In One Person (19 page)

“That’s not my heart,” I told her.

“Yes, it is—your heart is beating in your penis,” Elaine said. “Do all boys’ hearts beat there?”

“I can’t speak for other boys,” I answered. But she’d let go of my penis, and had rolled away from me.

There was more than one parked bus at the gym with its diesel engine running; the flickering light from the movie projector was still blinking from the basketball court, and the meaningless shouts and whoops of the returning jocks echoed in the dormitory quadrangle—the wrestlers were among them, maybe, or maybe not.

Elaine now lay on the bed with her forehead almost touching the windowsill, where the draft of cold air from the cracked-open window was the coldest. “When I was kissing you, and holding your penis, and you were touching my breasts, I was thinking of Kittredge—that bastard,” Elaine told me.

“I know—it’s okay,” I said to her. I knew what a good and truthful friend she was, but—even so—I couldn’t tell her that I’d been thinking of Miss Frost.

“No, it’s
not
okay,” Elaine said; she was crying.

Elaine was lying on her side at the foot of her bed, facing the window, and I stretched out behind her with my chest flush to her back; I could kiss the back of her neck that way, and (with one hand) I could manage to touch her breasts under her untucked shirt. The heartbeat in my penis was still pounding away. Through her jeans, through my corduroy pants, I doubted that Elaine could detect the pulse in my penis, though I had pressed myself against her and she’d thrust her small bum into me.

Elaine had a boy’s nonexistent bottom, and no hips to speak of; she was wearing a pair of boy’s dungarees (to go with her boy’s shirt), and I suddenly thought, as I kissed her neck and her damp hair, that Elaine actually smelled like a boy, too. After all, she’d been sweating; she wore no perfume, no makeup of any kind, not even lipstick, and here I was rubbing myself against her boyish bum.

“You still have a hard-on, don’t you?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t stop rubbing against her, but Elaine was moving her hips; she was rubbing against me, too.

“It’s okay—what you’re doing,” Elaine told me.

“No, it’s
not
okay,” I said, but I lacked the conviction I’d heard in Elaine’s voice—when, only a moment ago, she’d said the same thing to me. (What I meant, of course, was that I was thinking of Kittredge, too.)

Miss Frost was a big woman; she was broad-shouldered, and her hips were wide. Miss Frost did
not
have a young boy’s bum; by no stretch of my imagination was I thinking of Miss Frost while I rubbed myself against Elaine Hadley, who was quietly crying.

“No, really, it’s okay—I like it, too,” Elaine was saying softly, when we both heard Kittredge calling from the quad.

“My sweet Naples—is that your blue light burning?” Kittredge called. I felt Elaine’s body stiffen. There were other boys’ voices in the quadrangle—in the area of Tilley, the jock dorm—but only Kittredge’s voice stood out distinctly.

“I told you he wouldn’t watch the end of a Western—that bastard,” Elaine whispered to me.

“Oh, Naples—is your blue light a beacon for
me
?” Kittredge called. “Are you still a maid, Naples, or a maid no more?” he called out. (I would
realize, one day, that Kittredge was mock-Shakespearean—a kind of
faux
Shakespeare—to his core.)

Elaine was sobbing when she reached to turn off her lamp with the dark-blue shade. When she thrust herself back into me, her sobs were louder; she was grunting as she rubbed against me. Her sobs and grunts were strangely commingled, not unlike the yelps a dog makes when it’s dreaming.

“Don’t let him get to you, Elaine—he’s such an asshole,” I whispered in her ear.

“
Shhh!
”
she hushed me. “No actual talking,” she said breathlessly, between her half-strangled cries.

“Is that
you,
Naples?” Kittredge called to her. “Lights out so soon? To bed alone, alas!”

My dress shirt had come untucked from my corduroys; it must have been the incessant rubbing. The shirt was blue—the same color as Kittredge’s boxers, I was thinking. Elaine began to moan. “Keep doing it! Do it
harder
!” she moaned. “Yes! Like
that
—God, don’t stop!” she cried loudly.

