by John Irving
"Intercrural," I said to the old wrestling coach.
"That's it--that's what she called it!" Herm cried. "It's nothin' but rubbin' your thing between the other fella's thighs--it's just rubbin', isn't it?" the wrestling coach asked me.
"I'm pretty sure you can't get AIDS that way," I told him.
"But she was always this way, Billy--that's what she wants you to know," Herm said. "She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger."
"Pull the trigger," I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as protecting me; I'd not once imagined that--for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously--she was also protecting herself.
"No penetratin', no bein' penetrated--just rubbin'," Coach Hoyt repeated. "Al said--she said; I'm sorry, Billy--'That's as far as I can go, Herm. That's all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can't ever pull the trigger.' That's what she told me to tell you, Billy."
"So she's safe," I said. "She really is all right, and she's going to stay all right."
"She's sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, 'she's safe'--what do you mean, 'she's gonna stay all right'? Nobody stays all right, Billy! Gettin' old isn't safe!" Coach Hoyt exclaimed. "I'm just tellin' you she doesn't have AIDS. She didn't want you worryin' about her havin' AIDS, Billy."
"Oh."
"Al Frost--sorry, Miss Frost to you--never did anything safe, Billy. Shit," the old coach said, "she may look like a woman--I know she's got the moves down pat--but she still thinks, if you can call it that, like a fuckin' wrestler. It's just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be wrestlin', Billy--that's not safe at all."
Fucking wrestlers! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were finally talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging wrestling; they were all like that! It didn't make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost wasn't like other wrestlers; she'd put the wrestling behind her--at least that had been my impression.
"What are you saying, Herm?" I asked the old coach. "Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to wrestle him? Is she going to pick a fight?"
"Some guys aren't gonna be satisfied with the rubbin' part, are they?" Herm asked me. "She won't pick a fight--she doesn't pick fights, Billy--but I know Al. She's not gonna back down from a fight--not if some dickhead who wanted more than a rubbin' picks a fight with her."
I didn't want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the intercrural part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn't--that she truly couldn't--have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.
Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? "I just like to look the part," Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn't that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn't that sound like she was satisfied with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.
"How's that duck-under, Billy?" Coach Hoyt asked me.
"Oh, I've been practicing," I told him--kind of a white lie, wasn't it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson's, or one of the medications he was taking--the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.
We hugged each other good-bye; it was the last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. "The coach is gone, Billy--you're on your own with the duck-unders." (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)
When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow's shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. "Still waitin'," she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. "I've decided not to wheel him back inside," the nurse informed me. "He can't feel the snow fallin' on him."
"I'll tell you something about him," I said to the old nurse. "He's exactly the same now as he always was--dead certain."
She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow's body. "I'm not quarrelin' with you over language," she told me. "You're the writer."
ONE SNOWY DECEMBER NIGHT after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent's, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park--exactly at that distant intersection--was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.
My feet wouldn't move. I couldn't have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn't have saved myself from the flying debris.
The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving "home"--so to speak--and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would "save" me from having sex with men--and I would therefore be "safe" from ever getting AIDS--but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)
And if the abovementioned thoughts weren't paralyzing enough, I was also rooted like a tree to that Seventh Avenue sidewalk because I was utterly ashamed of myself. I was--once again--poised to cruise those mournful corridors of St. Vincent's, not because I'd come to visit and comfort a dying friend or a former lover, but because I was, absurdly, looking for Kittredge.
It was almost Christmas, 1984, and Elaine and I were still searching that sacred hospital--and various hospices--for a cruel boy who had abused us when we were all oh-so-young.
Elaine and I had been looking for Kittredge for three years. "Let him go," Larry had told us both. "If you find him, he'll only disappoint you--or hurt you again. You're both in your forties. Aren't you a little old to be exorcising a demon from your unhappy lives as teenagers?" (There was no way Lawrence Upton could say the teenagers word nicely.)
These factors must have contributed to my paralysis on Seventh Avenue in the West Village this snowy December night, but the fact that Elaine and I were behaving as if we were teenagers--that is, as far as Kittredge was concerned--doubtless contributed to my tears. (As a teenager, I had cried a lot.) Thus I was standing outside St. Vincent's crying, when the older woman in the fur coat came up to me. She was an expensive-looking little woman in her sixties, but she was notably pretty; I might have recognized her if she'd still been attired in the sleeveless dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she'd declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he'd told her: "This is the guy who was going to be Lear's Fool."
