In One Person (18 page)

Elaine lay next to me on the bed, and I turned on my side to look at her. “Do I give you a hard-on?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Oh, my God—it’s always so hot in this room!” she suddenly cried, sitting up. The colder the weather was outside, the hotter it was in those old dormitories—and the higher the floor you were on, the hotter it got. At bedtime, or after lights-out, the students were always opening their windows, albeit only a crack, to let a little cold air in, but the ancient radiators would keep cranking up the heat.

Elaine was wearing a boy’s dress shirt—white, with a button-down collar, though she never buttoned the collar, and she always left the top two buttons unbuttoned. Now she untucked the shirt from her jeans; she pinched the shirt between her thumb and index finger, and, holding it away from her stick-thin body, she blew on her chest to cool herself off.

“Do you have a hard-on
now
?” she asked me; she’d opened the window a crack before lying down on the bed beside me.

“No—I must be too nervous,” I told her.

“Don’t be nervous. We’re just kissing and touching, right?” Elaine asked me.

“Right,” I said.

I could feel a razor-sharp draft of cold air from the cracked-open window when Elaine kissed me, a chaste little peck on the lips, which must have been as disappointing to her as it was to me—because she said, “Tongues are okay. French kissing is allowed.”

The next kiss was much more interesting—tongues change everything. There is a gathering momentum to French kissing; Elaine and I were unfamiliar with what to do about it. Perhaps to distract myself, I thought of my mother overseeing my wayward father kissing someone
else
. There’s a
waywardness
to French kissing, I remember thinking. Elaine must have needed to distract herself, too. She broke free from our
kiss and breathlessly said, “Not the Everly Brothers
again
!” I’d been unaware of what was playing on the rock-’n’-roll station, but Elaine rolled away from me; reaching for her night table, she turned the radio off.

“I want to be able to hear us breathing,” Elaine said, rolling into my arms again.

Yes, I thought—breathing is very different when you’re French kissing someone. I lifted her untucked shirt and tentatively touched her bare stomach; she slid my hand up to her breast—well, to her
bra,
anyway—which was soft and small and fit easily in the palm of my hand.

“Is this a . . .
training
bra?” I asked her.

“It’s a
padded
bra,” Elaine said. “I don’t know about the training part.”

“It feels nice,” I told her. I wasn’t lying; the
training
word had triggered something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I held in the palm of my hand. (I mean, how much of what I felt was her breast—or was it mostly the bra?)

Elaine, as if heralding what our future relationship would become, must have read my mind, for she said—as always, loud and clear—“There’s more padding than breast, if you want to know the truth, Billy. Here, I’ll show you,” she said; she sat up and unbuttoned the white shirt, slipping it off her shoulders.

It was a pretty bra, more pearl-gray than white, and when she reached behind her back to unfasten it, her bra seemed to expand. I had only a glimpse of her small, pointy breasts before she put her shirt back on; her nipples were bigger than any boy’s, and those darker-colored rings around the nipples—the areolae, another unpronounceable plural!—were almost as big as her breasts. But while Elaine was buttoning her shirt, it was her bra—now on the bed, between us—that captured my attention. I picked it up; the soft, breast-shaped pads were sewn into the silky fabric. To my surprise, I instantly wanted to try it on—I wanted to know what it felt like to
wear
a bra. But I was no more honest about this feeling than I’d been about those other desires I had withheld from my friend Elaine.

It was only the slightest deviation from the norm that signaled to me a fallen boundary in our emerging relationship: As always, Elaine had left the top two buttons of her boy’s dress shirt unbuttoned, but this time she’d also left the bottommost button unbuttoned. My hand slipped more easily under her untucked shirt; it was the real thing (what little there was of it) that fit so perfectly in my palm.

“I don’t know about you, Billy,” Elaine said, as we lay face-to-face on one of her pillows, “but I had always imagined a boy touching my breasts for the first time as
messier
than it actually is.”

