In One Person

Chapter 11 ESPAÑA

“You should wait, William,” Miss Frost had said. “The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing—even devastating—consequences.”

“I’ll wait to read it until then,” I’d told her.

Is it any wonder that this was the novel I took with me to Europe in the summer of 1961, when I was traveling with Tom?

I’d just begun reading Madame Bovary when Atkins asked me, “Who is she, Bill?” In his tone of voice, and by the pitiful-looking way poor Tom was biting his lower lip, I perceived that he was jealous of Emma Bovary. I hadn’t yet met the woman! (I was still reading about the oafish Charles.)

I even shared with Atkins that passage about Charles’s father encouraging the boy to “take great swigs of rum and to shout insults at religious processions.” (A promising upbringing, I’d oh-so-wrongly concluded.) But when I read poor Tom that defining observation of Charles—“the audacity of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct”—I could see how hurtful this was. It would not be the last time I underestimated Atkins’s inferiority complex. After that first time, I couldn’t read Madame Bovary to myself; I was permitted to read that novel only if I read every word of it aloud to Tom Atkins.

Granted: Not every new reader of Madame Bovary takes away from that novel a distrust (bordering on hatred) of monogamy, but my contempt of monogamy was born in the summer of ’61. To be fair to Flaubert, it was poor Tom’s craven need for monogamy that I loathed.

What an awful way to read that wonderful novel—out loud to Tom Atkins, who feared infidelity even as the first sexual adventure of his young life was just getting started! The aversion Atkins felt for Emma’s adultery was akin to his gag reflex at the vagina word; yet well before Emma’s descent into infidelity, poor Tom was revolted by her—the description of “her satin slippers, with their soles yellowed from the beeswax on the dance-floor” disgusted him.

“Who cares about that sickening woman’s feet?” Atkins cried.

Of course it was Emma’s heart that Flaubert was exposing—“contact with the rich had left it smeared with something that would never fade away.”

“Like the beeswax on her slippers—don’t you see?” I asked poor Tom.

“Emma is nauseating,” Atkins replied. What I soon found nauseating was Tom’s conviction that having sex with me was the only remedy for how he’d “suffered” while listening to Madame Bovary.

“Then let me read it to myself!” I begged him. But, in that case, I would have been guilty of neglecting him—worse, I would have been choosing Emma’s company over his!

And so I read aloud to Atkins—“she was filled with lust, with rage, with hatred”—while he writhed; it was as if I were torturing him.

When I read aloud that part where Emma is so enjoying the very idea of having her first lover—“as if a second puberty had come upon her”—I believed that Atkins was going to throw up in our bed. (I thought Flaubert would have appreciated the irony that poor Tom and I were in France at the time, and there was no toilet in our room at the pension—only a bidet.)

While Atkins went on vomiting in the bidet, I considered how the infidelity that poor Tom truly feared—namely, mine—was thrilling to me. With the accidental assistance of Madame Bovary, I see now why I added monogamy to the list of distasteful things I associated with the exclusively heterosexual life, but—more accurately—it was Tom Atkins who was to blame. Here we were, in Europe—experiencing the sexual everything that Miss Frost had so protectively withheld from me—and Atkins was already agonizing over the eventuality of my leaving him (perhaps, but not necessarily, for someone else).

While Atkins was barfing in that bidet in France, I kept reading aloud to him about Emma Bovary. “She summoned the heroines from the books she had read, and the lyric host of these unchaste women began their chorus in her memory, sister-voices, enticing her.” (Don’t you just love that?)

Okay, it was cruel—how I raised my voice with that bit about the “unchaste women”—but Atkins was noisily retching, and I wanted to be heard over the running water in the bidet.

Tom and I were in Italy when Emma poisoned herself and died. (This was around the time I was compelled to keep looking at that prostitute with the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and poor Tom had noticed me looking at her.)

“‘Soon she was vomiting blood,’” I read aloud. By then, I thought I understood those things that Atkins disapproved of—even as they attracted me—but I’d not foreseen the vehemence with which Tom Atkins could disapprove. Atkins cheered when the end was near, and Emma Bovary was vomiting blood.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly, Tom,” I said, pausing just before that moment when Emma starts screaming. “Your cheers indicate to me that Emma is getting what she deserves—is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, Bill—of course she deserves it. Look what she’s done! Look how she’s behaved!” Atkins cried.

“She has married the dullest man in France, but because she fucks around, she deserves to die in agony—is that your point, Tom?” I asked him. “Emma Bovary is bored, Tom. Should she just stay bored—and by so doing earn the right to die peacefully, in her sleep?”

“You’re bored, aren’t you, Bill? You’re bored with me, aren’t you?” Atkins asked pitifully.

“Not everything is about us, Tom,” I told him.

I would regret this conversation. Years later, when Tom Atkins was dying—at that time when there were so many righteous souls who believed poor Tom, and others like him, deserved to die—I regretted that I had embarrassed Atkins, or that I’d ever made him feel ashamed.

Tom Atkins was a good person; he was just an insecure guy and a cloying lover. He was one of those boys who’d always felt unloved, and he loaded up our summer relationship with unrealistic expectations. Atkins was manipulative and possessive, but only because he wanted me to be the love of his life. I think poor Tom was afraid he would always be unloved; he imagined he could force the search for the love of his life into a single summer of one-stop shopping.

As for my ideas about finding the love of my life, I was quite the opposite to Tom Atkins; that summer of ’61, I was in no hurry to stop shopping—I’d just started!

Not that many pages further on in Madame Bovary, I would read aloud Emma’s actual death scene, her final convulsion—upon hearing the blind man’s tapping stick and his raucous singing. Emma dies imagining “the beggar’s hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster.”

Atkins was shaking with guilt and terror. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Bill!” poor Tom cried. “I didn’t mean it—I didn’t mean she deserved that, Bill!”

