In One Person

Chapter 14 TEACHER

All that had happened three years ago, when Gee was just a freshman. You should have seen Gee at the start of her senior year, in the fall term of 2010—at seventeen, that girl was a knockout. Gee would turn eighteen her senior year; she would graduate, on schedule, with the Class of 2011. All I’m saying is, you should have seen her when she was a senior. Mrs. Hadley and Richard were right: Gee was special.

That fall term of 2010, we were in rehearsals for what Richard called “the fall Shakespeare.” We would be performing Romeo and Juliet in that most edgy time—the brief bit of school that remains between the Thanksgiving break and Christmas vacation.

As a teacher, I can tell you that’s a terrible time: The kids are woefully distracted, they have exams, they have papers due—and, to make it worse, the fall sports have been replaced by the winter ones. There is much that’s new, but a lot that’s old; everyone has a cough, and tempers are short.

The Drama Club at Favorite River had last put on Romeo and Juliet in the winter of ’85, which was twenty-five years ago. I still remembered what Larry had said to Richard about casting a boy as Juliet. (Larry thought Shakespeare would have loved the idea!) But Richard had asked, “Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” Not even Lawrence Upton could find an answer for that.

Now I knew a boy with the balls to play Juliet. I had Gee, and—as a girl—Gee was just about perfect. At seventeen, Gee still actually had balls, too. She’d begun the extensive psychological examinations—the counseling and psychotherapy—necessary for young people who are serious about gender reassignment. I don’t believe that her beard had yet been removed by the process of electrolysis; Gee may not have been old enough for electrolysis, but I don’t really know. I do know that, with her parents’ and her doctor’s approval, Gee was receiving injections of female hormones; if she stayed committed to her sex change, she would have to continue to take those hormones for the rest of her life. (I had no doubt that Gee, soon to be Georgia, Montgomery would stay committed.)

What was it Elaine once said, about the possibility of Kittredge playing Juliet? It wouldn’t have worked, we agreed. “Juliet is nothing if she’s not sincere,” Elaine had said.

Boy, did I ever have a Juliet who was sincere! Gee had always had balls, but now she had breasts—small but very pretty ones—and her hair had acquired a new luster. My, how her eyelashes had grown! Gee’s skin had become softer, and the acne was altogether gone; her hips had spread, though she’d actually lost weight since her freshman year—her hips were already womanly, if not yet curvaceous.

What’s more important, the whole community at Favorite River Academy knew who (and what) Gee Montgomery was. Sure, there were still a few jocks who hadn’t entirely accepted how sexually diverse a school we were trying to be. There will always be a few troglodytes.

Larry would have been proud of me, I thought. In a word, it might have surprised Larry to see how involved I was. Political activism didn’t come naturally to me, but I was at least a little active politically. I’d traveled to some college campuses in our state. I’d spoken to the LGBT groups at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. I’d supported the same-sex marriage bill, which the Vermont State Senate passed into law—over the veto of our Republican governor, a troglodyte.

Larry would have laughed to see me supporting gay marriage, because Larry knew what I thought of any marriage. “Old Mr. Monogamy,” Larry would have teased me. But gay marriage is what the gay and bi kids want, and I support those kids.

“I see a future hero in you!” Grandpa Harry had told me. I wouldn’t go that far, but I hope Miss Frost might have approved of me. In my own way, I was protecting someone—I’d protected Gee. I was a worthwhile person in Gee’s life. Maybe Miss Frost would have liked me for that.

This was my life at age sixty-eight. I was a part-time English teacher at my old school, Favorite River Academy; I also directed the Drama Club there. I was a writer, and an occasional political activist—on the side of LGBT groups, everywhere. Oh, forgive me; the language, I know, keeps changing.

A very young teacher at Favorite River told me it was no longer appropriate (or inclusive enough) to say LGBT—it was supposed to be LGBTQ.

“What is the fucking Q for?” I asked the teacher. “Quarrelsome, perhaps?”

“No, Bill,” the teacher said. “Questioning.”

“Oh.”

“I remember you at the questioning phase, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. Ah, well—yes, I remember me at that phase, too. I’m okay about saying LGBTQ; at my age, I just have trouble remembering the frigging Q!

Mrs. Hadley lives in the Facility now. She’s ninety, and Richard visits her every day. I visit Martha twice a week—at the same time I visit Uncle Bob. At ninety-three, the Racquet Man is doing surprisingly well—that is, physically. Bob’s memory isn’t all it was, but that’s a good fella’s failing. Sometimes, Bob even forgets that Gerry and her California girlfriend—the one who’s as old as I am—were married in Vermont this year.

It was a June 2010 wedding; we had it at my house on River Street. Both Mrs. Hadley and Uncle Bob were there—Martha in a wheelchair. The Racquet Man was pushing Mrs. Hadley around.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take over pushing the wheelchair, Bob?” Richard and I and Elaine kept asking.

“What makes you think I’m pushing it?” the Racquet Man asked us. “I’m just leaning on it!”

Anyway, when Uncle Bob asks me when Gerry’s wedding is, I have to keep reminding him that she’s already married.

It was, in part, Bob’s forgetfulness that almost caused me to miss one small highlight of my life—a small but truly important highlight, I think.

“What are you going to do about Señor Bovary, Billy?” Uncle Bob asked me, when I was driving him back to the Facility from Gerry’s wedding.

“Señor who?” I asked the Racquet Man.

“Shit, Billy—I’m sorry,” Uncle Bob said. “I can’t remember my Alumni Affairs anymore—as soon as I hear something, I seem to forget it!”

But it wasn’t exactly in the category of an announcement for publication in The River Bulletin; it was just a query that came to Bob, in care of the “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”

Please pass this message along to young William,

the carefully typed letter began.

His father, William Francis Dean, would like to know how his son is—even if the old prima donna himself won’t write his son and just ask him. There was an AIDS epidemic, you know; since he’s still writing books, we assume that young William survived it. But how’s his health? As we say over here—if you would be so kind as to ask young William—Cómo está? And please tell young William, if he wants to see us before we die, he ought to pay us a visit!

The carefully typed letter was from my father’s longtime lover—the toilet-seat skipper, the reader, the guy who reconnected with my dad on the subway and didn’t get off at the next station.

He had typed, not signed, his name:

Señor Bovary

I WENT ONE SUMMER recently, with a somewhat cynical Dutch friend, to the gay-pride parade in Amsterdam; that city is a hopeful experiment, I have long believed, and I loved the parade. There were surging tides of men dancing in the streets—guys in purple and pink leather, boys in Speedos with leopard spots, men in jockstraps, kissing, one woman sleekly covered with wet-looking green feathers and sporting an all-black strap-on cock. I said to my friend that there were many cities where they preached tolerance, but Amsterdam truly practiced it—even flaunted it. As I spoke, a long barge glided by on one of the canals; an all-girls’ rock band was playing onboard, and there were women wearing transparent leotards and waving to us onshore. The women were waving dildoes.

