by John Irving
When Caliban calls Prospero a tyrant, Ariel (invisible) says, "Thou liest." Since Ariel is invisible, Caliban thinks Trinculo has called him a liar. In the same scene, Ariel says "Thou liest" to Stephano, who thinks Trinculo has called him a liar--Stephano hits Trinculo.
"I have to say 'Thou liest' twice," I told Miss Frost, being careful to say the liest word correctly--with two syllables.
"Sometimes he says 'least'--one syllable, rhymes with yeast," Elaine told Miss Frost.
"Oh, my," the librarian said, briefly closing her eyes at the horror of it. "Look at me, William," Miss Frost said. I did as she told me; for once, I didn't need to sneak a look at her. "Say 'finest' to me, William," she said.
This was not hard to do. Miss Frost was the finest of my all-over-the-place infatuations. "Finest," I said to her, still looking right at her.
"Well, William--just remember that liest rhymes with finest," Miss Frost said.
"Go on, say it," Elaine told me.
"Thou liest," I said, as the invisible Ariel is supposed to say. I made a perfect two-syllable match for the finest word.
"May all your difficulties be so easy to fix, William," Miss Frost said. "I love running lines," she told Elaine, as she closed the door.
I was impressed that Miss Frost even knew what "running lines" meant. When Richard had asked her if she'd ever acted, Miss Frost had quickly answered him: "Only in my mind. When I was younger--all the time." Yet she'd certainly made a name for herself as a standout in the First Sister Players.
"Miss Frost is an Ibsen woman!" Nils had said to Richard, but she'd not had many roles--not beyond those of the severely tested women in Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, and The Wild (fucking) Duck.
It suffices to say: For someone who'd heretofore acted only in her mind, but who seemed a natural at portraying Ibsen's women, Miss Frost was clearly familiar with all that "running lines" entailed--and she couldn't have been more supportive of Elaine Hadley and me.
It was awkward, at first--how Elaine and I arranged ourselves on Miss Frost's bed. It was only a queen-size mattress, but the brass bed frame was rather high; when Elaine and I sat (somewhat primly) side by side, our feet didn't reach the floor. But when we stretched out on our stomachs, we had to contort ourselves to look at each other; it was only when we propped the pillows up against the headboard (those brass rails like prison bars) that we could lie on our sides, facing each other, and run our lines--our copies of the play held between us, for reference.
"We're like an old married couple," Elaine said; I was already thinking the same thing.
Our first evening in Miss Frost's snowstorm room, Elaine fell asleep. I knew she had to get up earlier than I did; due to the bus ride to Ezra Falls, she was always tired. When Miss Frost knocked on the door, Elaine was startled; she threw her arms around my neck, and she was still holding tight when Miss Frost came inside the small room. Notwithstanding these amorous-looking circumstances, I don't believe that Miss Frost assumed we'd been making out. Elaine and I certainly didn't look as if we'd been necking, and Miss Frost merely said, "It's almost time for me to close the library. Even Shakespeare has to go home and get some sleep."
As everyone who's ever been part of a theatrical production knows, after all the stressful rehearsals, and the interminable memorization--I mean when your lines are truly run--even Shakespeare comes to an end. We put on four shows of The Tempest. I managed to make liest rhyme with finest in every performance, though on opening night I almost said "finest breasts," when I thought I saw Kittredge's wonderfully dressed mother in the audience--only to learn from Kittredge, during the intermission, that I was mistaken. The woman wasn't his mom.
"The woman you think is my mom is in Paris," Kittredge dismissively said.
"Oh."
"You must have seen some other middle-aged woman who spends too much money on her clothes," Kittredge said.
"Your mother is very beautiful," I told him. I genuinely meant this, in the nicest possible way.
"Your mom is hotter," Kittredge told me matter-of-factly. There was no hint of sarcasm, nor anything the slightest suggestive, in his remark; he spoke in the same empirical way in which he'd said his mother (or the woman who wasn't his mother) was in Paris. Soon, the hot word, the way Kittredge meant it, would be the rage at Favorite River.
Later, Elaine would say to me, "What are you doing, Billy--trying to be his friend?"