I could see her breath in that cold razor of air from the open window; I was grinding against her for what seemed the longest time, before I realized what I was saying. “Like that?” I kept asking her. “Like
that
?” (No actual talking, as Elaine had requested, but our voices were being broadcast to the quadrangle of dorms—all the way to Tilley and the gym, where the returning team buses were still unloading.)

The flickering light from the movie projector had stopped; the windows of the basketball court were in darkness. The Western was over; the gun smoke from the shoot-out had drifted away—like the Favorite River boys, drifting back to their dormitories, but not Kittredge.

“Cut it out, Naples!” Kittredge called. “Are you there, too, Nymph?” he called to me.

Elaine had begun a prolonged, orgasmic scream. She would say later: “More like childbirth than orgasm, or so I imagine—I’m never having any children. Have you seen the size of babies’
heads
?” she asked me.

Her caterwauling may have sounded like an orgasm to Kittredge. Elaine and I were still straightening out the bedcovers when we heard the knock on the door from the dormitory hall.

“God, where’s my bra?” Elaine asked; she couldn’t find it in the bedcovers, but she wouldn’t have had time to put it on, anyway. (She had to answer the door.)

“It’s
him,
” I warned her.

“Of course it is,” she said. She went into the living room of the apartment; she looked at herself in the long mirror, in the foyer, before opening the door.

I found her bra on the bed; it had been lost in the crazy patterns of the rumpled quilt, but I quickly stuffed it into my Jockey briefs. My erection had completely subsided; there was more room for Elaine’s little bra in my briefs than there had been for my hard-on.

“I wanted to be sure you were all right,” I heard Kittredge saying to Elaine. “I was afraid there was a fire, or something.”

“There was a fire, all right, but I’m fine,” Elaine told him.

I came out of Elaine’s bedroom. She’d not invited Kittredge into the apartment; he stood in the doorway to the dorm. Some of the Bancroft boys scurried by in the hall, peering into the foyer.

“So you’re here, too, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me.

I saw that he had a fresh mat burn on one cheek, but the mat burn made him no less cocksure than before.

“I suppose you won your match,” I said to him.

“That’s right, Nymph,” he said, but he kept looking at Elaine. Because her shirt was white, you could see her nipples through the fabric, and the darker rings around her nipples—those unpronounceable areolae—looked like wine stains on her fair skin.

“This doesn’t look good, Naples. Where’s your bra?” Kittredge asked her.

Elaine smiled at me. “Did you find it?” she asked me.

“I didn’t really look all that hard for it,” I lied.

“You should think about your reputation, Naples,” Kittredge told her. This was a new tack for him; it caught both Elaine and me off-guard.

“There’s nothing wrong with my reputation,” Elaine said defensively.

“You should think about her reputation, too, Nymph,” Kittredge told me. “A girl can’t get her reputation back—if you know what I mean.”

“I didn’t know you were such a
prude,
” Elaine said to him, but I could tell that the
reputation
word—or everything Kittredge had insinuated about it—truly upset her.

“I’m not a prude, Naples,” he said, smiling at her. It was a smile you give a girl when you’re alone with her; I could see that she’d allowed him to get to her.

“I was just
faking
it, Kittredge!” she yelled at him. “I was just
acting
—we both were!” she shouted.

“It didn’t sound like acting—not entirely,” he said to her. “You have to be careful who you pretend to be, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me, but he kept looking at Elaine as if he were alone with her.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, Kittredge, I should find my bra and put it on before my parents come home—you should go, too, Billy,” Elaine said to me, but she never took her eyes off Kittredge. Neither of them looked at me.

