In One Person

Chapter 3 MASQUERADE

The wrestler with the most beautiful body was named Kittredge. He had a hairless chest with absurdly well-defined pectoral muscles; those muscles were of an exaggerated, comic-book clarity. A thin line of dark-brown, almost-black hair ran from his navel to his pubes, and he had one of those cute penises—I have such a dread of that plural! His penis was inclined to curl against his right thigh, or it appeared to be preternaturally pointed to the right. There was no one I could ask concerning what the rightward inclination of Kittredge’s penis signified. In the showers, at the gym, I lowered my eyes; for the most part, I wouldn’t look at him above his strong, hairy legs.

Kittredge had a heavy beard, but he had perfect skin and was generally clean-shaven. I found him at his most devastatingly handsome with two or three days’ stubble, when he looked older than the other students, and even some of the Favorite River faculty—including Richard Abbott and Mr. Hadley. Kittredge played soccer in the fall, and lacrosse in the spring, but wrestling was the foremost showcase for his beautiful body, and the wrestling seemed well suited to his innate cruelty.

While I rarely saw him bully anyone—that is, physically—he was aggressive and intimidating, and his sarcasm was of a cutting-edge kind. In that all-boys’, boarding-school world, Kittredge was honored as an athlete, but I remember him best for how effectively abusive he was. Kittredge was brilliant at inflicting verbal pain, and he had the body to back up what he said; no one stood up to him. If you despised him, you kept quiet about it. I both despised and adored him. Alas, the despising-him part did little to lessen my crush on him; my attraction to him was a burden I bore through my junior year, when Kittredge was a senior—when I believed I had only one year of agony remaining. I foresaw a day, just around the corner, when my longing for him would cease to torment me.

It would be a blow, and an additional burden, to discover that Kittredge had failed to pass the foreign-language requirement; he would stay at the school for a fifth year. We would be seniors together. By then, Kittredge not only looked older than the other Favorite River students—he truly was older.

If only at the beginning of those seemingly endless years of our incarceration together, I misheard the nuance in the pronunciation of Kittredge’s first name—“Jock,” I thought everyone called him. It fit. Surely, I thought, Jock was a nickname—anyone who was as cool as Kittredge had one. But his first name, his actual name, was Jacques.

“Zhak,” we called Kittredge. In my infatuation with him, I must have imagined that my fellow students found him as beautiful as I did—that we’d instinctively Frenchified the jock word because of Kittredge’s good looks!

He was born and grew up in New York City, where his father had something to do with international banking—or maybe it was international law. Kittredge’s mother was French. She was a Jacqueline—in French, the feminine of Jacques. “My mom, who I don’t believe really is my mom, is very vain,” Kittredge said, repeatedly—as if he weren’t vain. I wondered if it was a measure of Jacqueline Kittredge’s vanity that she had named her son—he was an only child—after herself.

I saw her only once—at a wrestling match. I admired her clothes. She certainly was beautiful, though I thought her boy was better-looking. Mrs. Kittredge had a masculine kind of attractiveness; she looked chiseled—she even had her son’s prominent jaw. How could Kittredge have believed she wasn’t his mom? They looked so much alike.

“She looks like Kittredge with breasts,” Elaine Hadley said to me—with her typical, clarion-voiced authority. “How could she not be his mother?” Elaine asked me. “Unless she’s his much-older sister. Come on, Billy—if they were the same age, she could be his twin!”

At the wrestling match, Elaine and I had stared at Kittredge’s mother; she seemed unfazed by it. With her striking bones, her jutting breasts, her perfectly fitted and most flattering clothes, Mrs. Kittredge was surely used to being stared at.

“I wonder if she waxes her face,” I said to Elaine.

“Why would she have to?” Elaine asked me.

“I can imagine her with a mustache,” I said.

“Yeah, but with no hair on her chest, like him,” Elaine replied. I suppose that Kittredge’s mom was riveting to us because we could see Kittredge in her, but Mrs. Kittredge was also riveting in her own disturbing way. She was the first older woman who made me feel I was too young and inexperienced to understand her. I remember thinking that it must have been intimidating to have her as a mother—even for Kittredge.

I knew that Elaine had a crush on Kittredge because she’d told me. (Embarrassingly, we’d both memorized Kittredge’s chest.) That fall of ’59, when I was seventeen, I hadn’t been honest with Elaine about my crushes; I’d not yet been brave enough to tell her that both Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge turned me on. And how could I have told Elaine about my confounding lust for her mom? Occasionally, I was still masturbating to the homely and flat-chested Martha Hadley—that tall, big-boned woman with a wide, thin-lipped mouth, whose long face I imagined on those young girls who were the training-bra models in my mom’s mail-order catalogs.

It might have comforted Elaine to know that I shared her misery over Kittredge, who at the outset was as scathing or indifferent (or both) to her as he was to me, though he had been treating us slightly better lately—since Richard Abbott had cast the three of us in The Tempest. It was wise of Richard to have cast himself as Prospero, because there was no mere boy among the Favorite River students who could have properly played the “true” Duke of Milan, as Shakespeare calls him, and Miranda’s loving father. His twelve years of island life have honed Prospero’s magical powers, and there are few prep-school boys who can make such powers evident onstage.

Okay—maybe Kittredge could have done it. He was well cast as a ravishingly sexy Ferdinand; Kittredge was convincing in his love for Miranda, though this caused Elaine Hadley, who was cast as Miranda, no end of suffering.

“I would not wish / Any companion in the world but you,” Miranda tells Ferdinand.

And Ferdinand says to Miranda: “I, / Beyond all limit of what else i’ the world, / Do love, prize, honor you.”

