In One Person

Chapter 12 A WORLD OF EPILOGUES

Do epidemics herald their own arrivals, or do they generally arrive unannounced? I had two warnings; at the time, they seemed merely coincidental—I didn’t heed them.

It was a few weeks after my mother’s death before Richard Abbott began to speak again. He continued to teach his classes at the academy—albeit by rote, Richard had even managed to direct a play—but he had nothing personal to say to those of us who loved him.

It was April of that same year (’78) when Elaine told me that Richard had spoken to her mother. I called Mrs. Hadley immediately after I got off the phone with Elaine.

“I know Richard’s going to call you, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Just don’t expect him to be quite his old self.”

“How is he?” I asked her.

“I’m trying to say this carefully,” Mrs. Hadley said. “I don’t want to blame Shakespeare, but there’s such a thing as too much graveyard humor—if you ask me.”

I didn’t know what Martha Hadley meant; I just waited for Richard to call. I think it was May before I finally heard from him, and Richard just started right in—as if we’d never been out of touch.

Given his grief, I would have guessed that Richard hadn’t had the time or inclination to read my third novel, but he’d read it. “The same old themes, but better done—the pleas for tolerance never grow tiresome, Bill. Of course, everyone is intolerant of something or someone. Do you know what you’re intolerant of, Bill?” Richard asked me.

“What would that be, Richard?”

“You’re intolerant of intolerance—aren’t you, Bill?”

“Isn’t that a good thing to be intolerant of?” I asked him.

“And you are proud of your intolerance, too, Bill!” Richard cried. “You have a most justifiable anger at intolerance—at intolerance of sexual differences, especially. God knows, I would never say you’re not entitled to your anger, Bill.”

“God knows,” I said cautiously. I couldn’t quite see where Richard was going.

“As forgiving as you are of sexual differences—and rightly so, Bill!—you’re not always so forgiving, are you?” Richard asked.

“Ah, well . . .” I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I’d heard it before. Richard had told me that I’d not been standing in my mother’s shoes in 1942, when I was born; he’d said I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him—it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.

“As Portia says: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ Act four, scene one—but I know it’s not your favorite Shakespeare, Bill,” Richard Abbott said.

Yes, we’d fought about The Merchant of Venice in the classroom—eighteen years ago. It was one of the few Shakespeare plays we’d read in class that Richard had not directed onstage. “It’s a comedy—a romantic comedy—but with an unfunny part,” Richard had said. He meant Shylock—Shakespeare’s incontrovertible prejudice against Jews.

I took Shylock’s side. Portia’s speech about “mercy” was vapid, Christian hypocrisy; it was Christianity at its most superior-sounding and most saccharine. Whereas Shylock has a point: The hatred of him has taught him to hate. Rightly so!

“I am a Jew,” Shylock says—act 3, scene 1. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” I love that speech! But Richard didn’t want to be reminded that I’d always been on Shylock’s side.

“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 the 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 deer-hunting 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.)

“What a melodrama,” Elaine said wearily, when—as early as the summer of ’81—Mrs. Hadley and Richard started living together. Old hippie that she was, Martha Hadley refused to get married again, and Richard (I’m sure) was happy just to be in Mrs. Hadley’s uncomplaining presence. What did Richard Abbott care about remarrying?

Besides, they both understood that if they didn’t get married, they would be asked to move out of Bancroft Hall. It may have been the start of the eighties, but it was small-town Vermont, and Favorite River had its share of boarding-school rules. An unmarried couple, living together in a faculty apartment in a prep school—well, this wouldn’t quite do. Both Mrs. Hadley and Richard had had it with an all-boys’ dorm; Elaine and I didn’t doubt that. It’s entirely possible that Richard Abbott and Martha Hadley decided they would be crazy to get married; by choosing to live together in sin, they got out of living in a dorm!

Mrs. Hadley and Richard had the summer to find a place to live in town, or at least near First Sister—a modest house, something a couple of secondary-school teachers could afford. The place they found was not more than a few doors down River Street from what had once been the First Sister Public Library—now the historical society. The house had gone through a succession of owners in recent years; it needed some repairs, Richard told me somewhat haltingly over the phone.

I sensed his hesitation; if it was money he needed, I would have gladly given him what I could, but I was surprised Richard hadn’t asked Grandpa Harry first. Harry loved Richard, and I knew that Grandpa Harry had given his blessing to Richard’s living with Martha Hadley.

“The house isn’t more than a ten-minute walk from Grandpa Harry’s house, Bill,” Richard said over the phone. I could tell he was stalling.

“What is it, Richard?” I asked him.

“It’s the former Frost home, Bill,” Richard said. Given the history of the many recent and unreliable owners, we both knew that no traces of Miss Frost could conceivably have remained. Miss Frost was gone—both Richard Abbott and I knew that. Yet the house being “the former Frost home” was a glimpse into the darkness—the past darkness, I thought at the time. I saw no foreshadow of a future darkness.

AS FOR MY SECOND warning that a plague was coming, I just plain missed it. There’d been no Christmas card from the Atkins family in 1980; I hadn’t noticed. When a card came—it was long after the holiday, but the card still proclaimed “Season’s Greetings”—I remember being surprised that Tom hadn’t included a review of my fourth novel. (The book wasn’t yet published, but I’d sent Atkins a copy of the galleys; I thought that such a faithful fan of my writing deserved a sneak preview. After all, no one else was comparing me favorably to Flaubert!)

But there was nothing enclosed with the “Season’s Greetings” card, which arrived sometime in February of ’81—at least I think it showed up that late. I noted that the children and the dog looked older. What gave me pause was how much older poor Tom looked; it was almost as if he’d aged several years between Christmases.

My guess was that the photo had been taken on a family ski trip—everyone was dressed for skiing, and Atkins even wore a ski hat. They’d brought the dog skiing! I marveled.

The kids looked tanned—the wife, too. Remembering how fair-skinned Tom was, he probably had to be careful about the sun; thus I saw nothing amiss about Tom not being tanned. (Knowing Atkins, he’d probably heeded the earliest alarms about skin cancer and the importance of wearing sunscreen—he’d always been a boy who had heeded every alarm.)

But there was something silvery about Tom’s skin color, I thought—not that I could see much of his face, because Atkins’s stupid ski hat covered his eyebrows. Yet I could tell—just from that partial view of poor Tom’s face—that he’d lost weight. Quite a lot of weight, I speculated, but, given the ski clothes, I couldn’t really tell. Maybe Atkins had always been a bit hollow-cheeked.

Yet I’d stared at this belated Christmas card for the longest time. There was a look I hadn’t seen before in the expression of Tom’s wife. How was it possible, in a single expression, to convey a fear of both the unknown and the known?

Mrs. Atkins’s expression reminded me of that line in Madame Bovary—it’s at the end of chapter 6. (The one that goes like a dart to a bull’s-eye, or to your heart—“it seemed quite inconceivable that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream.”) Tom’s wife didn’t look afraid—she seemed terrified! But what could possibly have frightened her so?

And where was the smile that the Tom Atkins I knew could rarely suppress for long? Atkins had this goofy, openmouthed smile—with lots of teeth and his tongue showing. But poor Tom had tightly closed his mouth—like a kid who’s trying to conceal a wad of chewing gum from a teacher, or like someone who knows his breath is bad.

For some reason, I’d shown the Atkins family photo to Elaine. “You remember Atkins,” I said, handing her the late-arriving Christmas card.

