In One Person (75 page)

“Oh, did you hear that?” my dad asked the love of his life. “Not the
fag
word! Can you imagine being called a fag and
not
beating the shit out of someone?” my father asked his lover.

“Nicer—try being nicer, Franny,” Bovary said, but I saw that he was smiling. They were a cute couple, but prissy—made for each other, as they say.

My dad stood up and hooked his thumbs into the tight waistband of his girdle. “If you gentlemen would be so kind as to give me a little
privacy,
” he said. “This ridiculous undergarment is killing me.”

I went back to the bar with Bovary, but there would be no hope of further conversation there; the skinny gay boys had multiplied, in part because there were more older men by themselves at the bar. There was an all-boys’ band playing in a pink strobe light, and men and boys were dancing together out on the dance floor; some of the T-girls were dancing, too, either with a boy or with one another.

When my father joined us at the bar, he was the picture of masculine conformity; in addition to those athletic-looking sandals (like Bovary’s), my dad was wearing a tan-colored sports jacket with a dark-brown handkerchief in the breast pocket of the jacket. The murmur of “Franny!” passed through the crowd as we were leaving the club.

We were walking on Hortaleza, just past the Plaza de Chueca, when a gang of young men recognized my father; even
as a man,
Franny must have been famous in that district.
“Vómito!”
one of the young men cheerfully greeted him.

“Vómito!”
my dad happily said back to him; I could see he was pleased that they knew who he was, even
not
as a woman.

I was struck that, well after midnight, there were throngs of people in the streets of Chueca. But Bovary told me there was a good chance of a smoking ban making Chueca even noisier and more crowded at night. “All the men will be standing outside the clubs and bars, on these narrow
streets—all of them drinking and smoking, and shouting to be heard,” Señor Bovary said.

“Think of all the
bears
!” my father said, wrinkling his nose.

“William has nothing against bears, Franny,” Bovary gently said. I saw that they were holding hands, partners in propriety.

They walked me all the way back to the Santo Mauro, my hotel on the Zurbano.

“I think you should admit to your son, Franny, that you’re a
little
proud of him for beating up that bully,” Bovary said to my father in the courtyard of the Santo Mauro.

“It
is
appealing to know I have a son who can beat the shit out of somebody,” my father said.

“I didn’t beat the shit out of him. It was one move—he just fell awkwardly, on a hard surface,” I tried to explain.

“That’s not what the Racquet Man said,” my dad told me. “Bob made me believe you wiped the floor with the fucker.”

“Good old Bob,” I said.

I offered to call them a taxi; I didn’t know that they lived in the neighborhood. “We’re right around the corner from the Santo Mauro,” Señor Bovary explained. This time, when he offered me his hand, palm down, I took his hand and kissed it.

“Thank you for making this happen,” I said to Bovary. My father stepped forward and gave me a sudden hug; he also gave me a quick, dry kiss on both my cheeks—he was so
very
European.

“Maybe, when I come back to Spain—for my next Spanish translation—maybe I can come see you again, or you can come to Barcelona,” I said to my father. But, somehow, this seemed to make my dad uncomfortable.

“Maybe,” was all my father said.

“Perhaps nearer that time would be a good time to talk about it,” Mr. Bovary suggested.

“My
manager,
” my dad said, smiling at me but pointing to Señor Bovary.

“
And
the love of your life!” Bovary cried happily. “Don’t you ever forget it, Franny!”

“How could I?” my father said to us. “I keep telling the story, don’t I?”

I sensed that this was good-bye; it seemed unlikely that I would see them again. (As my father had said: “We already are who we are, aren’t we?”)

But the
good-bye
word felt too final; I couldn’t say it.

“
Adiós,
young William,” Señor Bovary said.

“
Adiós
,”
I said to him. They were walking away—holding hands, of course—when I called after my father. “
Adiós,
Dad!”

“Did he call me ‘Dad’—is that what he said?” my father asked Mr. Bovary.

“He did—he distinctly did,” Bovary told him.

“
Adiós,
my son!” my father said.

“Adiós!”
I kept calling to my dad and the love of his life, until I could no longer see them.

A
T
F
AVORITE
R
IVER
A
CADEMY
, the black-box theater in the Webster Center for the Performing Arts was not the main stage in that relatively new but brainless building—well intentioned, to be kind, but stupidly built.

Times have changed: Students today don’t study Shakespeare the way I did. Nowadays, I could not fill the seats for a main-stage performance of any Shakespeare play, not even
Romeo and Juliet
—not even with a former boy playing Juliet! The black box was a better teaching tool for my actors, anyway, and it was great for smaller audiences. The students were much more relaxed in our black-box productions, but we all complained about the mice. It may have been a relatively new building, but—due to either faulty design or misguided contracting—the crawl space under the Webster Center was poorly insulated and had not been mouse-proofed.

When it starts to get cold, any stupidly built building in Vermont will have mice. The kids working with me in our black-box production of
Romeo and Juliet
called them “stage mice”; I can’t tell you why, except that the mice had occasionally been spotted onstage.

It was cold that November. The Thanksgiving break was only a week away, and we already had snow on the ground—it was even cold, for that time of year, for
Vermont
. (No wonder the mice had moved indoors.)

I’d just persuaded Richard Abbott to move into the River Street house with me; at eighty, Richard hardly needed to spend another winter in Vermont in a house by himself—he was on his own now that Martha was in the Facility. I gave Richard what had been my bedroom as a child, and that bathroom I’d once shared with Grandpa Harry.