Elaine was an excellent Miranda, though opening night was not her best performance; she'd needed prompting. It was probably my fault.
"Good wombs have borne bad sons," Miranda says to her father--in reference to Antonio, Prospero's brother.
I'd talked to Elaine about the good-wombs idea, possibly too much. I'd told Elaine my own ideas about my biological father--how whatever seemed bad in me I had ascribed to the code-boy, to the sergeant's genes (not my mom's). At the time, I still counted my mother among the good wombs in the world. She may have been embarrassingly seducible--the very word I used to describe my mom to Elaine--but Mary Marshall Dean or Abbott was essentially innocent of any wrongdoing. Maybe my mother was gullible, occasionally backward--I said this to Elaine, in lieu of the retarded word--but never "bad."
Admittedly, it was funny how I couldn't pronounce the wombs word--not even the singular. Both Elaine and I had laughed about how hard I came down on the letter b.
"It's a silent b, Billy!" Elaine had cried. "You don't say the b!"
It was comical, even to me. What need did I have of the womb (or wombs) word?
But I'm sure this was why Elaine had moms on her mind on opening night--"Good moms have borne bad sons," Elaine (as Miranda) almost said. Elaine must have heard the moms word coming; she stopped herself short after "Good--" There was then what every actor fears: an incriminating silence.
"Wombs," my mother whispered; she had a prompter's perfect whisper--it was almost inaudible.
"Wombs!" Elaine Hadley had shouted. Richard (as Prospero) had jumped. "Good wombs have borne bad sons!" Miranda, back in character, too emphatically said. It didn't happen again.
Naturally, Kittredge would say something to Elaine about it--after our opening-night performance.
"You need to work on the wombs word, Naples," he told her. "It's probably a word that causes you some nervous excitement. You should try saying to yourself, 'Every woman has a womb--even I have a womb. Wombs are no big deal.' We can work on saying this together--if it helps. You know, I say 'womb,' you say 'wombs are no big deal,' or I say 'wombs,' and you say 'I've got one!'--that kind of thing."
"Thanks, Kittredge," Elaine said. "How very thoughtful." She was biting her lower lip, which I knew she did only when she was pining for him and hating herself for it. (I was accustomed to the feeling.)
Then suddenly, after months of such histrionic closeness, our contact with Kittredge was over; Elaine and I were despondent. Richard tried to talk to us about the postpartum depression that occasionally descends on actors following a play. "We didn't give birth to The Tempest," Elaine said impatiently. "Shakespeare did!"
Speaking strictly for myself, I missed running lines on Miss Frost's brass bed, too, but when I confessed this to Elaine, she said, "Why? It's not like we ever fooled around, or anything."
I was increasingly fond of Elaine, if not in that way, but you have to be careful what you say to your friends when you're trying too hard to make them feel better.
"Well, it wasn't because I didn't want to fool around with you," I told her.
We were in Elaine's bedroom--with the door open--on a Saturday night at the start of winter term. This would have been the New Year, 1960, though our ages hadn't changed; I was still seventeen, and Elaine was sixteen. It was movie night at Favorite River Academy, and from Elaine's bedroom window, we could see the flickering light of the movie projector in the new onion-shaped gym, which was attached to the old gym--where, on winter weekends, Elaine and I often watched Kittredge wrestle. Not this weekend; the wrestlers were away, competing somewhere to t
he south of us--at Mount Hermon, maybe, or at Loomis.
When the team buses returned, Elaine and I would see them from her fifth-floor bedroom window. Even in the January cold, with all the windows closed, the sound of shouting boys reverberated in the quadrangle of dormitories. The wrestlers, and the other athletes, would carry their gear from the buses to the new gym, where the lockers and the showers were. If the movie was still playing, some of the jocks would stay in the gym to see the end.
But they were showing a Western on this Saturday night; only morons watched the end of a Western without seeing the beginning of the movie--the endings were all the same. (There would be a shoot-out, a predictable comeuppance.) Elaine and I had been betting on whether or not Kittredge would stay in the gym to see the end of the Western--that is, if the wrestling-team bus returned before the movie was over.