But my cynical Dutch friend gave me a tired (and barely tolerant) look; he seemed as indifferent to the gay goings-on as the mostly foreign-born prostitutes in the windows and doorways of de Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district.

“Amsterdam is so over,” my Dutch friend said. “The new scene for gays in Europe is Madrid.”

“Madrid,” I repeated, the way I do. I was an old bi guy in his sixties, living in Vermont. What did I know about the new scene for gays in Europe? (What did I know about any frigging scene?)

IT WAS ON SEÑOR Bovary’s recommendation that I stayed at the Santo Mauro in Madrid; it was a pretty, quiet hotel on the Zurbano—a narrow, tree-lined street (a residential but boring-looking neighborhood) “within walking distance of Chueca.” Well, it was a long walk to Chueca, “the gay district of Madrid”—as Señor Bovary described Chueca in his email to me. Bovary’s typed letter, which was mailed to Uncle Bob at Favorite River’s Office of Alumni Affairs, had not included a return address—just an email address and Señor Bovary’s cell-phone number.

The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father’s enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

“I believe that the Bovary character is your dad’s age, Billy,” Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940 Owl, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Señor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same ’40 Owl that Franny Dean had wanted to be a “performer,” but performing what?)

From the emails of “the Bovary character,” as the Racquet Man had called my dad’s lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Señor Bovary’s idea, and I was following his instructions. “Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I’ll meet you for dinner on your second night. We’ll take a stroll; we’ll end up in Chueca, and I’ll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious,” Señor Bovary’s email said.

What club? I wondered.

“Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.” Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was that sort of club. But what kind of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there’s more than one kind of gay club.)

In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry heat, however—very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence—not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.

There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don’t notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye—a noite means “the night” in Portuguese—and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.

The streets between the Gran Vía and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders’ gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and—on the corner of the Calle de Hernán Cortés—there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There’s one thing I’m glad to be too old for: thongs.)

Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at my hotel before I went to bed. I was too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Inés Café on Hortaleza; there were mostly men in couples, and a woman who was alone. She was wearing flip-flops and a halter top; she had an angular face and looked very sad, resting her mouth on one hand. I almost tried to pick her up. I remember wondering if, in Spain, the women were very thin until they suddenly became fat. I was noticing a certain type of man—skinny in a tank top, but with a small and helpless-looking potbelly.

I had a café con leche as late as 5 P.M.—very unlike me, too late in the day for me to drink coffee, but I was trying to stay awake. I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina—Libros, I believe it was called. (I’m not kidding, a bookstore called “Books.”) The English novel, in English, was well represented there, but there was nothing contemporary—not even from the twentieth century. I browsed the fiction section for a while. Diagonally across the street, on the corner of San Gregorio, was what looked like a popular bar—the Ángel Sierra. The siesta must have been over by the time I left the bookstore, because that bar was beginning to get crowded.

I passed a coffeehouse, also on the Calle de Gravino, with some older, stylishly dressed lesbians sitting at a window table—to my limited knowledge, the only lesbians I spotted in Chueca, and almost the only women I saw anywhere in that district. But it was still early in the evening, and I knew that everything in Spain happens late. (I’d been in Barcelona before, on translation trips. My Spanish-language publisher is based there.)

As I was leaving Chueca—for that long walk back to the Santo Mauro—I stopped in at a bear bar on the Calle de las Infantas. The bar called Hot was packed with men standing chest to chest and back to back. They were older men, and you know what bears are like—ordinary-looking men, chubby guys with beards, many beer drinkers among them. It was Spain, so of course there was a lot of smoking; I didn’t stay long, but Hot had a friendly atmosphere. The shirtless bartenders were the youngest guys in the place—they were hot, all right.

THE DAPPER LITTLE MAN who met me at a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor the following night did not immediately summon to mind a young soldier with his pants down at his ankles, reading Madame Bovary in a storm at sea, while—on his bare bum—he skipped over a row of toilet seats to meet my young father.

Señor Bovary’s hair was neatly trimmed and all white, as were the short bristles of his no-nonsense mustache. He wore a pressed, short-sleeved white shirt with two breast pockets—one for his reading glasses, the other armed with pens. His khaki trousers were sharply creased; perhaps the only contemporary components of the fastidious man’s old-fashioned image were his sandals. They were the kind of sandals that young outdoorsmen wear when they wade in raging rivers and run through fast-flowing streams—those sandals that have the built-up and serious-looking treads of running shoes.

“Bovary,” he said; he extended his hand, palm down, so that I didn’t know if he expected me to shake it or kiss it. (I shook it.)

“I’m so glad you contacted me,” I told him.

“I don’t know what your father has been waiting for, now that your mother—una mujer difícil, ‘a difficult woman’—has been dead for thirty-two years. It is thirty-two, isn’t it?” the little man asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Let me know what your HIV status is; I’ll tell your father,” Bovary said. “He’s dying to hear, but I know him—he’ll never ask you himself. He’ll just worry about it after you’ve gone back home. He’s an impossible procrastinator!” Bovary exclaimed affectionately, giving me a small, twinkling smile.

I told him: I keep testing negative; I don’t have HIV disease.

“No toxic cocktail for you—that’s the ticket!” Señor Bovary exclaimed. “We don’t have the virus, either—if you’re interested. I admit to having had sex only with your father, and—save that truly disastrous dalliance with your mom—your dad has had sex only with me. How boring is that?” the little man asked me, smiling more. “I’ve read your writing—so, of course, has your father. On the evidence of what you’ve written about—well, one can’t blame your dad for worrying about you! If half of what you write about has happened to you, you must have had sex with everyone!”

“With men and women, yes—with everyone, no,” I said, smiling back at him.

“I’m only asking because he won’t ask. Honestly, you’ll meet your father, and you’ll feel you’ve had interviews that are more in-depth than anything he’ll ask you or even say to you,” Señor Bovary warned me. “It isn’t that he doesn’t care—I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s always worrying about you—but your father is a man who believes your privacy is not to be invaded. Your dad is a very private man. I’ve only ever seen him be public about one thing.”

“And that is?” I asked.

“I’m not going to spoil the show. We should be going, anyway,” Señor Bovary said, looking at his watch.

“What show?” I asked him.

“Look, I’m not the performer—I just manage the money,” Bovary said. “You’re the writer in the family, but your father does know how to tell a story—even if it’s always the same story.”

I followed him, at a fairly fast pace, from the Plaza Mayor to the Puerta del Sol. Bovary must have had those special sandals because he was a walker; I’ll bet he walked everywhere in Madrid. He was a trim, fit man; he’d had very little to eat for dinner, and nothing to drink but mineral water.

It was probably nine or ten o’clock at night, but there were a lot of people in the streets. As we walked up Montero, we passed some prostitutes—“working girls,” Bovary called them.

I heard one of them say the guapo word.

“She says you’re handsome,” Señor Bovary translated.

“Perhaps she means you,” I told him; he was very handsome, I thought.