I remember holding him while he cried. Madame Bovary is not a horror story, but the novel had that effect on Tom Atkins. He was very fair-skinned, with freckles on his chest and back, and when he got upset and cried, his face flushed pink—as if someone had slapped him—and his freckles looked inflamed.

When I read on in Madame Bovary—that part where Charles finds Rodolphe’s letter to Emma (Charles is so stupid, he tells himself that his unfaithful wife and Rodolphe must have loved each other “platonically”)—Atkins was wincing, as if in pain. “‘Charles was not one of those men who like to get to the bottom of things,’” I continued, while poor Tom moaned.

“Oh, Bill—no, no, no! Please tell me I’m not one of those men like Charles. I do like to get to the bottom of things!” Atkins cried. “Oh, Bill—I honestly do, I do, I do!” He once more dissolved in tears—as he would again, when he was dying, when poor Tom indeed got to the bottom of things. (It was not the bottom that any of us saw coming.)

“Is there eternal darkness, Bill?” Atkins would one day ask me. “Is there a monster’s face, waiting there?”

“No, no, Tom,” I would try 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 would ask me.

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

We were still in Italy, that summer of ’61, when I got to the end of Madame Bovary; by then, Atkins was such a self-pitying wreck that I’d snuck into the WC and read the ending to myself. When it was time for the reading-aloud part, I skipped that paragraph about the autopsy on Charles—that horrifying bit when they open him up and find nothing. I didn’t want to deal with poor Tom’s distress at the nothing word. (“How could there have been nothing, Bill?” I imagined Atkins asking.)

Maybe it was the fault of the paragraph I omitted from my reading, but Tom Atkins wasn’t content with the ending of Madame Bovary.

“It’s just not very satisfying,” Atkins complained.

“How about a blow job, Tom?” I asked him. “I’ll show you satisfying.”

“I was being serious, Bill,” Atkins told me peevishly.

“So was I, Tom—so was I,” I said.

After that summer, it wasn’t a surprise to either of us that we went our separate ways. It was easier, for a while, to maintain a limited but cordial correspondence than to see each other. I wouldn’t hear from Atkins for a couple of our college years; I guessed that he might have tried having a girlfriend, but someone told me Tom was lost on drugs, and that there’d been an ugly and very public exposure of a homosexual kind. (In Amherst, Massachusetts!) This was early enough in the sixties that the homosexual word had a forbiddingly clinical sound to it; at that time, of course, homosexuals had no “rights”—we weren’t even a “group.” I was still living in New York in ’68, and even in New York there wasn’t what I would have called a gay “community,” not a true community. (Just all the cruising.)

I suppose the frequency with which gay men encountered one another in doctors’ offices might have constituted a different kind of community; I’m kidding, but it was my impression that we had more than our fair share of gonorrhea. In fact, a gay doctor (who was treating me for the clap) told me that bisexual men should wear condoms.

I don’t remember if the clap doctor said why, or if I asked him; I probably took his unfriendly advice as further evidence of prejudice against bisexuals, or maybe this doctor reminded me of a gay Dr. Harlow. (In ’68, I knew a lot of gay guys; their doctors weren’t telling them to wear condoms.)

The only reason I remember this incident at all is that I was about to publish my first novel, and I had just met a woman I was interested in, in that way; at the same time, of course, I was constantly meeting gay guys. And it wasn’t only because of this clap doctor (with the apparent prejudice against bisexuals) that I started wearing a condom; I credit Esmeralda for making condoms appealing to me, and I missed Esmeralda—I definitely did.

In any case, the next time I heard from Tom Atkins, I had become a condom-wearer and poor Tom had a wife and children. As if that weren’t shocking enough, our correspondence had degenerated to Christmas cards! Thus I learned, from a Christmas photo, that Tom Atkins had a family—an older boy, a younger girl. (Needless to say, I hadn’t been invited to the wedding.)

In the winter of 1969, I became a published novelist. The woman I’d met in New York around the time I was persuaded to wear a condom had lured me to Los Angeles; her name was Alice, and she was a screenwriter. It was somehow reassuring that Alice had told me she wasn’t interested in “adapting” my first novel.

“I’m not going down that road,” Alice said. “Our relationship means more to me than a job.”

I’d told Larry what Alice had said, thinking this might reassure him about her. (Larry had met Alice only once; he hadn’t liked her.)

“Maybe you should consider, Bill, what Alice means,” Larry said. “What if she already pitched your novel to all the studios, and no one was interested?”

Well, my old pal Larry was the first to tell me that no one would ever make a film from my first novel; he also told me I would hate living in L.A., although I think what Larry meant (or hoped) was that I would hate living with Alice. “She’s not your soprano understudy, Bill,” Larry said.

But I liked living with Alice—Alice was the first woman I’d lived with who knew I was bisexual. She said it didn’t matter. (Alice was bisexual.)

Alice was also the first woman I’d talked to about having a child together—but, like me, she was no fan of monogamy. We’d gone to Los Angeles with a bohemian belief in the enduring superiority of friendship; Alice and I were friends, and we both believed that the concept of “the couple” was a dinosaur idea. We’d given each other permission to have other lovers, though there were limitations—namely, it was okay with Alice if I saw men, just not other women, and I told her it was okay with me if she saw women, just not other men.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine had said. “I don’t think those kinds of arrangements work.”

At the time, I wouldn’t have considered Elaine to be an authority on “arrangements”; I also knew that, even in ’69, Elaine had expressed an on-again, off-again interest in our living together. But Elaine was steadfast in her resolution never to have any children; she hadn’t changed her mind about the size of babies’ heads.

Alice and I additionally believed, most naïvely, in the enduring superiority of writers. Naturally, we didn’t see each other as rivals; she was a screenwriter, I was a novelist. What could possibly go wrong? (“Uh-oh,” as Elaine would say.)

