In One Person (76 page)

“So my vagina is ‘not a ballroom’ in a
positive
way?” Elaine now said on the phone. “Well, that sounds okay. I can’t wait to get a good look at your penis, Billy—I know you’ll take my staring at your penis in a
positive
way.”

“I can’t wait, too,” I told her.

“Just remember who’s the
perfect
size for you, Billy,” Elaine said.

“I love you, Elaine,” I told her.

“I love you, too, Billy,” Elaine said.

Thus was my not-a-ballroom faux pas put to rest—thus that ghost departed. Thus did my worst memory of Esmeralda (
that
terrifying angel) take flight.

I
T WAS THE THIRD
week of November 2010—for as long as I live, I won’t forget this. I had my hands full with
Romeo and Juliet;
I had a terrific cast of kids, and (as you know) a Juliet with all the balls a director could ever ask for.

The stage mice chiefly bothered the few females in that cast—namely, my Lady Montague and my Lady Capulet, and my Nurse. As for my Juliet, Gee didn’t shriek when the stage mice were scurrying around; Gee
tried to stomp on the disruptive little rodents. Gee and my bloodthirsty Tybalt had killed some stage mice by stomping on them, but my Mercutio and my Romeo were the experts in my cast at setting the mousetraps. I was constantly reminding them that they had to disarm the mousetraps when our
Romeo and Juliet
was in performance. I didn’t want that grisly snapping sound—or the occasional death squeal of a stage mouse—to interrupt the show.

My Romeo was a cow-eyed boy of strictly conventional handsomeness, but he had exceptionally good diction. He could say that act 1, scene 1 line (of utmost importance) so that the audience could really hear it. “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”—that one.

It was also important to Gee that—as she told me—my Romeo was not her type. “But I’m okay about kissing him,” she’d added.

Fortunately, my Romeo was okay about kissing Gee—despite everyone in our school knowing that Gee had balls (and a penis). It would have taken a brave boy at Favorite River to have ventured to
date
Gee; it hadn’t happened. Gee had always lived in a girls’ dorm; even with balls and a penis, Gee would never bother the girls, and the girls knew it. The girls had not once bothered Gee, either.

Putting Gee in a boys’ dorm might have been asking for trouble; Gee liked boys, but because Gee was a boy who was trying to become a girl, some of the boys
definitely
would have bothered her.

No one had imagined—least of all, me—that Gee would turn out to be such a pretty young woman. No doubt, there were boys at Favorite River Academy who had a serious crush on her—straight boys, because Gee was completely passable, and those gay boys who were turned on by Gee
because
she had balls and a penis.

Richard Abbott and I took turns driving Gee out to see Martha at the Facility. At ninety, Mrs. Hadley was a kind of wise grandmother to Gee; Martha told Gee not to date any boys at Favorite River.

“Save the dating for when you get to college,” Mrs. Hadley had advised her.

“That’s what I’m doing—I’m waiting on the dating,” Gee Montgomery had told me. “All the guys at Favorite River are too immature for me, anyway,” she said.

There was one boy who seemed
very
mature to me—at least physically. He was, like Gee, a senior, but he was also a wrestler, which was why I had cast him as the fiery-tempered Tybalt—a kinsman to the Capulets,
and the hothead who is most responsible for what happens in the play. Oh, I know, it is the long-standing discord between the Montagues and the Capulets that brings about the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but Tybalt is the catalyst. (I hope Herm Hoyt and Miss Frost would have forgiven me for casting a wrestler as my catalyst.)

My Tybalt was the most mature-looking boy at Favorite River—a four-year varsity wrestler from Germany. Manfred was a light-heavyweight; his English was correct, and very carefully enunciated, but he’d retained a slight accent. I’d told Manfred to let us hear the accent in
Romeo and Juliet
. How wicked of me—to have my Tybalt be a wrestler with a German accent. But, to tell you the truth, I was a little worried about how big a crush Manfred might have had on Gee. (And I know Gee liked him.) If there was a boy at Favorite River who was conceivably courageous enough to date Gee Montgomery—that is, even to
ask
her for a date—that boy, who very much looked like a man, was my hot-blooded Tybalt.

