“Upset me how?” I asked her. I could hear her hanging her clothes in the wardrobe closet; it was distracting to imagine her naked, but I kept reading.
“There’s no such thing as trying not to have a crush on Kittredge, William—‘trying not to’ doesn’t work,” Miss Frost said.
That was when the penultimate sentence of the second paragraph stopped me; I just closed the book and shut my eyes.
“I told you to stop reading, didn’t I?” Miss Frost said.
The sentence began: “There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her”—I stopped there wondering if I would dare to continue.
“It’s not a novel your mother should see,” Miss Frost was saying, “and if you’re not prepared to talk about your crush on Kittredge with Richard—well, I wouldn’t let Richard know what you’re reading, either.” I could feel her lie down on the bed, behind me; her bare skin touched my back, but she’d not taken off all her clothes. She gently took hold of my penis in her big hand.
“There’s a fish called a shad,” Miss Frost said.
“A shad?” I asked; my penis was stiffening.
“Yes—that’s what it’s called,” Miss Frost told me. “It migrates upstream to spawn. Shad roe is a delicacy. You know what roe is, don’t you?” she asked me.
“The eggs, right?”
“The unborn eggs, yes—they take them out of the female fish, and some people love to eat them,” Miss Frost explained.
“Oh.”
“Say ‘shad roe’ for me, William.”
“Shad roe,” I said.
“Try saying it without the r,” she told me.
“Shadow,” I said, without thinking; my penis and her hand had most of my attention.
“Like Lear’s shadow?” she asked me.
“Lear’s shadow,” I said. “I didn’t want a part in the play, anyway,” I told her.
“Well, at least you didn’t say Lear’s shad roe,” Miss Frost said.
“Lear’s shadow,” I repeated.
“And what’s this that I’ve got in my hand?” she asked me.
“My penith,” I answered.
“I wouldn’t change that penith for all the world, William,” Miss Frost said. “I believe you should say that word any fucking way you want to.”
What happened next would usher in the unattainable; what Miss Frost did to me would prove inimitable. She pulled me suddenly to her—I was flat on my back—and she kissed me on my mouth. She was wearing a bra—not a padded one, like Elaine’s, but a see-through bra with only slightly bigger cups than I’d expected. The material was sheer, and much silkier than the soft cotton of Elaine’s bra, and—to compare it to the more utilitarian undergarments in my mother’s mail-order catalogs—Miss Frost’s bra was not in the training-bra category; it was altogether sexier and more sophisticated. Miss Frost also wore a half-slip, of the slinky kind women wear under a skirt—this one was a beige color—and when she straddled my hips and sat on me, she appeared to hike up the half-slip, well above mid-thigh. Her weight, and how firmly she held me, pressed me into the bed.
I held one of her small, soft breasts in one hand; with my other hand, I tried to touch her, under her half-slip, but Miss Frost said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” She took my straying hand and clasped it to her other breast.
It was my penis that she guided under her half-slip. I had never penetrated anyone, and when I felt this most amazing friction, of course this felt like penetration to me. There was a slippery sensation—there was absolutely no pain, yet my penis had never been so tightly gripped—and when I ejaculated, I cried out against her small, soft breasts. I was surprised that my face was pressed against her breasts and her silky bra, because I didn’t remember the moment when Miss Frost had stopped kissing me. (She’d said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” Obviously, she couldn’t have been kissing me and speaking to me at the same time.)
There was so much I wanted to say to her, and ask her, but Miss Frost was not in a mood for conversation. Perhaps she was feeling the curious constraints of “so little time” again, or so I managed to convince myself.
She drew a bath for me; I was hoping that she would take off the rest of her clothes and get into the big tub with me, but she did not. She knelt beside that bathtub with the lion paws for feet, and the lion heads for faucets, and she gently bathed me—she was especially gentle with my penis. (She even spoke of it affectionately, using the penith word in a way that made us both laugh.)
But Miss Frost kept looking at her watch. “Late for check-in means a restriction, William. A restriction might entail an earlier check-in time. No visits to the First Sister Public Library after closing time—we wouldn’t like that, would we?”