I’d forgotten that my first conversation with Alice had been about the draft. When I got summoned for a physical—I can’t remember exactly when this was, or many other details, because I had a terrible hangover that day—I checked the box that said something along the lines of “homosexual tendencies,” which I vaguely recall whispering to myself in an Austrian accent, as if Herr Doktor Grau were still alive and speaking to me.

The army psychiatrist was a tight-assed lieutenant; I remember him. He kept his office door open while he interrogated me—so that the recruits who were waiting their turn could overhear us—but I’d lived through earlier and vastly smarter intimidation tactics. (Think of Kittredge.)

“And then what?” Alice had asked, when I was telling her the story. She was a great person to tell a story to; Alice always gave me the impression that she couldn’t wait to hear what happened next. But Alice was impatient with the vagueness of my draft story.

“You don’t like girls?” the lieutenant had asked me.

“Yes, I do—I do like girls,” I told him.

“Then what are your ‘homosexual tendencies,’ exactly?” the army psychiatrist asked.

“I like guys, too,” I told him.

“You do?” he asked. “Do you like guys better than you like girls?” the psychiatrist continued loudly.

“Oh, it’s just so hard to choose,” I said, a little breathlessly. “I really, really like them both!”

“Uh-huh,” the lieutenant said. “And do you see this tendency continuing?”

“Well, I certainly hope so!” I said—as enthusiastically as I could manage. (Alice loved this story; at least she said she did. She thought it would make a funny scene in a movie.)

“The funny word should have warned you, Bill,” Larry would tell me much later, when I was back in New York. “Or the movie word, maybe.”

What might have warned me about Alice was that she took notes when we were talking. “Who takes notes on conversations?” Larry had asked me; not waiting for an answer, he’d also asked, “And which of you likes it that she doesn’t shave her armpits?”

About two weeks after I’d checked the box for “homosexual tendencies,” or whatever the stupid form said, I received my classification notice—or maybe it was my reclassification notice. I think it was a 4-F; I was found “not qualified”; there was something about the “established physical, mental, or moral standards.”

“But exactly what did the notification say—what was your actual classification?” Alice had asked me. “You can’t just think it was a Four-F.”

“I don’t remember—I don’t care,” I told her.

“But that’s just so vague!” Alice said.

Of course the vague word should have warned me, too.

There’d been a follow-up letter, perhaps from the Selective Service, but maybe not, telling me to see a shrink—not just any shrink, but a particular one.

I’d sent the letter to Grandpa Harry; he and Nils knew a lawyer, for their logging and lumber business. The lawyer said that I couldn’t be forced to see a shrink; I didn’t, and I never heard from the draft again. The problem was that I’d written about this—albeit in passing—in my first novel. I didn’t realize it was my novel Alice was interested in; I thought she was interested in every little thing about me.

“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy,” I wrote in that novel. (Alice had told me how much she loved that line.) The first-person narrator is an out-of-the-closet gay man who’s in love with the protagonist, who refuses to check the “homosexual tendencies” box; the protagonist, who is an in-the-closet gay man, will die in Vietnam. You might say it is a story about how not coming out can kill you.

One day, I could tell that Alice was really agitated. She seemed to be working on so many projects at the same time—I never knew which screenplay she was writing, at any given moment. I just assumed that one of these scripts-in-progress was causing her agitation, but she confessed to me that one of the studio execs she knew had been “bugging” her about me and my first novel.

He was a guy she regularly made a point of putting down. “Mr. Sharpie,” she sometimes called him—or “Mr. Pastel,” more recently. I had the impression of an immaculate dresser, but a guy who wore golfing clothes—light-colored clothes, anyway. (You know: lime-green pants, pink polo shirts—pastel colors.)

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

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

“Like what?” I asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know the guy,” I told her. “What’s he like to ‘deal with,’ Alice?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice knew she’d been caught. With her hand on her forehead—still shielding her eyes—she recited, with resignation, “‘Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I said ‘would have been,’ William—not ‘would be.’ I’m not ever going to be a mother now,” Miss Frost told me.

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

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

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

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

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Elaine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Answer it, will you?” I called to Elaine.

“What if it’s Rachel?” Elaine called to me.

“Rachel knows you—she knows we’re not doing it, Elaine!” I called from the bathroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Billy, Billy—come here, come here. Don’t go down that road, Billy,” Elaine said, holding out her arms to me.

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

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

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

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

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

“Rachel is sucking up to you, and you don’t see it,” Elaine said. I didn’t say anything, and Elaine added: “If you ask me, I think my tits are bigger.”

“Bigger than—”

“Rachel’s!”

“Oh.”

Elaine was never sexually jealous of anyone I was sleeping with, but she didn’t like it when I was hanging out with a writer who was younger than she was—man or woman.

“Rachel writes in the present tense—‘I go, she says, he goes, I think.’ That shit,” Elaine declared.

“Yes, well—”

“And the ‘thinking, wishing, hoping, wondering’—that shit!” Elaine cried.

“Yes, I know—” I started to say.

“I hope she doesn’t verbalize her orgasms: ‘Billy—I’m coming!’ That shit,” Elaine said.

“Well, no—not that I remember,” I replied.

“I think she’s one of those young-women writers who baby her students,” Elaine said.

Elaine had taught more than I had; I never argued with her about teaching, or Mrs. Kittredge. Grandpa Harry was generous to me; he gave me a little money for Christmas every year. I’d had part-time college-teaching jobs, the occasional writer-in-residence stint—the latter never longer than a single semester. I didn’t dislike teaching, but it hadn’t invaded my writing time—as I knew it did invade the writing time of many writer friends, Elaine among them.

“Just so you know, Elaine—I find there’s more to like about Rachel than her small breasts,” I said.

“I would sincerely hope so, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked my old friend.

“You know that guy Rachel almost married?” Elaine asked me.

“Not personally,” I told her.

“He hit on me,” Elaine said.

“Oh.”

