“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.
But I did call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. “I’ll find you a place to stay in New York,” I told Elaine. “If I can’t find two places in New York, I’ll try living in Vermont—you know, I’ll just try it.”
“Your house has no furniture in it, Billy,” Elaine pointed out.
“Ah, well . . .”
That was when I called Larry.
“I just have a cold—it’s nothing, Bill,” Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn’t a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about Pneumocystis pneumonia, and the fever.
“What’s your T-cell count?” I asked him. “When were you going to tell me? Don’t bullshit me, Larry!”
“Please come home, Bill—you and Elaine. Please, both of you, come home,” Larry said. (Just that—not a long speech—and he was out of breath.)
Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street—just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet—or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry’s poetry patrons—the patroness, as I thought of her—had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it—we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)