John Irving - In One Person

“Nineteen thirty-one,” I answered. Her fingers had strayed from my lips; she was touching the collar of my shirt, almost as if there were something about a boy’s button-down dress shirt that had affected her—a sentimental attachment, maybe.

“You’re so close,” Miss Frost said.

“Close to what ?” I asked her.

“Just close,” she said. “We haven’t much time.”

“Is it time to close the library?” I asked her, but Miss Frost only smiled; then, as if giving the matter more thought, she glanced at her watch.

“Well, what harm is there in closing a little early tonight?” she said suddenly.

“Sure—why not?” I said. “There’s no one here but us. I don’t think Atkins is coming back.”

“Poor Tom,” Miss Frost said. “He doesn’t have a crush on me, William—Tom Atkins has a crush on you !”

The second she said so, I knew it was true. “Poor Tom,” which would become how I thought of Atkins, probably sensed I had a crush on Miss Frost; he must have been jealous of her.

“Poor Tom is just spying on me, and you,” Miss Frost told me. “And what does Kittredge want to talk to you about?” she suddenly asked me.

“Oh, that’s nothing—that’s just a German thing. I help Kittredge with his German,” I explained.

“Tom Atkins would be a safer choice for you than Jacques Kittredge, William,” Miss Frost said. I knew this was true, too, though I didn’t find Atkins attractive—except in the way that someone who adores you can become a little attractive to you, over time. (But that almost never works out, does it?)

Yet, when I began to tell Miss Frost that I wasn’t really attracted to Atkins—that not all boys were attractive to me, just a very few boys, actually—well, this time she put her lips to mine. She simply kissed me. It was a fairly firm kiss, moderately aggressive; there was only one assertive thrust, a single dart of her warm tongue. Believe me: I’ll soon be seventy; I’ve had a long lifetime of kisses, and this one was more confident than any man’s handshake.

“I know, I know,” she murmured against my lips. “We have so little time—let’s not talk about poor Tom.”

“Oh.”

I followed her into the foyer, where I was still thinking that her concern with “time” had only to do with the closing time of the library, but Miss Frost said: “I presume that check-in time for seniors is still ten o’clock, William—except on a Saturday night, when I’m guessing it’s still eleven. Nothing ever changes at that awful school, does it?”

I was impressed that Miss Frost even knew about check-in time at Favorite River Academy—not to mention that she was exactly right about it.

I watched her lock the door to the library and turn off the outdoor light; she left the dim light in the foyer on, while she went about the main library, killing the other lights. I had completely forgotten that I’d asked her advice—on the subject of a book about my having a crush on Kittredge, and “trying not to”—when Miss Frost handed me a slender novel. It was only about forty-five pages longer than King Lear, which happened to be the story I’d read most recently.

It was a novel by James Baldwin called Giovanni’s Room —the title of which I could barely read, because Miss Frost had extinguished all the lights in the main library. There was only the light from the dimly lit foyer—scarcely sufficient for Miss Frost and me to see our way to the basement stairs.

On the dark stairs, lit only by what scant light followed us from the foyer of the library—and a dull glowing ahead of us, which beckoned us to Miss Frost’s cubicle, partitioned off from the furnace room—I suddenly remembered that there was another novel I wanted the confident librarian’s advice about.

The name Al was on my lips, but I could not bring myself to say it. I said, instead: “Miss Frost, what can you tell me about Madame Bovary ? Do you think I would like it?”

“When you’re older, William, I think you’ll love it.”

“That’s kind of what Richard said, and Uncle Bob,” I told her.

“Your uncle Bob has read Madame Bovary —you can’t mean Muriel’s Bob!” Miss Frost exclaimed.

“Bob hasn’t read it—he was just telling me what it was about,” I explained.

“Someone who hasn’t read a novel doesn’t really know what it’s about, William.”

“Oh.”

“You should wait, William,” Miss Frost said. “The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing—even devastating—consequences.”

“I’ll wait to read it until then,” I told her.

Her bedroom and bathroom—formerly, the coal bin—was lit only by a reading lamp, affixed to the headboard of rails on the old-fashioned brass bed. Miss Frost lit the cinnamon-scented candle on the night table, turning off the lamp. In the candlelight, she told me to undress. “That means everything, William—please don’t keep on your socks.”

I did as she told me, with my back turned to her, while she said she would appreciate “some privacy”; she briefly used the toilet with the wooden seat—I believe I heard her pee, and flush—and then, from the sound of running water, I think she had a quick wash-up and brushed her teeth in the small sink.

I lay naked on her brass bed; in the flickering candlelight, I read that Giovanni’s Room was published in 1956. From the attached library card, I saw that only one patron of the First Sister Public Library had checked out the novel—in four years—and I wondered if Mr. Baldwin’s solitary reader had in fact been Miss Frost. I did not finish the first two paragraphs before Miss Frost said, “Please don’t read that now, William. It’s very sad, and it will surely upset you.”

“Upset me how ?” I asked her. I could hear her hanging her clothes in the wardrobe closet; it was distracting to imagine her naked, but I kept reading.

“There’s no such thing as trying not to have a crush on Kittredge, William—‘trying not to’ doesn’t work,” Miss Frost said.

That was when the penultimate sentence of the second paragraph stopped me; I just closed the book and shut my eyes.

“I told you to stop reading, didn’t I?” Miss Frost said.

The sentence began: “There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her”—I stopped there wondering if I would dare to continue.

“It’s not a novel your mother should see,” Miss Frost was saying, “and if you’re not prepared to talk about your crush on Kittredge with Richard—well, I wouldn’t let Richard know what you’re reading, either.” I could feel her lie down on the bed, behind me; her bare skin touched my back, but she’d not taken off all her clothes. She gently took hold of my penis in her big hand.

“There’s a fish called a shad,” Miss Frost said.

“A shad?” I asked; my penis was stiffening.

“Yes—that’s what it’s called,” Miss Frost told me. “It migrates upstream to spawn. Shad roe is a delicacy. You know what roe is, don’t you?” she asked me.

“The eggs, right?”

“The unborn eggs, yes—they take them out of the female fish, and some people love to eat them,” Miss Frost explained.

“Oh.”

“Say ‘shad roe’ for me, William.”

“Shad roe,” I said.

“Try saying it without the r, ” she told me.

“Shadow,” I said, without thinking; my penis and her hand had most of my attention.

“Like Lear’s shadow?” she asked me.