In One Person

Käfig—not all that long before he hit on me—Larry might have asked, “No soprano understudy tonight? Where is that pretty, pretty girl? Not your
average
Lady Macbeth, Bill—is she?”
    “No, she’s not
average
,” I might have mumbled. We just talked; nothing happened that night.
    In fact, later that same night, I was in bed with Esmeralda when she asked me something significant. “Your German accent—it’s so perfectly
Austrian
, it just kills me. Your German isn’t that great, but you speak it so authentically. Where does your German
come from
, Billy—I can’t believe I’ve never asked you!”
    We had just made love. Okay, it hadn’t been that spectacular—the landlady’s dog didn’t bark, and my ears weren’t echoing—but we’d had vaginal sex, and we both loved it. “No more anal for us, Billy—I’m over it,” Esmeralda had said.
    Naturally, I knew that I
wasn’t
over anal sex. I also understood that I not only loved Esmeralda’s vagina; I’d already accepted the enslaving idea that I would never get “over” vaginas, either. Of course, it wasn’t only Esmeralda’s vagina that had enslaved me. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have a penis.
    I blame the “Where does your German
come from
” question. That started me thinking about where our
desires
“come from”; that is a dark, winding road. And that was the night I knew I would be leaving Esmeralda.

Chapter
6
    T HE P ICTURES I K EPT OF E LAINE
    I was in German III my junior year at Favorite River Academy. That winter after old Grau died, Fräulein Bauer’s section of German III acquired some of Dr. Grau’s students—Kittredge among them. They were an ill-prepared group; Herr Doktor Grau was a confusing teacher. It was a graduation requirement at Favorite River that you had to take three years of the same language; if Kittredge was taking German III as a senior, this meant that he had flunked German in a previous year, or that he’d started out studying another foreign language and, for some unknown reason, had switched to German.
    “Isn’t your mom French?” I asked him. (I assumed he’d spoken French at home.)
    “I got tired of doing what my alleged mother wanted,” Kittredge said. “Hasn’t that happened to you yet, Nymph?”
    Because Kittredge was so witheringly smart, I was surprised he was such a weak German student; I was less surprised to discover he was lazy. He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. Foreign languages demand a willingness to memorize and a tolerance for repetition; that Kittredge could learn his lines for a play showed he had the capacity for this kind of self-polishing—onstage, he was a poised performer. But he lacked the necessary discipline for studying a foreign language—German, especially. The articles—“The frigging
der, die, das, den, dem
shit!” as Kittredge angrily stated—were beyond his patience.
    That year, when Kittredge
should have
graduated, I didn’t help his final grade by agreeing to assist him with his homework; that Kittredge virtually copied my translations of our daily assignments would be of no help to him in the in-class exams, which he had to write by himself. I most certainly didn’t want Kittredge to fail German III; I foresaw the repercussions of him repeating his senior year, when I would also be a senior. But it was hard to say no to him when he asked for help.
    “It’s hard to say no to him, period,” Elaine would later say. I blame myself that I didn’t know they were involved.
    That winter term, there were auditions for what Richard Abbott called “the spring Shakespeare”—to distinguish it from the Shakespeare play he had directed in the fall term. At Favorite River, Richard sometimes made us boys do Shakespeare in the winter term, too.
    I hate to say this, but I believe that Kittredge’s participation in the Drama Club was responsible for a surge in the popularity of our school plays—notwithstanding all the Shakespeare. There was more than usual interest when Richard read aloud the cast list for
Twelfth Night
at morning meeting; the list was later posted in the academy dining hall, where students actually stood in line for their opportunity to stare at the dramatis personae.
    Orsino, Duke of Illyria, was our teacher and director, Richard Abbott. Richard, as the Duke, begins
Twelfth Night
with those familiar and rhapsodic lines “‘If music be the