In One Person

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.

“Lear’s shadow,” I said. “I didn’t want a part in the play, anyway,” I told her.

“Well, at least you didn’t say Lear’s shad roe,” Miss Frost said.

“Lear’s shadow,” I repeated.

“And what’s this that I’ve got in my hand?” she asked me.

“My penith,” I answered.

“I wouldn’t change that penith for all the world, William,” Miss Frost said. “I believe you should say that word any fucking way you want to.”

What happened next would usher in the unattainable; what Miss Frost did to me would prove inimitable. She pulled me suddenly to her—I was flat on my back—and she kissed me on my mouth. She was wearing a bra—not a padded one, like Elaine’s, but a see-through bra with only slightly bigger cups than I’d expected. The material was sheer, and much silkier than the soft cotton of Elaine’s bra, and—to compare it to the more utilitarian undergarments in my mother’s mail-order catalogs—Miss Frost’s bra was not in the training-bra category; it was altogether sexier and more sophisticated. Miss Frost also wore a half-slip, of the slinky kind women wear under a skirt—this one was a beige color—and when she straddled my hips and sat on me, she appeared to hike up the half-slip, well above mid-thigh. Her weight, and how firmly she held me, pressed me into the bed.

I held one of her small, soft breasts in one hand; with my other hand, I tried to touch her, under her half-slip, but Miss Frost said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” She took my straying hand and clasped it to her other breast.

It was my penis that she guided under her half-slip. I had never penetrated anyone, and when I felt this most amazing friction, of course this felt like penetration to me. There was a slippery sensation—there was absolutely no pain, yet my penis had never been so tightly gripped—and when I ejaculated, I cried out against her small, soft breasts. I was surprised that my face was pressed against her breasts and her silky bra, because I didn’t remember the moment when Miss Frost had stopped kissing me. (She’d said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” Obviously, she couldn’t have been kissing me and speaking to me at the same time.)

There was so much I wanted to say to her, and ask her, but Miss Frost was not in a mood for conversation. Perhaps she was feeling the curious constraints of “so little time” again, or so I managed to convince myself.

She drew a bath for me; I was hoping that she would take off the rest of her clothes and get into the big tub with me, but she did not. She knelt beside that bathtub with the lion paws for feet, and the lion heads for faucets, and she gently bathed me—she was especially gentle with my penis. (She even spoke of it affectionately, using the penith word in a way that made us both laugh.)

But Miss Frost kept looking at her watch. “Late for check-in means a restriction, William. A restriction might entail an earlier check-in time. No visits to the First Sister Public Library after closing time—we wouldn’t like that, would we?”

When I had a look at her watch, I saw it was not even nine-thirty. I was just a few minutes’ walk from Bancroft Hall, which I pointed out to Miss Frost.

“Well, you might run into Kittredge and have a German discussion—you never know, William,” was all she said.