"Kittredge isn't stupid," Elaine had said. "He won't hang around the gym to watch the final fifteen minutes of a horse opera." (Elaine had a low opinion of Westerns, which she called "horse operas" only when she was being kind; she more often called them "male propaganda.")
"Kittredge is a jock--he'll hang around the gym with the other jocks," I had said. "It doesn't matter what the movie is."
The jocks who did not hang around the gym after their road trips didn't have far to go. The jock dorm, which was called Tilley, was a five-story brick rectangle next to the gym. For whatever mindless reason, the jocks always whooped it up in the quad of dorms when they walked or ran to Tilley from the gym.
Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, were out; they'd gone off with Richard and my mom--as they often did together, especially when there was a foreign film playing in Ezra Falls. The marquee at the movie house in Ezra Falls capitalized it when a film had SUBTITLES. This wasn't just a warning to those local Vermonters who were disinclined (or unable) to read subtitles; this amounted to a caveat of a different kind--namely, that a foreign film was likely to have more sexual content than many Vermonters were used to.
When my mom and Richard and the Hadleys went to Ezra Falls to see those films with subtitles, Elaine and I weren't usually invited. Therefore, while our parents were out watching sex movies, Elaine and I were alone--either in her bedroom or in mine, always with the door open.
Elaine did not attend movie night in the Favorite River gym--not even when they weren't showing a Western. The atmosphere in the academy gym on movie nights was too all-boys for Elaine's liking. Faculty daughters of a certain age did not feel comfortable in that young-male environment. There was intentional farting, and far worse signs of loutish behavior. Elaine hypothesized that if they showed the foreign sex films in the academy gym on movie nights, some of the boys would beat off on the basketball court.
Generally, when we were left alone, Elaine and I preferred her bedroom to mine. The Hadleys' fifth-floor dormitory apartment had more of an overview of the quad; Richard and my mom's apartment, and my bedroom, were on the third floor of the dorm. Our dormitory was called Bancroft, and there was a bust of old Bancroft, a long-dead professor emeritus at Favorite River, in the ground-floor common room--the butt room, it was called. Bancroft (or at least his bust) was bald, and he had bushy eyebrows.
I was in the process of acquainting myself with Favorite River Academy's past. I had encountered photographs of the actual Professor Bancroft. He'd been a young faculty member once, and I'd seen his photos--when he had a full head of hair--in those long-ago yearbooks in the academy library. (You shouldn't guess about someone's past; if you don't see any evidence of it, a person's past remains unknown to you.)
When Elaine went with me to the yearbook room, she demonstrated little interest in the older yearbooks that fascinated me. I had barely inched my way through the First World War, but Elaine Hadley had begun with the contemporary yearbooks; she liked looking at the photographs of boys who were still at the school, or who'd only recently graduated. At the rate we were going, Elaine and I estimated that we might arrive at the same yearbook in the early years of World War II--or just before that war, maybe.
"Well, he's good-looking," Elaine would say, when she fancied this or that boy in the yearbook photos.
"Show me," I would say--ever her loyal friend, but not yet giving myself away to her. (We had somewhat similar taste in young men.)
It's a wonder I dared to suggest that I'd wanted to fool around with Elaine. While this was a well-meaning lie, I may also have been trying to throw her off the track; I might have been worried that Elaine somehow sensed I was given to those homosexual yearnings Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau sought to treat "aggressively."
At first, Elaine didn't believe me. "You just said what?" she asked me. We had been flopping around on her bed--certainly not in a sexual way. We were bored, listening to a rock-'n'-roll station on Elaine's radio while keeping an eye out her fifth-floor window. The return of the team buses meant little to us, though this nonevent would mean that Kittredge was once again at large in the quad.
There was a reading lamp with a dark-blue shade on Elaine's windowsill; the lamp shade was made of glass, as thick as a Coke bottle. Kittredge knew that the dark-blue light in the fifth-floor window of Bancroft was coming from Elaine's bedroom. Ever since we'd been in The Tempest together, Kittredge would occasionally serenade that blue light in Elaine's bedroom, which he could see from anywhere in the quadrangle of dormitories--even from Tilley, the jock dorm. I had not spotted Professor Tilley in my search of the faculty photographs in the yearbook room. If Tilley was a professor emeritus at Favorite River, he must have taught at the school in more modern times than those school days of yore--the ones old Bancroft had once whinnied in.
