In One Person

keys, Uncle Bob,” I said, showing him the ball.
    “Well, I know I put my car keys in
someone
’s jacket pocket, Billy,” the Racquet Man said.
    “Any news from
your
graduating class?” I suddenly asked him; he was drunk enough—I thought I might catch him off-guard. “What news from the Class of ’35?” I asked my uncle as casually as I could.
    “Nothing from Big Al, Billy—believe me, I would tell you,” he said.
    Grandpa Harry was making the rounds at his party
as a woman
now; it was at least an improvement that he was acknowledging to everyone that his daughters were dead—not just late for the party, as he’d earlier said. I could see Nils Borkman following his old partner, as if the two of them were on skis and armed, gliding through the snowy woods. Bob dropped another empty beer bottle, and I kicked it under Grandpa Harry’s living-room couch. No one noticed the beer bottles, not since Grandpa Harry had reappeared—that is,
not
as Grandpa Harry.
    “I’m sorry for your loss, Harry—yours and mine,” Uncle Bob said to my grandfather, who was wearing a faded-purple dress I remembered as one of Nana Victoria’s favorites. The blue-gray wig was at least “age-appropriate,” Richard Abbott would later say—when Richard was able to speak again, which wouldn’t be soon. Nils Borkman told me that the falsies must have come from the costume shop at the First Sister Players, or maybe Grandpa Harry had stolen them from the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy.
    The withered and arthritic hand that held out a new beer to my uncle Bob did not belong to the caterer with the dyed-red hair. It was Herm Hoyt—he was only a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Coach Hoyt looked a lot more beaten up.
    Herm had been sixty-eight when he was coaching Kittredge in ’61; he’d looked ready to retire then. Now, at eighty-five, Coach Hoyt had been retired for fifteen years.
    “Thanks, Herm,” the Racquet Man quietly said, raising the beer to his lips. “Billy here has been asking about our old friend Al.”
    “How’s that duck-under comin’ along, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked.
    “I guess you haven’t heard from her, Herm,” I replied.
    “I hope you’ve been
practicin
’, Billy,” the old coach said.
    I then told Herm Hoyt a long and involved story about a fellow runner I’d met in Central Park. The guy was about my age, I told the coach, and by his cauliflower ears—and a certain stiffness in his shoulders and neck, as he ran—I deduced that he was a wrestler, and when I mentioned wrestling, he thought that I was a wrestler, too.
    “Oh, no—I just have a halfway-decent duck-under,” I told him. “I’m no wrestler.”
    But Arthur—the wrestler’s name was Arthur—misunderstood me. He thought I meant that I
used to
wrestle, and I was just being modest or self-deprecating.
    Arthur had gone on and on (the way wrestlers will) about how I should still be wrestling. “You should be picking up some other moves to go with that duck-under—it’s not too late!” he’d told me. Arthur wrestled at a club on Central Park South, where he said there were a lot of guys “our age” who were still wrestling. Arthur was confident that I could find an appropriate workout partner in my weight-class.
    Arthur was unstoppably enthusiastic about my not “quitting” wrestling, simply because I was in my thirties and no longer competing on a school or college team.
    “But I was never on a team!” I tried to tell him.
    “Look—I know a lot of guys our age who were never starters,” Arthur had told me. “And they’re still wrestling!”
    Finally, as I told Herm Hoyt, I just became so exasperated with Arthur’s insistence that I come to wrestling practice at his frigging club, I told him the truth.
    “Exactly what did you tell the fella, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.
    That I was gay—or, more accurately, bisexual.
    “Jeez …” Herm started to say.
    That a former wrestler, who’d briefly been my lover, had tried to teach me a little wrestling—strictly for my own self-defense. That the former wrestling coach of this same ex-wrestler had also given me some tips.
    “You mean that duck-under you mentioned—that’s
it
?” Arthur had asked.
    “That’s it. Just the duck-under,” I’d admitted.
    “Jeez, Billy …” old Coach Hoyt was saying, shaking his head.
    “Well, that’s the story,” I said to Herm. “I
haven’t
been practicing the duck-under.”
    “There’s only one wrestlin’