The Front Runner

  Moving like an automaton, I put the sprinkler by them and turned the water on.

  In the house, a pair of his old Tigers, the ones he wore for everyday, lay dusty by the door. His type­writer on the table by the window, and the folders full of plans for the gay-studies program. In the kitchen, nuts and cereals on the shelf, and a few much-sprouted potatoes in the refrigerator. His belts and old jeans hanging in the closet. The burled-walnut bed, with dust on the bedspread.

  I locked the door and sat alone in the house the rest of the day, not eating, hardly moving. The canister of ashes sat on the bedside table. It was hard to remember that he'd existed. Yet there were those ashes, and those things in the house, and a dozen semen samples in a clinic deep-freeze, and one Olympic world record, and all the headlines, and all the memories of him in other people's minds.

  Night came. I had asked the campus switchboard to take all calls, and nothing disturbed the silence of the house. I lay down on the bed fully clothed, with all the lights out. Through the window came the soft sough­ing of the breeze in the spruce boughs. Then, as the hours passed, I could hear a dripping from the eaves. It was raining, a gentle warm autumn rain. The canister sat on the bedside table.

  Exhausted, I must have dozed off. Suddenly I woke up with a terrible start. A sound.

  I lay on my elbow, listening. In the silence of the house, it came again. A clear musical clink in the kitchen, like a teacup.

  I began to shake all over violently, and a hot prick­ling sweat sprang out on me. In that moment, possibly, I was close to insanity. I got quickly out of bed and went into the living room. The sound came again, mak­ing me shudder with a terrible joy. My legs trembling,

  I went toward the kitchen. What did I expect to see there?

  A dark shape moved in the kitchen, came toward me.

  It was the dog. He had been nosing in his china feed bowl, and his metal ID tag had struck musically against it. He was hungry, and sad, and came whining to me, pushing his nose into my hand.

  Sinking into a kitchen chair, I sat there a while and managed to stop shaking. Then I turned on the light, opened a can of dog food and fed him.

  The gray light came at the windows, later now that the season was advancing. Did I expect to hear the joyous abandoned bird songs? But it was fall, and few birds sang now.

  I got up and put my shoes on. It was just past five A.M. Without putting on a raincoat, I took the canister in the crook of my arm, left the dog shut in the house, and went out alone."

  First I went over to the old cinder track, and scat­tered a couple of handfuls of his ashes there, to sweeten the spikes of my freshmen. I felt no horror at handling them. In fact, I felt nothing at all.

  Then, with the mist cool on my face, I took the long three-mile walk up into the woods. No one had used the main trail since Billy and I had last run there, back in July. The marks of our spikes had long ago been washed away by the rain.

  Turning off onto the side trail, I made my way along, detouring around poison ivy and getting my pants caught in brambles. Finally I came down the slope through the mountain laurel. The seed pods hung on the laurel like clusters of tiny green grapes. The clear­ing was all grown up with ferns, which were now yel­lowing and dying down. The leaves on the giant beeches were browning a little. The waterfall over the mossy ledge had dried up to a tiny trickle.

  I scattered the rest of his ashes there. I scraped a hole in the loam and buried the canister. Then I washed the ashes and dirt from my fingers in the trickle drip­ping from the ledge.

  The Buddhists would have said that he'd been re­turned to the round of life.

  Two weeks later, school opened and I went back to coaching.

  Joe Prescott had offered to give me a semester off, with my assistants taking over, so that I could go off somewhere and rest. But I didn't see how that would help me.

  A week after the flood of students arrived, I gave the usual campus-wide talk with color slides, to get the kids to turn out for track. The talk wasn't up to its usual par—I didn't crack any jokes—in fact, it was more low-key than usual. But 115 freshmen boys and girls signed up immediately. It was the largest number I'd ever had.

  In addition, we had another influx of quality runners from other colleges and universities. For the first time, we were going to have a big-time team in terms of depth, rather than in terms of a couple of superstars like Billy and Vince. The boys came to me with their eyes blazing with ambition, and with sympathy be­cause of Billy. Several wanted to talk about the 1980 Olympics.

