In the kitchen, Bogus found some paper and sat down and began writing. His first sentence was one he'd written before: 'Her gynecologist recommended him to me.' Others followed and formed a paragraph. 'Ironic: the best urologist in New York is French. Dr Jean Claude Vigneron: ONLY BY APPOINTMENT. So I made one.'
What have I begun? he wondered. He didn't know. He put the paper with these crude beginnings in his pocket to save for a time when he had more to say.
He wished he understood what made him feel so restless. Then it occurred to him that he was actually at peace with himself for the first time in his life. He realized how much he'd been anticipating peace some day, but the feeling was not what he'd expected. He used to think that peace was a state he would achieve, but the peace he was feeling was like a force he'd submitted to. God, why should peace depress me? he thought. But he wasn't depressed, exactly. Nothing was exact.
He was chalking up his pool cue, thinking how he wanted the balls to break, when he became aware that he wasn't the only one who was up and awake in the sleeping house. 'That you, Big?' he said quietly, without turning around. (Later, he would lose another night's sleep wondering how he knew it was her.)
Biggie was careful; she only skirted the borders of her subject - the phase Colm was going through, how he was at the age when boys turn more naturally to a father than to a mother. 'I know it's going to be painful for you,' she told Bogus, 'but Colm's turning more and more to Couth. When you're here, I can tell the child is confused.'
'I'm going to Europe soon,' Trumper said bitterly. 'Then I won't be around to confuse him for a good long time.'
'I'm sorry,' Biggie said. 'I really like seeing you. I just don't like how it makes me feel, sometimes, when you're around.'
Trumper felt a strange meanness come over him; he wanted to tell Biggie that she simply resented being confronted with how happy he was with Tulpen. But that was insane; he wanted to tell her no such thing. He didn't even believe it. 'I get confused too,' he told her, and she nodded, agreeing with such sudden vigor that he felt embarrassed. Then she left him alone again, fleeing upstairs so quickly that he thought she must be trying not to cry in front of him. Or not to laugh!
He was thinking that he actually agreed with how Biggie felt - that he liked to see her, but didn't like the way he felt around her - when he thought he heard her coming back downstairs.
But this time it was Tulpen, and Trumper saw at a glance that she'd been awake for a while herself and that she'd probably just passed Biggie in the upstairs hall.
'Oh, shit,' he said. 'It's so complicated sometimes.' He went quickly over to her and hugged her; she seemed in need of some reassurance.
'I want to leave tomorrow,' Tulpen said.
'But it's Throgsgafen.'
'After the meal, then,' she said. 'I don't want to spend another night.'
'OK, OK,' he told her, 'I know, I know.' His voice went on comforting her without much meaning to his words. He knew that back in New York there'd be a week of trying to understand this, but it didn't pay to think too hard about what came after the holiday, about the often lonely business of living with someone. Surviving a relationship with any other human being sometimes seemed impossible to him. But so what? he thought.
'I love you,' he whispered to Tulpen.
'I know,' she said.
He took her back upstairs to bed, and just before she fell asleep, she asked him groggily, 'Why can't you just fall asleep next to me after we make love? Why does it wake you up? It puts me to sleep, but it wakes you up. That's not fair, because I wake up later and the bed's empty and I find you staring at the fish or watching the baby sleep or playing pool with your old wife ...'
He lay awake until dawn, trying to figure all that out. Tulpen was sleeping soundly and didn't wake up when Colm appeared at their bedside in layers of sweaters over his pajamas, wading boots and a wool hat. 'I know, I know,' Trumper whispered. 'If I come down to the dock, you can go down too.'
It was cold, but they were wearing lots of clothes; the slush had turned to ice and they slid on their bottoms down the steep flagstone path. The sun was hazy, but the air was clear inland and across the bay. Out to sea, a dense fog was slowly rolling in; it would take a while to reach them, though, and they had the clearest part of the coming day to themselves.
They shared an apple. They heard the babies waking up in the house above them: brief cries, then a renewed silence on receiving their respective breasts. Colm and Bogus agreed on the dullness of babies.
'I saw Moby Dick last night,' Bogus decided to tell Colm, who looked a little suspicious. 'It may have been just the old island,' Trumper confessed, 'but I heard a great slap, like his tail hitting the water.'
'You're making that up,' Colm said. That's not real!'
'Not real?' said Trumper. He'd never heard Colm use the word before.
