In One Person

by John Irving

  "Your mom is dead, Bill. Have you no feelings for your mother?" Richard asked me.

  "No feelings," I repeated. I was remembering her hatred of homosexuals--her rejection of me, not only because I looked like my father but also because I had something of his weird (and unwelcome) sexual orientation.

  "How does Shylock put it?" I asked Richard Abbott. (I knew perfectly well how Shylock put it, and Richard had long understood how I'd embraced this.)

  "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Shylock asks. "If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"

  "Okay, Bill--I know, I know. You're a pound-of-flesh kind of guy," Richard said.

  " 'And if you wrong us,' " I said, quoting Shylock, " 'shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.' And what did they do to Shylock, Richard?" I asked. "They forced him to become a fucking Christian!"

  "It's a difficult play, Bill--that's why I've not put it onstage," Richard said. "I'm not sure it's suitable for kids in a secondary school."

  "How are you doing, Richard?" I asked him, hoping to change the subject.

  "I remember that boy who was ready to rewrite Shakespeare--that boy who was so sure the epilogue to The Tempest was extraneous," Richard said.

  "I remember that boy, too," I told him. "I was wrong about that epilogue."

  "If you live long enough, Bill--it's a world of epilogues," Richard Abbott said.

  That was the first warning I paid no attention to. Richard was only twelve years older than I was; that's not such a big difference--not when Richard was forty-eight and I was thirty-six. We seemed almost like contemporaries in 1978. I'd been only thirteen when Richard had taken me to get my first library card--that evening when we both met Miss Frost. At twenty-five, Richard Abbott had seemed so debonair to me--and so authoritative.

  At thirty-six, I didn't find anyone "authoritative"--not even Larry, not anymore. Grandpa Harry, while he was steadfastly good-hearted, was slipping into strangeness; even to me (a pillar of tolerance, as I saw myself), Harry's eccentricities had been more acceptable onstage. Not even Mrs. Hadley was the authority she once seemed, and while I listened to my best friend, Elaine, who knew me so well, I increasingly took Elaine's advice with a grain of salt. (After all, Elaine wasn't any better--or more reliable--in relationships than I was.) I suppose if I'd heard from Miss Frost--even at the know-it-all age of thirty-six--I might still have found her authoritative, but I didn't hear from her.

  I did, albeit cautiously, heed Herm Hoyt's advice: The next time I encountered Arthur, that wrestler who was my age and also ran around the reservoir in Central Park, I asked him if I was still welcome to practice my less-than-beginner-level wrestling skills at the New York Athletic Club--that is, now that Arthur understood I was a bisexual man in need of improving my self-defense, and not a real wrestler.

  Poor Arthur. He was one of those well-intentioned straight guys who wouldn't have dreamed of being cruel--or even remotely unkind--to gays. Arthur was a liberal, open-minded New Yorker; he not only prided himself on being fair--he was exceedingly fair--but he agonized over what was "right." I could see him suffering over how "wrong" it would be not to invite me to his wrestling club, just because I was--well, as Uncle Bob would say, a little light in the loafers.

  My very existence as a bisexual was not welcomed by my gay friends; they either refused to believe that I really liked women, or they felt I was somehow dishonest (or hedging my bets) about being gay. To most straight men--even a prince among them, which Arthur truly was--a bisexual man was simply a gay guy. The only part about being bi that even registered with straight men was the gay part. That was what Arthur would be up against when he talked about me to his pals at the wrestling club.

  This was the end of the freewheeling seventies; while acceptance of sexual differences wasn't necessarily the norm, such acceptance was almost normal in New York--in liberal circles, such acceptance was expected. But I felt responsible for the spot I'd put Arthur in; I had no knowledge of the tight-assed elements in the New York Athletic Club, in those days when the venerable old institution was an all-male bastion.

  I have no idea what Arthur had to go through just to get me a guest pass, or an athletic pass, to the NYAC. (Like my final draft classification, or reclassification, I'm not sure what my stupid pass to the New York Athletic Club was called.)

  "Are you crazy, Billy?" Elaine asked me. "Are you trying to get yourself killed? That place is notoriously anti-everything. It's anti-Semitic, it's anti-black."

  "It is?" I asked her. "How do you know?"

