In One Person

by John Irving

  "This day didn't end well. Carlton's father came home and was furious to see Carlton like this," Mrs. Delacorte was saying as I looked more closely at the photo. "The boys had been having such a wonderful time, and that tyrant of a man ruined it!"

  "The boys," I repeated. The very pretty girl in the photograph was Jacques Kittredge.

  "Oh, you know him--I know you do!" Mrs. Delacorte said, pointing at the oh-so-perfectly cross-dressed Kittredge. He'd applied his lipstick far more expertly than Delacorte had applied his, and one of Mrs. Delacorte's beautiful but old-fashioned dresses was an exquisite fit. "The Kittredge boy," the little woman said. "He went to Favorite River--he was a wrestler, too. Carlton was always in awe of him, I think, but he was a devil--that boy. He could be charming, but he was a devil."

  "How was Kittredge a devil?" I asked Mrs. Delacorte.

  "I know he stole my clothes," she said. "Oh, I gave him some old things I didn't want--he was always asking me if he could have my clothes! 'Oh, please, Mrs. Delacorte,' he would say, 'my mother's clothes are huge, and she doesn't let me try them on--she says I always mess them up!' He just went on, and on, like that. And then my clothes started disappearing--I mean things I know perfectly well I would never have given him."

  "Oh."

  "I don't know about you," Mrs. Delacorte said, "but I'm going to have another drink." She left me to fix herself a second whiskey; I looked at all the other photos on the bulletin board in Delacorte's childhood bedroom. There were three or four photographs with Kittredge in the picture--always as a girl. When Mrs. Delacorte came back to her dead son's room, I was still holding the photo she'd handed me.

  "Please take it," she told me. "I don't like remembering how that day ended."

  "Okay," I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.

  DID I TELL ELAINE about Kittredge and Mrs. Delacorte's clothes? Did I show Elaine that photo of Kittredge as a girl? No, of course not--Elaine was holding out on me, wasn't she?

  Some guy Elaine knew got a Guggenheim; he was a fellow writer, and he told Elaine that his seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street was the perfect place for two writers.

  "Where's Post Street?" I asked Elaine.

  "Near Union Square, he said--it's in San Francisco, Billy," Elaine told me.

  I didn't know San Francisco at all; I only knew there were a lot of gays there. Of course I knew there were gay men dying in big numbers in San Francisco, but I didn't have any close friends or former lovers there, and Larry wouldn't be there to bully me about getting more involved. There was another incentive: Elaine and I couldn't (or wouldn't) keep looking for Kittredge--not in San Francisco, or so we'd thought.

  "Where's your friend going on his Guggenheim?" I asked Elaine.

  "Somewhere in Europe," Elaine said.

  "Maybe we should try living together in Europe," I suggested.

  "The apartment in San Francisco is available now, Billy," Elaine told me. "And, for a place that will accommodate two writers, it's so cheap."

  When Elaine and I got a look at our view from the eighth floor of that rat's-ass apartment--those uninspiring rooftops on Geary Street, and that bloodred vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio (the neon for HOTEL was burned out before we arrived in San Francisco)--we could understand why that two-writer apartment was so cheap. It should have been free!

  But if Tom and Sue Atkins dying of AIDS struck Elaine and me as too much, we couldn't stand what Mrs. Delacorte had done to herself, nor have I ever heard that such a drawn-out death was a common suicide plan of the loved ones of AIDS victims, particularly (as Larry had so knowingly told Elaine and me) among single moms who were losing their only children. But, as Larry also said, how would I have heard about anything like that? (It was true, as he'd said, that I wasn't involved.)

  "You're going to try living together in San Francisco," Larry said to Elaine and me, as if we were runaway children. "Oh, my--a little late to be lovebirds, isn't it?" (I thought Elaine was going to hit him.) "And, pray tell, what made you choose San Francisco? Have you heard there are no gay men dying there? Maybe we all should move to San Francisco!"

  "Fuck you, Larry," Elaine said.

  "Dear Bill," Larry said, ignoring her, "you can't run away from a plague--not if it's your plague. And don't tell me that AIDS is too Grand Guignol for your taste! Just look at what you write, Bill--overkill is your middle name!"

  "You've taught me a lot," was all I could tell him. "I didn't stop loving you, Larry, just because I stopped being your lover. I still love you."

  "More overkill, Bill," was all Larry said; he couldn't (or wouldn't) even look at Elaine, and I knew how fond he was of her--and of her writing.

  "I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman," Elaine had told me about Mrs. Kittredge. "I will never be as close to anyone again."