How hard it must have been for Elaine to hear that—in one rehearsal after another—only to be ignored (or belittled) by Kittredge whenever she encountered him offstage. That he was treating us “slightly better” since the start of rehearsals for The Tempest didn’t mean that Kittredge couldn’t still be awful.

Richard had cast me as Ariel; in the dramatis personae for the play, Shakespeare calls Ariel “an airy Spirit.”

No, I don’t believe that Richard was being particularly prescient in regard to my emerging and confusing sexual orientation. He told the cast that Ariel’s gender was “polymorphous—more a matter of habiliment than anything organic.”

From the first Enter Ariel moment (act 1, scene 2), Ariel says to Prospero: “To thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality.” Richard had called the cast’s attention—especially my attention—to the male pronoun. (In the same scene, the stage direction for Ariel reads: he demonstrates.)

It was unfortunate for me that Prospero commands Ariel: “Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea, be subject / To no sight but thine and mine—invisible / To every eyeball else.”

Alas, I would not be invisible to the audience. The Enter Ariel as a water nymph always got a big laugh—even before I was in costume with makeup. That stage direction was what led Kittredge to start calling me “Nymph.”

I remember exactly how Richard had put it: “Keeping the character of Ariel in the male gender is simpler than tricking out one more choirboy in women’s garb.” (But women’s garb—well, at least the wig—was how I would be tricked out!)

Nor was it lost on Kittredge when Richard said, “It’s possible that Shakespeare saw a continuum from Caliban through Prospero to Ariel—a kind of spiritual evolution. Caliban is all earth and water, brute force and guile. Prospero is human control and insight—he’s the ultimate alchemist. And Ariel,” Richard said, smiling at me—no smile was ever lost on Kittredge—“Ariel is a spirit of air and fire, freed from mortal concerns. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that presenting Ariel as explicitly female might detract from this notion of a continuum. I believe that Ariel’s gender is mutable.”

“Director’s choice, in other words?” Kittredge asked Richard.

Our director and teacher regarded Kittredge cautiously before answering him. “The sex of angels is also mutable,” Richard said. “Yes, Kittredge—director’s choice.”

“But what will the so-called water nymph look like?” Kittredge asked. “Like a girl, right?”

“Probably,” Richard said, more cautiously.

I was trying to imagine how I would be costumed and made up as an invisible water nymph; I could never have foreseen the algae-green wig I wore, nor the crimson wrestling tights. (Crimson and silver-gray—“death-gray,” Grandpa Harry had called it—were the Favorite River Academy colors.)

“So Billy’s gender is . . . mutable,” Kittredge said, smiling.

“Not Billy’s—Ariel’s,” Richard said.

But Kittredge had made his point; the cast of The Tempest would not forget the mutable word. “Nymph,” Kittredge’s nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.

“It doesn’t matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me privately. “You’ll never be as hot as your mother.”

I was aware that my mom was pretty, and—at seventeen—I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys’ academy like Favorite River regarded her. But no other boy had told me that my mom was “hot”; as I often found myself with Kittredge, I was at a loss for words. I’m sure that the hot word was not yet in use—not the way Kittredge had used it. But Kittredge definitely meant “hot” in that way.

When Kittredge spoke of his own mother, which he rarely did, he usually raised the issue of there being a possible mix-up. “Maybe my real mom died in childbirth,” Kittredge said. “My father found some unwed mother in the same hospital—an unfortunate woman (her child was stillborn, but the woman never knew), a woman who looked like my mother. There was a switch. My dad would be capable of such a deception. I’m not saying the woman knows she’s my stepmother. She may even believe my dad is my stepfather! At the time, she might have been taking a lot of drugs—she must have been depressed, maybe suicidal. I have no doubt that she believes she’s my mom—she just doesn’t always act like a mother. She’s done some contradictory things—contradictory to motherhood. All I’m saying is that my dad has never been answerable for his behavior with women—with any woman. My dad just makes deals. This woman may look like me, but she’s not my mom—she’s not anyone’s mother.”

“Kittredge is in denial—big time,” Elaine had told me. “That woman looks like his mother and his father!”

When I told Elaine Hadley what Kittredge had said about my mom, Elaine suggested that I tell Kittredge our opinion of his mother—based on our shameless staring at her, at one of his wrestling matches. “Tell him his mom looks like him, with tits,” Elaine said.

“You tell him,” I told her; we both knew I wouldn’t. Elaine wouldn’t talk to Kittredge about his mom, either.

Initially, Elaine was almost as afraid of Kittredge as I was—nor would she ever have used the tits word in his company. She was very conscious of having inherited her mom’s flat chest. Elaine was nowhere near as homely as her mother; Elaine was thin and gawky, and she had no boobs, but she had a pretty face—and, unlike her mom, Elaine would never be big-boned. Elaine was delicate-looking, which made her trombone of a voice all the more surprising. Yet, at first, she was so intimidated in Kittredge’s presence that she often croaked or mumbled; at times, she was incoherent. Elaine was so afraid of sounding too loud around him. “Kittredge fogs up my glasses,” was the way she put it.

Their first meeting onstage—as Ferdinand and Miranda—was dazzlingly clear; one never saw two souls so unmistakably drawn to each other. Upon seeing Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a “wonder”; he asks, “If you be maid or no?”

“‘No wonder sir, / But certainly a maid,’” Elaine (as Miranda) replies in a vibrant, gonglike voice. But offstage, Kittredge had managed to make Elaine self-conscious about her booming voice. After all, she was only sixteen; Kittredge was eighteen, going on thirty.

Elaine and I were walking back to the dorm after rehearsal one night—the Hadleys had a faculty apartment in the same dorm where I lived with Richard Abbott and my mom—when Kittredge magically materialized beside us. (Kittredge was always doing that.) “You two are quite a couple,” he told us.

