In One Person

by John Irving

  "I love your big dick," I said.

  Donna shrugged; her small breasts were the target. "You know the difference between an amateur cross-dresser and someone like me?" Donna asked.

  I knew the answer--it was always her answer. "Yes, I know--you're committed to changing your body."

  "I'm not an amateur," Donna repeated.

  "I know--just don't change your breasts. They're perfect," I told her, and went back to bed.

  "You know what's the matter with you, Billy?" Donna asked me. I was already in bed, with my back turned to the light coming from under the door of the walk-in closet. I knew her answer to this question, too, but I didn't say anything. "You're not like anyone else, Billy--that's what's the matter with you," Donna said.

  AS FOR CROSS-DRESSING, DONNA could never interest me in trying on her clothes. She would talk, from time to time, about the seemingly remote possibility of surgery--not just the breast implants, which were tempting to many transsexuals, but the bigger deal, the sex-change surgery. Technically speaking, Donna--and every other transsexual who ever attracted me--was what they call a "pre-op." (I know only a few post-op transsexuals. The ones I know are very courageous. It's daunting to be around them; they know themselves so well. Imagine knowing yourself that well! Imagine being that sure about who you are.)

  Donna would say, "I suppose you were never curious--I mean, to be like me."

  "That's right," I told her, truthfully.

  "I suppose, all your life, you've wanted to keep your penis--you probably really like it," she said.

  "I like yours, too," I told her--also truthfully.

  "I know you do," she said, sighing. "I just don't always like it so much myself. But I always like yours," Donna quickly added.

  Poor Tom would have found Donna too "complicated," I think, but I thought she was very brave.

  I found it intimidating that Donna was so certain about who she was, but that was also one of the things I loved about her--that and the cute, rightward inclination of her penis, which reminded me of you-know-who.

  As it would turn out, my only exposure to Kittredge's penis was what I managed to glimpse of him--always furtively--in the showers at the Favorite River gym.

  I had much more exposure to Donna's penis. I saw as much of her as I wanted, though--in the beginning--I had such an insatiable hunger for her (and for other transsexuals, albeit only the ones who were like her) that I couldn't imagine ever seeing or having enough of Donna. In the end, I didn't move on because I was tired of her, or because she ever doubted or had second thoughts about who she was. In the end, it was me she doubted. It was Donna who moved on, and her distrust of me made me doubt myself.

  When I stopped seeing Donna (more accurately, when she stopped seeing me), I became more cautious with transsexuals--not because I no longer desired them, and I still find them extraordinarily brave, but because transsexuals (Donna, especially) forced me to acknowledge the most confusing aspects of my bisexuality every fucking day! Donna was exhausting.

  "I usually like straight guys," she would constantly remind me. "I also like other transsexuals--not just the ones like me, you know."

  "I know, Donna," I would assure her.

  "And I can deal with straight guys who also like women--after all, I'm trying to live my life, all the time, as a woman. I'm just a woman with a penis!" she would say, her voice rising.

  "I know, I know," I would tell her.

  "But you also like other guys--just guys--and you like women, Billy."

  "Yes, I do--some women," I would admit to her. "And cute guys--not all cute guys," I would remind her.

  "Yeah, well--fuck what all means, Billy," Donna would say. "What gets to me is that I don't know what you like about me, and what it is about me that you don't like."

  "There's nothing about you I don't like, Donna. I like all of you," I promised her.

  "Yeah, well--if you're going to leave me for a woman, like a straight guy one day would, I get it. Or if you're going to go back to guys, like a gay guy one day would--well, I get that, too," Donna said. "But the thing about you, Billy--and I don't get this at all--is that I don't know who or what you're going to leave me for."

  "I don't know, either," I would tell her, truthfully.

  "Yeah, well--that's why I'm leaving you, Billy," Donna said.

  "I'm going to miss you like crazy," I told her. (This was also true.)

  "I'm already getting over you, Billy," was all she said. But until that night in Hamburg, I believed that Donna and I had a chance together.