“She doesn’t mean me—she knows me,” was all Bovary said. He was all business—Mr. Money Manager, I was thinking.

Then we crossed the Gran Vía into Chueca, by that towering building—the Telefónica. “We’re still a little early,” Señor Bovary was saying, as he looked again at his watch. He seemed to consider (then he reconsidered) taking a detour. “There’s a bear bar on this street,” he said, pausing at the intersection of Hortaleza and the Calle de las Infantas.

“Yes, Hot—I had a beer there last night,” I told him.

“Bears are all right, if you like bellies,” Bovary said.

“I have nothing against bears—I just like beer,” I said. “It’s all I drink.”

“I just drink agua con gas,” Señor Bovary said, giving me his small, twinkling smile.

“Mineral water, with bubbles—right?” I asked him.

“I guess we both like bubbles,” was all Bovary said; he had continued walking along Hortaleza. I wasn’t paying very close attention to the street, but I recognized that nightclub with the Portuguese name—A Noite.

When Señor Bovary led me inside, I asked, “Oh, is this the club?”

“Mercifully, no,” the little man replied. “We’re just killing time. If the show were starting here, I wouldn’t have brought you, but the show starts very late here. It’s safe just to have a drink.”

There were some skinny gay boys hanging around the bar. “If you were alone, they’d be all over you,” Bovary told me. It was a black marble bar, or maybe it was polished granite. I had a beer and Señor Bovary had an agua con gas while we waited.

There was a blue-tinted ballroom and a proscenium stage at A Noite; they were playing Sinatra songs backstage. When I quietly used the retro word for the nightclub, all Bovary said was, “To be kind.” He kept checking his watch.

When we went out on Hortaleza again, it was almost 11 P.M.; I had never seen as many people on the street. When Bovary brought me to the club, I realized I’d walked past it and not noticed it—at least twice. It was a very small club with a long line out front—on Hortaleza, between the Calle de las Infantas and San Marcos. The name of the club I saw only now—for the first time. The club was called SEÑOR BOVARY.

“Oh,” I said, as Bovary led me around the line to the stage door.

“We’ll see Franny’s show, then you’ll meet him,” the little man was saying. “If I’m lucky, he won’t see you with me till the end of his routine—or near the end, anyway.”

The same types I’d seen at A Noite, those skinny gay boys, were crowding the bar, but they made room for Señor Bovary and me. Onstage was a transsexual dancer, very passable—nothing retro about her.

“Shameless catering to straight guys,” Bovary whispered in my ear. “Oh, and guys like you, I suppose—is she your type?”

“Yes, definitely,” I told him. (I thought the lime-green strobe pulsing on the dancer was a little tacky.)

It wasn’t exactly a strip show; the dancer had certainly had her boobs done, and she was very proud of them, but she never took off the thong. The crowd gave her a big hand when she exited the stage, passing through the audience—even passing by the bar, still in her thong but carrying the rest of her clothes. Bovary said something to her in Spanish, and she smiled.

“I told her you were a very important guest, and that she was definitely your type,” the little man said mischievously to me. When I started to say something, he put an index finger to his lips and whispered: “I’ll be your translator.”

I first thought he was making a joke—about translating for me, if I were later to find myself with the transsexual dancer—but Bovary meant that he would translate for my father. “Franny! Franny! Franny!” voices in the crowd kept calling.

From the instant Franny Dean came onstage, there were ooohs and ahhhs; it wasn’t just the glitter and drop-dead décolletage of the dress, but with that plunging neckline and the poised way my father carried it off, I could see why Grandpa Harry had a soft spot for William Francis Dean. The wig was a jet-black mane with silver sparkles; it matched the dress. The falsies were modest—small, like the rest of him—and the pearl necklace wasn’t ostentatious, yet it picked up the powder-blue light onstage. That same powder-blue light had turned all the white onstage and in the audience a pearl-gray color—even Señor Bovary’s white shirt, where we sat at the bar.

“I have a little story to tell you,” my dad told the crowd, in Spanish. “It won’t take very long,” he said with a smile; his old, thin fingers toyed with his pearls. “Maybe you’ve heard this before?” he asked—as Bovary whispered, in English, in my ear.

“Sí!” shouted the crowd, in chorus.

“Sorry,” my father replied, “but it’s the only story I know. It’s the story of my life, and the one love in it.”

I already knew the story. It was, in part, what he’d told me when I was recovering from scarlet fever—only in more detail than a child could possibly have remembered.

“Imagine meeting the love of your life on a toilet!” Franny Dean cried. “We were in a latrine, awash with seawater; we were on a ship, awash with vomit!”

“Vómito!” the crowd repeated, in a unified cry.

I was amazed how many of them had heard the story; they knew it by heart. There were many older people in the audience, both men and women; there were young people, too—mostly boys.

“There’s no sound quite like the sound of a human derrière, passing a succession of toilet seats—that slapping sound, as the love of your life approaches, coming nearer and nearer,” my father said; he paused and took a deep breath while many of the young boys in the audience dropped their pants down to their ankles (their underpants, too) and slapped one another on their bare asses.

My father exhaled onstage and said, with a condemning sigh, “No, not like that—it was a different slapping sound, more refined.” In his glittering black dress with the plunging neckline, my dad paused again—while those chastised boys pulled up their pants, and the audience settled down.

“Imagine reading in a storm at sea. How much of a reader would you need to be?” my father asked. “I’ve been a reader all my life. I knew that if I ever met the love of my life, he would have to be a reader, too. But, oh—to first make contact with him that way! Cheek to cheek, so to speak,” my dad said, jutting out one skinny hip and slapping himself on the buttocks.

“Cheek to cheek!” the crowd cried—or however you say that in Spanish. (I can’t remember.) He’d met Bovary on a toilet, butt to butt; how perfect was that?

There wasn’t much more to the show. When my father’s story, about the love of his life, was finished, I noticed that many of the older people in the audience quickly slipped away—as did nearly all the women. The women who stayed, I realized only later—as I was leaving—were the transsexuals and the transvestites. (The young boys stayed, and by the time I left the club, there were many more of them—in addition to some older men, who were mostly alone, no doubt on the prowl.)

Señor Bovary led me backstage to meet my father. “Don’t be disappointed,” he kept whispering in my ear, as if he were still translating and we were still sitting at the bar.

My father, standing in his dressing room, was already stripped to the waist—wig off—by the time Bovary and I got backstage. William Francis Dean had a snow-white crew cut and the starved-down, muscular body of a lightweight wrestler or a jockey. The little falsies, and a bra no bigger than Elaine’s—the one I used to wear when I was sleeping—were on my dad’s dressing-room table, all heaped together with the pearl necklace. The dress, which unzipped from the back, had been undone only as far as my father’s slender waist, and he’d slipped the top half off his shoulders.

