John Irving - In One Person

I took Shylock’s side. Portia’s speech about “mercy” was vapid, Christian hypocrisy; it was Christianity at its most superior-sounding and most saccharine. Whereas Shylock has a point: The hatred of him has taught him to hate. Rightly so!

“I am a Jew,” Shylock says—act 3, scene 1. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” I love that speech! But Richard didn’t want to be reminded that I’d always been on Shylock’s side.

“Your mom is dead, Bill. Have you no feelings for your mother?” Richard asked me.

“No feelings,” I repeated. I was remembering her hatred of homosexuals—her rejection of me, not only because I looked like my father but also because I had something of his weird (and unwelcome) sexual orientation.

“How does Shylock put it?” I asked Richard Abbott. (I knew perfectly well how Shylock put it, and Richard had long understood how I’d embraced this.)

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Shylock asks. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

“Okay, Bill—I know, I know. You’re a pound-of-flesh kind of guy,” Richard said.

“‘And if you wrong us,’” I said, quoting Shylock, “‘shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.’ And what did they do to Shylock, Richard?” I asked. “They forced him to become a fucking Christian !”

“It’s a difficult play, Bill—that’s why I’ve not put it onstage,” Richard said. “I’m not sure it’s suitable for kids in a secondary school.”

“How are you doing, Richard?” I asked him, hoping to change the subject.

“I remember that boy who was ready to rewrite Shakespeare—that boy who was so sure the epilogue to The Tempest was extraneous,” Richard said.

“I remember that boy, too,” I told him. “I was wrong about that epilogue.”

“If you live long enough, Bill—it’s a world of epilogues,” Richard Abbott said.

That was the first warning I paid no attention to. Richard was only twelve years older than I was; that’s not such a big difference—not when Richard was forty-eight and I was thirty-six. We seemed almost like contemporaries in 1978. I’d been only thirteen when Richard had taken me to get my first library card—that evening when we both met Miss Frost. At twenty-five, Richard Abbott had seemed so debonair to me—and so authoritative.

At thirty-six, I didn’t find anyone “authoritative”—not even Larry, not anymore. Grandpa Harry, while he was steadfastly good-hearted, was slipping into strangeness; even to me (a pillar of tolerance, as I saw myself), Harry’s eccentricities had been more acceptable onstage. Not even Mrs. Hadley was the authority she once seemed, and while I listened to my best friend, Elaine, who knew me so well, I increasingly took Elaine’s advice with a grain of salt. (After all, Elaine wasn’t any better—or more reliable—in relationships than I was.) I suppose if I’d heard from Miss Frost—even at the know-it-all age of thirty-six—I might still have found her authoritative, but I didn’t hear from her.

I did, albeit cautiously, heed Herm Hoyt’s advice: The next time I encountered Arthur, that wrestler who was my age and also ran around the reservoir in Central Park, I asked him if I was still welcome to practice my less-than-beginner-level wrestling skills at the New York Athletic Club—that is, now that Arthur understood I was a bisexual man in need of improving my self-defense, and not a real wrestler.

Poor Arthur. He was one of those well-intentioned straight guys who wouldn’t have dreamed of being cruel—or even remotely unkind—to gays. Arthur was a liberal, open-minded New Yorker; he not only prided himself on being fair—he was exceedingly fair—but he agonized over what was “right.” I could see him suffering over how “wrong” it would be not to invite me to his wrestling club, just because I was—well, as Uncle Bob would say, a little light in the loafers.

My very existence as a bisexual was not welcomed by my gay friends; they either refused to believe that I really liked women, or they felt I was somehow dishonest (or hedging my bets) about being gay. To most straight men—even a prince among them, which Arthur truly was—a bisexual man was simply a gay guy. The only part about being bi that even registered with straight men was the gay part. That was what Arthur would be up against when he talked about me to his pals at the wrestling club.

This was the end of the freewheeling seventies; while acceptance of sexual differences wasn’t necessarily the norm, such acceptance was almost normal in New York—in liberal circles, such acceptance was expected. But I felt responsible for the spot I’d put Arthur in; I had no knowledge of the tight-assed elements in the New York Athletic Club, in those days when the venerable old institution was an all-male bastion.

I have no idea what Arthur had to go through just to get me a guest pass, or an athletic pass, to the NYAC. (Like my final draft classification, or re classification, I’m not sure what my stupid pass to the New York Athletic Club was called.)

“Are you crazy, Billy?” Elaine asked me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? That place is notoriously anti- everything . It’s anti- Semitic, it’s anti- black .”

“It is?” I asked her. “How do you know?”

“It’s anti- women —I fucking know that!” Elaine had said. “It’s an Irish Catholic boys’ club, Billy—just the Catholic part ought to have you running for the hills.”

“I think you would like Arthur,” I told Elaine. “He’s a good guy—he really is.”

“I suppose he’s married,” Elaine said with a sigh.

Come to think of it, I had seen a wedding ring on Arthur’s left hand. I never fooled around with married men—with married women, sometimes, but not with married men. I was bisexual, but I was long over being conflicted. I couldn’t stand how conflicted married men were—that is, when they were also interested in gay guys. And according to Larry, all married men were disappointing lovers.

“Why?” I’d asked him.

“They’re freaks about gentleness—they must have learned to be gentle from their pushy wives. Those men have no idea how boring ‘gentle’ is,” Larry told me.

“I don’t think ‘gentle’ is always boring,” I said.

“Please pardon me, dear Bill,” Larry had said, with that characteristically condescending wave of his hand. “I’d forgotten you were steadfastly a top .”

I really liked Larry, more and more, as a friend. I had even grown to like how he teased me. We’d both been reading the memoir of a noted actor—“a noted bi, ” Larry called him.

The actor claimed that, all his life, he had “fancied” older women and younger men. “As you might imagine,” the noted actor wrote, “when I was younger, there were many older women who were available. Now that I’m older—well, of course, there are many more available younger men.”

“I don’t see my life as that neat, ” I said to Larry. “I don’t imagine being bi will ever seem exactly well rounded .”

“Dear Bill,” Larry said—in that way he had, as if he were writing me an important letter. “The man is an actor —he isn’t bi, he’s gay . No wonder—now that he’s older—there are many more younger men around! Those older women were the only women he felt safe with!”

“That’s not my profile, Larry,” I told him.

“But you’re still a young man!” Larry had cried. “Just wait, dear Bill—just wait.”