For Today I Am a Boy (20 page)

“Hits home, doesn't it?”

Only when she spoke did I realize that a woman had been sitting on the bench inside the shelter. Her cheeks and nose were red, like she'd been sitting there a long, long while. Her frizzy blond hair was dense as a topiary sculpture. “Hi. I'm Claire.”

I shook her offered hand. “Peter.” She held just my fingers, no higher than the knuckles, a ladylike gesture that I wanted to imitate.

“You should come to a meeting,” she said.

“A meeting?”

“At Pathway.”

Her face was sweetly plump; there were a few rolls over the waistband of her dress under her open coat. “Do you just sit by this poster all day?” I asked.

“Not every day,” she said with a gruff laugh. “It's part of my ministry. I just came back from their residential camp, Pathway to Love. It was my second time there. I recommend it.”

“Thank you, but I'm not very religious.”

She took out a card to give me. “Why don't you have coffee with me? Maybe I can convince you.”

I felt drawn to Claire immediately. The way she forced a smile was both endearing and familiar. Her black coat had powdery gray patches from dust or flour. Was she flirting? I took her card. “Maybe,” I said.

When I went in to work that morning, Buddy was there, asking a table of girls how their service had been, calling for free Irish coffees from the bar. The café had survived its follow-up inspection; even coked up, Buddy had a certain charm. He came to collect the coffees personally.

“Buddy,” I said.

His eyes stayed on the girls, a saucer balanced in each hand. “Hmm?”

I hesitated. I wanted to know how Buddy saw me, how Claire might have seen me. I deepened my voice. “Could you set me up with someone?”

“Like, a date?”

“Yes. With a woman,” I added.

Buddy looked me up and down. His laugh was sudden and pointed. “I don't know anybody for
you,
man.”

 

On our first date, I met Claire at a dessert shop on Saint-Denis. Claire got there first. She ordered us both coffee and a pot of chocolate fondue with bananas and strawberries. She poured five sugar packets into her mug. As we talked, she waved for coffee after coffee for us until I felt like my eyelids had been peeled back and pinned to my head.

Pathway to Love, the residential camp, was held on a small island where the church-owned boat was the only way on or off. “I learned that my disturbing desires were caused by a poor relationship with my mother and poor relationships with women in general,” Claire said in the flat, arrhythmic voice that children use to recite poetry.

“I heard God twice.” Claire speared a banana slice. “He spoke directly to me. Once during directed prayer, and once during the ice baths.”

Claire described the baths—steel tubs left over from when the camp was a care facility. One of the camp leaders had helped her into the tub, naked, shoving her feet through the layers of melting ice into the cold water below. The leader put glossy, torn magazine pages into the bath, a mix of decades-old pornography and modern fashion magazines. A woman in a leopard-print bikini looking over her shoulder, showing a cheeky smile and just the side of her high, pointed breast. Two women in long T-shirts and no underwear, kissing—one woman's T-shirt was pulled up around her waist, and the other woman had slipped a finger inside her. Claire remembered the silky, natural pink of her nails, the color of the underside of an oyster shell.

The camp leader watched Claire from the corner. “Do you feel the Lord moving through you?” he asked.

Claire's skin stung. She felt like she was shrinking, like her arms were retracting into her shoulders and her legs into her hips, her head sinking into her neck like a turtle's. The sensation was not unpleasant; her whole life she'd felt overly large, somehow more solid and obvious than everyone else.

The stinging became real, fiery pain. Claire started to lift herself out of the tub. “No,” the leader said. “God means for you to feel that. Look at the pictures.”

The paper was starting to dissolve. The women's faces were coming apart, their spread legs, their arched backs. Only a few minutes had gone by. Her breathing quickened.

“Call to God,” the leader said. His voice was soothing, faraway. “Ask Him for guidance. Can you feel Him? Can you see Him? Can you hear Him?” He asked the questions over and over again, in time with Claire's chattering teeth. “Can you feel Him? Can you see Him? Can you hear Him?”

