In One Person

you’re staying in—I’ll be sure to tell Donna that you and Lorna got in a
lot
of trouble.”
    Lorna laughed. “I’ll probably tell Donna that you and Lilly got in trouble, too,” Lorna told me. “Donna loves it when I say, ‘Lilly never knew a cock she didn’t like, big
or
little’—that cracks her up.”
    Lilly laughed, and I did, too, but the flirting was finished. It had all been for Donna. I kissed Donna’s two friends good-bye at the Sherbourne subway station, their cheeks perfectly soft and smooth, with no hint of a beard—absolutely nothing you could feel against your face, and not the slightest shadow on their pretty faces. I still have dreams about those two.
    I was thinking, as I kissed them good-bye, of what Elaine told me Mrs. Kittredge had said, when Elaine was traveling in Europe with Kittredge’s mother. (This was what Mrs. Kittredge
really
said—not the story Elaine first told me.)
    “I don’t know what your son wants,” Elaine had told Kittredge’s mother. “I just know he always wants
something
.”
    “I’ll tell you what he wants—even more than he wants to fuck us,” Mrs. Kittredge said. “He wants to
be
one of us, Elaine. He doesn’t want to be a boy or a man; it doesn’t matter to him that he’s finally so
good
at being a boy or a man. He never
wanted
to be a boy or a man in the first place!”
    But if Kittredge was a woman now—if he was like Donna had been, or like Donna’s two very “passable” friends—and if Kittredge had AIDS and was dying somewhere, what if they’d had to stop giving Kittredge the estrogens? Kittredge had a
very
heavy beard; I could still feel, after more than thirty years, how heavy his beard was. I had so often, and for so long, imagined Kittredge’s beard scratching against my face.
    Do you remember what he said to me, about transsexuals? “I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge had whispered in my ear, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along.” (He’d been talking about the transvestites he’d seen in Paris.) “I think, if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris,” Kittredge had said to me. “But
you
, Nymph—you’ve already
done
it!” Kittredge had cried.
    Elaine and I had seen Kittredge’s single room at Favorite River Academy, most memorably (to me) the photograph of Kittredge and his mother that was taken after a wrestling match. What Elaine and I had noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body.
    The truth was, Kittredge’s face had
worked
on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes. Elaine had convinced me that Kittredge must have been the one who switched the faces in the photograph; Mrs. Kittredge couldn’t have done it. “That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor,” Elaine had said, in her authoritarian way.
    I was back home from Toronto, having said good-bye to Donna. Lavender would never smell the same to me again, and you can imagine what an anticlimax it would be when Uncle Bob called me in my River Street house with the latest news of a classmate’s death.
    “You’ve lost another classmate, Billy—not your favorite person, if memory serves,” the Racquet Man said. As vague as I am concerning when I heard the news about Donna, I can tell you
exactly
when it was that Uncle Bob called me with the news about Kittredge.
    I’d just celebrated my fifty-third birthday. It was March 1995; there was still a lot of snow on the ground in First Sister, with nothing but mud season to look forward to.
    Elaine and I had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico; she’d been looking at houses to rent in Playa del Carmen. I would have happily gone to Mexico with her, but she was having a boyfriend problem: Her boyfriend was a tight-assed turd who didn’t want Elaine to go anywhere with me.
    “Didn’t you tell him we don’t do it?” I asked her.
    “Yes, but I also told him that we
used to
do it—or that we tried to,” Elaine said, revising herself.
    “Why did you tell him that?” I asked her.
    “I’m trying out a new honesty policy,” Elaine answered. “I’m not making up so many stories, or I’m trying not to.”
    “How is this policy working out with