“Poor Tom,” Elaine automatically said; we both laughed, but Elaine stopped laughing when she had a look at the photograph. “What’s the matter with him—what’s he got in his mouth?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He’s got something in his mouth, Billy—he doesn’t want anyone to see it,” Elaine told me. “And what’s the matter with those children?”

“The children?” I asked her. I’d not noticed that anything was wrong with the kids.

“They look like they’ve been crying,” Elaine explained. “Jesus—it looks like they cry all the time!”

“Let me see that,” I said, taking the photo. The children looked okay to me. “Atkins used to cry a lot,” I told Elaine. “He was a real crybaby—maybe the kids got it from Tom.”

“Come on, Billy—something’s not normal. I mean with all of them,” Elaine said.

“The dog looks normal,” I said. (I was just fooling around.)

“I’m not talking about the dog, Billy,” Elaine said.

IF YOUR PASSAGE THROUGH the Reagan years (1981–89) was unclouded by watching someone you knew die of AIDS, then you don’t remember those years (or Ronald Reagan) the way I do. What a decade it was—and we would have that horseback-riding B actor in charge for most of it! (For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the AIDS word.) Those years have been blurred by the passage of time, and by the conscious and unconscious forgetting of the worst details. Some decades slip by, others drag on; what made the eighties last forever was that my friends and lovers kept dying—into the nineties, and beyond. By ’95—in New York, alone—more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.

It was some months after that February conversation Elaine and I had about the Atkins family photo—I know it was later in ’81—when Larry’s young lover Russell got sick. (I felt awful that I’d dismissed Russell as a Wall Street guy; I’d called him a poetaster, too.)

I was a snob; I used to turn up my nose at the patrons Larry surrounded himself with. But Larry was a poet—poets don’t make any money. Why shouldn’t poets, and other artists, have patrons?

PCP was the big killer—a pneumonia (Pneumocystis carinii). In young Russell’s case, as it often was, this pneumonia was the first presentation of AIDS—a young and otherwise healthy-looking guy with a cough (or shortness of breath) and a fever. It was the X-ray that didn’t look great—in the parlance of radiologists and doctors, a “whiteout.” Yet there was no suspicion of the disease; there was, at first, the phase of not getting better on antibiotics—finally, there was a biopsy (or lung lavage), which showed the cause to be PCP, that insidious pneumonia. They usually put you on Bactrim; that’s what Russell was taking. Russell was the first AIDS patient I watched waste away—and, don’t forget, Russell had money and he had Larry.

Many writers who knew Larry saw him as spoiled and self-centered—even pompous. I shamefully include my former self in this category of Lawrence Upton observers. But Larry was one of those people who improve in a crisis.

“It should be me, Bill,” Larry told me when I first paid a visit to Russell. “I’ve had a life—Russell is just beginning his.” Russell was placed in hospice care in his own magnificent Chelsea brownstone; he had his own nurse. All this was new to me then—that Russell had chosen not to go on a breathing machine allowed him to be cared for at home. (Intubating at home is problematic; it’s easier to hook a person up to a ventilator in a hospital.) I later saw and remembered that gob of Xylocaine jelly on the tip of the endotracheal tube, but not in Russell’s case; he wasn’t intubated, not at home.

I remember Larry feeding Russell. I could see the cheesy patches of Candida in Russell’s mouth, and his white-coated tongue.

Russell had been a beautiful young man; his face would soon be disfigured with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Russell’s eyebrows where it resembled a fleshy, misplaced earlobe; another purplish lesion drooped from Russell’s nose. (The latter was so strikingly prominent that Russell later chose to hide it behind a bandanna.) Larry told me that Russell referred to himself as “the turkey”—because of the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

“Why are they so young, Bill?” Larry kept asking me—when “they,” the sheer number of young men who were dying in New York, had made us realize that Russell was just the beginning.

We saw Russell age, in just a few months—his hair thinned, his skin turned leaden, he was often covered with a cool-to-the-touch film of sweat, and his fevers went on forever. The Candida went down his throat, into the esophagus; Russell had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. The lymph nodes in his neck bulged. He could scarcely breathe, but Russell refused to go on a ventilator (or to a hospital); in the end, he faked taking the Bactrim—Larry would find the tablets scattered in Russell’s bed.

Russell died in Larry’s arms; I’m sure Larry wished it had been the other way around. (“He weighed nothing,” Larry said.) By then, Larry and I were already visiting friends at St. Vincent’s Hospital. As Larry predicted, it would get so crowded at St. Vincent’s that you couldn’t go to visit a friend, or a former lover, and not encounter someone else you knew. You would glance in a doorway, and there was someone you hadn’t known was sick; in more than one instance, Larry claimed, he’d spotted someone he hadn’t known was gay!

Women found out that their husbands had been seeing men—only when their husbands were dying. Parents learned that their young male children were dying before they knew (or had figured out) that their kids were gay.

Only a few women friends of mine were infected—not many. I was terrified about Elaine; she’d slept with some men I knew were bisexual. But two abortions had taught Elaine to insist on condoms; she was of the opinion that nothing else could keep her from getting pregnant.

We’d had an earlier condom conversation; when the AIDS epidemic started, Elaine had asked me, “You’re still a condom guy—right, Billy?” (Since ’68! I’d told her.)

“I should be dead,” Larry said. He wasn’t sick; he looked fine. I wasn’t sick, either. We kept our fingers crossed.

It was still in ’81, near the end of the year, when there was that bleeding episode in the wrestling room at the New York Athletic Club. I’m not sure if all the wrestlers knew that the AIDS virus was mainly transmitted by blood and semen, because there was a time when hospital workers were afraid they could catch it from a cough or a sneeze, but that day I got a nosebleed in the wrestling room, everyone already knew enough to be scared shitless of blood.

It often happens in wrestling: You don’t know you’re bleeding until you see your blood on your opponent. I was working out with Sonny; when I saw the blood on Sonny’s shoulder, I backed away. “You’re bleeding—” I started to say; then I saw Sonny’s face. He was staring at my nosebleed. I put my hand to my face and saw the blood—on my hand, on my chest, on the mat. “Oh, it’s me,” I said, but Sonny had left the wrestling room—running. The locker room, where the training room was, was on another floor.

“Go get the trainer, Billy—tell him we’ve got blood here,” Arthur told me. All the wrestlers had stopped wrestling; no one would touch the blood on the mat. Normally, a nosebleed was no big deal; you just wiped off the mat with a towel. Blood, in a wrestling room, used to be of no importance.

Sonny had already sent the trainer to the wrestling room; the trainer arrived with rubber gloves on, and with towels soaked in alcohol. Minutes later, I saw Sonny standing under the shower in the locker room—he was wearing his wrestling gear, even his shoes, in the shower. I emptied out my locker before I took a shower. I wanted to give Sonny time to finish showering before I went anywhere near the shower room. I was betting that Sonny hadn’t told the trainer that “the writer” had bled in the wrestling room; Sonny must have told him that “the gay guy” was bleeding. I know that’s what I would have said to the trainer, at that time.

Arthur saw me only when I was leaving the locker room; I’d showered and dressed, and I had some cautionary cotton balls stuffed up both nostrils—not a drop of blood in sight, but I was carrying a green plastic garbage bag with the entire contents of my locker. I got the garbage bag from a guy in the equipment room; boy, did he look happy I was leaving!

“Are you okay, Billy?” Arthur asked me. Someone would keep asking me that question—for about fourteen or fifteen years.