  "It's anti-women--I fucking know that!" Elaine had said. "It's an Irish Catholic boys' club, Billy--just the Catholic part ought to have you running for the hills."

  "I think you would like Arthur," I told Elaine. "He's a good guy--he really is."

  "I suppose he's married," Elaine said with a sigh.

  Come to think of it, I had seen a wedding ring on Arthur's left hand. I never fooled around with married men--with married women, sometimes, but not with married men. I was bisexual, but I was long over being conflicted. I couldn't stand how conflicted married men were--that is, when they were also interested in gay guys. And according to Larry, all married men were disappointing lovers.

  "Why?" I'd asked him.

  "They're freaks about gentleness--they must have learned to be gentle from their pushy wives. Those men have no idea how boring 'gentle' is," Larry told me.

  "I don't think 'gentle' is always boring," I said.

  "Please pardon me, dear Bill," Larry had said, with that characteristically condescending wave of his hand. "I'd forgotten you were steadfastly a top."

  I really liked Larry, more and more, as a friend. I had even grown to like how he teased me. We'd both been reading the memoir of a noted actor--"a noted bi," Larry called him.

  The actor claimed that, all his life, he had "fancied" older women and younger men. "As you might imagine," the noted actor wrote, "when I was younger, there were many older women who were available. Now that I'm older--well, of course, there are many more available younger men."

  "I don't see my life as that neat," I said to Larry. "I don't imagine being bi will ever seem exactly well rounded."

  "Dear Bill," Larry said--in that way he had, as if he were writing me an important letter. "The man is an actor--he isn't bi, he's gay. No wonder--now that he's older--there are many more younger men around! Those older women were the only women he felt safe with!"

  "That's not my profile, Larry," I told him.

  "But you're still a young man!" Larry had cried. "Just wait, dear Bill--just wait."

  IT BECAME, OF COURSE, a source of both comedy and concern--with the women I saw and the gay men I knew--that I regularly attended wrestling practice at the NYAC. My gay friends refused to believe that I had next to no homoerotic interest in the wrestlers I met at the club, but my crushes on that kind of wrong person had been a phase for me, perhaps a part of the coming-out process. (Well, okay--a slowly passing, not-altogether-gone phase.) Straight men didn't often attract me, at least not very much; that they could sense this, as Arthur did, had made it increasingly possible for me to have straight men for friends.

  Yet Larry insisted that my wrestling practices were a kind of high-energy, risky cruising; Donna, my dear but easily offended transsexual friend, dismissed what she called my "duck-under fixation" as the cultivation of a death wish. (Soon after this pronouncement, Donna disappeared from New York--to be followed by reports that she'd been sighted in Toronto.)

  As for the wrestlers at the New York Athletic Club, they were a mixed lot--in every respect, not only in how they treated me. My women friends, Elaine among them, believed that it was only a matter of time before I would be beaten to a pulp, but I was not once threatened (or deliberately hurt) at the NYAC.

  The older guys generally ignored me; once someone cheerfully said, when we were introduced, "Oh, you're the gay guy--right?" But he shook my hand and patted me on t
he back; later, he always smiled and said something friendly when we saw each other. We weren't in the same weight-class. If he was avoiding contact with me--on the mat, I mean--I wouldn't have known.

  There was the occasional mass evacuation of the sauna, when I made an after-practice appearance there. I spoke to Arthur about it. "Maybe I should steer clear of the sauna--do you think?"

  "That's your call, Billy--that's their problem, not yours," Arthur said. (I was "Billy" to all the wrestlers.)

  I decided, despite Arthur's assurances, to stay out of the sauna. Practices were at seven in the evening; I became almost comfortable going to them. I was not called--at least not to my face--"the gay guy," except for that one time. I was commonly referred to as "the writer"; most of the wrestlers hadn't read my sexually explicit novels--those pleas for tolerance of sexual differences, as Richard Abbott would continue to describe my books--but Arthur had read them. Like many men, he'd told me that his wife was my biggest fan.

  I was always hearing that from men about the women in their lives--their wives, their girlfriends, their sisters, even their mothers, were my biggest fans. Women read fiction more than men do, I would guess.

