John Irving - In One Person

“We should leave these two alone, Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Yes, yes—you’re on your own, Bill,” Richard said, patting me on the back. “Ask Bill to tell you about a transsexual he knew, Gee,” Richard said to the girl-in-progress, as he was leaving.

“Transgender,” Gee corrected Richard.

“Not to me,” I told the kid. “I know the language changes; I know I’m an old man, and out of date. But the person I knew was a transsexual to me. At that time, that’s who she was. I say ‘transsexual.’ If you want to hear the story, you’ll just have to get used to that. Don’t correct my language,” I told the kid. He just sat there on that smelly couch, staring at me. “I’m a liberal, too,” I told him, “but I don’t say ‘yes’ to everything.”

“We’re reading The Tempest in Richard’s class,” Gee said—apropos of nothing, or so I thought. “It’s too bad we can’t put it onstage,” the boy added, “but Richard has assigned us parts to read in class. I’m Caliban—I’m the monster, naturally.”

“I was Ariel once,” I told him. “I saw my grandfather do Caliban onstage; he played Caliban as a woman, ” I said to the girl-in-progress.

“Really?” the kid asked me; he smiled for the first time, and I could suddenly see it. He had a pretty girl’s smile; it was hidden in the boy’s unformed face, and further concealed by his sloppy boy’s body, but I could see the her in him. “Tell me about the transgender you knew,” the kid told me.

“Transsexual,” I said.

“Okay—please tell me about her,” Gee asked me.

“It’s a long story, Gee—I was in love with her,” I told him—I told her, I should say.

“Okay,” she repeated.

Later that day, we went together to the dining hall. The kid was only fourteen, and she was famished. “You see that jock over there?” Gee asked me; I couldn’t see which jock Gee meant, because there was a whole table of them—football players, from the look of them. I just nodded.

“He calls me Tampon, or sometimes just George—not Gee. Needless to say, never Georgia,” the kid said, smiling.

“Tampon is pretty terrible,” I told the girl.

“Actually, I prefer it to George,” Gee told me. “You know, Mr. A., you could probably direct The Tempest, couldn’t you—if you wanted to? That way, we could put Shakespeare onstage.”

No one had ever called me Mr. A.; I must have liked it. I’d already decided that if Gee wanted to be a girl this badly, she had to be one. I wanted to direct The Tempest, too.

“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.