When I had a look at her watch, I saw it was not even nine-thirty. I was just a few minutes’ walk from Bancroft Hall, which I pointed out to Miss Frost.
“Well, you might run into Kittredge and have a German discussion—you never know, William,” was all she said.
I had noticed a wet, silky feeling, and when I touched my penis—before stepping into the bath—my fingers had a vaguely perfumy smell. Maybe Miss Frost had used a lubricant of some kind, I imagined—something I would be reminded of years later, when I first smelled those liquid soaps that are made from almond or avocado oil. But, whatever it was, the bath had washed it away.
“No detours to that old yearbook room—not tonight, William,” Miss Frost was saying; she helped me get dressed, as if I were a child going off to my first day of school. She even put a dab of toothpaste on her finger, and stuck it in my mouth. “Go rinse your mouth in the sink,” she told me. “I assume you can find your way out—I’ll lock up again, when I go.” She kissed me then—a long, lingering kiss that caused me to put both my hands on her hips.
Miss Frost quickly intercepted my hands, taking them from her slinky, knee-length half-slip and clasping them to her breasts, where (I had the distinct impression) she believed my hands belonged. Or perhaps she believed that my hands didn’t belong below her waist—that I should not, or must not, touch her “there.”
As I made my way up the dark basement stairs, toward the faint light that was glowing from the foyer of the library, I was remembering an idiot admonition in a long-ago morning meeting—the always-numbing warning from Dr. Harlow, on the occasion of a weekend dance we were having with a visiting all-girls’ school. “Don’t touch your dates below their waists,” our peerless school physician said, “and you and your dates will be happier!”
But this couldn’t be true, I was thinking, when Miss Frost called to me—I was still on the stairs. “Go straight home, William—and come see me soon!”
We have so little time! I almost called back to her—one of those premonitory thoughts I would remember later, and forever, though at the time I imagined I was thinking of saying it just to see what she would say. Miss Frost was the one who seemed to think we had so little time, for whatever reason.
Outside, I had a passing thought about poor Atkins—poor Tom. I was sorry that I’d been mean to him, though it made me laugh at myself to recall I had ever imagined he might have a crush on Miss Frost. It was funny to think of them being together—Atkins with his pronunciation problem, his complete incapability of saying the time word, and Miss Frost saying it every other minute!
I had passed the mirror in the dimly lit foyer, scarcely looking at myself, but—in the star-bright September night—I considered that I had looked much more grown up to myself (than before my encounter with Miss Frost, I mean). Yet, as I made my way along River Street to the Favorite River campus, I reflected that I could not tell from my expression in the mirror that I’d just had sex for the first time.
And that thought had an unnerving, disturbing companion—namely, I suddenly imagined that maybe I hadn’t had sex. (Not actual sex—no actual penetration, I mean.) Then I thought: How can I be thinking such a thing on what is the most pleasurable ni
ght of my young life?
I as yet had no idea that it was possible not to have actual sex (or actual penetration) and still have unsurpassable sexual pleasure—a pleasure that, to this day, has been unmatched.
But what did I know? I was only eighteen; that night, with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in my book bag, my crushes on the wrong people were just beginning.
THE COMMON ROOM IN Bancroft Hall was, like the common rooms in other dorms, called the butt room; the seniors who were smokers were allowed to spend their study hours there. Many nonsmokers who were seniors thought it was a privilege too important to be missed; even they chose to spend their study hours there.
No one warned us of the dangers of secondhand smoke in those fearless years—least of all our imbecilic school physician. I don’t recall a single morning meeting that addressed the affliction of smoking! Dr. Harlow had devoted his time and talents to the treatment of excessive crying in boys—in the doctor’s stalwart belief that there was a cure for homosexual tendencies in the young men we were becoming.
I was fifteen minutes early for check-in; when I walked into the familiar blue-gray haze of smoke in the Bancroft butt room, Kittredge accosted me. I don’t know what wrestling hold it was. I would later try to describe it to Delacorte—who I heard didn’t do a bad job as Lear’s Fool, by the way. Between rinsing and spitting, Delacorte said: “It sounds like an arm-bar. Kittredge arm-bars the shit out of everyone.”
