In One Person

by John Irving

  "Hey, Tampon!" someone called.

  "Let's have a word with the football players," I told Gee. We went over to their table; they instantly stopped eating. They saw the tragic-looking mess of a boy--the transgender wannabe, as they probably thought of him--and they saw me, a sixty-five-year-old man, whom they might have mistaken for a faculty member (I soon would be). After all, I looked way too old to be Gee's father.

  "This is Gee--that's her name. Remember it," I said to them. They didn't respond. "Which of you called Gee 'Tampon'?" I asked them; there was no response to my question, either. (Fucking bullies; most of them are cowards.)

  "If someone mistakes you for a tampon, Gee--whose fault is it, if you don't speak up about it?" I asked the girl, who still looked like a boy.

  "That would be my fault," Gee said.

  "What's her name?" I asked the football players.

  All but one of them called out, "Gee!" The one who hadn't spoken, the biggest one, was eating again; he was looking at his food, not at me, when I spoke to him.

  "What's her name?" I asked again; he pointed to his mouth, which was full.

  "I'll wait," I told him.

  "He's not on the faculty," the big football player said to his teammates, when he'd swallowed his food. "He's just a writer who lives in town. He's some old gay guy who lives here, and he went to school here. He can't tell us what to do--he's not on the faculty."

  "What's her name?" I asked him.

  "Douche Bag?" the football player asked me; he was smiling now--so were the other football players.

  "You see why I'm 'pretty angry,' as you say, Gee?" I asked the fourteen-year-old. "Is this the guy who calls you Tampon?"

  "Yes--that's him," Gee said.

  The football player, the one who knew who I was, had stood up from the table; he was a very big kid, maybe four inches taller than I am, and easily twenty or thirty pounds heavier.

  "Get lost, you old fag," the big kid said to me. I thought it would be better if I could get him to say the fag word to Gee. I knew I would have the fucker then; the dress code may have relaxed at Favorite River, but there were other rules in place--rules that didn't exist when I'd been a student. You couldn't get thrown out of Favorite River for saying tampon or douche bag, but the fag word was in the category of hate. (Like the nigger word and the kike word, the fag word could get you in trouble.)

  "Fucking football players," I heard Gee say; it was something Herm Hoyt used to say. (Wrestlers are rather contemptuous about how tough football players think they are.) That young transgender-in-progress must have been reading my mind!

  "What did you say, you little fag?" the big kid said. He took a cheap shot at Gee--he smacked the heel of his hand into the fourteen-year-old's face. It must have hurt her, but I saw that Gee wasn't going to back down; her nose was starting to bleed when I stepped between them.

  "That's enough," I said to the big kid, but he bumped me with his chest. I saw the right hook coming, and took the punch on my left forearm--the way Jim Somebody had shown me, down that fourth-floor hall in the boxing room at the NYAC. The football player was a little surprised when I reached up and caught the back of his neck in a collar-tie. He pushed back against me, hard; he was a heavy kid, and he leaned all his weight on me--just what you want your opponent to do, if you have a halfway-decent duck-under.

  The dining-hall floor was a lot harder than a wrestling mat, and the big kid landed awkwardly, with all his weight (and most of mine) on one shoulder. I was pretty sure he'd separated that shoulder, or he had broken his collarbone--or both. At the time, he was just lying on the floor, trying not to move that shoulder or his upper arm.

  "Fucking football players," Gee repeated, this time to the whole table of them. They could see her nose was bleeding more.

  "For the fourth time, what's her name?" I asked the big kid lying on the floor.

  "Gee," the douche-bag, tampon guy said. It turned out that he was a PG--a nineteen-year-old postgraduate who'd been admitted to Favorite River to play football. Either the separated shoulder or the broken collarbone would cause him to miss the rest of the football season. The academy didn't expel him for the fag word, but he was put on probation. (Both Gee and I had hoped that her nose was broken, but it wasn't.) The PG would be thrown out of school the following spring for using the dyke word, in reference to a girl who wouldn't sleep with him.

  When I agreed to teach part-time at Favorite River, I said I would do so only on the condition that the academy make an effort to educate new students, especially the older PGs, on the subject of the liberal culture at Favorite River--I meant, of course, in regard to our acceptance of sexual diversity.

  But there in the dining hall, on that September day in 2007, I didn't have anything more of an educative nature to say to the football players.

  My new protegee, Gee, however, had more to say to those jocks, who were still sitting at their table. "I'm going to become a girl," she told them bravely. "One day, I'll be Georgia. But, for now, I'm just Gee, and you can see me as Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest."

  "Perhaps it will be a winter-term play," I cautioned the football players, not that I expected any of them to come see it. I just thought that I might need that long to get the kids ready; all the students in Richard's Shakespeare class were freshmen. I would open auditions to the entire school, but I feared that the kids who would be most interested in the play were (like Gee) only freshmen.

  "There's one more thing," my protegee said to the football players. Her nose was streaming blood, but I could tell Gee was happy about that. "Mr. A. is not an old gay guy--he's an old bi guy. You got that?"

