In One Person

“What is the fucking Q for?” I asked the teacher. “Quarrelsome, perhaps?”

“No, Bill,” the teacher said. “Questioning.”

“Oh.”

“I remember you at the questioning phase, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. Ah, well—yes, I remember me at that phase, too. I’m okay about saying LGBTQ; at my age, I just have trouble remembering the frigging Q!

Mrs. Hadley lives in the Facility now. She’s ninety, and Richard visits her every day. I visit Martha twice a week—at the same time I visit Uncle Bob. At ninety-three, the Racquet Man is doing surprisingly well—that is, physically. Bob’s memory isn’t all it was, but that’s a good fella’s failing. Sometimes, Bob even forgets that Gerry and her California girlfriend—the one who’s as old as I am—were married in Vermont this year.

It was a June 2010 wedding; we had it at my house on River Street. Both Mrs. Hadley and Uncle Bob were there—Martha in a wheelchair. The Racquet Man was pushing Mrs. Hadley around.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take over pushing the wheelchair, Bob?” Richard and I and Elaine kept asking.

“What makes you think I’m pushing it?” the Racquet Man asked us. “I’m just leaning on it!”

Anyway, when Uncle Bob asks me when Gerry’s wedding is, I have to keep reminding him that she’s already married.

It was, in part, Bob’s forgetfulness that almost caused me to miss one small highlight of my life—a small but truly important highlight, I think.

“What are you going to do about Senor Bovary, Billy?” Uncle Bob asked me, when I was driving him back to the Facility from Gerry’s wedding.

“Senor who?” I asked the Racquet Man.

“Shit, Billy—I’m sorry,” Uncle Bob said. “I can’t remember my Alumni Affairs anymore—as soon as I hear something, I seem to forget it!”

But it wasn’t exactly in the category of an announcement for publication in The River Bulletin; it was just a query that came to Bob, in care of the “Cries for Help from the Where-Have- You-Gone? Dept.”

Please pass this message along to young William,

the carefully typed letter began.

His father, William Francis Dean, would like to know how his son is—even if the old prima donna himself won’t write his son and just ask him. There was an AIDS epidemic, you know; since he’s still writing books, we assume that young William survived it. But how’s his health? As we say over here—if you would be so kind as to ask young William—Como esta? And please tell young William, if he wants to see us before we die, he ought to pay us a visit!

The carefully typed letter was from my father’s longtime lover—the toilet-seat skipper, the reader, the guy who reconnected with my dad on the subway and didn’t get off at the next station.

He had typed, not signed, his name:

Senor Bovary

I WENT ONE SUMMER recently, with a somewhat cynical Dutch friend, to the gay-pride parade in Amsterdam; that city is a hopeful experiment, I have long believed, and I loved the parade. There were surging tides of men dancing in the streets—guys in purple and pink leather, boys in Speedos with leopard spots, men in jockstraps, kissing, one woman sleekly covered with wet-looking green feathers and sporting an all-black strap-on cock. I said to my friend that there were many cities where they preached tolerance, but Amsterdam truly practiced it—even flaunted it. As I spoke, a long barge glided by on one of the canals; an all-girls’ rock band was playing onboard, and there were women wearing transparent leotards and waving to us onshore. The women were waving dildoes.

But my cynical Dutch friend gave me a tired (and barely tolerant) look; he seemed as indifferent to the gay goings-on as the mostly foreign-born prostitutes in the windows and doorways of de Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district.

“Amsterdam is so over,” my Dutch friend said. “The new scene for gays in Europe is Madrid.”

“Madrid,” I repeated, the way I do. I was an old bi guy in his sixties, living in Vermont. What did I know about the new scene for gays in Europe? (What did I know about any frigging scene?)

IT WAS ON SENOR Bovary’s recommendation that I stayed at the Santo Mauro in Madrid; it was a pretty, quiet hotel on the Zurbano—a narrow, tree-lined street (a residential but boring-looking neighborhood) “within walking distance of Chueca.” Well, it was a long walk to Chueca, “the gay district of Madrid”—as Senor Bovary described Chueca in his email to me. Bovary’s typed letter, which was mailed to Uncle Bob at Favorite River’s Office of Alumni Affairs, had not included a return address—just an email address and Senor Bovary’s cell-phone number.

The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father’s enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

“I believe that the Bovary character is your dad’s age, Billy,” Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940 Owl, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Senor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same ’40 Owl that Franny Dean had wanted to be a “performer,” but performing what?)

From the emails of “the Bovary character,” as the Racquet Man had called my dad’s lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Senor Bovary’s idea, and I was following his instructions. “Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I’ll meet you for dinner on your second night. We’ll take a stroll; we’ll end up in Chueca, and I’ll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious,” Senor Bovary’s email said.

What club? I wondered.

“Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.” Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was that sort of club. But what kind of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there’s more than one kind of gay club.)

In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry heat, however—very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence—not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.

There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don’t notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye— a noite means “the night” in Portuguese—and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.

The streets between the Gran Via and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders’ gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and—on the corner of the Calle de Hernan Cortes—there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There’s one thing I’m glad to be too old for: thongs.)

Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at