By that Wednesday, we were off-script in
Romeo and Juliet
—we were in the fine-tuning phase. Our rehearsal was later in the evening than usual; we had an 8
P.M.
start—due to Manfred being at a pre-season wrestling match somewhere in Massachusetts.

I’d gone to the theater close to our usual rehearsal time, about 6:45 or 7:00 on that Wednesday, and—as I expected—most of my cast would show up early as well. Come 8:00, we would
all
be waiting for Manfred—my most combative Tybalt.

I was having a political conversation with my Benvolio, one of my gay boys. He was very active in the campus LGBTQ group, and we were talking about the election of the new governor of Vermont, a Democrat—“our gay-rights governor,” my Benvolio was in the midst of saying.

Suddenly, he interrupted himself and said: “I forgot to tell you, Mr. A. There’s a guy looking for you. He was in the dining hall, asking about you.”

I’d actually been in the dining hall for a quick bite to eat earlier that same evening, and someone else had told me there was a guy asking where he might find me. A young woman in the English Department had told me—a kind of Amanda-type, but
not
. (Amanda had moved on, to my relief.)

“How old a guy?” I’d asked this young faculty person. “What did he look like?”

“My age, or only a little older—good-looking,” she’d told me. I was
guessing that this young English teacher was in her early thirties—maybe mid-thirties.

“How old a man, would you guess?” I asked my young Benvolio. “What did he look like?”

“
Late
thirties, maybe,” my Benvolio answered. “
Very
handsome—
hot,
if you ask me,” the gay boy said, smiling. (He was an excellent Benvolio to my cow-eyed Romeo, I was thinking.)

My cast was showing up in the black box—some arriving alone, some in twos or threes. If Manfred got back from his wrestling match ahead of schedule, we could start our rehearsal; most of the kids still had homework to do—they would have a late night.

Here came my clergymen, my Friar Lawrence and my Friar John, and my officious-sounding Apothecary. Here came my chatterboxes—two junior girls, my Lady Montague and my Lady Capulet. And there was my Mercutio—only a sophomore, but a long-legged and talented one. He had the requisite charm and derring-do for the likable but doomed Mercutio.

Straggling into the black box, not quite last, were various Attendants, Maskers, Torchbearers, my Boy with a drum (a tiny freshman, who could have played a dwarf), several Servingmen (including Tybalt’s page), sundry Gentlemen and Gentlewomen—and my Paris, my Prince Escalus, and the others. My Nurse came at the end, shoving my Balthasar and my Petruchio ahead of her. Juliet’s Nurse was a stalwart girl—a field-hockey player, and one of the most outspoken lesbians in the LGBTQ group. My Nurse did not countenance most male behavior—including gay and bi male behavior. I was very fond of her. If there were ever any trouble—a food fight in the dining hall, or a disaffected student with a weapon—I knew I could count on Juliet’s Nurse to watch my back. She had a grudging respect for Gee, but I knew they weren’t friends.

And where was Gee? I began to wonder. My Juliet was usually the first to arrive at the theater.

“There’s a guy looking for you, Mr. A.—some creep who thinks very highly of himself,” Juliet’s Nurse told me. “I think he’s hitting on Gee, or maybe he’s just walking with her and talking to her. They’re on their way here, anyway,” my Nurse said.

But I did not, at first, see the stranger; when I spotted Gee, she was alone. I’d been discussing Mercutio’s death scene with my long-legged Mercutio. I was agreeing with him that there is, as my talented sophomore
put it, some black humor involved, when Mercutio first describes the seriousness of his stab wound to Romeo—“’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough. ’Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” Yet I cautioned my Mercutio not to make it the least bit
funny
when he curses the Capulets and the Montagues: “A plague o’ both your houses!”

“Sorry I’m a little late, Mr. A.—I got delayed,” Gee said; she looked flushed, even red-cheeked, but it was cold outside. There was no one with her.

