John Irving - In One Person

As for my ideas about finding the love of my life, I was quite the opposite to Tom Atkins; that summer of ’61, I was in no hurry to stop shopping—I’d just started!

Not that many pages further on in Madame Bovary, I would read aloud Emma’s actual death scene, her final convulsion—upon hearing the blind man’s tapping stick and his raucous singing. Emma dies imagining “the beggar’s hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster.”

Atkins was shaking with guilt and terror. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Bill!” poor Tom cried. “I didn’t mean it—I didn’t mean she deserved that, Bill!”

I remember holding him while he cried. Madame Bovary is not a horror story, but the novel had that effect on Tom Atkins. He was very fair-skinned, with freckles on his chest and back, and when he got upset and cried, his face flushed pink—as if someone had slapped him—and his freckles looked inflamed.

When I read on in Madame Bovary —that part where Charles finds Rodolphe’s letter to Emma (Charles is so stupid, he tells himself that his unfaithful wife and Rodolphe must have loved each other “platonically”)—Atkins was wincing, as if in pain. “‘Charles was not one of those men who like to get to the bottom of things,’” I continued, while poor Tom moaned.

“Oh, Bill—no, no, no! Please tell me I’m not one of those men like Charles. I do like to get to the bottom of things!” Atkins cried. “Oh, Bill—I honestly do, I do, I do !” He once more dissolved in tears—as he would again, when he was dying, when poor Tom indeed got to the bottom of things. (It was not the bottom that any of us saw coming.)

“ Is there eternal darkness, Bill?” Atkins would one day ask me. “Is there a monster’s face, waiting there?”

“No, no, Tom,” I would try to assure him. “It’s either just darkness— no monster, no anything —or it’s very bright, truly the most amazing light, and there are lots of wonderful things to see.”

“No monsters, either way—right, Bill?” poor Tom would ask me.

“That’s right, Tom—no monsters, either way.”

We were still in Italy, that summer of ’61, when I got to the end of Madame Bovary; by then, Atkins was such a self-pitying wreck that I’d snuck into the WC and read the ending to myself. When it was time for the reading-aloud part, I skipped that paragraph about the autopsy on Charles—that horrifying bit when they open him up and find nothing . I didn’t want to deal with poor Tom’s distress at the nothing word. (“How could there have been nothing, Bill?” I imagined Atkins asking.)

Maybe it was the fault of the paragraph I omitted from my reading, but Tom Atkins wasn’t content with the ending of Madame Bovary .

“It’s just not very satisfying, ” Atkins complained.

“How about a blow job, Tom?” I asked him. “I’ll show you satisfying .”

“I was being serious, Bill,” Atkins told me peevishly.

“So was I, Tom—so was I,” I said.

After that summer, it wasn’t a surprise to either of us that we went our separate ways. It was easier, for a while, to maintain a limited but cordial correspondence than to see each other. I wouldn’t hear from Atkins for a couple of our college years; I guessed that he might have tried having a girlfriend, but someone told me Tom was lost on drugs, and that there’d been an ugly and very public exposure of a homosexual kind. (In Amherst, Massachusetts!) This was early enough in the sixties that the homosexual word had a forbiddingly clinical sound to it; at that time, of course, homosexuals had no “rights”—we weren’t even a “group.” I was still living in New York in ’68, and even in New York there wasn’t what I would have called a gay “community,” not a true community. (Just all the cruising.)

I suppose the frequency with which gay men encountered one another in doctors’ offices might have constituted a different kind of community; I’m kidding, but it was my impression that we had more than our fair share of gonorrhea. In fact, a gay doctor (who was treating me for the clap) told me that bisexual men should wear condoms.

I don’t remember if the clap doctor said why, or if I asked him; I probably took his unfriendly advice as further evidence of prejudice against bisexuals, or maybe this doctor reminded me of a gay Dr. Harlow. (In ’68, I knew a lot of gay guys; their doctors weren’t telling them to wear condoms.)

The only reason I remember this incident at all is that I was about to publish my first novel, and I had just met a woman I was interested in, in that way; at the same time, of course, I was constantly meeting gay guys. And it wasn’t only because of this clap doctor (with the apparent prejudice against bisexuals) that I started wearing a condom; I credit Esmeralda for making condoms appealing to me, and I missed Esmeralda—I definitely did.

In any case, the next time I heard from Tom Atkins, I had become a condom-wearer and poor Tom had a wife and children. As if that weren’t shocking enough, our correspondence had degenerated to Christmas cards! Thus I learned, from a Christmas photo, that Tom Atkins had a family—an older boy, a younger girl. (Needless to say, I hadn’t been invited to the wedding.)

In the winter of 1969, I became a published novelist. The woman I’d met in New York around the time I was persuaded to wear a condom had lured me to Los Angeles; her name was Alice, and she was a screenwriter. It was somehow reassuring that Alice had told me she wasn’t interested in “adapting” my first novel.

“I’m not going down that road,” Alice said. “Our relationship means more to me than a job.”

I’d told Larry what Alice had said, thinking this might reassure him about her. (Larry had met Alice only once; he hadn’t liked her.)

“Maybe you should consider, Bill, what Alice means,” Larry said. “What if she already pitched your novel to all the studios, and no one was interested?”

Well, my old pal Larry was the first to tell me that no one would ever make a film from my first novel; he also told me I would hate living in L.A., although I think what Larry meant (or hoped) was that I would hate living with Alice. “She’s not your soprano understudy, Bill,” Larry said.

But I liked living with Alice—Alice was the first woman I’d lived with who knew I was bisexual. She said it didn’t matter. ( Alice was bisexual.)

Alice was also the first woman I’d talked to about having a child together—but, like me, she was no fan of monogamy. We’d gone to Los Angeles with a bohemian belief in the enduring superiority of friendship; Alice and I were friends, and we both believed that the concept of “the couple” was a dinosaur idea. We’d given each other permission to have other lovers, though there were limitations—namely, it was okay with Alice if I saw men, just not other women, and I told her it was okay with me if she saw women, just not other men.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine had said. “I don’t think those kinds of arrangements work.”

At the time, I wouldn’t have considered Elaine to be an authority on “arrangements”; I also knew that, even in ’69, Elaine had expressed an on-again, off-again interest in our living together. But Elaine was steadfast in her resolution never to have any children; she hadn’t changed her mind about the size of babies’ heads.

Alice and I additionally believed, most naïvely, in the enduring superiority of writers. Naturally, we didn’t see each other as rivals; she was a screenwriter, I was a novelist. What could possibly go wrong? (“Uh-oh,” as Elaine would say.)