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"Oh, it's you, Tom," I said, as casually as I could.
"So now it's 'Tom,' is it?" Atkins asked me.
"I'm just sick of the last-name culture of this awful school--aren't you?" I asked him.
"Now that you mention it," Atkins said bitterly; I could tell that poor Tom's feathers were still ruffled from our run-in at the First Sister Public Library.
"Look, I'm sorry about the other night," I told him. "I didn't mean to add to whatever misery Kittredge had caused you by calling you his 'messenger boy.' I apologize."
Atkins had a way of often seeming on the verge of tears. If Dr. Harlow had ever wanted to summon before us a quaking example of what our school physician meant by "excessive crying in boys," I imagined that he needed only to snap his fingers and ask Tom Atkins to burst into tears at morning meeting.
"It seemed that I probably interrupted you and Miss Frost," Atkins said searchingly.
"Miss Frost and I talk a lot about writing," I told him. "She tells me what books I should read. I tell her what I'm interested in, and she gives me a novel."
"What novel did she give you the other night?" Tom asked. "What are you interested in, Bill?"
"Crushes on the wrong people," I told Atkins. It was astonishing how quickly my first sexual relationship, with anyone, had emboldened me. I felt encouraged--even compelled--to say things I'd heretofore been reluctant to say, not only to a timid soul like Tom Atkins but even to such a powerful nemesis and forbidden love as Jacques Kittredge.
Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn't feel sufficiently "emboldened" to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn't have dared to say "crushes on the wrong people" to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)
I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something--maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was "crushes" that poor Tom couldn't say.
Atkins suddenly blurted: "Thrushes on the wrong people--that's a subject that interests me, too!"
"I said 'crushes,' Tom."
"I can't say that word," Atkins admitted. "But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you're finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know."
"It's a novel by James Baldwin," I told Atkins.
"It's about being in love with a black person?" Atkins asked.
"No. What gave you that idea, Tom?"
"James Baldwin is black, isn't he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?"
James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn't know that. I'd not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni's Room was a library book--as such, it didn't have a dust jacket. I'd not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.
"It's a novel about a man who's in love with another man," I told Tom quietly.
"Yes," Atkins whispered. "That's what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the 'wrong people.' "
"I'll let you read it when I'm finished," I said. I had finished Giovanni's Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black--and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.
In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror--"my body is dull and white and dry." But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni's Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I'd wanted to reread since Great Expectations.
Now, when I'm nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love--I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager--but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni's Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.
Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin's time there--well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni's Room doesn't like them. "I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them," Baldwin wrote.
Okay, I'm guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn't know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair--one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn't an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I'm talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!
I'm also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. B
ut, believe me, I don't fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time--"les folles," he called them.
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them--don't put them down.
