John Irving - In One Person

“It’s stink, Tom.”

“The stench, ” Atkins said, vomiting on the stairs.

“Jesus, Tom—”

“And that awful woman with the cavernous cunt!” Atkins cried.

“The what ?” I asked him.

“The terrible girlfriend—you know who I mean, Bill.”

“I guess that was the point of it, Tom—how someone he once desired now turns him off,” I said.

“They smell like fish, you know,” Atkins told me.

“Do you mean women?” I asked him.

He gagged again, then recovered himself. “I mean their things, ” Atkins said.

“Their vaginas, Tom?”

“Don’t say that word!” poor Tom cried, retching.

“I have to go, Tom,” I told him. “I have to prepare myself for a little chat with Dr. Harlow.”

“Talk to Kittredge, Bill. They’re always making Kittredge have a talk with Dr. Harlow. Kittredge knows how to handle Dr. Harlow,” Atkins told me. I didn’t doubt it; I just didn’t want to talk to Kittredge about anything.

But, of course, Kittredge had heard about Miss Frost. Nothing of a sexual nature escaped him. If you were a boy at Favorite River and you received a restriction, Kittredge not only knew your crime; he knew who had caught you, and the terms of confinement your restriction entailed.

Not only was the public library off limits to me; I was told not to see Miss Frost—not that I knew where to find her. The whereabouts of the family home she’d shared with her mental-case mother were unknown to me. Besides, that house was for sale; for all I knew, Miss Frost (and her mom) had already moved out.

I did my homework, and what writing I could manage, in the yearbook room of the academy library. It was always a little before check-in when I passed, as quickly as I could, through the Bancroft Hall butt room, where both the smoking and the nonsmoking boys seemed uncharacteristically disturbed to see me. I suppose that my sexual reputation troubled them; whatever convenient pigeonhole they’d put me in might not be the right fit for me now.

If those boys had heretofore thought of me as a miserable faggot, what were they to make of my apparent friendship with Kittredge? And now there was this story about the transsexual town librarian. Okay, so she was some guy in drag; she wasn’t a real woman, but she presented as a woman. Maybe more to the point, I had acquired an undeniable mystique—if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don’t forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys—even if the older woman has a penis!

Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true. The truth was, I hadn’t had what most people call sex—there’d been no penetration! But those butt-room boys didn’t know that, nor would they have believed it. In the minds of my fellow students at Favorite River Academy, Miss Frost and I had done everything .

I’d climbed the stairs to the second floor of Bancroft when Kittredge suddenly swept me into his arms; at a dead run, Kittredge carried me up the third flight of stairs and into the hall of the dormitory. Worshipful boys gaped at us from the open doorways to their rooms; I could feel their sad envy, a familiar and pathetic longing.

“Holy shit, Nymph—you are the nooky master!” Kittredge whispered in my ear. “You are the poontang man! Way to go, Nymph! I am so impressed with you—you are my new hero! Listen up! ” Kittredge called to the gawking boys in the third-floor hall, and in their doorways. “While you jerk-offs are beating your meat, and only dreaming about getting laid, this guy is really doing it . You there,” Kittredge suddenly said to a round-faced underclassman who stood terror-frozen in the hall; his name was Trowbridge, he was wearing pajamas, and he held his toothbrush (with a gob of toothpaste already on it) as if he hoped the toothbrush were a magic wand.

“I’m Trowbridge,” the starstruck boy said.

“Where are you going, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked him.

“I’m going to brush my teeth,” Trowbridge said in a trembling voice.

“And after that, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked the boy. “No doubt you’ll soon be pulling your pud, imagining your face pressed between a couple of enormous knockers.” But by his aghast expression, I thought it unlikely that Trowbridge had yet dared to jerk off in the dormitory; he surely had a roommate—Trowbridge was probably afraid to beat off in Bancroft. “Whereas this young man, Trowbridge,” Kittredge continued, still holding me in his strong arms, “ this young man has not only challenged the public image of gender roles. This nooky master, this poontang man,” Kittredge cried, jouncing me up and down, “this stud has actually porked a transsexual ! Do you have any idea, Trowbridge, what transsexual snatch even is ?”

“No,” Trowbridge said in a small voice.

Even holding me in his arms, Kittredge managed his signature shrug; it was his mother’s insouciant shrug, the one Elaine had learned. “My dear Nymph,” Kittredge whispered, as he continued to carry me down the hall. “I am so impressed with you!” he said again. “An actual transsexual—in Vermont, of all places! I’ve seen some, of course, but in Paris—and in New York. The transvestites in Paris tend to hang out with one another; they’re quite a colorful crowd, but you get the feeling that they do everything together. I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge whispered, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along. That must be different!”

“Do you mean les folles ?” I asked him.

I couldn’t stop thinking about les folles —“screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs,” as Baldwin describes them. But either Kittredge hadn’t heard me, or my French accent was so off the mark that he ignored me.

“Naturally, the transsexuals are another story in New York,” Kittredge continued. “They strike me as loners—a lot of them are hookers, maybe. There’s one who hangs out on Seventh Avenue—I’m pretty sure she’s a hooker. She is really tall ! I hear there’s a club they all go to—I don’t know where. Nowhere you want to go by yourself, I’ll bet. I think if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris. But you, Nymph—you’ve already done it! How was it?” he asked me—seemingly with the utmost sincerity, but I knew enough to be careful. With Kittredge, you were never sure where the conversation was headed.

“It was absolutely wonderful,” I told him. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever have a sexual experience exactly like it again.”

“Really,” Kittredge said flatly. We’d stopped in front of the door to the faculty apartment I shared with my mom and Richard Abbott, but Kittredge didn’t look the least tired from carrying me, and he gave me no indication that he ever intended to put me down. “I suppose she had a penis,” Kittredge said then, “and you saw it, touched it, and did all those things one does with a penis—right, Nymph?”

Something in his voice had changed, and I was afraid of it. “To be honest with you, I was so caught up in the moment that I kind of lose track of the details,” I told him.

“ Do you?” Kittredge softly asked, but he didn’t seem to care. It was as if the details of any sexual adventure were already known to him, and he was bored by them. For a moment, Kittredge looked surprised that he was holding me—or perhaps repulsed. He suddenly put me down. “You know, Nymph, they’re going to make you talk to Harlow—you know that, don’t you?” he asked.