“Shall I unzip you the rest of the way, Franny?” Señor Bovary asked the performer. My father turned his back to Bovary, allowing his lover to unzip him. Franny Dean stepped out of the dress, revealing only a tight black girdle; he’d already unfastened his black stockings from the girdle—the stockings were rolled at his narrow ankles. When my dad sat at his dressing-room table, he pulled the rolled-down stockings off his small feet and threw them at Señor Bovary. (All this before he began to remove his makeup, starting with the eyeliner; he’d already removed the fake eyelashes.)

“It’s a good thing I didn’t see you whispering to young William at the bar until I was almost done with the Boston part of the story,” my father said peevishly to Bovary.

“It’s a good thing someone invited young William to come see you before you’re dead, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.

“Mr. Bovary exaggerates, William,” my dad told me. “As you can see for yourself, I’m not dying.”

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Mr. Bovary told us in a wounded tone.

“Don’t you dare,” my dad said to the love of his life.

“I dare not,” Bovary replied, with droll resignation. He gave me a long-suffering look, of the you-see-what-I-put-up-with kind.

“What’s the point of having a love of your life, if he’s not always with you?” my father asked me.

I didn’t know what to say; I was quite at a loss for words.

“Be nice, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.

“Here’s what women do, William—small-town girls, anyway,” my father said. “They find something they love about you—even if there’s just one thing they find endearing. For example, your mother liked to dress me up—and I liked it, too.”

“Maybe later, Franny—maybe say this to young William after you’ve had a chance to get to know each other,” Mr. Bovary suggested.

“It’s too late for young William and me to get to know each other. We were denied that opportunity. Now we already are who we are, aren’t we, William?” my dad asked me. Once again, I didn’t know what to say.

“Please try to be nicer, Franny,” Bovary told him.

“Here’s what women do, as I was saying,” my father continued. “Those things they don’t love about you—those things they don’t even like—well, guess what women do about those things? They imagine they can change those things—that’s what women do! They imagine they can change you,” my father said.

“You knew one girl, Franny, una mujer difícil—” Mr. Bovary started to say.

“Now who’s not being nice?” my dad interrupted him.

“I’ve known some men who tried to change me,” I told my father.

“I can’t compete with everyone you’ve known, William—I couldn’t possibly claim to have had your experience,” my dad said. I was surprised he was a prig.

“I used to wonder where I came from,” I told him. “Those things in myself that I didn’t understand—those things I was questioning, especially. You know what I mean. How much of me came from my mother? There was little that came from her that I could see. And how much of me came from you? There was a time when I thought about that, quite a lot,” I told him.

“We heard about you beating up some boy,” my father said.

“Say this later, Franny,” Mr. Bovary pleaded with him.

“You beat up a kid at school—rather recently, wasn’t it?” my dad asked me. “Bob told me about it. The Racquet Man was quite proud of you for it, but I found it upsetting. You didn’t get violence from me—you didn’t get aggression. I wonder if all that anger doesn’t come from those Winthrop women,” he told me.

“He was a big kid,” I said. “He was nineteen, a football player—a fucking bully.”

But my father and Señor Bovary looked as though they were ashamed of me. I was on the verge of explaining Gee to them—how she’d been only fourteen, a boy becoming a girl, and the nineteen-year-old thug had hit her in the face, bloodying her nose—but I suddenly thought that I didn’t owe these disapproving old queens an explanation. I didn’t give a shit about that football player.

“He called me a fag,” I told them. I guessed that would make them sniffy.

“Oh, did you hear that?” my dad asked the love of his life. “Not the fag word! Can you imagine being called a fag and not beating the shit out of someone?” my father asked his lover.

“Nicer—try being nicer, Franny,” Bovary said, but I saw that he was smiling. They were a cute couple, but prissy—made for each other, as they say.

My dad stood up and hooked his thumbs into the tight waistband of his girdle. “If you gentlemen would be so kind as to give me a little privacy,” he said. “This ridiculous undergarment is killing me.”

I went back to the bar with Bovary, but there would be no hope of further conversation there; the skinny gay boys had multiplied, in part because there were more older men by themselves at the bar. There was an all-boys’ band playing in a pink strobe light, and men and boys were dancing together out on the dance floor; some of the T-girls were dancing, too, either with a boy or with one another.

When my father joined us at the bar, he was the picture of masculine conformity; in addition to those athletic-looking sandals (like Bovary’s), my dad was wearing a tan-colored sports jacket with a dark-brown handkerchief in the breast pocket of the jacket. The murmur of “Franny!” passed through the crowd as we were leaving the club.

We were walking on Hortaleza, just past the Plaza de Chueca, when a gang of young men recognized my father; even as a man, Franny must have been famous in that district. “Vómito!” one of the young men cheerfully greeted him.

“Vómito!” my dad happily said back to him; I could see he was pleased that they knew who he was, even not as a woman.

I was struck that, well after midnight, there were throngs of people in the streets of Chueca. But Bovary told me there was a good chance of a smoking ban making Chueca even noisier and more crowded at night. “All the men will be standing outside the clubs and bars, on these narrow streets—all of them drinking and smoking, and shouting to be heard,” Señor Bovary said.

“Think of all the bears!” my father said, wrinkling his nose.

“William has nothing against bears, Franny,” Bovary gently said. I saw that they were holding hands, partners in propriety.

They walked me all the way back to the Santo Mauro, my hotel on the Zurbano.

“I think you should admit to your son, Franny, that you’re a little proud of him for beating up that bully,” Bovary said to my father in the courtyard of the Santo Mauro.

“It is appealing to know I have a son who can beat the shit out of somebody,” my father said.

“I didn’t beat the shit out of him. It was one move—he just fell awkwardly, on a hard surface,” I tried to explain.

“That’s not what the Racquet Man said,” my dad told me. “Bob made me believe you wiped the floor with the fucker.”

“Good old Bob,” I said.

I offered to call them a taxi; I didn’t know that they lived in the neighborhood. “We’re right around the corner from the Santo Mauro,” Señor Bovary explained. This time, when he offered me his hand, palm down, I took his hand and kissed it.

“Thank you for making this happen,” I said to Bovary. My father stepped forward and gave me a sudden hug; he also gave me a quick, dry kiss on both my cheeks—he was so very European.

“Maybe, when I come back to Spain—for my next Spanish translation—maybe I can come see you again, or you can come to Barcelona,” I said to my father. But, somehow, this seemed to make my dad uncomfortable.

“Maybe,” was all my father said.

“Perhaps nearer that time would be a good time to talk about it,” Mr. Bovary suggested.

“My manager,” my dad said, smiling at me but pointing to Señor Bovary.

“And the love of your life!” Bovary cried happily. “Don’t you ever forget it, Franny!”

“How could I?” my father said to us. “I keep telling the story, don’t I?”

I sensed that this was good-bye; it seemed unlikely that I would see them again. (As my father had said: “We already are who we are, aren’t we?”)

But the good-bye word felt too final; I couldn’t say it.

“Adiós, young William,” Señor Bovary said.

“Adiós,” I said to him. They were walking away—holding hands, of course—when I called after my father. “Adiós, Dad!”

