In One Person (70 page)

“You see, Billy?” Donna said. “I told you to watch out for Lorna. She’s
already found a way to let you know she’s a bottom, and that she likes
little
cocks.”

The three friends all laughed at that—I had to laugh, too. I only noticed, when I was saying good-bye to Donna, that her friends and I had not once called her by name—not Donna
or
Don. The two transsexuals waited for me when I was saying good-bye to John; I would have hated his job.

I walked with Lorna and Lilly to the Sherbourne subway station; they were taking the subway home, they said. By the way they said the
home
word, and the way they were holding hands, I got the feeling that they lived together. When I asked them where I could catch a taxi to take me back to my hotel, Lilly said, “I’m glad you mentioned what hotel you’re staying in—I’ll be sure to tell Donna that you and Lorna got in a
lot
of trouble.”

Lorna laughed. “I’ll probably tell Donna that you and Lilly got in trouble, too,” Lorna told me. “Donna loves it when I say, ‘Lilly never knew a cock she didn’t like, big
or
little’—that cracks her up.”

Lilly laughed, and I did, too, but the flirting was finished. It had all been for Donna. I kissed Donna’s two friends good-bye at the Sherbourne subway station, their cheeks perfectly soft and smooth, with no hint of a beard—absolutely nothing you could feel against your face, and not the slightest shadow on their pretty faces. I still have dreams about those two.

I was thinking, as I kissed them good-bye, of what Elaine told me Mrs. Kittredge had said, when Elaine was traveling in Europe with Kittredge’s mother. (This was what Mrs. Kittredge
really
said—not the story Elaine first told me.)

“I don’t know what your son wants,” Elaine had told Kittredge’s mother. “I just know he always wants
something
.”

“I’ll tell you what he wants—even more than he wants to fuck us,” Mrs. Kittredge said. “He wants to
be
one of us, Elaine. He doesn’t want to be a boy or a man; it doesn’t matter to him that he’s finally so
good
at being a boy or a man. He never
wanted
to be a boy or a man in the first place!”

But if Kittredge was a woman now—if he was like Donna had been, or like Donna’s two very “passable” friends—and if Kittredge had AIDS and was dying somewhere, what if they’d had to stop giving Kittredge the estrogens? Kittredge had a
very
heavy beard; I could still feel, after more than thirty years, how heavy his beard was. I had so often, and for so long, imagined Kittredge’s beard scratching against my face.

Do you remember what he said to me, about transsexuals? “I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge had whispered in my ear, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along.” (He’d been talking about the transvestites he’d seen in Paris.) “I think, if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris,” Kittredge had said to me. “But
you,
Nymph—you’ve already
done
it!” Kittredge had cried.

Elaine and I had seen Kittredge’s single room at Favorite River Academy, most memorably (to me) the photograph of Kittredge and his mother that was taken after a wrestling match. What Elaine and I had noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body.

The truth was, Kittredge’s face had
worked
on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes. Elaine had convinced me that Kittredge must have been the one who switched the faces in the photograph; Mrs. Kittredge couldn’t have done it. “That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor,” Elaine had said, in her authoritarian way.

I was back home from Toronto, having said good-bye to Donna. Lavender would never smell the same to me again, and you can imagine what an anticlimax it would be when Uncle Bob called me in my River Street house with the latest news of a classmate’s death.

“You’ve lost another classmate, Billy—not your favorite person, if memory serves,” the Racquet Man said. As vague as I am concerning when I heard the news about Donna, I can tell you
exactly
when it was that Uncle Bob called me with the news about Kittredge.

I’d just celebrated my fifty-third birthday. It was March 1995; there was still a lot of snow on the ground in First Sister, with nothing but mud season to look forward to.

Elaine and I had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico; she’d been looking at houses to rent in Playa del Carmen. I would have happily gone to Mexico with her, but she was having a boyfriend problem: Her boyfriend was a tight-assed turd who didn’t want Elaine to go anywhere with me.

“Didn’t you tell him we don’t do it?” I asked her.

“Yes, but I also told him that we
used to
do it—or that we tried to,” Elaine said, revising herself.

“Why did you tell him that?” I asked her.

“I’m trying out a new honesty policy,” Elaine answered. “I’m not making up so many stories, or I’m trying not to.”

“How is this policy working out with your
fiction
writing?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I can go to Mexico with you, Billy—not right now,” was all she’d said.

I’d had a recent boyfriend problem of my own, but when I dumped the boyfriend, I had rather soon developed a girlfriend problem. She was a first-year faculty member at Favorite River, a young English teacher. Mrs. Hadley and Richard had introduced us; they’d invited me to dinner, and there was Amanda. When I first saw her, I thought she was one of Richard’s students—she looked that young to me. But she was an anxious young woman in her late twenties.

“I’m almost thirty,” Amanda was always saying, as if she was anxious that she was too young-looking; therefore, saying she would soon be thirty made her seem older.

When we started sleeping together, Amanda was anxious about where we did it. She had a faculty apartment in one of the girls’ dorms at Favorite River; when I spent the night with her there, the girls in the dormitory knew about it. But, most nights, Amanda had dorm duty—she couldn’t stay with me in my house on River Street. The way it was working out, I wasn’t sleeping with Amanda nearly enough—that was the developing problem. And then, of course, there was the
bi
issue: She’d read all my novels, she said she
loved
my writing, but that I was a bi guy made her anxious, too.

“I just can’t believe you’re fifty-
three
!” Amanda kept saying, which confused me. I couldn’t tell if she meant I seemed so much younger than I was, or that she was appalled at herself for dating an
old
bi guy in his fifties.