“I’m going to withdraw my application for lifetime membership, Arthur—if that’s okay with you,” I said. “The dress code at this place is a nuisance for a writer. I don’t wear a coat and tie when I write. Yet I have to put on a coat and tie just to get in the front door here—only to get undressed to wrestle.”

“I totally understand, Billy. I just hope you’re going to be okay,” Arthur said.

“I can’t belong to a club with such an uptight dress code. It’s all wrong for a writer,” I told him.

Some of the other wrestlers were showing up in the locker room after practice—Ed and Wolfie and Jim, my former workout partners, among them. Everyone saw me holding the green plastic garbage bag; I didn’t have to tell them it was my last wrestling practice.

I left the club by the back door to the lobby. You look odd carrying a garbage bag on Central Park South. I went out of the New York Athletic Club on West Fifty-eighth Street, where there were a few narrow alleys that served as delivery entrances to the hotels on Central Park South. I knew I would find a Dumpster for my garbage bag, and what amounted to my life as a beginning wrestler in the dawn of the AIDS crisis.

IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER the inglorious nosebleed had ended my wrestling career that Larry and I were having dinner downtown and he told me he’d heard that bottoms were more likely to get sick than tops. I knew tops who had it, but more bottoms got it—this was true. I never knew how Larry managed to have “heard” everything, but he heard right most of the time.

“Blow jobs aren’t too terribly risky, Bill—just so you know.” Larry was the first person to tell me that. Of course Larry seemed to know (or he assumed) that the number of sex partners in your life was a factor. Ironically, I didn’t hear about the condom factor from Larry.

Larry had responded to Russell’s death by seeking to help every young man he knew who was dying; Larry had an admirably stronger stomach for visiting the AIDS patients we knew at St. Vincent’s, and in hospice care, than I did. I could sense myself withdrawing, just as I was aware of people shrinking away from me—not only my fellow wrestlers.

Rachel had retreated immediately. “She may think she can catch the disease from your writing, Billy,” Elaine told me.

Elaine and I had talked about getting out of New York, but the problem with living in New York for any length of time is that many New Yorkers can’t imagine that there’s anywhere else they could live.

As more of our friends contracted the virus, Elaine and I would imagine ourselves with one or another of the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. Elaine developed night sweats. I woke up imagining I could feel the white plaques of Candida encroaching on my teeth. (I admitted to Elaine that I often woke up at night and peered into my mouth in a mirror—with a flashlight!) And there was that seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking—it cropped up mostly on your eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of your nose. Herpes could run wild on your lips; the ulcers simply wouldn’t heal. There were also those clusters of molluscum; they looked like smallpox—they could completely cover your face.

And there’s a certain smell your hair has when it is matted by your sweat and flattened by your pillow. It’s not just how translucent-looking and funny-smelling your hair is. It’s the salt that dries and hardens on your forehead, from the unremitting fever and the incessant sweating; it’s your mucous membranes, too—they get chock-full of yeast. It’s a yeasty but, at the same time, fruity smell—the way curd smells, or mildew, or a dog’s ears when they’re wet.

I wasn’t afraid of dying; I was afraid of feeling guilty, forever, because I wasn’t dying. I couldn’t accept that I would or might escape the AIDS virus for as accidental a reason as being told to wear a condom by a doctor who disliked me, or that the random luck of my being a top would or might save me. I was not ashamed of my sex life; I was ashamed of myself for not wanting to be there for the people who were dying.

“I’m not good at this. You are,” I told Larry; I meant more than the hand-holding and the pep talks.

Cryptococcal meningitis was caused by a fungus; it affected your brain, and was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture—it presented with fever and headache and confusion. There was a separate spinal-cord disease, a myelopathy that caused progressive weakness—loss of function in your legs, incontinence. There was little one could do about it—vacuolar myelopathy, it was called.

I was watching Larry empty the bedpan of our friend who had this awful myelopathy; I was truly marveling at Larry—he’d become a saint—when I suddenly realized that I had no difficulty pronouncing the myelopathy word, or any of the other AIDS-associated words. (That Pneumocystis pneumonia, for example—I could actually say it. Kaposi’s sarcoma, those terrible lesions, gave me no pronunciation problem; I could say “cryptococcal meningitis” as if it meant no more to me than the common cold. I didn’t even hesitate to pronounce “cytomegalovirus”—a major cause of blindness in AIDS.)

“I should call your mother,” I told Elaine. “I seem to be having a pronunciation breakthrough.”

“It’s just because you’re distancing yourself from this disease, Billy,” Elaine said. “You’re like me—you’re imagining yourself as standing on the outside, looking in.”

“I should call your mother,” I repeated, but I knew Elaine was right.

“Let’s hear you say ‘penis,’ Billy.”

“That’s not fair, Elaine—that’s different.”

“Say it,” Elaine said.

But I knew how it would sound. It was, is, and will always be penith to me; some things never change. I didn’t try to say the penis word for Elaine. “Cock,” I said to her.

I didn’t call Mrs. Hadley about my pronunciation breakthrough, either. I was trying to distance myself from the disease—even as the epidemic was only beginning. I was already feeling guilty that I didn’t have it.

THE 1981 ATKINS CHRISTMAS card came on time that year. No generic “Season’s Greetings,” more than a month late, but an unapologetic “Merry Christmas” in December.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine said, when I showed her the Atkins family photo. “Where’s Tom?”

Atkins wasn’t in the picture. The names of the family were printed on the Christmas card in small capitals: TOM, SUE, PETER, EMILY & JACQUES ATKINS. (Jacques was the Labrador; Atkins had named the dog after Kittredge!) But Tom had missed the family photograph.

“Maybe he wasn’t feeling very photogenic,” I said to Elaine.

“His color wasn’t so hot last Christmas, was it? And he’d lost all that weight,” Elaine said.

“The ski hat was hiding his hair and his eyebrows,” I added. (There’d been no Tom Atkins review of my fourth novel, I’d noticed. I doubted that Atkins had changed his mind about Madame Bovary.)

“Shit, Billy,” Elaine said. “What do you make of the message?”

The message, which was written by hand on the back of the Christmas photo, was from the wife. There was not a lot of information in it, and it wasn’t very Christmasy.

Tom has mentioned you. He would like to see you.

Sue Atkins

“I think he’s dying—that’s what I think,” I told Elaine.

“I’ll go with you, Billy—Tom always liked me,” Elaine said.

Elaine was right—poor Tom had always adored her (and Mrs. Hadley)—and, not unlike old times, I felt braver in Elaine’s company. If Atkins was dying of AIDS, I was pretty sure his wife would already know everything about that summer twenty years ago, when Tom and I were in Europe together.

That night, I called Sue Atkins. It turned out that Tom had been placed in hospice care at his home in Short Hills, New Jersey. I’d never known what Atkins did, but his wife told me that Tom had been a CEO at a life-insurance company; he’d worked in New York City, five days a week, for more than a decade. I guessed that he’d never felt like seeing me for lunch or dinner, but I was surprised when Sue Atkins said that she’d thought her husband had been seeing me; apparently, there were nights when Tom hadn’t made it back to New Jersey in time for dinner.

“It wasn’t me he was seeing,” I told Mrs. Atkins. I mentioned that Elaine wanted to visit Tom, too—if we weren’t “intruding,” was how I’d put it.

Before I could explain who Elaine was, Sue Atkins said, “Yes, that would be all right—I’ve heard all about Elaine.” (I didn’t ask Mrs. Atkins what she’d heard about me.)

