In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  “Okay,” I wrote to Elaine, “but what makes you so sure cruelty is genetic?”

  “What about kissing?” Elaine wrote me back. “Those two kiss the same way, Billy. Kissing is definitely genetic.”

  Elaine’s genetic dissertation on Kittredge was in the same letter where she announced her intention to be a writer; even in the area of that most sacred ambition, Elaine had been more candid with me than I’d managed to be with her. Here I was embarking on my long-desired adventure with Miss Frost, yet I still hadn’t told Elaine about that!

  I’d not told anyone about that, naturally. I had also resisted reading more of Giovanni’s Room, until I realized that I wanted to see Miss Frost again—as soon as I could—and I believed that I shouldn’t show up at the First Sister Public Library without being prepared to discuss the writing of James Baldwin with Miss Frost. Thus I plunged ahead in the novel—not very far ahead, in fact, before I was stopped cold by another sentence. This one was just after the beginning of the second chapter, and it rendered me incapable of reading further for an entire day.

  “I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” I read. I immediately thought of Kittredge—how my dislike of him was completely entangled with my dislike of myself for being attracted to him. I thought that James Baldwin’s writing was a little too true for me to handle, but I forced myself to try again the very next night.

  There is that description, still in the second chapter, of “the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys,” from which I inwardly recoiled; I would soon model myself on those boys, and seek their company, and the thought of an abundance of “knife-blade boys” in my future frightened me.

  Then, in spite of my fear, I was suddenly halfway into the novel, and I couldn’t stop reading. Even that part where the narrator’s hatred for his male lover is as powerful as his love for him, and is “nourished by the same roots”; or the part where Giovanni is described as somehow always desirable, while at the same time his breath makes the narrator “want to vomit”—I truly detested those passages, but only because of how much I loathed and feared those feelings in myself.

  Yes, having these disturbing attractions to other boys and men also made me afraid of what Baldwin calls “the dreadful whiplash of public morality,” but I was much more frightened by the passage that describes the narrator’s reaction to having sex with a woman—“I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive.”

  Why hadn’t that happened to me? I wondered. Was it only because Miss Frost had small breasts? If she’d had big ones, would I have felt “intimidated”—instead of so amazingly aroused? And, once again, there came the unbidden thought: Had I really “entered” her? If I had not, and I did enter her the next time, would I subsequently feel disgusted—instead of so completely satisfied?

  You must understand that, until I read Giovanni’s Room, I’d never read a novel that had shocked me, and I’d already (at eighteen) read a lot of novels—many of them excellent. James Baldwin wrote excellent stuff, and he shocked me—most of all when Giovanni cries to his lover, “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love.” That phrase, “the stink of love,” shocked me, and it made me feel so awfully naïve. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or a boy?

  I was terribly agitated to read this; I wanted to talk to someone about it, and I almost went and woke up Richard to talk to him.

  But I remembered what Miss Frost had said. I wasn’t prepared to talk to Richard Abbott about my crush on Kittredge. I just stayed in bed; I was wearing Elaine’s bra, as usual, and I read on and on in Giovanni’s Room—on into the night.

  I remembered the perfumy smell on my fingers, after I’d touched my penis and before I stepped into the bath Miss Frost had drawn for me; that almond- or avocado-oil scent wasn’t at all like the smell of shit. But, of course, Miss Frost was a woman, and if I had penetrated her, surely I had not penetrated her there!

  MRS. HADLEY WAS SUITABLY impressed that I had conquered the shadow word, but because I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell Martha Hadley about Miss Frost, I had some difficulty describing how I’d mastered one of my unpronounceables.

  “Whatever made you think of saying ‘shad roe’ without the r, Billy?”

  “Ah, well . . .” I started to say, and then stopped—in the manner of Grandpa Harry.

  It was a mystery to Mrs. Hadley, and to me, how “the shad-roe technique” (as Martha Hadley called it) could be applied to my other pronunciation problems.

  Naturally, upon leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office—once again, on the stairs in the music building—I ran into Atkins.

  “Oh, it’s you, Tom,” I said, as casually as I could.

  “So now it’s ‘Tom,’ is it?” Atkins asked me.

  “I’m just sick of the last-name culture of this awful school—aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “Now that you mention it,” Atkins said bitterly; I could tell that poor Tom’s feathers were still ruffled from our run-in at the First Sister Public Library.

  “Look, I’m sorry about the other night,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to add to whatever misery Kittredge had caused you by calling you his ‘messenger boy.’ I apologize.”

  Atkins had a way of often seeming on the verge of tears. If Dr. Harlow had ever wanted to summon before us a quaking example of what our school physician meant by “excessive crying in boys,” I imagined that he needed only to snap his fingers and ask Tom Atkins to burst into tears at morning meeting.