  Two more gay runners came to me, a pair of mara-thoners from UCLA. I had to shelter them. Who else would, if I didn't? Billy would have died in vain if I had turned them away because of my personal grief.

  "But you're coached by me at your own risk," I told them. "Make sure you understand that."

  In the warm autumn sunshine, I was out at the track-side every day, with the Harper Split in my hand and runners hurtling by, their spikes gnashing in the cinders. For the first time in my life, I saw those run­ners stripped of sexual myth. They were moving ob­jects, oxygen capacity of lungs, glycogen breakdown, nothing more.

  I tried hard to remember Billy running on that track, standing by the bleachers toweling himself, his shoul­ders and thighs steaming in the winter sunlight. But his living memory had been obliterated. As I looked at the track, all I could see was his body lying in lane 1 with the broken glasses by it.

  In the locker room, I could see his body on the bench, one leg fallen aside, the spiked shoe resting on the cement floor. The blood was dripping slowly from his head onto the floor.

  At every spot on campus where a memory of him might have been evoked, I saw instead his death. It was stuck in my mind like a color slide stuck in a projector. In our living room, he had fallen forward in his chair with his head on his typewriter, and the blood had run onto the disordered papers. Out in the yard, he lay dead in the unmown grass, by the last asters in bloom in the border.

  It was the same in New York City, when John and I sometimes went down on business. We passed Central Park and I could glimpse the carousel off through the trees—he was slumped on the gilded horse, his head leaning on the pole, and blood ran down the pole as the carousel turned slowly, playing "After the Ball Is Over." We passed the theaters where the all-male films play, and I could see him lying in the seat with his head fallen back, his shirt open. In the light from the screen, the blood glistened on his face.

  For the first time in my life, I cursed the control I had —that control that had deprived me of five months of his love. I prayed to God, "You're helping me too much, God. You've made me too strong. Lay off a little. Let me come apart at the seams, let me cry, let me grieve, let me go a little berserk and howl and beat my head against a wall."

  I ran ten miles every day, prepared the cross-country team for the upcoming Eastern meets, and fended off necrophiliac reporters.

  With both Vince and Billy gone, the gay-studies pro­gram was drifting rudderless. Joe quickly brought in a young New York activist, Jan Van Deusen, to take over, and he, the psychotherapist and several students pulled it together. It wasn't easy, because Billy's compassion and personality had been its heart. But Van Deusen agreed with me and with Joe Prescott that such a pro­gram had to have a value independent of that of the people running it. Shortly the gay-crisis switchboard was in operation again, to take those sporadic but des­perate calls from other campuses, some of them from miserable athletes.

  That fall I saw little of Vince. After Billy's death, he had seemed to go completely haywire. In a way, I envied his enormous capacity for experiencing grief.

  He announced that he didn't want to run any more, and quit the pro tour, and hung up his spikes. Settling in New York, he shortly was involved in the heaviest kind of gay activism. His status as Billy's best friend, his own status, his raging grief and his physical im-pressiveness moved him immediately into the front ranks of the radical gay leaders. Shortly he wore the charisma of a revolut
ionary.

  When Vince did come up to Prescott to see me, or when I ran into him in New York, he always talked about Billy so much that I was glad when he left. He was the only one in my circle of acquaintances who hadn't learned that I couldn't bear even to have Billy's name mentioned in my hearing.

  With the cross-country season under way, I had to face up to the "fox-hunting," as Billy called it in Mon­treal.

  I wondered emotionlessly if maybe, with his child around, I would finally be able to feel human again. It was a painful business, and I might have procrastinated, except that the doctor warned me that the frozen semen was good for only about two and one-half years. If we found a suitable woman soon, we might be able to get two children out of those samples.

  One afternoon in late October, Betsy Heden came to talk to me in my office in the athletic building. She was wearing a long tightly belted green raincoat, carrying her briefcase, and her hair was damp.