“
Messier,
” I repeated. I must have been stalling.

I was remembering Dr. Harlow’s annual morning-meeting talk to us boys, concerning our
treatable afflictions;
I was recalling that “an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys and men” fell into this dubiously curable category.

I must have repressed the annual morning-meeting presentation of Dr. Grau—“Herr Doktor” Grau, as we boys called Favorite River’s school psychiatrist. Dr. Grau gave us the same lunatic spiel every year—how we were all of an age of arrested development, “frozen,” the Herr Doktor said, “like bugs in amber.” (By our frightened expressions, we boys could tell that not all of us had seen bugs in amber—or even knew what they were.) “You are in the
polymorphous-perverse
phase,” Dr. Grau assured us. “It is only natural, at this phase, that you exhibit infantile sexual tendencies, in which the genitals are not yet identified as the sole or principal sexual organs.” (But how could we fail to recognize such an obvious thing about our genitals? we boys thought with alarm.) “At this phase,” Herr Doktor Grau continued, “coitus is not necessarily the recognizable goal of erotic activity.” (Then why did we think about coitus nonstop? we boys wondered with dread.) “You are experiencing pregenital libidinal fixations,” old Grau told us, as if this were somehow reassuring. (He also taught German at the academy, in the same unintelligible fashion.) “You must come talk to me about these
fixations,
” the old Austrian always concluded. (No boy I knew at Favorite River admitted to having such fixations; no one I knew ever talked to Dr. Grau about
anything
!)

Richard Abbott told me and the cast of
The Tempest
that Ariel’s gender was “polymorphous—more a matter of habiliment than anything organic.” This later led Richard to conclude that the gender of the character I played was
“
mutable,
”
and I was further confused regarding my (and Ariel’s) sexual orientation.

Yet, when I asked Richard if he meant anything at all resembling the “
polymorphous-perverse
phase” of the “bugs in amber” bullshit Dr. Grau had gone on (and on) about in morning meeting, Richard adamantly denied there was any connection.

“No one listens to old Grau, Bill,” Richard had told me. “Don’t you listen to him, either.”

Wise advice—but while it was possible not to heed what Dr. Grau said, we boys were forced to
hear
him. And, lying next to Elaine, with my hand on her bare breast, and our tongues once more entangled in a way that made us imagine what the next most erotic thing to do with each other was, I became aware of my growing erection.

With our mouths still pressed together, Elaine managed to ask: “Are you getting a hard-on
yet
?” Yes, I was, and I’d noted Elaine’s impatience in her overloud utterance of the
yet
word, but my confusion was such that I was unsure what had initiated my erection.

Yes, the French kissing was exciting, and (to this day) the touch of a woman’s bare breasts is not something I am indifferent to; yet I believe my hard-on began when I imagined wearing Elaine’s padded bra. At that moment, wasn’t I exhibiting the “infantile sexual tendencies” Dr. Grau had warned us boys about?

But all I said to Elaine, in the midst of our darting tongues, was a strangled-sounding “Yes!”

This time, when Elaine broke free from me, she bit my lower lip in the hurried-up process. “You actually have a boner,” Elaine said to me, seriously.

“Yes, I actually do,” I admitted. I felt my lower lip, to be sure I wasn’t bleeding. (I was looking all around for her bra.)

“Oh, God—I don’t want to see it!” Elaine cried. This was sexually confusing to me, too. I hadn’t suggested
showing
my hard-on to her! I didn’t want her to see it. In fact, I would have been embarrassed for her to see it; I thought it would probably disappoint her, or make her laugh (or throw up).

“Maybe I could just
touch
it,” Elaine considered, more thoughtfully. “I don’t mean your bare boner!” she quickly added. “Maybe I could just
feel
it—I mean, through your clothes.”

“Sure—why not?” I said, as casually as I could, though I would wonder (for years) if anyone else ever went through a sexual initiation of such a highly negotiated kind.