“We’re not a couple!” Elaine blurted out, much louder than she’d meant to. Kittredge pretended to stagger, as if from an unseen blow; he held his ears.

“I must warn you, Nymph—you’re in danger of losing your hearing,” Kittredge said to me. “When this little lady has her first orgasm, you better be wearing earplugs. And I wouldn’t do it in the dormitory, if I were you,” Kittredge warned me. “The whole dorm would hear her.” He then drifted away from us, down a different, darker path; Kittredge lived in the jock dorm, the one nearest the gym.

It was too dark to see if Elaine Hadley had blushed. I touched her face lightly, just enough to ascertain if she was crying; she wasn’t, but her cheek was hot and she brushed my hand away. “No one’s giving me an orgasm anytime soon!” Elaine cried after Kittredge.

We were in a quadrangle of dormitories; in the distance, there were lights in the surrounding dorm windows, and a chorus of voices whooped and cheered—as if a hundred unseen boys had heard her. But Elaine was very agitated when she cried out; I doubted that Kittredge (or anyone but me) had understood her. I was wrong, though what Elaine had cried with police-siren shrillness sounded like, “No nun’s liver goes into spasm for a raccoon!” (Or nonsense of a similar, incomprehensible kind.)

But Kittredge had grasped Elaine’s meaning; his sweetly sarcastic voice reached us from somewhere in the dark quadrangle. Cruelly, it was as the sexy Ferdinand that Kittredge called out of the darkness to my friend Elaine, who was (at that moment) not feeling much like Miranda.

“O, if a virgin, / And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you / The Queen of Naples,” Ferdinand swears to Miranda—and so Kittredge amorously called. The quad of dorms was eerily quiet; when those Favorite River boys heard Kittredge speak, they were silenced by their own awe and stupefaction. “Good night, Nymph!” I heard Kittredge call. “Good night, Naples!”

Thus Elaine Hadley and I had our nicknames. When Kittredge named you, it may have been a dubious honor, but the designation was both lasting and traumatic.

“Shit,” Elaine said. “It could be worse—Kittredge could be calling me Maid or Virgin.”

“Elaine?” I said. “You’re my one true friend.”

“‘Abhorrèd slave,’” she said to me.

This was uttered as sharply as a bark; there was a doglike echo in the quadrangle of dorms. We both knew it is what Miranda says to Caliban—“a savage and deformed slave,” Shakespeare calls him, but Caliban is an unfinished monster.

Prospero berates Caliban: “thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.”

Caliban doesn’t deny it. Caliban hates Prospero and his daughter (“toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”), though the monster once lusted after Miranda and wishes he “had peopled” the island with little Calibans. Caliban is evidently male, but it’s uncertain how human he is.

When Trinculo, the jester, first notices Caliban, Trinculo says, “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive?”

I knew that Elaine Hadley had been kidding—speaking to me as Miranda speaks to Caliban, Elaine was just fooling around—but as we drew near to our dormitory, the lights from the windows illuminated her tear-streaked face. In only a minute or two, Kittredge’s mockery of Ferdinand and Miranda’s romance had taken effect; Elaine was crying. “You’re my only friend!” she blubbered to me.

I felt sorry for her, and put my arm around her shoulders; this provoked more whoops and cheers from those unseen boys who’d whooped and cheered before. Did I know that this night was the beginning of my masquerade? Was I conscious of giving those Favorite River boys the impression that Elaine Hadley was my girlfriend? Was I acting, even then? Consciously or not, I was making Elaine Hadley my disguise. For a while, I would fool Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry—not to mention Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, and (if not for long, and to a lesser extent) my mother.

Yes, I was aware that my mom was changing. She’d been so nice to me when I was little. I used to wonder, when I was a teenager, what had become of the small boy she’d once loved.

I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked—she meant reality, of course.”

My mom’s assessment of “pure imagining” was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.

One Christmas—I believe it was the first Christmas I’d come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years—I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, “What are you writing now, Billy?”

“A novel,” I told her.

“Well, that should make you happy,” she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who’d begun to lose his hearing—sawmill damage, I suppose.

“Me? Why should it make me happy that Bill is writing another novel? Not that I didn’t love the last one, Bill, because I sure-as-shit did love it!” Grandpa Harry quickly assured me.

“Of course you loved it,” my mother told him. “Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?”

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry had started to say, but then stopped. As Harry got older, he stopped himself from saying what he was going to say—more and more.

I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, when I began to sense that my mom wasn’t as nice to me as she’d been before, I got in the habit of stopping myself from saying what I wanted to say. Not anymore.

MANY YEARS LATER, LONG after I’d left Favorite River Academy, at the height of my interest in she-males—I mean dating them, not being one—I was having dinner with Donna one night, and I told her about Grandpa Harry’s onstage life as a female impersonator.

“Was it only onstage?” Donna asked.

“As far as I know,” I answered her, but you couldn’t lie to her. One of a couple of uncomfortable things about Donna was that she always knew when you were holding out on her.

Nana Victoria had been dead for more than a year when I first heard from Richard that no one could persuade Grandpa Harry to part with my late grandmother’s clothes. (At the sawmill, of course, Harry Marshall was sure-as-shit still dressing like a lumberman.)

Eventually, I would come clean to Donna about Grandpa Harry spending his evenings in his late wife’s attire—if only in the privacy of his River Street home. I would leave out the part about Harry’s cross-dressing adventures after he was moved to that assisted-living facility he and Nils Borkman had (years before) generously built for the elderly in First Sister. The other residents had complained about Harry repeatedly surprising them in drag. (As Grandpa Harry would one day tell me, “I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”)

Fortunately, when Richard Abbott told me what had happened at the assisted-living facility, Grandpa Harry’s River Street home had not yet been sold; it was still on the market. Richard and I quickly moved Harry back into the familiar surroundings of the house he’d lived in with Nana Victoria for so many years. Nana Victoria’s clothes were moved back into the River Street house with him, and the nurse Richard and I hired, for Grandpa Harry’s round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry’s apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall’s many female impersonations onstage.

“Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?” Donna asked me one night.

“Not really,” I’d answered her.

My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I’m sorry, but we didn’t use to say “transgender”—not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call “passable”—one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural—hormones were okay, but no surgical implants—and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.

How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin—even her upper arms were slender—and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I’ve known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.

Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost’s. Donna didn’t like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.

She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York—after we broke up, I heard she’d moved to Toronto—but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals—Europe was more sexually accepting and sophisticated, generally—but Donna was insecure about learning another language.

She’d dropped out of college, because her college years coincided with what she called her “sexual-identity crisis,” and she had little confidence in herself intellectually. This was crazy, because she read all the time—she was very smart—but there are those years when we’re supposed to feed and grow our minds, and Donna felt that she’d lost those years to her difficult decision to live as a woman.

Especially when we were in Germany, where I could speak the language, Donna was at her happiest—that is, when we were together on those German-language translation trips, not only in Germany but also in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Donna loved Zurich; I know it struck her, as Zurich does everyone, as a very well-to-do city. She loved Vienna, too—from my student days in Vienna, I still knew my way around (a little). Most of all, Donna was delighted with Hamburg—to her, I think, Hamburg was the most elegant-seeming German city.

In Hamburg, my German publishers always put me up at the Vier Jahreszeiten; it was such an elegant hotel, I think it gave Donna most of her delight with Hamburg. But then there was that awful evening, after which Donna could never be happy in Hamburg—or, perhaps, with me—again.

It began innocently enough. A journalist who’d interviewed me invited us to a nightclub on the Reeperbahn; I didn’t know the Reeperbahn, or what kind of club it was, but this journalist (and his wife, or girlfriend) invited Donna and me to go out with them and see a show. Klaus (with a K) and Claudia (with a C) were their names; we took a taxi together to the club.

I should have known what kind of place it was when I saw those skinny boys at the bar on our way in. A Transvestiten-Cabaret—a transvestite show. (I’m guessing the skinny boys at the bar were the performers’ boyfriends, because it wasn’t a pickup place, and, the boys at the bar excepted, there wasn’t a visible gay presence.)

It was a show for sex tourists—guys in drag, entertaining straight couples. The all-male groups were young men there for the laughs; the all-women groups were there to see the penises. The performers were comedians; they were very aware of themselves as men. They were not half as passable as my dear Donna; they were the old-fashioned transvestites who weren’t really trying to pass as female. They were meticulously made up, and elaborately costumed; they were very good-looking, but they were good-looking men dressed as women. In their dresses and wigs, they were very feminine-looking men, but they weren’t fooling anybody—they weren’t even trying to.

Klaus and Claudia clearly had no idea that Donna was one of them (though she was much more convincing, and infinitely more committed).

“I didn’t know,” I told Donna. “I really didn’t. I’m sorry.”

Donna couldn’t speak. It had not occurred to her—this was the seventies—that one of the more sophisticated and accepting things about Europe, when it came to difficult decisions regarding sexual identity, was that the Europeans were so used to sexual differences that they had already begun to make fun of them.

That the performers were making fun of themselves must have been terribly painful for Donna, who’d had to work so hard to take herself seriously as a woman.

There was one skit with a very tall tranny driving a make-believe car, while her date—a frightened-looking, smaller man—is attempting to go down on her. What frightens the small man is how big the tranny’s cock is, and how his inexpert attentions to this monster cock are interfering with the tranny’s driving.

Of course Donna couldn’t understand the German; the tranny was talking nonstop, offering breathless criticism of what a bad blow job she was getting. Well, I had to laugh, and I don’t think Donna ever forgave me.

Klaus and Claudia clearly thought I had a typical American girlfriend; they thought Donna was not enjoying the show because she was a sexually uptight prude. There was no way to explain anything to them—not there.

When we left, Donna was so distraught that she jumped when one of the waitresses spoke to her. The waitress was a tall transvestite; she could have passed for one of the performers. She said to Donna (in German), “You are looking really fine.” It was a compliment, but I knew that the tranny knew Donna was a transsexual. (Almost no one could tell, not at that time. Donna didn’t advertise it; her entire effort went into being a woman, not getting away as one.)

“What did she say?” Donna kept asking me, as we left the club. In the seventies, the Reeperbahn wasn’t the tourist trap that it is today; there were the sex tourists, of course, but the street itself was seedier then—the way Times Square used to be seedier, too, and not so overrun with gawkers.

“She was complimenting you—she thought you looked ‘really fine.’ She meant you were beautiful,” I told Donna.

“She meant ‘for a man,’ right—isn’t that what she meant?” Donna asked me. She was crying. Klaus and Claudia still didn’t get it. “I’m not some two-bit cross-dresser!” Donna cried.

“We’re sorry if this was a bad idea,” Klaus said rather stiffly. “It’s meant to be funny—it’s not intended to be offensive.” I just kept shaking my head; there was no way to save the night, I knew.

“Look, pal—I’ve got a bigger dick than the tranny driving that nonexistent car!” Donna said to Klaus. “You want to see it?” Donna asked Claudia.

“Don’t,” I said to her—I knew Donna was no prude. Far from it!

“Tell them,” she told me.

Naturally, I had already written a couple of novels about sexual differences—about challenging and, at times, confusing sexual identities. Klaus had read my novels; he’d interviewed me, for Christ’s sake—he and his wife (or girlfriend) should have known that my girlfriend wasn’t a prude.

