John Irving - In One Person

Elaine now lay on the bed with her forehead almost touching the windowsill, where the draft of cold air from the cracked-open window was the coldest. “When I was kissing you, and holding your penis, and you were touching my breasts, I was thinking of Kittredge—that bastard,” Elaine told me.

“I know—it’s okay,” I said to her. I knew what a good and truthful friend she was, but—even so—I couldn’t tell her that I’d been thinking of Miss Frost.

“No, it’s not okay,” Elaine said; she was crying.

Elaine was lying on her side at the foot of her bed, facing the window, and I stretched out behind her with my chest flush to her back; I could kiss the back of her neck that way, and (with one hand) I could manage to touch her breasts under her untucked shirt. The heartbeat in my penis was still pounding away. Through her jeans, through my corduroy pants, I doubted that Elaine could detect the pulse in my penis, though I had pressed myself against her and she’d thrust her small bum into me.

Elaine had a boy’s nonexistent bottom, and no hips to speak of; she was wearing a pair of boy’s dungarees (to go with her boy’s shirt), and I suddenly thought, as I kissed her neck and her damp hair, that Elaine actually smelled like a boy, too. After all, she’d been sweating; she wore no perfume, no makeup of any kind, not even lipstick, and here I was rubbing myself against her boyish bum.

“You still have a hard-on, don’t you?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t stop rubbing against her, but Elaine was moving her hips; she was rubbing against me, too.

“It’s okay—what you’re doing,” Elaine told me.

“No, it’s not okay,” I said, but I lacked the conviction I’d heard in Elaine’s voice—when, only a moment ago, she’d said the same thing to me. (What I meant, of course, was that I was thinking of Kittredge, too.)

Miss Frost was a big woman; she was broad-shouldered, and her hips were wide. Miss Frost did not have a young boy’s bum; by no stretch of my imagination was I thinking of Miss Frost while I rubbed myself against Elaine Hadley, who was quietly crying.

“No, really, it’s okay—I like it, too,” Elaine was saying softly, when we both heard Kittredge calling from the quad.

“My sweet Naples—is that your blue light burning?” Kittredge called. I felt Elaine’s body stiffen. There were other boys’ voices in the quadrangle—in the area of Tilley, the jock dorm—but only Kittredge’s voice stood out distinctly.

“I told you he wouldn’t watch the end of a Western—that bastard,” Elaine whispered to me.

“Oh, Naples—is your blue light a beacon for me ?” Kittredge called. “Are you still a maid, Naples, or a maid no more?” he called out. (I would realize, one day, that Kittredge was mock-Shakespearean—a kind of faux Shakespeare—to his core.)

Elaine was sobbing when she reached to turn off her lamp with the dark-blue shade. When she thrust herself back into me, her sobs were louder; she was grunting as she rubbed against me. Her sobs and grunts were strangely commingled, not unlike the yelps a dog makes when it’s dreaming.

“Don’t let him get to you, Elaine—he’s such an asshole,” I whispered in her ear.

“Shhh!” she hushed me. “No actual talking,” she said breathlessly, between her half-strangled cries.

“Is that you, Naples?” Kittredge called to her. “Lights out so soon? To bed alone, alas!”

My dress shirt had come untucked from my corduroys; it must have been the incessant rubbing. The shirt was blue—the same color as Kittredge’s boxers, I was thinking. Elaine began to moan. “Keep doing it! Do it harder !” she moaned. “Yes! Like that —God, don’t stop!” she cried loudly.

I could see her breath in that cold razor of air from the open window; I was grinding against her for what seemed the longest time, before I realized what I was saying. “Like that?” I kept asking her. “Like that ?” (No actual talking, as Elaine had requested, but our voices were being broadcast to the quadrangle of dorms—all the way to Tilley and the gym, where the returning team buses were still unloading.)

The flickering light from the movie projector had stopped; the windows of the basketball court were in darkness. The Western was over; the gun smoke from the shoot-out had drifted away—like the Favorite River boys, drifting back to their dormitories, but not Kittredge.

“Cut it out, Naples!” Kittredge called. “Are you there, too, Nymph?” he called to me.

Elaine had begun a prolonged, orgasmic scream. She would say later: “More like childbirth than orgasm, or so I imagine—I’m never having any children. Have you seen the size of babies’ heads ?” she asked me.

Her caterwauling may have sounded like an orgasm to Kittredge. Elaine and I were still straightening out the bedcovers when we heard the knock on the door from the dormitory hall.

“God, where’s my bra?” Elaine asked; she couldn’t find it in the bedcovers, but she wouldn’t have had time to put it on, anyway. (She had to answer the door.)

“It’s him, ” I warned her.

“Of course it is,” she said. She went into the living room of the apartment; she looked at herself in the long mirror, in the foyer, before opening the door.

I found her bra on the bed; it had been lost in the crazy patterns of the rumpled quilt, but I quickly stuffed it into my Jockey briefs. My erection had completely subsided; there was more room for Elaine’s little bra in my briefs than there had been for my hard-on.

“I wanted to be sure you were all right,” I heard Kittredge saying to Elaine. “I was afraid there was a fire, or something.”

“There was a fire, all right, but I’m fine,” Elaine told him.

I came out of Elaine’s bedroom. She’d not invited Kittredge into the apartment; he stood in the doorway to the dorm. Some of the Bancroft boys scurried by in the hall, peering into the foyer.

“So you’re here, too, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me.

I saw that he had a fresh mat burn on one cheek, but the mat burn made him no less cocksure than before.

“I suppose you won your match,” I said to him.

“That’s right, Nymph,” he said, but he kept looking at Elaine. Because her shirt was white, you could see her nipples through the fabric, and the darker rings around her nipples—those unpronounceable areolae—looked like wine stains on her fair skin.

“This doesn’t look good, Naples. Where’s your bra?” Kittredge asked her.

Elaine smiled at me. “Did you find it?” she asked me.

“I didn’t really look all that hard for it,” I lied.

“You should think about your reputation, Naples,” Kittredge told her. This was a new tack for him; it caught both Elaine and me off-guard.

“There’s nothing wrong with my reputation,” Elaine said defensively.

“You should think about her reputation, too, Nymph,” Kittredge told me. “A girl can’t get her reputation back—if you know what I mean.”

“I didn’t know you were such a prude, ” Elaine said to him, but I could tell that the reputation word—or everything Kittredge had insinuated about it—truly upset her.

“I’m not a prude, Naples,” he said, smiling at her. It was a smile you give a girl when you’re alone with her; I could see that she’d allowed him to get to her.

“I was just faking it, Kittredge!” she yelled at him. “I was just acting —we both were!” she shouted.

“It didn’t sound like acting—not entirely,” he said to her. “You have to be careful who you pretend to be, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me, but he kept looking at Elaine as if he were alone with her.