In One Person

me, Tom!” I hollered up the stairs.
    “What did you just say, Tom Atkins? Say it again!” I heard Mrs. Hadley call down to him.
    “Time! Time! Time!” I heard Atkins crying, before his tears engulfed him.
    “Oh, don’t
cry
, you silly boy!” Martha Hadley was saying. “Tom, Tom—please stop crying. You should be
happy
!” But I heard Atkins blubbering on and on; once the tears started, he couldn’t stop them. (I knew the feeling.)
    “Listen to me, Tom!” I called up the stairwell. “You’re on a roll, man. Now’s the time to try ‘vagina.’ I know you can do it! If you can conquer ‘time,’ trust me—‘vagina’ is easy! Let me hear you say the
vagina
word, Tom! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”
    “Watch your language, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley called down the stairwell. I would have kept up the encouragements to poor Tom, but I didn’t want Martha Hadley—or another faculty person in the music building—to give me a restriction.
    I had a date—a fucking date!—with Miss Frost, so I didn’t repeat the
vagina
word. I just went on my way down the stairs; all the way out of the music building, I could hear Tom Atkins crying.
    I T’S EASY TO SEE , with hindsight, how I gave myself away. I wasn’t in the habit of showering and shaving before I went out in the evening to the library. While I was in the habit of not saying to Richard or my mom which library I was going to, I suppose I should have been smart enough to take
Giovanni’s Room
with me. (I left the novel under my pillow, with Elaine’s bra, but that was because I wasn’t intending to return the book to the library. I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins, but only after I’d asked Miss Frost if she thought that was a good idea.)
    “You look
nice
, Billy,” my mother commented, as I was leaving our dormitory apartment. She almost never complimented me on my appearance; while she’d more than once said I was “
going to be
good-looking,” she hadn’t said that in a couple of years. I’m guessing that I was already
too
good-looking, in my mom’s opinion, because the way she said the
nice
word wasn’t very nice.
    “Going to the library, Bill?” Richard asked me.
    “That’s right,” I said. It was stupid of me not to take my German homework with me. Because of Kittredge, I was almost never without my Goethe and my Rilke. But that night my book bag was practically empty. I had one of my writing notebooks with me—that was all.
    “You look too
nice
for the library, Billy,” my mom said.
    “I suppose I can’t go around looking like Lear’s
shadow
, can I?” I asked the two of them. I was just showing off, but, in retrospect, it was inadvisable to give my mother and Richard Abbott a taste of my newfound confidence.
    It was only a little later that same evening—I’m sure I was still in the yearbook room of the academy library—when Kittredge showed up at Bancroft Hall, looking for me. My mother answered the door to our apartment, but when she saw who it was, I’m certain she wouldn’t have invited Kittredge in. “Richard!” she no doubt called. “Jacques Kittredge is here!”
    “I was hoping for a word with the German scholar,” Kittredge said charmingly.
    “Richard!” my mom would have called again.
    “I’m coming, Jewel!” Richard would have answered. It was a small apartment; while my mother wanted nothing to do with talking to Kittredge, I’m sure she overheard every word of Kittredge’s conversation with Richard.
    “If it’s the German scholar you’re looking for, Jacques, I’m afraid he’s gone to the library,” Richard told Kittredge.
    “
Which
library?” Kittredge asked. “He’s a two-library student, that German scholar. The other night, he was hanging out in the town library—you know, the
public
one.”
    “What’s Billy doing in the
public
library, Richard?” my mom might have asked. (She would have thought this, anyway; she would have asked Richard later, if not while Kittredge was still there.)
    “I guess Miss Frost is continuing to advise him about what to read,” Richard Abbott may have answered—either then or later.
    “I gotta be going,” Kittredge probably said. “Just tell the German scholar that I did pretty well on the quiz—my best grade ever. Tell him he was dead-on about the ‘passion brings pain’ part. Tell him he even guessed right about the ‘terrifying angel’—I nailed that part,” Kittredge told Richard.
    “I’ll tell him,” Richard would have said to