In One Person

up a handsome, swashbuckling-looking guy with a pencil-thin mustache and dark sideburns; honestly, he looked like one of the actors who played Zorro—one of the old black-and-white versions. We had fun, we drank a lot more
cerveza
, and when I came back to Vermont, it was almost looking like spring.
    Not much would happen to me—not for fifteen years—except that I became a teacher. The private schools—you’re supposed to call them “independent” schools, but I still let the
private
word slip out—aren’t so strict about the retirement age. Richard Abbott wouldn’t retire from Favorite River Academy until he was in his early seventies, and even after he retired, Richard went to all the productions of the school’s Drama Club.
    Richard wasn’t very happy about his various replacements—well, nobody was happy about that lackluster bunch of buffoons. There wasn’t anyone in the English Department who had Richard’s feelings for Shakespeare, and there was no one who knew shit about theater. Martha Hadley and Richard were all over me to get
involved
at the academy.
    “The kids read your novels, Billy,” Richard kept telling me.
    “Especially—you know—the kids who are sexually
different
, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said; she was still working with individual “cases” (as she called them) in her eighties.
    It was from Elaine that I first heard there were groups for lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender kids on college campuses. It was Richard Abbott—in his late seventies—who told me there was even such a group of kids at Favorite River Academy. It was hard for a bi guy of my generation to imagine such organized and recognized groups. (They were becoming so common, these groups were known by their initials. When I first heard about this, I couldn’t believe it.)
    When Elaine was teaching at NYU, she invited me to come give a reading from a new novel to the LGBT group on campus. (I was so out of it; it took me days of reciting those initials before I could keep them in the correct order.)
    It would have been the fall term of 2007 at Favorite River Academy when Mrs. Hadley told me there was someone special she and Richard wanted me to meet. I immediately thought it was a new teacher at the academy—someone in the English Department, either a pretty woman or a cute guy, I guessed, or possibly this “special” person had just been hired to breathe a hope of new life into the failing, all-but-expired Drama Club at Favorite River.
    I was remembering Amanda—
that’s
where I thought this matchmaking enterprise of Martha Hadley’s (and Richard’s) was headed. But, no—not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren’t trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow—one bad fall, a broken hip—and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn’t have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of
2011
! I couldn’t imagine being that young again!)
    “We want to introduce you to a new
student
, Bill,” Richard said; he was rather indignant at the very idea of him (or Martha) finding me a likely date.
    “A new freshman, Billy—someone special,” Mrs. Hadley said.
    “Someone with pronunciation problems, you mean?” I asked Martha Hadley.
    “We’re not trying to fix you up with a teacher, Bill. We think you should
be
a teacher,” Richard said.
    “We want you to meet one of the new LGBT kids, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley told me.
    “Sure—why not?” I said. “I don’t know about being a teacher, but I’ll meet the kid. Boy or girl?” I remember asking Martha Hadley and Richard. They just looked at each other.
    “Ah, well—” Richard started to say, but Mrs. Hadley interrupted him.
    Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. “Boy or girl, Billy,” she said. “Well, that’s the question. That’s why we want you to meet him, or her—that’s the question.”
    “Oh,” I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.
    T HE R ACQUET M AN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement