In One Person

with Alice had caused me to pay less attention to children. Enclosed with the Christmas card was what I first mistook for one of those third-person Christmas letters; I almost didn’t read it, but then I did.
    It was Tom Atkins trying hard to write a book review of my first novel—a most generous (albeit awkward) review, as it turned out. As I would later learn, all of poor Tom’s reviews of my novels would conclude with the same outrageous sentence. “It’s better than
Madame Bovary
, Bill—I know you don’t believe me, but it really is!” Coming from Atkins, of course I knew that
anything
would be better than
Madame Bovary
.
    L AWRENCE U PTON’S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY party was on a bitter-cold Saturday night in New York, in February of 1978. I was no longer Larry’s lover—not even his occasional fuck buddy—but we were close friends. My third novel was about to be published—around the time of my birthday, in March of that same year—and Larry had read the galleys. He’d pronounced it my best book; that Larry’s praise had been unqualified spooked me somewhat, because Larry wasn’t known for withholding his reservations.
    I’d met him in Vienna, when he’d been forty-five; I’d had fifteen years of listening to Lawrence Upton’s edgy endorsements, which had included his often barbed appreciation of me and my writing.
    Now, even at the sumptuous bash for his sixtieth—at the Chelsea brownstone of his young Wall Street admirer, Russell—Larry had singled me out for a toast. I was going to be thirty-six in another month; I was unprepared to have Larry toast me, and my soon-to-be-published novel—especially among his mostly older, oh-so-superior friends.
    “I want to thank
most
of you for making me feel younger than I am—beginning with you, dear Bill,” Larry had begun. (Okay—perhaps Larry was being a
little
barbed, to Russell.)
    I knew it wouldn’t be a late night, not with all the old farts in that crowd, but I’d not expected such a warmhearted event. I wasn’t living with anyone at the time; I had a few fuck buddies in the city—they were men my age, for the most part—and I was very fond of a young novelist who was teaching in the writing program at Columbia. Rachel was just a few years younger than I was, in her early thirties. She’d published two novels and was working on a book of short stories; at her invitation, I’d visited one of her writing classes, because the students were reading one of my novels. We’d been sleeping with each other for a couple of months, but there’d been no talk of living together. Rachel had an apartment on the Upper West Side, and I was in a comfortable-enough apartment on Third Avenue and East Sixty-fourth. Keeping Central Park between us seemed an acceptable idea. Rachel had just escaped from a long, claustrophobic relationship with someone she described as a “serial-marriage zealot,” and I had my fuck buddies.
    I’d brought Elaine to Larry’s birthday party. Larry and Elaine really liked each other; frankly, until my third novel, which Larry praised so generously, I’d had the feeling that Larry liked Elaine’s writing better than mine. This was okay with me; I felt the same way, though Elaine was a doggedly slow writer. She’d published only one novel and one small collection of stories, but she was always busy writing.
    I mention how cold it was in New York that night, because I remember that was why Elaine decided she would come uptown and spend the night in my apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street; Elaine was living downtown, where she was renting the loft of a painter friend on Spring Street, and that fuck-head painter’s place was freezing. Also, how cold it was in Manhattan serves as a convenient foreshadow to how much colder it must have been in Vermont on that same February night.
    I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, when the phone rang; it hadn’t been a late party for Larry, as I’ve said, but it was late for me to be getting a phone call, even on a Saturday night.
    “Answer it, will you?” I called to Elaine.
    “What if it’s Rachel?” Elaine called to me.
    “Rachel knows you—she knows we’re not
doing it
, Elaine!” I called from the bathroom.
    “Well, it will be weird if it’s Rachel—believe me,” Elaine said, answering the phone. “Hello—this is Billy’s old friend, Elaine,” I heard her say. “We’re
not
having sex; it’s just a cold night to be alone downtown,” Elaine added.
    I