In One Person

by John Irving

  Alice told me that Mr. Pastel had asked her if I would try to "interfere" with a film based on my novel--if there ever were a movie made. Mr. Sharpie must have known she lived with me; he'd asked her if I would be "compliant" to changes in my story.

  "Just the usual novel-to-screenplay sort of changes, I guess," Alice said vaguely. "The guy just has a lot of questions."

  "Like what?" I asked her.

  "Where does the service-to-my-country part come into the story?" the studio exec in the light-colored clothing had asked Alice. I was a little confused by the question; I thought I'd written an anti-Vietnam novel.

  But in the exec's opinion, the reason the closeted gay protagonist doesn't check the "homosexual tendencies" box is that he feels an obligation to serve his country--not that he's so afraid to come out, he would rather risk dying in an unjust war!

  In this studio exec's opinion, "our voice-over character" (he meant my first-person narrator) admits to homosexual tendencies because he's a coward; the exec even said, "We should get the idea that he's faking it." The faking-it idea was Mr. Sharpie's substitute for my idea, in the novel--namely, that my first-person narrator is being brave to come out!

  "Who is this guy?" I asked Alice. No one had made me an offer for the film rights to my novel; I still owned those rights. "It sounds like someone is writing a script," I said.

  Alice's back was to me. "There's no script," she mumbled. "This guy just has a lot of questions about what you're like to deal with," Alice said.

  "I don't know the guy," I told her. "What's he like to 'deal with,' Alice?"

  "I was trying to spare you meeting this guy, Bill," was all Alice said. We were living in Santa Monica; she was always the driver, so she was sparing me the driving, too. I just stayed in the apartment and wrote. I could walk to Ocean Avenue and see the homeless people--I could run on the beach.

  What was it Herm Hoyt had said to me about the duck-under? "You hit it and run--you know how to run, don'tcha?" the old coach had said.

  I started to run in Santa Monica, in '69. I would soon be twenty-seven; I was already writing my second novel. It had been eight years since Miss Frost and Herm Hoyt had showed me how to hit a duck-under; I was probably a little rusty. The running suddenly seemed like a good idea.

  Alice drove me to the meeting. There were four or five studio execs gathered around an egg-shaped table in a glassy building in Beverly Hills, with near-blinding sunlight pouring through the windows, but only Mr. Sharpie spoke.

  "This is William Abbott, the novelist," Mr. Sharpie said, introducing me; it was probably my extreme self-consciousness, but I thought the novelist word made all the execs uneasy. To my surprise, Mr. Sharpie was a slob. The Sharpie word wasn't a compliment to how the guy dressed; it referred to the brand of waterproof pen he twirled in his hand. I hate those permanent markers. You can't really write with them--they bleed through the page; they make a mess. They're only good for making short remarks in the wide margins of screenplays--you know, manageable words like "This is shit!" or "Fuck this!"

  As for where the "Mr. Pastel" nickname came from--well, I couldn't see it. The guy was an unshaven slob dressed all in black. He was one of those execs who was trying to look like an artist of some indeterminate kind; he wore a sweat-stained black jogging suit over a black T-shirt, with black running shoes. Mr. Pastel looked very fit; since I'd just started running, I could see at a glance he ran harder than I did. Golf wasn't his game--it would have been insufficient exercise for him.

  "Perhaps Mr. Abbott will tell us his thoughts," Mr. Sharpie said, twirling his waterproof pen.

  "I'll tell you when I might take seriously the idea of service to my country," I began. "When local, state, and federal legislation, which currently criminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, is repealed; when the country's archaic anti-sodomy laws are overturned; when psychiatrists stop diagnosing me and my friends as clinically abnormal, medically incompetent freaks in need of 'rehabilitation'; when the media stops representing us as sissy, pansy, fairy, child-molesting perverts! I would actually like to have children one day," I said, pausing to look at Alice, but she had lowered her head and sat at the table with one hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes. She was wearing jeans and a man's blue-denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up--her customary uniform. In the sunlight, her hairy arms sparkled.