“Did he call me ‘Dad’—is that what he said?” my father asked Mr. Bovary.

“He did—he distinctly did,” Bovary told him.

“Adiós, my son!” my father said.

“Adiós!” I kept calling to my dad and the love of his life, until I could no longer see them.

AT FAVORITE RIVER ACADEMY, the black-box theater in the Webster Center for the Performing Arts was not the main stage in that relatively new but brainless building—well intentioned, to be kind, but stupidly built.

Times have changed: Students today don’t study Shakespeare the way I did. Nowadays, I could not fill the seats for a main-stage performance of any Shakespeare play, not even Romeo and Juliet—not even with a former boy playing Juliet! The black box was a better teaching tool for my actors, anyway, and it was great for smaller audiences. The students were much more relaxed in our black-box productions, but we all complained about the mice. It may have been a relatively new building, but—due to either faulty design or misguided contracting—the crawl space under the Webster Center was poorly insulated and had not been mouse-proofed.

When it starts to get cold, any stupidly built building in Vermont will have mice. The kids working with me in our black-box production of Romeo and Juliet called them “stage mice”; I can’t tell you why, except that the mice had occasionally been spotted onstage.

It was cold that November. The Thanksgiving break was only a week away, and we already had snow on the ground—it was even cold, for that time of year, for Vermont. (No wonder the mice had moved indoors.)

I’d just persuaded Richard Abbott to move into the River Street house with me; at eighty, Richard hardly needed to spend another winter in Vermont in a house by himself—he was on his own now that Martha was in the Facility. I gave Richard what had been my bedroom as a child, and that bathroom I’d once shared with Grandpa Harry.

Richard didn’t complain about the ghosts. Maybe he would have, if he’d ever encountered Nana Victoria’s ghost, or Aunt Muriel’s—or even my mother’s—but the only ghost Richard ever saw was Grandpa Harry’s. Naturally, Harry’s ghost showed up a few times in that bathroom he’d once shared with me—thankfully, not in that bathtub.

“Harry appears to be confused, as if he’s lost his toothbrush,” was all Richard ever said about Grandpa Harry’s ghost.

The bathtub Harry had blown his brains out in was gone. If Grandpa Harry was actually going to repeat blowing his brains out in a bathroom, it would be the master bathroom—the one I now used—and that inviting new bathtub (the way Harry had repeated himself for Amanda).

But, as I’ve told you, I never saw the ghosts in that River Street house. There was the one morning when I woke up and found my clothes—neatly arranged, in the order I would put them on—at the foot of my bed. These were clean clothes, my jeans on the bottom of the pile; the shirt was perfectly folded, with my socks and underwear on top. It was precisely the way my mother used to prepare my clothes for me when I was a little boy. She must have done this every night, after I’d fallen asleep. (She’d stopped doing this around the time when I became a teenager or shortly before.) I had completely forgotten how she’d once loved me. My guess is that her ghost wanted to remind me.

It happened only that one morning, but it was enough to make me remember when I had loved her—without reservation. Now, after those many years when I had lost her affection and believed I no longer loved her, I was able to mourn her—the way we are supposed to mourn our parents when they’re gone.

WHEN I FIRST MOVED into the River Street house, I found Uncle Bob standing beside a box of books in the downstairs hall. Aunt Muriel had wanted me to have these “monuments of world literature,” Bob had struggled to explain, but Muriel’s ghost hadn’t delivered the books—Uncle Bob had brought the box. He’d belatedly discovered that Muriel had intended to give me the books, but that fatal car crash must have interrupted her plans. Uncle Bob hadn’t noticed that the books were for me; there was a note inside the box, but some years had passed before Bob read it.

“These books are by your forebears, Billy,” Aunt Muriel had written, in her unmistakably assertive longhand. “You’re the writer in the family—you should have them.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know when she was intending to give them to you, Billy,” Bob sheepishly said.

The forebears word is worth noting. At first, I was flattered by the company of the esteemed writers Muriel had selected for me; it was a highly literary collection of works. There were two plays by García Lorca—Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba. (I hadn’t known that Muriel knew I loved Lorca—his poems, too.) There were three plays by Tennessee Williams; maybe Nils Borkman had given these plays to Muriel, I’d first thought. There was a book of poems by W. H. Auden, and poems by Walt Whitman and Lord Byron. There were those unsurpassed novels by Herman Melville and E. M. Forster—I mean Moby-Dick and Howards End. There was Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. Yet I still didn’t understand why my aunt Muriel had gathered these particular writers together and called them my “forebears”—not until I unearthed, from the bottom of the box, two little books that lay touching each other: Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

“Oh,” I said to Uncle Bob. My gay forebears, Aunt Muriel must have thought—my not-so-straight brethren, I could only guess.

“I think your aunt meant this in a positive way, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“You think so?” I asked the Racquet Man. We both stood there in the downstairs hall, trying to imagine Muriel putting these books in a box for me in a positive way.

I never told Gerry about her mother’s gift to me—fearing that Muriel might have left nothing, or worse, for Gerry. I didn’t ask Elaine if she thought Muriel had intended these books for me in a positive way. (Elaine’s opinion of Muriel was that my aunt had been born a menacing ghost.)

It was the phone call from Elaine—late one night, in my River Street house—that reminded me of Esmeralda, gone from my life (but not from my mind) these many years. Elaine was crying into the phone; yet another bad boyfriend had dumped her, but this one had made cruel comments about my dear friend’s vagina. (I’d never told Elaine my unfortunate, not-a-ballroom appraisal of Esmeralda’s vagina—boy, was this ever not the night to tell Elaine that story!)

“You’re always telling me how you love my little breasts, Billy,” Elaine was saying, between sobs, “but you’ve never said anything about my vagina.”

“I love your vagina!” I assured her.

“You’re not just saying that, are you, Billy?”

“No! I think your vagina is perfect!” I told her.

“Why?” Elaine asked; she’d stopped crying.

I was determined not to make the Esmeralda mistake with my dearest friend. “Ah, well—” I began, and then paused. “I’ll be absolutely honest with you, Elaine. Some vaginas feel as big as ballrooms, whereas your vagina feels just right. It’s the perfect size—perfect for me, anyway,” I said, as casually as I could.

“Not a ballroom—is that what you’re saying, Billy?”

How did I end up here again? I was thinking. “Not a ballroom, in a positive way!” I cried.

Elaine’s nearsightedness was a thing of the past; she’d had that Lasik surgery—it was as if she were seeing for the first time. Before the surgery, when she’d had sex, she always took her glasses off—she’d never had a really good look at a penis. Now she could actually see penises; she didn’t like the looks of some of them—“of most of them,” Elaine had said. She’d told me that, the next time we were together, she wanted to take a good look at my penis. I thought it was a little tragic that Elaine didn’t know another guy well enough to feel comfortable about staring at his penis, but what are friends for?

“So my vagina is ‘not a ballroom’ in a positive way?” Elaine now said on the phone. “Well, that sounds okay. I can’t wait to get a good look at your penis, Billy—I know you’ll take my staring at your penis in a positive way.”

