She didn’t answer me, but I could see that she was afraid of my having all the sex I wanted, the way I wanted it. This time, Richard didn’t jump into the conversation; he didn’t try to help her out. As I went to my bedroom and closed the door, I was thinking that Richard Abbott probably knew something I didn’t know.
I lay down on my bed and tried to imagine everything that I might not know. It must have been something my mother had kept from me, I thought, and maybe Richard had disapproved of her not telling me. That would explain why Richard hadn’t rushed in to help my mom out of whatever mess she’d made for herself. (Richard hadn’t even managed to say his usual “Take it easy, Bill” bullshit!)
Later, as I was trying to fall asleep, I was thinking that, if I ever had children, I would tell them everything. But the everything word only led me to remember the details of my sexual experience with Miss Frost. Those details, which I would impart—in as titillating (even in as pornographic) a fashion as I could manage—to Dr. Harlow in the morning, led me next to imagine the sex that I hadn’t had with Miss Frost. Naturally, with all there was to imagine, I was awake rather late into the night.
KITTREDGE HAD PREPARED ME SO well for my meeting with Dr. Harlow that the meeting itself was anticlimactic. I simply told the truth; I left no detail out. I even included the part about my not knowing, at first, if I’d had what most people call sex with Miss Frost—if there’d been any penetration. The penetration word seized Dr. Harlow’s attention to such a degree that he stopped writing on his pad of lined paper; he flat out asked me.
“Well, was there any penetration?” the doctor said impatiently.
“In due time,” I told him. “You can’t rush that part of the story.”
“I want to know exactly what happened, Bill!” Dr. Harlow exclaimed.
“Oh, you will!” I cried excitedly. “The not-knowing is part of the story.”
“I don’t care about the not-knowing part!” Dr. Harlow declared, pointing his pencil at me. But I was not about to be rushed. The longer I talked, the more the bald-headed owl-fucker had to listen.
At Favorite River Academy, we called the faculty and staff we intensely disliked “bald-headed owl-fuckers.” The origin of this is obscure. If the Favorite River yearbook was called The Owl, I’m guessing that this hinted at an owl’s presumed wisdom—as expressed in the questionable claim “wise as an owl,” or the equally unprovable “wise old owl.” (Our stupid sports teams were called the Bald Eagles, which was additionally confusing—eagles were not owls.)
“The ‘bald-headed’ reference may indicate the physical appearance of a circumcised penis,” Mr. Hadley had said once—when all the Hadleys were having dinner with Richard and my mom and me.
“What on earth makes you think so?” Mrs. Hadley asked her husband. I remember that Elaine and I were riveted by this conversation—my mother’s obvious discomfort with the penis word being part of our enthrallment.
“You see, Martha, the ‘owl-fucker’ part is indicative of the homo-hating culture of an all-boys’ school,” Mr. Hadley continued, in his history-teacher way. “The boys call those of us they most detest ‘bald-headed owl-fuckers’ because they are presuming that the very worst of us are homosexual men who diddle—or dream of diddling—young boys.”
Elaine and I howled; we thought this was so funny. We’d never imagined that the expression “bald-headed owl-fucker” actually meant anything!
But my mother suddenly spoke up. “It’s just one of those vulgar things the boys say, because they’re always saying vulgar things—it’s how they think,” my mom said, bitterly.
“But it originally meant something, Mary,” Mr. Hadley had insisted. “It surely originated for a reason,” the history teacher had intoned.
In my deliberate and detailed recounting to Dr. Harlow of my sexual experience with Miss Frost, I very much enjoyed remembering Mr. Hadley’s historical speculations concerning what a bald-headed owl-fucker actually was. Dr. Harlow clearly was one, and—as I prolonged my discovery that Miss Frost and I had had an intercrural sexual experience—I admit that I borrowed a few of James Baldwin’s well-chosen words. “There was no penetration,” I told Dr. Harlow, in due time, “therefore no ‘stink of love,’ but I so wanted there to be!”
“Stink of love!” Dr. Harlow repeated; I could see he was writing this down, and that he suddenly didn’t look well.
“I may never have a better orgasm,” I told Dr. Harlow, “but I still want to do everything—all those things Miss Frost was protecting me from, I mean. She made me want to do all those things—in fact, I can’t wait to do them!”
“Those homosexual things, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked me. Through his thinning, lusterless hair, I could see him sweating.
“Yes, of course ‘homosexual things’—but also other things, to both men and women!” I said eagerly.
“Both, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked.
“Why not?” I said to the bald-headed owl-fucker. “I was attracted to Miss Frost when I believed she was a woman. When I realized she was a man, I was no less attracted to her.”
“And are there other people, of both sexes—at this school, and in this town—who also attract you, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked.
“Sure. Why not?” I said again. Dr. Harlow had stopped writing; perhaps the task of the opus ahead of him seemed unending.
“Students, Bill?” the bald-headed owl-fucker asked.
“Sure,” I said. I closed my eyes for dramatic effect, but this had more of an effect on me than I’d anticipated. I suddenly saw myself in Kittredge’s powerful embrace; he had me in the arm-bar, but of course there was more to it than that.
“Faculty wives?” Dr. Harlow suggested, less than spontaneously.
I needed only to think of Mrs. Hadley’s homely face, superimposed again and again on those training-bra models in my mother’s mail-order catalogs.
“Why not?” I asked, a third time. “One faculty wife, anyway,” I added.
“Just one?” Dr. Harlow asked, but I could tell that the bald-headed owl-fucker wanted to ask me which one.
At that instant, it occurred to me how Kittredge would have answered Dr. Harlow’s insinuating question. First of all, I looked bored—as if I had much more to say, but just couldn’t be bothered.
My acting career was almost over. (I didn’t know this at the time, when I was the center of attention in Dr. Harlow’s office, but I had only one, extremely minor, role remaining.) Yet I was able to summon my best imitation of Kittredge’s shrug and Grandpa Harry’s evasions.
“Ah, well . . .” I started to say; then I stopped talking. Instead of speaking, I mastered that insouciant shrug—the one Kittredge had inherited from his mother, the one Elaine had learned from Mrs. Kittredge.
“I see, Bill,” Dr. Harlow said.
“I doubt that you do,” I told him. I saw the old homo-hater stiffen.
“You doubt that I do!” the doctor cried indignantly. Dr. Harlow was furiously writing down what I’d told him.
“Trust me on this one, Dr. Harlow,” I said, remembering every word that Miss Frost had spoken to me. “Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”