A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (10 page)

“Me too,” he said, immediately.

We left the House of Pies and made out in the parking lot.

Two weeks later I told David I was willing to take my profile off the Internet dating sites and stop telling the homeless guy in front of the 7-Eleven that I “loved him too.” I wanted to be exclusive.

“Are you saying you want me to be your boyfriend?” he had said. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, putting his shirt back on. He stopped what he was doing, leaving one arm in the sleeve of his T-shirt and one arm out, like a stroke victim waiting for his nurse. Or a widower who was sleeping his way
across an ocean of grief to get to dry land. “I don't think I'm ready for that,” he concluded.

There was a good chance that he was dating seven other women, so I emailed our mutual friend Martha to ask her why David acted like he was so into me one minute and “feeling pressured” the next. She emailed me back, saying,
That's what all the ladies want to know.
Feeling panicky, I typed,
Is he really dating other women? If he is, he's certainly good at making a gal feel like she's the one.
Martha wrote,
Oh yeah, he's good.
My heart racing, I called her and she assured me she was kidding and said he was probably, as a widower and a single dad, just being cautious.

Which is what I decided to tell myself so I didn't have to think about the alternative. I also decided to back way off. I was falling way too hard for him and he wasn't ready.

When he invited me to Baja I wanted to ask him if he was taking his other ladies on trips that involved planes and exclusive resorts, while I got the two-hundred-dollar road trip with a bargain motel. But I resisted. I knew I shouldn't think of it as anything more than an adventure with an intimate old friend.

 

 

In the car with David I wanted to touch him while he drove. Not like how truck drivers touch themselves, but just rest a hand on his shoulder or his knee. But I didn't want to make any needy moves. I decided to pretend we were both gay and posing as each other's partner so as not to ignite the
homophobes of Baja—anything to eliminate expectations for the trip.

The first goat we saw on the side of the road—standing in the sand and munching on a tennis shoe stuck to the side of a cactus—sent us screeching to a halt and leaping for our cameras like we were on safari and had spotted a lion.

I should have asked David if I could pee after the goat photo shoot, since I'd had to go for the last four hours. But I didn't know if seeing me crouch behind a cactus and urinate on my shoes was what I wanted for him at such an unclear romantic juncture in our relationship. Plus I knew he had his camera at the ready.

A few hours back, at the military fuck-with-the-gringos checkpoint, we'd been asked to show our passports. I thought I'd spotted some restroom facilities, so I rolled down my window to ask if I could use them, but before I opened my mouth a twelve-year-old armed Mexican border guard made kissing noises at me. Or maybe he was sucking corn out of his teeth. My Spanish wasn't good enough to ask which, so I nixed the bathroom plan altogether, just to be on the safe side.

Fifteen minutes after leaving the goat, I confessed to David that I needed to use the restroom. It was as if I'd screamed,
“Banditos!
” He immediately sped up and started darting his head back and forth, combing the horizon for any signs of a bathroom.

“Okay, we'll find you one!” he said. “Just hold on! It's gonna be okay. Just hold on!”

When he found a gas station, he pulled in and rolled down his window to ask the attendant where the bathroom was. In an attempt to speak the language, he went through his entire Spanish vocabulary as the attendant patiently waited for a complete sentence.

“
Hola. ¿Que pasa? Buenos dias—tardes—dias. Buenos. Yo soy el baño
,” he said.

(I later discovered that he'd basically told the man, “I am the toilet.”)

“Over there,” the guy answered, in English.

In the bathroom, I held on to the walls like a little princess, so as not to dirty myself by falling into the hole in the ground full of shit. Maybe driving and listening at the same time was hard for David—maybe that was why he'd been so disengaged.

Back in what we called “America,” he'd once admitted that multitasking was a challenge for him. We were in the grocery store, and he couldn't pick out crackers
and
answer my questions about whether I seemed particularly self-absorbed that day.

But since we had stopped and my bladder was empty it might be a good time to get the party back on. Remind him of the good feelings that had been flowing between us in the past months—all the laughing we used to do.

“No toilet paper, do you mind?” I asked him, wiping my hands on his sleeve.

He was still so caught up in the emergency of my needing to use the restroom, he missed my attempt at humor. “Was it okay?” he wanted to know.

“If I told you I fell into the shit hole, would you still want to share a bed with me tonight?” I asked. But he didn't hear me. He had already strapped himself back in the car, ready to hit the road again.

“I want to make sure we get to the hotel before it gets dark so I can see the road signs.”

I supposed it was conscientious of him. A little boring, but nice.

“
Granny Does a Tranny!
” I blurted out, once we were back on the road.

David swerved and yelled, “Where?!?”

“Favorite porno titles!” I said. “Your turn!”

David had his hand on his heart and looked a little pale. “Lauren, that scared me,” he said. “I thought there was something on the road or—”

“
One in the Pink, Two in the Stink!
Go!” I persisted. I started laughing. At least I was entertaining myself.

But David didn't laugh or play.

“You don't think anything is funny!” I complained. He disagreed. According to him, he thought lots of things were funny, he just didn't quite understand what I was saying.

“One in the what, two in the where?”

During the pre-House of Pies stage of our relationship I'd told him about the one-night stand I'd had with a guy that
eHarmony.com
said was my soul mate. All of my friends—most of whom were actual comedy professionals—loved that story. Of course these were the same people who, when I told them about a friend of mine who died very young in a violent way, burst out laughing. Not because they were evil, but because they were used to laughing at everything. They were easily confused if something was supposed to be
not funny
, and often had to be told, “Put on a sad face. This is actually a sad story.”

But the eHarmony story was one that I myself also thought was funny.

