In One Person (35 page)

“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
!

M
RS
. H
ADLEY 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.”