In One Person

Atkins asked pitifully.
    “Not everything is about
us
, Tom,” I told him.
    I would regret this conversation. Years later, when Tom Atkins was dying—at that time when there were so many righteous souls who believed poor Tom, and others like him,
deserved
to die—I regretted that I had embarrassed Atkins, or that I’d ever made him feel ashamed.
    Tom Atkins was a good person; he was just an insecure guy and a cloying lover. He was one of those boys who’d always felt unloved, and he loaded up our summer relationship with unrealistic expectations. Atkins was manipulative and possessive, but only because he wanted me to be the love of his life. I think poor Tom was afraid he would
always
be unloved; he imagined he could force the search for the love of his life into a single summer of one-stop shopping.
    As for my ideas about finding the love of my life, I was quite the opposite to Tom Atkins; that summer of ’61, I was in no hurry to stop shopping—I’d just started!
    Not that many pages further on in
Madame Bovary
, I would read aloud Emma’s actual death scene, her final convulsion—upon hearing the blind man’s tapping stick and his raucous singing. Emma dies imagining “the beggar’s hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster.”
    Atkins was shaking with guilt and terror. “I wouldn’t wish that on
anyone
, Bill!” poor Tom cried. “I didn’t mean it—I didn’t mean she deserved
that
, Bill!”
    I remember holding him while he cried.
Madame Bovary
is not a horror story, but the novel had that effect on Tom Atkins. He was very fair-skinned, with freckles on his chest and back, and when he got upset and cried, his face flushed pink—as if someone had slapped him—and his freckles looked inflamed.
    When I read on in
Madame Bovary
—that part where Charles finds Rodolphe’s letter to Emma (Charles is so stupid, he tells himself that his unfaithful wife and Rodolphe must have loved each other “platonically”)—Atkins was wincing, as if in pain. “‘Charles was not one of those men who like to get to the bottom of things,’ ” I continued, while poor Tom moaned.
    “Oh, Bill—no, no, no! Please tell me I’m
not
one of those men like Charles. I
do
like to get to the bottom of things!” Atkins cried. “Oh, Bill—I honestly do, I do, I
do
!” He once more dissolved in tears—as he would again, when he was dying, when poor Tom indeed got to the bottom of things. (It was not the bottom that any of us saw coming.)
    “
Is
there eternal darkness, Bill?” Atkins would one day ask me. “Is there a monster’s face, waiting there?”
    “No, no, Tom,” I would try to assure him. “It’s either
just
darkness—
no
monster, no
anything
—or it’s very bright, truly the most amazing light, and there are lots of wonderful things to see.”
    “No monsters, either way—right, Bill?” poor Tom would ask me.
    “That’s right, Tom—no monsters, either way.”
    We were still in Italy, that summer of ’61, when I got to the end of
Madame Bovary
; by then, Atkins was such a self-pitying wreck that I’d snuck into the WC and read the ending to myself. When it was time for the reading-aloud part, I skipped that paragraph about the autopsy on Charles—that horrifying bit when they open him up and find
nothing
. I didn’t want to deal with poor Tom’s distress at the
nothing
word. (“How could there have been
nothing
, Bill?” I imagined Atkins asking.)
    Maybe it was the fault of the paragraph I omitted from my reading, but Tom Atkins wasn’t content with the ending of
Madame Bovary
.
    “It’s just not very
satisfying
,” Atkins complained.
    “How about a blow job, Tom?” I asked him. “I’ll show you
satisfying
.”
    “I was being serious, Bill,” Atkins told me peevishly.
    “So was I, Tom—so was I,” I said.
    After that summer, it wasn’t a surprise to either of us that we went our separate ways. It was easier, for a while, to maintain a limited but cordial correspondence than to see each other. I wouldn’t hear from Atkins for a couple of our college years; I guessed that he might have tried having a girlfriend, but someone told me Tom was lost on drugs, and that there’d been an ugly and very public exposure of a homosexual kind. (In Amherst, Massachusetts!) This was early enough in the sixties that the
homosexual
word had a forbiddingly clinical sound to it; at that time, of course, homosexuals had no “rights”—we weren’t even a