by John Irving
"All the childhood shit!" Kittredge cried. "Did fucking Rilke never get over his childhood, or something?"
" 'You, almost still a child'--I guarantee that'll be on the quiz, Kittredge."
"And 'reine Ubersteigung'! The 'pure transcendence' bullshit!" Kittredge cried, holding me tighter. "That one will be there!"
"With Rilke, you can count on the childhood thing--it'll be there," I warned him.
" 'Lange Nachmittage der Kindheit,' " Kittredge sang in my ear. " 'Long afternoons of childhood.' Aren't you impressed that I know that one, Nymph?"
"If it's the long phrases you're worried about, don't forget this one: 'Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft werden weniger--neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.' Remember that one?" I asked him.
"Fuck!" Kittredge cried. "I thought that was Goethe!"
"It's about childhood, right? It's Rilke," I told him. Dass ich dich fassen mocht--If only I could clasp you! I was thinking. (That was Goethe.) But all I said was " 'Schopfungskraft.' "
"Double-fuck!" Kittredge said. "I know that's Goethe."
"It doesn't mean 'double-fuck,' though," I told him. I don't know what he did with the arm-bar, but it started hurting. "It means 'creative power,' or something like that," I said, and the pain stopped; I had almost liked it. "I'll bet you don't know 'Stossgebet'--you missed it last year," I reminded him. The pain was back in the arm-bar; it felt pretty good.
"You're feeling dauntless tonight, aren't you, Nymph? The two libraries must have boosted your confidence," Kittredge told me.
"How's Delacorte doing with 'Lear's shadow'--and all the rest of it?" I asked him.
He let up on the arm-bar; he seemed to hold me almost soothingly. "What's a fucking 'Stossgebet,' Nymph?" he asked me.
"An 'ejaculatory prayer,' " I told him.
"Triple-fuck," he said, with uncharacteristic resignation. "Fucking Goethe."
"You had trouble with 'uberschlechter' last year, too--if Steiner gets sneaky and throws an adjective in. I'm just trying to help you," I told him.
Kittredge released me from the arm-bar. "I think I know this one--it means 'really bad,' right?" he asked me. (You must understand that the entire time we were not exactly wrestling--and not exactly conversing, either--the denizens of the Bancroft butt room were enthralled. Kittredge was ever the eye magnet, in any crowd, and here I was--at least appearing to hold my own with him.)
"Don't get fooled by 'Demut,' will you?" I asked him. "It's a short word, but it's still Goethe."
"I know that one, Nymph," Kittredge said, smiling. "It's 'humility,' isn't it?"
"Yes," I said; I was surprised he knew the word, even in English. "Just remember: If it sounds like a homily or a proverb, it's probably Goethe," I told him.
" 'Old age is a polite gentleman'--you mean that sort of bullshit." To my further surprise, Kittredge even knew the German, which he then recited: " 'Das Alter ist ein hoflich' Mann.' "
"There's one that sounds like Rilke, but it's Goethe," I warned him.
"It's the one about the fucking kiss," Kittredge said. "Say it in German, Nymph," he commanded me.
" 'Der Kuss, der letzte, grausam suss,' " I said to him, thinking of Miss Frost's frank kisses. I couldn't help but think of kissing Kittredge, too; I was starting to shake again.
" 'The kiss, the last one, cruelly sweet,' " Kittredge translated.
"That's right, or you could say 'the last kiss of all,' if you wanted to," I told him. " 'Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden!' " I then said to him, taking every word to heart.
"Fucking Goethe!" Kittredge cried. I could tell he didn't know it--there was no guessing it, either.
" 'Passion brings pain,' " I translated for him.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "Lots of pain."
"You guys," one of the smokers said. "It's almost check-in time."
"Quadruple-fuck," Kittredge said. I knew he could sprint across the quadrangle of dorms to Tilley, or--if he was late--Kittredge could be counted on to make up a brilliant excuse.
" 'Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,' " I said to Kittredge, as he was leaving the butt room.
"Rilke, right?" he asked me.
"It's Rilke, all right. It's a famous one," I told him. " 'Every angel is terrifying.' "
That stopped Kittredge in the doorway to the butt room. He looked at me before he ran on; it was a look that frightened me, because I thought I saw both complete understanding and total contempt in his handsome face. It was as if Kittredge suddenly knew everything about me--not only who I was, and what I was hiding, but everything that awaited me in my future. (My menacing Zukunft, as Rilke would have called it.)
"You're a special boy, aren't you, Nymph?" Kittredge quickly asked me. But he ran on, not expecting an answer; he just called to me as he ran. "I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!"
I know it isn't what Rilke meant by "every angel," but I was thinking of Kittredge and Miss Frost, and maybe poor Tom Atkins--and who knew who else there would be in my future?--as my terrifying angels.
