John Irving - In One Person

“Jesus,” Elaine suddenly said. “How did the bastard swing a single ?”

It was a single room; Kittredge had no roommate—that’s what was “not typical” about it. Elaine and I speculated that the single room might have been part of the deal Mrs. Kittredge made with the academy when she’d told them—and Mr. and Mrs. Hadley—that she would take Elaine to Europe and get the unfortunate girl a safe abortion. It was also possible that Kittredge had been an overpowering and abusive roommate; perhaps no one had wanted to be Kittredge’s roommate, but this struck both Elaine and me as unlikely. At Favorite River Academy, it would have been prestigious to be Kittredge’s roommate; even if he abused you, you wouldn’t want to give up the honor. The single room, in combination with Kittredge’s evidently compulsive neatness, smacked of privilege. Kittredge exuded privilege, as if he’d managed (even in utero) to create his own sense of entitlement.

What was most upsetting to Elaine about Kittredge’s room was that there was absolutely no evidence in it that he’d ever known her; maybe she’d expected to see a photograph of herself. (She admitted to me that she’d given him several.) I didn’t ask her if she’d given Kittredge one of her bras, but that was because I was hoping to ask her if she would give me another one.

There were some school-newspaper photographs, and yearbook photos, of Kittredge wrestling. There were no pictures of girlfriends (or ex-girlfriends). There were no photographs of Kittredge as a child; if he’d ever had a dog, there were no pictures of the dog. There were no photos of anyone who could have been his father. The only picture of Mrs. Kittredge had been taken the one time she’d come to Favorite River to see her son wrestle. The photo must have been taken after the match; Elaine and I had been at that match—it was the only time I saw Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and I didn’t remember seeing anyone take a picture of Kittredge and his mom at the match, but someone had.

What Elaine and I noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand—it must have been Kittredge’s—had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body. It was a funny photograph, but Elaine and I didn’t laugh about it.

The truth is, Kittredge’s face worked on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes, and Mrs. Kittredge’s face went very well with Kittredge’s wrestler’s body (in tights and a singlet).

“I suppose it’s possible, ” I said to Elaine, “that Mrs. Kittredge could have switched the faces in the photograph.” (I didn’t really think so, but I said it.)

“No,” Elaine flatly said. “Only Kittredge could have done it. That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor.”

“If you say so,” I told my dear friend. (As I’ve already told you, I wouldn’t question Elaine’s authority on the subject of Mrs. Kittredge. How could I?)

“YOU’D BETTER GO TO work on Gerry and find that 1940 yearbook, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I did this at our family dinner on Christmas Day—when Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob and Gerry joined my mom and me, and Richard Abbott, at Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. Nana Victoria always made a big to-do about the essential and necessary “old-fashionedness” of Christmas dinner.

It was also a tradition in our family that the Borkmans joined us for Christmas dinner. In my memory, Christmas was one of the few days of the year I saw Mrs. Borkman. At Nana Victoria’s insistence, we all called her “Mrs.” Borkman; I never knew her first name. When I say “all,” I don’t mean only the children. Surprisingly, that is how Aunt Muriel and my mother addressed Mrs. Borkman—and Uncle Bob and Richard Abbott, when they spoke to the presumed “Ibsen woman” Nils had married. (She had not left Nils, nor had she shot herself in the temple, but we assumed that Nils Borkman would never have married a woman who wasn’t an Ibsen woman, and we therefore wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. Borkman had done something dire.)

The Borkmans did not have children, which indicated to my aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria that there was something amiss (or indeed dire) in their relationship.

“Motherfucking Christ,” Gerry said to me on that Christmas Day, 1960. “Isn’t it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depresses the shit out of me, and I’m neither suicidal nor Norwegian!”

On that warmhearted note, I decided to introduce Gerry to the mysterious subject of the missing 1940 Owl, which—according to Mr. Lockley’s records—Uncle Bob had checked out of the academy library and had not returned.

“I don’t know what your dad is doing with that yearbook,” I told Gerry, “but I want it.”

“What’s in it?” Gerry asked me.

“Some members of our illustrious family don’t want me to see what’s in it,” I said to Gerry.

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll find the fucking yearbook—I’m dying to see what’s in it myself,” Gerry told me.

“It’s probably something of a delicate nature,” I said to her.

“Ha!” Gerry cried. “Nothing I get my hands on is ‘of a delicate nature’ for very long!”

When I repeated what she’d said to Elaine, my dear friend remarked: “The very idea of having sex with Gerry is nauseating to me.”

To me, too, I almost told Elaine. But that’s not what I said. I thought my sexual forecast was cloudy; I wasn’t at all sure about my sexual future. “Sexual desire is pretty specific,” I said to Elaine, “and it’s usually pretty decisive, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Elaine answered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that, in the past, my sexual desire has been very specific—my attraction to someone very decisive,” I said to Elaine. “But all that seems to be changing. Your breasts, for example—I love them specifically, because they’re yours, not just because they’re small. Those dark parts,” I tried to tell her.

“The areolae,” Elaine said.

“Yes, I love those parts. And kissing you—I love kissing you,” I told her.

“Jesus— now you tell me, Billy!” Elaine said.

“I only know it now—I’m changing, Elaine, but I’m not at all sure how, ” I told her. “By the way, I wonder if you would give me one of your bras—my mother cut up the old one.”

“She did ?” Elaine cried.

“Maybe there’s one you’ve outgrown, or you’re just tired of it,” I said to her.

“My stupid breasts grew only a little, even when I was pregnant,” she told me. “Now I think I’ve stopped growing. You can have as many of my bras as you want, Billy,” Elaine said.

One night, after Christmas, we were in my bedroom—with the door open, of course. Our parents were seeing a movie together in Ezra Falls; we’d been invited to join them, but we hadn’t wanted to go. Elaine had just started kissing me, and I was fondling her breasts—I’d managed to get one of her breasts out of her bra—when there was a pounding on the apartment door.

“Open the fucking door, Billy!” my cousin Gerry was shouting. “I know your parents and the Hadleys are at a movie—my asshole parents went with them!”

“Jesus—it’s that awful girl!” Elaine whispered. “She’s got the yearbook, I’ll bet you.”

It hadn’t taken Gerry long to find the ’40 Owl. Uncle Bob may have been the one to check it out of the academy library, but Gerry found the yearbook under her mother’s side of the bed. It had doubtless been my aunt Muriel’s idea to keep the yearbook of that graduating class away from me, or maybe Muriel and my mom had cooked up the idea together. Uncle Bob was just doing what those Winthrop women had told him to do; according to Miss Frost, Uncle Bob had been a pussy before he was pussy-whipped.