In One Person

‘Stossgebet,’ Nymph?” he asked me.

“An ‘ejaculatory prayer,’” I told him.

“Triple-fuck,” he said, with uncharacteristic resignation. “Fucking Goethe.”

“You had trouble with ‘uberschlechter’ last year, too—if Steiner gets sneaky and throws an adjective in. I’m just trying to help you,” I told him.

Kittredge released me from the arm-bar. “I think I know this one—it means ‘really bad,’ right?” he asked me. (You must understand that the entire time we were not exactly wrestling—and not exactly conversing, either—the denizens of the Bancroft butt room were enthralled. Kittredge was ever the eye magnet, in any crowd, and here I was—at least appearing to hold my own with him.)

“Don’t get fooled by ‘Demut,’ will you?” I asked him. “It’s a short word, but it’s still Goethe.”

“I know that one, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling. “It’s ‘humility,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said; I was surprised he knew the word, even in English. “Just remember: If it sounds like a homily or a proverb, it’s probably Goethe,” I told him.

“‘Old age is a polite gentleman’—you mean that sort of bullshit.” To my further surprise, Kittredge even knew the German, which he then recited: “‘Das Alter ist ein hoflich’ Mann.’”

“There’s one that sounds like Rilke, but it’s Goethe,” I warned him.

“It’s the one about the fucking kiss,” Kittredge said. “Say it in German, Nymph,” he commanded me.

“‘Der Kuss, der letzte, grausam suss,’” I said to him, thinking of Miss Frost’s frank kisses. I couldn’t help but think of kissing Kittredge, too; I was starting to shake again.

“‘The kiss, the last one, cruelly sweet,’” Kittredge translated.

“That’s right, or you could say ‘the last kiss of all,’ if you wanted to,” I told him. “‘Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden!’” I then said to him, taking every word to heart.

“Fucking Goethe!” Kittredge cried. I could tell he didn’t know it—there was no guessing it, either.

“‘Passion brings pain,’” I translated for him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of pain.”

“You guys,” one of the smokers said. “It’s almost check-in time.”

“Quadruple-fuck,” Kittredge said. I knew he could sprint across the quadrangle of dorms to Tilley, or—if he was late—Kittredge could be counted on to make up a brilliant excuse.

“‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,’” I said to Kittredge, as he was leaving the butt room.

“Rilke, right?” he asked me.

“It’s Rilke, all right. It’s a famous one,” I told him. “‘Every angel is terrifying.’”

That stopped Kittredge in the doorway to the butt room. He looked at me before he ran on; it was a look that frightened me, because I thought I saw both complete understanding and total contempt in his handsome face. It was as if Kittredge suddenly knew everything about me—not only who I was, and what I was hiding, but everything that awaited me in my future. (My menacing Zukunft, as Rilke would have called it.)

“You’re a special boy, aren’t you, Nymph?” Kittredge quickly asked me. But he ran on, not expecting an answer; he just called to me as he ran. “I’ll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!”

I know it isn’t what Rilke meant by “every angel,” but I was thinking of Kittredge and Miss Frost, and maybe poor Tom Atkins—and who knew who else there would be in my future?—as my terrifying angels.

And what was it Miss Frost had said, when she advised me to wait before reading Madame Bovary? What if my terrifying angels, beginning with Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge (my “future relationships,” was what Miss Frost had said), all had “disappointing—even devastating —consequences,” as she’d also put it?

“What’s wrong, Bill?” Richard Abbott asked, when I came into our dormitory apartment. (My mother had already gone to bed; at least their bedroom door was closed, as it often was.) “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” Richard said.

“Not a ghost,” I told him. “Just my future, maybe,” I said. I chose to leave him with the mystery of my remark; I went straight to my bedroom, and closed the door.

There was Elaine’s padded bra, where it nearly always was—under my pillow. I lay looking at it for a long time, seeing little of my future—or my terrifying angels—in it.

Chapter 8 BIG AL

“It is Kittredge’s cruelty that I chiefly dislike,” I wrote to Elaine that fall.

“He came by it genetically,” she wrote me back. Of course I couldn’t dispute Elaine’s superior knowledge of Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and “that awful woman” had been intimate enough for Elaine to become assertive on the matter of those mother-to-son genes that were passed. “Kittredge can deny she’s his mom till the cows come home, Billy, but I’m telling you she’s one of those moms who breast-fed the fucker till he was shaving!”

“Okay,” I wrote to Elaine, “but what makes you so sure cruelty is genetic?”

“What about kissing?” Elaine wrote me back. “Those two kiss the same way, Billy. Kissing is definitely genetic.”

Elaine’s genetic dissertation on Kittredge was in the same letter where she announced her intention to be a writer; even in the area of that most sacred ambition, Elaine had been more candid with me than I’d managed to be with her. Here I was embarking on my long-desired adventure with Miss Frost, yet I still hadn’t told Elaine about that!

I’d not told anyone about that, naturally. I had also resisted reading more of Giovanni’s Room, until I realized that I wanted to see Miss Frost again—as soon as I could—and I believed that I shouldn’t show up at the First Sister Public Library without being prepared to discuss the writing of James Baldwin with Miss Frost. Thus I plunged ahead in the novel—not very far ahead, in fact, before I was stopped cold by another sentence. This one was just after the beginning of the second chapter, and it rendered me incapable of reading further for an entire day.

“I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” I read. I immediately thought of Kittredge—how my dislike of him was completely entangled with my dislike of myself for being attracted to him. I thought that James Baldwin’s writing was a little too true for me to handle, but I forced myself to try again the very next night.

There is that description, still in the second chapter, of “the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys,” from which I inwardly recoiled; I would soon model myself on those boys, and seek their company, and the thought of an abundance of “knife-blade boys” in my future frightened me.

Then, in spite of my fear, I was suddenly halfway into the novel, and I couldn’t stop reading. Even that part where the narrator’s hatred for his male lover is as powerful as his love for him, and is “nourished by the same roots”; or the part where Giovanni is described as somehow always desirable, while at the same time his breath makes the narrator “want to vomit”—I truly detested those passages, but only because of how much I loathed and feared those feelings in myself.

Yes, having these disturbing attractions to other boys and men also made me afraid of what Baldwin calls “the dreadful whiplash of public morality,” but I was much more frightened by the passage that describes the narrator’s reaction to having sex with a woman—“I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive.”

Why hadn’t that happened to me? I wondered. Was it only because Miss Frost had small breasts? If she’d had big ones, would I have felt “intimidated”—instead of so amazingly aroused? And, once again, there came the unbidden thought: Had I really “entered” her? If I had not, and I did enter her the next time, would I subsequently feel disgusted—instead of so completely satisfied?