“I can’t wait, too,” I told her.

“Just remember who’s the perfect size for you, Billy,” Elaine said.

“I love you, Elaine,” I told her.

“I love you, too, Billy,” Elaine said.

Thus was my not-a-ballroom faux pas put to rest—thus that ghost departed. Thus did my worst memory of Esmeralda (that terrifying angel) take flight.

IT WAS THE THIRD week of November 2010—for as long as I live, I won’t forget this. I had my hands full with Romeo and Juliet; I had a terrific cast of kids, and (as you know) a Juliet with all the balls a director could ever ask for.

The stage mice chiefly bothered the few females in that cast—namely, my Lady Montague and my Lady Capulet, and my Nurse. As for my Juliet, Gee didn’t shriek when the stage mice were scurrying around; Gee tried to stomp on the disruptive little rodents. Gee and my bloodthirsty Tybalt had killed some stage mice by stomping on them, but my Mercutio and my Romeo were the experts in my cast at setting the mousetraps. I was constantly reminding them that they had to disarm the mousetraps when our Romeo and Juliet was in performance. I didn’t want that grisly snapping sound—or the occasional death squeal of a stage mouse—to interrupt the show.

My Romeo was a cow-eyed boy of strictly conventional handsomeness, but he had exceptionally good diction. He could say that act 1, scene 1 line (of utmost importance) so that the audience could really hear it. “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”—that one.

It was also important to Gee that—as she told me—my Romeo was not her type. “But I’m okay about kissing him,” she’d added.

Fortunately, my Romeo was okay about kissing Gee—despite everyone in our school knowing that Gee had balls (and a penis). It would have taken a brave boy at Favorite River to have ventured to date Gee; it hadn’t happened. Gee had always lived in a girls’ dorm; even with balls and a penis, Gee would never bother the girls, and the girls knew it. The girls had not once bothered Gee, either.

Putting Gee in a boys’ dorm might have been asking for trouble; Gee liked boys, but because Gee was a boy who was trying to become a girl, some of the boys definitely would have bothered her.

No one had imagined—least of all, me—that Gee would turn out to be such a pretty young woman. No doubt, there were boys at Favorite River Academy who had a serious crush on her—straight boys, because Gee was completely passable, and those gay boys who were turned on by Gee because she had balls and a penis.

Richard Abbott and I took turns driving Gee out to see Martha at the Facility. At ninety, Mrs. Hadley was a kind of wise grandmother to Gee; Martha told Gee not to date any boys at Favorite River.

“Save the dating for when you get to college,” Mrs. Hadley had advised her.

“That’s what I’m doing—I’m waiting on the dating,” Gee Montgomery had told me. “All the guys at Favorite River are too immature for me, anyway,” she said.

There was one boy who seemed very mature to me—at least physically. He was, like Gee, a senior, but he was also a wrestler, which was why I had cast him as the fiery-tempered Tybalt—a kinsman to the Capulets, and the hothead who is most responsible for what happens in the play. Oh, I know, it is the long-standing discord between the Montagues and the Capulets that brings about the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but Tybalt is the catalyst. (I hope Herm Hoyt and Miss Frost would have forgiven me for casting a wrestler as my catalyst.)

My Tybalt was the most mature-looking boy at Favorite River—a four-year varsity wrestler from Germany. Manfred was a light-heavyweight; his English was correct, and very carefully enunciated, but he’d retained a slight accent. I’d told Manfred to let us hear the accent in Romeo and Juliet. How wicked of me—to have my Tybalt be a wrestler with a German accent. But, to tell you the truth, I was a little worried about how big a crush Manfred might have had on Gee. (And I know Gee liked him.) If there was a boy at Favorite River who was conceivably courageous enough to date Gee Montgomery—that is, even to ask her for a date—that boy, who very much looked like a man, was my hot-blooded Tybalt.

By that Wednesday, we were off-script in Romeo and Juliet—we were in the fine-tuning phase. Our rehearsal was later in the evening than usual; we had an 8 P.M. start—due to Manfred being at a pre-season wrestling match somewhere in Massachusetts.

I’d gone to the theater close to our usual rehearsal time, about 6:45 or 7:00 on that Wednesday, and—as I expected—most of my cast would show up early as well. Come 8:00, we would all be waiting for Manfred—my most combative Tybalt.

I was having a political conversation with my Benvolio, one of my gay boys. He was very active in the campus LGBTQ group, and we were talking about the election of the new governor of Vermont, a Democrat—“our gay-rights governor,” my Benvolio was in the midst of saying.

Suddenly, he interrupted himself and said: “I forgot to tell you, Mr. A. There’s a guy looking for you. He was in the dining hall, asking about you.”

I’d actually been in the dining hall for a quick bite to eat earlier that same evening, and someone else had told me there was a guy asking where he might find me. A young woman in the English Department had told me—a kind of Amanda-type, but not. (Amanda had moved on, to my relief.)

“How old a guy?” I’d asked this young faculty person. “What did he look like?”

“My age, or only a little older—good-looking,” she’d told me. I was guessing that this young English teacher was in her early thirties—maybe mid-thirties.

“How old a man, would you guess?” I asked my young Benvolio. “What did he look like?”

“Late thirties, maybe,” my Benvolio answered. “Very handsome—hot, if you ask me,” the gay boy said, smiling. (He was an excellent Benvolio to my cow-eyed Romeo, I was thinking.)

My cast was showing up in the black box—some arriving alone, some in twos or threes. If Manfred got back from his wrestling match ahead of schedule, we could start our rehearsal; most of the kids still had homework to do—they would have a late night.

Here came my clergymen, my Friar Lawrence and my Friar John, and my officious-sounding Apothecary. Here came my chatterboxes—two junior girls, my Lady Montague and my Lady Capulet. And there was my Mercutio—only a sophomore, but a long-legged and talented one. He had the requisite charm and derring-do for the likable but doomed Mercutio.

Straggling into the black box, not quite last, were various Attendants, Maskers, Torchbearers, my Boy with a drum (a tiny freshman, who could have played a dwarf), several Servingmen (including Tybalt’s page), sundry Gentlemen and Gentlewomen—and my Paris, my Prince Escalus, and the others. My Nurse came at the end, shoving my Balthasar and my Petruchio ahead of her. Juliet’s Nurse was a stalwart girl—a field-hockey player, and one of the most outspoken lesbians in the LGBTQ group. My Nurse did not countenance most male behavior—including gay and bi male behavior. I was very fond of her. If there were ever any trouble—a food fight in the dining hall, or a disaffected student with a weapon—I knew I could count on Juliet’s Nurse to watch my back. She had a grudging respect for Gee, but I knew they weren’t friends.

And where was Gee? I began to wonder. My Juliet was usually the first to arrive at the theater.

“There’s a guy looking for you, Mr. A.—some creep who thinks very highly of himself,” Juliet’s Nurse told me. “I think he’s hitting on Gee, or maybe he’s just walking with her and talking to her. They’re on their way here, anyway,” my Nurse said.