I didn't realize how much Kittredge's infrequent serenades meant to Elaine; they were, of course, mocking in tone--"Shakespearean patois," as Elaine described it. Yet I knew that Elaine often fell asleep with that dark-blue lamp on--and that when Kittredge didn't serenade her, she was unhappy about it.
It was into this rock-'n'-roll-radio atmosphere of idle waiting, in the loneliness of Elaine Hadley's dark-blue bedroom, where I introduced the idea of my wanting to fool around with her. It wasn't that this was such a bad idea; it just wasn't true. It's not surprising that Elaine's initial response was one of disbelief.
"You just said what?" my friend Elaine asked.
"I don't want to do or say anything that would endanger our friendship," I told her.
"You want to fool around with me?" Elaine asked.
"Yes, I do--a little," I said.
"No . . . penetration, is that what you mean?" she asked.
"No . . . yes, that's what I mean," I said. Elaine knew that I had a little trouble with the penetration word; it was one of those nouns that could cause a pronunciation problem for me, but I would soon get over it.
"Say it, Billy," Elaine said.
"No . . . going all the way," I told her.
"But what kind of fooling around, exactly?" she asked.
I lay facedown on her bed and covered my head with one of her pillows. This must have been unacceptable to her, because she straddled my hips and sat on my lower back. I could feel her breathing on the back of my neck; she nuzzled my ear. "Kissing?" she whispered. "Touching?"
"Yes," I said, in a muffled voice.
Elaine pulled the pillow off my head. "Touching what?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Not everything," Elaine said.
"No! Certainly not," I said.
"You can touch my breasts," she said. "I don't have any breasts, anyway."
"Yes, you do," I told her. She had something there, and I admit that I wanted to touch her breasts. (I confess to wanting to touch all kinds of breasts, especially small ones.)
Elaine lay next to me on the bed, and I turned on my side to look at her. "Do I give you a hard-on?" she asked me.
"Yes," I lied.
"Oh, my God--it's always so hot in this room!" she suddenly cried, sitting up. The colder the weather was outside, the hotter it was in those old
dormitories--and the higher the floor you were on, the hotter it got. At bedtime, or after lights-out, the students were always opening their windows, albeit only a crack, to let a little cold air in, but the ancient radiators would keep cranking up the heat.
Elaine was wearing a boy's dress shirt--white, with a button-down collar, though she never buttoned the collar, and she always left the top two buttons unbuttoned. Now she untucked the shirt from her jeans; she pinched the shirt between her thumb and index finger, and, holding it away from her stick-thin body, she blew on her chest to cool herself off.
"Do you have a hard-on now?" she asked me; she'd opened the window a crack before lying down on the bed beside me.
"No--I must be too nervous," I told her.
"Don't be nervous. We're just kissing and touching, right?" Elaine asked me.
"Right," I said.
I could feel a razor-sharp draft of cold air from the cracked-open window when Elaine kissed me, a chaste little peck on the lips, which must have been as disappointing to her as it was to me--because she said, "Tongues are okay. French kissing is allowed."
The next kiss was much more interesting--tongues change everything. There is a gathering momentum to French kissing; Elaine and I were unfamiliar with what to do about it. Perhaps to distract myself, I thought of my mother overseeing my wayward father kissing someone else. There's a waywardness to French kissing, I remember thinking. Elaine must have needed to distract herself, too. She broke free from our kiss and breathlessly said, "Not the Everly Brothers again!" I'd been unaware of what was playing on the rock-'n'-roll station, but Elaine rolled away from me; reaching for her night table, she turned the radio off.
"I want to be able to hear us breathing," Elaine said, rolling into my arms again.
Yes, I thought--breathing is very different when you're French kissing someone. I lifted her untucked shirt and tentatively touched her bare stomach; she slid my hand up to her breast--well, to her bra, anyway--which was soft and small and fit easily in the palm of my hand.
"Is this a . . . training bra?" I asked her.
"It's a padded bra," Elaine said. "I don't know about the training part."