“Oh, hi, Mom—how’s it going? I should tell you that, contrary to feeling violated, I feel that Miss Frost was protecting me—she truly prevented me from penetrating her, and I hope it goes without saying that she didn’t penetrate me!”
I usually didn’t get to say more than that before my mother would run into her bedroom and close the door. “Richard!” she would call, forgetting that she was giving Richard the “silent treatment” because he’d taken up Miss Frost’s lost cause.
“No what most people call sex, Mom—that’s what I’m telling you,” I would continue saying to her, on the other side of her closed bedroom door. “What Miss Frost truly did to me amounted to nothing more than a fancy kind of masturbation. There’s a special name for it and everything, but I’ll spare you the details!”
“Stop it, Billy—stop it, stop it, stop it!” my mom would cry. (I guess she forgot that she was giving me the “silent treatment,” too.)
“Take it easy, Bill,” Richard Abbott would caution me. “I think your mom is feeling pretty fragile these days.”
“Pretty fragile these days,” I repeated, looking straight at him—until Richard looked away.
“Trust me on this one, William,” Miss Frost had said to me, when we were holding each other’s penises. “Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”
But I didn’t want to break that habit; it had been her habit, and I decided to embrace it.
“I’m not judging you, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “I can see for myself, without you belaboring the details, that your experience with Miss Frost has affected you in certain positive ways.”
“Belaboring the details,” I repeated. “Positive ways.”
“However, Billy, I feel it is my duty to inform you that in a sexual situation of this awkward kind, there is an expectation, in the minds of many adults.” Here Martha Hadley paused; so did I. I was considering repeating that bit about “in a sexual situation of this awkward kind,” but Mrs. Hadley suddenly continued her arduous train of thought. “What many adults hope to hear you express, Billy, is something you have not, as yet, expressed.”
“There is an expectation that I will express what?” I asked her.
“Remorse,” Martha Hadley said.
“Remorse,” I repeated, looking straight at her, until Mrs. Hadley looked away.
“The repetition thing is annoying, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.
“Yes, isn’t it?” I asked her.
“I’m sorry that they’re making you see Dr. Harlow,” she told me.
“Do you think Dr. Harlow is hoping to hear me express remorse?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.
“That would be my guess, Billy,” she said.
“Thank you for telling me,” I told her.
Atkins was on the music-building stairs again. “It’s so very tragic,” he started. “Last night, when I was thinking about it, I threw up.”
“You were thinking about what?” I asked him.
“Giovanni’s Room!” he cried; we’d already discussed the novel, but I gathered that poor Tom wasn’t done. “That part about the smell of love—”
“The stink of love,” I corrected him.
“The reek of it,” Atkins said, gagging.
“It’s stink, Tom.”
“The stench,” Atkins said, vomiting on the stairs.
“Jesus, Tom—”
“And that awful woman with the cavernous cunt!” Atkins cried.
“The what?” I asked him.
“The terrible girlfriend—you know who I mean, Bill.”
“I guess that was the point of it, Tom—how someone he once desired now turns him off,” I said.
“They smell like fish, you know,” Atkins told me.
“Do you mean women?” I asked him.
He gagged again, then recovered himself. “I mean their things,” Atkins said.
“Their vaginas, Tom?”
“Don’t say that word!” poor Tom cried, retching.
“I have to go, Tom,” I told him. “I have to prepare myself for a little chat with Dr. Harlow.”
“Talk to Kittredge, Bill. They’re always making Kittredge have a talk with Dr. Harlow. Kittredge knows how to handle Dr. Harlow,” Atkins told me. I didn’t doubt it; I just didn’t want to talk to Kittredge about anything.
But, of course, Kittredge had heard about Miss Frost. Nothing of a sexual nature escaped him. If you were a boy at Favorite River and you received a restriction, Kittredge not only knew your crime; he knew who had caught you, and the terms of confinement your restriction entailed.
Not only was the public library off limits to me; I was told not to see Miss Frost—not that I knew where to find her. The whereabouts of the family home she’d shared with her mental-case mother were unknown to me. Besides, that house was for sale; for all I knew, Miss Frost (and her mom) had already moved out.
I did my homework, and what writing I could manage, in the yearbook room of the academy library. It was always a little before check-in when I passed, as quickly as I could, through the Bancroft Hall butt room, where both the smoking and the nonsmoking boys seemed uncharacteristically disturbed to see me. I suppose that my sexual reputation troubled them; whatever convenient pigeonhole they’d put me in might not be the right fit for me now.
If those boys had heretofore thought of me as a miserable faggot, what were they to make of my apparent friendship with Kittredge? And now there was this story about the transsexual town librarian. Okay, so she was some guy in drag; she wasn’t a real woman, but she presented as a woman. Maybe more to the point, I had acquired an undeniable mystique—if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don’t forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys—even if the older woman has a penis!
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true. The truth was, I hadn’t had what most people call sex—there’d been no penetration! But those butt-room boys didn’t know that, nor would they have believed it. In the minds of my fellow students at Favorite River Academy, Miss Frost and I had done everything.
I’d climbed the stairs to the second floor of Bancroft when Kittredge suddenly swept me into his arms; at a dead run, Kittredge carried me up the third flight of stairs and into the hall of the dormitory. Worshipful boys gaped at us from the open doorways to their rooms; I could feel their sad envy, a familiar and pathetic longing.
“Holy shit, Nymph—you are the nooky master!” Kittredge whispered in my ear. “You are the poontang man! Way to go, Nymph! I am so impressed with you—you are my new hero! Listen up!” Kittredge called to the gawking boys in the third-floor hall, and in their doorways. “While you jerk-offs are beating your meat, and only dreaming about getting laid, this guy is really doing it. You there,” Kittredge suddenly said to a round-faced underclassman who stood terror-frozen in the hall; his name was Trowbridge, he was wearing pajamas, and he held his toothbrush (with a gob of toothpaste already on it) as if he hoped the toothbrush were a magic wand.