  "How intimate?" I'd asked her; she'd not answered me.

  "It's his mother who marked me!" Elaine had cried, about that aforementioned awful woman. "It's her I'll never forget!"

  "Marked you how?" I'd asked her, but she'd begun to cry, and we had done our adagio thing; we'd just held each other, saying nothing--doing our slowly, softly, gently routine. That was how we'd lived together in San Francisco, for what amounted to almost all of 1985.

  A lot of people left where they were living in the middle of the AIDS crisis; many of us moved somewhere else, hoping it would be better--but it wasn't. There was no harm in trying; at least living together didn't harm Elaine and me--it just didn't work out for us to be lovers. "If that part were ever going to work," Martha Hadley would tell us, but only after we'd ended the experiment, "I think it would have clicked when you were kids--not in your forties."

  Mrs. Hadley had a point, as always, but Elaine and I didn't entirely have a bad year together. I kept the photograph of Kittredge and Delacorte in dresses and lipstick as a bookmark in whatever book I was reading, and I left the particular book lying around in the usual places--on the night table on my side of the bed; on the kitchen countertop, next to the coffeemaker; in the small, crowded bathroom, where it would be in Elaine's way. Well, Elaine's eyesight was awful.

  It took almost a year for Elaine to see that photo; she came out of the bathroom, naked--she was holding the picture in one hand, and the book I'd been reading in the other. She had her glasses on, and she threw the book at me!

  "Why didn't you just show it to me, Billy? I knew it was Delacorte, months ago," Elaine told me. "As for the other kid, I just thought he was a girl!"

  "Quid pro quo," I said to my dearest friend. "You've got something to tell me, too--don't you?"

  It's easy to see, with hindsight, how it might have gone better for us in San Francisco if we'd just told each other what we knew about Kittredge when we'd first heard about it, but you live your life at the time you live it--you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

  The photograph of Kittredge as a girl did not make him look--as his mother had allegedly described him to Elaine--like a "sickly little boy"; he (or that pretty girl in the picture) didn't look like a child who had "no confidence," as Mrs. Kittredge had supposedly told Elaine. Kittredge didn't look like a kid who was "picked on by the other children, especially by the boys," or so (I'd been told) that awful woman had said.

  "Mrs. Kittredge said that to you, right?" I asked Elaine.

  "Not exactly," Elaine mumbled.

  It had been even harder for me to believe that Kittredge "was once intimidated by girls," not to mention that Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son so that he would gain confidence--not that I'd ever completely believed this had happened, as I reminded Elaine.

  "It happened, Billy," Elaine said softly. "I just didn't like the reason--I changed the reason it happened."

  I told Elaine about Kittredge stealing Mrs. Delacorte's clothes; I told her what Delacorte had breathlessly cried, just before he died. Delacorte had clearly meant Ki
ttredge--"he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!"

  "I didn't want you to like him or forgive him, Billy," Elaine told me. "I hated him for the way he just handed me over to his mother; I didn't want you to pity him, or have sympathy for him. I wanted you to hate him, too."

  "I do hate him, Elaine," I told her.

  "Yes, but that's not all you feel for him--I know," she told me.

  Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge's part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident--even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a girl. His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter--if not usually from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman--that would surely bring him to his senses!

  How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid--that is, the "right" way--and we'll never so much as imagine having sex with another man!

  "You should have told me," I said to Elaine.

  "You should have shown me the photograph, Billy."

  "Yes, I should have--we both 'should have.' "

  Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him--and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge as a woman.

  "A pretty one, too, I'll bet," Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the beautiful word.

  It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds--not to mention the as a woman part--staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.

  "Just don't call Larry--not yet," Elaine said.

  But I did call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. "I'll find you a place to stay in New York," I told Elaine. "If I can't find two places in New York, I'll try living in Vermont--you know, I'll just try it."

  "Your house has no furniture in it, Billy," Elaine pointed out.

  "Ah, well . . ."

  That was when I called Larry.

  "I just have a cold--it's nothing, Bill," Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn't a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about Pneumocystis pneumonia, and the fever.

  "What's your T-cell count?" I asked him. "When were you going to tell me? Don't bullshit me, Larry!"

  "Please come home, Bill--you and Elaine. Please, both of you, come home," Larry said. (Just that--not a long speech--and he was out of breath.)

  Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street--just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet--or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry's poetry patrons--the patroness, as I thought of her--had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it--we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)

  When Elaine and I moved in--to help the live-in nurse look after Larry--it was not the same as living "together"; we were done with that experiment. Larry's house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleepin nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day--in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn't write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.

  Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he'd been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the same man I'd admired when I first met him--in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn't hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn't walk or even stand, and he was incontinent--about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) "It's my penis, again, Bill," Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.

  "Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry," Elaine would chime in.

  "Oh, I know--have you ever heard anything quite like it?" Larry would exclaim. "Please say it, Bill--give us the plural!"

  For Larry, I would do it--well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. "Penith-zizzes," I said--always quietly, at first.

  "What? I can't hear you," Larry would say.

  "Louder, Billy," Elaine said.

  "Penith-zizzes!" I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in--all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. "Penith-zizzes!"

  One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep. "What's wrong?" the young nurse asked. (There he was, in his pajamas.)

  "We're saying 'penises' in another language," Larry explained. "Bill is teaching us." But it was Larry who taught me.

  As I said once to Elaine: "I'll tell you who my teachers were--the ones who meant the most to me. Larry, of course, but also Richard Abbott, and--maybe the most important of all, or at the most important time--your mother."

  Lawrence Upton died in December of '86; he was sixty-eight. (It's hard to believe, but Larry was almost the same age I am now!) He lived for a year in hospice care, in that house on West Tenth Street. He died on Elaine's shift, but she came and woke me up; that was the deal Elaine and I had made with each other, because we'd both wanted to be there when Larry died. As Larry had said about Russell, the night Russell died in Larry's arms: "He weighed nothing."

  The night Larry died, both Elaine and I lay beside him and cradled him in our arms. The morphine was playing tricks on Larry; who knows how consciously (or not) Larry said what he said to Elaine and me? "It's my penis again," Larry told us. "And again, and again, and again--it's always my penis, isn't it?"

  Elaine sang him a song, and he died when she was still singing.

  "That's a beautiful song," I told her. "Who wrote it? What's it called?"

  "Felix Mendelssohn wrote it," Elaine said. "Never mind what it's called. If you ever die on me, Billy, you'll hear it again. I'll tell you then what it's called."

  THERE WERE A COUPLE of years when Elaine and I rattled around in that too-grand town house Larry had left us. Elaine had a vapid, nondescript boyfriend, whom I disliked for the sole reason that he wasn't substantial enough for her. His name was Raymond, and he burned his toast almost every morning, setting off the frigging smoke detector.

  I was on Elaine's shit list for much of that time, because I was seeing a transsexual who kept urging Elaine to wear sexier-looking clothes; Elaine wasn't inclined to "sexier-looking."

  "Elwood has bigger boobs than I have--everybody has," Elaine said to me. Elaine purposely called my transsexual friend Elwood, or Woody. My transsexual friend called herself El. Soon everyone would be using the transgender word; my friends told me I should use it, too--not to mention those terribly correct young people giving me the hairy eyeball because I continued to say "transsexual" when I was supposed to say "transgender."

  I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

  It suffices to say that the late eighties were a time of transition for Elaine and me, though some people apparently had nothing better to do than update the frigging gender language. It was a
trying two years, and the financial effort to own and maintain that house on West Tenth Street--including the killer taxes--put a strain on our relationship.

  One evening, Elaine told me the story that she was sure she'd spotted Charles, poor Tom's nurse, in a room at St. Vincent's. (I'd stopped hearing from Charles.) Elaine had peered into a doorway--she was looking for someone else--and there was this shriveled former bodybuilder, his wrinkled and ruined tattoos hanging illegibly from the stretched and sagging skin of his once-powerful arms.

  "Charles?" Elaine had said from the doorway, but the man had roared like an animal at her; Elaine had been too frightened to go inside the room.

  I was pretty sure I knew who it was--not Charles--but I went to St. Vincent's to see for myself. It was the winter of '88; I'd not been inside that last-stop hospital since Delacorte had died and Mrs. Delacorte had injected herself with his blood. I went one more time--just to be certain that the roaring animal Elaine had seen wasn't Charles.

  It was that terrifying bouncer from the Mineshaft, of course--the one they called Mephistopheles. He roared at me, too. I never set foot in St. Vincent's again. (Hello, Charles--if you're out there. If you're not, I'm sorry.)

  That same winter, one night when I was out with El, I was told another story. "I just heard about this girl--you know, she was like me but a little older," El said.

  "Uh-huh," I said.

  "I think you knew her--she went to Toronto," El said.

  "Oh, you must mean Donna," I said.

  "Yeah, that's her," El said.

  "What about her?" I asked.

  "She's not doing too well--that's what I heard," El told me.

  "Oh."

  "I didn't say she was sick," El said. "I just heard she's not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone special to you, huh? I heard that, too."