  "In short," I continued, "I might take seriously the idea of service to my country when my country begins to demonstrate that it gives a shit about me!" (I had rehearsed this speech while running on the beach--from the Santa Monica Pier to where Chautauqua Boulevard ends at the Pacific Coast Highway, and back again--but I'd not realized that the hairy mother of my future children and the studio exec who thought my first-person narrator should be faking his homosexual tendencies were in cahoots.)

  "You know what I love?" this same studio exec said then. "I love that voice-over about childhood. How's it go, Alice?" the craven shit asked her. That's when I knew they were fucking each other; it was the way he'd asked the question. And if the "voice-over" existed, someone was already writing the script.

  Alice knew she'd been caught. With her hand on her forehead--still shielding her eyes--she recited, with resignation, " 'Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.' "

  "Yeah--that's it!" the exec cried. "I love that so much, I think it should begin and end our movie. It bears repeating, doesn't it?" he asked me, but he wasn't waiting for an answer. "It's the tone of voice we want--isn't it, Alice?" he asked.

  "You know how much I love that line, Bill," Alice said, still shielding her eyes. Maybe Mr. Pastel's underwear was light-colored, I thought--or perhaps his sheets.

  I couldn't just get up and leave. I didn't know how to get back to Santa Monica from Beverly Hills; Alice was the driver in our little would-be family.

  "Look at it this way, dear Bill," Larry said, when I came back to New York in the fall of '69. "If you'd had children with that conniving ape, your kids would have been born with hairy armpits. Women who want babies will say and do anything!"

  But I think I'd wanted children, with someone--okay, maybe with anyone--as sincerely as Alice had. Over time, I would give up the idea of having children, but it's harder to stop wanting to have children.

  "Do you think I would have been a good mother, William?" Miss Frost had asked me once.

  "You? I think you would be a fantastic mother!" I said to her.

  "I said 'would have been,' William--not 'would be.' I'm not ever going to be a mother now," Miss Frost told me.

  "I think you would have been a terrific mom," I told her.

  At the time, I didn't understand why Miss Frost had made such a big deal of the "would have been" or "would be" business, but I get it now. She'd given up the idea of ever having children, but she couldn't stop the wanting part.

  WHAT REALLY PISSED ME off about Alice and the fucking movie business is that I was living in Los Angeles when the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village--in June of '69. I missed the Stonewall riots! Yes, I know it was street hustlers and drag queens who first fought back, but the resultant protest rally in Sheridan Square--the night after the raid--was the start of something. I wasn't happy that I was stuck in Santa Monica, still running on the beach and relying on Larry to tell me what had happened back in New York. Larry had certainly not been to the Stonewall with me--not ever--and I doubt he was among the patrons on that June night when some gays resisted the now-famous raid. But to hear Larry talk, you would think he was the first gay man to cruise Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street, and that he was among the regulars at the Stonewall--even that he'd been carted off to jail with the kicking, punching drag queens, when (as I later learned) Larry had been with his patrons-of-poetry people in the Hamptons, or with that young poetaster of a Wall Street guy Larry was fucking on Fire Island. (His name was Russell.)

  And it wasn't until I came back to New York that my dearest friend, Elaine, admitted to me that
Alice had hit on her the one time Elaine had visited us in Santa Monica.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked Elaine.

  "Billy, Billy," Elaine began, as her mother used to preface her admonitions to me, "did you not know that your most insecure lovers will always try to discredit your friends?"

  Of course I did know that, or I should have. I'd already learned it from Larry--not to mention Tom Atkins.

  And it was right around that time when I heard again from poor Tom. A dog (a Labrador retriever) had been added to the photograph on the Atkins family Christmas card of 1969; at the time, Tom's children struck me as too young to be going to school, but the breakup with Alice had caused me to pay less attention to children. Enclosed with the Christmas card was what I first mistook for one of those third-person Christmas letters; I almost didn't read it, but then I did.

  It was Tom Atkins trying hard to write a book review of my first novel--a most generous (albeit awkward) review, as it turned out. As I would later learn, all of poor Tom's reviews of my novels would conclude with the same outrageous sentence. "It's better than Madame Bovary, Bill--I know you don't believe me, but it really is!" Coming from Atkins, of course I knew that anything would be better than Madame Bovary.