Elaine was teaching that term—grading final papers, I explained on the phone. Perhaps we could come to Short Hills on a Saturday; there wouldn’t be all the commuters on the train, I was thinking.

“The children will be home from school, but that will be fine with Tom,” Sue said. “Certainly Peter knows who you are. That trip to Europe—” Her voice just stopped. “Peter knows what’s going on, and he’s devoted to his father,” Mrs. Atkins began again. “But Emily—well, she’s younger. I’m not sure how much Emily really knows. You can’t do much to counter what your kids hear in school from the other kids—not if your kids won’t tell you what the other kids are saying.”

“I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” I told Tom’s wife.

“I always knew this might happen. Tom was candid about his past,” Sue Atkins said. “I just didn’t know he’d gone back there. And this terrible disease—” Her voice stopped again.

I was looking at the Christmas card while we spoke on the phone. I’m not good at guessing young girls’ ages. I wasn’t sure how old Emily was; I just knew she was the younger child. I was estimating that the boy, Peter Atkins, would have been fourteen or fifteen—about the same age poor Tom had been when I’d first met him and thought he was a loser who couldn’t even pronounce the time word. Atkins had told me he’d called me Bill, instead of Billy, because he noticed that Richard Abbott always called me Bill, and anyone could see how much I loved Richard.

Poor Tom had also confessed to me that he’d overheard Martha Hadley’s outburst, when I was seeing Mrs. Hadley in her office and Atkins had been waiting for his turn. “Billy, Billy—you’ve done nothing wrong!” Mrs. Hadley had cried, loud enough for Atkins to have heard her through the closed door. (It was when I’d told Martha Hadley about my crushes on other boys and men, including my slightly fading crush on Richard and my much more devastating crush on Kittredge.)

Poor Tom told me that he’d thought I was having an affair with Mrs. Hadley! “I actually believed you’d just ejaculated in her office, or something, and she was trying to assure you that you’d done nothing ‘wrong’—that’s what I thought she meant by the wrong word, Bill,” Atkins had confessed to me.

“What an idiot you are!” I’d told him; now I felt ashamed.

I asked Sue Atkins how Tom was doing—I meant those opportunistic illnesses I already knew something about, and what drugs Tom was taking. When she said he’d developed a rash from the Bactrim, I knew poor Tom was being treated for the Pneumocystis pneumonia. Since Tom was in hospice care at home, he wasn’t on a ventilator; his breathing would be harsh and aspirate—I knew that, too.

Sue Atkins also said something about how hard it was for Tom to eat. “He has trouble swallowing,” she told me. (Just telling me this made her suppress a cough, or perhaps she’d gagged; she suddenly sounded short of breath.)

“From the Candida—he can’t eat?” I asked her.

“Yes, it’s esophageal candidiasis,” Mrs. Atkins said, the terminology sounding oh-so-familiar to her. “And—this is fairly recent—there’s a Hickman catheter,” Sue explained.

“How recent is the Hickman?” I asked Mrs. Atkins.

“Oh, just the last month,” she told me. So they were feeding him through the catheter—malnutrition. (With Candida, difficulty swallowing usually responded to fluconazole or amphotericin B—unless the yeast had become resistant.)

“If they have you on a Hickman for hyperalimentation feeding, Bill, you’re probably starving,” Larry had told me.

I kept thinking about the boy, Peter; in the Christmas photo, he reminded me of the Tom Atkins I’d known. I imagined that Peter might be what poor Tom himself had once described as “like us.” I was wondering if Atkins had noticed that his son was “like us.” That was how Tom had put it, years ago: “Not everyone here understands people like us,” he’d said, and I’d wondered if Atkins was making a pass at me. (It had been the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me.)

“Bill!” Sue Atkins said sharply, on the phone. I realized I was crying.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t you dare cry around us when you come here,” Mrs. Atkins said. “This family is all cried out.”

“Don’t let me cry,” I told Elaine on that Saturday, not long before Christmas 1981. The holiday shoppers were headed the other way, into New York City. There was almost no one on the train to Short Hills, New Jersey, on that December Saturday.

“How am I supposed to stop you from crying, Billy? I don’t have a gun—I can’t shoot you,” Elaine said.

I was feeling a little jumpy about the gun word. Elmira, the nurse Richard Abbott and I had hired to look after Grandpa Harry, ceaselessly complained to Richard about “the gun.” It was a Mossberg .30-30 carbine, lever-action—the same type of short-barreled rifle Nils had used to kill himself. (I can’t remember, but I think Nils had a Winchester or a Savage, and it wasn’t a lever-action; I just know it was also a .30-30 carbine.)

Elmira had complained about Grandpa Harry “excessively cleanin’ the damn Mossberg”; apparently, Harry would clean the gun in Nana Victoria’s clothes—he got gun oil on a lot of her dresses. It was all the dry-cleaning that upset Elmira. “He’s not out shootin’—no more deerhuntin’ on skis, not at his age, he’s promised me—but he just keeps cleanin’ and cleanin’ the damn Mossberg!” she told Richard.

Richard had asked Grandpa Harry about it. “There’s no point in havin’ a gun if you don’t keep it clean,” Harry had said.

“But perhaps you could wear your clothes when you clean it, Harry,” Richard had said. “You know—jeans, an old flannel shirt. Something Elmira doesn’t have to get dry-cleaned.”

Harry hadn’t responded—that is, not to Richard. But Grandpa Harry told Elmira not to worry: “If I shoot myself, Elmira, I promise I won’t leave you with any friggin’ dry-cleanin’.”

Now, of course, both Elmira and Richard were worried about Grandpa Harry shooting himself, and I kept thinking about that super-clean .30-30. Yes, I was worried about Grandpa Harry’s intentions, too, but—to be honest with you—I was relieved to know the damn Mossberg was ready for action. To be very honest with you, I wasn’t worrying about Grandpa Harry as much as I was worrying about me. If I got the disease, I knew what I was going to do. Vermont boy that I am, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I was planning to head home to First Sister—to Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. I knew where he kept that .30-30; I knew where Harry stashed his ammunition. What my grandpa called a “varmint gun” was good enough for me.

In this frame of mind, and determined not to cry, I showed up in Short Hills, New Jersey, to pay a visit to my dying friend Tom Atkins, whom I’d not seen for twenty years—virtually half my life ago.

With half a brain, I might have anticipated that the boy, Peter, would be the one to answer the door. I should have expected to be greeted by a shocking physical resemblance to Tom Atkins—as I first knew him—but I was speechless.

“It’s the son, Billy—say something!” Elaine whispered in my ear. (Of course I was already struggling to make an effort not to cry.) “Hi—I’m Elaine, this is Billy,” Elaine said to the boy with the carrot-colored hair. “You must be Peter. We’re old friends of your dad.”

“Yes, we’ve been expecting you—please come in,” Peter said politely. (The boy had just turned fifteen; he’d applied to the Lawrenceville School, for what would be his sophomore year, and he was waiting to hear if he got in.)

“We weren’t sure what time you were coming, but now is a good time,” Peter Atkins was saying, as he led Elaine and me inside. I wanted to hug the boy—he’d used the time word twice; he had no trace of a pronunciation problem!—but, under the circumstances, I knew enough not to touch him.

Off to one side of the lavish vestibule was a rather formal-looking dining room—where absolutely no one ate (or had ever eaten), I was thinking—when the boy told us that Charles had just left. “Charles is my dad’s nurse,” Peter was explaining. “Charles comes to take care of the catheter—you have to keep flushing out the catheter, or it will clot off,” Peter told Elaine and me.

