John Irving - In One Person

But it wasn’t exactly in the category of an announcement for publication in The River Bulletin; it was just a query that came to Bob, in care of the “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”

Please pass this message along to young William,

the carefully typed letter began.

His father, William Francis Dean, would like to know how his son is—even if the old prima donna himself won’t write his son and just ask him. There was an AIDS epidemic, you know; since he’s still writing books, we assume that young William survived it. But how’s his health? As we say over here—if you would be so kind as to ask young William—Cómo está? And please tell young William, if he wants to see us before we die, he ought to pay us a visit!

The carefully typed letter was from my father’s longtime lover—the toilet-seat skipper, the reader, the guy who reconnected with my dad on the subway and didn’t get off at the next station.

He had typed, not signed, his name:

Señor Bovary

I WENT ONE SUMMER recently, with a somewhat cynical Dutch friend, to the gay-pride parade in Amsterdam; that city is a hopeful experiment, I have long believed, and I loved the parade. There were surging tides of men dancing in the streets—guys in purple and pink leather, boys in Speedos with leopard spots, men in jockstraps, kissing, one woman sleekly covered with wet-looking green feathers and sporting an all-black strap-on cock. I said to my friend that there were many cities where they preached tolerance, but Amsterdam truly practiced it—even flaunted it. As I spoke, a long barge glided by on one of the canals; an all-girls’ rock band was playing onboard, and there were women wearing transparent leotards and waving to us onshore. The women were waving dildoes.

But my cynical Dutch friend gave me a tired (and barely tolerant) look; he seemed as indifferent to the gay goings-on as the mostly foreign-born prostitutes in the windows and doorways of de Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district.

“Amsterdam is so over, ” my Dutch friend said. “The new scene for gays in Europe is Madrid.”

“Madrid,” I repeated, the way I do. I was an old bi guy in his sixties, living in Vermont. What did I know about the new scene for gays in Europe? (What did I know about any frigging scene ?)

IT WAS ON SEÑOR Bovary’s recommendation that I stayed at the Santo Mauro in Madrid; it was a pretty, quiet hotel on the Zurbano—a narrow, tree-lined street (a residential but boring-looking neighborhood) “within walking distance of Chueca.” Well, it was a long walk to Chueca, “the gay district of Madrid”—as Señor Bovary described Chueca in his email to me. Bovary’s typed letter, which was mailed to Uncle Bob at Favorite River’s Office of Alumni Affairs, had not included a return address—just an email address and Señor Bovary’s cell-phone number.

The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father’s enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

“I believe that the Bovary character is your dad’s age, Billy,” Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940 Owl, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Señor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same ’40 Owl that Franny Dean had wanted to be a “performer,” but performing what ?)

From the emails of “the Bovary character,” as the Racquet Man had called my dad’s lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Señor Bovary’s idea, and I was following his instructions. “Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I’ll meet you for dinner on your second night. We’ll take a stroll; we’ll end up in Chueca, and I’ll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious,” Señor Bovary’s email said.

What club? I wondered.

“Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.” Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was that sort of club. But what kind of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there’s more than one kind of gay club.)

In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry heat, however—very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence—not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.

There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don’t notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye— a noite means “the night” in Portuguese—and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.

The streets between the Gran Vía and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders’ gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and—on the corner of the Calle de Hernán Cortés—there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There’s one thing I’m glad to be too old for: thongs.)

Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at my hotel before I went to bed. I was too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Inés Café on Hortaleza; there were mostly men in couples, and a woman who was alone. She was wearing flip-flops and a halter top; she had an angular face and looked very sad, resting her mouth on one hand. I almost tried to pick her up. I remember wondering if, in Spain, the women were very thin until they suddenly became fat. I was noticing a certain type of man—skinny in a tank top, but with a small and helpless-looking potbelly.

I had a café con leche as late as 5 P.M.—very unlike me, too late in the day for me to drink coffee, but I was trying to stay awake. I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina—Libros, I believe it was called. (I’m not kidding, a bookstore called “Books.”) The English novel, in English, was well represented there, but there was nothing contemporary—not even from the twentieth century. I browsed the fiction section for a while. Diagonally across the street, on the corner of San Gregorio, was what looked like a popular bar—the Ángel Sierra. The siesta must have been over by the time I left the bookstore, because that bar was beginning to get crowded.

I passed a coffeehouse, also on the Calle de Gravino, with some older, stylishly dressed lesbians sitting at a window table—to my limited knowledge, the only lesbians I spotted in Chueca, and almost the only women I saw anywhere in that district. But it was still early in the evening, and I knew that everything in Spain happens late. (I’d been in Barcelona before, on translation trips. My Spanish-language publisher is based there.)

As I was leaving Chueca—for that long walk back to the Santo Mauro—I stopped in at a bear bar on the Calle de las Infantas. The bar called Hot was packed with men standing chest to chest and back to back. They were older men, and you know what bears are like—ordinary-looking men, chubby guys with beards, many beer drinkers among them. It was Spain, so of course there was a lot of smoking; I didn’t stay long, but Hot had a friendly atmosphere. The shirtless bartenders were the youngest guys in the place—they were hot, all right.