In One Person

Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.

Amanda screamed and screamed—Christ, she wouldn’t stop screaming. “You kept the actual gun—you keep it in your bedroom closet! Who would ever keep the very same gun his grandfather used to blow himself all over the bathroom, Billy?” Amanda yelled at me.

“Amanda has a point about the gun, Bill,” Richard would say to me, when I told him that Amanda and I were no longer seeing each other.

“Nobody wants you to have that gun, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“If you get rid of the gun, maybe the ghosts will leave, Billy,” Elaine told me.

But those ghosts have never appeared to me; I think you have to be receptive to see ghosts like that, and I guess I’m not “receptive” in that way. I have my own ghosts—my own “terrifying angels,” as I (more than once) have thought of them—but my ghosts don’t live in that River Street house in First Sister, Vermont.

I would go to Mexico, alone, that mud season of 1995. I rented a house Elaine told me about in Playa del Carmen. I drank a lot of cerveza, and I picked up a handsome, swashbuckling-looking guy with a pencil-thin mustache and dark sideburns; honestly, he looked like one of the actors who played Zorro—one of the old black-and-white versions. We had fun, we drank a lot more cerveza, and when I came back to Vermont, it was almost looking like spring.

Not much would happen to me—not for fifteen years—except that I became a teacher. The private schools— you’re supposed to call them “independent” schools, but I still let the private word slip out—aren’t so strict about the retirement age. Richard Abbott wouldn’t retire from Favorite River Academy until he was in his early seventies, and even after he retired, Richard went to all the productions of the school’s Drama Club.

Richard wasn’t very happy about his various replacements—well, nobody was happy about that lackluster bunch of buffoons. There wasn’t anyone in the English Department who had Richard’s feelings for Shakespeare, and there was no one who knew shit about theater. Martha Hadley and Richard were all over me to get involved at the academy.

“The kids read your novels, Billy,” Richard kept telling me.

“Especially—you know—the kids who are sexually different, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said; she was still working with individual “cases” (as she called them) in her eighties.

It was from Elaine that I first heard there were groups for lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender kids on college campuses. It was Richard Abbott—in his late seventies—who told me there was even such a group of kids at Favorite River Academy. It was hard for a bi guy of my generation to imagine such organized and recognized groups. (They were becoming so common, these groups were known by their initials. When I first heard about this, I couldn’t believe it.)

When Elaine was teaching at NYU, she invited me to come give a reading from a new novel to the LGBT group on campus. (I was so out of it; it took me days of reciting those initials before I could keep them in the correct order.)

It would have been the fall term of 2007 at Favorite River Academy when Mrs. Hadley told me there was someone special she and Richard wanted me to meet. I immediately thought it was a new teacher at the academy—someone in the English Department, either a pretty woman or a cute guy, I guessed, or possibly this “special” person had just been hired to breathe a hope of new life into the failing, all-but-expired Drama Club at Favorite River.

I was remembering Amanda—that’s where I thought this match-making enterprise of Martha Hadley’s (and Richard’s) was headed. But, no—not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren’t trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow—one bad fall, a broken hip—and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn’t have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of 2011! I couldn’t imagine being that young again!)

“We want to introduce you to a new student, Bill,” Richard said; he was rather indignant at the very idea of him (or Martha) finding me a likely date.

“A new freshman, Billy—someone special,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Someone with pronunciation problems, you mean?” I asked Martha Hadley.

“We’re not trying to fix you up with a teacher, Bill. We think you should be a teacher,” Richard said.

“We want you to meet one of the new LGBT kids, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley told me.

“Sure—why not?” I said. “I don’t know about being a teacher, but I’ll meet the kid. Boy or girl?” I remember asking Martha Hadley and Richard. They just looked at each other.

“Ah, well—” Richard started to say, but Mrs. Hadley interrupted him.

Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. “Boy or girl, Billy,” she said. “Well, that’s the question. That’s why we want you to meet him, or her—that’s the question.”

“Oh,” I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.

THE RACQUET MAN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement surgeries, and a fall downstairs when he was supposed to be healing from the second surgery. “I’m starting to feel like an old fella, Billy,” Bob told me when I went to visit him in the Facility in the autumn of 2007—the same September Mrs. Hadley and Richard introduced me to the LGBT kid, the one who would change my life.

Uncle Bob was recovering from pneumonia—the result of being bedridden for a period of time after he fell. From the AIDS epidemic, I still had a vivid memory of that pneumonia—the one so many people never recovered from. I was happy to see Bob up and about, but he’d decided he was staying at the Facility.

“I gotta let these folks look after me, Billy,” the Racquet Man said. I understood how he felt; Muriel had been gone for almost thirty years, and Gerry, who was sixty-eight, had just started living with a new girlfriend in California.

“Vagina Lady,” which had been Elaine’s name for Helena, was long gone. No one had met Gerry’s new girlfriend, but Gerry had written me about her. She was “only” my age, Gerry told me—as if the girl were under the age of consent.

“The next thing you know, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me, “they’ll start legalizing same-sex marriage all over the place, and Gerry will be marrying her next new girlfriend. If I stay put in the Facility, Gerry will have to get married in Vermont!” the Racquet Man exclaimed, as if the very idea of that ever happening was beyond credibility.

Thus assured that my ninety-year-old uncle Bob was safe at the Facility, I made my way to Noah Adams Hall, which was the building for English and foreign-language studies at Favorite River; I was meeting the “special” new student in Richard’s ground-floor office, which was adjacent to Richard’s classroom. Mrs. Hadley was also meeting us there.

To my horror, Richard’s office hadn’t changed; it was awful. There was a fake-leather couch that smelled worse than any dog bed you’ve ever smelled; there were three or four straight-backed wooden chairs, of the kind with those arms that have a flat mini-desk for writing. There was Richard’s desk, which was always a mountain of upheaval; a pile of opened books and loose papers obscured the writing surface. Richard’s desk chair was on casters, so that Richard could slide all around his office in a seated position—which, to the students’ general amusement, Richard did.

What had changed at Favorite River, since my days at the formerly all-boys’ school, was not only the girls—it was the dress code. If there was one in 2007, I couldn’t tell you what it was; coats and ties were no longer required. There was some vague rule against “torn” jeans—this meant jeans that were tattered or slashed. There was a rule that you couldn’t come to the dining hall in your pajamas, and another one, which was always being protested, that concerned the girls’ bare midriffs—how much midriff could be bare was the issue. Oh, and so-called plumbers’ cracks were deemed offensive—this was most offensive, I was