“Clot off,” I repeated—my first words in the Atkins house. Elaine elbowed me in my ribs.

“My mom is resting, but she’ll be right down,” the boy was saying. “I don’t know where my sister is.”

We had stopped alongside a closed door in a downstairs hall. “This used to be my father’s study,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was hesitating before he opened the door. “But our bedrooms are upstairs—Dad can’t climb stairs,” Peter continued, not opening the door. “If my sister is in here, with him, she may scream—she’s only thirteen, about to be fourteen,” the boy told Elaine and me; he had his hand on the doorknob, but he wasn’t ready to let us in. “I weigh about a hundred and forty pounds,” Peter Atkins said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “My dad’s lost some weight, since you’ve seen him,” the boy said. “He weighs almost a hundred—maybe ninety-something pounds.” Then he opened the door.

“It broke my heart,” Elaine told me, later. “How that boy was trying to prepare us.” But as I was only beginning to learn about that goddamn disease, there was no way to be prepared for it.

“Oh, there she is—my sister, Emily,” Peter Atkins said, when he finally let us enter the room where his dad lay dying.

The dog, Jacques, was a chocolate Labrador with a gray-white muzzle—an old dog, I could tell, not only by his grizzled nose and jaws, but by how slowly and unsteadily the dog came out from under the hospital bed to greet us. One of his hind legs slipped a little on the floor; his tail wagged only slightly, as if it hurt his hips to wag his tail at all.

“Jacques is almost thirteen,” Peter told Elaine and me, “but that’s pretty old for a dog—and he has arthritis.” The dog’s cold, wet nose touched my hand and then Elaine’s; that was all the old Lab had wanted. There was a subsequent thump when the dog lay down under the bed again.

The girl, Emily, was curled up like a second dog at the foot of her father’s hospital bed. It was probably of some small comfort to Tom that his daughter was keeping his feet warm. It was an indescribable exertion for Atkins to breathe; I knew that his hands and feet would be cold—the circulation to Tom’s extremities was closing down, trying to shunt blood to his brain.

Emily’s reaction to Elaine and me was delayed. She sat up and screamed, but belatedly; she’d been reading a book, which flew from her hands. The sound of its fluttering pages was lost to the girl’s scream. I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room—what had been Atkins’s “study,” as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.

I also observed that his daughter’s scream had little effect on Tom Atkins—he’d barely moved in the hospital bed. It probably hurt him to turn his head; yet his bare chest, while the rest of his shrunken body lay still, was vigorously heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Tom’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.

“These are Dad’s old friends, from school, Emily,” Peter said irritably to his little sister. “You knew they were coming.”

The girl stalked across the room to her far-flung book; when she’d retrieved it, she turned and glared. Emily definitely glared at me; she may have been glaring at her brother and Elaine, too. When the thirteen-year-old spoke, I felt certain she was speaking only to me, though Elaine would try in vain to assure me later, on the train, that Tom’s daughter had been addressing both of us. (I don’t think so.)

“Are you sick, too?” Emily asked.

“No, I’m not—I’m sorry,” I answered her. The girl then marched out of the room.

“Tell Mom they’re here, Emily. Tell Mom!” Peter called after his angry sister.

“I will!” we heard the girl shout.

“Is that you, Bill?” Tom Atkins asked; I saw him try to move his head, and I stepped closer to the bed. “Bill Abbott—are you here?” Atkins asked; his voice was weak and terribly labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen tank must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief; there probably was a mask, but I didn’t see it—the oxygen was in lieu of a ventilator. Morphine would come next, at the end stage.

“Yes, it’s me—Bill—and Elaine is with me, Tom,” I told Atkins. I touched his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. I could see poor Tom’s face now. That greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.

“Elaine, too!” Atkins gasped. “Elaine and Bill! Are you all right, Bill?” he asked me.

“Yes, I’m all right,” I told him; I’d never felt so ashamed to be “all right.”

There was a tray of medications, and other intimidating-looking stuff, on the bedside table. (I would remember the heparin solution, for some reason—it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter.) I saw the white, cheesy curds of the Candida crusting the corners of poor Tom’s mouth.

“I did not recognize him, Billy,” Elaine would say later, when we were returning to New York. Yet how do you recognize a grown man who weighs only ninety-something pounds?

Tom Atkins and I were thirty-nine, but he resembled a man in his sixties; his hair was not only translucent and thin—what there was of it was completely gray. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks caved in; poor Tom’s nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color.

Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face—that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin was so improbably hard and tense, you were sure it was going to split.

I was holding one of Tom’s cold hands, and Elaine was holding the other one—I could see Elaine trying not to stare at the Hickman catheter in Atkins’s bare chest—when we heard the dry cough. For a moment, I imagined that poor Tom had died and his cough had somehow escaped his body. But I saw the son’s eyes; Peter knew that cough, and where it came from. The boy turned to the open doorway of the room—where his mother now stood, coughing. It didn’t sound like all that serious a cough, but Sue Atkins was having trouble stopping it. Elaine and I had heard that cough before; the earliest stages of Pneumocystis pneumonia don’t sound too bad. The shortness of breath and the fever were often worse than the cough.

“Yes, I have it,” Sue Atkins said; she was controlling the cough, but she couldn’t stop it. “In my case, it’s just starting,” Mrs. Atkins said; she was definitely short of breath.

“I infected her, Bill—that’s the story,” Tom Atkins said.

Peter, who’d been so poised, was trying to slip sideways past his mother into the hall.

“No—you stay here, Peter. You need to hear what your father has to say to Bill,” Sue Atkins told her son; the boy was crying now, but he backed into the room, still looking at the doorway, which his mom was blocking.

“I don’t want to stay, I don’t want to hear . . .” the boy began; he was shaking his head, as if this were a proven method to make himself stop crying.

“Peter—you have to stay, you have to listen,” Tom Atkins said. “Peter is why I wanted to see you, Bill,” Tom said to me. “Bill has some discernible traces of moral responsibility—doesn’t he, Elaine?” Tom suddenly asked her. “I mean Bill’s writing—at least his writing has discernible traces of moral responsibility, doesn’t it? I don’t really know Bill anymore,” Atkins admitted. (Tom couldn’t say more than three or four words without needing to take a breath.)

“Moral responsibility,” I repeated.

“Yes, he does—Billy takes moral responsibility. I think so,” Elaine said. “I don’t mean only in your writing, Billy,” Elaine added.

“I don’t have to stay—I’ve heard this before,” Sue Atkins suddenly said. “You don’t have to stay, either, Elaine. We can go try to talk to Emily. She’s a challenge to talk to, but she’s better with women than she is with men—as a rule. Emily really hates men,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“Emily screams almost every time she sees a man,” Peter explained; he had stopped crying.

“Okay, I’ll come with you,” Elaine said to Sue Atkins. “I’m not all that crazy about most men, either—I just don’t like women at all, usually.”

“That’s interesting,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“I’ll come back when it’s time to say good-bye,” Elaine called to Tom, as she was leaving, but Atkins seemed to ignore the good-bye reference.

“It’s amazing how easy time becomes—when there’s no more of it, Bill,” Tom began.

“Where is Charles—he should be here, shouldn’t he?” Peter Atkins asked his dad. “Just look at this room! Why is that old oxygen tank still here? The oxygen doesn’t help him anymore,” the boy explained to me. “Your lungs need to work in order to have any benefit from oxygen. If you can’t breathe in, how are you going to get the oxygen? That’s what Charles says.”