  “It seemed that I probably interrupted you and Miss Frost,” Atkins said searchingly.

  “Miss Frost and I talk a lot about writing,” I told him. “She tells me what books I should read. I tell her what I’m interested in, and she gives me a novel.”

  “What novel did she give you the other night?” Tom asked. “What are you interested in, Bill?”

  “Crushes on the wrong people,” I told Atkins. It was astonishing how quickly my first sexual relationship, with anyone, had emboldened me. I felt encouraged—even compelled—to say things I’d heretofore been reluctant to say, not only to a timid soul like Tom Atkins but even to such a powerful nemesis and forbidden love as Jacques Kittredge.

  Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn’t feel sufficiently “emboldened” to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn’t have dared to say “crushes on the wrong people” to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)

  I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something—maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was “crushes” that poor Tom couldn’t say.

  Atkins suddenly blurted: “Thrushes on the wrong people—that’s a subject that interests me, too!”

  “I said ‘crushes,’ Tom.”

  “I can’t say that word,” Atkins admitted. “But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you’re finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know.”

  “It’s a novel by James Baldwin,” I told Atkins.

  “It’s about being in love with a black person?” Atkins asked.

  “No. What gave you that idea, Tom?”

  “James Baldwin is black, isn’t he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?”

  James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn’t know that. I’d not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni’s Room was a library book—as such, it didn’t have a dust jacket. I’d not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.

  “It’s a novel about a man who’s in love with another man,” I told Tom quietly.

  “Yes,
” Atkins whispered. “That’s what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the ‘wrong people.’”

  “I’ll let you read it when I’m finished,” I said. I had finished Giovanni’s Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black—and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.

  In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror—“my body is dull and white and dry.” But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni’s Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I’d wanted to reread since Great Expectations.

  Now, when I’m nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love—I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager—but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni’s Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.

  Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin’s time there—well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni’s Room doesn’t like them. “I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them,” Baldwin wrote.

  Okay, I’m guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn’t know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair—one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn’t an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I’m talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!

  I’m also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. But, believe me, I don’t fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time—“les folles,” he called them.

  All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them—don’t put them down.

  In rereading Giovanni’s Room just recently, I not only found the novel to be as perfect as I’d remembered it; I also discovered something I had missed, or I’d read without noticing, when I was eighteen. I mean the part where Baldwin writes that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

  Yes, that’s true. Naturally, when I was eighteen, I was still inventing myself nonstop; I don’t only mean sexually. And I was unaware that I needed “mooring posts”—not to mention how many I would need, or who my mooring posts would be.

  Poor Tom Atkins needed a mooring post, in the worst way. That much was evident to me, as Atkins and I conversed, or we tried to, on the subject of crushes (or thrushes!) on the wrong people. For a moment it seemed we would never progress from where we stood on the stairs of the music building, and that what passed for our conversation had permanently lagged.

  “Have you had any breakthroughs with your pronunciation problems, Bill?” Atkins awkwardly asked me.

  “Just one, actually,” I told him. “I seem to have conquered the shadow word.”

  “Good for you,” Atkins said sincerely. “I’ve not conquered any of mine—not in a while, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” I told him. “It must be tough having trouble with one of those words that comes up all the time. Like the time word,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s a tough one,” Atkins admitted. “What’s one of your worst ones?”

  “The word for your whatchamacallit,” I told him. “You know—dong, schlong, dick, dork, willy, dipstick, dipping wick, quim-stuffer,” I said.

  “You can’t say penis?” Atkins whispered.

  “It comes out penith,” I told him.

  “Well, at least it’s comprehensible, Bill,” Atkins said encouragingly.

  “Do you have one that’s worse than the time word?” I asked him.

  “The female equivalent of your penis,” Atkins answered. “I can’t come close to saying it—it just kills me to try it.”

  “You mean ‘vagina,’ Tom?”

  Atkins nodded vigorously; I thought poor Tom had that verge-of-tears aspect, in the way he wouldn’t stop nodding his head, but Mrs. Hadley saved him from crying—albeit only momentarily.

  “Tom Atkins!” Martha Hadley called down the stairwell. “I can hear your voice, but you are late for your appointment! I am waiting for you!”

  Atkins started to run up the stairs, without thinking. He gave me a friendly but vaguely embarrassed look, over his shoulder; I distinctly heard him call to Mrs. Hadley as he continued up the stairs. “I’m sorry! I’m coming!” Atkins shouted. “I just lost track of the time!” Both Martha Hadley and I had clearly heard him.

  “That sounds like a breakthrough to me, Tom!” I hollered up the stairs.

