The Front Runner (38 page)

For the first time in my life, I cursed the control I had —that control that had deprived me of five months of his love. I prayed to God, "You're helping me too much, God. You've made me too strong. Lay off a little. Let me come apart at the seams, let me cry, let me grieve, let me go a little berserk and howl and beat my head against a wall."

I ran ten miles every day, prepared the cross-country team for the upcoming Eastern meets, and fended off necrophiliac reporters.

With both Vince and Billy gone, the gay-studies program was drifting rudderless. Joe quickly brought in a young New York activist, Jan Van Deusen, to take over, and he, the psychotherapist and several students pulled it together. It wasn't easy, because Billy's compassion and personality had been its heart. But Van Deusen

agreed with me and with Joe Prescott that such a program had to have a value independent of that of the people running it. Shortly the gay-crisis switchboard was in operation again, to take those sporadic but desperate calls from other campuses, some of them from miserable athletes.

That fall I saw little of Vince. After Billy's death, he had seemed to go completely haywire. In a way, I envied his enormous capacity for experiencing grief.

He announced that he didn't want to run any more, and quit the pro tour, and hung up his spikes. Settling in New York, he shortly was involved in the heaviest kind of gay activism. His status as Billy's best friend, his own status, his raging grief and his physical im-pressiveness moved him immediately into the front ranks of the radical gay leaders. Shortly he wore the charisma of a revolutionary.

When Vince did come up to Prescott to see me, or when I ran into him in New York, he always talked about Billy so much that I was glad when he left. He was the only one in my circle of acquaintances who hadn't learned that I couldn't bear even to have Billy's name mentioned in my hearing.

With the cross-country season under way, I had to face up to the "fox-hunting," as Billy called it in Montreal.

I wondered emotionlessly if maybe, with his child around, I would finally be able to feel human again. It was a painful business, and I might have procrastinated, except that the doctor warned me that the frozen semen was good for only about two and one-half years. If we found a suitable woman soon, we might be able to get two children out of those samples.

One afternoon in late October, Betsy Heden came to talk to me in my office in the athletic building. She was wearing a long tightly belted green raincoat, carrying her briefcase, and her hair was damp.

She sat down in the oak armchair by my desk, and we talked about her running. She was having some problems doing the amount of training for the level I thought she could be running at.

"The trouble with me is, I'm not very competitive," she said. "I think deep down I just do it to feel good and have, a nice figure. I'm not really motivated."

"Motivation is important," I said.

"Like Billy," she said. "He was motivated."

I looked down at the desk. After a moment, she said softly, "I'm sorry, Harlan."

"It's my fault," I said. "I just haven't adjusted."

She sat there looking down at her briefcase on her lap, very slender and contained. She had taken Billy's death as hard as anybody among his friends, and it had left her quieter, less of a soapbox orator. She had been burying herself in her senior-year studies, and had not been attending the team open house.

"Harlan," she said, "you've got to forgive me, but there's something I have to talk to you about."

A class was trooping past in the corridor, and I got up and hung the
COACH IN CONFERENCE
sign on the door and closed it.

"I heard that you're looking for a woman to . . . to . . ."

"Who told you that?" I barked. I'd been very anxious that this wouldn't get bandied around.

"Vince did. Don't worry. He didn't tell anybody else, and I didn't."

"Vince always did talk too much," I said bitterly.

"Don't be mad at him. He just wanted to help. Anyway, what I wanted to say was . . ." She sat playing with the handle on her briefcase. ". . . Billy was the sweetest friend I ever had. He was the only man I never felt threatened with. I really hated men up until then. Men always seemed so egotistical and out to satisfy themselves. Billy showed me that they could be gentle, and that they can be an awfully good kind of a friend."

I sat straight and immobile, staring straight ahead at the piles of papers on my desk, schedules, entries for meets, track magazines.

