In One Person

“Well, it will be weird if it’s Rachel—believe me,” Elaine said, answering the phone. “Hello—this is Billy’s old friend, Elaine,” I heard her say. “We’re not having sex; it’s just a cold night to be alone downtown,” Elaine added.

I finished brushing my teeth; when I came out of the bathroom, Elaine wasn’t talking. Either the caller had hung up, or whoever it was was giving an earful to Elaine—maybe it was Rachel and I shouldn’t have let Elaine answer the phone, I was thinking.

Then I saw Elaine on my bed; she’d found a clean T-shirt of mine to wear for pajamas, and she was already under the covers with the phone pressed to her ear and tears streaking her face. “Yes, I’ll tell him, Mom,” Elaine was saying.

I couldn’t imagine under what circumstances Mrs. Hadley might have been prompted to call me; I thought it unlikely that Martha Hadley would have had my phone number. Perhaps because it was a milestone night for Larry, I was inclined to imagine other potential milestones.

Who had died? My mind raced through the likeliest suspects. Not Nana Victoria; she was already dead. She’d “slipped away” when she was still in her seventies, I’d heard Grandpa Harry say—as if he were envious. Maybe he was—Harry was eighty-four. Grandpa Harry was fond of spending his evenings in his River Street home—more often than not, in his late wife’s attire.

Harry had not yet “slipped away” into the dementia that would (one day soon) cause Richard Abbott and me to move the old lumberman into the assisted-living facility that Nils Borkman and Harry had built for the town. I know I’ve already told you this story—how the other residents of the Facility (as the elderly of First Sister ominously called the place) complained about Grandpa Harry “surprising” them in drag. I would think at the time: After a few episodes when Harry was in drag, how could anyone have been surprised? But Richard Abbott and I immediately moved Grandpa Harry back to the privacy of his River Street home, where we hired a round-the-clock nurse to look after him. (All this—and more, of course—awaited me, in my not-too-distant future.)

Oh, no! I thought—as Elaine hung up the phone. Don’t let it be Grandpa Harry!

I wrongly imagined that Elaine knew my thoughts. “It’s your mom, Billy. Your mom and Muriel were killed in a car crash—nothing’s happened to Miss Frost,” Elaine quickly said.

“Nothing’s happened to Miss Frost,” I repeated, but I was thinking: How could I not once have contacted her, in all these years? I hadn’t even tried! Why did I never seek her out? She would be sixty-one. I was suddenly astonished that I hadn’t seen Miss Frost, or heard one word about her, in seventeen years. I hadn’t even asked Herm Hoyt if he’d heard from her.

On this bitter-cold night in New York, in February of 1978, when I was almost thirty-six, I had already decided that my bisexuality meant I would be categorized as more unreliable than usual by straight women, while at the same time (and for the same reasons) I would never be entirely trusted by gay men.

What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn’t mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever “protected” anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile? How could I be almost forty and not love anyone as sincerely as I loved Elaine? How could I not have lived up to those expectations Miss Frost must have had for me? She’d protected me, but for what reason? Had she simply delayed my becoming promiscuous? That was never a word used positively, for if gay men were more openly promiscuous—even more deliberately so than straight guys—bisexuals were often accused of being more promiscuous than anybody!

If Miss Frost were to meet me now, who would she think I most resembled? (I don’t mean in my choice of partners; I mean in the sheer number, not to mention the shallowness, of my relationships.)

“Kittredge,” I answered myself, aloud. What tangents I would take—not to think about my mother! My mom was dead, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t let myself think about her.

“Oh, Billy, Billy—come here, come here. Don’t go down that road, Billy,” Elaine said, holding out her arms to me.

THE CAR, WHICH MY aunt Muriel had been driving, was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had strayed into Muriel’s lane on Vermont’s Route 30. My mother and Muriel were returning home from one of their Saturday shopping trips to Boston; on that Saturday night, they were probably talking up a storm—just yakking away, nattering about nothing or everything—when the carload of partying skiers came down the road from Stratton Mountain and turned east-southeast on Route 30. My mom and Muriel were headed west-northwest on Route 30; somewhere between Bondville and Rawsonville, the two cars collided. There was plenty of snow for the skiers, but Route 30 was bone-dry and crusted with road salt; it was twelve degrees below zero, too cold to snow.

The Vermont State Police reported that my mother and Muriel were killed instantly; Aunt Muriel had only recently turned sixty, and my mom would have been fifty-eight in April of that year. Richard Abbott was just forty- eight. “Kinda young to be a widower,” as Grandpa Harry would say. Uncle Bob was on the young side to be a widower, too. Bob was Miss Frost’s age—he was sixty-one.

Elaine and I rented a car and drove to Vermont together. We argued the whole way about what I “saw” in Rachel, the thirty-something fiction writer who was teaching at Columbia.

“You’re flattered when younger writers like your writing—or you’re oblivious to how they come on to you, maybe,” Elaine began. “All the time you’ve spent around Larry has at least taught you to be wary of older writers who suck up to you.”

“I guess I’m oblivious to it—namely, that Rachel is sucking up to me. But Larry never sucked up to me,” I said. (Elaine was driving; she was an aggressive driver, and when she drove, it made her more aggressive in other ways.)

“Rachel is sucking up to you, and you don’t see it,” Elaine said. I didn’t say anything, and Elaine added: “If you ask me, I think my tits are bigger.”

“Bigger than—”

“Rachel’s!”

“Oh.”

Elaine was never sexually jealous of anyone I was sleeping with, but she didn’t like it when I was hanging out with a writer who was younger than she was—man or woman.

“Rachel writes in the present tense—‘I go, she says, he goes, I think.’ That shit,” Elaine declared.

“Yes, well—”

“And the ‘thinking, wishing, hoping, wondering’—that shit!” Elaine cried.

“Yes, I know—” I started to say.

“I hope she doesn’t verbalize her orgasms: ‘Billy—I’m coming!’ That shit,” Elaine said.

“Well, no—not that I remember,” I replied.

“I think she’s one of those young-women writers who baby her students,” Elaine said.

Elaine had taught more than I had; I never argued with her about teaching, or Mrs. Kittredge. Grandpa Harry was generous to me; he gave me a little money for Christmas every year. I’d had part-time college-teaching jobs, the occasional writer-in-residence stint—the latter never longer than a single semester. I didn’t dislike teaching, but it hadn’t invaded my writing time—as I knew it did invade the writing time of many writer friends, Elaine among them.

“Just so you know, Elaine—I find there’s more to like about Rachel than her small breasts,” I said.

“I would sincerely hope so, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked my old friend.

“You know that guy Rachel almost married?” Elaine asked me.

“Not personally,” I told her.

“He hit on me,” Elaine said.

“Oh.”

“He told me that, one time, Rachel shit in the bed—that’s what he told me, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Nothing like that has happened, yet,” I told Elaine. “But I’ll be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”

After that, we drove for a while in silence. When we left New York State and crossed into Vermont, a little west of Bennington, there were more dead things in the road; the bigger dead things had been dragged to the side