No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say--as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue--"I'm so sorry for your troubles."
I couldn't speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three years; I didn't remember how I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, "I know it's hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you're visiting. I'll go with you, I'll help you do this--if you help me. It's even hard for me, you know. It's my son who's dying," Mrs. Delacorte told me, "and I wish I could be him. I want him to be the one who's going to go on living. I don't want to go on living without him!" she cried.
"Mrs. Delacorte?" I guessed--only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte's near-death expressions as a wrestler.
"Oh, it'
s you!" she cried. "You're that writer now--Carlton talks about you. You're Carlton's friend from school. You've come to see Carlton, haven't you? Oh, he'll be so glad to see you--you must come inside!"
Thus I was dragged to Delacorte's deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.
"Oh, Carlton--look who's here, look who's come to see you!" Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent's. I hadn't even known Delacorte's first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him Carlton. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him--due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)
Of course, I'd seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling--when he looked like he was starving--but he was really starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte's skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They'd had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They'd been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.
"At this point, the suction is very important--to help clear secretions," Mrs. Delacorte had said.
"At this point, yes," I'd lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.
"This is the guy who was going to be Lear's Fool," Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.
"Yes, yes--I know, dear, I know," the little woman was telling him.
"Did you bring more cups?" he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn't supposed to rinse or spit--or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to hold the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.
Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected--he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. "This guy was Ariel in The Tempest," Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room--and on the occasion of every later visit. "He was Sebastian in Twelfth Night," Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. "It was the shadow word that prevented him from being Lear's Fool, which was why I got the part," Delacorte raved.
Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. "He didn't come to see me die, when I was Lear's Fool--of course I understand," Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. "I do appreciate that he's come to see me die now--you've both come now, and I truly appreciate it!" he told us.
Delacorte not once called me by name, and I truly can't remember if he ever did; I don't recall him once addressing me as either Bill or Billy when we were Favorite River students. But what does that matter? I didn't even know what his first name was! Since I'd not seen him onstage as Lear's Fool, I have a more permanent picture of Delacorte from Twelfth Night; he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek--declaring to Sir Toby Belch (Uncle Bob), "O, had I but followed the arts!"
Delacorte died after several days of near-total silence, with the two clean paper cups held shakily in his hands. Elaine was there that day, with Mrs. Delacorte and me, and--coincidentally--so was Larry. He'd spotted Elaine and me from the doorway of Delacorte's room, and had poked his head inside. "Not the one you were looking for, or is it?" Larry had asked.
Elaine and I both shook our heads. A very tired Mrs. Delacorte was dozing while her son slipped away. There was no point in introducing Delacorte to Larry; Delacorte, by his silence, seemed to have already slipped away, or else he was headed in that direction--nor did Elaine and I disturb Mrs. Delacorte to introduce her to Larry. (The little woman hadn't slept a wink for God knows how long.)
Naturally, Larry was the AIDS authority in the room. "Your friend hasn't got long," he whispered to Elaine and me; then he left us there. Elaine took Mrs. Delacorte to the women's room, because the exhausted mother was so worn out she looked as if she might fall or become lost if she went by herself.
I was alone with Delacorte only a moment. I'd grown so accustomed to his silence, I first thought that someone else had spoken. "Have you seen him?" came the faintest whisper. "Leave it to him--he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!" Delacorte breathlessly cried.
"Who?" I whispered in the dying man's ear, but I knew who. Who else would Delacorte have had on his demented mind at that instant, or almost the instant, of his death? Delacorte died minutes later, with his mother's small hands on his wasted face. Mrs. Delacorte asked Elaine and me if she could have a moment alone with her son's body; of course we complied.
Bullshit or not, it was Larry who later told us that we shouldn't have left Mrs. Delacorte alone in the room with her son's body. "A single mom, right--an only child, I'm guessing?" Larry said. "And when there's a Hickman catheter, Bill, you don't want to leave any loved one alone with the body."
"I didn't know, Larry--I've never heard of such a thing!" I told him.
