The jocks who did not hang around the gym after their road trips didn’t have far to go. The jock dorm, which was called Tilley, was a five-story brick rectangle next to the gym. For whatever mindless reason, the jocks always whooped it up in the quad of dorms when they walked or ran to Tilley from the gym.
Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, were out; they’d gone off with Richard and my mom—as they often did together, especially when there was a foreign film playing in Ezra Falls. The marquee at the movie house in Ezra Falls capitalized it when a film had SUBTITLES. This wasn’t just a warning to those local Vermonters who were disinclined (or unable) to read subtitles; this amounted to a caveat of a different kind—namely, that a foreign film was likely to have more sexual content than many Vermonters were used to.
When my mom and Richard and the Hadleys went to Ezra Falls to see those films with subtitles, Elaine and I weren’t usually invited. Therefore, while our parents were out watching sex movies, Elaine and I were alone—either in her bedroom or in mine, always with the door open.
Elaine did not attend movie night in the Favorite River gym—not even when they weren’t showing a Western. The atmosphere in the academy gym on movie nights was too all-boys for Elaine’s liking. Faculty daughters of a certain age did not feel comfortable in that young-male environment. There was intentional farting, and far worse signs of loutish behavior. Elaine hypothesized that if they showed the foreign sex films in the academy gym on movie nights, some of the boys would beat off on the basketball court.
Generally, when we were left alone, Elaine and I preferred her bedroom to mine. The Hadleys’ fifth-floor dormitory apartment had more of an overview of the quad; Richard and my mom’s apartment, and my bedroom, were on the third floor of the dorm. Our dormitory was called Bancroft, and there was a bust of old Bancroft, a long-dead professor emeritus at Favorite River, in the ground-floor common room—the butt room, it was called. Bancroft (or at least his bust) was bald, and he had bushy eyebrows.
I was in the process of acquainting myself with Favorite River Academy’s past. I had encountered photographs of the actual Professor Bancroft. He’d been a young faculty member once, and I’d seen his photos—when he had a full head of hair—in those long-ago yearbooks in the academy library. (You shouldn’t guess about someone’s past; if you don’t see any evidence of it, a person’s past remains unknown to you.)
When Elaine went with me to the yearbook room, she demonstrated little interest in the older yearbooks that fascinated me. I had barely inched my way through the First World War, but Elaine Hadley had begun with the contemporary yearbooks; she liked looking at the photographs of boys who were still at the school, or who’d only recently graduated. At the rate we were going, Elaine and I estimated that we might arrive at the same yearbook in the early years of World War II—or just before that war, maybe.
“Well, he’s good-looking,” Elaine would say, when she fancied this or that boy in the yearbook photos.
“Show me,” I would say—ever her loyal friend, but not yet giving myself away to her. (We had somewhat similar taste in young men.)
It’s a wonder I dared to suggest that I’d wanted to fool around with Elaine. While this was a well-meaning lie, I may also have been trying to throw her off the track; I might have been worried that Elaine somehow sensed I was given to those homosexual yearnings Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau sought to treat “aggressively.”
At first, Elaine didn’t believe me. “You just said what?” she asked me. We had been flopping around on her bed—certainly not in a sexual way. We were bored, listening to a rock-’n’-roll station on Elaine’s radio while keeping an eye out her fifth-floor window. The return of the team buses meant little to us, though this nonevent would mean that Kittredge was once again at large in the quad.
There was a reading lamp with a dark-blue shade on Elaine’s windowsill; the lamp shade was made of glass, as thick as a Coke bottle. Kittredge knew that the dark-blue light in the fifth-floor window of Bancroft was coming from Elaine’s bedroom. Ever since we’d been in The Tempest together, Kittredge would occasionally serenade that blue light in Elaine’s bedroom, which he could see from anywhere in the quadrangle of dormitories—even from Tilley, the jock dorm. I had not spotted Professor Tilley in my search of the faculty photographs in the yearbook room. If Tilley was a professor emeritus at Favorite River, he must have taught at the school in more modern times than those school days of yore—the ones old Bancroft had once whinnied in.
I didn’t realize how much Kittredge’s infrequent serenades meant to Elaine; they were, of course, mocking in tone—“Shakespearean patois,” as Elaine described it. Yet I knew that Elaine often fell asleep with that dark-blue lamp on—and that when Kittredge didn’t serenade her, she was unhappy about it.
It was into this rock-’n’-roll-radio atmosphere of idle waiting, in the loneliness of Elaine Hadley’s dark-blue bedroom, where I introduced the idea of my wanting to fool around with her. It wasn’t that this was such a bad idea; it just wasn’t true. It’s not surprising that Elaine’s initial response was one of disbelief.
“You just said what?” my friend Elaine asked.
“I don’t want to do or say anything that would endanger our friendship,” I told her.
“You want to fool around with me?” Elaine asked.
“Yes, I do—a little,” I said.
“No . . . penetration, is that what you mean?” she asked.
“No . . . yes, that’s what I mean,” I said. Elaine knew that I had a little trouble with the penetration word; it was one of those nouns that could cause a pronunciation problem for me, but I would soon get over it.
“Say it, Billy,” Elaine said.
“No . . . going all the way,” I told her.
“But what kind of fooling around, exactly?” she asked.
I lay facedown on her bed and covered my head with one of her pillows. This must have been unacceptable to her, because she straddled my hips and sat on my lower back. I could feel her breathing on the back of my neck; she nuzzled my ear. “Kissing?” she whispered. “Touching?”
“Yes,” I said, in a muffled voice.
Elaine pulled the pillow off my head. “Touching what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Not everything,” Elaine said.
“No! Certainly not,” I said.
“You can touch my breasts,” she said. “I don’t have any breasts, anyway.”
“Yes, you do,” I told her. She had something there, and I admit that I wanted to touch her breasts. (I confess to wanting to touch all kinds of breasts, especially small ones.)
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.