by John Irving
"You tell him," I told her; we both knew I wouldn't. Elaine wouldn't talk to Kittredge about his mom, either.
Initially, Elaine was almost as afraid of Kittredge as I was--nor would she ever have used the tits word in his company. She was very conscious of having inherited her mom's flat chest. Elaine was nowhere near as homely as her mother; Elaine was thin and gawky, and she had no boobs, but she had a pretty face--and, unlike her mom, Elaine would never be big-boned. Elaine was delicate-looking, which made her trombone of a voice all the more surprising. Yet, at first, she was so intimidated in Kittredge's presence that she often croaked or mumbled; at times, she was incoherent. Elaine was so afraid of sounding too loud around him. "Kittredge fogs up my glasses," was the way she put it.
Their first meeting onstage--as Ferdinand and Miranda--was dazzlingly clear; one never saw two souls so unmistakably drawn to each other. Upon seeing Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a "wonder"; he asks, "If you be maid or no?"
" 'No wonder sir, / But certainly a maid,' " Elaine (as Miranda) replies in a vibrant, gonglike voice. But offstage, Kittredge had managed to make Elaine self-conscious about her booming voice. After all, she was only sixteen; Kittredge was eighteen, going on thirty.
Elaine and I were walking back to the dorm after rehearsal one night--the Hadleys had a faculty apartment in the same dorm where I lived with Richard Abbott and my mom--when Kittredge magically materialized beside us. (Kittredge was always doing that.) "You two are quite a couple," he told us.
"We're not a couple!" Elaine blurted out, much louder than she'd meant to. Kittredge pretended to stagger, as if from an unseen blow; he held his ears.
"I must warn you, Nymph--you're in danger of losing your hearing," Kittredge said to me. "When this little lady has her first orgasm, you better be wearing earplugs. And I wouldn't do it in the dormitory, if I were you," Kittredge warned me. "The whole dorm would hear her." He then drifted away from us, down a different, darker path; Kittredge lived in the jock dorm, the one nearest the gym.
It was too dark to see if Elaine Hadley had blushed. I touched her face lightly, just enough to ascertain if she was crying; she wasn't, but her cheek was hot and she brushed my hand away. "No one's giving me an orgasm anytime soon!" Elaine cried after Kittredge.
We were in a quadrangle of dormitories; in the distance, there were lights in the surrounding dorm windows, and a chorus of voices whooped and cheered--as if a hundred unseen boys had heard her. But Elaine was very agitated when she cried out; I doubted that Kittredge (or anyone but me) had understood her. I was wrong, though what Elaine had cried with police-siren shrillness sounded like, "No nun's liver goes into spasm for a raccoon!" (Or nonsense of a similar, incomprehensible kind.)
But Kittredge had grasped Elaine's meaning; his sweetly sarcastic voice reached us from somewhere in the dark quadrangle. Cruelly, it was as the sexy Ferdinand that Kittredge called out of the darkness to my friend Elaine, who was (at that moment) not feeling much like Miranda.
"O, if a virgin, / And your affection not gone forth, I'll make you / The Queen of Naples," Ferdinand swears to Miranda--and so Kittredge amorously called. The quad of dorms was eerily quiet; when those Favorite River boys heard Kittredge speak, they were silenced by their own awe and stupefaction. "Good night, Nymph!" I heard Kittredge call. "Good night, Naples!"
Thus Elaine Hadley and I had our nicknames. When Kittredge named you, it may have been a dubious honor, but the designation was both lasting and traumatic.
"Shit," Elaine said. "It could be worse--Kittredge could be calling me Maid or Virgin."
"Elaine?" I said. "You're my one true friend."
" 'Abhorred slave,' " she said to me.
This was uttered as sharply as a bark; there was a doglike echo in the quadrangle of dorms. We both knew it is what Miranda says to Caliban--"a savage and deformed slave," Shakespeare calls him, but Caliban is an unfinished monster.
Prospero berates Caliban: "thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child."
Caliban doesn't deny it. Caliban hates Prospero and his daughter ("toads, beetles, bats, light on you!"), though the monster once lusted after Miranda and wishes he "had peopled" the island with little Calibans. Caliban is evidently male, but it's uncertain how human he is.
When Trinculo, the jester, first notices Caliban, Trinculo says, "What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive?"
I knew that Elaine Hadley had been kidding--speaking to me as Miranda speaks to Caliban, Elaine was just fooling around--but as we drew near to our dormitory, the lights from the windows illuminated her tear-streaked face. In only a minute or two, Kittredge's mockery of Ferdinand and Miranda's romance had taken effect; Elaine was crying. "You're my only friend!" she blubbered to me.
I felt sorry for her, and put my arm around her shoulders; this provoked more whoops and cheers from those unseen boys who'd whooped and cheered before. Did I know that this night was the beginning of my masquerade? Was I conscious of giving those Favorite River boys the impression that Elaine Hadley was my girlfriend? Was I acting, even then? Consciously or not, I was making Elaine Hadley my disguise. For a while, I would fool Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry--not to mention Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, and (if not for long, and to a lesser extent) my mother.
