John Irving - In One Person

I was remembering Amanda— that’s where I thought this match-making enterprise of Martha Hadley’s (and Richard’s) was headed. But, no—not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren’t trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow—one bad fall, a broken hip—and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn’t have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of 2011 ! I couldn’t imagine being that young again!)

“We want to introduce you to a new student, Bill,” Richard said; he was rather indignant at the very idea of him (or Martha) finding me a likely date.

“A new freshman, Billy—someone special,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Someone with pronunciation problems, you mean?” I asked Martha Hadley.

“We’re not trying to fix you up with a teacher, Bill. We think you should be a teacher,” Richard said.

“We want you to meet one of the new LGBT kids, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley told me.

“Sure—why not?” I said. “I don’t know about being a teacher, but I’ll meet the kid. Boy or girl?” I remember asking Martha Hadley and Richard. They just looked at each other.

“Ah, well—” Richard started to say, but Mrs. Hadley interrupted him.

Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. “Boy or girl, Billy,” she said. “Well, that’s the question. That’s why we want you to meet him, or her—that’s the question.”

“Oh,” I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.

THE RACQUET MAN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement surgeries, and a fall downstairs when he was supposed to be healing from the second surgery. “I’m starting to feel like an old fella, Billy,” Bob told me when I went to visit him in the Facility in the autumn of 2007—the same September Mrs. Hadley and Richard introduced me to the LGBT kid, the one who would change my life.

Uncle Bob was recovering from pneumonia—the result of being bedridden for a period of time after he fell. From the AIDS epidemic, I still had a vivid memory of that pneumonia—the one so many people never recovered from. I was happy to see Bob up and about, but he’d decided he was staying at the Facility.

“I gotta let these folks look after me, Billy,” the Racquet Man said. I understood how he felt; Muriel had been gone for almost thirty years, and Gerry, who was sixty-eight, had just started living with a new girlfriend in California.

“Vagina Lady,” which had been Elaine’s name for Helena, was long gone. No one had met Gerry’s new girlfriend, but Gerry had written me about her. She was “only” my age, Gerry told me—as if the girl were under the age of consent.

“The next thing you know, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me, “they’ll start legalizing same-sex marriage all over the place, and Gerry will be marrying her next new girlfriend. If I stay put in the Facility, Gerry will have to get married in Vermont !” the Racquet Man exclaimed, as if the very idea of that ever happening was beyond credibility.

Thus assured that my ninety-year-old uncle Bob was safe at the Facility, I made my way to Noah Adams Hall, which was the building for English and foreign-language studies at Favorite River; I was meeting the “special” new student in Richard’s ground-floor office, which was adjacent to Richard’s classroom. Mrs. Hadley was also meeting us there.

To my horror, Richard’s office hadn’t changed; it was awful. There was a fake-leather couch that smelled worse than any dog bed you’ve ever smelled; there were three or four straight-backed wooden chairs, of the kind with those arms that have a flat mini-desk for writing. There was Richard’s desk, which was always a mountain of upheaval; a pile of opened books and loose papers obscured the writing surface. Richard’s desk chair was on casters, so that Richard could slide all around his office in a seated position—which, to the students’ general amusement, Richard did.

What had changed at Favorite River, since my days at the formerly all-boys’ school, was not only the girls—it was the dress code. If there was one in 2007, I couldn’t tell you what it was; coats and ties were no longer required. There was some vague rule against “torn” jeans—this meant jeans that were tattered or slashed. There was a rule that you couldn’t come to the dining hall in your pajamas, and another one, which was always being protested, that concerned the girls’ bare midriffs—how much midriff could be bare was the issue. Oh, and so-called plumbers’ cracks were deemed offensive—this was most offensive, I was told, when the “cracks” belonged to the boys. Both the girls’ bare midriffs and the boys’ plumbers’ cracks were hotly debated rules, which were constantly under revision in infinitesimal ways. They were sexually discriminatory rules, the students said; girls’ midriffs and boys’ cracks were being singled out as “bad.”

Here I’d been expecting Martha and Richard’s “special” student to be some cutting-edge hermaphrodite—a kind of alluring-to-everyone mélange of reproductive organs, a he or a she as sexually beguiling as the mythological combination of a nymph and a satyr in a Fellini film—but there in Richard’s office, slouched on that dog bed of a couch, was a sloppily dressed, slightly overweight boy with a brightly inflamed pimple on his neck and only the spottiest evidence of a prepubescent beard. That zit was almost as angry-looking as the boy himself. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed—either in resentment or due to the effort he was making to scrutinize me more closely.

“Hi, I’m Bill Abbott,” I said to the boy.

“This is George—” Mrs. Hadley started to say.

“Georgia,” the boy quickly corrected her. “I’m Georgia Montgomery—the kids call me Gee.”

“Gee,” I repeated.

“Gee will do for now,” the boy said, “but I’m going to be Georgia. This isn’t my body,” he said angrily. “I’m not what you see. I’m becoming someone else.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I came to this school because you went here,” the boy told me.

“Gee was in school in California,” Richard started to explain.

“I thought there might be other transgender kids here,” Gee told me, “but there aren’t—nobody who’s out, anyway.”

“His parents—” Mrs. Hadley tried to tell me.

“ Her parents,” Gee corrected Martha.

“Gee’s parents are very liberal, ” Martha said to me. “They support you, don’t they?” Mrs. Hadley asked the boy—or the girl-in-progress, if that’s who he or she was.

“My parents are liberal, and they do support me,” Gee said, “but my parents are also afraid of me—they say ‘yes’ to everything, like my coming all the way to Vermont.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’ve read all your books,” Gee told me. “You’re pretty angry, aren’t you? You’re pretty pessimistic, anyway. You don’t see all the sexual intolerance ending anytime soon, do you?” the boy asked me.

“I write fiction, ” I cautioned him. “I’m not necessarily as pessimistic about real life as I am when I make up a story.”

“You seem pretty angry,” the boy insisted.