In One Person (37 page)

“My, my—what a busy boy you’ve been, William,” she said, leading me to the basement stairs. “You’ve read
Giovanni’s Room,
haven’t you?”

“Twice!” I managed to say.

“
Twice,
already!
And
you’ve found the time to read those old yearbooks, haven’t you, William? I knew it wouldn’t take you long to get from 1931 to 1935. Was it that wrestling-team photo in ’35—was that the one that caught your eye, William?”

“Yes!” I scarcely managed to tell her. Miss Frost was lighting the cinnamon-scented candle in her bedroom; then she turned off the reading lamp that was fastened to the headboard of her brass bed, where the covers were already turned down.

“I couldn’t very well have kept you from seeing those old yearbooks—could I, William?” she went on saying. “I’m not welcome in the academy library. And if you hadn’t seen that picture of me in my wrestling days, surely somebody would have told you about me—eventually. I’m frankly astonished that someone
didn’t
tell you,” Miss Frost said.

“My family doesn’t tell me much,” I told her. I was undressing as quickly as I could, and Miss Frost had already unbuttoned her blouse and taken off her skirt. This time, when she used the toilet, she didn’t mention the matter of her privacy.

“Yes, I know about that family of yours!” she said, laughing. She hiked up her half-slip, and—first lifting the wooden toilet seat—she peed standing up, rather loudly, but with her back to me. I didn’t see her penis, but there was no doubt, from the forceful way she was pissing, that she had one.

I lay naked on the brass bed and watched her washing her hands and face, and brushing her teeth, in that little sink. I saw her wink at me in the mirror. “I guess you must have been a pretty good wrestler,” I said to her, “if they made you captain of the team.”

“I didn’t ask to be captain,” she told me. “I just kept beating everybody—I beat everyone, so they made me captain. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could refuse.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, the wrestling kept them all from questioning me,” Miss Frost said. She was hanging up her skirt and blouse in the wardrobe closet; this time, she took her bra off, too. “They don’t question you—I mean
sexually
—if you’re a wrestler. It kind of keeps them off the track—if you know what I mean, William.”

“I know what you mean,” I told her. I thought that her breasts were wonderful—so small, and with such perfect nipples, but her breasts were bigger than poor Elaine’s. Miss Frost had a fourteen-year-old’s breasts, and they looked small on her only because she was so big and strong.

“I love your breasts,” I said to her.

“Thank you, William. They won’t get any bigger, but it’s a wonder what hormones can induce. I guess I don’t really
need
to have bigger ones,” Miss Frost said, smiling at me.

“I think they’re the perfect size,” I told her.

“I assure you, I didn’t have them when I
wrestled
—that wouldn’t have worked out very well,” Miss Frost said. “I kept wrestling—thus, I kept the questions at bay, all through college,” she told me. “No breasts—no living as a woman, William—until
after
I was out of college.”

“Where’d you go to college?” I asked her.

“Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.”

“Were you as good a wrestler as Kittredge?” I asked her. She lay down beside me on the bed, but this time when she took my penis in her big hand, I was facing her.

“Kittredge isn’t that good,” Miss Frost said. “He just hasn’t had any competition. New England isn’t exactly a hotbed for wrestling. It’s nothing like Pennsylvania.”

“Oh.”

I touched her half-slip, in the area where I thought her penis was; she let me touch her. I didn’t try to reach under the half-slip. I just touched her penis through the slinky material of her half-slip; this one was a pearl-gray color, almost the same color as Elaine’s bra. When I thought of Elaine’s bra, I remembered
Giovanni’s Room,
which was under the same pillow.

The James Baldwin novel was so unbearably sad that I suddenly didn’t want to talk about it with Miss Frost; instead, I asked her, “Wasn’t it difficult being a wrestler, when you wanted to be a girl and you were attracted to other boys?”

“It wasn’t that difficult when I was winning. I like to be on top,” she told me. “When you’re winning in wrestling, you’re on top. It was more difficult in Pennsylvania, because I wasn’t winning all the time there. I was on the bottom more than I liked,” she said, “but I was older then—I could handle losing. I
hated
being pinned, but I was pinned only twice—by the same fucking guy. Wrestling was my
cover,
William. Back then, boys like us needed a cover. Wasn’t Elaine a cover, William? She looked like your cover to me,” Miss Frost said. “Nowadays, don’t boys like us still need a little cover?”

“Yes, we do,” I whispered.

“Oh, now we’re whispering again!” Miss Frost whispered. “Whispering is a kind of cover, too, I guess.”

“You must have studied something in that college in Pennsylvania—not just wrestling,” I said to her. “The yearbook said your choice of career was ‘fiction’—kind of a funny career path, isn’t it?” I asked her. (I believe I was just babbling, as a way to distract myself from Miss Frost’s penis.)

“In college, I studied library science,” Miss Frost was saying, while we went on holding each other’s penises. Hers wasn’t as hard as mine—not yet, anyway. I thought that, even not hard, her penis was bigger than mine, but if you’re not experienced, you can’t really estimate the size of someone’s penis—not if you can’t see it. “I thought that a library would be a fairly safe and forgiving place for a man who was on his way to becoming a woman,” Miss Frost continued. “I even knew
which
library I wanted to work in—the very same academy library where those old yearbooks are, William. I thought: What other library would appreciate me as much as my old school library? I’d been a good student at Favorite River, and I’d been a
very
good wrestler—not so good by Pennsylvania standards, maybe, but I’d been very good in New England. Of course, when I came back to First Sister
as a woman,
Favorite River Academy wanted nothing to do with someone like me—not around all those
impressionable
boys! Everyone is naïve about something, William, and I was naïve about that. I knew my old school had liked me when I was Big Al; I was naïve enough to be unprepared for them
not
liking me as
Miss
Frost. It was only because your grandpa Harry was on the board of the town
library—this funny old public library, where I was
way
overqualified to be the librarian—that they gave me the job here.”