“Peter, please stop,” Tom Atkins said to his son. “I asked Charles for a little privacy—Charles will be back soon.”

“You’re talking too much, Daddy,” the boy said. “You know what happens when you try to talk too much.”

“I want to talk to Bill about you, Peter,” his father said.

“This part is crazy—this part makes no sense,” Peter said.

Tom Atkins seemed to be hoarding his remaining breath before he spoke to me: “I want you to keep an eye on my boy when I’m gone, Bill—especially if Peter is ‘like us,’ but even if he isn’t.”

“Why me, Tom?” I asked him.

“You don’t have any children, do you?” Atkins asked me. “All I’m asking you is to keep one eye on one kid. I don’t know what to do about Emily—you might not be the best choice for someone to look after Emily.”

“No, no, no,” the boy suddenly said. “Emily stays with me—she goes where I go.”

“You’ll have to talk her into it, Peter, and you know how stubborn she is,” Atkins said; it was harder and harder for poor Tom to get enough breath. “When I die—when your mom is dead, too—it’s this man here I want you talking to, Peter. Not your grandfather.”

I’d met Tom’s parents at our graduation from Favorite River. His father had taken a despairing look at me; he’d refused to shake my hand. That was Peter’s grandfather; he hadn’t called me a fag, but I’d felt him thinking it.

“My father is very . . . unsophisticated,” Atkins had told me at the time.

“He should meet my mom,” was all I’d said.

Now Tom was asking me to be his son’s advice-giver. (Tom Atkins had never been much of a realist.) “Not your grandfather,” Atkins said a second time to Peter.

“No, no, no,” the boy repeated; he’d started to cry again.

“Tom, I don’t know how to be a father—I’ve had no experience,” I said. “And I might get sick, too.”

“Yes!” Peter Atkins cried. “What if Bill or Billy, or whatever his name is, gets sick?”

“I think I better have a little oxygen, Bill—Peter knows how to do it, don’t you, Peter?” Tom asked his son.

“Yes—of course I know how to do it,” the boy said; he immediately stopped crying. “Charles is the one who should be giving you oxygen, Daddy—and it won’t work, anyway!” the fifteen-year-old cried. “You just think the oxygen is getting to your lungs; it really isn’t.” I saw the oxygen mask then—Peter knew where it was—and while the boy attended to the oxygen tank, Tom Atkins smiled proudly at me.

“Peter is a wonderful boy,” Atkins said; I saw that Tom couldn’t look at his son when he said this, or he would have lost his composure. Atkins was managing to hold himself together by looking at me.

Similarly, when Atkins spoke, I could manage to hold myself together only by looking at his fifteen-year-old son. Besides, as I would say later to Elaine, Peter looked more like Tom Atkins to me than Atkins even remotely looked like himself.

“You weren’t this assertive when I knew you, Tom,” I said, but I kept my eyes on Peter; the boy was very gently fitting the oxygen mask to his father’s unrecognizable face.

“What does ‘assertive’ mean?” Peter asked me; his father laughed. The laugh made Atkins gasp and cough, but he’d definitely laughed.

“What I mean by ‘assertive’ is that your dad is someone who takes charge of a situation—he’s someone who has confidence in a situation that many people lack confidence in,” I said to the boy. (I couldn’t believe I was saying this about the Tom Atkins I’d known, but at this moment it was true.)

“Is that any better?” Peter asked his father, who was struggling to breathe the oxygen; Tom was working awfully hard for very little relief, or so it seemed to me, but Atkins managed to nod at his son’s question—all the while never taking his eyes off me.

“I don’t think the oxygen makes a difference,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was examining me more closely than before. I saw Atkins inch his forearm across the bed; he nudged his son with that arm. “So . . .” the boy began, as if this were his idea, as if his dad hadn’t already said to him, When my old friend Bill is here, you be sure to ask him about the summer we spent in Europe together, or words to that effect. “So . . .” the boy started again. “I understand that you and my dad traveled all over Europe together. So—what was that like?”

I knew I would burst into tears if I so much as glanced at Tom Atkins—who laughed again, and coughed, and gasped—so I just kept looking at Tom’s carrot-haired likeness, his darling fifteen-year-old son, and I said, as if I were also following a script, “First of all, I was trying to read this book, but your dad wouldn’t let me—not unless I read the whole book out loud to him.”

“You read a whole book out loud to him!” Peter exclaimed in disbelief.

“We were both nineteen, but he made me read the entire novel—out loud. And your father hated the book—he was actually jealous of one of the characters; he simply didn’t want me to spend a single minute alone with her,” I explained to Peter. The boy was thoroughly delighted now. (I knew what I was doing—I was auditioning.)

I guess that the oxygen was working a little—or it was working in Tom’s mind—because Atkins had closed his eyes, and he was smiling. It was almost the same goofy smile I remembered, if you could ignore the Candida.

“How can you be jealous of a woman in a novel?” Peter Atkins asked me. “This was only make-believe—a made-up story, right?”

“Right,” I told Peter, “and she’s a miserable woman. She’s unhappy all the time, and she eventually poisons herself and dies. Your dad even detested this woman’s feet!”

“Her feet!” the boy exclaimed, laughing more.

“Peter!” we heard his mother calling. “Come here—let your father rest!”

But my audition was doomed from the start.

“It was entirely orchestrated—the whole thing was rehearsed. You know that, don’t you, Billy?” Elaine would ask me later, when we were on the train.

“I know that now,” I would tell her. (I didn’t know it then.)

Peter left the room just as I was getting started! I’d had much more to say about that summer Tom Atkins and I spent in Europe, but suddenly young Peter was gone. I thought poor Tom was asleep, but he’d moved the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose, and—with his eyes still closed—he found my wrist with his cold hand. (At first touch, I’d thought his hand was the old dog’s nose.) Tom Atkins wasn’t smiling now; he must have known we were alone. I believe Atkins also knew that the oxygen wasn’t working; I think he knew that it would never work again. His face was wet with tears.

“Is there eternal darkness, Bill?” Atkins asked me. “Is there a monster’s face, waiting there?”

“No, no, Tom,” I tried 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 asked me.

“That’s right, Tom—no monsters, either way.”

I was aware of someone behind me, in the doorway of the room. It was Peter; he’d come back—I didn’t know how long he’d been there, or what he’d overheard.

“Is the monster’s face in the darkness in that same book?” the boy asked me. “Is the face also make-believe?”

“Ha!” Atkins cried. “That’s a good question, Peter! What do you say to that, Bill?” There was a convulsion of coughing then, and more violent gasping; the boy ran to his dad and helped him put the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth, but the oxygen was ineffective. Atkins’s lungs weren’t functioning properly—he couldn’t draw enough air to help himself.

“Is this a test, Tom?” I asked my old friend. “What do you want from me?”

Peter Atkins just stood there, watching us. He helped his father pull the oxygen mask away from his mouth. “When you’re dying, everything is a test, Bill. You’ll see,” Tom said; with his son’s help, Atkins was putting the oxygen mask back in place, but he suddenly stopped the seemingly pointless process.

“It’s a made-up story, Peter,” I told the boy. “The unhappy woman who poisons herself—even her feet are made up. It’s make-believe—the monster’s face in the darkness, too. It’s all imagined,” I said.

“But this isn’t ‘imagined,’ is it?” the boy asked me. “My mom and my dad are dying—that isn’t imagined, is it?”