“He told me that, one time, Rachel shit in the bed—that’s what he told me, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Nothing like that has happened, yet,” I told Elaine. “But I’ll be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”

After that, we drove for a while in silence. When we left New York State and crossed into Vermont, a little west of Bennington, there were more dead things in the road; the bigger dead things had been dragged to the side of the road, but we could still see them. I remember a couple of deer, in the bigger category, and the usual raccoons and porcupines. There’s a lot of roadkill in northern New England.

“Would you like me to drive?” I asked Elaine.

“Sure—yes, I would,” Elaine answered quietly. She found a place to pull off the road, and I took over the driving. We turned north again, just before Bennington; there was more snow in the woods, and more dead things in the road and along the roadside.

We were a long way from New York City when Elaine said, “That guy didn’t hit on me, Billy—I made up the story about Rachel shitting in bed, too.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.”

“I did run into someone you went to school with—this is a true story,” Elaine told me.

“Who? In school with where?” I asked her.

“At the Institute, in Vienna—she was one of those Institute girls,” Elaine said. “When she met you, you told her you were trying to be faithful to a girlfriend back in the States.”

“I did tell some girls that,” I admitted.

“I told this Institute girl that I was the girlfriend you were trying to be faithful to, when you were in Vienna,” Elaine said.

We both had a laugh about that, but Elaine then asked me—more seriously—“Do you know what that Institute girl said, Billy?”

“No. What?” I asked.

“She said, ‘Poor you!’ That’s what she said—this is a true story, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I didn’t doubt it. Das Institut was awfully small; every student there knew when I was fucking a soprano understudy—and, later, when I was fucking a famous American poet.

“If you’d been my girlfriend, I would have been faithful to you, Elaine—or I would have sincerely tried,” I told her. I let her cry for a while in the passenger seat.

“If you’d been my boyfriend, I would have sincerely tried, too, Billy,” Elaine finally said.

We drove northeast, then headed west from Ezra Falls—the Favorite River running beside us, to the north side of the road. Even in February, as cold as it was, that river was never entirely frozen over. Of course I’d thought about having children with Elaine, but there was no point in bringing that up; Elaine wasn’t kidding about the size of babies’ heads—in her view, they were enormous.

When we drove down River Street, past the building that had once been the First Sister Public Library—it was now the town’s historical society—Elaine said, “I ran lines with you on that brass bed, for The Tempest, about a century ago.”

“Almost twenty years ago, yes,” I said. I wasn’t thinking about The Tempest, or running lines with Elaine on that brass bed. I had other memories of that bed, but as I drove past what used to be the public library, it occurred to me—a mere seventeen years after the much-maligned librarian had left town—that Miss Frost might have protected (or not) other young men in her basement bedroom.

But what other young men would Miss Frost have met in the library? I suddenly remembered that I’d never seen any children there. As for teenagers, there were only those occasional girls—the high school students condemned to Ezra Falls. I’d never seen any teenage boys in the First Sister Public Library—except for the night Tom Atkins came, looking for me.

Except for me, our town’s young boys would not have been encouraged to visit that library. Surely, no responsible parents in First Sister would have wanted their young male children to be in the company of the transsexual wrestler who was in charge of the place!

I suddenly realized why I’d been so late in getting a library card; no one in my family would ever have introduced me to Miss Frost. It was only because Richard Abbott proposed taking me to the First Sister Public Library, and no one in my family could ever say no to Richard—nor was anyone in my family quick enough to overrule Richard’s good-hearted and impromptu proposition. I’d managed to meet Miss Frost only because Richard recognized the absurdity of a small-town thirteen-year-old boy not having a library card.

“Almost twenty years ago feels like a century to me, Billy,” Elaine was saying.

Not to me, I was trying to say, but the words wouldn’t come. It feels like yesterday to me! I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t speak.

Elaine, who saw I was crying, put her hand on my thigh. “Sorry I brought up that brass bed, Billy,” Elaine said. (Elaine, who knew me so well, knew I wasn’t crying for my mother.)

GIVEN THE SECRETS MY family watched over—those silent vigils we kept, in lieu of anything remotely resembling honest disclosure—it is a wonder I didn’t also suffer a religious upbringing, but those Winthrop women were not religious. Grandpa Harry and I had been spared that falsehood. As for Uncle Bob and Richard Abbott, I know there were times when living with my aunt Muriel and my mother must have resembled a religious observance—the kind of demanding devotion that fasting requires, or perhaps a nocturnal trial (such as staying up all night, when going to sleep would be both customary and more natural).

“What is it that’s so appealin’ about a wake?” Grandpa Harry asked Elaine and me. We went first to his house on River Street; I’d half expected Harry to greet us as a woman, or at least dressed in Nana Victoria’s clothes, but he was looking like a lumberman—jeans, a flannel shirt, unshaven. “I mean, why would anyone livin’ find it suitable to watch over the bodies of the dead—that is, before you get to the buryin’ part? Where are the dead bodies gonna go? Why do dead bodies need watchin’?” Grandpa Harry asked.

It was Vermont; it was February. Nobody was burying Muriel or my mother until April, after the ground had thawed. I could only guess that the funeral home had asked Grandpa Harry if he’d wanted to have a proper wake; that had probably started the tirade.

“Jeez—we’ll be watchin’ the bodies till spring!” Harry had shouted.

There was no religious service planned. Grandpa Harry had a big house; friends and family members would show up for cocktails and a catered buffet. The memorial word was allowed, but not a “memorial service”; Elaine and I didn’t hear the service word mentioned. Harry seemed distracted and forgetful. Elaine and I both thought he didn’t behave like a man who’d just lost his only children, his two daughters; instead, Harry struck us as an eighty-four-year-old who had misplaced his reading glasses—Grandpa Harry was eerily disconnected from the moment. We left him to ready himself for the “party”; Elaine and I were not mistaken—Harry had used the party word.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine had said, as we were leaving the River Street house.

