She's Not There (12 page)

“My Friend Dough,” Luke sobbed. “He got hard and
died.
”

I often woke up and lay there in the dark. Usually this was about a quarter to four. I'm the wrong person, I thought. I'm living the wrong life, in the wrong body.

To which I would respond: You're a maniac. An idiot. You have a life a lot of other people dream about, a life so full of blessings that your heart hurts.

To which I would respond: I know. Still.

To which I would respond: Well, what do you think you're going to do about this now? Have a sex change, at age forty? Abandon all the love that has made your life whole, so that you can enter into a new life, about which you know nothing? What kind of woman do you think you'd be now, having never had a girlhood? What kind of person do you think you'd be, leaving your children without a father, your wife without a husband?

To which I would respond:
I know. Still.

To which I would respond: Well, you go on and have a sex change, then. Just leave me out of it. I'll just say my prayers so I can appreciate the things I have and not launch off like an imbecile into a life of lurid marginality.

To which I would respond: You know, don't you, that no amount of wishing that this were not the case can
make
it not the case. No amount of praying that you are not transgendered will make you something other than what you are. No amount of love from anyone will make you fit inside a body that does not match your spirit.

To which I would respond: Well, I'll be goddamned if I'm going to break anybody's heart. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to let my family down. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to give up everything I've always wanted just so I can
fit.

To which I would respond: I know. Still.

To which I would respond: Well, all right, then. You'll be goddamned.

Some nights, Luke and Patrick lay in our bed, their eyes all sleepy. Grace sang a song to them that I did not know, but which she remembered from her own childhood, called “Two Little Boys”:

Do you think I could leave you crying?
When there's room on my horse for two?
Climb up here, Jack, quit your crying,
We'll mend up your horse with glue.
When we grow up we'll both be soldiers
And our horses will not be toys.
Maybe then we'll remember
When we were two little boys.

One fall day the phone rang. “Hi, it's Charlie Kaufman,” said a voice long-distance. My old roommate from 108th Street had seen the review of
The Planets
in
The New Yorker
, and he'd called up to congratulate me. Charlie had moved out to Los Angeles since last we talked and was now one of the writers for a new Chris Elliott TV show called
Get a Life.

I thought about our room on 108th Street, the bars on the windows, the little pieces of film all over the floor. Working at the
American Bystander
, all that time dreaming big dreams that had, in the end, come to nothing. Still, Charlie and I had been friends. It made me feel a little better about that lost time.

“Let's stay in touch,” he said.

One night Russo and I went out drinking in Camden, and after dinner, decided to work off the weight we had presumably gained by taking a long walk through the town.

It was unimaginably dark. We heard the roar of the ocean through the trees, the sound of bells on buoys.

“I just hope I know where I'm going,” Russo said as we left town.

“It would be a first,” I said.

“Shut up, Boylan,” Russo suggested.

We turned down a street at the edge of town that wound through woods. As we walked it got even darker, something that didn't seem possible. “This is one of my favorite walks,” Russo said. “You have to trust me, when the sun's out, it's really beautiful.”

“Since when have I trusted you?”

I had never known the world to be as dark as it was that night, as Russo and I walked down that road through the woods. I could literally not see my hand in front of my face. There were no stars, no moon, and the black sky was covered with invisible clouds. We stumbled through the dark like blind men, aware that we had strayed from the pavement only when our shoes touched soft earth. We reached out for each other and walked with our arms on each other's shoulders, lurching drunkenly through the void.

“You know, it would be good for Grace to see you getting us lost for a change,” I said to Rick. “She admires you so much. It would be good for her to know the real you.”

“What are you saying, Boylan, that if she knew the real me, we wouldn't be lost in the dark?”

“No, we'd still be lost, she'd just be able to hold you responsible for it.”

“I'm going to get us home just fine,” said Russo. “I know exactly where we are.”

“Where are we?” I said.

Russo's voice came through the darkness.

“Up shit's creek,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “That's reassuring.” I squeezed his shoulder. It was good knowing he was there.

“You know, come to think of it, if Barbara were here, she could see the real you, Boylan.”

“Which is what?”

“A pathetic coward.”

Rick did finally get us home, but it took hours. We weren't on the road he'd thought we were on, either. Somehow we'd taken a wrong turn and walked miles out of our way. Rick now claims he knew this at the time but didn't want to tell me. The other thing he didn't tell me was that on one side of the road, as we walked through that haunted darkness, was a huge, creepy graveyard, its headstones bearing skulls and angels crumbling into dust.

I started playing rock and roll again. I hadn't been in a band since the Comfortable Chair. My new group, put together by a guy in the Geology Department, was called Diminished Faculties. We broke up when he didn't get tenure.

Then I met some other musicians who didn't have anything to do with Colby. Pretty soon I was playing with the Smelts, and then the Roy Hudson Band, and then Blue Stranger. I spent my days teaching the poetry of Keats, the afternoons playing Candyland, and the nights performing “Brown-Eyed Girl” for millworkers.

Sometimes, when I played in bars, people would buy me a pint. Occasionally the beers would stand in a row on top of the sound module.

I thought about Mr. Pitiful's, and the night I met Donna Fierenza, the rain hammering down in the streets of London.
There are women
and women and some hold you tight / While some leave you counting the
stars in the night. . . .

One day I autographed a copy of
The Planets
“To Donna and Neal, with love” and sent it off to the last address I'd had for Donna and her husband, a studio in Boston. I defaced the picture of myself on the back flap, so she couldn't see what I looked like now.

She didn't write back.

There was a large tract of forestland across the street from our house, and I used to take long walks there on the fire road. Sometimes I'd follow the stream into the forest as far as I could go. Frequently I'd run into moose. They'd give me a dirty look, then lumber off.