“Donna definitely has a bigger dick than the tranny driving the make-believe car,” I said to Klaus and Claudia. “Please don’t ask her to show it to you—not here.”

“Not here?” Donna screamed.

I truly don’t know why I said that; the stream of traffic, both cars and pedestrians, along the Reeperbahn must have made me anxious about Donna whipping out her penis there. I certainly didn’t mean—as I told Donna repeatedly, back at our hotel—that Donna would (or should) show them her penis at another time, or in another place! It just came out that way.

“I’m not an amateur cross-dresser,” Donna was sobbing. “I’m not, I’m not—”

“Of course you’re not,” I was telling her, when I saw Klaus and Claudia slipping away. Donna had put her hands on my shoulders; she was shaking me, and I suppose that Klaus and Claudia got a good look at Donna’s big hands. (She did have a bigger dick than the tranny gagging the guy who was giving her a bad blow job in that make-believe car.)

That night, back at the Vier Jahreszeiten, Donna was still crying when she washed her face before going to bed. We left the light on in the walk-in closet, with the closet door ajar; it served as a night-light, a way to find the bathroom in the dark. I lay awake looking at Donna, who was asleep. In the half-light, and with no makeup on, Donna’s face bore a hint of something masculine. Maybe it was because she wasn’t trying to be a woman when she slept; perhaps it was something in the contours of her jaw and cheekbones—something chiseled.

That night, looking at Donna asleep, I was reminded of Mrs. Kittredge; there’d been something masculine in her attractiveness, too—something of Kittredge himself about her, something all-male. But if a woman is aggressive, she can look male—even in her sleep.

I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the door to the walk-in closet was closed—I knew we’d left it ajar. Donna was not in bed beside me; in the light that was coming from the walk-in closet, from under the door, I could see the shadows of her moving feet.

She was naked, looking at herself in the full-length mirror in the walk-in closet. I knew this routine.

“Your breasts are perfect,” I told her.

“Most men like them bigger,” Donna said. “You’re not like most men I know, Billy. You even like actual women, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t hurt your beautiful breasts—please don’t do anything to them,” I told her.

“What’s it matter that I have a big dick? You’re strictly a top, Billy—that won’t ever change, right?” she asked me.

“I love your big dick,” I said.

Donna shrugged; her small breasts were the target. “You know the difference between an amateur cross-dresser and someone like me?” Donna asked.

I knew the answer—it was always her answer. “Yes, I know—you’re committed to changing your body.”

“I’m not an amateur,” Donna repeated.

“I know—just don’t change your breasts. They’re perfect,” I told her, and went back to bed.

“You know what’s the matter with you, Billy?” Donna asked me. I was already in bed, with my back turned to the light coming from under the door of the walk-in closet. I knew her answer to this question, too, but I didn’t say anything. “You’re not like anyone else, Billy—that’s what’s the matter with you,” Donna said.

AS FOR CROSS-DRESSING, DONNA could never interest me in trying on her clothes. She would talk, from time to time, about the seemingly remote possibility of surgery—not just the breast implants, which were tempting to many transsexuals, but the bigger deal, the sex-change surgery. Technically speaking, Donna—and every other transsexual who ever attracted me—was what they call a “pre-op.” (I know only a few post-op transsexuals. The ones I know are very courageous. It’s daunting to be around them; they know themselves so well. Imagine knowing yourself that well! Imagine being that sure about who you are.)

Donna would say, “I suppose you were never curious—I mean, to be like me.”

“That’s right,” I told her, truthfully.

“I suppose, all your life, you’ve wanted to keep your penis—you probably really like it,” she said.

“I like yours, too,” I told her—also truthfully.

“I know you do,” she said, sighing. “I just don’t always like it so much myself. But I always like yours,” Donna quickly added.

Poor Tom would have found Donna too “complicated,” I think, but I thought she was very brave.

I found it intimidating that Donna was so certain about who she was, but that was also one of the things I loved about her—that and the cute, rightward inclination of her penis, which reminded me of you-know-who.

As it would turn out, my only exposure to Kittredge’s penis was what I managed to glimpse of him—always furtively—in the showers at the Favorite River gym.

I had much more exposure to Donna’s penis. I saw as much of her as I wanted, though—in the beginning—I had such an insatiable hunger for her (and for other transsexuals, albeit only the ones who were like her) that I couldn’t imagine ever seeing or having enough of Donna. In the end, I didn’t move on because I was tired of her, or because she ever doubted or had second thoughts about who she was. In the end, it was me she doubted. It was Donna who moved on, and her distrust of me made me doubt myself.

When I stopped seeing Donna (more accurately, when she stopped seeing me), I became more cautious with transsexuals—not because I no longer desired them, and I still find them extraordinarily brave, but because transsexuals (Donna, especially) forced me to acknowledge the most confusing aspects of my bisexuality every fucking day! Donna was exhausting.

“I usually like straight guys,” she would constantly remind me. “I also like other transsexuals—not just the ones like me, you know.”

“I know, Donna,” I would assure her.

“And I can deal with straight guys who also like women—after all, I’m trying to live my life, all the time, as a woman. I’m just a woman with a penis!” she would say, her voice rising.

“I know, I know,” I would tell her.

“But you also like other guys—just guys—and you like women, Billy.”

“Yes, I do—some women,” I would admit to her. “And cute guys—not all cute guys,” I would remind her.

“Yeah, well—fuck what all means, Billy,” Donna would say. “What gets to me is that I don’t know what you like about me, and what it is about me that you don’t like.”

“There’s nothing about you I don’t like, Donna. I like all of you,” I promised her.

“Yeah, well—if you’re going to leave me for a woman, like a straight guy one day would, I get it. Or if you’re going to go back to guys, like a gay guy one day would—well, I get that, too,” Donna said. “But the thing about you, Billy—and I don’t get this at all—is that I don’t know who or what you’re going to leave me for.”