  She sat down in the oak armchair by my desk, and we talked about her running. She was having some problems doing the amount of training for the level I thought she could be running at.

  "The trouble with me is, I'm not very competitive," she said. "I think deep down I just do it to feel good and have, a nice figure. I'm not really motivated."

  "Motivation is important," I said.

  "Like Billy," she said. "He was motivated."

  I looked down at the desk. After a moment, she said softly, "I'm sorry, Harlan."

  "It's my fault," I said. "I just haven't adjusted."

  She sat there looking down at her briefcase on her lap, very slender and contained. She had taken Billy's death as hard as anybody among his friends, and it had left her quieter, less of a soapbox orator. She had been burying herself in her senior-year studies, and had not been attending the team open house.

  "Harlan," she said, "you've got to forgive me, but there's something I have to talk to you about."

  A class was trooping past in the corridor, and I got up and hung the coach in conference sign on the door and closed it.

  "I heard that you're looking for a woman to . . . to . . ."

  "Who told you that?" I barked. I'd been very anxious that this wouldn't get bandied around.

  "Vince did. Don't worry. He didn't tell anybody else, and I didn't."

  "Vince always did talk too much," I said bitterly.

  "Don't be mad at him. He just wanted to help. Any­way, what I wanted to say was . . ." She sat playing with the handle on her briefcase. ". . . Billy was the sweetest friend I ever had. He was the only man I never felt threatened with. I really hated men up until then. Men always seemed so egotistical and out to sat­isfy themselves. Billy showed me that they could be gentle, and that they can be an awfully good kind of a friend."

  I sat straight and immobile, staring straight ahead at the piles of papers on my desk, schedules, entries for meets, track magazines.

  "Anyway," said Betsy, "I've been thinking. I've al­ways wanted to have a baby. But, like, I couldn't stand to let myself be screwed by some guy, even for that. But. . ." She was blushing just a little now. "If it's artificial insemination you're going to do ... I think if there's one guy whose baby I'd have, it would be Billy's. You understand what I mean? Just because he was a friend. I'd do that for him."

  I found that I had both hands over my face. In that moment, I found out how great my capacity for feel­ing pain still was.

  She was sitting right there in the chair where Billy had sat on the day we'd met. I tried hard to remember how he had looked in his battered Mao jacket, how he had fixed me with those clear eyes of his and said, "We're gay." But I couldn't even remember it. In that moment, even the images of his death were obliterated. He had never existed. He was just a fantasy, one of those fantasies from the gay films where the lovers are always young and horny and beautiful and there is no death.

  "Oh Harlan," she said, "I'm so sorry I made you cry," and she put her head down on a pile of papers on the side of my desk and started to sob. "I'm not crying," I said.

  But she kept on sobbing. I sat there unmoving— comforting weeping females had never been a specialty of mine. Finally she quieted down, sat up and fished in her Mexican over-the-shoulder bag, presumably for Kleenex. Silently I hauled out my own handkerchief and gave it to her.

  "It isn't clean," I apologized.

  "That's all right," she said, and blew her nose in it and wiped her eyes.

  I was trembling just a little.

  "Well," she said, "I don't know what you're look­ing for in a ... a woman. Maybe I don't meet the requirements. Would you consider me?"

  I looked at her. We had never, for some reason, considered the idea of a lesbian, and I wasn't so sure. On the other hand, we knew Betsy far better than some stranger we'd be screening. And Billy had cared for her. That made it more personal, more fitting somehow.

  "Well, here's the deal," I said, and explained what would be required of her.

  "Look," she said, "it's okay if you pay the medical expenses, but I don't want to be paid extra. But the problem is, I want a baby to take away and keep for myself."

  "Who says we have to stop at one baby?" I said. "He left a dozen specimens, if you give me one, you can have another one for yourself."

  She nodded. "That sounds reasonable."

  "And we have to have the doctor check you out first," I said. "I don't want anybody with hereditary diseases. And we have to make sure you're functioning right before we start. We can't waste even one of those specimens. You understand, don't you?"

  "I hate doctors."

