John Irving - In One Person

Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn’t feel sufficiently “emboldened” to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn’t have dared to say “crushes on the wrong people” to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)

I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something—maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was “crushes” that poor Tom couldn’t say.

Atkins suddenly blurted: “ Thrushes on the wrong people—that’s a subject that interests me, too!”

“I said ‘crushes,’ Tom.”

“I can’t say that word,” Atkins admitted. “But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you’re finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know.”

“It’s a novel by James Baldwin,” I told Atkins.

“It’s about being in love with a black person?” Atkins asked.

“No. What gave you that idea, Tom?”

“James Baldwin is black, isn’t he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?”

James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn’t know that. I’d not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni’s Room was a library book—as such, it didn’t have a dust jacket. I’d not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.

“It’s a novel about a man who’s in love with another man,” I told Tom quietly.

“Yes,” Atkins whispered. “That’s what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the ‘wrong people.’”

“I’ll let you read it when I’m finished,” I said. I had finished Giovanni’s Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black—and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.

In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror—“my body is dull and white and dry.” But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni’s Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I’d wanted to reread since Great Expectations .

Now, when I’m nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love—I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager—but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni’s Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.

Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin’s time there—well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni’s Room doesn’t like them. “I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them, ” Baldwin wrote.

Okay, I’m guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn’t know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair—one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn’t an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I’m talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!

I’m also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. But, believe me, I don’t fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time— “les folles,” he called them.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them—don’t put them down.

In rereading Giovanni’s Room just recently, I not only found the novel to be as perfect as I’d remembered it; I also discovered something I had missed, or I’d read without noticing, when I was eighteen. I mean the part where Baldwin writes that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

Yes, that’s true. Naturally, when I was eighteen, I was still inventing myself nonstop; I don’t only mean sexually. And I was unaware that I needed “mooring posts”—not to mention how many I would need, or who my mooring posts would be.

Poor Tom Atkins needed a mooring post, in the worst way. That much was evident to me, as Atkins and I conversed, or we tried to, on the subject of crushes (or thrushes !) on the wrong people. For a moment it seemed we would never progress from where we stood on the stairs of the music building, and that what passed for our conversation had permanently lagged.

“Have you had any breakthroughs with your pronunciation problems, Bill?” Atkins awkwardly asked me.

“Just one, actually,” I told him. “I seem to have conquered the shadow word.”

“Good for you,” Atkins said sincerely. “I’ve not conquered any of mine—not in a while, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Tom,” I told him. “It must be tough having trouble with one of those words that comes up all the time. Like the time word,” I said.

“Yes, that’s a tough one,” Atkins admitted. “What’s one of your worst ones?”

“The word for your whatchamacallit, ” I told him. “You know—dong, schlong, dick, dork, willy, dipstick, dipping wick, quim-stuffer,” I said.

“You can’t say penis ?” Atkins whispered.

“It comes out penith, ” I told him.

“Well, at least it’s comprehensible, Bill,” Atkins said encouragingly.

“Do you have one that’s worse than the time word?” I asked him.

“The female equivalent of your penis,” Atkins answered. “I can’t come close to saying it—it just kills me to try it.”

“You mean ‘vagina,’ Tom?”

Atkins nodded vigorously; I thought poor Tom had that verge-of-tears aspect, in the way he wouldn’t stop nodding his head, but Mrs. Hadley saved him from crying—albeit only momentarily.

“Tom Atkins!” Martha Hadley called down the stairwell. “I can hear your voice, but you are late for your appointment! I am waiting for you!”

Atkins started to run up the stairs, without thinking. He gave me a friendly but vaguely embarrassed look, over his shoulder; I distinctly heard him call to Mrs. Hadley as he continued up the stairs. “I’m sorry! I’m coming!” Atkins shouted. “I just lost track of the time!” Both Martha Hadley and I had clearly heard him.

“That sounds like a breakthrough to me, Tom!” I hollered up the stairs.

“What did you just say, Tom Atkins? Say it again!” I heard Mrs. Hadley call down to him.

“Time! Time! Time!” I heard Atkins crying, before his tears engulfed him.

“Oh, don’t cry, you silly boy!” Martha Hadley was saying. “Tom, Tom—please stop crying. You should be happy !” But I heard Atkins blubbering on and on; once the tears started, he couldn’t stop them. (I knew the feeling.)

“Listen to me, Tom!” I called up the stairwell. “You’re on a roll, man. Now’s the time to try ‘vagina.’ I know you can do it! If you can conquer ‘time,’ trust me—‘vagina’ is easy! Let me hear you say the vagina word, Tom! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”

“Watch your language, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley called down the stairwell. I would have kept up the encouragements to poor Tom, but I didn’t want Martha Hadley—or another faculty person in the music building—to give me a restriction.