“I don’t know, either,” I would tell her, truthfully.

“Yeah, well—that’s why I’m leaving you, Billy,” Donna said.

“I’m going to miss you like crazy,” I told her. (This was also true.)

“I’m already getting over you, Billy,” was all she said. But until that night in Hamburg, I believed that Donna and I had a chance together.

I USED TO BELIEVE my mom and I had a chance together, too. I mean more than the “chance” of staying friends; I mean that I used to think nothing could ever drive us apart. My mother once worried about my most minor injuries—she imagined my life was in danger at the first cough or sneeze. There was something childlike about her fears for me; my nightmares gave her nightmares, my mom once said.

My mother told me that, as a child, I had “fever dreams”; if so, they persisted into my teenage years. Whatever they were, they seemed more real than dreams. If there was any reality to the most recurrent of these dreams, it eluded me for the longest time. But one night, when I’d been sick—I was actually recuperating from scarlet fever—it seemed that Richard Abbott was telling me a war story, yet Richard’s only war story was the lawn-mower accident that had disqualified him from military service. This wasn’t Richard Abbott’s story; it was my father’s war story, or one of them, and Richard couldn’t possibly have told it to me.

The story (or the dream) began in Hampton, Virginia—Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, was where my code-boy father boarded a transport ship for Italy. The transports were Liberty ships. The ground cadre of the 760th Bomb Squadron left Virginia on a dark and threatening January day; within the sheltered harbor, the soldiers had their first meal at sea—pork chops, I was told (or dreamed). When my dad’s convoy hit the open seas, the Liberty ships encountered an Atlantic winter storm. The enlisted personnel occupied the fore and aft holds; each man had his helmet hung by his bunk—the helmets would soon become vomit basins for seasick soldiers. But the sergeant didn’t get seasick. My mom had told me that he’d grown up on Cape Cod; as a boy, he’d been a sailor—he was immune to seasickness.

Consequently, my code-boy dad did his duty—he emptied the seasick soldiers’ helmets. Amidships, at deck level—a laborious climb from the bunks, below the deck—was a huge head. (Even in the dream, I had to interrupt the story and ask what a “head” was; the person I thought was Richard, but it couldn’t have been Richard, told me that the head was a huge latrine—the toilets stretched across the entire ship.)

During one of many helmet-emptying ordeals, my father stopped to sit down on one of the toilets. There was no point in trying to pee while standing up; the ship was pitching and rolling—you had to sit down. My dad sat on the toilet with both his hands gripping the seat. Seawater sloshed around his ankles, soaking his shoes and pants. At the farthest end of the long row of toilets, another soldier sat holding the seat, but this soldier’s grip was precarious. My dad saw that the other soldier was also immune to seasickness; he was actually reading, holding on to the toilet seat with only one hand. When the ship suddenly pitched more steeply, the bookworm lost his grip. He came skipping over the toilet seats—his ass made a slapping sound—until he collided with my father at the opposite end of the row of toilets.

“Sorry—I just had to keep reading!” he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he’d slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater.

“What were you reading?” the code-boy called.

“Madame Bovary!” the soldier shouted in the storm.

“I can tell you what happens,” the sergeant said.

“Please don’t!” the bookworm answered. “I want to read it for myself!”

In the dream, or in the story someone (who was not Richard Abbott) was telling me, my father never saw this soldier for the rest of the voyage. “Past a barely visible Gibraltar,” I remember the dream (or someone) saying, “the convoy slipped into the Mediterranean.”

One night, off the coast of Sicily, the soldiers belowdecks were awakened by crashing noises and the sounds of cannon fire; the convoy was under aerial attack by the Luftwaffe. Subsequently, my dad heard that an adjacent Liberty ship had been hit and sunk with all hands. As for the soldier who’d been reading Madame Bovary in the storm, he failed to introduce himself to my dad before the convoy made landfall at Taranto. The code-boy’s war story would continue and conclude without my disappearing dad ever encountering the toilet-traveling man.

“Years later,” said the dream (or the storyteller), my father was “finishing up” at Harvard. He was riding on the Boston subway, the MTA; he’d got on at the Charles Street station, and was on his way back to Harvard Square.

A man who got on at Kendall Square began to stare at him. The sergeant was “discomfited” by the strange man’s interest in him; “it felt like an unnatural interest—a foreboding of something violent, or at least unpleasant.” (It was the language of the story that made this recurrent dream seem more real to me than other dreams. It was a dream with a first-person narrator—a dream with a voice.)

The man on the subway started changing seats; he kept moving closer to my dad. When they were almost in physical contact with each other, and the subway was slowing down for the next stop, the stranger turned to my father and said, “Hi. I’m Bovary. Remember me?” Then the subway stopped at Central Square, where the bookworm got off, and the sergeant was once more on his way to Harvard Square.

I WAS TOLD THAT the fever part of scarlet fever abates within a week—usually within three to five days. I’m pretty sure that I was over the fever part when I asked Richard Abbott if he’d ever told me this story—perhaps at the onset of the rash, or during the sore-throat part, which began a couple of days before the rash. My tongue had been the color of a strawberry, but when I first spoke to Richard about this most vivid and recurrent dream, my tongue was a beefy dark red—more of a raspberry color—and the rash was starting to go away.

“I don’t know this story, Bill,” Richard told me. “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”

“Oh.”

“It sounds like a Grandpa Harry story to me,” Richard said.