Whatever the name of the wrestling hold is, it didn’t hurt. I just knew I couldn’t get away from him, and I didn’t try. It was frankly overwhelming to be held so tightly by Kittredge, when I had just been held by Miss Frost.
“Hi, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Where have you been?”
“The library,” I answered.
“I heard you left the library a while ago,” Kittredge said.
“I went to the other library,” I told him. “There’s a public library, the town library.”
“I suppose one library isn’t enough for a busy boy like you, Nymph. Herr Steiner is hitting us with a quiz tomorrow—I’m guessing more Rilke than Goethe, but what do you think?”
I’d had Herr Steiner in German II—he was one of the Austrian skiers. He wasn’t a bad teacher, or a bad guy, but he was pretty predictable. Kittredge was right that there would be more Rilke than Goethe on the quiz; Steiner liked Rilke, but who didn’t? Herr Steiner also liked big words, and so did Goethe. Kittredge got in trouble in German because he was always guessing. You can’t guess in a foreign language, especially not in a language as precise as German. Either you know it or you don’t.
“You’ve got to know the big words in Goethe, Kittredge. The quiz won’t be all Rilke,” I told him.
“The phrases Steiner likes in Rilke are all the long ones,” Kittredge complained. “They’re hard to remember.”
“There are some short phrases in Rilke, too. Everyone likes them—not just Steiner,” I warned him. “‘Musik: Atem der Statuen.’”
“Shit!” Kittredge cried. “I know that—what is that?”
“‘Music: breathing of statues,’” I translated for him, but I was thinking about the arm-bar, if that was the wrestling hold; I was hoping he would hold me forever. “And there’s this one: ‘Du, fast noch Kind’—do you know that one?”
“All the childhood shit!” Kittredge cried. “Did fucking Rilke never get over his childhood, or something?”
“‘You, almost still a child’—I guarantee that’ll be on the quiz, Kittredge.”
“And ‘reine Übersteigung’! The ‘pure transcendence’ bullshit!” Kittredge cried, holding me tighter. “That one will be there!”
“With Rilke, you can count on the childhood thing—it’ll be there,” I warned him.
“‘Lange Nachmittage der Kindheit,’” Kittredge sang in my ear. “‘Long afternoons of childhood.’ Aren’t you impressed that I know that one, Nymph?”
“If it’s the long phrases you’re worried about, don’t forget this one: ‘Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft werden weniger—neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.’ Remember that one?” I asked him.
“Fuck!” Kittredge cried. “I thought that was Goethe!”
“It’s about childhood, right? It’s Rilke,” I told him. Dass ich dich fassen möcht—If only I could clasp you! I was thinking. (That was Goethe.) But all I said was “‘Schöpfungskraft.’”
“Double-fuck!” Kittredge said. “I know that’s Goethe.”
“It doesn’t mean ‘double-fuck,’ though,” I told him. I don’t know what he did with the arm-bar, but it started hurting. “It means ‘creative power,’ or something like that,” I said, and the pain stopped; I had almost liked it. “I’ll bet you don’t know ‘Stossgebet’—you missed it last year,” I reminded him. The pain was back in the arm-bar; it felt pretty good.
“You’re feeling dauntless tonight, aren’t you, Nymph? The two libraries must have boosted your confidence,” Kittredge told me.
“How’s Delacorte doing with ‘Lear’s shadow’—and all the rest of it?” I asked him.
He let up on the arm-bar; he seemed to hold me almost soothingly. “What’s a fucking ‘Stossgebet,’ Nymph?” he asked me.
“An ‘ejaculatory prayer,’” I told him.
“Triple-fuck,” he said, with uncharacteristic resignation. “Fucking Goethe.”
“You had trouble with ‘überschlechter’ last year, too—if Steiner gets sneaky and throws an adjective in. I’m just trying to help you,” I told him.