  I was impressed that the football players nodded. Well, okay, not the big one on the dining-hall floor; he was just lying there, not moving. I only regret that Miss Frost and Coach Hoyt didn't see me hit that duck-under. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty good duck-under--my one move.

  Chapter 14

  TEACHER

  All that had happened three years ago, when Gee was just a freshman. You should have seen Gee at the start of her senior year, in the fall term of 2010--at seventeen, that girl was a knockout. Gee would turn eighteen her senior year; she would graduate, on schedule, with the Class of 2011. All I'm saying is, you should have seen her when she was a senior. Mrs. Hadley and Richard were right: Gee was special.

  That fall term of 2010, we were in rehearsals for what Richard called "the fall Shakespeare." We would be performing Romeo and Juliet in that most edgy time--the brief bit of school that remains between the Thanksgiving break and Christmas vacation.

  As a teacher, I can tell you that's a terrible time: The kids are woefully distracted, they have exams, they have papers due--and, to make it worse, the fall sports have been replaced by the winter ones. There is much that's new, but a lot that's old; everyone has a cough, and tempers are short.

  The Drama Club at Favorite River had last put on Romeo and Juliet in the winter of '85, which was twenty-five years ago. I still remembered what Larry had said to Richard about casting a boy as Juliet. (Larry thought Shakespeare would have loved the idea!) But Richard had asked, "Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?" Not even Lawrence Upton could find an answer for that.

  Now I knew a boy with the balls to play Juliet. I had Gee, and--as a girl--Gee was just about perfect. At seventeen, Gee still actually had balls, too. She'd begun the extensive psychological examinations--the counseling and psychotherapy--necessary for young people who are serious about gender reassignment. I don't believe that her beard had yet been removed by the process of electrolysis; Gee may not have been old enough for electrolysis, but I don't really know. I do know that, with her parents' and her doctor's approval, Gee was receiving injections of female hormones; if she stayed committed to her sex change, she would have to continue to take those hormones for the rest of her life. (I had no doubt that Gee, soon to be Georgia, Montgomery would stay committed.) What was it Elaine once said, about the possibility of Kittredge playin
g Juliet? It wouldn't have worked, we agreed. "Juliet is nothing if she's not sincere," Elaine had said.

  Boy, did I ever have a Juliet who was sincere! Gee had always had balls, but now she had breasts--small but very pretty ones--and her hair had acquired a new luster. My, how her eyelashes had grown! Gee's skin had become softer, and the acne was altogether gone; her hips had spread, though she'd actually lost weight since her freshman year--her hips were already womanly, if not yet curvaceous.

  What's more important, the whole community at Favorite River Academy knew who (and what) Gee Montgomery was. Sure, there were still a few jocks who hadn't entirely accepted how sexually diverse a school we were trying to be. There will always be a few troglodytes.

  Larry would have been proud of me, I thought. In a word, it might have surprised Larry to see how involved I was. Political activism didn't come naturally to me, but I was at least a little active politically. I'd traveled to some college campuses in our state. I'd spoken to the LGBT groups at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. I'd supported the same-sex marriage bill, which the Vermont State Senate passed into law--over the veto of our Republican governor, a troglodyte.

  Larry would have laughed to see me supporting gay marriage, because Larry knew what I thought of any marriage. "Old Mr. Monogamy," Larry would have teased me. But gay marriage is what the gay and bi kids want, and I support those kids.

  "I see a future hero in you!" Grandpa Harry had told me. I wouldn't go that far, but I hope Miss Frost might have approved of me. In my own way, I was protecting someone--I'd protected Gee. I was a worthwhile person in Gee's life. Maybe Miss Frost would have liked me for that.

  This was my life at age sixty-eight. I was a part-time English teacher at my old school, Favorite River Academy; I also directed the Drama Club there. I was a writer, and an occasional political activist--on the side of LGBT groups, everywhere. Oh, forgive me; the language, I know, keeps changing.

  A very young teacher at Favorite River told me it was no longer appropriate (or inclusive enough) to say LGBT--it was supposed to be LGBTQ.

  "What is the fucking Q for?" I asked the teacher. "Quarrelsome, perhaps?"

  "No, Bill," the teacher said. "Questioning."

  "Oh."

  "I remember you at the questioning phase, Billy," Martha Hadley told me. Ah, well--yes, I remember me at that phase, too. I'm okay about saying LGBTQ; at my age, I just have trouble remembering the frigging Q!

  Mrs. Hadley lives in the Facility now. She's ninety, and Richard visits her every day. I visit Martha twice a week--at the same time I visit Uncle Bob. At ninety-three, the Racquet Man is doing surprisingly well--that is, physically. Bob's memory isn't all it was, but that's a good fella's failing. Sometimes, Bob even forgets that Gerry and her California girlfriend--the one who's as old as I am--were married in Vermont this year.

  It was a June 2010 wedding; we had it at my house on River Street. Both Mrs. Hadley and Uncle Bob were there--Martha in a wheelchair. The Racquet Man was pushing Mrs. Hadley around.