And what was it Miss Frost had said, when she advised me to wait before reading Madame Bovary? What if my terrifying angels, beginning with Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge (my "future relationships," was what Miss Frost had said), all had "disappointing--even devastating--consequences," as she'd also put it?
"What's wrong, Bill?" Richard Abbott asked, when I came into our dormitory apartment. (My mother had already gone to bed; at least their bedroom door was closed, as it often was.) "You look as if you've seen a ghost!" Richard said.
"Not a ghost," I told him. "Just my future, maybe," I said. I chose to leave him with the mystery of my remark; I went straight to my bedroom, and closed the door.
There was Elaine's padded bra, where it nearly always was--under my pillow. I lay looking at it for a long time, seeing little of my future--or my terrifying angels--in it.
Chapter 8
BIG AL
"It is Kittredge's cruelty that I chiefly dislike," I wrote to Elaine that fall.
"He came by it genetically," she wrote me back. Of course I couldn't dispute Elaine's superior knowledge of Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and "that awful woman" had been intimate enough for Elaine to become assertive on the matter of those mother-to-son genes that were passed. "Kittredge can deny she's his mom till the cows come home, Billy, but I'm telling you she's one of those moms who breast-fed the fucker till he was shaving!"
"Okay," I wrote to Elaine, "but what makes you so sure cruelty is genetic?"
"What about kissing?" Elaine wrote me back. "Those two kiss the same way, Billy. Kissing is definitely genetic."
Elaine's genetic dissertation on Kittredge was in the same letter where she announced her intention to be a writer; even in the area of that most sacred ambition, Elaine had been more candid with me than I'd managed to be with her. Here I was embarking on my long-desired adventure with Miss Frost, yet I still hadn't told Elaine about that!
I'd not told anyone about that, naturally. I had also resisted reading more of Giovanni's Room, until I realized that I wanted to see Miss Frost again--as soon as I could--and I believed that I shouldn't show up at the First Sister Public Library without being prepared to discuss the writing of James Baldwin with Miss Frost. Thus I plunged ahead in the novel--not very far ahead, in fact, before I was stopped cold by another sentence. This one was just after the beginning of the second chapter, and it rendered me incapable of reading further for an entire day.
"I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt," I read. I immediately thought of Kittredge--how my dislike of him was completely entangled with my dislike of myself for being attracted to him. I thought that James Baldwin's writing was a little too true for me to handle, but I forced myself to try again the very next night.
There is that description, still in the second chapter, of "the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys," from which I inwardly recoiled; I would soon model myself on those boys, and seek their com
pany, and the thought of an abundance of "knife-blade boys" in my future frightened me.
Then, in spite of my fear, I was suddenly halfway into the novel, and I couldn't stop reading. Even that part where the narrator's hatred for his male lover is as powerful as his love for him, and is "nourished by the same roots"; or the part where Giovanni is described as somehow always desirable, while at the same time his breath makes the narrator "want to vomit"--I truly detested those passages, but only because of how much I loathed and feared those feelings in myself.
Yes, having these disturbing attractions to other boys and men also made me afraid of what Baldwin calls "the dreadful whiplash of public morality," but I was much more frightened by the passage that describes the narrator's reaction to having sex with a woman--"I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive."
Why hadn't that happened to me? I wondered. Was it only because Miss Frost had small breasts? If she'd had big ones, would I have felt "intimidated"--instead of so amazingly aroused? And, once again, there came the unbidden thought: Had I really "entered" her? If I had not, and I did enter her the next time, would I subsequently feel disgusted--instead of so completely satisfied?
You must understand that, until I read Giovanni's Room, I'd never read a novel that had shocked me, and I'd already (at eighteen) read a lot of novels--many of them excellent. James Baldwin wrote excellent stuff, and he shocked me--most of all when Giovanni cries to his lover, "You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love." That phrase, "the stink of love," shocked me, and it made me feel so awfully naive. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn't that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or a boy?
I was terribly agitated to read this; I wanted to talk to someone about it, and I almost went and woke up Richard to talk to him.
But I remembered what Miss Frost had said. I wasn't prepared to talk to Richard Abbott about my crush on Kittredge. I just stayed in bed; I was wearing Elaine's bra, as usual, and I read on and on in Giovanni's Room--on into the night.
I remembered the perfumy smell on my fingers, after I'd touched my penis and before I stepped into the bath Miss Frost had drawn for me; that almond-or avocado-oil scent wasn't at all like the smell of shit. But, of course, Miss Frost was a woman, and if I had penetrated her, surely I had not penetrated her there!
MRS. HADLEY WAS SUITABLY impressed that I had conquered the shadow word, but because I couldn't (or wouldn't) tell Martha Hadley about Miss Frost, I had some difficulty describing how I'd mastered one of my unpronounceables.