It was not yet eleven o’clock when Kittredge and I stepped into the fifth-floor hall of the dorm; the Bancroft boys who were loitering in the hall, or gawking at Kittredge from the open doorways of their rooms, were clearly shocked to see him. “Did you win again?” some kid asked him. Kittredge just nodded.

“I heard the wrestling team lost,” another boy said.

“I’m not the team,” Kittredge told him. “I can only win my weight-class.”

We went down the stairwell to the third floor, where I said good night to him. Dorm check-in—even for seniors, on a Saturday night—was at eleven.

“I suppose Richard and your mom are out with the Hadleys,” Kittredge said, matter-of-factly.

“Yes, there’s a foreign film in Ezra Falls,” I told him.

“Humping in French, Italian, or Swedish,” Kittredge said. I laughed, but he wasn’t trying to be funny. “You know, Nymph—you’re not in France, Italy, or Sweden. You’ve got to be more careful with that girl you’re humping, or not humping.”

At the moment, I wondered if Kittredge might be genuinely concerned for Elaine’s “reputation,” as he’d referred to it, but you could never tell with Kittredge; you often didn’t see where he was going with what he said.

“I would never do anything to hurt Elaine,” I told him.

“Listen, Nymph,” he said. “You can hurt people by having sex with them and by
not
having sex with them.”

“I guess that’s true,” I said cautiously.

“Does your mom sleep naked, or does she wear something?” Kittredge asked me, as if he hadn’t suddenly changed the subject.

“She wears something,” I told him.

“Well, that’s mothers for you,” he said. “Most mothers, anyway,” he added.

“It’s almost eleven,” I warned him. “You don’t want to be late for check-in.”

“Does Elaine sleep naked?” Kittredge asked me.

Of course, what I should have told him was that my desire never to do anything to hurt Elaine prevented me from telling the likes of Kittredge whether she slept naked or not, but in truth I didn’t know if Elaine slept naked. I thought it would be perfectly mysterious to say to Kittredge, which I did, “When Elaine’s with me, she’s not asleep.”

To which Kittredge simply said: “You’re a mystery, aren’t you, Nymph? I just don’t know about you, but I’ll figure you out one day—I really will.”

“You’re going to be late for check-in,” I told him.

“I’m going to the infirmary—I’m going to get this mat burn checked out,” he said, pointing to his cheek. It wasn’t much of a mat burn, in my opinion, but Kittredge said, “I like the weekend nurse at the infirmary—the mat burn’s just an excuse to see her. Saturday night is a good night to stay in the infirmary,” he told me.

On that provocative note, he left me—that was Kittredge. If he was still figuring me out, I hadn’t yet figured
him
out. Was there really a “weekend nurse” at the Favorite River infirmary? Did Kittredge have an older-woman thing going? Or was he acting, as Elaine and I had been? Was he just faking it?

I
HADN’T BEEN BACK
in our dormitory apartment for very long, not more than a couple of minutes, before my mom and Richard came home from the movie. I’d barely had time to take Elaine’s padded bra from my Jockey briefs. (I’d no sooner put the bra under my pillow when Elaine phoned me.)

“You have my bra, don’t you?” she asked me.

“What happens to the duck?” I asked her, but she wasn’t in the mood for it.

“Do you have my bra, Billy?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I want you to have it.” I didn’t tell her that Kittredge had asked me if she slept naked.

Then Richard and my mom came home, and I asked them about the foreign film. “It was
disgusting
!” my mother said.

“I didn’t know you were such a
prude,
” I said to her.

“Take it easy, Bill,” Richard said.

“I’m not a prude!” my mom told me. She seemed unreasonably upset.
I had been kidding. It was just something I’d heard Elaine say to Kittredge.

“I didn’t know what the movie was about, Jewel,” Richard said to her. “I’m sorry.”

“Look at you!” my mom said to me. “You look more wrinkled than an unmade bed. I think you should have that conversation with Billy, Richard.”

My mom went into their bedroom and closed the door. “
What
conversation?” I asked Richard.