John Irving - In One Person

Richard Abbott told me and the cast of The Tempest that Ariel’s gender was “polymorphous—more a matter of habiliment than anything organic.” This later led Richard to conclude that the gender of the character I played was “mutable,” and I was further confused regarding my (and Ariel’s) sexual orientation.

Yet, when I asked Richard if he meant anything at all resembling the “ polymorphous-perverse phase” of the “bugs in amber” bullshit Dr. Grau had gone on (and on) about in morning meeting, Richard adamantly denied there was any connection.

“No one listens to old Grau, Bill,” Richard had told me. “Don’t you listen to him, either.”

Wise advice—but while it was possible not to heed what Dr. Grau said, we boys were forced to hear him. And, lying next to Elaine, with my hand on her bare breast, and our tongues once more entangled in a way that made us imagine what the next most erotic thing to do with each other was, I became aware of my growing erection.

With our mouths still pressed together, Elaine managed to ask: “Are you getting a hard-on yet ?” Yes, I was, and I’d noted Elaine’s impatience in her overloud utterance of the yet word, but my confusion was such that I was unsure what had initiated my erection.

Yes, the French kissing was exciting, and (to this day) the touch of a woman’s bare breasts is not something I am indifferent to; yet I believe my hard-on began when I imagined wearing Elaine’s padded bra. At that moment, wasn’t I exhibiting the “infantile sexual tendencies” Dr. Grau had warned us boys about?

But all I said to Elaine, in the midst of our darting tongues, was a strangled-sounding “Yes!”

This time, when Elaine broke free from me, she bit my lower lip in the hurried-up process. “You actually have a boner,” Elaine said to me, seriously.

“Yes, I actually do,” I admitted. I felt my lower lip, to be sure I wasn’t bleeding. (I was looking all around for her bra.)

“Oh, God—I don’t want to see it!” Elaine cried. This was sexually confusing to me, too. I hadn’t suggested showing my hard-on to her! I didn’t want her to see it. In fact, I would have been embarrassed for her to see it; I thought it would probably disappoint her, or make her laugh (or throw up).

“Maybe I could just touch it,” Elaine considered, more thoughtfully. “I don’t mean your bare boner!” she quickly added. “Maybe I could just feel it—I mean, through your clothes.”

“Sure—why not?” I said, as casually as I could, though I would wonder (for years) if anyone else ever went through a sexual initiation of such a highly negotiated kind.

The boys at Favorite River Academy were not permitted to wear jeans; dungarees, as we called them then, were not allowed in class or in the dining hall, where we were obliged to wear coats and ties. Most boys wore khakis, or—in the winter months—flannel trousers or corduroys. I was wearing a baggy pair of corduroys on this January Saturday night. It was a comfortable pair of pants to have a boner in, but I was also wearing Jockey briefs, and they were increasingly uncomfortable. Maybe it was the only men’s underwear you could buy in Vermont in 1960—white Jockey briefs. (I don’t know; at the time, my mom still bought all my clothes.)

I’d seen Kittredge’s underwear, at the gym—blue cotton boxers, the color of a blue dress shirt. Maybe his French mother had bought them in Paris, or in New York. “That woman has to be his mother,” Elaine had said. “She could be Kittredge, if she didn’t have those breasts—that woman would know where to buy boxers like that.” And Kittredge’s blue boxers were pressed; this wasn’t an affectation of Kittredge’s, because the school laundry pressed everything—not just your trousers and dress shirts, but even your underwear and your stupid socks. (This was talked about with a derision almost equal to that assigned to the advice of Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau.)

Notwithstanding this social history, my first erection inspired by Elaine Hadley (or by her bra) was stiffening in a tight-fitting pair of Jockey briefs, which were threatening to cut off circulation to my “inspired” hard-on. Elaine—with an aggressiveness I was unprepared for—suddenly put her hand on those very genitals that Dr. Grau had told us we’d “not yet identified” as our own goddamn sexual organs! There was no question in my mind concerning what and where my “sole or principal sexual organs” were, and when Elaine grabbed hold of them, I flinched.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” Elaine cried, momentarily deafening the nearer of my ears. “I can’t imagine what having one of those is like!”

This was sexually confusing, too. Did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine what having a penis inside her was like, or did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine being a boy and having her own penis? I didn’t ask. I was relieved that she’d released my balls from her not inconsiderable grasp, but Elaine held fast to my penis, and I continued to fondle her breasts. Had we resumed the French kissing where we’d left off, there’s no telling what the aforementioned “gathering momentum” might have led to, but in fact we’d just begun to kiss again—tentatively, at first, with only the tips of our tongues making contact. I watched Elaine close her eyes, and I closed mine.

Thus I discovered that it was possible to be holding Elaine Hadley’s breast while I imagined I was fondling an equally permissive Miss Frost. (Miss Frost’s breasts would only be slightly bigger than Elaine’s, I had long imagined.) With my eyes closed, I could even conceive that the fierce grip of Elaine’s small hand on my penis was in truth Miss Frost’s far bigger hand—in which case, Miss Frost must have been restraining herself. And, as the French kissing quickened—both Elaine and I were soon breathless—I fantasized that it was Miss Frost’s long tongue thrusting against mine, and that we were entwined on the brass bed in her basement hideaway in the First Sister Public Library.

When the diesel fumes from the first of the returning team buses reached the cracked-open window of Elaine’s fifth-floor room, I managed to think I was smelling the oil-burning furnace next to Miss Frost’s former coal bin of a bedroom. When I opened my eyes, I half expected to be face-to-face with Miss Frost, but there instead was my friend Elaine Hadley, with her eyes tightly closed.

All the time I’d been imagining Miss Frost, it had not occurred to me that Elaine might have been imagining, too. Not surprisingly, the name on her lips, which she somehow managed to say in my mouth, was “Kittredge!” (Elaine had correctly identified the diesel fumes from the returning team bus; she was wondering if it was the wrestling-team bus, because she’d been imagining Kittredge while I was imagining Miss Frost.)

Elaine’s eyes were wide open now. I must have looked as guilty as she did. There was a pulse in my penis; if I could feel it throbbing, I knew that Elaine could feel it, too.

“Your heart’s beating, Billy,” she said.

“That’s not my heart,” I told her.

“Yes, it is—your heart is beating in your penis,” Elaine said. “Do all boys’ hearts beat there?”

“I can’t speak for other boys,” I answered. But she’d let go of my penis, and had rolled away from me.

There was more than one parked bus at the gym with its diesel engine running; the flickering light from the movie projector was still blinking from the basketball court, and the meaningless shouts and whoops of the returning jocks echoed in the dormitory quadrangle—the wrestlers were among them, maybe, or maybe not.