  I USED TO BELIEVE my mom and I had a chance together, too. I mean more than the "chance" of staying friends; I mean that I used to think nothing could ever drive us apart. My mother once worried about my most minor injuries--she imagined my life was in danger at the first cough or sneeze. There was something childlike about her fears for me; my nightmares gave her nightmares, my mom once said.

  My mother told me that, as a child, I had "fever dreams"; if so, they persisted into my teenage years. Whatever they were, they seemed more real than dreams. If there was any reality to the most recurrent of these dreams, it eluded me for the longest time. But one night, when I'd been sick--I was actually recuperating from scarlet fever--it seemed that Richard Abbott was telling me a war story, yet Richard's only war story was the lawn-mower accident that had disqualified him from military service. This wasn't Richard Abbott's story; it was my father's war story, or one of them, and Richard couldn't possibly have told it to me.

  The story (or the dream) began in Hampton, Virginia--Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, was where my code-boy father boarded a transport ship for Italy. The transports were Liberty ships. The ground cadre of the 760th Bomb Squadron left Virginia on a dark and threatening January day; within the sheltered harbor, the soldiers had their first meal at sea--pork chops, I was told (or dreamed). When my dad's convoy hit the open seas, the Liberty ships encountered an Atlantic winter storm. The enlisted personnel occupied the fore and aft holds; each man had his helmet hung by his bunk--the helmets would soon become vomit basins for seasick soldiers. But the sergeant didn't get seasick. My mom had told me that he'd grown up on Cape Cod; as a boy, he'd been a sailor--he was immune to seasickness.

  Consequently, my code-boy dad did his duty--he emptied the seasick soldiers' helmets. Amidships, at deck level--a laborious climb from the bunks, below the deck--was a huge head. (Even in the dream, I had to interrupt the story and ask what a "head" was; the person I thought was Richard, but it couldn't have been Richard, told me that the head was a huge latrine--the toilets stretched across the entire ship.)

  During one of many helmet-emptying ordeals, my father stopped to sit down on one of the toilets. There was no point in trying to pee while standing up; the ship was pitching and rolling--you had to sit down. My dad sat on the toilet with both his hands gripping the seat. Seawater sloshed around his ankles, soaking his shoes and pants. At the farthest end of the long row of toilets, another soldier sat holding the seat, but this soldier's grip was precarious. My dad saw that the other soldier was also immune to seasickness; he was actually reading, holding on to the toilet seat with only one hand. When the ship suddenly pitched more steeply, the bookworm lost his grip. He came skipping over the toilet seats--his ass made a slapping sound--until he collided with my father at the opposite end of the row of toilets.

  "Sorry--I just had to keep reading!" he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he'd slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater.

  "What were you reading?" the code-boy called.

  "Madame Bovary!" the soldier shouted in the storm.

  "I can tell you what happens," the sergeant said.

  "Please don't!" the bookworm answered. "I want to read it for myself!"

  In the dream, or in the story someone (who was not Richar
d Abbott) was telling me, my father never saw this soldier for the rest of the voyage. "Past a barely visible Gibraltar," I remember the dream (or someone) saying, "the convoy slipped into the Mediterranean."

  One night, off the coast of Sicily, the soldiers belowdecks were awakened by crashing noises and the sounds of cannon fire; the convoy was under aerial attack by the Luftwaffe. Subsequently, my dad heard that an adjacent Liberty ship had been hit and sunk with all hands. As for the soldier who'd been reading Madame Bovary in the storm, he failed to introduce himself to my dad before the convoy made landfall at Taranto. The code-boy's war story would continue and conclude without my disappearing dad ever encountering the toilet-traveling man.

  "Years later," said the dream (or the storyteller), my father was "finishing up" at Harvard. He was riding on the Boston subway, the MTA; he'd got on at the Charles Street station, and was on his way back to Harvard Square.

  A man who got on at Kendall Square began to stare at him. The sergeant was "discomfited" by the strange man's interest in him; "it felt like an unnatural interest--a foreboding of something violent, or at least unpleasant." (It was the language of the story that made this recurrent dream seem more real to me than other dreams. It was a dream with a first-person narrator--a dream with a voice.)

