In One Person

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.
    “I’m Trowbridge,” the starstruck boy said.
    “Where are you going, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked him.
    “I’m going to brush my teeth,” Trowbridge said in a trembling voice.
    “And after that, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked the boy. “No doubt you’ll soon be pulling your pud, imagining your face pressed between a couple of enormous knockers.” But by his aghast expression, I thought it unlikely that Trowbridge had yet dared to jerk off in the dormitory; he surely had a roommate—Trowbridge was probably afraid to beat off in Bancroft. “Whereas
this
young man, Trowbridge,” Kittredge continued, still holding me in his strong arms, “
this
young man has not only challenged the public image of gender roles.
This
nooky master,
this
poontang man,” Kittredge cried, jouncing me up and down, “this
stud
has actually porked a
transsexual
! Do you have any idea, Trowbridge, what transsexual snatch even
is
?”
    “No,” Trowbridge said in a small voice.
    Even holding me in his arms, Kittredge managed his signature shrug; it was his mother’s insouciant shrug, the one Elaine had learned. “My dear Nymph,” Kittredge whispered, as he continued to carry me down the hall. “I am
so
impressed with you!” he said again. “An actual transsexual—in
Vermont
, of all places! I’ve seen some, of course, but in Paris—and in New York. The transvestites in Paris tend to hang out with one another; they’re quite a colorful crowd, but you get the feeling that they do everything together. I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge whispered, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along.
That
must be different!”
    “Do you mean
les folles
?” I asked him.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about
les folles
—“screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs,” as Baldwin describes them. But either Kittredge hadn’t heard me, or my French accent was so off the mark that he ignored me.
    “Naturally, the transsexuals are another story in New York,” Kittredge continued. “They strike me as loners—a lot of them are hookers, maybe. There’s one who hangs out on Seventh Avenue—I’m pretty sure she’s a hooker. She is really
tall
! I hear there’s a club they all go to—I don’t know where. Nowhere you want to go by yourself, I’ll bet. I think if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris. But
you
, Nymph—you’ve already
done
it! How
was
it?” he asked me—seemingly with the utmost sincerity, but I knew enough to be careful. With Kittredge, you were never sure where the conversation was headed.
    “It was absolutely wonderful,” I told him. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever have a sexual experience exactly like it again.”
    “Really,” Kittredge said flatly. We’d stopped in front of the door to the faculty apartment I shared with my mom and Richard Abbott, but Kittredge didn’t look the least tired from carrying me, and he gave me no indication that he ever intended to put me down. “I suppose she had a penis,” Kittredge said then, “and you saw it, touched it, and did all those things one does with a penis—right, Nymph?”
    Something in his voice had changed, and I was afraid of it. “To be honest with you, I was so caught up in the moment that I kind of lose track of the details,” I told him.
    “
Do
you?” Kittredge softly asked, but he didn’t seem to care.