'Right,' said Colm, but the boy's attention was wandering - he was bored by his father - and Bogus wanted desperately for things to be lively between them.
'What kinds of book do you like best?' he asked Colm. As soon as he spoke, he thought, God, I am reduced to making small talk with my son.
'Well, I still like Moby Dick,' Colm said. Was he just being kind? ('Be kind to your father,' Bogus heard Couth telling Colm, shortly before they had all arrived.) 'I mean, I like the story,' Colm said. 'But it's just a story.'
On the dock beside his son, Trumper fought back sudden tears.
The great houseful of flesh above them would wake soon, almost like one giant person - perform its ablutions, feed itself, try to be helpful and kind. In this pleasant confusion a keen sense of things would be lost, but out on the dock, watching the sun slowly losing to the fog, Trumper felt bright and crisp. By now the fog covered the mouth of the bay and was bound to roll in on them; it was so thick that you couldn't tell what was behind it. But in his momentary piece of clear light, Trumper felt he could see through his brain.
Bogus and Colm heard a toilet flush, and then Ralph shouted from the house, 'Oh, that goddamn dog!'
Upstairs, a window opened; Biggie was framed in it, Anna in her arms. 'Good morning!' she called down to them.
'Happy Throgsgafen Day!' Bogus yelled, and Colm took up the cry.
Another window opened and Matje poked her head out like a parakeet from its cage. Downstairs, Tulpen opened the french doors of the pool room and held Merrill in the air above her head. Couth appeared in Biggie's window. Everyone was getting a last feel of the morning before the fog came in.
The kitchen door flew open, ejecting Gob, Loom and Ralph. He yelled, 'Those goddamn dogs threw up in the laundry room!'
'It was your dog, Ralph!' Couth called from his window. 'My dog never throws up!'
'It was Trumper!' Tulpen yelled from the pool room. 'He was up all night! He was up to something! Trumper puked in the laundry room!'
Bogus protested his innocence, but everyone chanted his guilt. Colm seemed delighted by this weird adult performance. The dogs began the day's cavorting, falling heavily on the ice. Bogus took his son's hand and they made their careful, slippery way up to the house.
Heavy traffic conditions ruled the kitchen. The dogs fought furiously outside the door while Colm, seeking to increase the chaos, blew a shrill whistle. Ralph announced that Matje's grape had grown. The women demanded that all but the children fast instead of having breakfast; they were already at work on the midday feast. Biggie and Tulpen each flaunted a breast which lolled free, a nipple-glued child riding on each busy hip. Matje fixed breakfast for Colm and scolded Ralph for not cleaning up after the dogs.
Ralph and Couth and Bogus hung around, with their slightly off-putting morning smells and a certain prickliness of appearance. Matje and Biggie and Tulpen were blowzy, wearing not quite clothes; bathrobes and soft slept-in stuff - a warm rumpled sensuousness about them.
Bogus wondered what he could have thought he wanted. But the kitchen was far too flurried for thinking; bodies were everywhere. So what if dog puke still lu
rked unseen in the laundry room! In good company we can be brave.
Mindful of his scars, his old harpoons and things, Bogus Trumper smiled cautiously at all the good flesh around him.
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT OF
IN ONE PERSON
THE BREATHTAKING NEW NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN IRVING
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost--not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word--both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part--people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who've treated me--alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to "severe speech impairments"--an overstatement. I'm now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I've ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don't even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries--the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. ("Liberry," or "liberries," I say--the way children do.)
It's all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont--a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street--until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town's amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town's little theater. My mom was the prompter--if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors--someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy--the almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was "old enough," I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I've never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)
Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom's age--or a little younger--when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking," but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her--notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself--to actually tell Miss Frost his name--the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, "My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be."
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
*
THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL--THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I'm always saying--was Great Expectations. I'm sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library--twice. I won't forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I'd never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
Miss Frost gave me a penetrating look. At the time, I doubt I was as tall as her shoulders. "Miss Frost was once what they call 'statuesque,'" my aunt had told me, as if even Miss Frost's height and shape existed only in the past. (She was forever statuesque to me.)
