In One Person

devil.”
    “How was Kittredge a devil?” I asked Mrs. Delacorte.
    “I know he stole my clothes,” she said. “Oh, I gave him some old things I didn’t want—he was always asking me if he could have my clothes! ‘Oh,
please
, Mrs. Delacorte,’ he would say, ‘my mother’s clothes are
huge
, and she doesn’t let me try them on—she says I always mess them up!’ He just went on, and on, like that. And then my clothes started disappearing—I mean things I know perfectly well I would
never
have given him.”
    “Oh.”
    “I don’t know about you,” Mrs. Delacorte said, “but
I’m
going to have another drink.” She left me to fix herself a second whiskey; I looked at all the other photos on the bulletin board in Delacorte’s childhood bedroom. There were three or four photographs with Kittredge in the picture—always
as a girl
. When Mrs. Delacorte came back to her dead son’s room, I was still holding the photo she’d handed me.
    “Please take it,” she told me. “I don’t like remembering how that day ended.”
    “Okay,” I said. I still have that photograph, though I don’t like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.
    D ID I TELL E LAINE about Kittredge and Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes? Did I show Elaine that photo of Kittredge
as a girl
? No, of course not—Elaine was holding out on
me
, wasn’t she?
    Some guy Elaine knew got a Guggenheim; he was a fellow writer, and he told Elaine that his seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street was the perfect place for two writers.
    “Where’s Post Street?” I asked Elaine.
    “Near Union Square, he said—it’s in San Francisco, Billy,” Elaine told me.
    I didn’t know San Francisco at all; I only knew there were a lot of gays there. Of course I knew there were gay men dying in big numbers in San Francisco, but I didn’t have any close friends or former lovers there, and Larry wouldn’t be there to bully me about getting more
involved
. There was another incentive: Elaine and I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep looking for Kittredge—not in San Francisco, or so we’d thought.
    “Where’s your friend going on his Guggenheim?” I asked Elaine.
    “Somewhere in Europe,” Elaine said.
    “Maybe we should try living together in Europe,” I suggested.
    “The apartment in San Francisco is available now, Billy,” Elaine told me. “And, for a place that will accommodate two writers, it’s so
cheap
.”
    When Elaine and I got a look at our view from the eighth floor of that rat’s-ass apartment—those uninspiring rooftops on Geary Street, and that bloodred vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio (the neon for HOTEL was burned out before we arrived in San Francisco)—we could understand why that two-writer apartment was so
cheap
. It should have been
free
!
    But if Tom and Sue Atkins dying of AIDS struck Elaine and me as too much, we couldn’t stand what Mrs. Delacorte had done to herself, nor have I
ever
heard that such a drawn-out death was a common suicide plan of the loved ones of AIDS victims, particularly (as Larry had so knowingly told Elaine and me) among single moms who were losing their only children. But, as Larry also said, how would I have heard about anything like that? (It was true, as he’d said, that I wasn’t
involved.)
    “You’re going to try living together in San Francisco,” Larry said to Elaine and me, as if we were runaway children. “Oh, my—a little late to be
lovebirds
, isn’t it?” (I thought Elaine was going to hit him.) “And, pray tell, what made you choose San Francisco? Have you heard there are no gay men dying there? Maybe we
all
should move to San Francisco!”
    “Fuck you, Larry,” Elaine said.
    “Dear Bill,” Larry said, ignoring her, “you can’t run away from a plague—not if it’s
your
plague. And don’t tell me that AIDS is too Grand Guignol for your taste! Just look at what you
write
, Bill—
overkill
is your middle name!”
    “You’ve taught me a lot,” was all I could tell him. “I didn’t stop loving you, Larry, just because I stopped being your lover. I still love you.”
    “More overkill, Bill,” was all Larry said; he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even look at Elaine, and I knew how fond he was of her—
and
of her writing.
    “I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman,” Elaine had told me about Mrs. Kittredge. “I will never be as close to anyone again.”
    “
How
intimate?” I’d asked her; she’d not answered