But I did not, at first, see the stranger; when I spotted Gee, she was alone. I’d been discussing Mercutio’s death scene with my long-legged Mercutio. I was agreeing with him that there is, as my talented sophomore put it, some black humor involved, when Mercutio first describes the seriousness of his stab wound to Romeo—“’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough. ’Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” Yet I cautioned my Mercutio not to make it the least bit funny when he curses the Capulets and the Montagues: “A plague o’ both your houses!”

“Sorry I’m a little late, Mr. A.—I got delayed,” Gee said; she looked flushed, even red-cheeked, but it was cold outside. There was no one with her.

“I heard some guy was bothering you,” I told her.

“He wasn’t bothering me—he’s got a thing about you,” my Juliet told me.

“He looked like he was hitting on you,” my sturdy Nurse said to her.

“No one’s hitting on me till I get to college,” Gee told her.

“Did the man say what he wanted?” I asked Gee; she shook her head.

“I think it’s personal, Mr. A.—the guy is upset about something,” Gee said.

We were all standing in the stage area, which was brightly lit; my stage manager had already dimmed the houselights. In our black box, we can position the audience where we want them; we can move the seats around. Sometimes, the audience completely encircles the stage or sits facing one another with the stage between them. For Romeo and Juliet, I had all the seats form a shallow horseshoe around the stage. With the houselights dimmed, but not dark, I could watch the rehearsals from any seat in the audience and still see well enough to read my notes—or write new notes.

It was my gay Benvolio who whispered in my ear, while all of us were still waiting for Manfred (my trouble-making Tybalt) to get back to campus from his wrestling match. “Mr. A.—I see him,” my Benvolio whispered. “That guy who’s looking for you—he’s in the audience.” With the houselights dimmed, I could not make out the man’s face; he was sitting in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped seats, about four or five rows back—just out of reach of the spotlights illuminating our stage.

“Should we call Security, Mr. A.?” Gee asked me.

“No, no—I’ll just see what he wants,” I told her. “If I appear to be stuck in an unwelcome conversation, just come interrupt us—pretend you have to ask me something about the play. Make up anything that comes to mind,” I said.

“You want me to come with you?” my bold Nurse, the field-hockey player, asked me.

“No, no,” I told the fearless girl, who was spoiling for a fight. “Just be sure I know when Manfred gets here.”

We were at that point in our rehearsals where I like to have the kids run their lines consecutively; I didn’t want to be rehearsing either piecemeal or out of sequence. My ever-ready Tybalt is an inciting presence in act 1, scene 1. (Enter Tybalt, drawing his sword, as the stage directions say.) The only rehearsing I wanted to do without Manfred was that small set piece the Chorus says, the prologue to the play.

“Listen up, Chorus,” I said. “Run through the prologue a couple of times. Take note that the most important line ends not with a comma, but a semicolon; pay attention to that semicolon. ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’; please pause after the semicolon.”

“We’re here, if you need us, Mr. A.,” I heard Gee say—as I went up an aisle to the fourth or fifth row of seats, into the dimly lit audience.

“Hey, Teacher,” I heard the man say, maybe a split second before I could clearly see him. He might as well have said, “Hey, Nymph”—that’s how familiar his voice was to me, almost fifty years after I’d last heard it. His handsome face, his wrestler’s build, his slyly confident smile—they were all familiar to me.

But you’re supposed to be dead! I was thinking—the “of natural causes” was the only doubtful part. Yet this Kittredge, of course, couldn’t have been my Kittredge. This Kittredge was only slightly more than half my age; if he’d been born in the early seventies, when I’d imagined Kittredge’s son had been born, he would have been in his late thirties—thirty-seven or thirty-eight, I would have guessed, upon meeting Kittredge’s only child.

“It’s truly striking how much you look like your father,” I said to young Kittredge, holding out my hand; he declined to shake it. “Well, of course, I mean if I had seen your father at your age—you look as I imagine he must have looked in his late thirties.”

“My father didn’t look at all like me when he was my age,” the young man said. “He was already in his early thirties when I was born; by the time I was old enough to remember what he looked like, he already looked like a woman. He hadn’t had the surgical reassignment yet, but he was very passable as a woman. I didn’t have a father. I had two mothers—one of them was hysterical most of the time, and the other one had a penis. After the surgery, as I understand it, he had some kind of vagina. He died of AIDS—I’m surprised you haven’t. I’ve read all your novels,” young Kittredge added, as if everything in my writing had indicated to him that I easily could have died of AIDS—or that I should have.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say to him; as Gee had said, he was upset. As I could see for myself, he was angry. I tried to make small talk. I asked him what his dad had done for a living, and how Kittredge had met Irmgard, the wife—this angry young man’s mother.

They’d met skiing—Davos, or maybe Klosters. Kittredge’s wife was Swiss, but she’d had a German grandmother; that’s where the Irmgard came from. Kittredge and Irmgard had homes in the ski town and in Zurich, where they’d both worked at the Schauspielhaus. (It was quite a famous theater.) I imagined that Kittredge had liked living in Europe; no doubt, he was used to Europe, because of his mother. And maybe a sex-change surgery was more easily arranged in Europe—I had no idea, really.

Mrs. Kittredge—the mom, I mean, not the wife—had killed herself soon after Kittredge’s death. (There was no doubt she’d been his real mother.) “Pills,” was all the grandson would say about it; he clearly wasn’t interested in talking to me about anything except the fact that his father became a woman. I began to get the feeling that young Kittredge believed I had something to do with what he saw as a despicable alteration.

“How was his German?” I asked Kittredge’s son, but that was of no concern to the angry young man.

“His German was passable—not as passable as he was as a woman. He didn’t make any effort to improve his German,” Kittredge’s son told me. “My father never worked as hard at anything as he worked at becoming a woman.”

“Oh.”

“When he was dying, he told me that something happened here—when you knew him,” Kittredge’s son said to me. “Something started here. He admired you—he said you had balls. You did something ‘inspiring,’ or so he told me. There was a transsexual involved—someone older, I think. Maybe you both knew her. Maybe my father admired her, too—maybe she inspired him.”

“I saw a photo of your father when he was younger—before he came here,” I told young Kittredge. “He was dressed and made up as a very pretty girl. I think something started, as you say, before he met me—and all the rest of it. I could show you that photo, if you—”

“I’ve seen those photographs—I don’t need to see another one!” Kittredge’s son said angrily. “What about the transsexual? How did you two inspire my father?”

“I’m surprised to hear he ‘admired’ me—I can’t imagine that I did anything he would have found ‘inspiring.’ I never thought he even liked me. In fact, your father was always rather cruel to me,” I told Kittredge’s son.

“What about the transsexual?” young Kittredge asked me again.

“I knew the transsexual—your father met her only once. I was in love with the transsexual. What happened with the transsexual happened to me!” I cried. “I don’t know what happened to your father.”