It was the first time I had been “home” when school was in session—that is, to Richard Abbott’s faculty apartment in Bancroft Hall—since I’d been a Favorite River student. But how young the students looked was more unnerving to Elaine.

“I don’t see anyone I could even imagine having sex with,” Elaine said.

At least Bancroft was still a boys’ dorm; it was disconcerting enough to see all the girls on the campus. In a process that was familiar to most of the single-sex boarding schools in New England, Favorite River had become a coed institution in 1973. Uncle Bob was no longer working in Admissions. The Racquet Man had a new career in Alumni Affairs. I could easily see Uncle Bob as a glad-hander, a natural at soliciting goodwill (and money) from a sentimental Favorite River alum. Bob also had a gift for inserting his queries into the class notes in the academy’s alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. It had become Bob’s passion to track down those elusive Favorite River graduates who’d failed to keep in touch with their old school. (Uncle Bob called his queries “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”)

Cousin Gerry had forewarned me that Bob’s drinking had been “unleashed” by all his traveling for Alumni Affairs, but I counted Gerry as the last surviving Winthrop woman—albeit a watered-down, lesbian version of that steadfastly disapproving gene. (You will recall that I’d always imagined Uncle Bob’s reputation for drinking was exaggerated.)

On another subject: Upon our return to Bancroft Hall, Elaine and I discovered that Richard Abbott couldn’t speak, and that Mr. and Mrs. Hadley weren’t talking to each other. The lack of communication between Martha Hadley and her husband was not unknown to me; Elaine had long predicted that her parents were headed for a divorce. (“It won’t be acrimonious, Billy—they’re already indifferent to each other,” Elaine had told me.) And Richard Abbott had confided to me—that is, before my mother died, when Richard could still speak—that he and my mom had stopped socializing with the Hadleys.

Elaine and I had speculated on the mysterious “stopped socializing” part. Naturally, this dovetailed with Elaine’s twenty-year theory that her mother was in love with Richard Abbott. Since I’d had crushes on Mrs. Hadley and Richard, what could I possibly contribute to this conversation?

I’d always believed that Richard Abbott was a vastly better man than my mother deserved, and that Martha Hadley was entirely too good for Mr. Hadley. Not only could I never remember that man’s first name, if he ever had one; something about Mr. Hadley’s fleeting brush with fame—the fame was due to his emergence as a political historian, and a voice of protest, during the Vietnam War—had served to dislocate him. If he’d once appeared aloof from his family—not only remote-seeming to his wife, Mrs. Hadley, but even distant from his only child, Elaine—Mr. Hadley’s identification with a cause (his anti-Vietnam crusades with the Favorite River students) completely severed him from Elaine and Martha Hadley, and further led him to have little (if anything) to do with adults.

It happens in boarding schools: There’s occasionally a male faculty member who is unhappy with his life as a grown-up. He tries to become one of the students. In Mr. Hadley’s case—according to Elaine—his unfortunate regression to become one of the students when he himself was already in his fifties coincided with Favorite River Academy’s decision to admit girls. This was just two years before the end of the Vietnam War.

“Uh-oh,” as I’d heard Elaine say, so many times, but this time she’d added something. “When the war is over, what crusade will my father be leading? How’s he going to engage all those girls?”

Elaine and I didn’t see my uncle Bob until the “party.” I had just read the Racquet Man’s query in the most recent issue of The River Bulletin; attached to the class notes for the Class of ’61, which was my class, there was this plaintive entry in the “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”

“What’s up with you, Jacques Kittredge?” Uncle Bob had written. Following his undergraduate degree from Yale (’65), Kittredge had completed a three-year residence at the Yale School of Drama; he’d earned an MFA in ’67. Thereafter, we’d heard nothing.

“An MFA in fucking what?” Elaine had asked more than ten years ago—when The River Bulletin had last heard a word from (or about) Kittredge. Elaine meant that it could have been a degree in acting, design, sound design, directing, playwriting, stage management, technical design and production, theater management—even dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. “I’ll bet he’s a fucking critic,” Elaine said. I told her I didn’t care what Kittredge was; I said I didn’t want to know.

“Yes, you do want to know. You can’t bullshit me, Billy,” Elaine had said.

Now here was the Racquet Man, slumped on a couch—actually sunken into a couch in Grandpa Harry’s living room, as if it would take a wrestling team to get Bob back on his feet.

“I’m sorry about Aunt Muriel,” I told him. Uncle Bob reached up from the couch to give me a hug, spilling his beer.

“Shit, Billy,” Bob said, “it’s the people you would least expect who are disappearing.”

“Disappearing,” I repeated warily.

“Take your classmate, Billy. Who would have picked Kittredge as a likely disappearance?” Uncle Bob asked.

“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” I asked the Racquet Man.

“An unwillingness to communicate is more likely,” Uncle Bob said. His speech was so slowed down that the communicate word sounded as if it had seven or eight syllables; I realized that Bob was quietly but spectacularly drunk, although the gathering in memory of my aunt Muriel and my mother was just getting started.

There were some empty beer bottles at Bob’s feet; when he dropped the now-empty bottle he’d been drinking (and spilling), he deftly kicked all but one of the bottles under the couch—somehow, without even looking at the bottles.

I’d once wondered if Kittredge had gone to Vietnam; he’d had that hero-looking aspect about him. I knew two other Favorite River wrestlers had died in the war. (Remember Wheelock? I barely remember him—an adequately “swashbuckling” Antonio, Sebastian’s friend, in Twelfth Night. And how about Madden, the self-pitying heavyweight who played Malvolio in that same production? Madden always saw himself as a “perpetual victim”; that’s all I remember about him.)

But, drunk as he was, Uncle Bob must have read my mind, because he suddenly said, “Knowing Kittredge, I’ll bet he ducked Vietnam—somehow.”