  I'd met Arthur's wife. She was very nice; she truly read a lot of fiction, and I liked much of what she liked--as a reader, I mean. Her name was Ellen--one of those perky blondes with a pageboy cut and an absurdly small, thin-lipped mouth. She had the kind of stand-up boobs that belied an otherwise unisex look--boy, was she ever not my kind of girl! But she was genuinely sweet to me, and Arthur--bless his heart--was very married. There would be no introducing him to Elaine.

  In fact, beyond having a beer in the NYAC tap room with Arthur, I did no socializing with the wrestlers I'd met at the club. The wrestling room was then on the fourth floor--at the opposite end of the hall from the boxing room. One of my frequent workout partners in the wrestling room--Jim Somebody (I forget his last name)--was also a boxer. All the wrestlers knew I'd had no competitive wrestling experience--that I was there for the self-defense aspect of the sport, period. In support of my self-defense, Jim took me down the hall to the boxing room; he tried to show me how to defend myself from being hit.

  It was interesting: I never really learned how to throw a decent punch, but Jim taught me how to cover up--how not to get hit so hard. Occasionally, one of Jim's punches would land a little harder than he'd intended; he always said he was sorry.

  In the wrestling room, too, I took some occasional (albeit accidental) punishment--a split lip, a bloody nose, a jammed finger or thumb. Because I was concentrating so hard on various ways to set up (and conceal) my duck-under, I was banging heads a lot; you more or less have to bang heads if you like being in the collar-tie. Arthur inadvertently head-butted me, and I took a few stitches in the area of my right eyebrow.

  Well, you should have heard Larry and Elaine--and all the others.

  "Macho Man," Larry called me, for a while.

  "You're telling me everyone's friendly to you--is that right, Billy?" Elaine asked. "This was just a cordial kind of head-butt, huh?"

  But--the teasing from those friends in my writing world notwithstanding--I was learning a little more wrestling. I was getting a lot better at the duck-under, too.

  "The one-move man," Arthur had called me, in my earliest days in that wrestling room--but, as time went on, I picked up a few other moves. It must have been boring for the real wrestlers to have me as a workout partner, but they didn't complain.

  To my surprise, three or four of the old-timers gave me some pointers. (Maybe they appreciated my staying out of the sauna.) There was a fair number of wrestlers in their forties--a few in their fifties, tough old fellas. There were kids right out of college; there were some Olympic hopefuls and former Olympians. There were Russians who'd defected (one Cuban, too); there were many Eastern Europeans, but only two Iranians. There were Greco-Roman guys and freestyle guys, and strictly folkstyle guys--the latter were most in evidence among the kids and the old-timers.

  Ed showed me how a cross-leg pull could set up my duck-under; Wolfie taught me an arm-drag series; Sonny showed me the Russian arm-tie and a nasty low-single. I wrote to Coach Hoyt about my progress. Herm and I both knew that I would never become a wrestler--not in my late thirties--but, as for learning to protect myself, I was learning. And I liked the 7 P.M. wrestling routine in my life.

  "You're becoming a gladiator!" Larry had said; for once, he wasn't teasing me.

  Even Elaine withheld her near-constant fears. "Your body is different, Billy--you know that, don't you? I'm not saying you're one of those gym rats who are doing it for cosmetic reasons--I know you have other reasons--but you are starting to look a little scary," Elaine said.

  I knew I wasn't "scary"--not to anyone. But, as the old decade ended and the eighties began, I was aware of the passing of some ancient, ingrained fears and apprehensions.

  Mind you: New York was not a safe city in the eighties; at least it was nowhere near as "safe" as it's become. But I, personally, felt safer--or more secure about who I was--than I'd ever felt before. I'd even begun to think of Miss Frost's fears for me as groundless, or else she'd lived in Vermont too long; maybe she'd been right to fear for my safety in Vermont, but not in New York.

  There were times when I didn't really feel like going to wrestling practice at the NYAC, but Arthur and many others had gone out of their way to make me feel welcome there. I didn't want to disappoint them, yet--increasingly--I was thinking: What do you need to defend yourself for? Whom do you need to defend yourself from?

  There was an effort under way to make me an official member of the New York Athletic Club; I can barely remember the process now, but it was very involved and it took a long time.

