In One Person

have a German discussion—you never know, William,” was all she said.
    I had noticed a wet, silky feeling, and when I touched my penis—before stepping into the bath—my fingers had a vaguely perfumy smell. Maybe Miss Frost had used a lubricant of some kind, I imagined—something I would be reminded of years later, when I first smelled those liquid soaps that are made from almond or avocado oil. But, whatever it was, the bath had washed it away.
    “No detours to that old yearbook room—not tonight, William,” Miss Frost was saying; she helped me get dressed, as if I were a child going off to my first day of school. She even put a dab of toothpaste on her finger, and stuck it in my mouth. “Go rinse your mouth in the sink,” she told me. “I assume you can find your way out—I’ll lock up again, when I go.” She kissed me then—a long, lingering kiss that caused me to put both my hands on her hips.
    Miss Frost quickly intercepted my hands, taking them from her slinky, knee-length half-slip and clasping them to her breasts, where (I had the distinct impression) she believed my hands belonged. Or perhaps she believed that my hands
didn’t
belong below her waist—that I should not, or must not, touch her “there.”
    As I made my way up the dark basement stairs, toward the faint light that was glowing from the foyer of the library, I was remembering an idiot admonition in a long-ago morning meeting—the always-numbing warning from Dr. Harlow, on the occasion of a weekend dance we were having with a visiting all-girls’ school. “Don’t touch your dates below their waists,” our peerless school physician said, “and you
and
your dates will be happier!”
    But this
couldn’t
be true, I was thinking, when Miss Frost called to me—I was still on the stairs. “Go straight home, William—and come see me soon!”
    We have so little time! I almost called back to her—one of those premonitory thoughts I would remember later, and forever, though at the time I imagined I was thinking of saying it just to see what
she
would say. Miss Frost was the one who seemed to think we had so little time, for whatever reason.
    Outside, I had a passing thought about poor Atkins—poor
Tom
. I was sorry that I’d been mean to him, though it made me laugh at myself to recall I had ever imagined he might have a crush on Miss Frost. It was funny to think of them being together—Atkins with his pronunciation problem, his complete incapability of saying the
time
word, and Miss Frost saying it every other minute!
    I had passed the mirror in the dimly lit foyer, scarcely looking at myself, but—in the star-bright September night—I considered that I had looked much more grown up to myself (than before my encounter with Miss Frost, I mean). Yet, as I made my way along River Street to the Favorite River campus, I reflected that I could not tell from my expression in the mirror that I’d just had sex for the first time.
    And that thought had an unnerving, disturbing companion—namely, I suddenly imagined that maybe I
hadn’t
had sex. (Not
actual
sex—no actual
penetration
, I mean.) Then I thought: How can I be thinking such a thing on what is the most pleasurable night of my young life?
    I as yet had no idea that it was possible not to have actual sex (or actual penetration) and still have unsurpassable sexual pleasure—a pleasure that, to this day, has been unmatched.
    But what did I know? I was only eighteen; that night, with James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
in my book bag, my crushes on the wrong people were just beginning.
    T HE COMMON ROOM IN Bancroft Hall was, like the common rooms in other dorms, called the butt room; the seniors who were smokers were allowed to spend their study hours there. Many nonsmokers who were seniors thought it was a privilege too important to be missed; even they chose to spend their study hours there.
    No one warned us of the dangers of secondhand smoke in those fearless years—least of all our imbecilic school physician. I don’t recall a single morning meeting that addressed the
affliction
of smoking! Dr. Harlow had devoted his time and talents to the treatment of excessive crying in boys—in the doctor’s stalwart belief that there was a cure for homosexual tendencies in the young men we were becoming.
    I was fifteen minutes early for check-in; when I walked into the familiar blue-gray haze of smoke in the Bancroft butt room, Kittredge accosted me. I don’t know what