The boys at Favorite River Academy were not permitted to wear jeans; dungarees, as we called them then, were not allowed in class or in the dining hall, where we were obliged to wear coats and ties. Most boys wore khakis, or—in the winter months—flannel trousers or corduroys. I was wearing a baggy pair of corduroys on this January Saturday night. It was a comfortable pair of pants to have a boner in, but I was also wearing
Jockey briefs, and they were increasingly uncomfortable. Maybe it was the only men’s underwear you could buy in Vermont in 1960—white Jockey briefs. (I don’t know; at the time, my mom still bought all my clothes.)

I’d seen Kittredge’s underwear, at the gym—blue cotton boxers, the color of a blue dress shirt. Maybe his French mother had bought them in Paris, or in New York. “That woman
has
to be his mother,” Elaine had said. “She could
be
Kittredge, if she didn’t have those breasts—that woman would know where to buy boxers like that.” And Kittredge’s blue boxers were
pressed;
this wasn’t an affectation of Kittredge’s, because the school laundry pressed everything—not just your trousers and dress shirts, but even your underwear and your stupid socks. (This was talked about with a derision almost equal to that assigned to the advice of Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau.)

Notwithstanding this social history, my first erection inspired by Elaine Hadley (or by her bra) was stiffening in a tight-fitting pair of Jockey briefs, which were threatening to cut off circulation to my “inspired” hard-on. Elaine—with an aggressiveness I was unprepared for—suddenly put her hand on those very genitals that Dr. Grau had told us we’d “not yet identified” as our own goddamn sexual organs! There was no question in my mind concerning what and where my “sole or principal sexual organs” were, and when Elaine grabbed hold of them, I flinched.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” Elaine cried, momentarily deafening the nearer of my ears. “I can’t imagine what having one of those is like!”

This was sexually confusing, too. Did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine what having a penis
inside
her was like, or did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine being a boy and having her own penis? I didn’t ask. I was relieved that she’d released my balls from her not inconsiderable grasp, but Elaine held fast to my penis, and I continued to fondle her breasts. Had we resumed the French kissing where we’d left off, there’s no telling what the aforementioned “gathering momentum” might have led to, but in fact we’d just begun to kiss again—tentatively, at first, with only the tips of our tongues making contact. I watched Elaine close her eyes, and I closed mine.

Thus I discovered that it was possible to be holding Elaine Hadley’s breast while I imagined I was fondling an equally permissive Miss Frost. (Miss Frost’s breasts would only be slightly bigger than Elaine’s, I had
long imagined.) With my eyes closed, I could even conceive that the fierce grip of Elaine’s small hand on my penis was in truth Miss Frost’s far bigger hand—in which case, Miss Frost must have been restraining herself. And, as the French kissing quickened—both Elaine and I were soon breathless—I fantasized that it was Miss Frost’s long tongue thrusting against mine, and that we were entwined on the brass bed in her basement hideaway in the First Sister Public Library.

When the diesel fumes from the first of the returning team buses reached the cracked-open window of Elaine’s fifth-floor room, I managed to think I was smelling the oil-burning furnace next to Miss Frost’s former coal bin of a bedroom. When I opened my eyes, I half expected to be face-to-face with Miss Frost, but there instead was my friend Elaine Hadley, with her eyes tightly closed.

All the time I’d been imagining Miss Frost, it had not occurred to me that Elaine might have been imagining, too. Not surprisingly, the name on her lips, which she somehow managed to say in my mouth, was “Kittredge!” (Elaine had correctly identified the diesel fumes from the returning team bus; she was wondering if it was the wrestling-team bus, because she’d been imagining Kittredge while I was imagining Miss Frost.)

Elaine’s eyes were wide open now. I must have looked as guilty as she did. There was a pulse in my penis; if I could feel it throbbing, I knew that Elaine could feel it, too.

“Your heart’s beating, Billy,” she said.