In One Person

“Near Union Square, he said—it’s in San Francisco, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I didn’t know San Francisco at all; I only knew there were a lot of gays there. Of course I knew there were gay men dying in big numbers in San Francisco, but I didn’t have any close friends or former lovers there, and Larry wouldn’t be there to bully me about getting more involved. There was another incentive: Elaine and I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep looking for Kittredge—not in San Francisco, or so we’d thought.

“Where’s your friend going on his Guggenheim?” I asked Elaine.

“Somewhere in Europe,” Elaine said.

“Maybe we should try living together in Europe,” I suggested.

“The apartment in San Francisco is available now, Billy,” Elaine told me. “And, for a place that will accommodate two writers, it’s so cheap.”

When Elaine and I got a look at our view from the eighth floor of that rat’s-ass apartment—those uninspiring rooftops on Geary Street, and that bloodred vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio (the neon for HOTEL was burned out before we arrived in San Francisco)—we could understand why that two-writer apartment was so cheap. It should have been free!

But if Tom and Sue Atkins dying of AIDS struck Elaine and me as too much, we couldn’t stand what Mrs. Delacorte had done to herself, nor have I ever heard that such a drawn-out death was a common suicide plan of the loved ones of AIDS victims, particularly (as Larry had so knowingly told Elaine and me) among single moms who were losing their only children. But, as Larry also said, how would I have heard about anything like that? (It was true, as he’d said, that I wasn’t involved.)

“You’re going to try living together in San Francisco,” Larry said to Elaine and me, as if we were runaway children. “Oh, my—a little late to be lovebirds, isn’t it?” (I thought Elaine was going to hit him.) “And, pray tell, what made you choose San Francisco? Have you heard there are no gay men dying there? Maybe we all should move to San Francisco!”

“Fuck you, Larry,” Elaine said.

“Dear Bill,” Larry said, ignoring her, “you can’t run away from a plague—not if it’s your plague. And don’t tell me that AIDS is too Grand Guignol for your taste! Just look at what you write, Bill—overkill is your middle name!”

“You’ve taught me a lot,” was all I could tell him. “I didn’t stop loving you, Larry, just because I stopped being your lover. I still love you.”

“More overkill, Bill,” was all Larry said; he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even look at Elaine, and I knew how fond he was of her—and of her writing.

“I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman,” Elaine had told me about Mrs. Kittredge. “I will never be as close to anyone again.”

“How intimate?” I’d asked her; she’d not answered me.

“It’s his mother who marked me!” Elaine had cried, about that aforementioned awful woman. “It’s her I’ll never forget!”

“Marked you how?” I’d asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and we had done our adagio thing; we’d just held each other, saying nothing—doing our slowly, softly, gently routine. That was how we’d lived together in San Francisco, for what amounted to almost all of 1985.

A lot of people left where they were living in the middle of the AIDS crisis; many of us moved somewhere else, hoping it would be better—but it wasn’t. There was no harm in trying; at least living together didn’t harm Elaine and me—it just didn’t work out for us to be lovers. “If that part were ever going to work,” Martha Hadley would tell us, but only after we’d ended the experiment, “I think it would have clicked when you were kids—not in your forties.”

Mrs. Hadley had a point, as always, but Elaine and I didn’t entirely have a bad year together. I kept the photograph of Kittredge and Delacorte in dresses and lipstick as a bookmark in whatever book I was reading, and I left the particular book lying around in the usual places—on the night table on my side of the bed; on the kitchen countertop, next to the coffeemaker; in the small, crowded bathroom, where it would be in Elaine’s way. Well, Elaine’s eyesight was awful.

It took almost a year for Elaine to see that photo; she came out of the bathroom, naked—she was holding the picture in one hand, and the book I’d been reading in the other. She had her glasses on, and she threw the book at me!

“Why didn’t you just show it to me, Billy? I knew it was Delacorte, months ago,” Elaine told me. “As for the other kid, I just thought he was a girl!”

“Quid pro quo,” I said to my dearest friend. “You’ve got something to tell me, too—don’t you?”

It’s easy to see, with hindsight, how it might have gone better for us in San Francisco if we’d just told each other what we knew about Kittredge when we’d first heard about it, but you live your life at the time you live it— you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.

The photograph of Kittredge as a girl did not make him look—as his mother had allegedly described him to Elaine—like a “sickly little boy”; he (or that pretty girl in the picture) didn’t look like a child who had “no confidence,” as Mrs. Kittredge had supposedly told Elaine. Kittredge didn’t look like a kid who was “picked on by the other children, especially by the boys,” or so (I’d been told) that awful woman had said.

“Mrs. Kittredge said that to you, right?” I asked Elaine.

“Not exactly,” Elaine mumbled.

It had been even harder for me to believe that Kittredge “was once intimidated by girls,” not to mention that Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son so that he would gain confidence—not that I’d ever completely believed this had happened, as I reminded Elaine.

“It happened, Billy,” Elaine said softly. “I just didn’t like the reason—I changed the reason it happened.”

I told Elaine about Kittredge stealing Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes; I told her what Delacorte had breathlessly cried, just before he died. Delacorte had clearly meant Kittredge—“he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!”

“I didn’t want you to like him or forgive him, Billy,” Elaine told me. “I hated him for the way he just handed me over to his mother; I didn’t want you to pity him, or have sympathy for him. I wanted you to hate him, too.”

“I do hate him, Elaine,” I told her.

“Yes, but that’s not all you feel for him—I know,” she told me.

Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge’s part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident—even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a girl. His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter—if not usually from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman—that would surely bring him to his senses!

How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid—that is, the “right” way—and we’ll never so much as imagine having sex with another man!

“You should have told me,” I said to Elaine.

“You should have shown me the photograph, Billy.”

“Yes, I should have—we both ‘should have.’”

Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him—and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge as a woman.

“A pretty one, too, I’ll bet,” Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the beautiful word.

It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds—not to mention the as a woman part—staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.

“Just don’t call Larry—not yet,” Elaine said.