“But why did you want to stay here in First Sister—
or
be at Favorite River Academy, which you say yourself is an
awful
school?” I asked her.

I was only eighteen, but I already never wanted to come back to Favorite River Academy or the Podunk town of First Sister, Vermont. I couldn’t wait to get away, to be somewhere—to be
anywhere
—where I could have sex with whomever I wanted to, without being stared at and judged by all these overly familiar people who presumed they
knew
me!

“I have an ailing parent, William,” Miss Frost explained. “My father died the year I started at Favorite River Academy; if he hadn’t passed away, my becoming a woman probably would have killed him. But my mother hasn’t been healthy for quite some time; I barely got through college because of my mother’s health problems. She’s one of those people who’s been sick so long that if she ever got well, she wouldn’t know she was cured. She’s sick in her
mind,
William; she doesn’t even
notice
that I’m a woman, or maybe she doesn’t remember that her little boy was
ever
a man. I’m sure she doesn’t remember that she used to have a little boy.”

“Oh.”

“Your grandpa Harry used to employ my dad. Harry knew I was the one who took care of my mom. That’s the only reason I had to come back to First Sister—whether Favorite River Academy would have me or not, William.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Miss Frost replied, in that
acting
way. “Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you—they can’t turn you away. And I got to meet
you,
William. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll be remembered as the crazy cross-dressing librarian who got you
started
as a writer. You have started, haven’t you?” she asked me.

But the story of her life, so far, seemed extraordinarily unhappy to me. While I went on touching her penis through that pearl-gray half-slip, I thought about
Giovanni’s Room,
which was all wrapped up in Elaine’s bra, under my pillow, and I said, “I
loved
the James Baldwin novel. I didn’t bring it back to the library because I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins. He and I have talked about it—I think he would love
Giovanni’s Room,
too. Is it all right with you if I lend it to him?”

“Is
Giovanni’s Room
in your book bag, William?” Miss Frost asked me suddenly. “Where is the actual book right now?”

“It’s at home,” I told her. I was suddenly afraid to say it was under my pillow—not to mention that the novel was in contact with Elaine Hadley’s padded pearl-gray bra.

“You mustn’t leave that novel at home,” Miss Frost told me. “Of course you can lend it to Tom. But tell Tom not to let his roommate see it.”

“I don’t know who Atkins has for a roommate,” I told her.

“It doesn’t matter who Tom’s roommate
is
—just don’t let the roommate see that novel. I told you not to let your mother—or Richard Abbott—see it. If I were you, I wouldn’t even let your grandpa Harry know you have it.”

“Grandpa knows I have a crush on Kittredge,” I said to Miss Frost. “Nobody but you knows I have a crush on
you,”
I told her.

“I hope you’re right about that, William,” she whispered. She bent over me and put my penis in her mouth—in less time than it took me to write this sentence. Yet, when I reached under her half-slip for
her
penis, she stopped me. “No—we’re not doing that,” she said.

“I want to do everything,” I told her.

“Of course you do, William, but you’ll have to do everything with someone else. It is not appropriate for a young man your age to do
everything
with someone my age,” Miss Frost told me. “I will not be responsible for your first time at trying
everything
.”

With that, she put my penis back in her mouth; for the time being, she would not explain herself further. When she was still sucking me, I said: “I don’t think we had
actual
sex the last time—I mean the penetration part. We did something else, didn’t we?”

“Talking is not very easily accomplished during a blow job, William,” Miss Frost said, sighing in such a way—while she lay down next to me, face-to-face—that I got the feeling this was probably curtains for the blow job, and it was. “You seemed to enjoy the ‘something else’ we did last time, William,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I
did
!” I cried. “I was just wondering about the penetration part.”

“You can wonder about it all you want, William, but there will be
no
‘penetration part’ with me. Don’t you see?” she asked me suddenly. “I am trying to
protect
you from ‘actual sex.’ At least a
little,
” Miss Frost added, smiling.

“But I don’t want to be
protected
!” I cried.

“I will not have ‘actual sex’ with an eighteen-year-old on my conscience,
William. As for who you will become, I’ve probably been of too much influence already!” Miss Frost declared. She was certainly right about that, though she must have imagined she was being more theatrical than prophetic—and I didn’t yet know just how much of an “influence” (on the rest of my
life
!) Miss Frost would be.

This time, she showed me the lotion she used—she let me smell it on her fingers. It had an almond fragrance. She didn’t straddle me, or sit on me; we lay sideways with our penises touching. I still didn’t see her penis, but Miss Frost rubbed her penis and mine together. When she rolled over, she took my penis between her thighs and pushed her buttocks against my stomach. Her half-slip was hiked up to her waist; I held one of her bare breasts in one hand, and her penis in the other. Miss Frost slid my penis between her thighs until I ejaculated into the palm of her hand.

We seemed to lie in each other’s arms for the longest time afterward, but I realize that we couldn’t have been alone like that for nearly as long as I imagined; we truly
didn’t
have much time together. I think it was because I loved listening to her talk, and the sound of her voice, that I imagined the time as passing more slowly than it actually did.