Martha Hadley, who was seventy-five, had retired, but she still met with individual students who had “special needs”—pronunciation problems included. Mrs. Hadley had told me that Amanda suffered from pronunciation problems. “That wasn’t why you introduced us, was it?” I asked Martha.

“It wasn’t
my
idea, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “It was Richard’s idea to introduce you to Amanda, because she is such a fan of your
writing
. I never thought it was a good idea—she’s way too young for you, and
she’s anxious about everything. I can only imagine that, because you are
bi
—well, that’s got to keep Amanda awake at night. She can’t
pronounce
the word
bisexual
!”

“Oh.”

That’s what was going on in my life when Uncle Bob called me about Kittredge. That’s why I said, half seriously, I had “nothing but mud season to look forward to”—nothing except my writing. (Moving to Vermont had been good for my writing.)

The account of Kittredge’s death had been submitted to the Office of Alumni Affairs by Mrs. Kittredge.

“Do you mean he had a wife, or do you mean his mother?” I asked Uncle Bob.

“Kittredge had a wife, Billy, but we heard from the mother.”

“Jesus—how old would
Mrs
. Kittredge be?” I asked Bob.

“She’s only seventy-two,” my uncle answered; Uncle Bob was seventy-eight, and he sounded a little insulted by my question. Elaine had told me that Mrs. Kittredge had only been eighteen when Kittredge was born.

According to Bob—that is, according to Mrs. Kittredge—my former heartthrob and tormentor had died in Zurich, Switzerland, “of natural causes.”

“Bullshit, Bob,” I said. “Kittredge was only a year older than I am—he was fifty-four. What ‘natural causes’ can kill you when you’re fifty-fucking-four?”

“My thoughts exactly, Billy—but that’s what his mom said,” the Racquet Man replied.

“From what I’ve heard, I’ll bet Kittredge died of AIDS,” I said.

“What mother of Mrs. Kittredge’s generation would be likely to tell her son’s old school
that
?” Uncle Bob asked me. (Indeed, Sue Atkins had reported only that Tom Atkins had died “after a long illness.”)

“You said Kittredge had a
wife,
” I replied to my uncle.

“He is survived by his wife and his son—an only child—and by his mother, of course,” the Racquet Man told me. “The boy is named after his father—another Jacques. The wife has a German-sounding name. You studied German, didn’t you, Billy? What kind of name is Irmgard?” Uncle Bob asked.

“Definitely German-sounding,” I said.

If Kittredge had wasted away in Zurich—even if he’d died in Switzerland
“of natural causes”—possibly his wife was Swiss, but
Irmgard
was a German name. Boy, was that ever a tough Christian name to carry around! It was terribly old-fashioned; one immediately felt the stiffness of the person wearing that heavy name. I thought it was a suitable name for an elderly schoolmistress, a strict disciplinarian.

I was guessing that the only child, the son named Jacques, would have been born sometime in the early seventies; that would have been right on schedule for the kind of career-oriented young man I imagined Kittredge was, in those early years—given the MFA from Yale, given his first few steps along a no doubt bright and shining career path in the world of
drama
. Only at the appropriate time would Kittredge have paused, and found a wife. And
then
what? How had things unraveled after that?

“That fucker—God
damn
him!” Elaine cried, when I told her Kittredge had died. She was furious—it was as if Kittredge had
escaped,
somehow. She couldn’t speak about the “of natural causes” bullshit, not to mention the wife. “He can’t get away with this!” Elaine cried.

“Elaine—he
died
. He didn’t get away with anything,” I said, but Elaine cried and cried.

Unfortunately, it was one of the few nights when Amanda didn’t have dorm duty; she was staying with me in the River Street house, and so I had to tell her about Kittredge, and Elaine, and all the rest.

No doubt, this history was more bi—and gay, and “transgender” (as Amanda would say)—in nature than anything Amanda had been forced to imagine, although she kept saying how much she
loved
my writing, where she’d no doubt encountered a world of sexual “differences” (as Richard would say).

I blame myself for not saying anything to Amanda about the frigging ghosts in that River Street house; only other people saw them—they never bothered
me
! But Amanda got up to go to the bathroom—it was the middle of the night—and her screaming woke me. It was a brand-new bathtub in that bathroom—it was
not
the same tub Grandpa Harry had pulled the trigger in, just the same bathroom—but, when Amanda finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened (when she was sitting on the toilet), it had no doubt been Harry she’d seen in that brand-new bathtub.

“He was curled up like a little boy in the bathtub—he
smiled
at me when I was peeing!” Amanda, who was still sobbing, explained.

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“But he was no little boy!” Amanda moaned.

“No, he wasn’t—that was my grandfather,” I tried to tell her calmly. Oh, that Harry—he certainly loved a new audience, even as a ghost! (Even
as a man
!)

“At first, I didn’t see the rifle—but he
wanted
me to see it, Billy. He showed me the gun, and then he shot himself in the head—his head went all over the place!” Amanda wailed.

Naturally, I had some explaining to do; I had to tell her everything about Grandpa Harry. We were up all night. Amanda would not go to the bathroom by herself in the morning—she wouldn’t even be alone in one of the other bathrooms, which I’d suggested. I understood; I was very understanding. I’ve never seen a frigging ghost—I’m sure they’re frightening.

I guess the last straw, as I would later explain to Mrs. Hadley and Richard, was that Amanda was so rattled in the morning—after all, the anxious young woman hadn’t had a good night’s sleep—she opened the door to my bedroom closet, thinking she was opening the door to the upstairs hall. And there was Grandpa Harry’s .30-30 Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.