Yes, I was aware that my mom was changing. She'd been so nice to me when I was little. I used to wonder, when I was a teenager, what had become of the small boy she'd once loved.
I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: "According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked--she meant reality, of course."
My mom's assessment of "pure imagining" was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.
One Christmas--I believe it was the first Christmas I'd come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years--I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, "What are you writing now, Billy?"
"A novel," I told her.
"Well, that should make you happy," she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who'd begun to lose his hearing--sawmill damage, I suppose.
"Me? Why should it make me happy that Bill is writing another novel? Not that I didn't love the last one, Bill, because I sure-as-shit did love it!" Grandpa Harry quickly assured me.
"Of course you loved it," my mother told him. "Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?"
"Ah, well . . ." Grandpa Harry had started to say, but then stopped. As Harry got older, he stopped himself from saying what he was going to say--more and more.
I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, when I began to sense that my mom wasn't as nice to me as she'd been before, I got in the habit of stopping myself from saying what I wanted to say. Not anymore.
MANY YEARS LATER, LONG after I'd left Favorite River Academy, at the height of my interest in she-males--I mean dating them, not being one--I was having dinner with Donna one night, and I told her about Grandpa Harry's onstage life as a female impersonator.
"Was it only onstage?" Donna asked.
"As far as I know," I answered her, but you couldn't lie to her. One of a couple of uncomfortable things about Donna was that she always knew when you were holding out on her.
Nana Victoria had been dead for more than a year when I first heard from Richard that no one could persuade Grandpa Harry to part with my late grandmother's clothes. (At the sawmill, of course, Harry Marshall was sure-as-shit still dressing like a lumberman.)
Eventually, I would come clean to Donna about Grandpa Harry spending his evenings in his late wife's attire--if only in the privacy of his River Street home. I would leave out the part about Harry's cross-dressing adventures after he was moved to that assisted-living facility he and Nils Borkman had (years before) generously built for the elderly in First Sister. The other
residents had complained about Harry repeatedly surprising them in drag. (As Grandpa Harry would one day tell me, "I think you've noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.")
Fortunately, when Richard Abbott told me what had happened at the assisted-living facility, Grandpa Harry's River Street home had not yet been sold; it was still on the market. Richard and I quickly moved Harry back into the familiar surroundings of the house he'd lived in with Nana Victoria for so many years. Nana Victoria's clothes were moved back into the River Street house with him, and the nurse Richard and I hired, for Grandpa Harry's round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry's apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall's many female impersonations onstage.
"Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?" Donna asked me one night.
"Not really," I'd answered her.
My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I'm sorry, but we didn't use to say "transgender"--not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call "passable"--one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural--hormones were okay, but no surgical implants--and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.
How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin--even her upper arms were slender--and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I've known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.
Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost's. Donna didn't like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.
She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York--after we broke up, I heard she'd moved to Toronto--but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals--Europe was more sexually accepting and sophisticated, generally--but Donna was insecure about learning another language.
She'd dropped out of college, because her college years coincided with what she called her "sexual-identity crisis," and she had little confidence in herself intellectually. This was crazy, because she read all the time--she was very smart--but there are those years when we're supposed to feed and grow our minds, and Donna felt that she'd lost those years to her difficult decision to live as a woman.
Especially when we were in Germany, where I could speak the language, Donna was at her happiest--that is, when we were together on those German-language translation trips, not only in Germany but also in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Donna loved Zurich; I know it struck her, as Zurich does everyone, as a very well-to-do city. She loved Vienna, too--from my student days in Vienna, I still knew my way around (a little). Most of all, Donna was delighted with Hamburg--to her, I think, Hamburg was the most elegant-seeming German city.
In Hamburg, my German publishers always put me up at the Vier Jahreszeiten; it was such an elegant hotel, I think it gave Donna most of her delight with Hamburg. But then there was that awful evening, after which Donna could never be happy in Hamburg--or, perhaps, with me--again.
It began innocently enough. A journalist who'd interviewed me invited us to a nightclub on the Reeperbahn; I didn't know the Reeperbahn, or what kind of club it was, but this journalist (and his wife, or girlfriend) invited Donna and me to go out with them and see a show. Klaus (with a K) and Claudia (with a C) were their names; we took a taxi together to the club.
I should have known what kind of place it was when I saw those skinny boys at the bar on our way in. A Transvestiten-Cabaret--a transvestite show. (I'm guessing the skinny boys at the bar were the performers' boyfriends, because it wasn't a pickup place, and, the boys at the bar excepted, there wasn't a visible gay presence.)
It was a show for sex tourists--guys in drag, entertaining straight couples. The all-male groups were young men there for the laughs; the all-women groups were there to see the penises. The performers were comedians; they were very aware of themselves as men. They were not half as passable as my dear Donna; they were the old-fashioned transvestites who weren't really trying to pass as female. They were meticulously made up, and elaborately costumed; they were very good-looking, but they were good-looking men dressed as women. In their dresses and wigs, they were very feminine-looking men, but they weren't fooling anybody--they weren't even trying to.
