John Irving - In One Person

Lorna laughed. “I’ll probably tell Donna that you and Lilly got in trouble, too,” Lorna told me. “Donna loves it when I say, ‘Lilly never knew a cock she didn’t like, big or little’—that cracks her up.”

Lilly laughed, and I did, too, but the flirting was finished. It had all been for Donna. I kissed Donna’s two friends good-bye at the Sherbourne subway station, their cheeks perfectly soft and smooth, with no hint of a beard—absolutely nothing you could feel against your face, and not the slightest shadow on their pretty faces. I still have dreams about those two.

I was thinking, as I kissed them good-bye, of what Elaine told me Mrs. Kittredge had said, when Elaine was traveling in Europe with Kittredge’s mother. (This was what Mrs. Kittredge really said—not the story Elaine first told me.)

“I don’t know what your son wants,” Elaine had told Kittredge’s mother. “I just know he always wants something .”

“I’ll tell you what he wants—even more than he wants to fuck us,” Mrs. Kittredge said. “He wants to be one of us, Elaine. He doesn’t want to be a boy or a man; it doesn’t matter to him that he’s finally so good at being a boy or a man. He never wanted to be a boy or a man in the first place!”

But if Kittredge was a woman now—if he was like Donna had been, or like Donna’s two very “passable” friends—and if Kittredge had AIDS and was dying somewhere, what if they’d had to stop giving Kittredge the estrogens? Kittredge had a very heavy beard; I could still feel, after more than thirty years, how heavy his beard was. I had so often, and for so long, imagined Kittredge’s beard scratching against my face.

Do you remember what he said to me, about transsexuals? “I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge had whispered in my ear, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along.” (He’d been talking about the transvestites he’d seen in Paris.) “I think, if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris,” Kittredge had said to me. “But you, Nymph—you’ve already done it!” Kittredge had cried.

Elaine and I had seen Kittredge’s single room at Favorite River Academy, most memorably (to me) the photograph of Kittredge and his mother that was taken after a wrestling match. What Elaine and I had noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body.

The truth was, Kittredge’s face had worked on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes. Elaine had convinced me that Kittredge must have been the one who switched the faces in the photograph; Mrs. Kittredge couldn’t have done it. “That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor,” Elaine had said, in her authoritarian way.

I was back home from Toronto, having said good-bye to Donna. Lavender would never smell the same to me again, and you can imagine what an anticlimax it would be when Uncle Bob called me in my River Street house with the latest news of a classmate’s death.

“You’ve lost another classmate, Billy—not your favorite person, if memory serves,” the Racquet Man said. As vague as I am concerning when I heard the news about Donna, I can tell you exactly when it was that Uncle Bob called me with the news about Kittredge.

I’d just celebrated my fifty-third birthday. It was March 1995; there was still a lot of snow on the ground in First Sister, with nothing but mud season to look forward to.

Elaine and I had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico; she’d been looking at houses to rent in Playa del Carmen. I would have happily gone to Mexico with her, but she was having a boyfriend problem: Her boyfriend was a tight-assed turd who didn’t want Elaine to go anywhere with me.

“Didn’t you tell him we don’t do it?” I asked her.

“Yes, but I also told him that we used to do it—or that we tried to,” Elaine said, revising herself.

“Why did you tell him that?” I asked her.

“I’m trying out a new honesty policy,” Elaine answered. “I’m not making up so many stories, or I’m trying not to.”

“How is this policy working out with your fiction writing?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I can go to Mexico with you, Billy—not right now,” was all she’d said.

I’d had a recent boyfriend problem of my own, but when I dumped the boyfriend, I had rather soon developed a girlfriend problem. She was a first-year faculty member at Favorite River, a young English teacher. Mrs. Hadley and Richard had introduced us; they’d invited me to dinner, and there was Amanda. When I first saw her, I thought she was one of Richard’s students—she looked that young to me. But she was an anxious young woman in her late twenties.

“I’m almost thirty,” Amanda was always saying, as if she was anxious that she was too young-looking; therefore, saying she would soon be thirty made her seem older.

When we started sleeping together, Amanda was anxious about where we did it. She had a faculty apartment in one of the girls’ dorms at Favorite River; when I spent the night with her there, the girls in the dormitory knew about it. But, most nights, Amanda had dorm duty—she couldn’t stay with me in my house on River Street. The way it was working out, I wasn’t sleeping with Amanda nearly enough—that was the developing problem. And then, of course, there was the bi issue: She’d read all my novels, she said she loved my writing, but that I was a bi guy made her anxious, too.

“I just can’t believe you’re fifty- three !” Amanda kept saying, which confused me. I couldn’t tell if she meant I seemed so much younger than I was, or that she was appalled at herself for dating an old bi guy in his fifties.

Martha Hadley, who was seventy-five, had retired, but she still met with individual students who had “special needs”—pronunciation problems included. Mrs. Hadley had told me that Amanda suffered from pronunciation problems. “That wasn’t why you introduced us, was it?” I asked Martha.

“It wasn’t my idea, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “It was Richard’s idea to introduce you to Amanda, because she is such a fan of your writing . I never thought it was a good idea—she’s way too young for you, and she’s anxious about everything. I can only imagine that, because you are bi —well, that’s got to keep Amanda awake at night. She can’t pronounce the word bisexual !”

“Oh.”

That’s what was going on in my life when Uncle Bob called me about Kittredge. That’s why I said, half seriously, I had “nothing but mud season to look forward to”—nothing except my writing. (Moving to Vermont had been good for my writing.)

The account of Kittredge’s death had been submitted to the Office of Alumni Affairs by Mrs. Kittredge.

“Do you mean he had a wife, or do you mean his mother?” I asked Uncle Bob.

“Kittredge had a wife, Billy, but we heard from the mother.”

“Jesus—how old would Mrs . Kittredge be?” I asked Bob.

“She’s only seventy-two,” my uncle answered; Uncle Bob was seventy-eight, and he sounded a little insulted by my question. Elaine had told me that Mrs. Kittredge had only been eighteen when Kittredge was born.

According to Bob—that is, according to Mrs. Kittredge—my former heartthrob and tormentor had died in Zurich, Switzerland, “of natural causes.”

“Bullshit, Bob,” I said. “Kittredge was only a year older than I am—he was fifty-four. What ‘natural causes’ can kill you when you’re fifty-fucking-four?”