  "Are you sure you don't want me to take over pushing the wheelchair, Bob?" Richard and I and Elaine kept asking.

  "What makes you think I'm pushing it?" the Racquet Man asked us. "I'm just leaning on it!"

  Anyway, when Uncle Bob asks me when Gerry's wedding is, I have to keep reminding him that she's already married.

  It was, in part, Bob's forgetfulness that almost caused me to miss one small highlight of my life--a small but truly important highlight, I think.

  "What are you going to do about Senor Bovary, Billy?" Uncle Bob asked me, when I was driving him back to the Facility from Gerry's wedding.

  "Senor who?" I asked the Racquet Man.

  "Shit, Billy--I'm sorry," Uncle Bob said. "I can't remember my Alumni Affairs anymore--as soon as I hear something, I seem to forget it!"

  But it wasn't exactly in the category of an announcement for publication in The River Bulletin; it was just a query that came to Bob, in care of the "Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept."

  Please pass this message along to young William,

  the carefully typed letter began.

  His father, William Francis Dean, would like to know how his son is--even if the old prima donna himself won't write his son and just ask him. There was an AIDS epidemic, you know; since he's still writing books, we assume that young William survived it. But how's his health? As we say over here--if you would be so kind as to ask young William--Como esta? And please tell young William, if he wants to see us before we die, he ought to pay us a visit!

  The carefully typed letter was from my father's longtime lover--the toilet-seat skipper, the reader, the guy who reconnected with my dad on the subway and didn't get off at the next station.

  He had typed, not signed, his name:

  Senor Bovary

  I WENT ONE SUMMER recently, with a somewhat cynical Dutch friend, to the gay-pride parade in Amsterdam; that city is a hopeful experiment, I have long believed, and I loved the parade. There were surging tides of men dancing in the streets--guys in purple and pink leather, boys in Speedos with leopard spots, men in jockstraps, kissing, one woman sleekly covered with wet-looking green feathers and sporting an all-black strap-on cock. I said to my friend that there were many cities where they preached tolerance, but Amsterdam truly practiced it--even flaunted it. As I spoke, a long barge glided by on one of the canals; an all-girls' rock band was playing onboard, and there were women wearing transparent leotards and waving to us onshore. The women were waving dildoes.

  But my cynical Dutch friend gave me a tired (and barely tolerant) look; he seemed as indifferent to the gay goings-on as the mostly foreign-born prostitutes in the windows and doorways of de Wallen, Amsterdam's red-light district.

  "Amsterdam is so over," my Dutch friend said. "The new scene for gays in Europe is Madrid."

  "Madrid," I repeated, the way I do. I was an old bi guy in his sixties, living in Vermont. What did I know about the new scene for gays in Europe? (What did I know about any frigging scene?) IT WAS ON SENOR Bovary's recommendation that I stayed at the Santo Mauro in Madrid; it was a pretty, quiet hotel on the Zurbano--a narrow, tree-lined street (a residential but boring-looking neighborhood) "within walking distance of Chueca." Well, it was a long walk to Chueca, "the gay district of Madrid"--as Senor Bovary described Chueca in his email to me. Bovary's typed letter, which was mailed to Uncle Bob at Favorite River's Office of Alumni Affairs, had not included a return address--just an email address and Senor Bovary's cell-phone number.

  The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father's enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

  "I believe that the Bovary character is your dad's age, Billy," Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940 Owl, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Senor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same '40 Owl that Franny Dean had wanted to be a "performer," but performing what?) From the emails of "the Bovary character," as the Racquet Man had called my dad's lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Senor Bovary's idea, and I was following his instructions. "Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I'll meet you for dinner on your second night. We'll take a stroll; we'll end up in Chueca, and I'll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious," Senor Bovary's email said.

  What club? I wondered.

  "Franny wasn't a bad guy, Billy," Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. "He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean." Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was that sort of club. But what kind of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there's more than one kind of gay club.) In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry
heat, however--very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence--not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.

  There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don't notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye--a noite means "the night" in Portuguese--and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.

  The streets between the Gran Via and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders' gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and--on the corner of the Calle de Hernan Cortes--there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There's one thing I'm glad to be too old for: thongs.) Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at my hotel before I went to bed. I was too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Ines Cafe on Hortaleza; there were mostly men in couples, and a woman who was alone. She was wearing flip-flops and a halter top; she had an angular face and looked very sad, resting her mouth on one hand. I almost tried to pick her up. I remember wondering if, in Spain, the women were very thin until they suddenly became fat. I was noticing a certain type of man--skinny in a tank top, but with a small and helpless-looking potbelly.

  I had a cafe con leche as late as 5 P.M.--very unlike me, too late in the day for me to drink coffee, but I was trying to stay awake. I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina--Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.") The English novel, in English, was well represented there, but there was nothing contemporary--not even from the twentieth century. I browsed the fiction section for a while. Diagonally across the street, on the corner of San Gregorio, was what looked like a popular bar--the Angel Sierra. The siesta must have been over by the time I left the bookstore, because that bar was beginning to get crowded.