“No,” I told him. “You can always find me, Peter,” I suddenly said to the boy. “I’ll be available to you—I promise.”

“There!” Peter cried—not to me, to his dad. “I got him to say it! Does that make you happy? It doesn’t make me happy!” the boy cried.

“Peter!” his mom was calling. “Let your father rest! Peter?”

“I’m coming!” the boy called; he ran out of the room.

Tom Atkins had closed his eyes again. “Let me know when we’re alone, Bill,” he gasped; he held the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose, but I could tell that—as little as the oxygen helped—he wanted it.

“We’re alone,” I told Atkins.

“I’ve seen him,” Tom whispered hoarsely. “He’s not at all who we thought he was—he’s more like us than we ever imagined. He’s beautiful, Bill!”

“Who’s beautiful—who’s more like us than we ever imagined, Tom?” I asked, but I knew that the subject had changed; there’d been only one person Tom and I had always spoken of with fear and secrecy, with love and hatred.

“You know who, Bill—I’ve seen him,” Atkins whispered.

“Kittredge?” I whispered back.

Atkins covered his mouth and nose with the oxygen mask; he was nodding yes, but it hurt him to move his head and he was making a torturous endeavor just to breathe.

“Kittredge is gay?” I asked Tom Atkins, but this stimulated a prolonged coughing fit, which was followed by a self-contradictory nodding and shaking of his head. With my help, Atkins lifted the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose—albeit briefly.

“Kittredge looks exactly like his mother!” Atkins gasped; then he was back on the mask, making the most horrible sucking sounds. I didn’t want to agitate him more than my presence already had. Atkins had closed his eyes again, though his face was frozen in more of a grimace than a smile, when I heard Elaine calling me.

I found Elaine with Mrs. Atkins and the children in the kitchen. “He shouldn’t be on the oxygen if no one’s watching him—not for long, anyway,” Sue Atkins said when she saw me.

“No, Mom—that’s not quite what Charles says,” Peter corrected her. “We just have to keep checking the tank.”

“For God’s sake, Peter—please stop criticizing me!” Mrs. Atkins cried; this made her breathless. “That old tank is probably empty! Oxygen doesn’t really help him!” She coughed and coughed.

“Charles shouldn’t allow the oxygen tank to be empty!” the boy said indignantly. “Daddy doesn’t know the oxygen doesn’t help him—sometimes he thinks it helps.”

“I hate Charles,” the girl, Emily, said.

“Don’t hate Charles, Emily—we need Charles,” Sue Atkins said, trying to catch her breath.

I looked at Elaine; I felt truly lost. It surprised me that Emily was sitting next to Elaine on a couch facing the kitchen TV, which was off; the girl was curled up beside Elaine, who had her arm around the thirteen-year-old’s shoulders.

“Tom believes in your character, Bill,” Mrs. Atkins said to me (as if my character had been under discussion for hours). “Tom hasn’t known you for twenty years, yet he believes he can judge your character by the novels you write.”

“Which are made up, which are make-believe—right?” Peter asked me.

“Please don’t, Peter,” Sue Atkins said tiredly, still struggling to suppress that not-so-innocent cough.

“That’s right, Peter,” I said.

“All this time, I thought Tom was seeing him,” Sue Atkins said to Elaine, pointing at me. “But Tom must have been seeing that other guy—the one you were all so crazy about.”

“I don’t think so,” I said to Mrs. Atkins. “Tom told me he had ‘seen’ him—not that he ‘was seeing’ him. There’s a difference.”

“Well, what do I know? I’m just the wife,” Sue Atkins said.

“Do you mean Kittredge, Billy—is that who she means?” Elaine asked me.

“Yes, that’s his name—Kittredge. I think Tom was in love with him—I guess you all were,” Mrs. Atkins said. She was a little feverish, or maybe it was the drugs she was taking—I couldn’t tell. I knew the Bactrim had given poor Tom a rash; I didn’t know where. I had only a vague idea of what other side effects were possible with Bactrim. I just knew that Sue Atkins had Pneumocystis pneumonia, so she was probably taking Bactrim and she definitely had a fever.

Mrs. Atkins seemed numb, as if she were barely aware that her children, Emily and Peter, were right there with us—in the kitchen.

“Hey—it’s just me!” a man’s voice called from the vestibule. The girl, Emily, screamed—but she didn’t detach herself from Elaine’s encompassing arm.

“It’s just Charles, Emily,” her brother, Peter, said.

“I know it’s Charles—I hate him,” Emily said.

“Stop it, both of you,” their mother said.

“Who’s Kittredge?” Peter Atkins asked.

“I would like to know who he is, too,” Sue Atkins said. “God’s gift to men and women, I guess.”

“What did Tom say about Kittredge, Billy?” Elaine asked me. I’d been hoping to have this conversation on the train, where we would be alone—or not to have it, ever.

“Tom said he had seen Kittredge—that’s all,” I told Elaine. But I knew that wasn’t all. I didn’t know what Atkins had meant—that Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was; that Kittredge was more like us than we ever imagined.

That poor Tom thought Kittredge was beautiful—well, that I had no trouble imagining. But Atkins had seemed to indicate that Kittredge was and wasn’t gay; according to Tom, Kittredge looked exactly like his mother! (I wasn’t about to tell Elaine that!) How could Kittredge look exactly like Mrs. Kittredge? I was wondering.

Emily screamed. It must be Charles, the nurse, I thought, but no—it was Jacques, the dog. The old Lab was standing there, in the kitchen.

“It’s just Jacques, Emily—he’s a dog, not a man,” Peter said disdainfully to his sister, but the girl wouldn’t stop screaming.

“Leave her alone, Peter. Jacques is a male dog—maybe that did it,” Mrs. Atkins said. But when Emily didn’t or couldn’t stop screaming, Sue Atkins said to Elaine and me: “Well, it is unusual to see Jacques anywhere but at Tom’s bedside. Since Tom got sick, that dog won’t leave him. We have to drag Jacques outside to pee!”

“We have to offer Jacques a treat just to get him to come to the kitchen and eat,” Peter Atkins was explaining, while his sister went on screaming.

“Imagine a Lab you have to force to eat!” Sue Atkins said; she suddenly looked again at the old dog and started screaming. Now Emily and Mrs. Atkins were both screaming.

“It must be Tom, Billy—something’s happened,” Elaine said, over the screaming. Either Peter Atkins heard her, or he’d figured it out by himself—he was clearly a smart boy.

“Daddy!” the boy called, but his mother grabbed him and clutched him to her.

“Wait for Charles, Peter—Charles is with him,” Mrs. Atkins managed to say, though her shortness of breath had worsened. Jacques (the Labrador) sat there, just breathing.

Elaine and I chose not to “wait for Charles.” We left the kitchen and ran along the downstairs hall to the now-open door to Tom’s onetime study. (Jacques, who—for a hesitant second—seemed of a mind to follow us, stayed behind on the kitchen floor. The old dog must have known that his master had departed.) Elaine and I entered the transformed room, where we saw Charles bent over the body on the hospital bed, which the nurse had elevated to ease his task. Charles kept his head down; he did not look up at Elaine and me, though it was clear to us both that the nurse knew we were there.