“I’ll bet he did,” was all I said to Bob.

“No offense, Billy,” the Racquet Man added, accepting another beer from one of the passing caterers—a woman about my mom’s age, or Muriel’s, with dyed-red hair. She looked vaguely familiar; maybe she worked with Uncle Bob in Alumni Affairs, or she might have worked with him (years ago) in the Admissions Office.

“My dad was sloshed before he got here,” Gerry told Elaine and me, when we were standing together in the line for the buffet. I knew Gerry’s girlfriend; she was an occasional stand-up comic at a club I went to in the Village. She had a deadpan delivery and always wore a man’s black suit, or a tuxedo, with a loose-fitting white dress shirt.

“No bra,” Elaine had observed, “but the shirt’s too big for her, and it’s not see-through material. The point is, she doesn’t want you to know she has breasts—or what they look like.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry about your mom, Billy,” Gerry said. “I know she was completely dysfunctional, but she was your mother.”

“I’m sorry about yours,” I told Gerry. The stand-up comic made a horsey snorting sound.

“Not as deadpan as usual,” Elaine would say later.

“Someone’s gotta get the car keys from my fucking father,” Gerry said.

I was keeping an eye on Grandpa Harry. I was afraid he would sneak away from the party, only to reappear as a surprise reincarnation of Nana Victoria. Nils Borkman was keeping an eye on his old partner, too. (If Mrs. Borkman was there, I either didn’t see her or didn’t recognize her.)

“I’m back-watching your grandfather, Bill,” Nils told me. “If the funny stuff gets out of hand, I am emergency-calling you!”

“What funny stuff?” I asked him.

But just then, Grandpa Harry suddenly spoke up. “They’re always late, those girls. I don’t know where they are, but they’ll show up. Everyone just go ahead and eat. There’s plenty of food. Those girls can find somethin’ to eat when they get here.”

That quieted the crowd down. “I already told him that his girls aren’t coming to the party, Bill. I mean, he knows they’re dead—he’s just forgetfulness exemplified,” Nils told me.

“Forgetfulness personified,” I said to the old Norwegian; he was two years older than Grandpa Harry, but Nils seemed a little more reliable in the remembering department, and in some other departments.

I asked Martha Hadley if Richard had spoken yet. Not since the news of the accident, Mrs. Hadley informed me. Richard had hugged me a lot, and I’d hugged him back, but there’d been no words.

Mr. Hadley appeared lost in thought—as he often did. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked about anything but the war in Vietnam. Mr. Hadley had made himself a droll obituarist of every Favorite River boy who’d bitten the dust in Vietnam. I saw that he was waiting for me at the end of the buffet table.

“Get ready,” Elaine warned me, in a whisper. “Here comes another death you didn’t know about.”

There was no prologue—there never was, with Mr. Hadley. He was a history teacher; he just announced things. “Do you remember Merryweather?” Mr. Hadley asked me.

Not Merryweather! I thought. Yes, I remembered him; he was still an underclassman when I graduated. He’d been the wrestling-team manager—he handed out oranges, cut in quarters; he picked up the bloody and discarded towels.

“Not Merryweather—not in Vietnam!” I automatically said.

“Yes, I’m afraid so, Billy,” Mr. Hadley said gravely. “And Trowbridge—did you know Trowbridge, Billy?”

“Not Trowbridge!” I cried; I couldn’t believe it! I’d last seen Trowbridge in his pajamas! Kittredge had accosted him when the round-faced little boy was on his way to brush his teeth. I was very upset to think of Trowbridge dying in Vietnam.

“Yes, I’m afraid so—Trowbridge, too, Billy,” Mr. Hadley self-importantly went on. “Alas, yes—young Trowbridge, too.”

I saw that Grandpa Harry had disappeared—if not in the way Uncle Bob had recently used the word.

“Not a costume change, let’s hope, Bill,” Nils Borkman whispered in my ear.

I only then noticed that Mr. Poggio, the grocer, was there—he who’d so enjoyed Grandpa Harry onstage, as a woman. In fact, both Mr. and Mrs. Poggio were there, to pay their respects. Mrs. Poggio, I remembered, had not enjoyed Grandpa Harry’s female impersonations. This sighting caused me to look all around for the disapproving Riptons—Ralph Ripton, the sawyer, and his no-less-disapproving wife. But the Riptons, if they’d come to pay their respects, had left early—as was their habit at the plays put on by the First Sister Players.

I went to see how Uncle Bob was doing; there were a few more empty beer bottles at his feet, and now those feet could no longer locate the bottles and kick them under the couch.

I kicked a few bottles under the couch for him. “You won’t be tempted to drive yourself home, will you, Uncle Bob?” I asked him.

“That’s why I already put the car keys in your jacket pocket, Billy,” my uncle told me.

But when I felt around in my jacket pockets, I found only a squash ball. “Not the car keys, Uncle Bob,” I said, showing him the ball.

“Well, I know I put my car keys in someone’s jacket pocket, Billy,” the Racquet Man said.

“Any news from your graduating class?” I suddenly asked him; he was drunk enough—I thought I might catch him off-guard. “What news from the Class of ’35?” I asked my uncle as casually as I could.

“Nothing from Big Al, Billy—believe me, I would tell you,” he said.

Grandpa Harry was making the rounds at his party as a woman now; it was at least an improvement that he was acknowledging to everyone that his daughters were dead—not just late for the party, as he’d earlier said. I could see Nils Borkman following his old partner, as if the two of them were on skis and armed, gliding through the snowy woods. Bob dropped another empty beer bottle, and I kicked it under Grandpa Harry’s living-room couch. No one noticed the beer bottles, not since Grandpa Harry had reappeared—that is, not as Grandpa Harry.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Harry—yours and mine,” Uncle Bob said to my grandfather, who was wearing a faded-purple dress I remembered as one of Nana Victoria’s favorites. The blue-gray wig was at least “age-appropriate,” Richard Abbott would later say—when Richard was able to speak again, which wouldn’t be soon. Nils Borkman told me that the falsies must have come from the costume shop at the First Sister Players, or maybe Grandpa Harry had stolen them from the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy.