  The man on the subway started changing seats; he kept moving closer to my dad. When they were almost in physical contact with each other, and the subway was slowing down for the next stop, the stranger turned to my father and said, "Hi. I'm Bovary. Remember me?" Then the subway stopped at Central Square, where the bookworm got off, and the sergeant was once more on his way to Harvard Square.

  I WAS TOLD THAT the fever part of scarlet fever abates within a week--usually within three to five days. I'm pretty sure that I was over the fever part when I asked Richard Abbott if he'd ever told me this story--perhaps at the onset of the rash, or during the sore-throat part, which began a couple of days before the rash. My tongue had been the color of a strawberry, but when I first spoke to Richard about this most vivid and recurrent dream, my tongue was a beefy dark red--more of a raspberry color--and the rash was starting to go away.

  "I don't know this story, Bill," Richard told me. "This is the first time I've heard it."

  "Oh."

  "It sounds like a Grandpa Harry story to me," Richard said.

  But when I asked my grandfather if he'd told me the Madame Bovary story, Grandpa Harry started his "Ah, well" routine, hemming and hawing his way in circles around the question. No, he "definitely didn't" tell me the story, my grandfather said. Yes, Harry had heard the story--"a secondhand version, if I recall correctly"--but he conveniently couldn't remember who'd told him. "It was Uncle Bob, maybe--perhaps it was Bob who told you, Bill." Then my grandfather felt my forehead, and mumbled words to the effect that my fever seemed to be gone. When he peered into my mouth, he announced: "That's still a pretty ugly-lookin' tongue, though I would say the rash is disappearin' a bit."

  "It was too real to be a dream--at least, to begin with," I told Grandpa Harry.

  "Ah, well--if you're good at imaginin' things, which I believe you are pretty good at, Bill, I would say that some dreams can seem very real," my grandfather hemmed and hawed.

  "I'll ask Uncle Bob," I said.

  Bob was always putting squash balls in my pockets, or in my shoes--or under my pillow. It was a game; when I found the balls, I gave them back. "Oh, I've been looking for that squash ball all over, Billy!" Bob would say. "I'm so glad you found it."

  "What's Madame Bovary about?" I asked Uncle Bob. He'd come to see how I was recuperating from the scarlet fever, and I'd given him the squash ball I had found in the glass for my toothbrush--in the bathroom I shared with Grandpa Harry.

  Nana Victoria "would rather die" than share a bathroom with him, Harry had told me, but I liked sharing a bathroom with my grandfather.

  "Truth be told, I haven't actually read Madame Bovary, Billy," Uncle Bob told me; he peered into the hallway, outside my bedroom, checking to be sure that my mom (or my grandmother, or Aunt Muriel) wasn't within listening distance. Even though the coast was clear, Bob lowered his voice: "I believe it's about adultery, Billy--an unfaithful wife." I must have looked baffled, utterly uncomprehending, because Uncle Bob quickly said, "You should ask Richard what Madame Bovary is about--literature, you know, is Richard's department."

  "It's a novel?" I asked.

  "I don't think it's a true story," Uncle Bob answered. "But Richard would know."

  "Or I could ask Miss Frost," I suggested.

  "Uh-huh, you could--just don't say it was my idea," Uncle Bob said.

  "I know a story," I started to say. "Maybe you told me."

  "You mean the one about the guy reading Madame Bovary on a hundred toilets at the same time?" Bob cried. "I absolutely love that story!"

  "Me, too," I said. "It's very funny!"

  "Hilarious!" Uncle Bob declared. "No, I never told you that story, Billy--at least I don't remember telling you that story," he said quickly.

  "Oh."

  "Maybe your mom told you?" Uncle Bob asked. I must have given him an incredulous look, because Bob suddenly said, "Probably not."

  "It's a dream I keep having, but someone must have told me first," I said.

  "Dinner-party conversation, perhaps--one of those stories children overhear, when the adults think they've gone to bed or they can't possibly be listening," Uncle Bob said. While this was more credible than my mother being the source of the toilet-seat story, neither Bob nor I looked very convinced. "Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, Billy," he said to me, with more conviction.

  It was shortly after he'd left when I discovered another squash ball, or the same squash ball, under my covers.

