In One Person

psychiatrist was a tight-assed lieutenant; I remember
him
. He kept his office door open while he interrogated me—so that the recruits who were waiting their turn could overhear us—but I’d lived through earlier and vastly smarter intimidation tactics. (Think of Kittredge.)
    “And
then
what?” Alice had asked, when I was telling her the story. She was a great person to tell a story to; Alice always gave me the impression that she couldn’t wait to hear what happened next. But Alice was impatient with the vagueness of my draft story.
    “You don’t like girls?” the lieutenant had asked me.
    “Yes, I do—I
do
like girls,” I told him.
    “Then what are your ‘homosexual tendencies,’ exactly?” the army psychiatrist asked.
    “I like guys, too,” I told him.
    “You do?” he asked. “Do you like guys
better
than you like girls?” the psychiatrist continued loudly.
    “Oh, it’s just so hard to
choose
,” I said, a little breathlessly. “I really, really like them
both
!”
    “Uh-huh,” the lieutenant said. “And do you see this tendency
continuing
?”
    “Well, I certainly
hope
so!” I said—as enthusiastically as I could manage. (Alice loved this story; at least she said she did. She thought it would make a funny scene in a movie.)
    “The
funny
word should have warned you, Bill,” Larry would tell me much later, when I was back in New York. “Or the
movie
word, maybe.”
    What might have warned me about Alice was that she took notes when we were talking. “Who takes
notes
on conversations?” Larry had asked me; not waiting for an answer, he’d also asked, “And which of you
likes
it that she doesn’t shave her armpits?”
    About two weeks after I’d checked the box for “homosexual tendencies,” or whatever the stupid form said, I received my classification notice—or maybe it was my reclassification notice. I think it was a 4-F; I was found “not qualified”; there was something about the “established physical, mental, or moral standards.”
    “But exactly what did the notification say—what was your actual classification?” Alice had asked me. “You can’t just
think
it was a Four-F.”
    “I don’t remember—I don’t care,” I told her.
    “But that’s just so
vague
!” Alice said.
    Of course the
vague
word should have warned me, too.
    There’d been a follow-up letter, perhaps from the Selective Service, but maybe not, telling me to see a shrink—not just any shrink, but a particular one.
    I’d sent the letter to Grandpa Harry; he and Nils knew a lawyer, for their logging and lumber business. The lawyer said that I couldn’t be forced to see a shrink; I didn’t, and I never heard from the draft again. The problem was that I’d written about this—albeit in passing—in my first novel. I didn’t realize it was my
novel
Alice was interested in; I thought she was interested in every little thing about me.
    “Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy,” I wrote in that novel. (Alice had told me how much she loved that line.) The first-person narrator is an out-of-the-closet gay man who’s in love with the protagonist, who refuses to check the “homosexual tendencies” box; the protagonist, who is an in-the-closet gay man, will die in Vietnam. You might say it is a story about how
not
coming out can kill you.
    One day, I could tell that Alice was really agitated. She seemed to be working on so many projects at the same time—I never knew which screenplay she was writing, at any given moment. I just assumed that one of these scripts-in-progress was causing her agitation, but she confessed to me that one of the studio execs she knew had been “bugging” her about me and my first novel.
    He was a guy she regularly made a point of putting down. “Mr. Sharpie,” she sometimes called him—or “Mr. Pastel,” more recently. I had the impression of an immaculate dresser, but a guy who wore golfing clothes—light-colored clothes, anyway. (You know: lime-green pants, pink polo shirts—
pastel
colors.)
    Alice told me that Mr. Pastel had asked her if I would try to “interfere” with a film based on my novel—
if
there ever were a movie made. Mr. Sharpie must have known she lived with me; he’d asked her if I would be “compliant” to changes in my story.
    “Just the usual novel-to-screenplay sort of changes, I guess,” Alice said vaguely. “The guy just has a lot of
questions
.”
    “Like what?” I asked her.
    “Where does