  "This is a gay doctor," I said. "I think he'll be all right."

  "Actually," she said, "it's not as if I'm going to take the baby away to the North Pole. I'll be around here, probably. We'll see each other, the children can get together. Maybe we can live in the same neighborhood or something. I think you'd feel sad if I took one of Billy's children far away somewhere. Wouldn't you?"

  The doctor found her to be a healthy female with a clean medical history. He ran some tests, ensured that she was ovulating and determined the exact day for her insemination. One day in November, we were in his examination room. I had requested to be there, be­cause every cell of my body cried out that I should be there, and Betsy, after some vacillation, had agreed.

  She lay draped modestly on the table, her knees up and her bare feet on the sides of the table. She had refused to put her feet in the metal stirrups. Her cheeks were afire.

  "Now don't you look at me, Harlan," she said.

  "Why the hell would I want to look at you?" I said.

  The doctor was very gentle with her, but she winced anyway when he inserted the speculum. Then, as he had explained, he inverted a small cup containing the pre­cious thawed semen over the cervix.

  "Now just lie there for twenty minutes," said the doctor.

  We were alone in the room, the door closed, hearing the nurses bustle gently in the corridor outside, smelling the medical smells. Betsy lay looking up at the ceiling, her knees flat now, completely covered by the stiff white drape.

  Suddenly she smiled.

  "What?" I said.

  "Oh, I was just thinking," she said. "It's a front-runner's race going on in there."

  I found myself smiling. "How do you know there aren't any kickers in there?"

  I found myself taking her slender hand and patting it.

  "You're one of the few women I've ever known," I said, "that's worth a damn."

  Nothing happened that month, and we both got very worried. I was keeping track of the days on an old training schedule, and I think I was more nervous than she was.

  But the next time around, in early January, Betsy said gloatingly, "I've missed my period."

  She finished her senior year getting bigger and big­ger. "Betsy, have you gone straight?" the students asked her incredulously. She smiled mysteriously. Only she, I, Vince and John Sive knew that it was Billy's child.

  Betsy became very involved in her pregnancy. She to
ok scrupulous care of herself, exercised moderately, jogged clear into her sixth month, and talked about natural childbirth to anybody who would listen.

  The baby was born on September 2, 1977, three weeks early, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I would have liked to be in the delivery room, but under the circumstances that was hardly possible. And it was probably just as well—Betsy had a difficult delivery be­cause of her narrow hips.

  John and I went through the waiting-room agonies., If I'd been a smoker, I'd have filled a couple of ash­trays at least.

  Finally the doctor came in, smiling. "It's a boy. He's a small baby, only five pounds, eight ounces. But they're both fine."

  "Billy was small when he was born too," said John.

  Later, when we went into her room, Betsy was propped up on the pillows in a pink lace pegnoir. She looked exhausted, out cold like a runner after a hard race. She was very pale. She had the pegnoir open, and was giving the baby what she had impressed on us as being the important first breast-feeding.

  She colored when she saw us, but she smiled a little, weakly, and didn't cover her breast. Her eyes were al­most a little defiant. We sat down by the bed and watched.

  "I'm a little disappointed," said Betsy. "I wanted a girl. But it doesn't matter, he's a lovely baby."

  When the baby finished nursing, she put him in my arms and opened the wrap so we could see him. He was a quiet little thing, so small and slender that I worried. He had the fine bones and fair skin of both his parents. But he kicked his tiny feet against me with surprising strength. He had a few wisps of pale brown, hair, and his squinty blue eyes looked up at me un-seeingly.

  I sat riven with pain, thinking of the body that had sired this mite of life.

  That pain never seemed to diminish. I would go along for days, surviving, managing to be businesslike and cheerful and concerned about other people's lives, and suddenly the ground would give way under my feet and I'd fall 10,000 meters into pain. In New York, we might pass the Continental Baths, or the Bedford Theater, or the restaurant where we always ate, and it would hit me like a blow. On campus I would be running in the woods, and I would come to the fork where the side trail branched off, and it would hit me like a blow.