John Irving - In One Person

“I do hate him, Elaine,” I told her.

“Yes, but that’s not all you feel for him—I know,” she told me.

Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge’s part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident—even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a girl . His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter—if not usually from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman—that would surely bring him to his senses!

How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid—that is, the “right” way—and we’ll never so much as imagine having sex with another man!

“You should have told me,” I said to Elaine.

“You should have shown me the photograph, Billy.”

“Yes, I should have—we both ‘should have.’”

Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him—and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge as a woman .

“A pretty one, too, I’ll bet,” Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the beautiful word.

It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds—not to mention the as a woman part—staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.

“Just don’t call Larry—not yet,” Elaine said.

But I did call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. “I’ll find you a place to stay in New York,” I told Elaine. “If I can’t find two places in New York, I’ll try living in Vermont—you know, I’ll just try it.”

“Your house has no furniture in it, Billy,” Elaine pointed out.

“Ah, well . . .”

That was when I called Larry.

“I just have a cold—it’s nothing, Bill,” Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn’t a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about Pneumocystis pneumonia, and the fever.

“What’s your T-cell count?” I asked him. “When were you going to tell me? Don’t bullshit me, Larry!”

“Please come home, Bill—you and Elaine. Please, both of you, come home,” Larry said. (Just that—not a long speech—and he was out of breath.)

Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street—just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet—or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry’s poetry patrons—the patroness, as I thought of her—had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it—we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)

When Elaine and I moved in—to help the live-in nurse look after Larry—it was not the same as living “together”; we were done with that experiment. Larry’s house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleep-in nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day—in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn’t write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.

Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he’d been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the same man I’d admired when I first met him—in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn’t hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn’t walk or even stand, and he was incontinent—about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) “It’s my penis, again, Bill,” Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.

“Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry,” Elaine would chime in.

“Oh, I know—have you ever heard anything quite like it?” Larry would exclaim. “Please say it, Bill—give us the plural !”

For Larry, I would do it—well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. “Penith-zizzes,” I said—always quietly, at first.

“What? I can’t hear you,” Larry would say.

“Louder, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Penith-zizzes!” I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in—all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. “Penith-zizzes!”

One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep. “What’s wrong?” the young nurse asked. (There he was, in his pajamas.)

“We’re saying ‘penises’ in another language,” Larry explained. “Bill is teaching us.” But it was Larry who taught me.

As I said once to Elaine: “I’ll tell you who my teachers were—the ones who meant the most to me. Larry, of course, but also Richard Abbott, and—maybe the most important of all, or at the most important time —your mother.”

Lawrence Upton died in December of ’86; he was sixty-eight. (It’s hard to believe, but Larry was almost the same age I am now !) He lived for a year in hospice care, in that house on West Tenth Street. He died on Elaine’s shift, but she came and woke me up; that was the deal Elaine and I had made with each other, because we’d both wanted to be there when Larry died. As Larry had said about Russell, the night Russell died in Larry’s arms: “He weighed nothing.”

The night Larry died, both Elaine and I lay beside him and cradled him in our arms. The morphine was playing tricks on Larry; who knows how consciously (or not) Larry said what he said to Elaine and me? “It’s my penis again,” Larry told us. “And again, and again, and again—it’s always my penis, isn’t it?”

Elaine sang him a song, and he died when she was still singing.

“That’s a beautiful song,” I told her. “Who wrote it? What’s it called?”

“Felix Mendelssohn wrote it,” Elaine said. “Never mind what it’s called. If you ever die on me, Billy, you’ll hear it again. I’ll tell you then what it’s called.”

THERE WERE A COUPLE of years when Elaine and I rattled around in that too-grand town house Larry had left us. Elaine had a vapid, nondescript boyfriend, whom I disliked for the sole reason that he wasn’t substantial enough for her. His name was Raymond, and he burned his toast almost every morning, setting off the frigging smoke detector.

I was on Elaine’s shit list for much of that time, because I was seeing a transsexual who kept urging Elaine to wear sexier-looking clothes; Elaine wasn’t inclined to “sexier-looking.”

“Elwood has bigger boobs than I have— everybody has,” Elaine said to me. Elaine purposely called my transsexual friend Elwood, or Woody. My transsexual friend called herself El. Soon everyone would be using the transgender word; my friends told me I should use it, too—not to mention those terribly correct young people giving me the hairy eyeball because I continued to say “transsexual” when I was supposed to say “transgender.”