“I heard some guy was bothering you,” I told her.

“He wasn’t bothering
me
—he’s got a thing about
you,
” my Juliet told me.

“He looked like he was hitting on you,” my sturdy Nurse said to her.

“No one’s hitting on me till I get to college,” Gee told her.

“Did the man say what he wanted?” I asked Gee; she shook her head.

“I think it’s personal, Mr. A.—the guy is upset about something,” Gee said.

We were all standing in the stage area, which was brightly lit; my stage manager had already dimmed the houselights. In our black box, we can position the audience where we want them; we can move the seats around. Sometimes, the audience completely encircles the stage or sits facing one another with the stage between them. For
Romeo and Juliet,
I had all the seats form a shallow horseshoe around the stage. With the houselights dimmed, but not dark, I could watch the rehearsals from any seat in the audience and still see well enough to read my notes—or write new notes.

It was my gay Benvolio who whispered in my ear, while all of us were still waiting for Manfred (my trouble-making Tybalt) to get back to campus from his wrestling match. “Mr. A.—I see him,” my Benvolio whispered. “That guy who’s looking for you—he’s in the audience.” With the houselights dimmed, I could not make out the man’s face; he was sitting in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped seats, about four or five rows back—just out of reach of the spotlights illuminating our stage.

“Should we call Security, Mr. A.?” Gee asked me.

“No, no—I’ll just see what he wants,” I told her. “If I appear to be stuck in an unwelcome conversation, just come interrupt us—pretend you have to ask me something about the play. Make up anything that comes to mind,” I said.

“You want me to come with you?” my bold Nurse, the field-hockey player, asked me.

“No, no,” I told the fearless girl, who was spoiling for a fight. “Just be sure I know when Manfred gets here.”

We were at that point in our rehearsals where I like to have the kids run their lines consecutively; I didn’t want to be rehearsing either piecemeal or out of sequence. My ever-ready Tybalt is an inciting presence in act 1, scene 1. (
Enter Tybalt, drawing his sword,
as the stage directions say.) The only rehearsing I wanted to do without Manfred was that small set piece the Chorus says, the prologue to the play.

“Listen up, Chorus,” I said. “Run through the prologue a couple of times. Take note that the most important line ends not with a comma, but a semicolon; pay attention to that semicolon. ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’; please
pause
after the semicolon.”

“We’re here, if you need us, Mr. A.,” I heard Gee say—as I went up an aisle to the fourth or fifth row of seats, into the dimly lit audience.

“Hey,
Teacher,
” I heard the man say, maybe a split second before I could clearly see him. He might as well have said, “Hey,
Nymph
”—that’s how familiar his voice was to me, almost fifty years after I’d last heard it. His handsome face, his wrestler’s build, his slyly confident smile—they were all familiar to me.

But you’re supposed to be
dead
! I was thinking—the “of natural causes” was the only doubtful part. Yet
this
Kittredge, of course, couldn’t have been
my
Kittredge. This Kittredge was only slightly more than half my age; if he’d been born in the early seventies, when I’d imagined Kittredge’s son had been born, he would have been in his late thirties—thirty-seven or thirty-eight, I would have guessed, upon meeting Kittredge’s only child.

“It’s truly striking how much you look like your father,” I said to young Kittredge, holding out my hand; he declined to shake it. “Well, of course, I mean if I had seen your father at your age—you look as I
imagine
he must have looked in his late thirties.”

“My father didn’t look at all like me when he was my age,” the young man said. “He was already in his early thirties when I was born; by the time I was old enough to remember what he looked like, he already looked like a woman. He hadn’t had the surgical reassignment yet, but he was very passable as a woman. I didn’t
have
a father. I had two mothers—one of them was hysterical most of the time, and the other one had
a penis. After the surgery, as I understand it, he had some kind of vagina. He died of AIDS—I’m surprised you
haven’t
. I’ve read all your novels,” young Kittredge added, as if everything in my writing had indicated to him that I easily could have died of AIDS—or that I
should
have.