The withered and arthritic hand that held out a new beer to my uncle Bob did not belong to the caterer with the dyed-red hair. It was Herm Hoyt—he was only a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Coach Hoyt looked a lot more beaten up.

Herm had been sixty-eight when he was coaching Kittredge in ’61; he’d looked ready to retire then. Now, at eighty-five, Coach Hoyt had been retired for fifteen years.

“Thanks, Herm,” the Racquet Man quietly said, raising the beer to his lips. “Billy here has been asking about our old friend Al.”

“How’s that duck-under comin’ along, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked.

“I guess you haven’t heard from her, Herm,” I replied.

“I hope you’ve been practicin’, Billy,” the old coach said.

I then told Herm Hoyt a long and involved story about a fellow runner I’d met in Central Park. The guy was about my age, I told the coach, and by his cauliflower ears—and a certain stiffness in his shoulders and neck, as he ran—I deduced that he was a wrestler, and when I mentioned wrestling, he thought that I was a wrestler, too.

“Oh, no—I just have a halfway-decent duck-under,” I told him. “I’m no wrestler.”

But Arthur—the wrestler’s name was Arthur—misunderstood me. He thought I meant that I used to wrestle, and I was just being modest or self-deprecating.

Arthur had gone on and on (the way wrestlers will) about how I should still be wrestling. “You should be picking up some other moves to go with that duck-under—it’s not too late!” he’d told me. Arthur wrestled at a club on Central Park South, where he said there were a lot of guys “our age” who were still wrestling. Arthur was confident that I could find an appropriate workout partner in my weight-class.

Arthur was unstoppably enthusiastic about my not “quitting” wrestling, simply because I was in my thirties and no longer competing on a school or college team.

“But I was never on a team!” I tried to tell him.

“Look—I know a lot of guys our age who were never starters,” Arthur had told me. “And they’re still wrestling!”

Finally, as I told Herm Hoyt, I just became so exasperated with Arthur’s insistence that I come to wrestling practice at his frigging club, I told him the truth.

“Exactly what did you tell the fella, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.

That I was gay—or, more accurately, bisexual.

“Jeez . . .” Herm started to say.

That a former wrestler, who’d briefly been my lover, had tried to teach me a little wrestling—strictly for my own self-defense. That the former wrestling coach of this same ex-wrestler had also given me some tips.

“You mean that duck-under you mentioned—that’s it?” Arthur had asked.

“That’s it. Just the duck-under,” I’d admitted.

“Jeez, Billy . . .” old Coach Hoyt was saying, shaking his head.

“Well, that’s the story,” I said to Herm. “I haven’t been practicing the duck-under.”

“There’s only one wrestlin’ club I know on Central Park South, Billy,” Herm Hoyt told me. “It’s a pretty good one.”

“When Arthur understood what my history with the duck-under was, he didn’t seem interested in pursuing the matter of my coming to wrestling practice,” I explained to Coach Hoyt.

“It might not be the best idea,” Herm said. “I don’t know the fellas at that club—not anymore.”

“They probably don’t get many gay guys wrestling there—you know, for self-defense—is that your guess, Herm?” I asked the old coach.

“Has this Arthur fella read your writin’, Billy?” Herm Hoyt asked me.

“Have you?” I asked Herm, surprised.

“Jeez—sure, I have. Just don’t ask me what it’s about, Billy!” the old wrestling coach said.

“How about Miss Frost?” I suddenly asked him. “Has she read my writing?”

“Persistent, isn’t he?” Uncle Bob asked Herm.

“She knows you’re a writer, Billy—everybody who knows you knows that,” the wrestling coach said.

“Don’t ask me what you write about, either, Billy,” Uncle Bob said. He dropped the empty bottle and I kicked it under Grandpa Harry’s couch. The woman with the dyed-red hair brought another beer for the Racquet Man. I realized why she’d seemed familiar; all the caterers were from the Favorite River Academy dining service—they were kitchen workers, from the academy dining halls. That woman who kept bringing Bob another beer had been in her forties when I’d last seen her; she came from the past, which would always be with me.

“The wrestlin’ club is the New York Athletic Club—they have other sports there, for sure, but they weren’t bad at wrestlin’, Billy. You could probably do some practicin’ of your duck-under there,” Herm was saying. “Maybe ask that Arthur fella about it, Billy—after all these years, I’ll bet you could use some practicin’.”

“Herm, what if the wrestlers beat the shit out of me?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of Miss Frost and you showing me a duck-under in the first place?”

“Bob’s asleep, and he’s pissed all over himself,” the old coach abruptly observed.

“Uncle Bob . . .” I started to say, but Herm Hoyt grabbed the Racquet Man by both shoulders and shook him.

“Bob—stop pissin’!” the wrestling coach shouted.

When Bob’s eyes blinked open, he was as caught off-guard as anyone working in the office of Alumni Affairs at Favorite River Academy ever would be.

“España,” the Racquet Man said, when he saw me.

“Jeez, Bob—be careful what you say,” Herm Hoyt said.

“España,” I repeated.

“That’s where he is—he says he’s never coming back, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me.

“That’s where who is?” I asked my drunken uncle.

Our only conversation, if you could call it that, had been about Kittredge; it was hard to imagine Kittredge speaking Spanish. I knew the Racquet Man didn’t mean Big Al—Uncle Bob wasn’t telling me that Miss Frost was in Spain, and she was never coming back.

“Bob . . .” I started to say, but the Racquet Man had nodded off again. Herm Hoyt and I could see that Bob was still pissing.

“Herm . . .” I started to say.

