In One Person (16 page)

“But what
sex
is the guile supposed to be?” Kittredge asked. “Is Caliban a
lesbian
monster? Is it a she or a he who tried to rape Miranda?”

“Sex, sex, sex!” Elaine Hadley screamed. “All you think about is sex!”

“Don’t forget those earplugs, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling at me.

Elaine and I couldn’t look at him without seeing his mother, with her legs so perfectly crossed on those uncomfortable bleacher seats at Kittredge’s wrestling match; Mrs. Kittredge had seemed to watch her son’s systematic mauling of his overmatched opponent as if it were a pornographic film, but with the detached confidence of an experienced woman who knew she could do it better. “Your mother is a man with breasts,” I wanted to say to Kittredge, but of course I didn’t dare.

I could only guess how Kittredge might have responded. “Do you mean my
stepmother
?” he would have asked, before breaking my arms and legs.

I spoke to my mom and Richard in the privacy of our dormitory apartment. “What is it about Grandpa Harry?” I asked them. “I know that Ariel’s gender is polymorphous—more a matter of
habiliment
than anything organic, as you say,” I said to Richard. “Okay, so my trappings, my equipment—the wig, the tights—suggest that Ariel’s gender is mutable. But isn’t Caliban a
male
monster? Isn’t Grandpa Harry playing Caliban like some kind of . . .” I paused. I refused to call my grandfather
Queen Lear,
because that was Kittredge’s nickname for him. “Like some kind of
dyke
?” was how I put it. The
dyke
word was in vogue at Favorite River—among those students (like Kittredge) who never tired of
homo, fag,
and
queer,
which they used viciously.

“Daddy isn’t a
dyke
!” my mother snapped. Snapping had once seemed so unlike her; now, increasingly, when she snapped, she snapped at
me
.

“Well, Bill . . .” Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. “Don’t get upset, Jewel,” he said to my mom, whose agitation had distracted Richard. “What I really think, Bill,” Richard began again, “is that gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”

A lame response, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Was I growing disappointed in Richard, or was I just growing up?

“I guess that wasn’t an answer to your question, was it?” Elaine Hadley asked me later, when I confessed to her that the sexual identity of Grandpa Harry as Caliban was confusing to me.

I
T WAS FUNNY HOW
, when Elaine and I were alone, we didn’t usually hold hands, or anything like that, but when we were out in public, we spontaneously reached for each other’s hands, and we would maintain contact for only as long as we had an audience. (It was another kind of code between us, like the way we would ask each other, “What happens to the duck?”)

Yet, on our initial visit together to the First Sister Public Library, Elaine and I didn’t hold hands. It was my impression that Miss Frost wouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Elaine and I were romantically involved—not for a minute. Elaine and I were just seeking a possible place where we could run our lines for
The Tempest
. Our dormitory apartments were claustrophobic and very public—unless we ran our lines in her bedroom or mine, with the door closed. We’d been too successful in masquerading as boyfriend and girlfriend. My mom and Richard, or the
Hadleys, would have had a cow if we’d closed our bedroom doors when we were together.

As for the yearbook room in the academy library, there was the occasional faculty member at work there, and it wasn’t a room with a door you could close; our voices would have been heard elsewhere in the building. (Elaine and I feared we could be heard
throughout
the much smaller First Sister Public Library!)

“We wondered if there might be a more
private
room here,” I explained to Miss Frost.

“More
private,
” the librarian repeated.

“Where we wouldn’t be heard,” Elaine said, in her sonic-boom voice. “We want to run our lines for
The Tempest,
but we don’t want to
bother
anyone!” Elaine hastily added—lest Miss Frost think we were seeking some soundproof asylum for Elaine’s aforementioned first orgasm.

Miss Frost looked at me. “You want to run lines in a library,” she said, as if this were a well-fitted piece to the puzzle of my earlier wanting to
write
in a library. But Miss Frost didn’t betray my intentions—namely, becoming a writer. (I had not yet been candid with my good friend Elaine on the writing subject; my desire to be a writer and my
other
desires were still kept secret from Elaine.)

“We can try to run our lines
quietly,
” Elaine said, in an abnormally soft voice—for her.

“No, no, dear—you must feel free to run lines as they should be said, onstage,” Miss Frost told Elaine, patting my friend’s hand with her much bigger hand. “I think I know a place where you could
scream
and no one would hear you.” As it turned out, the concept that there was a contained space in the First Sister Public Library where one could scream unheard was not as much of a miracle as the room itself.

Miss Frost led Elaine and me down the basement stairs to what, at first glance, appeared to be the furnace room of the old library. It was a red-brick building of the Georgian period, and the building’s first furnace had been coal; the blackened remains of the coal chute were still hanging from a transom window. But the hulking coal burner had been toppled on its side and dragged to an unused corner of the basement; its replacement was a more modern oil furnace. Quite a new-looking propane hot-water heater stood near the oil-burning furnace, and a separate room (with a door) had been assembled in the vicinity of the transom window. A rectangular notch, near the basement ceiling, had been cut
in one wall of the room—where the remnants of the coal chute dangled from the lone window. At one time, the coal chute had run from the transom window into the room—formerly, the coal bin. It was now a furnished bedroom and bathroom.

There was an old-fashioned brass bed with a headboard of brass rails, as sturdy-looking as prison bars, to which a reading lamp had been affixed. There was a small sink and mirror in one corner of the room, and in another corner, unconcealed, stood a solitary sentinel—not an actual guard but a toilet with a wooden seat. There was a night table by the bed, where I saw an orderly stack of books and a squat, scented candle. (It smelled like cinnamon in the room; I guessed that the candle concealed the smell of oil fumes from the nearby furnace.)

