In One Person

You must understand that, until I read Giovanni’s Room, I’d never read a novel that had shocked me, and I’d already (at eighteen) read a lot of novels—many of them excellent. James Baldwin wrote excellent stuff, and he shocked me—most of all when Giovanni cries to his lover, “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love.” That phrase, “the stink of love,” shocked me, and it made me feel so awfully naive. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or a boy?

I was terribly agitated to read this; I wanted to talk to someone about it, and I almost went and woke up Richard to talk to him.

But I remembered what Miss Frost had said. I wasn’t prepared to talk to Richard Abbott about my crush on Kittredge. I just stayed in bed; I was wearing Elaine’s bra, as usual, and I read on and on in Giovanni’s Room—on into the night.

I remembered the perfumy smell on my fingers, after I’d touched my penis and before I stepped into the bath Miss Frost had drawn for me; that almond- or avocado-oil scent wasn’t at all like the smell of shit. But, of course, Miss Frost was a woman, and if I had penetrated her, surely I had not penetrated her there!

MRS. HADLEY WAS SUITABLY impressed that I had conquered the shadow word, but because I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell Martha Hadley about Miss Frost, I had some difficulty describing how I’d mastered one of my unpronounceables.

“Whatever made you think of saying ‘shad roe’ without the r, Billy?”

“Ah, well . . .” I started to say, and then stopped—in the manner of Grandpa Harry.

It was a mystery to Mrs. Hadley, and to me, how “the shad-roe technique” (as Martha Hadley called it) could be applied to my other pronunciation problems.

Naturally, upon leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office—once again, on the stairs in the music building—I ran into Atkins.

“Oh, it’s you, Tom,” I said, as casually as I could.

“So now it’s ‘Tom,’ is it?” Atkins asked me.

“I’m just sick of the last-name culture of this awful school—aren’t you?” I asked him.

“Now that you mention it,” Atkins said bitterly; I could tell that poor Tom’s feathers were still ruffled from our run-in at the First Sister Public Library.

“Look, I’m sorry about the other night,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to add to whatever misery Kittredge had caused you by calling you his ‘messenger boy.’ I apologize.”

Atkins had a way of often seeming on the verge of tears. If Dr. Harlow had ever wanted to summon before us a quaking example of what our school physician meant by “excessive crying in boys,” I imagined that he needed only to snap his fingers and ask Tom Atkins to burst into tears at morning meeting.

“It seemed that I probably interrupted you and Miss Frost,” Atkins said searchingly.

“Miss Frost and I talk a lot about writing,” I told him. “She tells me what books I should read. I tell her what I’m interested in, and she gives me a novel.”

“What novel did she give you the other night?” Tom asked. “What are you interested in, Bill?”

“Crushes on the wrong people,” I told Atkins. It was astonishing how quickly my first sexual relationship, with anyone, had emboldened me. I felt encouraged—even compelled—to say things I’d heretofore been reluctant to say, not only to a timid soul like Tom Atkins but even to such a powerful nemesis and forbidden love as Jacques Kittredge.

Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn’t feel sufficiently “emboldened” to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn’t have dared to say “crushes on the wrong people” to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)

I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something—maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was “crushes” that poor Tom couldn’t say.

Atkins suddenly blurted: “Thrushes on the wrong people—that’s a subject that interests me, too!”

“I said ‘crushes,’ Tom.”

“I can’t say that word,” Atkins admitted. “But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you’re finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know.”

“It’s a novel by James Baldwin,” I told Atkins.

“It’s about being in love with a black person?” Atkins asked.

“No. What gave you that idea, Tom?”

“James Baldwin is black, isn’t he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?”

James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn’t know that. I’d not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni’s Room was a library book—as such, it didn’t have a dust jacket. I’d not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.

“It’s a novel about a man who’s in love with another man,” I told Tom quietly.

“Yes,” Atkins whispered. “That’s what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the ‘wrong people.’”

“I’ll let you read it when I’m finished,” I said. I had finished Giovanni’s Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black—and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.

In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror—“my body is dull and white and dry.” But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni’s Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I’d wanted to reread since Great Expectations.

Now, when I’m nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love—I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager—but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni’s Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.

Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin’s time there—well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni’s Room doesn’t like them. “I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them,” Baldwin wrote.

Okay, I’m guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn’t know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair—one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn’t an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I’m talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!

I’m also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. But, believe me, I don’t fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time—“les folles,” he called them.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them—don’t put them down.

In rereading Giovanni’s Room just recently, I not only found the novel to be as perfect as I’d remembered it; I also discovered something I had missed, or I’d read without noticing, when I was eighteen. I mean the part where Baldwin writes that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

Yes, that’s true. Naturally, when I was eighteen, I was still inventing myself