Claire shut her eyes. She tilted her head back, submerging her hair and feeling a new jolt as the water touched her scalp. “I feel Him. I hear Him.” She said it first, and then she did, she heard the voice, clear as day.

In the dessert shop, jittery with caffeine, I asked, “What did He say?”

Claire looked radiant. “He forgave me. He forgave all my sins. He said there was a wonderful man out there waiting for me, and one day soon, He would bless our love.” She took my hand, stilled the shaking. “I know how you feel, Peter. You want one thing, but more than that, you want to want something else.”

I could feel her bliss, her peace, through the warmth of her palm. “All things are possible in Christ,” she said.

 

Claire lived in her late mother's house. In the airy, ramshackle kitchen, we baked several cakes at once, using all of her pans: a Bundt cake, a loaf cake, a round cake, a square cake, a cheesecake in the springform. Once the last of them was in the oven, we started on a batch of butter cookies. Claire had trained as a baker but quit to devote herself to Pathway. She kept tall bulk bins of sugar and flour under the sink.

We had our own, two-person version of Pathway. I told her about blissful dreams where I was a woman. Dreams where I would be running my hands down Margie's thighs and suddenly I would
be
Margie, that body mine all of the time. Dreams where I was a wife and mother in a shiny, prefab house. Dreams where I was a Jane Austen heroine, witty and demure in a hand-sewn housedress, fending off suitors. Dreams where I was an ancient queen or a supermodel, admired by all—antiquated, hyperfeminine fantasies. Dreams where I was penetrated by men. Dreams where the thing snapped off as easily and painlessly as a tree branch. I told her about Father. I had never spoken so candidly with anyone.

We iced the cakes and decorated them with candy and fruits canned in syrup. “What you want and what your father wanted aren't so different,” she said. “He wanted you to have a family. You want to have a family.”

She told me about a recurring dream where she was at an orgy of women—every woman on earth was there, fields of pink and brown smoothing out toward the horizon. She told me about an ex-girlfriend. “A sinful, sinful woman,” Claire said dreamily.

She led me into a small room off the kitchen. Intended as a pantry, it had walls with built-in shelves stocked floor to ceiling with animated Disney films on VHS. She picked a few—
The
Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty,
and
Cinderella
—and we watched them on the couch. We ate all of the cookies and two whole cakes without noticing. The next cookie was in my hand before I had finished the last one so that there were no pauses in the pleasure.

Once we were too full to move, as Cinderella ran from the ball, her dress unraveling into sparkles and rags, Claire pulled a blanket over our laps and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Doesn't this feel nice?” she said. I felt starved for touch. I put my arm around her.

Prince kissed princess. The music swelled in choral voices. Claire sat up and turned to face me. I touched her cheek. Her breath smelled of icing, and I wanted to kiss her. She looked proud. Could it be this easy?

I touched my lips to hers, found her skin warm and dry. She was the second person I had ever kissed. It wasn't bad. All things are possible.

 

Before me, Claire had dated a man she met at Pathway. After several tries, they successfully made love once. At a meeting, he confessed that he'd spent the whole time reliving the details of a homosexual encounter “just to get through it.” The counselor asked Claire if she'd done the same. “No,” she said.

Claire remembered turning her head while they were in bed and seeing his knuckles whitened from squeezing the pillow underneath her. She hadn't thought about much of anything. She had watched him—going through his frantic, stuttering motions and hawing like a donkey—in the same state of meditative peace that she evoked in me now. She didn't associate it at all with her previous liaisons with women, where she'd been possessed, where some malevolent force had caused her to pull at her own hair and scream frightfully, had given her hallucinations of falling and knots untying and angels descending. A man thrusting inside her had felt good, like voting or getting your teeth cleaned.

That's how sex is supposed to feel for a woman, Claire explained. Like civic pride, like virtue, like doing one's duty.

 

With me, she went slower. Firm, close-mouthed kisses, caresses on the inner forearms. On a long, contented afternoon of small touches, we lay on her bed together, fully clothed. She was on her back and I was on my stomach, stroking her hair. “We could get married,” she said. “Someday.”