"Of course you haven't heard of such a thing, Bill--you're not involved! How would you have heard? You're exactly like him, Elaine," Larry told her. "The two of you are keeping such a distance from this disease--you're barely bystanders!"
"Don't pull rank on us, Larry," Elaine said.
"Larry is always pulling rank, one way or another," I said.
"You know, you're not just bisexual, Bill. You're bi-everything!" Larry told me.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked him.
"You're a solo pilot, aren't you, Bill?" Larry asked me. "You're cruising solo--no copilot has any clout with you." (I still have no idea what Larry meant.)
"Don't pull rank on us, Mr. Florence Fucking Nightingale," Elaine said to Larry.
Elaine and I had been standing in the corridor outside Delacorte's room, when one of the nurses passed by and paused to speak to us. "Is Carlton--" the nurse started to say.
"Yes, he's gone--his mother is with him," Elaine said.
"Oh, dear," the nurse said, stepping quickly into Delacorte's room, but she got there too late. Mrs. Delacorte had done what she wanted to do--what she'd probably planned to do, once she knew her son was going to die. She must have had the needle and a syringe in her purse. She'd stuck the needle into the end of the Hickman catheter; she'd drawn some blood out of the Hickman, but she emptied that first syringe into the wastebasket. The first syringe was mostly full of heparin. Mrs. Delacorte had done her homework; she knew that the second syringe would be almost entirely Carlton's blood, teeming with the virus. Then she'd injected herself, deep into her gluteus, with about five milliliters of her son's blood. (Mrs. Delacorte would die of AIDS in 1989; she died in hospice care in her apartment, in New York.)
At Elaine's insistence, I took Mrs. Delacorte uptown in a taxi--after she'd given herself a lethal dose of her beloved Carlton's blood. She had a tenth-floor apartment in one of those innocuously perfect buildings with an awning and a doorman on Park Avenue and East Seventy-or Eighty-something.
"I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a drink," she told me. "Please come in." I did.
It was hard to fathom why Delacorte had died at St. Vincent's, when Mrs. Delacorte could clearly have provided more comfortable hospice care for him in her own Park Avenue apartment. "Carlton always objected to feeling privileged," Mrs. Delacorte explained. "He wanted to die like Everyman--that's what he said. He wouldn't let me provide him with hospice care here, even though they could probably have used the extra room at St. Vincent's--as I told him, many times," she said.
They no doubt did need the extra room at St. Vincent's, or they soon would. (Some people waited to die in the corridors there.)
"Would you like to see Carlton's r
oom?" Mrs. Delacorte asked me, when we both had a drink in hand, and I don't drink--nothing but beer. I had a whiskey with Mrs. Delacorte; maybe it was bourbon. I would have done anything that little woman wanted. I even went with her to Delacorte's childhood room.
I found myself in a museum of what had been Carlton Delacorte's privileged life in New York, before he'd been sent "away" to Favorite River Academy; it was a fairly common story that Delacorte's leaving home had coincided with his parents getting a divorce, about which Mrs. Delacorte was candid with me.
More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton's father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he'd berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother's clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.
"Of course I knew--probably long before Carlton did," Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. "Mothers know," she said, unconsciously limping a little. "You can't force children to become something they're not. You can't simply tell a boy not to play with dolls."
"No, you can't," I said; I was looking at all the photographs in the room--pictures of the unguarded Delacorte, before I knew him. He'd been just a little boy once--one who'd like nothing better than to dress and make himself up as a little girl.
"Oh, look at this--just look," the little woman suddenly said; the ice cubes were clicking together in her near-empty glass as she reached and untacked a photo from a bulletin board of photographs in her departed son's bedroom. "Look at how happy he was!" Mrs. Delacorte cried, handing me the photo.
I'm guessing that Delacorte was eleven or twelve in the picture; I had no difficulty recognizing his impish little face. Certainly, the lipstick had accentuated his grin. The cheap mauve wig--with a pink streak--was ridiculous; it was one of those wigs you can find in a Halloween-type costume shop. And of course Mrs. Delacorte's dress was too big for the boy, but the overall effect was hilarious and endearing--well, not if you were Mr. Delacorte, I guess. There was a taller, slightly older-looking girl in the photograph with Delacorte--a very pretty girl, but with short hair (as closely cut as a boy's) and an arrestingly confident but tight-lipped smile.