"Adagio means slowly, softly, gently," Elaine answered.
"Oh."
That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at lovemaking, 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 imagine about Kittredge's mother, or how "close" Elaine ever was to her. The shadows and body parts of the woman (or women) in those photographs are more vivid to me than my one memory of Mrs. Kittredge at a wrestling match, the first and only time I actually saw her. I know "that awful woman" best by her effect on my friend Elaine--the way I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people, the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.
Chapter 7
MY TERRIFYING ANGELS
If an unwanted pregnancy was the "abyss" that an intrepid girl could fall into--the abyss word was my mother's, though I'll bet she'd heard it first from fucking Muriel--surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to homosexual activity. In such love lay madness; in acting out my most dire imaginings, I would certainly descend to the bottomless pit of the universe of desire. Or so I believed in the fall of my senior year at Favorite River Academy, when I once more ventured to the First Sister Public Library--this time, I thought, to save myself. I was eighteen, but my sexual m
isgivings were innumerable; my self-hatred was huge.
If you were, like me, at an all-boys' boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone--you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age--and you loathed yourself. I'd always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
With Elaine starting her new life at Northfield, I was spending more and more time in the yearbook room of the academy library. When my mom or Richard asked me where I was going, I always answered: "I'm going to the library." I didn't tell them which library. And without Elaine to slow me down--she could never resist showing me those hot-looking boys from the more contemporary of the yearbooks--I was blazing my way through the graduating classes of the decreasingly distant past. I'd left World War I behind; I was way ahead of my imagined schedule. At the rate I was going through those yearbooks, I would catch up with the present well before the spring of '61 and my own graduation from Favorite River.
In fact, I was a mere thirty years behind myself; on the same September evening I decided to leave the academy library and pay a visit to Miss Frost, I'd begun to peruse the yearbook for the Class of '31. An absolutely heart-stopping boy in the wrestling-team photo had caused me to abruptly close the yearbook. I thought: I simply can't keep thinking about Kittredge, and boys like him; I must not give in to those feelings, or I am doomed.
Just what exactly was holding my doom at bay? My contrived image of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model in a mail-order catalog wasn't working anymore. It was increasingly difficult to masturbate to even the most imaginative transposing of Mrs. Hadley's homely face on the least bosomy of those small-breasted young girls. All that held Kittredge (and boys like him) at bay was my ardent fantasizing about Miss Frost.
The Favorite River Academy yearbook was called The Owl. ("Anyone who knows why is probably dead," Richard Abbott had replied, when I'd asked him why.) I pushed the '31 Owl aside. I gathered up my notebooks, and my German homework--cramming everything but The Owl into my book bag.
I was taking German IV, though it wasn't required. I was still helping Kittredge with German III, which he'd flunked but was perforce repeating. It was somewhat easier to help him, since we were no longer taking German III together. Essentially, all I did was save Kittredge a little time. The hard stuff in German III was the introduction to Goethe and Rilke; there was more of them in German IV. When Kittredge got stuck on a phrase, I saved him time by giving him a quick and rudimentary translation. That some of the same Goethe and Rilke was as confounding to Kittredge the second time truly incensed him, but frankly the notes and hurried comments that now passed between us were easier for me than our previous conversations. I was trying to be in Kittredge's presence as little as I possibly could.
To that end, I dropped out of the fall Shakespeare play--to Richard's oft-expressed disappointment. Richard had cast Kittredge as Edgar in King Lear. Furthermore, there was an unforeseen flaw in Richard's having cast me as Lear's Fool. When I was telling Mrs. Hadley that I wanted no part in the play, because Kittredge had "a hero's part"--not to mention that Edgar is later disguised as Poor Tom, so that Kittredge had essentially been given "a dual role"--Martha Hadley wanted to know how closely I'd looked over my lines. Given that my number of unpronounceables was growing, did I foresee that the Fool presented me with any vocabulary issues? Was Mrs. Hadley hinting that my pronunciation problems could excuse me from the play?
"What are you getting at?" I asked her. "You think I can't handle 'cutpurses' or 'courtesan,' or are you worried that 'codpiece' will throw me for a loop--just because of the whatchamacallit the codpiece covers, or because I have trouble with the word for the whatchamacallit itself?"
"Don't be defensive, Billy," Martha Hadley said.
"Or was it the 'arrant whore' combination that you thought might trip me up?" I asked her. "Or maybe 'coxcomb'--either the singular or the plural, or both!"
"Calm down, Billy," Mrs. Hadley said. "We're both upset about Kittredge."
"Kittredge had the last lines in Twelfth Night!" I cried. "Now Richard gives him the last lines again! We have to hear Kittredge say, 'The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.' "
" 'The oldest hath borne most,' " Kittredge-as-Edgar continues.