I pulled apart two of her tight, frizzy curls. She closed her eyes, smiling. “We both want children. We'd be amicable roommates. It's more than most people have.”

“I want that,” I said. “More than what I want.”

She nodded. She always knew what I meant. “We could fill this house with children,” she murmured. I moved closer and kissed her. Her body tensed and she recoiled, then she obediently tilted up her face.

We fell asleep. When I woke, it was dark; she had turned onto her side and I had spooned against her back in my sleep. The thing was hard between us. I tried not to move, tried to pack down my disgust into something smaller and denser, into something small enough to swallow, something I could make disappear.

Dating Claire was like learning to meditate. Discipline consumed my life. All the clamor inside was silenced, replaced with static, white noise.

 

Claire's pastor told her she was neglecting her ministry, so we went to the Village on east Sainte-Catherine to hand out flyers for Pathway. Rainbow flags hung from every other balcony, rainbow stickers in the shop windows. Claire said one of the principles of Pathway was “reject temptation and accept the Lord.” She said, “You need to approach the devil to defeat him.”

We stood on the sidewalk between two bar patios. Claire thrust flyers into the hands of two girls walking together. “Do you want to know the path to happiness?” she asked. “The path to love?”

“I know the path to love, honey,” the girl said, still heading for the bar. “It's right through those doors.” She and her friend laughed.

I didn't say anything as I handed out the flyers. Most people took them. I watched some get thrown away at the first trash can. One man, younger than me, read it through and tucked it into his back pocket. Someone threw a beer at us. We jumped back and the plastic cup just splashed our feet.

A woman approached us. My first thought was that she was unusually tall. She wore a striped blue sundress and opaque tan nylons with white pumps. Her crooked, once-broken nose called up a strange memory: little boys beating each other on the playground.

She faced us directly, her hands on her hips. “I think you two better get out of here,” she said.

“This is a public sidewalk,” Claire said.

“Yes, but you're harassing my customers.” Her voice was throaty, awkward. False. “You can go on handing out your hateful little flyers across the street.”

“God loves you,” Claire said. “Even when you do what is unnatural. Even when you disobey Him. He's always waiting for you.”

“I can call you in for loitering.” Thick-limbed, thick-shouldered. Square jaw smothered in orange-toned foundation, fake eyelashes in the daytime. Still somehow convincing. I felt a sinking sensation, like the sidewalk had gone soft under my feet. The white static in my brain crackled back into images. It's easy to have a phobia of water if you always stay inland, avoid the shimmering, inviting, treacherous depths.

Claire tugged me by the sleeve to the corner of the intersection. Passing cars roared in my ears. She stroked my hand sympathetically as we waited for the light to change. “The devil conjured that demon just for you,” she said.

 

I'd left Mother alone after Father died. When I thought of her, I imagined all but one of the chairs against the wall, Mother sitting alone at the kitchen table and mourning—her dead husband, and her children who had run to every corner of the earth.

Mother answered the phone in Cantonese. “
Wai?
”

“Mother?”

“Peter? What do you want? I'm busy.”

I wanted her to meet Claire. I wanted to marry Claire, wanted the train of her wedding dress to trail behind us like a white flag of surrender, erasing
faggots and whores.
I'd thought Mother would be overjoyed to hear from me. Her voice was brisk and unfamiliar.

After a moment of dead air, Mother made an impatient noise. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.” I hesitated. “How have you been?”

“Fine, fine. Are you coming home?”

“I can come visit.”

“Good!” I could hear the TV in the background on Mother's end: someone cried out in high-pitched, whiny Cantonese,
“Aiyee!”
Canned laughter. “Can you bring a big car?”

 

I rented a van and drove it to Fort Michel on my next day off. The outside of the house was in need of repairs—the gutter had come loose, the paint on the sidings was chipped—but the inside was spotless and bare. She'd had the carpets ripped out and replaced by laminate, fake wood that broadcasted its fakeness: even, glossy, no knots. The new table in the kitchen sat only two.