In One Person

those moms who breast-fed the fucker till he was shaving!”
    “Okay,” I wrote to Elaine, “but what makes you so sure cruelty is genetic?”
    “What about kissing?” Elaine wrote me back. “Those two kiss the same way, Billy. Kissing is definitely genetic.”
    Elaine’s genetic dissertation on Kittredge was in the same letter where she announced her intention to be a writer; even in the area of that most sacred ambition, Elaine had been more candid with me than I’d managed to be with her. Here I was embarking on my long-desired adventure with Miss Frost, yet I still hadn’t told Elaine about
that
!
    I’d not told anyone about that, naturally. I had also resisted reading more of
Giovanni’s Room
, until I realized that I wanted to see Miss Frost again—as soon as I could—and I believed that I shouldn’t show up at the First Sister Public Library without being prepared to discuss the writing of James Baldwin with Miss Frost. Thus I plunged ahead in the novel—not very far ahead, in fact, before I was stopped cold by another sentence . This one was just after the beginning of the second chapter, and it rendered me incapable of reading further for an entire day.
    “I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” I read. I immediately thought of Kittredge—how my dislike of him was completely entangled with my dislike of myself for being attracted to him. I thought that James Baldwin’s writing was a little too true for me to handle, but I forced myself to try again the very next night.
    There is that description, still in the second chapter, of “the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys,” from which I inwardly recoiled; I would soon model myself on those boys, and seek their company, and the thought of an abundance of “knife-blade boys” in my future frightened me.
    Then, in spite of my fear, I was suddenly halfway into the novel, and I couldn’t stop reading. Even that part where the narrator’s hatred for his male lover is as powerful as his love for him, and is “nourished by the same roots”; or the part where Giovanni is described as somehow always desirable, while at the same time his breath makes the narrator “want to vomit”—I truly detested those passages, but only because of how much I loathed and feared those feelings in myself.
    Yes, having these disturbing attractions to other boys and men also made me afraid of what Baldwin calls “the dreadful whiplash of public morality,” but I was much more frightened by the passage that describes the narrator’s reaction to having sex with a woman—“I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive.”
    Why hadn’t that happened to
me
? I wondered. Was it only because Miss Frost had small breasts? If she’d had big ones, would I have felt “intimidated”—instead of so amazingly aroused? And, once again, there came the unbidden thought: Had I really “entered” her? If I had not, and I did enter her the next time, would I subsequently feel disgusted—instead of so completely satisfied?
    You must understand that, until I read
Giovanni’s Room
, I’d never read a novel that had shocked me, and I’d already (at eighteen) read a lot of novels—many of them excellent. James Baldwin wrote excellent stuff,
and
he shocked me—most of all when Giovanni cries to his lover, “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love.” That phrase, “the stink of love,” shocked me, and it made me feel so awfully naïve. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man
might
smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of
shit
, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or a boy?
    I was terribly agitated to read this; I wanted to talk to someone about it, and I almost went and woke up Richard to talk to him.
    But I remembered what Miss Frost had said. I wasn’t prepared to talk to Richard Abbott about my crush on Kittredge. I just stayed in bed; I was wearing Elaine’s bra, as usual, and I read on and on in
Giovanni’s Room
—on into the night.
    I remembered the perfumy smell on my fingers, after I’d touched my penis and before I stepped into the bath Miss Frost had drawn for me; that almond-or avocado-oil scent wasn’t at all like the smell of shit. But, of course, Miss Frost was a
woman
, and if