John Irving - In One Person

“Uh, Bill—is this the tub where your grandfather—”

“Yes, it is,” I quickly told him. “Why?”

Larry had looked for bloodstains, but the bathroom and the tub were spotlessly clean. (Elmira must have scrubbed her ass off in there!) Yet Larry had found something he wanted to show me. There was a chip in the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

“Was that chip always there?” Larry asked me.

“Yes, always—this bathtub was chipped when I was a small child,” I lied.

“So you say, Bill—so you say, ” Larry said suspiciously.

We both knew how the bathtub had been chipped. The bullet from the .30-30 must have passed through Grandpa Harry’s head while he had been curled up on his side. The bullet had chipped the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

“When you’re auctioning off the old furniture,” I told Richard and Martha privately, “please get rid of that bathtub.”

I didn’t have to specify which bathtub.

“You’ll never live in this terrible town, Billy. You’re crazy even to imagine you might,” Elaine said. It was the night after our Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps we were lying awake in bed because we’d eaten too much, and we couldn’t fall asleep, or maybe we were listening for ghosts.

“When we used to live here, in this terrible town—when we were in those Shakespeare plays—was there ever, in that time at Favorite River, a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” I asked Elaine. I could feel her imagining him, as I was, in the darkness—talk about listening for ghosts !

“There was only one boy who had the balls for it, Billy,” Elaine answered me, “but he wouldn’t have been right for the part.”

“Why not?” I asked her. I knew she meant Kittredge; he was pretty enough—he had the balls, all right.

“Juliet is nothing if she’s not sincere, ” Elaine said. “Kittredge would have looked the part, of course, but he would have hammed it up, somehow—Kittredge didn’t do sincere, Billy,” Elaine said.

No, he didn’t, I thought. Kittredge could have been anyone—he could look the part in any role. But Kittredge was never sincere; he was forever concealed—he was always just playing a part.

AT THAT THANKSGIVING DINNER, there was both awkwardness and comedy. In the latter category, the two Korean girls managed to give the Japanese boy the idea that we were eating a peacock. (I don’t know how the girls conveyed the peacock idea to the lonely-looking boy, or why Fumi—the boy—was so stricken at the thought of eating a peacock.)

“No, no—it’s a turkey, ” Mrs. Hadley said to Fumi, as if he were having a pronunciation problem.

Since I’d grown up in that River Street house, I found the encyclopedia and showed Fumi what a turkey looked like. “ Not a peacock,” I said. The Korean girls, Su Min and Dong Hee, were whispering in Korean; they were also giggling.

Later, after a lot of wine, it was the vivacious, chatty mother of two—now Gerry’s girlfriend—who gave a toast to our extended family for welcoming her to such an “intimate” holiday occasion. It was doubtless the wine, in combination with the intimate word, that compelled Helena to deliver an impromptu address on the subject of her vagina—or perhaps she’d meant for her remarks to praise all vaginas. “I want to thank you for having me,” Helena had begun. Then she got sidetracked. “I used to be someone who hated my vagina, but now I love it,” she said. She seemed, almost immediately, to think better of her comments, because she quickly said, “Of course, I love Gerry’s vagina—that goes without saying, I guess!—but it’s because of Gerry that I also love my vagina, and I used to just hate it”; she was standing, a bit unsteadily, with her glass raised. “Thank you for having me,” she repeated, sitting down.

I’m guessing that Uncle Bob had probably heard more toasts than anyone else at the dinner table—given all the glad-handing he did for Alumni Affairs, those back-slapping dinner parties with drunken Favorite River alums—but even Uncle Bob was rendered speechless by Helena’s toast to at least two vaginas.

I looked at Larry, who I know was bursting with something to say; in an entirely different way from Tom Atkins—who had routinely overreacted to the vagina word, or to even the passing thought of a vagina—Larry could be counted on for a vagina reaction. “Don’t,” I said quietly to him, across the dinner table, because I could always tell when Larry was struggling to restrain himself; his eyes opened very wide and his nostrils flared.

But now it was the Korean girls who’d failed to understand. “A what ?” Dong Hee had said.

“She hates, now loves, her what ?” Su Min asked.

It was Fumi’s turn to snicker; the Japanese boy had put the peacock-turkey misunderstanding behind him—the lonely-looking young man obviously knew what a vagina was.

“You know, a vagina,” Elaine said softly to the Korean girls, but Su Min and Dong Hee had never heard the word—and no one at the dinner table knew the Korean for it.

“My goodness—it’s where babies come from,” Mrs. Hadley tried to explain, but she looked suddenly stricken (perhaps recalling Elaine’s abortions).

“It’s where everything happens—you know, down there,” Elaine said to the Korean girls, but Elaine didn’t do anything when she said “down there”; she didn’t point or gesture, or indicate anything specifically.

“Well, it’s not where everything happens—I beg to differ,” Larry said, smiling; I knew he was just getting started.

“Oh, I’m so sorry—I’ve had too much to drink, and I forgot there were young people here!” Helena blurted out.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” Uncle Bob told Gerry’s new girlfriend; I could tell Bob liked Helena, who was not at all similar to a long list of Gerry’s previous girlfriends. “These kids are from another country, another culture; the things we talk about in this country are not necessarily topics for conversation in Korea, ” the Racquet Man painfully explained.

“Oh, crap!” Gerry cried. “Just try another fucking word !” Gerry turned to Su Min and Dong Hee, who were still very much in the dark as far as the vagina word was concerned. “It’s a twat, a snatch, a quim, a pussy, a muff, a honeypot—it’s a cunt, for Christ’s sake!” Gerry cried, the cunt word making Elaine (and even Larry) flinch.

“They get it, Gerry—please,” Uncle Bob said.

Indeed, the Korean girls had turned the color of a clean sheet of unlined paper; the Japanese kid had kept up, for the most part, although both “muff” and “honeypot” had surprised him.

“Is there a picture of it somewhere, Bill—if not in the encyclopedia?” Larry asked mischievously.

“Before I forget it, Bill,” Richard Abbott interjected—I could tell Richard was tactfully trying to drop the vagina subject—“what about the Mossberg?”

“The what ?” Fumi asked, in a frightened voice; if the muff and honeypot vulgarisms for vagina had thrown him, the Japanese boy had never heard the Mossberg word before.

“What about it?” I asked Richard.

“Shall we auction it off with the furniture, Bill? You don’t want to keep that old carbine, do you?”

“I’ll hang on to the Mossberg, Richard,” I told him. “I’ll keep the ammunition, too—if I ever live here, it makes sense to have a varmint gun around.”

“You’re in town, Billy,” Uncle Bob pointed out, about the River Street house. “You’re not supposed to shoot in town—not even varmints.”