Klaus and Claudia clearly had no idea that Donna was one of them (though she was much more convincing, and infinitely more committed).
"I didn't know," I told Donna. "I really didn't. I'm sorry."
Donna couldn't speak. It had not occurred to her--this was the seventies--that one of the more sophisticated and accepting things about Europe, when it came to difficult decisions regarding sexual identity, was that the Europeans were so used to sexual differences that they had already begun to make fun of them.
That the performers were making fun of themselves must have been terribly painful for Donna, who'd had to work so hard to take herself seriously as a woman.
There was one skit with a very tall tranny driving a make-believe car, while her date--a frightened-looking, smaller man--is attempting to go down on her. What frightens the small man is how big the tranny's cock is, and how his inexpert attentions to this monster cock are interfering with the tranny's driving.
Of course Donna couldn't understand the German; the tranny was talking nonstop, offering breathless criticism of what a bad blow job she was getting. Well, I had to laugh, and I don't think Donna ever forgave me.
Klaus and Claudia clearly thought I had a typical American girlfriend; they thought Donna was not enjoying the show because she was a sexually uptight prude. There was no way to explain anything to them--not there.
When we left, Donna was so distraught that she jumped when one of the waitresses spoke to her. The waitress was a tall transvestite; she could have passed for one of the performers. She said to Donna (in German), "You are looking really fine." It was a compliment, but I knew that the tranny knew Donna was a transsexual. (Almost no one could tell, not at that time. Donna didn't advertise it; her entire effort went into being a woman, not getting away as one.)
"What did she say?" Donna kept asking me, as we left the club. In the seventies, the Reeperbahn wasn't the tourist trap that it is today; there were the sex tourists, of course, but the street itself was seedier then--the way Times Square used to be seedier, too, and not so overrun with gawkers.
"She was complimenting you--she thought you looked 'really fine.' She meant you were beautiful," I told Donna.
"She meant 'for a man,' right--isn't that what she meant?" Donna asked me. She was crying. Klaus and Claudia still didn't get it. "I'm not some two-bit cross-dresser!" Donna cried.
"We're sorry if this was a bad idea," Klaus said rather stiffly. "It's meant to be funny--it's not intended to be offensive." I just kept shaking my head; there was no way to save the night, I knew.
"Look, pal--I've got a bigger dick than the tranny driving that nonexistent car!" Donna said to Klaus. "You want to see it?" Donna asked Claudia.
"Don't," I said to her--I knew Donna was no prude. Far from it!
"Tell them," she told me.
Naturally, I had already written a couple of novels about sexual differences--about challenging and, at times, confusing sexual identities. Klaus had read my novels; he'd interviewed me, for Christ's sake--he and his wife (or girlfriend) should have known that my girlfriend wasn't a prude.
"Donna definitely has a bigger dick than the tranny driving the make-believe car," I said to Klaus and Claudia. "Please don't ask her to show it to you--not here."
"Not here?" Donna screamed.
I truly don't know why I said that; the stream of traffic, both cars and pedestrians, along the Reeperbahn must have ma
de me anxious about Donna whipping out her penis there. I certainly didn't mean--as I told Donna repeatedly, back at our hotel--that Donna would (or should) show them her penis at another time, or in another place! It just came out that way.
"I'm not an amateur cross-dresser," Donna was sobbing. "I'm not, I'm not--"
"Of course you're not," I was telling her, when I saw Klaus and Claudia slipping away. Donna had put her hands on my shoulders; she was shaking me, and I suppose that Klaus and Claudia got a good look at Donna's big hands. (She did have a bigger dick than the tranny gagging the guy who was giving her a bad blow job in that make-believe car.)
That night, back at the Vier Jahreszeiten, Donna was still crying when she washed her face before going to bed. We left the light on in the walk-in closet, with the closet door ajar; it served as a night-light, a way to find the bathroom in the dark. I lay awake looking at Donna, who was asleep. In the half-light, and with no makeup on, Donna's face bore a hint of something masculine. Maybe it was because she wasn't trying to be a woman when she slept; perhaps it was something in the contours of her jaw and cheekbones--something chiseled.
That night, looking at Donna asleep, I was reminded of Mrs. Kittredge; there'd been something masculine in her attractiveness, too--something of Kittredge himself about her, something all-male. But if a woman is aggressive, she can look male--even in her sleep.
I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the door to the walk-in closet was closed--I knew we'd left it ajar. Donna was not in bed beside me; in the light that was coming from the walk-in closet, from under the door, I could see the shadows of her moving feet.
She was naked, looking at herself in the full-length mirror in the walk-in closet. I knew this routine.
"Your breasts are perfect," I told her.
"Most men like them bigger," Donna said. "You're not like most men I know, Billy. You even like actual women, for Christ's sake."
"Don't hurt your beautiful breasts--please don't do anything to them," I told her.
"What's it matter that I have a big dick? You're strictly a top, Billy--that won't ever change, right?" she asked me.