"Anyway," said Betsy, "I've been thinking. I've always wanted to have a baby. But, like, I couldn't stand to let myself be screwed by some guy, even for that. But. . ." She was blushing just a little now. "If it's ar-

tificial insemination you're going to do ... I think if there's one guy whose baby I'd have, it would be Billy's. You understand what I mean? Just because he was a friend. I'd do that for him."

I found that I had both hands over my face. In that moment, I found out how great my capacity for feeling pain still was.

She was sitting right there in the chair where Billy had sat on the day we'd met. I tried hard to remember how he had looked in his battered Mao jacket, how he had fixed me with those clear eyes of his and said, "We're gay." But I couldn't even remember it. In that moment, even the images of his death were obliterated. He had never existed. He was just a fantasy, one of those fantasies from the gay films where the lovers are always young and horny and beautiful and there is no death.

"Oh Harlan," she said, "I'm so sorry I made you cry," and she put her head down on a pile of papers on the side of my desk and started to sob. "I'm not crying," I said.

But she kept on sobbing. I sat there unmoving— comforting weeping females had never been a specialty of mine. Finally she quieted down, sat up and fished in her Mexican over-the-shoulder bag, presumably for Kleenex. Silently I hauled out my own handkerchief and gave it to her.

"It isn't clean," I apologized.

"That's all right," she said, and blew her nose in it and wiped her eyes.

I was trembling just a little.

"Well," she said, "I don't know what you're looking for in a ... a woman. Maybe I don't meet the requirements. Would you consider me?"

I looked at her. We had never, for some reason, considered the idea of a lesbian, and I wasn't so sure. On the other hand, we knew Betsy far better than some stranger we'd be screening. And Billy had cared for her. That made it more personal, more fitting somehow.

"Well, here's the deal," I said, and explained what would be required of her.

"Look," she said, "it's okay if you pay the medical expenses, but I don't want to be paid extra. But the problem is, I want a baby to take away and keep for myself."

"Who says we have to stop at one baby?" I said. "He left a dozen specimens, if you give me one, you can have another one for yourself."

She nodded. "That sounds reasonable."

"And we have to have the doctor check you out first," I said. "I don't want anybody with hereditary diseases. And we have to make sure you're functioning right before we start. We can't waste even one of those specimens. You understand, don't you?"

"I hate doctors."

"This is a gay doctor," I said. "I think he'll be all right."

"Actually," she said, "it's not as if I'm going to take the baby away to the North Pole. I'll be around here, probably. We'll see each other, the children can get together. Maybe we can live in the same neighborhood or something. I think you'd feel sad if I took one of Billy's children far away somewhere. Wouldn't you?"

The doctor found her to be a healthy female with a clean medical history. He ran some tests, ensured that she was ovulating and determined the exact day for her insemination. One day in November, we were in his examination room. I had requested to be there, because every cell of my body cried out that I should be there, and Betsy, after some vacillation, had agreed.

She lay draped modestly on the table, her knees up and her bare feet on the sides of the table. She had refused to put her feet in the metal stirrups. Her cheeks were afire.

"Now don't you look at me, Harlan," she said.

"Why the hell would I want to look at you?" I said.

The doctor was very gentle with her, but she winced anyway when he inserted the speculum. Then, as he had explained, he inverted a small cup containing the precious thawed semen over the cervix.

"Now just lie there for twenty minutes," said the doctor.

We were alone in the room, the door closed, hear-

ing the nurses bustle gently in the corridor outside, smelling the medical smells. Betsy lay looking up at the ceiling, her knees flat now, completely covered by the stiff white drape.

Suddenly she smiled.

"What?" I said.

"Oh, I was just thinking," she said. "It's a front-runner's race going on in there."

I found myself smiling. "How do you know there aren't any kickers in there?"

I found myself taking her slender hand and patting it.

"You're one of the few women I've ever known," I said, "that's worth a damn."

Nothing happened that month, and we both got very worried. I was keeping track of the days on an old training schedule, and I think I was more nervous than she was.

But the next time around, in early January, Betsy said gloatingly, "I've missed my period."

