In One Person

me.
    “It’s his mother who
marked
me!” Elaine had cried, about that aforementioned
awful woman
. “It’s
her
I’ll never forget!”
    “Marked you
how
?” I’d asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and we had done our
adagio
thing; we’d just held each other, saying nothing—doing our
slowly, softly, gently
routine. That was how we’d lived together in San Francisco, for what amounted to almost all of 1985.
    A lot of people left where they were living in the middle of the AIDS crisis; many of us moved somewhere else, hoping it would be better—but it wasn’t. There was no harm in trying; at least living together didn’t harm Elaine and me—it just didn’t work out for us to be lovers. “If that part were ever going to work,” Martha Hadley would tell us, but only after we’d ended the experiment, “I think it would have clicked when you were kids—not in your forties.”
    Mrs. Hadley had a point, as always, but Elaine and I didn’t entirely have a bad year together. I kept the photograph of Kittredge and Delacorte in dresses and lipstick as a bookmark in whatever book I was reading, and I left the particular book lying around in the usual places—on the night table on my side of the bed; on the kitchen countertop, next to the coffeemaker; in the small, crowded bathroom, where it would be in Elaine’s way. Well, Elaine’s eyesight was awful.
    It took almost a year for Elaine to
see
that photo; she came out of the bathroom, naked—she was holding the picture in one hand, and the book I’d been reading in the other. She had her glasses on, and she threw the book at me!
    “Why didn’t you just
show
it to me, Billy? I knew it was Delacorte, months ago,” Elaine told me. “As for the other kid, I just thought he was a
girl
!”
    “Quid pro quo,” I said to my dearest friend. “You’ve got something to tell me, too—don’t you?”
    It’s easy to see, with hindsight, how it might have gone better for us in San Francisco if we’d just told each other what we knew about Kittredge when we’d first heard about it, but you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.
    The photograph of Kittredge
as a girl
did not make him look—as his mother had allegedly described him to Elaine—like a “sickly little boy”; he (or that pretty girl in the picture) didn’t look like a child who had “no confidence,” as Mrs. Kittredge had supposedly told Elaine. Kittredge didn’t look like a kid who was “picked on by the other children, especially by the boys,” or so (I’d been told) that awful woman had said.
    “Mrs. Kittredge
said
that to you, right?” I asked Elaine.
    “Not exactly,” Elaine mumbled.
    It had been even harder for me to believe that Kittredge “was once intimidated by girls,” not to mention that Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son so that he would gain confidence—not that I’d ever completely believed this had happened, as I reminded Elaine.
    “It happened, Billy,” Elaine said softly. “I just didn’t like the reason—I changed the
reason
it happened.”
    I told Elaine about Kittredge stealing Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes; I told her what Delacorte had breathlessly cried, just before he died. Delacorte had clearly meant Kittredge—“he was never the one to be satisfied with just
fitting in
!”
    “I didn’t want you to like him or forgive him, Billy,” Elaine told me. “I hated him for the way he just handed me over to his mother; I didn’t want you to pity him, or have sympathy for him. I wanted you to hate him, too.”
    “I
do
hate him, Elaine,” I told her.
    “Yes, but that’s not all you feel for him—I know,” she told me.
    Mrs. Kittredge
had
seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge’s part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident—even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a
girl
. His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter—if not
usually
from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman—that would surely bring him to his senses!
    How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid—that is, the “right” way—and we’ll never so much