  “What did you just say, Tom Atkins? Say it again!” I heard Mrs. Hadley call down to him.

  “Time! Time! Time!” I heard Atkins crying, before his tears engulfed him.

  “Oh, don’t cry, you silly boy!” Martha Hadley was saying. “Tom, Tom—please stop crying. You should be happy!” But I heard Atkins blubbering on and on; once the tears started, he couldn’t stop them. (I knew the feeling.)

  “Listen to me, Tom!” I called up the stairwell. “You’re on a roll, man. Now’s the time to try ‘vagina.’ I know you can do it! If you can conquer ‘time,’ trust me—‘vagina’ is easy! Let me hear you say the vagina word, Tom! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”

  “Watch your language, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley called down the stairwell. I would have kept up the encouragements to poor Tom, but I didn’t want Martha Hadley—or another faculty person in the music building—to give me a restriction.

  I had a date—a fucking date!—with Miss Frost, so I didn’t repeat the vagina word. I just went on my way down the stairs; all the way out of the music building, I could hear Tom Atkins crying.

  IT’S EASY TO SEE, with hindsight, how I gave myself away. I wasn’t in the habit of showering and shaving before I went out in the evening to the library. While I was in the habit of not saying to Richard or my mom which library I was going to, I suppose I should have been smart enough to take Giovanni’s Room with me. (I left the novel under my pillow, with Elaine’s bra, but that was because I wasn’t intending to return the book to the library. I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins, but only after I’d asked Miss Frost if she thought that was a good idea.)

  “You look nice, Billy,” my mother commented, as I was leaving our dormitory apartment. She almost never complimented me on my appearance; while she’d more than once said I was “going to be good-looking,” she hadn’t said that in a couple of years. I’m guessing that I was already too good-looking, in my mom’s opinion, because the way she said the nice word wasn’t very nice.

  “Going to the library, Bill?” Richard asked me.

  “That’s right,” I said. It was stupid of me not to take my German homework with me. Because of Kittredge, I was almost never without my Goethe and my Rilke. But that night my book bag was practically empty. I had one of my writing notebooks with me—that was all.

  “You look too nice for the library, Billy,” my mom said.

  “I suppose I can’t go around looking like Lear’s shadow, can I?” I asked the two of them. I was just showing off, but, in retrospect, it was inadvisable to give my mother and Richard Abbott a taste of my newfound confidence.

  It was only a little later that same evening—I’m sure I was still in the yearbook room of the academy library—when Kittredge showed up at Bancroft Hall, looking for me. My mother answered the door to our apartment, but when she saw who it was, I’m certain she wouldn’t have invited Kittredge in. “Richard!” she no doubt called. “Jacques Kittredge is here!”

  “I was hoping for a word
with the German scholar,” Kittredge said charmingly.

  “Richard!” my mom would have called again.

  “I’m coming, Jewel!” Richard would have answered. It was a small apartment; while my mother wanted nothing to do with talking to Kittredge, I’m sure she overheard every word of Kittredge’s conversation with Richard.

  “If it’s the German scholar you’re looking for, Jacques, I’m afraid he’s gone to the library,” Richard told Kittredge.

  “Which library?” Kittredge asked. “He’s a two-library student, that German scholar. The other night, he was hanging out in the town library—you know, the public one.”

  “What’s Billy doing in the public library, Richard?” my mom might have asked. (She would have thought this, anyway; she would have asked Richard later, if not while Kittredge was still there.)

  “I guess Miss Frost is continuing to advise him about what to read,” Richard Abbott may have answered—either then or later.

  “I gotta be going,” Kittredge probably said. “Just tell the German scholar that I did pretty well on the quiz—my best grade ever. Tell him he was dead-on about the ‘passion brings pain’ part. Tell him he even guessed right about the ‘terrifying angel’—I nailed that part,” Kittredge told Richard.

  “I’ll tell him,” Richard would have said to Kittredge. “You got the ‘passion brings pain’ part—you nailed the ‘terrifying angel,’ too. I’ll be sure to tell him.”

  By then, my mother would already have found the library book in my bedroom. She knew that I kept Elaine’s bra under my pillow; I’ll bet that’s the first place she looked.

  Richard Abbott was a well-informed guy; he may have already heard what Giovanni’s Room was about. Of course, my German homework—the ever-present Goethe and Rilke—would have been visible in my bedroom, too. Whatever was preoccupying me, in which library, it didn’t appear to be my German homework. And folded in the pages of Mr. Baldwin’s superb novel would have been my handwritten notes—quotations from Giovanni’s Room included, of course. Naturally, “stink of love” would have been among my jottings, and that sentence I thought of whenever I thought of Kittredge: “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”