“Something happened here—that’s all I know,” the son said bitterly. “My father read all your books, obsessively. What was he looking for in your novels? I’ve read them—I never found my father there, not that I would necessarily have recognized him in your pages.”

I thought of my father, then, and I said—as gently as I could manage—to Kittredge’s angry son, “We already are who we are, aren’t we? I can’t make your father comprehensible to you, but surely you can have some sympathy for him, can’t you?” (I’d never imagined myself asking anyone to have sympathy for Kittredge!)

I had once believed that if Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me. Now I wasn’t so sure. When Kittredge had met Miss Frost, I’d seen him change from dominant to submissive—in about ten seconds.

Just then Gee was there, in the row of seats beside us. My cast for Romeo and Juliet had surely heard the raised voices; they must have been worried about me. No doubt, they could hear how angry young Kittredge was. To me, he seemed just a callow, disappointing reflection of his father.

“Hi, Gee,” I said. “Is Manfred here? Are we ready?”

“No—we still don’t have our Tybalt,” Gee told me. “But I have a question. It’s about act one, scene five—it’s the very first thing I say, when the Nurse tells me Romeo is a Montague. You know, when I learn I’m in love with the son of my enemy—it’s that couplet.”

“What about it?” I asked her; she was stalling for us both, I could see. We wanted Manfred to arrive. Where was my easily outraged Tybalt when I needed him?

“I don’t think I should sound sorry for myself,” Gee continued. “I don’t think of Juliet as self-pitying.”

“No, she’s not,” I said. “Juliet may sound fatalistic—at times—but she shouldn’t sound self-pitying.”

“Okay—let me say it,” Gee said. “I think I’ve got it—I’m just saying it as it is, but I’m not complaining about it.”

“This is my Juliet,” I told young Kittredge. “My best girl, Gee. Okay,” I said to Gee, “let’s hear it.”

“‘My only love sprung from my only hate! / Too early seen unknown, and known too late!’” my Juliet said.

“That couldn’t be better, Gee,” I told her, but young Kittredge was just staring at her; I couldn’t tell if he admired her or suspected her.

“What kind of name is Gee?” Kittredge’s son asked her. I could see that my best girl’s confidence was a little shaken; here was a handsome, rather worldly-looking man—someone not from our Favorite River community, where Gee had earned our respect and had developed much confidence in herself as a woman. I could see that Gee was doubting herself. I knew what she was thinking—in young Kittredge’s presence, and under his intimidating scrutiny. Do I look passable? Gee was wondering.

“Gee is just a made-up name,” the young girl evasively told him.

“What’s your real name?” Kittredge’s son asked her.

“I was George Montgomery, at birth. I’m going to be Georgia Montgomery later,” Gee told him. “Right now, I’m just Gee. I’m a boy who’s becoming a girl—I’m in transition,” my Juliet said to young Kittredge.

“That couldn’t be better, Gee,” I told her again. “I think you said that perfectly.”

One glance at Kittredge’s son told me: He’d had no idea that Gee was a work-in-progress; he hadn’t known she was a transgender kid, on her brave way to becoming a woman. One glance at Gee told me that she knew she’d been passable; I think that gave my Juliet a ton of confidence. I realize now that if Kittredge’s son had said anything disrespectful to Gee, I would have tried to kill him.

At that moment, Manfred arrived. “The wrestler is here!” someone shouted—my Mercutio, maybe, or it might have been my gay Benvolio.

“We have our Tybalt!” my strong Nurse called to Gee and me.

“Ah, at last,” I said. “We’re ready.”

Gee was running toward the stage—as if her next life depended on starting this delayed rehearsal. “Good luck—break a leg,” young Kittredge called after her. Just like his father—you couldn’t read his tone of voice. Was he being sincere or sarcastic?

I could see that my most assertive Nurse had pulled Manfred aside. No doubt, she was filling the hot-tempered Tybalt in—she wanted “the wrestler” to know there was a potential problem, a creep (as she’d called young Kittredge) in the audience. I was ushering Kittredge’s son to an aisle between the horseshoe-shaped seats, just accompanying the young man to the nearest exit, when Manfred presented himself in the aisle—as ready for a fight as Tybalt ever was.

When Manfred wanted to speak privately to me, he always spoke in German; he knew I’d lived in Vienna and could still speak a little German, albeit badly. Manfred politely asked if there was anything he could do to help me—in German.

Fucking wrestlers! I saw that my Tybalt had lost half his mustache; they’d had to shave one side of his lip before they gave him the stitches! (Manfred would have to shave the other half of his lip before we were in performance; I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a Tybalt with only half a mustache.)

“Your German is pretty good,” young Kittredge, sounding surprised, said to Manfred.

“It ought to be—I’m German,” Manfred told him aggressively, in English.

“This is my Tybalt. He’s also a wrestler, like your father,” I said to Kittredge’s son. They shook hands a little tentatively. “I’ll be right there, Manfred—you can wait onstage for me. Nice lip,” I told him, as he was going down the aisle to the stage.

Young Kittredge reluctantly shook my hand at the exit door. He was still agitated; he’d had more to say, but—in at least one way—he was not like his father. Whatever one thinks of Kittredge, I can tell you this: He was a cruel fucker, but he was a fighter. The son, whether he had wrestled or not, needed just one look at Manfred; Kittredge’s son was no fighter.

“Look, here it is—I just have to say this,” young Kittredge said; he almost couldn’t look at me. “I don’t know you, I admit—I don’t have a clue who my father really was, either. But I’ve read all your books, and I know what you do—I mean, in your writing. You make all these sexual extremes seem normal—that’s what you do. Like Gee, that girl, or whatever she is—or what she’s becoming. You create these characters who are so sexually ‘different,’ as you might call them—or ‘fucked up,’ which is what I would call them—and then you expect us to sympathize with them, or feel sorry for them, or something.”

“Yes, that’s more or less what I do,” I told him.

“But so much of what you describe is not natural!” Kittredge’s son cried. “I mean, I know what you are—not only from your writing. I’ve read what you say about yourself, in interviews. What you are isn’t natural—you aren’t normal!”

He’d held his voice down when he was talking about Gee—I’ll give him credit for that—but now Kittredge’s son had raised his voice again. I knew that my stage manager—not to mention the entire cast for Romeo and Juliet—could hear every word. It was suddenly so quiet in our little black-box theater; I swear you could have heard a stage mouse fart.

“You’re bisexual, aren’t you?” Kittredge’s son then asked me. “Do you think that’s normal, or natural—or sympathetic? You’re a switch-hitter!” he said, opening the exit door; thank goodness, everyone could see he was finally leaving.

“My dear boy,” I said sharply to young Kittredge, in what has become my lifelong imitation of the way Miss Frost so pointedly and thrillingly spoke to me.

“My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” Miss Frost had said to me; I’ve never forgotten it. Is it any wonder that this was what I said to young Kittredge, the cocksure son of my old nemesis and forbidden love?