  LAWRENCE UPTON'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY party was on a bitter-cold Saturday night in New York, in February of 1978. I was no longer Larry's lover--not even his occasional fuck buddy--but we were close friends. My third novel was about to be published--around the time of my birthday, in March of that same year--and Larry had read the galleys. He'd pronounced it my best book; that Larry's praise had been unqualified spooked me somewhat, because Larry wasn't known for withholding his reservations.

  I'd met him in Vienna, when he'd been forty-five; I'd had fifteen years of listening to Lawrence Upton's edgy endorsements, which had included his often barbed appreciation of me and my writing.

  Now, even at the sumptuous bash for his sixtieth--at the Chelsea brownstone of his young Wall Street admirer, Russell--Larry had singled me out for a toast. I was going to be thirty-six in another month; I was unprepared to have Larry toast me, and my soon-to-be-published novel--especially among his mostly older, oh-so-superior friends.

  "I want to thank most of you for making me feel younger than I am--beginning with you, dear Bill," Larry had begun. (Okay--perhaps Larry was being a little barbed, to Russell.)

  I knew it wouldn't be a late night, not with all the old farts in that crowd, but I'd not expected such a warmhearted event. I wasn't living with anyone at the time; I had a few fuck buddies in the city--they were men my age, for the most part--and I was very fond of a young novelist who was teaching in the writing program at Columbia. Rachel was just a few years younger than I was, in her early thirties. She'd published two novels and was working on a book of short stories; at her invitation, I'd visited one of her writing classes, because the students were reading one of my novels. We'd been sleeping with each other for a couple of months, but there'd been no talk of living together. Rachel had an apartment on the Upper West Side, and I was in a comfortable-enough apartment on Third Avenue and East Sixty-fourth. Keeping Central Park between us seemed an acceptable idea. Rachel had just escaped from a long, claustrophobic relationship with someone she described as a "serial-marriage zealot," and I had my fuck buddies.

  I'd brought Elaine to Larry's birthday party. Larry and Elaine really liked each other; frankly, until my third novel, which Larry praised so generously, I'd had the feeling that Larry liked Elaine's writing better than mine. This was okay with me; I felt the same way, though Elaine was a doggedly slow writer. She'd published only one novel and one small collection of stories, but she was always busy writing.

  I mention how cold it was in New York that night, because I remember that was why Elaine decided she would come uptown and spend the night in my apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street; Elaine was living downtown, where she was renting the loft of a painter friend on Spring Street, and that fuck-head painter's place was freezing. Also, how cold it was in Manhattan serves as a convenient foreshadow to how much colder it must have been in Vermont on that same February night.

  I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, when the phone rang; it hadn't been a late party for Larry, as I've said, but it was late for me to be getting a phone call, even on a Saturday night.

  "Answer it, will you?" I called to Elaine.

  "What if it's Rachel?" Elaine called to me.

  "Rachel knows you--she knows we're not doing it, Elaine!" I called from the bathroom.

  "Well, it will be weird if it's Rachel--believe me," Elaine said, answering the phone. "Hello--this is Billy's old friend, Elaine," I heard her say. "We're not having sex; it's just a cold night to be alone downtown," Elaine added.

  I finished brushing my teeth; when I came out of the bathroom, Elaine wasn't talking. Either the caller had hung up, or whoever it was was giving an earful to Elaine--maybe it was Rachel and I shouldn't have let Elaine answer the phone, I was thinking.

  Then I saw Elaine on my bed; she'd found a clean T-shirt of mine to wear for pajamas, and she was already under the covers with the phone pressed to her ear and tears streaking her face. "Yes, I'll tell him, Mom," Elaine was saying.

  I couldn't imagine under what circumstances Mrs. Hadley might have been prompted to call me; I thought it unlikely that Martha Hadley would have had my phone number. Perhaps because it was a milestone night for Larry, I was inclined to imagine other potential milestones.