"Whatever made you think of saying 'shad roe' without the r, Billy?"
"Ah, well . . ." I started to say, and then stopped--in the manner of Grandpa Harry.
It was a mystery to Mrs. Hadley, and to me, how "the shad-roe technique" (as Martha Hadley called it) could be applied to my other pronunciation problems.
Naturally, upon leaving Mrs. Hadley's office--once again, on the stairs in the music building--I ran into Atkins.
"Oh, it's you, Tom," I said, as casually as I could.
"So now it's 'Tom,' is it?" Atkins asked me.
"I'm just sick of the last-name culture of this awful school--aren't you?" I asked him.
"Now that you mention it," Atkins said bitterly; I could tell that poor Tom's feathers were still ruffled from our run-in at the First Sister Public Library.
"Look, I'm sorry about the other night," I told him. "I didn't mean to add to whatever misery Kittredge had caused you by calling you his 'messenger boy.' I apologize."
Atkins had a way of often seeming on the verge of tears. If Dr. Harlow had ever wanted to summon before us a quaking example of what our school physician meant by "excessive crying in boys," I imagined that he needed only to snap his fingers and ask Tom Atkins to burst into tears at morning meeting.
"It seemed that I probably interrupted you and Miss Frost," Atkins said searchingly.
"Miss Frost and I talk a lot about writing," I told him. "She tells me what books I should read. I tell her what I'm interested in, and she gives me a novel."
"What novel did she give you the other night?" Tom asked. "What are you interested in, Bill?"
"Crushes on the wrong people," I told Atkins. It was astonishing how quickly my first sexual relationship, with anyone, had emboldened me. I felt encouraged--even compelled--to say things I'd heretofore been reluctant to say, not only to a timid soul like Tom Atkins but even to such a powerful nemesis and forbidden love as Jacques Kittredge.
Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn't feel sufficiently "emboldened" to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn't have dared to say "crushes on the wrong people" to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)
I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something--maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was "crushes" that poor Tom couldn't say.
Atkins suddenly blurted: "Thrushes on the wrong people--that's a subject that interests me, too!"
"I said 'crushes,' Tom."
"I can't say that word," Atkins admitted. "But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you're finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know."
"It's a novel by James Baldwin," I told Atkins.
"It's about being in love with a black person?" Atkins asked.
"No. What gave you that idea, Tom?"
"James Baldwin is black, isn't he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?"
James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn't know that. I'd not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni's Room was a library book--as such, it didn't have a dust jacket. I'd not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.
"It's a novel about a man who's in love with another man," I told Tom quietly.
"Yes," Atkins whispered. "That's what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the 'wrong people.' "
"I'll let you read it when I'm finished," I said. I had finished Giovanni's Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black--and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.
In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror--"my body is dull and white and dry." But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni's Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I'd wanted to reread since Great Expectations.
Now, when I'm nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love--I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager--but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni's Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.
Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin's time there--well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni's Room doesn't like them. "I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them," Baldwin wrote.
Okay, I'm guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn't know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair--one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn't an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I'm talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!
I'm also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. B
ut, believe me, I don't fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time--"les folles," he called them.
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them--don't put them down.
In rereading Giovanni's Room just recently, I not only found the novel to be as perfect as I'd remembered it; I also discovered something I had missed, or I'd read without noticing, when I was eighteen. I mean the part where Baldwin writes that "people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents."
Yes, that's true. Naturally, when I was eighteen, I was still inventing myself nonstop; I don't only mean sexually. And I was unaware that I needed "mooring posts"--not to mention how many I would need, or who my mooring posts would be.
Poor Tom Atkins needed a mooring post, in the worst way. That much was evident to me, as Atkins and I conversed, or we tried to, on the subject of crushes (or thrushes!) on the wrong people. For a moment it seemed we would never progress from where we stood on the stairs of the music building, and that what passed for our conversation had permanently lagged.
"Have you had any breakthroughs with your pronunciation problems, Bill?" Atkins awkwardly asked me.
"Just one, actually," I told him. "I seem to have conquered the shadow word."
"Good for you," Atkins said sincerely. "I've not conquered any of mine--not in a while, anyway."
"I'm sorry, Tom," I told him. "It must be tough having trouble with one of those words that comes up all the time. Like the time word," I said.
"Yes, that's a tough one," Atkins admitted. "What's one of your worst ones?"
"The word for your whatchamacallit," I told him. "You know--dong, schlong, dick, dork, willy, dipstick, dipping wick, quim-stuffer," I said.
"You can't say penis?" Atkins whispered.
"It comes out penith," I told him.
"Well, at least it's comprehensible, Bill," Atkins said encouragingly.
"Do you have one that's worse than the time word?" I asked him.
"The female equivalent of your penis," Atkins answered. "I can't come close to saying it--it just kills me to try it."
