that he might have tried having a girlfriend, but someone told me Tom was lost on drugs, and that there'd been an ugly and very public exposure of a homosexual kind. (In Amherst, Massachusetts!) This was early enough in the sixties that the homosexual word had a forbiddingly clinical sound to it; at that time, of course, homosexuals had no "rights"--we weren't even a "group." I was still living in New York in '68, and even in New York there wasn't what I would have called a gay "community," not a true community. (Just all the cruising.)
I suppose the frequency with which gay men encountered one another in doctors' offices might have constituted a different kind of community; I'm kidding, but it was my impression that we had more than our fair share of gonorrhea. In fact, a gay doctor (who was treating me for the clap) told me that bisexual men should wear condoms.
I don't remember if the clap doctor said why, or if I asked him; I probably took his unfriendly advice as further evidence of prejudice against bisexuals, or maybe this doctor reminded me of a gay Dr. Harlow. (In '68, I knew a lot of gay guys; their doctors weren't telling them to wear condoms.)
The only reason I remember this incident at all is that I was about to publish my first novel, and I had just met a woman I was interested in, in that way; at the same time, of course, I was constantly meeting gay guys. And it wasn't only because of this clap doctor (with the apparent prejudice against bisexuals) that I started wearing a condom; I credit Esmeralda for making condoms appealing to me, and I missed Esmeralda--I definitely did.
In any case, the next time I heard from Tom Atkins, I had become a condom-wearer and poor Tom had a wife and children. As if that weren't shocking enough, our correspondence had degenerated to Christmas cards! Thus I learned, from a Christmas photo, that Tom Atkins had a family--an older boy, a younger girl. (Needless to say, I hadn't been invited to the wedding.)
In the winter of 1969, I became a published novelist. The woman I'd met in New York around the time I was persuaded to wear a condom had lured me to Los Angeles; her name was Alice, and she was a screenwriter. It was somehow reassuring that Alice had told me she wasn't interested in "adapting" my first novel.
"I'm not going down that road," Alice said. "Our relationship means more to me than a job."
I'd told Larry what Alice had said, thinking this might reassure him about her. (Larry had met Alice only once; he hadn't liked her.)
"Maybe you should consider, Bill, what Alice means," Larry said. "What if she already pitched your novel to all the studios, and no one was interested?"
Well, my old pal Larry was the first to tell me that no one would ever make a film from my first novel; he also told me I would hate living in L.A., although I think what Larry meant (or hoped) was that I would hate living with Alice. "She's not your soprano understudy, Bill," Larry said.
But I liked living with Alice--Alice was the first woman I'd lived with who knew I was bisexual. She said it didn't matter. (Alice was bisexual.)
Alice was also the first woman I'd talked to about having a child together--but, like me, she was no fan of monogamy. We'd gone to Los Angeles with a bohemian belief in the enduring superiority of friendship; Alice and I were friends, and we both believed that the concept of "the couple" was a dinosaur idea. We'd given each other permission to have other lovers, though there were limitations--namely, it was okay with Alice if I saw men, just not other women, and I told her it was okay with me if she saw women, just not other men.
"Uh-oh," Elaine had said. "I don't think those kinds of arrangements work."
At the time, I wouldn't have considered Elaine to be an authority on "arrangements"; I also knew that, even in '69, Elaine had expressed an on-again, off-again interest in our living together. But Elaine was steadfast in her resolution never to have any children; she hadn't changed her mind about the size of babies' heads.
Alice and I additionally believed, most naively, in the enduring superiority of writers. Naturally, we didn't see each other as rivals; she was a screenwriter, I was a novelist. What could possibly go wrong? ("Uh-oh," as Elaine would say.)
I'd forgotten that my first conversation with Alice had been about the draft. When I got summoned for a physical--I can't remember exactly when this was, or many other details, because I had a terrible hangover that day--I checked the box that said something along the lines of "homosexual tendencies," which I vaguely recall whispering to myself in an Austrian accent, as if Herr Doktor Grau were still alive and speaking to me.
The army psychiatrist was a tight-assed lieutenant; I remember him. He kept his office door open while he interrogated me--so that the recruits who were waiting their turn could overhear us--but I'd lived through earlier and vastly smarter intimidation tactics. (Think of Kittredge.)
"And then what?" Alice had asked, when I was telling her the story. She was a great person to tell a story to; Alice always gave me the impression that she couldn't wait to hear what happened next. But Alice was impatient with the vagueness of my draft story.
"You don't like girls?" the lieutenant had asked me.
"Yes, I do--I do like girls," I told him.
"Then what are your 'homosexual tendencies,' exactly?" the army psychiatrist asked.
"I like guys, too," I told him.
"You do?" he asked. "Do you like guys better than you like girls?" the psychiatrist continued loudly.
"Oh, it's just so hard to choose," I said, a little breathlessly. "I really, really like them both!"
"Uh-huh," the lieutenant said. "And do you see this tendency continuing?"
"Well, I certainly hope so!" I said--as enthusiastically as I could manage. (Alice loved this story; at least she said she did. She thought it would make a funny scene in a movie.)
"The funny word should have warned you, Bill," Larry would tell me much later, when I was back in New York. "Or the movie word, maybe."
What might have warned me about Alice was that she took notes when we were talking. "Who takes notes on conversations?" Larry had asked me; not waiting for an answer, he'd also asked, "And which of you likes it that she
doesn't shave her armpits?"
About two weeks after I'd checked the box for "homosexual tendencies," or whatever the stupid form said, I received my classification notice--or maybe it was my reclassification notice. I think it was a 4-F; I was found "not qualified"; there was something about the "established physical, mental, or moral standards."
"But exactly what did the notification say--what was your actual classification?" Alice had asked me. "You can't just think it was a Four-F."
"I don't remember--I don't care," I told her.
"But that's just so vague!" Alice said.
Of course the vague word should have warned me, too.
There'd been a follow-up letter, perhaps from the Selective Service, but maybe not, telling me to see a shrink--not just any shrink, but a particular one.
I'd sent the letter to Grandpa Harry; he and Nils knew a lawyer, for their logging and lumber business. The lawyer said that I couldn't be forced to see a shrink; I didn't, and I never heard from the draft again. The problem was that I'd written about this--albeit in passing--in my first novel. I didn't realize it was my novel Alice was interested in; I thought she was interested in every little thing about me.
"Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy," I wrote in that novel. (Alice had told me how much she loved that line.) The first-person narrator is an out-of-the-closet gay man who's in love with the protagonist, who refuses to check the "homosexual tendencies" box; the protagonist, who is an in-the-closet gay man, will die in Vietnam. You might say it is a story about how not coming out can kill you.
One day, I could tell that Alice was really agitated. She seemed to be working on so many projects at the same time--I never knew which screenplay she was writing, at any given moment. I just assumed that one of these scripts-in-progress was causing her agitation, but she confessed to me that one of the studio execs she knew had been "bugging" her about me and my first novel.
He was a guy she regularly made a point of putting down. "Mr. Sharpie," she sometimes called him--or "Mr. Pastel," more recently. I had the impression of an immaculate dresser, but a guy who wore golfing clothes--light-colored clothes, anyway. (You know: lime-green pants, pink polo shirts--pastel colors.)