  Who had died? My mind raced through the likeliest suspects. Not Nana Victoria; she was already dead. She'd "slipped away" when she was still in her seventies, I'd heard Grandpa Harry say--as if he were envious. Maybe he was--Harry was eighty-four. Grandpa Harry was fond of spending his evenings in his River Street home--more often than not, in his late wife's attire.

  Harry had not yet "slipped away" into the dementia that would (one day soon) cause Richard Abbott and me to move the old lumberman into the assisted-living facility that Nils Borkman and Harry had built for the town. I know I've already told you this story--how the other residents of the Facility (as the elderly of First Sister ominously called the place) complained about Grandpa Harry "surprising" them in drag. I would think at the time: After a few episodes when Harry was in drag, how could anyone have been surprised? But Richard Abbott and I immediately moved Grandpa Harry back to the privacy of his River Street home, where we hired a round-the-clock nurse to look after him. (All this--and more, of course--awaited me, in my not-too-distant future.)

  Oh, no! I thought--as Elaine hung up the phone. Don't let it be Grandpa Harry!

  I wrongly imagined that Elaine knew my thoughts. "It's your mom, Billy. Your mom and Muriel were killed in a car crash--nothing's happened to Miss Frost," Elaine quickly said.

  "Nothing's happened to Miss Frost," I repeated, but I was thinking: How could I not once have contacted her, in all these years? I hadn't even tried! Why did I never seek her out? She would be sixty-one. I was suddenly astonished that I hadn't seen Miss Frost, or heard one word about her, in seventeen years. I hadn't even asked Herm Hoyt if he'd heard from her.

  On this bitter-cold night in New York, in February of 1978, when I was almost thirty-six, I had already decided that my bisexuality meant I would be categorized as more unreliable than usual by straight women, while at the same time (and for the same reasons) I would never be entirely trusted by gay men.

  What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever "protected" anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile? How could I be almost forty and not love anyone as sincerely as I loved Elaine? How could I not have lived up to those expectations Miss Frost must have had for me? She'd protected me, but for what reason? Had she simply delayed my becoming promiscuous? That was never a word used positively, for if gay men were more openly promiscuous--even more deliberately so than straight guys--bisexuals were often accused of being more promis
cuous than anybody!

  If Miss Frost were to meet me now, who would she think I most resembled? (I don't mean in my choice of partners; I mean in the sheer number, not to mention the shallowness, of my relationships.)

  "Kittredge," I answered myself, aloud. What tangents I would take--not to think about my mother! My mom was dead, but I couldn't or wouldn't let myself think about her.

  "Oh, Billy, Billy--come here, come here. Don't go down that road, Billy," Elaine said, holding out her arms to me.

  THE CAR, WHICH MY aunt Muriel had been driving, was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had strayed into Muriel's lane on Vermont's Route 30. My mother and Muriel were returning home from one of their Saturday shopping trips to Boston; on that Saturday night, they were probably talking up a storm--just yakking away, nattering about nothing or everything--when the carload of partying skiers came down the road from Stratton Mountain and turned east-southeast on Route 30. My mom and Muriel were headed west-northwest on Route 30; somewhere between Bondville and Rawsonville, the two cars collided. There was plenty of snow for the skiers, but Route 30 was bone-dry and crusted with road salt; it was twelve degrees below zero, too cold to snow.

  The Vermont State Police reported that my mother and Muriel were killed instantly; Aunt Muriel had only recently turned sixty, and my mom would have been fifty-eight in April of that year. Richard Abbott was just forty-eight. "Kinda young to be a widower," as Grandpa Harry would say. Uncle Bob was on the young side to be a widower, too. Bob was Miss Frost's age--he was sixty-one.

  Elaine and I rented a car and drove to Vermont together. We argued the whole way about what I "saw" in Rachel, the thirty-something fiction writer who was teaching at Columbia.

  "You're flattered when younger writers like your writing--or you're oblivious to how they come on to you, maybe," Elaine began. "All the time you've spent around Larry has at least taught you to be wary of older writers who suck up to you."

  "I guess I'm oblivious to it--namely, that Rachel is sucking up to me. But Larry never sucked up to me," I said. (Elaine was driving; she was an aggressive driver, and when she drove, it made her more aggressive in other ways.)