But when I asked my grandfather if he’d told me the Madame Bovary story, Grandpa Harry started his “Ah, well” routine, hemming and hawing his way in circles around the question. No, he “definitely didn’t” tell me the story, my grandfather said. Yes, Harry had heard the story—“a secondhand version, if I recall correctly”—but he conveniently couldn’t remember who’d told him. “It was Uncle Bob, maybe—perhaps it was Bob who told you, Bill.” Then my grandfather felt my forehead, and mumbled words to the effect that my fever seemed to be gone. When he peered into my mouth, he announced: “That’s still a pretty ugly-lookin’ tongue, though I would say the rash is disappearin’ a bit.”

“It was too real to be a dream—at least, to begin with,” I told Grandpa Harry.

“Ah, well—if you’re good at imaginin’ things, which I believe you are pretty good at, Bill, I would say that some dreams can seem very real,” my grandfather hemmed and hawed.

“I’ll ask Uncle Bob,” I said.

Bob was always putting squash balls in my pockets, or in my shoes—or under my pillow. It was a game; when I found the balls, I gave them back. “Oh, I’ve been looking for that squash ball all over, Billy!” Bob would say. “I’m so glad you found it.”

“What’s Madame Bovary about?” I asked Uncle Bob. He’d come to see how I was recuperating from the scarlet fever, and I’d given him the squash ball I had found in the glass for my toothbrush—in the bathroom I shared with Grandpa Harry.

Nana Victoria “would rather die” than share a bathroom with him, Harry had told me, but I liked sharing a bathroom with my grandfather.

“Truth be told, I haven’t actually read Madame Bovary, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me; he peered into the hallway, outside my bedroom, checking to be sure that my mom (or my grandmother, or Aunt Muriel) wasn’t within listening distance. Even though the coast was clear, Bob lowered his voice: “I believe it’s about adultery, Billy—an unfaithful wife.” I must have looked baffled, utterly uncomprehending, because Uncle Bob quickly said, “You should ask Richard what Madame Bovary is about—literature, you know, is Richard’s department.”

“It’s a novel?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s a true story,” Uncle Bob answered. “But Richard would know.”

“Or I could ask Miss Frost,” I suggested.

“Uh-huh, you could—just don’t say it was my idea,” Uncle Bob said.

“I know a story,” I started to say. “Maybe you told me.”

“You mean the one about the guy reading Madame Bovary on a hundred toilets at the same time?” Bob cried. “I absolutely love that story!”

“Me, too,” I said. “It’s very funny!”

“Hilarious!” Uncle Bob declared. “No, I never told you that story, Billy—at least I don’t remember telling you that story,” he said quickly.

“Oh.”

“Maybe your mom told you?” Uncle Bob asked. I must have given him an incredulous look, because Bob suddenly said, “Probably not.”

“It’s a dream I keep having, but someone must have told me first,” I said.

“Dinner-party conversation, perhaps—one of those stories children overhear, when the adults think they’ve gone to bed or they can’t possibly be listening,” Uncle Bob said. While this was more credible than my mother being the source of the toilet-seat story, neither Bob nor I looked very convinced. “Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, Billy,” he said to me, with more conviction.

It was shortly after he’d left when I discovered another squash ball, or the same squash ball, under my covers.

I knew perfectly well that my mother hadn’t told me the Madame Bovary, multiple-toilet-seats story, but of course I asked her. “I never thought that story was the least bit funny,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had anything to do with telling you that story, Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe Daddy told you—I asked him not to!” my mother said.

“No, Grandpa definitely didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I’ll bet Uncle Bob did,” my mom said.

“Uncle Bob says he doesn’t remember telling me,” I replied.

“Bob drinks—he doesn’t remember everything,” my mother told me. “And you’ve had a fever recently,” she reminded me. “You know the dreams a fever can give you, Billy.”

“I thought it was a funny story, anyway—how the man’s ass made a slapping sound as he was skipping over the toilet seats!” I said.

“It’s not the least bit funny to me, Billy.”

“Oh.”

It was after I’d completely recovered from the scarlet fever that I asked Richard Abbott his opinion of Madame Bovary. “I think you would appreciate it more when you’re older, Bill,” Richard told me.

“How much older?” I asked him. (I would have been fourteen—I’m guessing. I’d not yet read and reread Great Expectations, but Miss Frost had already started me on my life as a reader—I know that.)

“I could ask Miss Frost how old she thinks I should be,” I suggested.

“I would wait a while before you ask her, Bill,” Richard said.

“How long a while?” I asked him.

Richard Abbott, who I thought knew everything, answered: “I don’t know, exactly.”

I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY when my mom became the prompter for Richard Abbott’s theatrical productions in the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy, but I was very much aware of her being the prompter for The Tempest. There were the occasional scheduling conflicts, because my mother was still prompting for the First Sister Players, but prompters could miss rehearsals now and then, and the performances—the actual shows put on by our town’s amateur theatrical society and Favorite River’s Drama Club—never overlapped.

In rehearsals, Kittredge would pretend to botch a line just to have my mom prompt him. “O most dear maid,” Ferdinand misspoke to Miranda in one of our rehearsals, when we were newly off-script.

“No, Jacques,” my mother said. “That would be ‘O most dear mistress,’ not maid.”

But Kittredge was acting—he was only pretending to flub the line, so that he could engage my mother in conversation. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Abbott—it won’t happen again,” he said to her; then he blew the very next dialogue assigned him.

“No, precious creature,” Ferdinand is supposed to say to Miranda, but Kittredge said, “No, precious mistress.”

“Not this time, Jacques,” my mom told him. “It’s ‘No, precious creature’—not mistress.”

“I think I’m trying too hard to please you—I want you to like me, but I’m afraid you don’t, Mrs. Abbott,” Kittredge said to my mother. He was flirting with her, and she blushed. I was embarrassed by how often I thought of my mom as easily seduced; it was almost as if I believed she was somewhat retarded, or so sexually naïve that anyone who flattered her could win her over.

