In One Person (60 page)

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

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

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

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

“Let’s hear you say ‘penis,’ Billy.”

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

“Say it,” Elaine said.

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

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

T
HE
1981 A
TKINS
C
HRISTMAS
card came on time that year. No generic “Season’s Greetings,” more than a month late, but an unapologetic “Merry Christmas” in December.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Atkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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