Miss Frost was a woman with an erect posture and broad shoulders, though it was chiefly her small but pretty breasts that got my attention. In seeming contrast to her mannish size and obvious physical strength, Miss Frost's breasts had a newly developed appearance--the improbable but budding look of a young girl's. I couldn't understand how it was possible for an older woman to have achieved this look, but surely her breasts had seized the imagination of every teenage boy who'd encountered her, or so I believed when I met her--when was it?--in 1955. Furthermore, you must understand that Miss Frost never dressed suggestively, at least not in the imposed silence of the forlorn First Sister Public Library; day or night, no matter the hour, there was scarcely anyone there.
I had overheard my imperious aunt say (to my mother): "Miss Frost is past an age where training bras suffice." At thirteen, I'd taken this to mean that--in my judgmental aunt's opinion--Miss Frost's bras were all wrong for her breasts, or vice versa. I thought not! And the entire time I was internally agonizing over my and my aunt's different fixations with Miss Frost's breasts, the daunting librarian went on giving me the aforementioned penetrating look.
I'd met her at thirteen; at this intimidating moment, I was fifteen, but given the invasiveness of Miss Frost's long, lingering stare, it felt like a two-year penetrating look to me. Finally she said, in regard to my wanting to read Great Expectations again, "You've already read this one, William."
"Yes, I loved it," I told her--this in lieu of blurting out, as I almost did, that I loved her. She was austerely formal--the first person to unfailingly address me as William. I was always called Bill, or Billy, by my family and friends.
I wanted to see Miss Frost wearing only her bra, which (in my interfering aunt's view) offered insufficient restraint. Yet, in lieu of blurting out such an indiscretion as that, I said: "I want to reread Great Expectations." (Not a word about my premonition that Miss Frost had made an impression on me that would be no less devastating than the one that Estella makes on poor Pip.)
"So soon?" Miss Frost asked. "You read Great Expectations only a month ago!"
"I can't wait to reread it," I said.
"There are a lot of books by Charles Dickens," Miss Frost told me. "You should try a different one, William."
"Oh, I will," I assured her, "but first I want to reread this one."
Miss Frost's second reference to me as William had given me an instant erection--though, at fifteen, I had a small penis and a laughably disappointing hard-on. (Suffice it to say, Miss Frost was in no danger of noticing that I had an erection.)
My all-knowing aunt had told my mother I was underdeveloped for my age. Naturally, my aunt had meant "underdeveloped" in other (or in all) ways; to my knowledge, she'd not seen my penis since I'd been an infant--if then. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word. For now, it's enough that you know I have extreme difficulty pronouncing "penis," which in my tortured utterance emerges--when I can manage to give voice to it at all--as
"penith." This rhymes with "zenith," if you're wondering. (I go to great lengths to avoid the plural.)
In any case, Miss Frost knew nothing of my sexual anguish while I was attempting to check out Great Expectations a second time. In fact, Miss Frost gave me the impression that, with so many books in the library, it was an immoral waste of time to reread any of them.
"What's so special about Great Expectations?" she asked me.
She was the first person I told that I wanted to be a writer "because of " Great Expectations, but it was really because of her.
"You want to be a writer!" Miss Frost exclaimed; she didn't sound happy about it. (Years later, I would wonder if Miss Frost might have expressed indignation at the sodomizer word had I suggested that as a profession.)
"Yes, a writer--I think so," I said to her.
"You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice."
She was certainly right about that, but I didn't know it at the time. And I wasn't pleading with her only so she would let me reread Great Expectations; my pleas were especially ardent, in part, because the more exasperated Miss Frost became with me, the more I appreciated the sudden intake of her breath--not to mention the resultant rise and fall of her surprisingly girlish breasts.
At fifteen, I was as smitten and undone by her as I'd been two years earlier. No, I must revise that: I was altogether more captivated by her at fifteen than I was at thirteen, when I'd been merely fantasizing about having sex with her and becoming a writer--whereas, at fifteen, the imagined sex was more developed (there were more concrete details) and I had already written a few sentences I admired.
Both the sex with Miss Frost and actually being a writer were unlikely, of course--but were they remotely possible? Curiously, I had enough hubris to believe so. As for where such an exaggerated pride or unearned self-confidence came from--well, I could only guess that genes had something to do with it.
I don't mean my mother's; I saw no hubris in her backstage role of the prompter. After all, I spent most of my evenings with my mom in that safe haven for those variously talented (and untalented) members of our town's amateur theatrical society. That little playhouse was not a uniformly prideful or brimming-with-confidence kind of place--hence the prompter.