“Franny Dean, my former wrestlin’-team manager, Billy—he’s in Spain. Your father is in Spain, Billy, and he’s happy there—that’s all I know.”

“Where in Spain, Herm?” I asked the old coach.

“España,” Herm Hoyt repeated, shrugging. “Somewhere in Spain, Billy—that’s all I can tell ya. Just keep thinkin’ about the happy part. Your dad is happy, and he’s in Spain. Your mom was never happy, Billy.”

I knew Herm was right about that. I went looking for Elaine; I wanted to tell her that my father was in Spain. My mother was dead, but my father—whom I’d never known—was alive and happy.

But before I could tell her, Elaine spoke to me first. “We should sleep in your bedroom tonight, Billy—not in mine,” she began.

“Okay—” I said.

“If Richard wakes up and decides to say something, he shouldn’t be alone—we should be there,” Elaine went on.

“Okay, but I just found out about something,” I told her; she wasn’t listening.

“I owe you a blow job, Billy—maybe this is your lucky night,” Elaine said. I thought she was drunk, or else I’d misheard her.

“What?” I said.

“I’m sorry for what I said about Rachel. That’s what the blow job is for,” Elaine explained; she was drunk, extending the number of syllables in her words in the overly articulated manner of the Racquet Man.

“You don’t owe me a blow job, Elaine,” I told her.

“You don’t want a blow job, Billy?” she asked me; she made “blow job” sound as if it had four or five syllables.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want one,” I told her. “España,” I said suddenly, because that’s what I wanted to talk about.

“España?” Elaine said. “Is that a kind of Spanish blow job, Billy?” She was tripping a little, as I led her over to say good night to Grandpa Harry.

“Don’t worry, Bill,” Nils Borkman suddenly said to me. “I am unloading the rifles! I am keeping a secret of the bullets!”

“España,” Elaine repeated. “Is it a gay thing, Billy?” she whispered to me.

“No,” I told her.

“You’ll show me, right?” Elaine asked. I knew that the trick would be keeping her awake until we were back in Bancroft Hall.

“I love you!” I said to Grandpa Harry, hugging him.

“I love you, Bill!” Harry told me, hugging me back. (His falsies had to have been modeled on someone with breasts as big as my aunt Muriel’s, but I didn’t tell my grandfather that.)

“You don’t owe me anything, Elaine,” I was saying, as we left that River Street house.

“Don’t say good night to my mom and dad, Billy—don’t get anywhere near my dad,” Elaine told me. “Not unless you want to hear about more casualties—not unless you have the stomach to listen to more fucking body-counting.”

After hearing about Trowbridge, I truly didn’t have the stomach for more casualties. I didn’t even say good night to Mrs. Hadley, because I could see that Mr. Hadley was loitering around.

“España,” I said quietly to myself, as I was helping Elaine up those three flights of stairs in Bancroft Hall; it’s a good thing I didn’t have to get her as far as her bedroom, which was on the frigging fifth floor.

As we were navigating the third-floor dormitory hall, I must have softly said “España” again—not so softly, I guess, because Elaine heard me.

“I’m a little worried about what kind of blow job an España is, exactly. It’s not rough stuff, is it, Billy?” Elaine asked me.

There was a boy in his pajamas in the hall—such a little boy, and he had his toothbrush in his hand. From his frightened expression, he obviously didn’t know who Elaine and I were; he’d also clearly heard what Elaine had asked about the España blow job.

“We’re just fooling around,” I told the small boy. “There’s not going to be any rough stuff. There’s not going to be a blow job!” I said to Elaine and the boy in pajamas. (With his toothbrush, he’d reminded me of Trowbridge, of course.)

“Trowbridge is dead. Did you know Trowbridge? He was killed in Vietnam,” I told Elaine.

“I didn’t know any Trowbridge,” Elaine said; like me, Elaine couldn’t stop staring at the young boy in pajamas. “You’re crying, Billy—please stop crying,” Elaine said. We were leaning on each other when I managed to open the door to silent Richard’s apartment. “Don’t worry about him crying—his mom just died. He’ll be all right,” Elaine said to the boy holding his toothbrush. But I had seen Trowbridge standing there, and perhaps I foresaw that there were more casualties coming; maybe I’d imagined all the body-counting in the not-too-distant future.

“Billy, Billy—please stop crying,” Elaine was saying. “What did you mean? ‘There’s not going to be a blow job!’ Do you think I’m bluffing? You know me, Billy—I’ve stopped bluffing. I don’t bluff anymore, Billy,” she babbled on.

“My father is alive. He’s living in Spain, and he’s happy. That’s all I know, Elaine,” I told her. “My dad, Franny Dean, is living in Spain—España.” But that was as far as I got.

Elaine had slipped off her coat as we’d stumbled through Richard and my mother’s living room; she’d kicked off her shoes and her skirt, upon entering my bedroom, and she was struggling to unbutton the buttons on her blouse when—on another level of half-consciousness—Elaine saw the bed of my adolescent years and dove for it, or she somehow managed to throw herself on it.

By the time I knelt next to her on the bed, I could see that Elaine had completely passed out; she was limp and unmoving as I took off her blouse and unclasped her rather uncomfortable-looking necklace. I put her to bed in her bra and panties, and went about the usual business of getting into the small bed beside her.

“España,” I whispered in the dark.

“You’ll show me, right?” Elaine said in her sleep.

I fell asleep thinking about why I had never tried to find my father. A part of me had rationalized this: If he’s curious about me, let him find me, I’d thought. But in truth I had a fabulous father; my stepfather, Richard Abbott, was the best thing that ever happened to me. (My mom had never been happy, but Richard was the best thing that ever happened to her, too; my mother must have been happy with Richard.) Maybe I’d never tried to find Franny Dean because finding him would have made me feel I was betraying Richard.

“What’s up with you, Jacques Kittredge?” the Racquet Man had written; of course I fell asleep thinking about that, too.