Fucking wrestlers! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were finally talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging wrestling; they were all like that! It didn’t make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost wasn’t like other wrestlers; she’d put the wrestling behind her—at least that had been my impression.
“What are you saying, Herm?” I asked the old coach. “Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to wrestle him? Is she going to pick a fight?”
“Some guys aren’t gonna be satisfied with the rubbin’ part, are they?” Herm asked me. “She won’t pick a fight—she doesn’t pick fights, Billy—but I know Al. She’s not gonna back down from a fight—not if some dickhead who wanted more than a rubbin’ picks a fight with her.”
I didn’t want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the intercrural part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn’t—that she truly couldn’t—have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.
Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? “I just like to look the part,” Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn’t that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn’t that sound like she was satisfied with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.
“How’s that duck-under, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.
“Oh, I’ve been practicing,” I told him—kind of a white lie, wasn’t it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson’s, or one of the medications he was taking—the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.
We hugged each other good-bye; it was the last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders.” (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)
When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow’s shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. “Still waitin’,” she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. “I’ve decided not to wheel him back inside,” the nurse informed me. “He can’t feel the snow fallin’ on him.”
“I’ll tell you something about him,” I said to the old nurse. “He’s exactly the same now as he always was—dead certain.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow’s body. “I’m not quarrelin’ with you over language,” she told me. “You’re the writer.”
ONE SNOWY DECEMBER NIGHT after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park—exactly at that distant intersection—was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.
My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.
The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”—so to speak—and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)
And if the abovementioned thoughts weren’t paralyzing enough, I was also rooted like a tree to that Seventh Avenue sidewalk because I was utterly ashamed of myself. I was—once again—poised to cruise those mournful corridors of St. Vincent’s, not because I’d come to visit and comfort a dying friend or a former lover, but because I was, absurdly, looking for Kittredge.
It was almost Christmas, 1984, and Elaine and I were still searching that sacred hospital—and various hospices—for a cruel boy who had abused us when we were all oh-so-young.
Elaine and I had been looking for Kittredge for three years. “Let him go,” Larry had told us both. “If you find him, he’ll only disappoint you—or hurt you again. You’re both in your forties. Aren’t you a little old to be exorcising a demon from your unhappy lives as teenagers?” (There was no way Lawrence Upton could say the teenagers word nicely.)
These factors must have contributed to my paralysis on Seventh Avenue in the West Village this snowy December night, but the fact that Elaine and I were behaving as if we were teenagers—that is, as far as Kittredge was concerned—doubtless contributed to my tears. (As a teenager, I had cried a lot.) Thus I was standing outside St. Vincent’s crying, when the older woman in the fur coat came up to me. She was an expensive-looking little woman in her sixties, but she was notably pretty; I might have recognized her if she’d still been attired in the sleeveless dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she’d declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he’d told her: “This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool.”
No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say—as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue—“I’m so sorry for your troubles.”
I couldn’t speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three years; I didn’t remember how I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, “I know it’s hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you’re visiting. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you do this—if you help me. It’s even hard for me, you know. It’s my son who’s dying,” Mrs. Delacorte told me, “and I wish I could be him. I want him to be the one who’s going to go on living. I don’t want to go on living without him!” she cried.
“Mrs. Delacorte?” I guessed—only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte’s near-death expressions as a wrestler.
“Oh, it’s you!” she cried. “You’re that writer now—Carlton talks about you. You’re Carlton’s friend from school. You’ve come to see Carlton, haven’t you? Oh, he’ll be so glad to see you—you must come inside!”
Thus I was dragged to Delacorte’s deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.
“Oh, Carlton—look who’s here, look who’s come to see you!” Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent’s. I hadn’t even known Delacorte’s first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him Carlton. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him—due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)