In One Person (53 page)

“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“When local, state, and federal legislation, which currently criminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, is repealed; when the country’s archaic anti-sodomy laws are overturned; when psychiatrists stop diagnosing me and my friends as clinically abnormal, medically incompetent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.

W
HAT 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
.

L
AWRENCE
U
PTON’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
!