Richard didn’t complain about the ghosts. Maybe he would have, if he’d ever encountered Nana Victoria’s ghost, or Aunt Muriel’s—or even
my mother’s—but the only ghost Richard ever saw was Grandpa Harry’s. Naturally, Harry’s ghost showed up a few times in that bathroom he’d once shared with me—thankfully,
not
in that bathtub.

“Harry appears to be confused, as if he’s lost his toothbrush,” was all Richard ever said about Grandpa Harry’s ghost.

The bathtub Harry had blown his brains out in was gone. If Grandpa Harry was actually going to
repeat
blowing his brains out in a bathroom, it would be the master bathroom—the one I now used—and that inviting new bathtub (the way Harry had
repeated
himself for Amanda).

But, as I’ve told you, I never saw the ghosts in that River Street house. There was the one morning when I woke up and found my clothes—neatly arranged, in the order I would put them on—at the foot of my bed. These were clean clothes, my jeans on the bottom of the pile; the shirt was perfectly folded, with my socks and underwear on top. It was precisely the way my mother used to prepare my clothes for me when I was a little boy. She must have done this every night, after I’d fallen asleep. (She’d stopped doing this around the time when I became a teenager or shortly before.) I had completely forgotten how she’d once loved me. My guess is that her ghost wanted to remind me.

It happened only that one morning, but it was enough to make me remember when I had loved her—without reservation. Now, after those many years when I had lost her affection and believed I no longer loved her, I was able to mourn her—the way we are supposed to mourn our parents when they’re gone.

W
HEN
I
FIRST MOVED
into the River Street house, I found Uncle Bob standing beside a box of books in the downstairs hall. Aunt Muriel had wanted me to have these “monuments of world literature,” Bob had struggled to explain, but Muriel’s ghost hadn’t delivered the books—Uncle Bob had brought the box. He’d belatedly discovered that Muriel had intended to give me the books, but that fatal car crash must have interrupted her plans. Uncle Bob hadn’t noticed that the books were for me; there was a note inside the box, but some years had passed before Bob read it.

“These books are by your forebears, Billy,”
Aunt Muriel had written, in her unmistakably assertive longhand.
“You’re the writer in the family—you should have them.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know
when
she was intending to give them to you, Billy,” Bob sheepishly said.

The
forebears
word is worth noting. At first, I was flattered by the company of the esteemed writers Muriel had selected for me; it was a highly literary collection of works. There were two plays by García Lorca—
Blood Wedding
and
The House of Bernarda Alba
. (I hadn’t known that Muriel knew I loved Lorca—his poems, too.) There were three plays by Tennessee Williams; maybe Nils Borkman had given these plays to Muriel, I’d first thought. There was a book of poems by W. H. Auden, and poems by Walt Whitman and Lord Byron. There were those unsurpassed novels by Herman Melville and E. M. Forster—I mean
Moby-Dick
and
Howards End
. There was
Swann’s Way
by Marcel Proust. Yet I still didn’t understand why my aunt Muriel had gathered these particular writers together and called them my “forebears”—not until I unearthed, from the bottom of the box, two little books that lay touching each other: Arthur Rimbaud’s
A Season in Hell
and James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
.

“Oh,” I said to Uncle Bob. My
gay
forebears, Aunt Muriel must have thought—my not-so-straight brethren, I could only guess.

“I think your aunt meant this in a
positive
way, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“You think so?” I asked the Racquet Man. We both stood there in the downstairs hall, trying to imagine Muriel putting these books in a box for me in a
positive
way.

I never told Gerry about her mother’s gift to me—fearing that Muriel might have left nothing, or worse, for Gerry. I didn’t ask Elaine if
she
thought Muriel had intended these books for me in a
positive
way. (Elaine’s opinion of Muriel was that my aunt had been
born
a menacing ghost.)

It was the phone call from Elaine—late one night, in my River Street house—that reminded me of Esmeralda, gone from my life (but not from my mind) these many years. Elaine was crying into the phone; yet another bad boyfriend had dumped her, but this one had made cruel comments about my dear friend’s vagina. (I’d never told Elaine my unfortunate, not-a-ballroom appraisal of Esmeralda’s vagina—boy, was this ever not the night to tell Elaine
that
story!)

“You’re always telling me how you love my little breasts, Billy,” Elaine was saying, between sobs, “but you’ve never said anything about my vagina.”

“I
love
your vagina!” I assured her.

“You’re not just saying that, are you, Billy?”

“No! I think your vagina is
perfect
!” I told her.

“Why?” Elaine asked; she’d stopped crying.

I was determined not to make the Esmeralda mistake with my dearest friend. “Ah, well—” I began, and then paused. “I’ll be absolutely honest with you, Elaine. Some vaginas feel as big as ballrooms, whereas
your
vagina feels just right. It’s the perfect size—perfect for
me,
anyway,” I said, as casually as I could.

“Not a ballroom—is that what you’re saying, Billy?”

How did I end up here again? I was thinking. “Not a ballroom, in a
positive
way!” I cried.

Elaine’s nearsightedness was a thing of the past; she’d had that Lasik surgery—it was as if she were seeing for the first time. Before the surgery, when she’d had sex, she always took her glasses off—she’d never had a really good look at a penis. Now she could actually see penises; she didn’t like the looks of some of them—“of
most
of them,” Elaine had said. She’d told me that, the next time we were together, she wanted to take a good look at
my
penis. I thought it was a little tragic that Elaine didn’t know another guy well enough to feel comfortable about staring at his penis, but what are friends for?