She finished her senior year getting bigger and bigger. "Betsy, have you gone straight?" the students asked her incredulously. She smiled mysteriously. Only she, I, Vince and John Sive knew that it was Billy's child.

Betsy became very involved in her pregnancy. She took scrupulous care of herself, exercised moderately, jogged clear into her sixth month, and talked about natural childbirth to anybody who would listen.

The baby was born on September 2, 1977, three weeks early, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I would have liked to be in the delivery room, but under the circumstances that was hardly possible. And it was probably just as well—Betsy had a difficult delivery because of her narrow hips.

John and I went through the waiting-room agonies., If I'd been a smoker, I'd have filled a couple of ashtrays at least.

Finally the doctor came in, smiling. "It's a boy. He's a small baby, only five pounds, eight ounces. But they're both fine."

"Billy was small when he was born too," said John.

Later, when we went into her room, Betsy was propped up on the pillows in a pink lace pegnoir. She looked exhausted, out cold like a runner after a hard race. She was very pale. She had the pegnoir open, and was giving the baby what she had impressed on us as being the important first breast-feeding.

She colored when she saw us, but she smiled a little, weakly, and didn't cover her breast. Her eyes were almost a little defiant. We sat down by the bed and watched.

"I'm a
little
disappointed," said Betsy. "I wanted a girl. But it doesn't matter, he's a lovely baby."

When the baby finished nursing, she put him in my arms and opened the wrap so we could see him. He was a quiet little thing, so small and slender that I worried. He had the fine bones and fair skin of both his parents. But he kicked his tiny feet against me with surprising strength. He had a few wisps of pale brown, hair, and his squinty blue eyes looked up at me un-seeingly.

I sat riven with pain, thinking of the body that had sired this mite of life.

That pain never seemed to diminish. I would go along for days, surviving, managing to be businesslike and cheerful and concerned about other people's lives, and suddenly the ground would give way under my feet and I'd fall 10,000 meters into pain. In New York, we might pass the Continental Baths, or the Bedford Theater, or the restaurant where we always ate, and it would hit me like a blow. On campus I would be running in the woods, and I would come to the fork where the side trail branched off, and it would hit me like a blow.

I had sat in the doctor's waiting room one day while the doctor gave Betsy the periodic examination, and I was fishing through the old magazines looking for something to read, and there was the year-old issue of
Time
with our faces on the cover. Billy must have existed —there was his face. Driven by a kind of fatalism, I turned to the cover story and the two pages of photographs. There we were, sitting on the green grass, side by side, our arms around each other, kissing. There we

were at the track, I standing there with the Harper Split in my hand, shouting the split time at him as he blurred past. The photographer had caught his long floating stride at its greatest stretch.

John and I had visited Steve and the Angel out on Fire Island that spring, and we had all walked along the beach barefoot. It was a cloudy windy day and the surf was a little rough. Our numbers were fewer— Vince, Jacques and Delphine were gone. Only the four of us were left.

We walked up the shore until only the lonely dunes were by us, their grasses blowing in the wind. We came to, and passed, the spot where Billy and I had made love. But the only image in my memory was his body being carried in by the white foam and left lying on the sand. His hair was full of sand and seaweed, and he did not move. As the foam came up again and again, it simply moved his limp legs a little.

Was it possible that we had known each other for only twenty-one months? We had met on December 8, 1974, and he was killed on September 9, 1976. It seemed to me that I had lived through several lifetimes of suffering before I met him, and several lifetimes of love in those twenty-one months. I would not be able to love anyone like that again.

I sat cradling his child. He had said,he would be reborn. But it was an illusion, perhaps the only one he had permitted himself. We would never again know each other as we had. There is no marriage in heaven, not even for gays.

Two weeks later, with Betsy recovered, we took the baby to the Church of the Beloved Disciple, and Father Moore christened him John William. Just a few people were there, and Steve Goodnight teased me a lot about being so middle-class as to want to christen the baby.