In One Person (66 page)

“Intercrural,” I said to the old wrestling coach.

“That’s it—that’s what she called it!” Herm cried. “It’s nothin’ but rubbin’ your thing between the other fella’s thighs—it’s just
rubbin’,
isn’t it?” the wrestling coach asked me.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t get AIDS that way,” I told him.

“But she was
always
this way, Billy—that’s what she wants you to
know,” Herm said. “She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger.”

“Pull the trigger,” I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as
protecting
me; I’d not once imagined that—for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously—she was also protecting
herself
.

“No penetratin’, no bein’ penetrated—just
rubbin’,
” Coach Hoyt repeated. “Al said—
she
said; I’m sorry, Billy—‘That’s as far as I can go, Herm. That’s all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can’t ever pull the trigger.’ That’s what she told me to tell you, Billy.”

“So she’s
safe,
” I said. “She really
is
all right, and she’s going to stay all right.”

“She’s sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, ‘she’s
safe
’—what do you mean, ‘she’s gonna
stay
all right’? Nobody
stays
all right, Billy! Gettin’ old isn’t
safe
!” Coach Hoyt exclaimed. “I’m just tellin’ you she doesn’t have AIDS. She didn’t want you worryin’ about her havin’
AIDS,
Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Al Frost—sorry,
Miss
Frost to you—never did anything
safe,
Billy. Shit,” the old coach said, “she may look like a woman—I know she’s got the moves down pat—but she still
thinks,
if you can call it that, like a fuckin’ wrestler. It’s just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be
wrestlin’,
Billy—that’s not safe at all.”

Fucking
wrestlers
! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were
finally
talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging
wrestling;
they were
all
like that! It didn’t make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost
wasn’t
like other wrestlers; she’d put the wrestling behind her—at least that had been my impression.

“What are you saying, Herm?” I asked the old coach. “Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to
wrestle
him? Is she going to pick a fight?”

“Some guys aren’t gonna be satisfied with the
rubbin’
part, are they?” Herm asked me. “She won’t pick a fight—she doesn’t
pick
fights, Billy—but I know Al. She’s not gonna back down from a fight—not if some dickhead who wanted more than a
rubbin’
picks a fight with her.”

I didn’t want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the
intercrural
part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn’t—that she truly
couldn’t
—have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.

Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? “I just like to look the part,” Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn’t that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn’t that sound like she was
satisfied
with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.

“How’s that duck-under, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.

“Oh, I’ve been practicing,” I told him—kind of a white lie, wasn’t it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson’s, or one of the medications he was taking—the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.

We hugged each other good-bye; it was the last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders.” (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)

When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow’s shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. “Still waitin’,” she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. “I’ve decided
not
to wheel him back inside,” the nurse informed me. “He can’t feel the snow fallin’ on him.”

“I’ll tell you something about him,” I said to the old nurse. “He’s exactly the same now as he always was—dead certain.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow’s body. “I’m not quarrelin’ with
you
over language,” she told me. “
You’re
the writer.”

O
NE SNOWY
D
ECEMBER NIGHT
after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park—exactly at that distant intersection—was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.

My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.

The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”—so to speak—and Elaine had
suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live
anywhere
with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men
and
women.)

And if the abovementioned thoughts weren’t paralyzing enough, I was also rooted like a tree to that Seventh Avenue sidewalk because I was utterly ashamed of myself. I was—once again—poised to cruise those mournful corridors of St. Vincent’s,
not
because I’d come to visit and comfort a dying friend or a former lover, but because I was, absurdly, looking for Kittredge.

It was almost Christmas, 1984, and Elaine and I were still searching that sacred hospital—and various hospices—for a cruel boy who had abused us when we were all oh-so-young.

Elaine and I had been looking for Kittredge for three years. “Let him go,” Larry had told us both. “If you find him, he’ll only disappoint you—or hurt you again. You’re both in your forties. Aren’t you a little old to be exorcising a demon from your unhappy lives as
teenagers
?” (There was no way Lawrence Upton could say the
teenagers
word nicely.)

These factors must have contributed to my paralysis on Seventh Avenue in the West Village this snowy December night, but the fact that Elaine and I were behaving as if we were teenagers—that is, as far as Kittredge was concerned—doubtless contributed to my tears. (As a teenager, I had cried a lot.) Thus I was standing outside St. Vincent’s crying, when the older woman in the fur coat came up to me. She was an expensive-looking little woman in her sixties, but she was notably pretty; I might have recognized her if she’d still been attired in the sleeveless dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she’d declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he’d told her: “This is the guy who was
going to be
Lear’s Fool.”

No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say—as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue—“I’m so sorry for your
troubles
.”

I couldn’t speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three
years; I didn’t remember
how
I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, “I know it’s hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you’re visiting. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you do this—if you help me. It’s even hard for me, you know. It’s my
son
who’s dying,” Mrs. Delacorte told me, “and I wish I could
be
him. I want
him
to be the one who’s going to go on living. I don’t want to go on living
without
him!” she cried.

“Mrs.
Delacorte
?” I guessed—only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte’s near-death expressions as a wrestler.

“Oh, it’s
you
!” she cried. “You’re that
writer
now—Carlton talks about you. You’re Carlton’s friend from school. You’ve come to see
Carlton,
haven’t you? Oh, he’ll be so glad to see you—you
must
come inside!”

Thus I was dragged to Delacorte’s deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.

“Oh,
Carlton
—look who’s here, look who’s come to see you!” Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent’s. I hadn’t even known Delacorte’s first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him
Carlton
. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him—due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)

Of course, I’d seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling—when he looked like he was starving—but he was
really
starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They’d been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.

“At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” Mrs. Delacorte had said.

“At this point, yes,” I’d lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.

“This is the guy who was
going to be
Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.

“Yes, yes—I know, dear, I know,” the little woman was telling him.

“Did you bring more cups?” he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn’t supposed to rinse or spit—or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to
hold
the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.

Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected—he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. “This guy was Ariel in
The Tempest,
” Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room—and on the occasion of every later visit. “He was Sebastian in
Twelfth Night,
” Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. “It was the
shadow
word that prevented him from being Lear’s Fool, which was why I got the part,” Delacorte raved.

Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. “He didn’t come to see me die, when I was Lear’s Fool—of course I understand,” Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. “I do appreciate that he’s come to see me die now—you’ve both come now, and I truly appreciate it!” he told us.

Delacorte not once called me by name, and I truly can’t remember if he ever did; I don’t recall him once addressing me as either Bill or Billy when we were Favorite River students. But what does that matter? I didn’t even know what his first name
was
! Since I’d not seen him onstage as Lear’s Fool, I have a more permanent picture of Delacorte from
Twelfth Night;
he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek—declaring to Sir Toby Belch (Uncle Bob), “O, had I but followed the arts!”

Delacorte died after several days of near-total silence, with the two clean paper cups held shakily in his hands. Elaine was there that day, with Mrs. Delacorte and me, and—coincidentally—so was Larry. He’d spotted Elaine and me from the doorway of Delacorte’s room, and had poked his head inside. “Not the one you were looking for, or is it?” Larry had asked.