John Irving - In One Person

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In One Person: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity,
is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.
His most political novel since
and
, John Irving’s
is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.” * * *
“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients’ deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses—namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised.
is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”
— ABRAHAM VERGHESE “
is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities—in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies—and ours—still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial—whatever lies between two familiar opposites—is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel—his best and most passionate since
—has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?”
— EDMUND WHITE

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Sad tidings for the Class of ’35! Al Frost: born, First Sister, Vermont, 1917; wrestling team captain, 1935 (undefeated); died, Dover or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1990.

“That’s it ?” I remember asking Uncle Bob.

“Shit, Billy—what else can we say in an alumni magazine?” the Racquet Man said.

When Richard and Martha were auctioning off the old furniture from Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, they told me they’d found thirteen beer bottles under the living-room couch—all Uncle Bob’s. (If I had to bet, all from that one party to commemorate Aunt Muriel and my mother.)

“Way to go, Bob!” I’d said to Mrs. Hadley and Richard.

I knew the Racquet Man was right. What can you say in a frigging alumni magazine about a transsexual wrestler who was killed in a bar fight? Not much.

IT WAS A COUPLE of years later—I was slowly adjusting to living in Vermont—when I got a late-night phone call from El. It took me a second or two to recognize her voice; I think she was drunk.

“You know that friend of yours—the girl like me, but she’s older?” El asked.

“You mean Donna,” I said, after a pause.

“Yeah, Donna,” El said. “Well, she is sick now—that’s what I heard.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I was saying, when El hung up the phone. It was too late to call anybody in Toronto; I just slept on the news. I’m guessing this would have been 1992 or ’93; it may even have been early in 1994. (After I moved to Vermont, I didn’t pay such close attention to time.)

I had a few friends in Toronto; I asked around. I was told about an excellent hospice there—everyone I knew said it was quite a wonderful place, under the circumstances. Casey House, it was called; just recently, someone told me it still exists.

The director of nursing at Casey House, at that time, was a great guy; his first name was John, if I remember correctly, and I think he had an Irish last name. Since I’d moved back to First Sister, I was discovering that I wasn’t very good at remembering names. Besides, whenever this was, exactly—when I heard about Donna being sick—I was already fifty, or in my fifties. (It wasn’t just names I had trouble remembering!)

John told me that Donna had been admitted to hospice care several months before. But Donna was “Don” to the nurses and other caregivers at Casey House, John had explained to me.

“Estrogen has side effects—in particular, it can affect the liver,” John told me. Furthermore, estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. “The itching that occurs with this condition was driving Don nuts,” was how John put it. It was Donna herself who’d told everyone to call her Don; upon stopping the estrogens, her beard came back.

It seemed exceptionally unfair to me that Donna, who had worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS; she was being forced to return to her former male self.

Donna also had cytomegalovirus. “In this case, the blindness may be a blessing,” John told me. He meant that Donna was spared seeing her beard, but of course she could feel it—even though one of the nurses shaved her face every day.

“I just want to prepare you,” John said to me. “Watch yourself. Don’t call him ‘Donna.’ Just try not to let that name slip.” In our phone conversations, I’d noticed that the director of nursing was careful to use the he and him words while discussing “Don.” John not once said she or her or Donna .

Thus prepared, I found my way to Huntley Street in downtown Toronto—a small residential-looking street, or so it seemed to me (between Church Street and Sherbourne Street, if you know the city). Casey House itself was like a very large family’s home; it had as pleasant and welcoming an atmosphere as was possible, but there’s only so much you can do about bedsores and muscular wasting—or the lingering smell, no matter how hard you try to mask it, of fulminant diarrhea. Donna’s room had an almost-nice lavender smell. (A bathroom deodorizer, a perfumed disinfectant—not one I would choose.) I must have held my breath.

“Is that you, Billy?” Donna asked; white splotches clouded her eyes, but she could hear okay. I’ll bet she’d heard me hold my breath. Of course they’d told her I was coming, and a nurse had very recently shaved her; I was unused to the masculine smell of the shaving cream, or maybe it was an after-shave gel. Yet, when I kissed her, I could feel the beard on Donna’s cheek—as I’d not once felt it when we were making love—and I could see the shadow of a beard on her clean-shaven face. She was taking Coumadin; I saw the pills on the bedside table.

I was impressed by what a good job the nurses were doing at Casey House; they were experts at accomplishing all they could to make Donna comfortable, including (of course) the pain control. John had explained to me the subtleties of sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir versus fentanyl patch, but I hadn’t really been listening. John also told me that Don was using a special cream that seemed to help control his itching, although the cream was exposing Don to “a lot of steroids.”

Suffice it to say, I saw that Donna was in good and caring hands at Casey House—even though she was blind, and she was dying as a man . While I was visiting with Donna, two of her Toronto friends also came to see her—two very passable transsexuals, each of them clearly dedicated to living her life as a woman . When Donna introduced us, I very much had the feeling that she’d forewarned them I would be there; in fact, Donna might have asked her friends to stop by when I was with her. Maybe Donna wanted me to see that she’d found “her people,” and that she’d been happy in Toronto.

The two transsexuals were very friendly to me—one of them flirted with me, but it was all for show. “Oh, you’re the writer —we know all about you!” the more outgoing but not flirtatious one said.

“Oh, yeah—the bi guy, right?” the one who was coming on to me said. (She definitely wasn’t serious about it. The flirting was entirely for Donna’s amusement; Donna had always loved flirting.)

“Watch out for her, Billy,” Donna told me, and all three of them laughed. Given Atkins, given Delacorte, given Larry—not to mention those airmen who killed Miss Frost—it wasn’t a terribly painful visit. At one point, Donna even said to her flirtatious friend, “You know, Lorna—Billy never complained that I had too big a cock. You liked my cock, didn’t you, Billy?” Donna asked me.

“I certainly did,” I told her, being careful not to say, “I certainly did, Donna .”

“Yeah, but you told me Billy was a top, ” Lorna said to Donna; the other transsexual, whose name was Lilly, laughed. “Try being a bottom and see what too big a cock does to you!”

“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.”

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