“I do like you, Jacques—I certainly don’t not like you!” my mom blurted out, while Elaine (as Miranda) stood there seething; Elaine knew that Kittredge had used the hot word for my mom.

“I get so nervous around you,” Kittredge told my mother, though he didn’t look nervous; he seemed increasingly confident.

“What a lot of bullshit!” Elaine Hadley croaked. Kittredge cringed at the sound of her voice, and my mother flinched as if she’d been slapped.

“Elaine, mind your language,” my mom said.

“Can we just get on with the play?” Elaine asked.

“Oh, Naples—you’re so impatient,” Kittredge said with a most disarming smile, first to Elaine and then to my mother. “Elaine can’t wait to get to the hand-holding part,” Kittredge told my mom.

Indeed, the scene they were rehearsing—act 3, scene 1—ends with Ferdinand and Miranda holding hands. It was Elaine’s turn to blush, but Kittredge, who was in complete control of the moment, had fixed his most earnest gaze on my mother. “I have a question, Mrs. Abbott,” he began, as if Elaine and Miranda didn’t exist—as if they’d never existed. “When Ferdinand says, ‘Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard, and many a time / The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear’—you know, that line—I wonder if that means I have been with a lot of women, and if I shouldn’t somehow imply that I am, you know, sexually experienced.”

My mom blushed more deeply than before.

“Oh, God!” Elaine Hadley cried.

And I—where was I? I was Ariel—“an airy Spirit.” I was waiting for Ferdinand and Miranda to exeunt—separately, like the stage direction said. I was standing by, with Caliban, Stephano (“a drunken butler,” Shakespeare calls him), and Trinculo; we were all in the next scene, in which I was invisible. With my mother blushing at Kittredge’s clever manipulations, I felt invisible—or I wanted to be.

“I’m just the prompter,” my mother said hastily to Kittredge. “That’s a question for the director—you should ask Mr. Abbott,” she said. My mom’s agitation was obvious, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked years ago, when she was either pregnant with me or already my mother—when she’d seen my womanizing father kissing someone else. I remembered how she’d said the else word when she told me about it, in the same perfunctory way she had corrected Kittredge’s purposeful flubs. (Once we were in performances of The Tempest, Kittredge wouldn’t muff a line—not a single word. I realize that I haven’t acknowledged this, but Kittredge was very good onstage.)

It was painful for me to see how easily undone my mom was—by the slightest sexual suggestion, from a teenager! I hated myself, because I saw that I was ashamed of my own mother, and I knew that whatever shame I felt for her had been formed by Muriel’s constant condescension and her chiding gossip. Naturally, I hated Kittredge for how effortlessly he had rattled my damaged mom—for how smoothly he was able to rattle Elaine and me, too—and then my mother called for help. “Richard!” she called. “Jacques has a question about his character!”

“Oh, God,” Elaine said again—this time, under her breath; she was barely audible, but Kittredge had heard her.

“Patience, dear Naples,” Kittredge said to her, taking her hand. He grasped her hand exactly as Ferdinand takes Miranda’s hand—before they part at the end of act 3, scene 1—but Elaine yanked her hand away from him.

“What is it about your character, Ferdinand?” Richard Abbott asked Kittredge.

“This is more bullshit,” Elaine said.

“Your language, Elaine!” my mother said.

“Some fresh air would be good for Miranda,” Richard said to Elaine. “Just a couple of deep breaths, and perhaps a needed expulsion of whatever words spontaneously come to mind. Take a break, Elaine—you should take a break, too, Bill,” Richard told me. “We want our Miranda and our Ariel in character.” (I guess Richard could see that I was agitated, too.)

There was a loading dock off the carpentry shop, to the rear of the backstage area, and Elaine and I stepped out on the dock in the cool night air. I tried to take her hand; at first she pulled her hand away from me, though not as violently as she’d jerked it away from Kittredge. Then, with the door to the loading dock still open, Elaine gave me back her hand; she rested her head against my shoulder. “They’re a cute couple, aren’t they?” we heard Kittredge say to someone, or to them all, before the door closed.

“Motherfucker!” Elaine Hadley yelled. “Penis-breath!” she shouted; then she gulped the cold air, until her breathing had returned to almost normal, and we went back inside the theater, where Elaine’s glasses instantly fogged up.

“Ferdinand is not saying to Miranda that he is sexually experienced,” Richard was telling Kittredge. “Ferdinand is saying how attentive he has been to women, and how often women have made an impression on him. All he means is that no one has impressed him as forcefully as Miranda.”

“It’s a speech about impressions, Kittredge,” Elaine managed to say. “It’s not a speech about sex.”

Enter Ariel, invisible—that was the stage direction to my upcoming scene (act 3, scene 2). But I was already truly invisible; I had somehow succeeded in giving them all the impression that Elaine Hadley was my love interest. For Elaine’s part, she seemed to be going along with it—maybe for self-protective reasons of her own. But Kittredge was smiling at us—in that sneering, superior way he had. I do not think the impressions word ever meant very much to Kittredge. I believe that everything was always about sex—about actual sex—to him. And if the present company was convinced that Elaine and I were interested in each other in a sexual way, possibly Kittredge alone remained unconvinced—at least this was the impression that his sneer gave Elaine and me.

Maybe this was why Elaine suddenly turned from him and kissed me. She barely brushed her lips against mine, but there was actual (if fleeting) contact; I suppose I even appeared to kiss her back, albeit briefly. That was all. It wasn’t much of a kiss; it didn’t even fog up her glasses.

I doubt that Elaine had an iota of sexual interest in me, and I believe she knew from the beginning that I was only pretending to be interested in her in that way. We were the most amateur actors—her innocent Miranda and my largely invisible Ariel—but we were acting, and there was an unspoken complicity in our deception.

After all, we both had something to hide.