I was horribly reminded of a man I’d seen a few times at the Mineshaft, that S&M club on Washington Street—at Little West Twelfth, in the Meatpacking District. (Larry would tell me the club was closed by the city’s Department of Health, but that wouldn’t be till ’85—four years after AIDS first appeared—which was when Elaine and I were conducting our experiment in living together in San Francisco.) The Mineshaft had a lot of disquieting action going on: There was a sling, for fist-fucking, suspended from the ceiling; there was a whole wall of glory holes; there was a room with a bathtub, where men were pissed on.

The man Charles closely resembled was a tattooed muscleman with ivory-pale skin; he had a shaved-bald head, with a black patch of whiskers on the point of his chin, and two diamond-stud earrings. He wore a black leather vest and a jockstrap, and a well-shined pair of motorcycle boots, and his job at the Mineshaft was to dispatch people who needed dispatching. He was called Mephistopheles; on his nights “off” from the Mineshaft, he would hang out at a gay black bar called Keller’s. I think Keller’s was on West Street, on the corner of Barrow, near the Christopher Street pier, but I never went there—no white guys I knew did. (The story I’d heard at the Mineshaft was that Mephistopheles went to Keller’s to fuck black guys, or to pick fights with them, and it didn’t matter to Mephistopheles which he did; the fucking and the fighting were all the same to him, which was no doubt why he fit right in at an S&M joint like the Mineshaft.)

Yet the male nurse, who was attending so carefully to my dead friend, was not that same Mephistopheles—nor were the ministrations Charles made to poor Tom’s remains of a deviant or sexual nature. Charles was fussing over the Hickman catheter dangling from Atkins’s unmoving chest.

“Poor Tommy—it’s not my job to remove the Hickman,” the nurse explained to Elaine and me. “The undertaker will pull it out. You see, there’s a cuff—it’s like a Velcro collar, around the tube—just inside the point where it enters the skin. Tommy’s cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That’s what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn’t fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a very firm jerk, and out it comes,” Charles told us; Elaine looked away.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have left Tom alone,” I told the nurse.

“Lots of people want to die alone,” the nurse said. “I know Tommy wanted to see you—I know he had something to say. I’ll bet he said it, right?” Charles asked me. He looked up at me and smiled. He was a strong, good-looking man with a crew cut and one silver earring—in the upper, cartilaginous part of his left ear. He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled, Charles looked nothing at all like the man I knew as Mephistopheles—a Mineshaft thug-enforcer.

“Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say,” I told Charles. “He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter.”

“Yes, well—good luck with that. I’m guessing that’ll be up to Peter!” Charles said. (I’d not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)

“No, no, no!” we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.

Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.

“It didn’t seem that the oxygen was working,” I said to Charles.

“It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it’s diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels—hence into your body,” the nurse explained.

“Tom’s hands were so cold,” Elaine said.

“Tommy didn’t want the ventilator,” Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins’s mouth. “I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him,” Charles said.

“And Mrs. Atkins—her cough,” I said. “It’s just going to get worse, right?”

“It’s a dry cough—sometimes it’s no cough. People make too much of the cough. It’s the shortness of breath that gets worse,” the nurse told me. “Tommy just ran out of breath,” Charles said.

“Charles—we want to see him!” Mrs. Atkins was calling.

“No, no, no,” Peter kept crying.

“I hate you, Charles!” Emily shouted from the kitchen.

“I know you do, honey!” Charles called back. “Just give me a second—all of you!”

I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. “I underestimated him,” I said to Elaine.

“Don’t cry now, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me—or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed—but he was merely trying to give me his business card. “Call me, William Abbott—let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to.”

“If he wants to,” I repeated, taking the nurse’s card.

Usually, when anyone addressed me as “William Abbott,” I could tell the person was a reader—or that he (or she) at least knew I was “the writer.” But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn’t tell about the reader part.

“Charles!” Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.

Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can’t say that Tom Atkins looked “peaceful,” but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.

“No, no, no,” his darling boy was crying—softer now.

Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. “Oh, it’s you, Jacques,” the nurse said. “It’s okay—you can come in. Come on.”

Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?

In the doorway, the old dog stood—uncertain of his next arthritic step.

“Come on, boy,” Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master’s former study. Charles lifted one of Tom’s cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.

There were other presences in the doorway—soon to be in the small room with us—and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom’s bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. “How nice to have met you, finally,” the dying woman said. “Do stay in touch.” Like Tom’s father, twenty years ago, she didn’t shake my hand.

The boy, Peter, didn’t once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he’d sat—expecting nothing—in the kitchen.

All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn’t quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we’d asked to wait. (To my surprise, we’d been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we’d been there half our lives.)

“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.

“What happens to the duck, Billy?” Elaine repeated—loudly enough, this time, so that I could hear her.

Okay, so this is another epilogue, I was thinking.

“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” Prospero says—act 4, scene 1. At one time, I’d actually imagined that The Tempest could and should end there.

How does Prospero begin the epilogue? I was trying to remember. Of course Richard Abbott would know, but even when Elaine and I got back to New York, I knew I didn’t want to call Richard. (I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Hadley about Atkins.)

“First line of the epilogue to The Tempest,” I said, as casually as I could, to Elaine in that funereal taxi. “You know—the end, spoken by Prospero. How’s it begin?”

“‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,’” Elaine recited. “Is that the bit you mean, Billy?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I told my dearest friend. That was exactly how I felt—o’erthrown.

“Okay, okay,” Elaine said, putting her arms around me. “You can cry now, Billy—we both can. Okay, okay.”

I was trying not to think of that line in Madame Bovary—Atkins had absolutely hated it. You know, that moment after Emma has given herself to the undeserving Rodolphe—when she feels her heart beating, “and the blood flowing in her body like a river of milk.” How that image had disgusted Tom Atkins!

Yet, as hard as it was for me to imagine—having seen the ninety-something pounds of Atkins as he lay dying, and his doomed wife, whose blood was no “river of milk” in her diseased body—Tom and Sue Atkins must have felt that way, at least once or twice.

“YOU’RE NOT SAYING THAT Tom Atkins told you Kittredge was gay—you’re not telling me that, are you?” Elaine asked me on the train, as I knew she would.

“No, I’m not telling you that—in fact, Tom both nodded and shook his head at the gay word. Atkins simply wasn’t clear. Tom didn’t exactly say what Kittredge is or was, only that he’d ‘seen’ him, and that Kittredge was ‘beautiful.’ And there was something else: Tom said Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was, Elaine—I don’t know more,” I told her.

“Okay. You ask Larry if he’s heard anything about Kittredge. I’ll check out some of the hospices, if you check out St. Vincent’s, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Tom never said that Kittredge was sick, Elaine.”

“If Tom saw him, Kittredge may be sick, Billy. Who knows where Tom went? Apparently, Kittredge went there, too.”

“Okay, okay—I’ll ask Larry, I’ll check out St. Vincent’s,” I said. I waited a moment, while New Jersey passed by outside the windows of our train. “You’re holding out on me, Elaine,” I told her. “What makes you think that Kittredge might have the disease? What don’t I know about Mrs. Kittredge?”

“Kittredge was an experimenter, wasn’t he, Billy?” Elaine asked. “That’s all I’m going on—he was an experimenter. He would fuck anyone, just to see what it was like.”

But I knew Elaine so well; I knew when she was lying—a lie of omission, maybe, not the other kind—and I knew I would have to be patient with her, as she had once (for years) been patient with me. Elaine was such a storyteller.

“I don’t know what or who Kittredge is, Billy,” Elaine told me. (This sounded like the truth.)

“I don’t know, either,” I said.

Here we were: Tom Atkins had died; yet Elaine and I were even then thinking about Kittredge.