Kittredge released me from the arm-bar. “I think I know this one—it means ‘really bad,’ right?” he asked me. (You must understand that the entire time we were not exactly wrestling—and not exactly conversing, either—the denizens of the Bancroft butt room were enthralled. Kittredge was ever the eye magnet, in any crowd, and here I was—at least appearing to hold my own with him.)
“Don’t get fooled by ‘Demut,’ will you?” I asked him. “It’s a short word, but it’s still Goethe.”
“I know that one, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling. “It’s ‘humility,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said; I was surprised he knew the word, even in English. “Just remember: If it sounds like a homily or a proverb, it’s probably Goethe,” I told him.
“‘Old age is a polite gentleman’—you mean that sort of bullshit.” To my further surprise, Kittredge even knew the German, which he then recited: “‘Das Alter ist ein höflich’ Mann.’”
“There’s one that sounds like Rilke, but it’s Goethe,” I warned him.
“It’s the one about the fucking kiss,” Kittredge said. “Say it in German, Nymph,” he commanded me.
“‘Der Kuss, der letzte, grausam süss,’” I said to him, thinking of Miss Frost’s frank kisses. I couldn’t help but think of kissing Kittredge, too; I was starting to shake again.
“‘The kiss, the last one, cruelly sweet,’” Kittredge translated.
“That’s right, or you could say ‘the last kiss of all,’ if you wanted to,” I told him. “‘Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden!’” I then said to him, taking every word to heart.
“Fucking Goethe!” Kittredge cried. I could tell he didn’t know it—there was no guessing it, either.
“‘Passion brings pain,’” I translated for him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of pain.”
“You guys,” one of the smokers said. “It’s almost check-in time.”
“Quadruple-fuck,” Kittredge said. I knew he could sprint across the quadrangle of dorms to Tilley, or—if he was late—Kittredge could be counted on to make up a brilliant excuse.
“‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,’” I said to Kittredge, as he was leaving the butt room.
“Rilke, right?” he asked me.
“It’s Rilke, all right. It’s a famous one,” I told him. “‘Every angel is terrifying.’”
That stopped Kittredge in the doorway to the butt room. He looked at me before he ran on; it was a look that fr
ightened me, because I thought I saw both complete understanding and total contempt in his handsome face. It was as if Kittredge suddenly knew everything about me—not only who I was, and what I was hiding, but everything that awaited me in my future. (My menacing Zukunft, as Rilke would have called it.)
“You’re a special boy, aren’t you, Nymph?” Kittredge quickly asked me. But he ran on, not expecting an answer; he just called to me as he ran. “I’ll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!”
I know it isn’t what Rilke meant by “every angel,” but I was thinking of Kittredge and Miss Frost, and maybe poor Tom Atkins—and who knew who else there would be in my future?—as my terrifying angels.
And what was it Miss Frost had said, when she advised me to wait before reading Madame Bovary? What if my terrifying angels, beginning with Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge (my “future relationships,” was what Miss Frost had said), all had “disappointing—even devastating—consequences,” as she’d also put it?
“What’s wrong, Bill?” Richard Abbott asked, when I came into our dormitory apartment. (My mother had already gone to bed; at least their bedroom door was closed, as it often was.) “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” Richard said.
“Not a ghost,” I told him. “Just my future, maybe,” I said. I chose to leave him with the mystery of my remark; I went straight to my bedroom, and closed the door.
There was Elaine’s padded bra, where it nearly always was—under my pillow. I lay looking at it for a long time, seeing little of my future—or my terrifying angels—in it.
Chapter 8
BIG AL
“It is Kittredge’s cruelty that I chiefly dislike,” I wrote to Elaine that fall.
“He came by it genetically,” she wrote me back. Of course I couldn’t dispute Elaine’s superior knowledge of Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and “that awful woman” had been intimate enough for Elaine to become assertive on the matter of those mother-to-son genes that were passed. “Kittredge can deny she’s his mom till the cows come home, Billy, but I’m telling you she’s one of those moms who breast-fed the fucker till he was shaving!”
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