  I knew perfectly well that my mother hadn't told me the Madame Bovary, multiple-toilet-seats story, but of course I asked her. "I never thought that story was the least bit funny," she said. "I wouldn't have had anything to do with telling you that story, Billy."

  "Oh."

  "Maybe Daddy told you--I asked him not to!" my mother said.

  "No, Grandpa definitely didn't tell me," I said.

  "I'll bet Uncle Bob did," my mom said.

  "Uncle Bob says he doesn't remember telling me," I replied.

  "Bob drinks--he doesn't remember everything," my mother told me. "And you've had a fever recently," she reminded me. "You know the dreams a fever can give you, Billy."

  "I thought it was a funny story, anyway--how the man's ass made a slapping sound as he was skipping over the toilet seats!" I said.

  "It's not the least bit funny to me, Billy."

  "Oh."

  It was after I'd completely recovered from the scarlet fever that I asked Richard Abbott his opinion of Madame Bovary. "I think you would appreciate it more when you're older, Bill," Richard told me.

  "How much older?" I asked him. (I would have been fourteen--I'm guessing. I'd not yet read and reread Great Expectations, but Miss Frost had already started me on my life as a reader--I know that.)

  "I could ask Miss Frost how old she thinks I should be," I suggested.

  "I would wait a while before you ask her, Bill," Richard said.

  "How long a while?" I asked him.

  Richard Abbott, who I thought knew everything, answered: "I don't know, exactly."

  I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY when my mom became the prompter for Richard Abbott's theatrical productions in the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy, but I was very much aware of her being the prompter for The Tempest. There were the occasional scheduling conflicts, because my mother was still prompting for the First Sister Players, but prompters could miss rehearsals now and then, and the performances--the actual shows put on by our town's amateur theatrical society and Favorite River's Drama Club--never overlapped.

  In rehearsals, Kittredge would pretend to botch a line just to have my mom prompt him. "O most dear maid," Ferdinand misspoke to Miranda in one of our rehearsals, when we were newly off-script.

 
"No, Jacques," my mother said. "That would be 'O most dear mistress,' not maid."

  But Kittredge was acting--he was only pretending to flub the line, so that he could engage my mother in conversation. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Abbott--it won't happen again," he said to her; then he blew the very next dialogue assigned him.

  "No, precious creature," Ferdinand is supposed to say to Miranda, but Kittredge said, "No, precious mistress."

  "Not this time, Jacques," my mom told him. "It's 'No, precious creature'--not mistress."

  "I think I'm trying too hard to please you--I want you to like me, but I'm afraid you don't, Mrs. Abbott," Kittredge said to my mother. He was flirting with her, and she blushed. I was embarrassed by how often I thought of my mom as easily seduced; it was almost as if I believed she was somewhat retarded, or so sexually naive that anyone who flattered her could win her over.

  "I do like you, Jacques--I certainly don't not like you!" my mom blurted out, while Elaine (as Miranda) stood there seething; Elaine knew that Kittredge had used the hot word for my mom.

  "I get so nervous around you," Kittredge told my mother, though he didn't look nervous; he seemed increasingly confident.

  "What a lot of bullshit!" Elaine Hadley croaked. Kittredge cringed at the sound of her voice, and my mother flinched as if she'd been slapped.

  "Elaine, mind your language," my mom said.

  "Can we just get on with the play?" Elaine asked.

  "Oh, Naples--you're so impatient," Kittredge said with a most disarming smile, first to Elaine and then to my mother. "Elaine can't wait to get to the hand-holding part," Kittredge told my mom.

  Indeed, the scene they were rehearsing--act 3, scene 1--ends with Ferdinand and Miranda holding hands. It was Elaine's turn to blush, but Kittredge, who was in complete control of the moment, had fixed his most earnest gaze on my mother. "I have a question, Mrs. Abbott," he began, as if Elaine and Miranda didn't exist--as if they'd never existed. "When Ferdinand says, 'Full many a lady I have eyed with best regard, and many a time The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear'--you know, that line--I wonder if that means I have been with a lot of women, and if I shouldn't somehow imply that I am, you know, sexually experienced."