John Irving - In One Person

But Herm Hoyt hadn’t asked to see me because he’d wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.

“I’m guessing you’ve heard from Miss Frost,” I said to her old wrestling coach. “Is she all right?”

“Funny—that’s what she wanted to know about you, Billy,” Herm said.

“You can tell her I’m all right,” I said quickly.

“I never asked her to tell me the sexual details—in fact, I would just as soon know nothin’ about that stuff, Billy,” the coach continued. “But she said there’s somethin’ you should know—so you won’t worry about her.”

“You should tell Miss Frost I’m a top,” I told him, “and I’ve been wearing condoms since ’68. Maybe she won’t worry too much about me, if she knows that,” I added.

“Jeez—I’m too old for more sexual details, Billy. Just let me finish what I started to say!” Herm said. He was ninety-one, not quite a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Herm had Parkinson’s, and Uncle Bob had told me that the coach was having difficulty with one of his medications; it was something Herm was supposed to take for his heart, or so Bob had thought. (The Parkinson’s was why Coach Hoyt had moved into the Facility in the first place.)

“I’m not even pretendin’ that I understand this, Billy, but here’s what Al wanted you to know—forgive me, what she wanted you to know. She doesn’t actually have sex,” Herm Hoyt told me. “She means not with anybody , Billy—she just doesn’t ever do it. She’s gone to a world of trouble to make herself a woman, but she doesn’t ever have sex—not with men or women, I’m tellin’ you, not ever . There’s somethin’ Greek about what she does—she said you knew all about it, Billy.”

“Intercrural,” I said to the old wrestling coach.

“That’s it—that’s what she called it!” Herm cried. “It’s nothin’ but rubbin’ your thing between the other fella’s thighs—it’s just rubbin’, isn’t it?” the wrestling coach asked me.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t get AIDS that way,” I told him.

“But she was always this way, Billy—that’s what she wants you to know,” Herm said. “She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger.”

“Pull the trigger,” I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as protecting me; I’d not once imagined that—for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously—she was also protecting herself .

“No penetratin’, no bein’ penetrated—just rubbin’, ” Coach Hoyt repeated. “Al said— she said; I’m sorry, Billy—‘That’s as far as I can go, Herm. That’s all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can’t ever pull the trigger.’ That’s what she told me to tell you, Billy.”

“So she’s safe, ” I said. “She really is all right, and she’s going to stay all right.”

“She’s sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, ‘she’s safe ’—what do you mean, ‘she’s gonna stay all right’? Nobody stays all right, Billy! Gettin’ old isn’t safe !” Coach Hoyt exclaimed. “I’m just tellin’ you she doesn’t have AIDS. She didn’t want you worryin’ about her havin’ AIDS, Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Al Frost—sorry, Miss Frost to you—never did anything safe, Billy. Shit,” the old coach said, “she may look like a woman—I know she’s got the moves down pat—but she still thinks, if you can call it that, like a fuckin’ wrestler. It’s just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be wrestlin’, Billy—that’s not safe at all.”

Fucking wrestlers ! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were finally talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging wrestling; they were all like that! It didn’t make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost wasn’t like other wrestlers; she’d put the wrestling behind her—at least that had been my impression.

“What are you saying, Herm?” I asked the old coach. “Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to wrestle him? Is she going to pick a fight?”

“Some guys aren’t gonna be satisfied with the rubbin’ part, are they?” Herm asked me. “She won’t pick a fight—she doesn’t pick fights, Billy—but I know Al. She’s not gonna back down from a fight—not if some dickhead who wanted more than a rubbin’ picks a fight with her.”

I didn’t want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the intercrural part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn’t—that she truly couldn’t —have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.

Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? “I just like to look the part,” Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn’t that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn’t that sound like she was satisfied with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.

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

“Oh, I’ve been practicing,” I told him—kind of a white lie, wasn’t it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson’s, or one of the medications he was taking—the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.

We hugged each other good-bye; it was the last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders.” (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)

When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow’s shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. “Still waitin’,” she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. “I’ve decided not to wheel him back inside,” the nurse informed me. “He can’t feel the snow fallin’ on him.”

“I’ll tell you something about him,” I said to the old nurse. “He’s exactly the same now as he always was—dead certain.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow’s body. “I’m not quarrelin’ with you over language,” she told me. “ You’re the writer.”

ONE SNOWY DECEMBER NIGHT after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park—exactly at that distant intersection—was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.

My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.

The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”—so to speak—and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)