There was also an open wardrobe closet, where Elaine and I could see some shelves and hangers—with what appeared to be a most minimal assortment of Miss Frost’s clothes. What was unquestionably the centerpiece of the small room—“my converted coal bin,” Miss Frost called it—was a bathtub of Victorian opulence, with very visible plumbing. (The floor of the room was unfinished plywood, and the wiring was very visible, too.)

“When there’s a snowstorm, and I don’t feel like driving or walking home,” Miss Frost said—as if this explained everything that was at once cozy but rudimentary about the basement room. (Neither Elaine nor I knew where Miss Frost lived, but we gathered it must have been within walking distance of the town library.)

Elaine stared at the bathtub; it had lion paws for feet, and lion heads for faucets. I was, I confess, fixated on the brass bed with the prison-bars headboard.

“Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to sit but the bed,” Miss Frost said, “unless you want to run lines in the tub.” She seemed not in the least concerned that Elaine and I might ever
do
anything on the bed, or take a bath together.

Miss Frost was about to leave us alone, to actually close the door on us—in her makeshift bedroom, her expedient home-away-from-home—when Elaine Hadley exclaimed, “The room is
perfect
! Thank you for helping us, Miss Frost.”

“You’re very welcome, Elaine,” Miss Frost said. “I assure you that you and William can scream your heads off in here, and no one will hear you.” But before closing the door, Miss Frost looked at me and smiled.
“If you need any help running lines—if there’s a question of emphasis, or a pronunciation problem—well, you know where to find me.” I didn’t know that Miss Frost had noticed my pronunciation problems; I’d actually spoken very little in her company.

I was too embarrassed to speak, but Elaine didn’t hesitate. “Now that you mention it, Miss Frost, Billy has encountered only one difficulty in Ariel’s vocabulary, and we’re working on it,” Elaine said.

“What difficulty is that, William?” Miss Frost asked me, with her most penetrating look. (Thank God there were no
penises
in Ariel’s vocabulary!)

When Caliban calls Prospero a tyrant, Ariel (invisible) says, “Thou liest.” Since Ariel is invisible, Caliban thinks
Trinculo
has called him a liar. In the same scene, Ariel says “Thou liest” to Stephano, who thinks Trinculo has called
him
a liar—Stephano hits Trinculo.

“I have to say ‘Thou liest’ twice,” I told Miss Frost, being careful to say the
liest
word correctly—with two syllables.

“Sometimes he says ‘least’—one syllable, rhymes with
yeast,
” Elaine told Miss Frost.

“Oh, my,” the librarian said, briefly closing her eyes at the horror of it. “Look at me, William,” Miss Frost said. I did as she told me; for once, I didn’t need to sneak a look at her. “Say ‘finest’ to me, William,” she said.

This was not hard to do. Miss Frost was the
finest
of my all-over-the-place infatuations. “Finest,” I said to her, still looking right at her.

“Well, William—just remember that
liest
rhymes with
finest,
” Miss Frost said.

“Go on, say it,” Elaine told me.

“Thou liest,” I said, as the invisible Ariel is supposed to say. I made a perfect two-syllable match for the
finest
word.

“May all your difficulties be so easy to fix, William,” Miss Frost said. “I love running lines,” she told Elaine, as she closed the door.

I was impressed that Miss Frost even knew what “running lines” meant. When Richard had asked her if she’d ever
acted,
Miss Frost had quickly answered him: “Only in my mind. When I was younger—all the time.” Yet she’d certainly made a name for herself as a standout in the First Sister Players.

“Miss Frost
is
an Ibsen woman!” Nils had said to Richard, but she’d not had many roles—not beyond those of the severely tested women in
Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House,
and
The Wild
(fucking)
Duck
.

It suffices to say: For someone who’d heretofore acted only in her mind, but who seemed a natural at portraying Ibsen’s women, Miss Frost was clearly familiar with all that “running lines” entailed—and she couldn’t have been more supportive of Elaine Hadley and me.

It was awkward, at first—how Elaine and I arranged ourselves on Miss Frost’s bed. It was only a queen-size mattress, but the brass bed frame was rather high; when Elaine and I sat (somewhat primly) side by side, our feet didn’t reach the floor. But when we stretched out on our stomachs, we had to contort ourselves to look at each other; it was only when we propped the pillows up against the headboard (those brass rails like prison bars) that we could lie on our sides, facing each other, and run our lines—our copies of the play held between us, for reference.

“We’re like an old married couple,” Elaine said; I was already thinking the same thing.

Our first evening in Miss Frost’s snowstorm room, Elaine fell asleep. I knew she had to get up earlier than I did; due to the bus ride to Ezra Falls, she was always tired. When Miss Frost knocked on the door, Elaine was startled; she threw her arms around my neck, and she was still holding tight when Miss Frost came inside the small room. Notwithstanding these amorous-looking circumstances, I don’t believe that Miss Frost assumed we’d been making out. Elaine and I certainly didn’t look as if we’d been necking, and Miss Frost merely said, “It’s almost time for me to close the library. Even Shakespeare has to go home and get some sleep.”

As everyone who’s ever been part of a theatrical production knows, after all the stressful rehearsals, and the interminable memorization—I mean when your lines are truly
run
—even Shakespeare comes to an end. We put on four shows of
The Tempest
. I managed to make
liest
rhyme with
finest
in every performance, though on opening night I almost said “finest breasts,” when I thought I saw Kittredge’s wonderfully dressed mother in the audience—only to learn from Kittredge, during the intermission, that I was mistaken. The woman wasn’t his mom.

“The woman you think is my mom is in Paris,” Kittredge dismissively said.