In One Person

as
imagine
having sex with another man!
    “You should have told me,” I said to Elaine.
    “You should have shown me the photograph, Billy.”
    “Yes, I should have—we both ‘should have.’”
    Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him—and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge
as a woman
.
    “A pretty one, too, I’ll bet,” Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the
beautiful
word.
    It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds—not to mention the
as a woman
part—staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.
    “Just don’t call Larry—not yet,” Elaine said.
    But I
did
call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. “I’ll find you a place to stay in New York,” I told Elaine. “If I can’t find two places in New York, I’ll try living in Vermont—you know, I’ll just
try
it.”
    “Your house has no furniture in it, Billy,” Elaine pointed out.
    “Ah, well …”
    That was when I called Larry.
    “I just have a cold—it’s nothing, Bill,” Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn’t a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about
Pneumocystis
pneumonia, and the fever.
    “What’s your T-cell count?” I asked him. “When were you going to tell me? Don’t bullshit me, Larry!”
    “Please come home, Bill—you
and
Elaine. Please,
both
of you, come home,” Larry said. (Just that—not a long speech—and he was out of breath.)
    Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street—just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet—or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry’s poetry patrons—the
patroness
, as I thought of her—had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it—we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)
    When Elaine and I moved in—to help the live-in nurse look after Larry—it was not the same as living “together”; we were done with that experiment. Larry’s house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleep-in nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day—in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn’t write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.
    Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he’d been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the same man I’d admired when I first met him—in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn’t hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn’t walk or even stand, and he was incontinent—about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) “It’s my
penis
, again, Bill,” Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.
    “Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry,” Elaine would chime in.
    “Oh, I know—have you ever heard anything quite like it?” Larry would exclaim. “Please say it, Bill—give us the
plural
!”
    For Larry, I would do it—well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. “Penith-zizzes,” I said—always quietly, at first.
    “What? I can’t hear you,” Larry would say.
    “Louder, Billy,” Elaine said.
    “
Penith-zizzes
!” I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in—all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. “
Penith-zizzes
!”
    One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep.