In One Person

I know you know who I mean—she’s always there, Elaine,” I said repeatedly. “Don’t be coy about it.”
    “I’m not being coy, Billy—you should talk about being
coy
, if that’s the word you’re using for being evasive, or not talking about things directly. If you know what I mean,” Elaine would say.
    “Okay, okay—so I have to
guess
who she is, is that it? So you’re paying me back for being less than candid with you—am I getting warm?” I asked my dear friend.
    E LAINE AND I WOULD try living together, though this would be many years later, after we’d both had sufficient disappointments in our lives. It wouldn’t work out—not for very long—but we were too good friends not to have tried it. We were also old enough, when we embarked on this adventure, to know that friends were more important than lovers—not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships. (It’s best not to generalize, but this was certainly the case for Elaine and me.)
    We had a seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street in San Francisco—in that area of Post Street between Taylor and Mason, near Union Square. Elaine and I had our own rooms, to write. Our bedroom was large and accommodating—it overlooked some rooftops on Geary Street, and the vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio. At night, the neon for the HOTEL word was dark—burned out, I guess—so that only the ADAGIO was lit. In my insomnia, I would get out of bed and go to the window and stare at the bloodred ADAGIO sign.
    One night, when I came back to bed, I inadvertently woke up Elaine, and I asked her about the
adagio
word. I knew it was Italian; not only had I heard Esmeralda say it, but I’d seen the word in her notes. In my forays into the world of opera and other music—both with Esmeralda and with Larry, in Vienna—I knew that the word had some use in music. I knew that Elaine would know what it meant; like her mother, Elaine was very musical. (Northfield had been a good fit for her—it was a great school for music.)
    “What’s it mean?” I asked Elaine, as we lay awake in that seedy Post Street apartment.
    “
Adagio
means slowly, softly, gently,” Elaine answered.
    “Oh.”
    That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at love-making, which we tried, too—with no more success than the living-together part, but we tried. “
Adagio
,” we would say, when we tried to make love, or afterward, when we were trying to fall asleep. We say it still; we said it when we left San Francisco, and we say it when we close letters or emails to each other now. It’s what love means to us, I guess—only
adagio
. (Slowly, softly, gently.) It works for friends, anyway.
    “So who was she, really—the lady in all those pictures?” I would ask Elaine, in that accommodating bedroom overlooking the neon-damaged Hotel Adagio.
    “You know, Billy—she’s still looking after me. She’ll always be hovering somewhere nearby, taking my temperature by hand, checking the blood on my pad to see if the bleeding is still ‘normal.’ It was always ‘normal,’ by the way, but she’s still checking—she wanted me to know that I would never leave her care, or her thoughts,” Elaine said.
    I lay there thinking about it—the only light out the window being the dull glow of lights from Union Square and that damaged neon sign, the vertical ADAGIO in bloodred, the HOTEL unlit.
    “You actually mean that Mrs. Kittredge is
still
—”
    “Billy!” Elaine interrupted me. “I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman. I will never be as close to anyone again.”
    “What about Kittredge?” I asked her, though I should have known better—after all those years.
    “Fuck Kittredge!” Elaine cried. “It’s his mother who
marked
me! It’s
her
I’ll never forget!”
    “
How
intimate? Marked you how?” I asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and I thought that I should just hold her—slowly, softly, gently—and say nothing. I’d already asked her about the abortion; it wasn’t that. She’d had another abortion, after the one in Europe.
    “They’re not so bad, when you consider the alternative,” was all Elaine ever said about her abortions. However Mrs. Kittredge had
marked
her, it wasn’t about that. And if Elaine had “experimented” with being a lesbian—I mean with Mrs. Kittredge—Elaine would go to her grave being vague about
that
.
    The pictures I kept of Elaine were what I could