In One Person

favorably to Flaubert!)
    But there was nothing enclosed with the “Season’s Greetings” card, which arrived sometime in February of ’81—at least I think it showed up that late. I noted that the children and the dog looked older. What gave me pause was how much older poor Tom looked; it was almost as if he’d aged several years between Christmases.
    My guess was that the photo had been taken on a family ski trip—everyone was dressed for skiing, and Atkins even wore a ski hat. They’d brought the dog
skiing
! I marveled.
    The kids looked tanned—the wife, too. Remembering how fair-skinned Tom was, he probably had to be careful about the sun; thus I saw nothing amiss about Tom not being tanned. (Knowing Atkins, he’d probably heeded the earliest alarms about skin cancer and the importance of wearing sunscreen—he’d always been a boy who had heeded every alarm.)
    But there was something silvery about Tom’s skin color, I thought—not that I could see much of his face, because Atkins’s stupid ski hat covered his eyebrows. Yet I could tell—just from that partial view of poor Tom’s face—that he’d lost weight. Quite a
lot
of weight, I speculated, but, given the ski clothes, I couldn’t really tell. Maybe Atkins had always been a bit hollow-cheeked.
    Yet I’d stared at this belated Christmas card for the longest time. There was a look I hadn’t seen before in the expression of Tom’s wife. How was it possible, in a single expression, to convey a fear of both the unknown and the known?
    Mrs. Atkins’s expression reminded me of that line in
Madame Bovary
—it’s at the end of chapter 6. (The one that goes like a dart to a bull’s-eye, or to your heart—“it seemed quite inconceivable that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream. ”) Tom’s wife didn’t look afraid—she seemed
terrified
! But what could possibly have frightened her so?
    And where was the smile that the Tom Atkins I knew could rarely suppress for long? Atkins had this goofy, openmouthed smile—with lots of teeth and his tongue showing. But poor Tom had tightly closed his mouth—like a kid who’s trying to conceal a wad of chewing gum from a teacher, or like someone who knows his breath is bad.
    For some reason, I’d shown the Atkins family photo to Elaine. “You remember Atkins,” I said, handing her the late-arriving Christmas card.
    “Poor Tom,” Elaine automatically said; we both laughed, but Elaine stopped laughing when she had a look at the photograph. “What’s the matter with him—what’s he got in his
mouth
?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “He’s got something in his mouth, Billy—he doesn’t want anyone to see it,” Elaine told me. “And what’s the matter with those children?”
    “The
children
?” I asked her. I’d not noticed that anything was wrong with the kids.
    “They look like they’ve been crying,” Elaine explained. “
Jesus
—it looks like they cry all the time!”
    “Let me see that,” I said, taking the photo. The children looked okay to me. “Atkins used to cry a lot,” I told Elaine. “He was a real crybaby—maybe the kids got it from Tom.”
    “Come on, Billy—something’s not normal. I mean with all of them,” Elaine said.
    “The dog looks normal,” I said. (I was just fooling around.)
    “I’m not talking about the dog, Billy,” Elaine said.
    I F YOUR PASSAGE THROUGH the Reagan years (1981–89) was unclouded by watching someone you knew die of AIDS, then you don’t remember those years (or Ronald Reagan) the way I do. What a decade it was—and we would have that horseback-riding B actor in charge for most of it! (For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the
AIDS
word.) Those years have been blurred by the passage of time, and by the conscious and unconscious forgetting of the worst details. Some decades slip by, others drag on; what made the eighties last forever was that my friends and lovers kept dying—into the nineties, and beyond. By ’95—in New York, alone—more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.
    It was some months after that February conversation Elaine and I had about the Atkins family photo—I know it was later in ’81—when Larry’s young lover Russell got sick. (I felt awful that I’d dismissed Russell as a Wall Street guy; I’d called him a poetaster, too.)
    I was a snob; I used to turn up my nose at the patrons Larry