“I had a one-night stand with a guy I met on eHarmony and it was kinda hilarious,” I had said to David.

The look on his face told me that he did not believe this situation could be hilarious, but I continued.

“According to eHarmony, this guy was my perfect match. You know how that site makes you do hours of psychological profiling to meet your perfect match?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head and staring into his coffee cup.

“Well, they do. And I did it, just for fun. And the one perfect match they found for me was this guy who was an ex-child star and our one deep connection was that we both liked ‘watching TV'!”

I paused here because this was where people usually liked to laugh.

“Go ahead,” David told his coffee cup.

“Oh, okay. So we met for drinks at 11:00 p.m. on a Wednesday night in Hollywood, which is already just so ... inappropriate!” I laughed this time so if he was feeling unsure he could just copy what I was doing.

He didn't laugh. Nor did he smile. “That is sort of inappropriate,” he said.

Jeez, sorry Pastor David, I thought. But knowing every pastor secretly liked a good sex story, I pushed onward.

“We ended up basically fighting all night about gun control. He loved guns. But it was kind of fun to fight—it was flirty-fighty. So we ended the night at his house, making out on his American flag blanket while Kenny Rogers played on the stereo.”

At that point David was staring at me with his head cocked to the side, like the RCA dog. He looked concerned. Perhaps worried for my safety.

“I'm okay,” I reassured him. Suddenly I felt like I was doing my “share” at a sex addict support group. I considered shutting up.

“Go ahead,” David said.

The tone of his voice did not say go ahead. It said, “Please stop.”

But I continued because I do what I'm told, and plus the best part of the story was coming up—the part where he was sure to laugh.

“Okay, this is the best part. During sex he tells me to pull his hair. Hard. And I try to but I can't get a grip because
he's got so much hair gel in it. So I'm grabbing a handful, then sliding off, wiping my hands on his pillows, and starting again. At one point he grabbed my hair, and I was like, ‘No-no-no—'”

God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, I thought, like the look of total discomfort on David's face.

“That's quite a story,” he said. “He sounds horrible.”

At the time, I thought I could never be with a man who didn't see the humor in the lowest, most shameful moments of my life. But I was trapped in a car with such a man, sliding deeper and deeper down into the heart of Mexico. I felt like I was being kidnapped.

“You didn't even think my eHarmony ex-child star hair-pulling story was funny,” I said, continuing our what-is-funny debate. “Everybody loves that one!”

“You know, not everything is funny,” David said. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pretended to be interested in what the road signs said.

The quiet that filled the car for the next three hours made me want to cry. I realized this was what it was like to be old. You drove in the car and enjoyed the silence. You sat quietly and waited to die.

I was about two seconds away from slapping my hands against the passenger window as cars passed, mouthing, “Help me! Help me!”

The longer I stared out into the desert, the more I felt like I didn't know who I was or what I was doing. I felt like an old lady, asking, “What happened? Where did everything go?” I missed the old drugstore and all my neighborhood friends. There had been no drugstore and I emailed my old neighbors all the time, but suddenly I missed everything. Even the not-so-great things.

My marriage was over—I was officially divorced. And now I was with this person and I had no idea who he was and no one to ask for character references since neither one of us had any friends or extended family in Baja (unless it turned out this was where my ex-husband had disappeared to).

Maybe I was just dehydrated, but suddenly I was overwhelmed with loneliness and started to cry. I turned my head toward the window. David didn't notice my tears because he was focused on a stand by the side of the road.

“Ice cream!” he said excitedly. “I bet they have good stuff.” He pulled the car over to get himself a double scoop.

I passed, but added, “Ask if they have tequila flavor.”

David, completely sincere, told me he would and took off. I used the moment alone to dry up. Soon he ran back to the car and beat on my window.

“This is the best ice cream I've ever had in my entire life. I'm not kidding! Oh, Lauren, you have to get some!”

With that he returned to eating his ice cream among the families and dogs gathered around the stand. He looked like Bobo the Clown, bouncing and pointing at his ice cream cone
every few minutes. The children found him delightful. The adults did too. Apparently they had never seen a gringo so excited about an ice cream cone. I hadn't either.

I wanted a beer, badly. But of course David didn't drink, a fact I had learned way back during that first meeting when we were both newly available.

Noticing the copious amounts of coffee he was consuming, I had said, “Geez, you sucked that down like a twelve-stepper.”

“What kind of stepper?” he'd asked, like it was a country-western dance.

“A twelve-stepper,” I said. “Alcoholics Anonymous? They're famous for going to meetings and jacking themselves up on coffee because it's the only high they have left, besides nicotine and porno. And gambling. And video games.”

I'd kept adding addictions, thinking one would make him laugh, but when I got to diet pills, he interrupted.

“Addiction kills and those meetings save people's lives on a daily basis,” he said.

 

 

Bobo came bouncing toward the car again and said, “Lauren, if you don't get a cone you will regret this for the rest of your life.”

I suspected that wouldn't be the decision I'd regret.

Two hours later, we'd passed a man on the side of the road sitting atop a cooler full of sliced mangos, wearing a cowboy hat adorned with hanging plastic mangos. We'd also passed
town after town, which at first glance I'd declare “an adorable abandoned village” only to realize that there were throngs of people competing for groceries inside the tiny cinder-block buildings.

Upon seeing the sign announcing our turnoff, David started yelling.

“Hey! Here we go! All right!”

He was as happy as I'd seen him since the ice cream.

“Look at that! I found it!” he exclaimed, turning into the motel parking lot. Once he'd shut off the engine, he apologized for being so intense during the trip. “I was just worried about missing our turnoff for the motel,” he said.