In One Person

I had noticed a wet, silky feeling, and when I touched my penis—before stepping into the bath—my fingers had a vaguely perfumy smell. Maybe Miss Frost had used a lubricant of some kind, I imagined—something I would be reminded of years later, when I first smelled those liquid soaps that are made from almond or avocado oil. But, whatever it was, the bath had washed it away.

“No detours to that old yearbook room—not tonight, William,” Miss Frost was saying; she helped me get dressed, as if I were a child going off to my first day of school. She even put a dab of toothpaste on her finger, and stuck it in my mouth. “Go rinse your mouth in the sink,” she told me. “I assume you can find your way out—I’ll lock up again, when I go.” She kissed me then—a long, lingering kiss that caused me to put both my hands on her hips.

Miss Frost quickly intercepted my hands, taking them from her slinky, knee-length half-slip and clasping them to her breasts, where (I had the distinct impression) she believed my hands belonged. Or perhaps she believed that my hands didn’t belong below her waist—that I should not, or must not, touch her “there.”

As I made my way up the dark basement stairs, toward the faint light that was glowing from the foyer of the library, I was remembering an idiot admonition in a long-ago morning meeting—the always-numbing warning from Dr. Harlow, on the occasion of a weekend dance we were having with a visiting all-girls’ school. “Don’t touch your dates below their waists,” our peerless school physician said, “and you and your dates will be happier!”

But this couldn’t be true, I was thinking, when Miss Frost called to me—I was still on the stairs. “Go straight home, William—and come see me soon!”

We have so little time! I almost called back to her—one of those premonitory thoughts I would remember later, and forever, though at the time I imagined I was thinking of saying it just to see what she would say. Miss Frost was the one who seemed to think we had so little time, for whatever reason.

Outside, I had a passing thought about poor Atkins—poor Tom. I was sorry that I’d been mean to him, though it made me laugh at myself to recall I had ever imagined he might have a crush on Miss Frost. It was funny to think of them being together—Atkins with his pronunciation problem, his complete incapability of saying the time word, and Miss Frost saying it every other minute!

I had passed the mirror in the dimly lit foyer, scarcely looking at myself, but—in the star-bright September night—I considered that I had looked much more grown up to myself (than before my encounter with Miss Frost, I mean). Yet, as I made my way along River Street to the Favorite River campus, I reflected that I could not tell from my expression in the mirror that I’d just had sex for the first time.

And that thought had an unnerving, disturbing companion—namely, I suddenly imagined that maybe I hadn’t had sex. (Not actual sex—no actual penetration, I mean.) Then I thought: How can I be thinking such a thing on what is the most pleasurable night of my young life?

I as yet had no idea that it was possible not to have actual sex (or actual penetration) and still have unsurpassable sexual pleasure—a pleasure that, to this day, has been unmatched.

But what did I know? I was only eighteen; that night, with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in my book bag, my crushes on the wrong people were just beginning.

THE COMMON ROOM IN Bancroft Hall was, like the common rooms in other dorms, called the butt room; the seniors who were smokers were allowed to spend their study hours there. Many nonsmokers who were seniors thought it was a privilege too important to be missed; even they chose to spend their study hours there.

No one warned us of the dangers of secondhand smoke in those fearless years—least of all our imbecilic school physician. I don’t recall a single morning meeting that addressed the affliction of smoking! Dr. Harlow had devoted his time and talents to the treatment of excessive crying in boys—in the doctor’s stalwart belief that there was a cure for homosexual tendencies in the young men we were becoming.

I was fifteen minutes early for check-in; when I walked into the familiar blue-gray haze of smoke in the Bancroft butt room, Kittredge accosted me. I don’t know what wrestling hold it was. I would later try to describe it to Delacorte—who I heard didn’t do a bad job as Lear’s Fool, by the way. Between rinsing and spitting, Delacorte said: “It sounds like an arm-bar. Kittredge arm-bars the shit out of everyone.”

Whatever the name of the wrestling hold is, it didn’t hurt. I just knew I couldn’t get away from him, and I didn’t try. It was frankly overwhelming to be held so tightly by Kittredge, when I had just been held by Miss Frost.

“Hi, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Where have you been?”

“The library,” I answered.

“I heard you left the library a while ago,” Kittredge said.

“I went to the other library,” I told him. “There’s a public library, the town library.”

“I suppose one library isn’t enough for a busy boy like you, Nymph. Herr Steiner is hitting us with a quiz tomorrow—I’m guessing more Rilke than Goethe, but what do you think?”

I’d had Herr Steiner in German II—he was one of the Austrian skiers. He wasn’t a bad teacher, or a bad guy, but he was pretty predictable. Kittredge was right that there would be more Rilke than Goethe on the quiz; Steiner liked Rilke, but who didn’t? Herr Steiner also liked big words, and so did Goethe. Kittredge got in trouble in German because he was always guessing. You can’t guess in a foreign language, especially not in a language as precise as German. Either you know it or you don’t.

“You’ve got to know the big words in Goethe, Kittredge. The quiz won’t be all Rilke,” I told him.

“The phrases Steiner likes in Rilke are all the long ones,” Kittredge complained. “They’re hard to remember.”

“There are some short phrases in Rilke, too. Everyone likes them—not just Steiner,” I warned him. “‘Musik: Atem der Statuen.’”

“Shit!” Kittredge cried. “I know that—what is that?”

“‘Music: breathing of statues,’” I translated for him, but I was thinking about the arm-bar, if that was the wrestling hold; I was hoping he would hold me forever. “And there’s this one: ‘Du, fast noch Kind’—do you know that one?”

“All the childhood shit!” Kittredge cried. “Did fucking Rilke never get over his childhood, or something?”

“‘You, almost still a child’—I guarantee that’ll be on the quiz, Kittredge.”

“And ‘reine Ubersteigung’! The ‘pure transcendence’ bullshit!” Kittredge cried, holding me tighter. “That one will be there!”

“With Rilke, you can count on the childhood thing—it’ll be there,” I warned him.

“‘Lange Nachmittage der Kindheit,’” Kittredge sang in my ear. “‘Long afternoons of childhood.’ Aren’t you impressed that I know that one, Nymph?”

“If it’s the long phrases you’re worried about, don’t forget this one: ‘Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft werden weniger—neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.’ Remember that one?” I asked him.

“Fuck!” Kittredge cried. “I thought that was Goethe!”

“It’s about childhood, right? It’s Rilke,” I told him. Dass ich dich fassen mocht—If only I could clasp you! I was thinking. (That was Goethe.) But all I said was “‘Schopfungskraft.’”

“Double-fuck!” Kittredge said. “I know that’s Goethe.”

“It doesn’t mean ‘double-fuck,’ though,” I told him. I don’t know what he did with the arm-bar, but it started hurting. “It means ‘creative power,’ or something like that,” I said, and the pain stopped; I had almost liked it. “I’ll bet you don’t know ‘Stossgebet’—you missed it last year,” I reminded him. The pain was back in the arm-bar; it felt pretty good.

“You’re feeling dauntless tonight, aren’t you, Nymph? The two libraries must have boosted your confidence,” Kittredge told me.

“How’s Delacorte doing with ‘Lear’s shadow’—and all the rest of it?” I asked him.

He let up on the arm-bar; he seemed to hold me almost soothingly. “What’s a fucking