  "A lifetime membership is the way to go--you don't imagine yourself moving away from New York, do you, Billy?" Arthur had asked; he was sponsoring my membership. It would be a stretch to say I was a famous novelist, but--with a fourth book about to be published--I was at least a well-known one.

  Nor did the money matter. Grandpa Harry was excited that I was "keepin' up the wrestlin' "--my guess is that Herm Hoyt had talked to him. Harry said he would happily pay the fee for my lifetime membership.

  "Don't put yourself out, Arthur--no more than you already have," I told him. "The club has been good for me, but I wouldn't want you alienating people or losing friends over me."

  "You're a shoo-in, Billy," Arthur told me. "It's no big deal being gay."

  "I'm bi--" I started to say.

  "I mean bi--it's no big deal, Billy," Arthur said. "It's not like it was."

  "No, I guess it isn't," I said, or so it seemed--as 1980 was soon to become 1981.

  How one decade could slide unnoticed into another was a mystery to me, though this period of time was marked by the death of Nils Borkman--and Mrs. Borkman's subsequent suicide.

  "They were both suicides, Bill," Grandpa Harry had whispered to me over the phone--as if his phone were being tapped.

  Nils was eighty-eight--soon to be eighty-nine, had he lived till 1981. It was the regular firearm season for deer--this was shortly before Christmas, 1980--and Nils had blown off the back of his head with a .30-30 carbine while he was transversing the Favorite River Academy athletic fields on his cross-country skis. The students had already gone home for Christmas vacation, and Nils had called his old adversary Chuck Beebe--the game warden who was opposed to Nils and Grandpa Harry making deerhunting a biathlon event.

  "Poachers, Chuck! I have with my own eyes seen them--on the Favorite River athletic fields. I am, as we speak, off to hunt down them!" Nils had urgently shouted into the phone.

  "What? Whoa!" Chuck had shouted back. "There's poachers in deer season--what are they usin', machine guns or somethin'? Nils?" the game warden had inquired. But Nils had hung up the phone. When Chuck found the body, it appeared that the rifle had been fired while Nils was withdrawing the weapon--from behind himself. Chuck was willing to call the shooting an accident, because he'd long believed
that the way Nils and Grandpa Harry hunted deer was dangerous.

  Nils had known perfectly well what he was doing. He normally hunted deer with a .30-06. The lighter .30-30 carbine was what Grandpa Harry called a "varmint gun." (Harry hunted deer with it; he said deer were varmints.) The carbine had a shorter barrel; Harry knew that it was easier for Nils to shoot himself in the back of the head with the .30-30.

  "But why would Nils shoot himself?" I'd asked Grandpa Harry.

  "Well, Bill--Nils was Norwegian," Grandpa Harry had begun; it took several minutes for Harry to remember that he'd not told me Nils had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.

  "Oh."

  "Mrs. Borkman will be the next to go, Bill," Grandpa Harry announced dramatically. We'd always joked about Mrs. Borkman being an Ibsen woman, but, sure enough, she shot herself that same day. "Like Hedda--with a handgun, in the temple!" Grandpa Harry had said admiringly--in a not that much later phone call.

  I have no doubt that losing his partner and old friend, Nils, precipitated Grandpa Harry's decline. Of course Harry had lost his wife and his only children, too. Thus Richard and I would soon venture down that assisted-living road of committing Grandpa Harry to the Facility, where Harry's "surprise" appearances in drag would quickly wear out his welcome. And--still early in '81, as I recall--Richard and I would move Grandpa Harry back into his River Street home, where Richard and I hired a live-in nurse to look after him. Elmira was the nurse's name; not only did she have fond memories of seeing Harry onstage as a woman (when Elmira had been a little girl), but Elmira even participated in choosing Grandpa Harry's dress-of-the-day from his long-hoarded stash of Nana Victoria's clothes.

  It was also relatively early in that year ('81) when Mr. Hadley left Mrs. Hadley; as it turned out, he ran off with a brand-new Favorite River Academy graduate. The girl was in her freshman year of college--I can't remember where. She would drop out of college in order to live with Mr. Hadley, who was sixty-one--Martha Hadley's age, exactly. Mrs. Hadley was my mother's age; she was a whopping ten years older than Richard Abbott, but Elaine must have been right in guessing that her mom had always loved Richard. (Elaine was usually right.)