As I walked through the woods, sometimes, I worked on the “being alive” problem. I'm still transgendered, I thought. Even though my life has been transformed by love. I still feel like a woman inside. At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie. It was there on the tip of my tongue as I taught my classes; it was there as I made meatballs for the woman I loved; it was there as I took the car through the car wash and shoveled the snow and built the fires and played piano and flipped pancakes. It was fair to say I was
never
not thinking about it.

Now I had two problems. One was being transgendered, which was stupid enough. But worse than this was the problem of having a secret, of having something so vital about myself that I had withheld from Grace. How am I going to tell her? I wondered as I walked among the pine and maples. This would destroy her, would destroy us, would destroy all the gifts we have been given.

Sometimes I'd think,
Say, are you insane?

I'd get back to the house and Grace would say, How was your walk?

Good, I'd say. It was good. My children would come over and wrap their arms around my knees.
Daddy's back.

One fall a friend of the family stopped by with his grandson. They were doing the college tour of New England. We all went out to dinner. I remembered visiting colleges with my own father in the summer of 1975, drinking beer with him in Oberlin, Ohio, him treating me like a grown-up for the first time. The next day I started writing a short bit about taking the college tour with a dysfunctional family.

In less than a year I'd finished the book, which I called
A Guide
to the Colleges of New England: A Novel,
which follows a high school senior named Dylan as he and his father visit, in order,Yale, Harvard, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan.

Each of the main characters in the family is keeping a very important secret from the people he or she loves the most.

My agent got the book on a Friday. The following week she'd closed a film deal with Geena Davis and Renny Harlin. A few weeks later, she sold the manuscript to Warner Books, and a month or so after that, New Line Cinema had hired me to write the screenplay. It was a hilarious and lucky time, money just raining down out of the sky.

The publisher didn't like the title, though. Could I think of a new one? Grace said, “How about
Getting In
?”

Great idea, I said. It's just disgusting enough to work.

With the money from the film deal, we bought a summer house by Long Pond, which doubled in the wintertime as my writer's office.

I spent all of my days there when I wasn't teaching. It was a beautiful post-and-beam house, built entirely out of pine and pegs. There wasn't a nail in the thing. From a second-floor balcony I could see all of Long Pond twinkling before me. I set up my desk in an atrium next to the porch and started work on a new novel.

Sometimes while I worked I put on a skirt and a knit top, just so I could work without being distracted. Then I'd think,
Why am I doing this?

And the response came, the same one as when I was fourteen:
Because I can't not.

I was chosen to direct Colby's program in Cork, Ireland, from 1998 to 1999. It was a great gig. The college would pay to move the whole family over to Cork for the year and provide us with a house to live in and a car to drive. As an exchange professor, I would teach at University College, Cork; I'd do a course in the fall for graduate students and a course in the spring for undergrads. And I would shepherd several dozen American students through the UCC system, take them on field trips to Dublin and Connemara and the Aran Isles.

Colby and University College, Cork, swap one faculty member each year. The year I was in Ireland, Colby got a zoologist, which most of my colleagues thought was a fair trade.

Several months before we left for our year in Ireland, I took a long walk through the woods.

I thought about Grace and the life we shared. I thought about how much I loved her. I thought about the two of us driving back from Charlotte and passing by the House of Mystery, stopping to kiss at every red light from North Carolina to Washington. How my eyes filled with tears when she made Thai shrimp with black peppercorns. The expression on her face as she'd walked down the aisle in the National Cathedral. I'd slipped a ring on her finger; inside the ring were the engraved words
Bright Star
, from the sonnet by Keats.

Her voice, soft and hushed as Luke cried for the first time in the delivery room. “That's amazing,” she'd whispered.

I came back inside, my face ashen. “What is it?” she said. “What's wrong?”

I sat at the dining room table. Grace was looking at me with a worried expression.

“What is it, Jim?” she said. “It's okay. Whatever it is, it's better you talk about it.”

Is it? I thought. Is it really better if I talk about it? Isn't keeping this hidden the only way I can protect you, can protect this family? Isn't that my job, taking care of us? Sometimes you can do that better with silence than with words.

Wouldn't it be better, after all, to be like the couple we saw on our honeymoon, the husband who couldn't talk and the wife who couldn't hear?

“Okay, listen,” I said to the person I loved more than anyone in the world. “There's something I have to tell you.”

The Troubles (Cork, Ireland, 1998–1999)

I fell off my bicycle on the way home from An Spailpin Fanach and lay there in the streets of Cork, looking up at the clouds. Soft rain fell on my cheeks. I felt completely contented lying there, the wheels of my bike spinning somewhere nearby.

Son? Are you all right, son?

I rode my bike to the pub only on those nights when I knew that, as they said in Ireland, “drink would be taken.” On this particular evening, I fell off the bike because a car in front of me had stopped quite suddenly. I jammed on the brakes and was, moments later, launched skyward.

It was an evening on which I had sung “Fooba Wooba John” in public. In the mornings, in the office of the chair of the English Department at UCC, I would often be able to tell just how drunk I'd been by the songs I'd sung.

“I didn't sing ‘The Dog Crapped on the Whiskey,' did I?” I'd ask my friend Eoin, whose name, by the way, is not the name of one of the dwarves from
The Hobbit
but is, in fact, a perfectly respectable Irish one pronounced the same as the English “Owen.”

“Ah, sure you did,” Eoin said with immeasurable delight.

“I didn't sing ‘That's the Way You Spell Chicken,' did I?”

Eoin nodded again. “Ah, but a
carse
ye did!” he said.

I sighed. “Just tell me I didn't sing ‘Fooba Wooba John,' please,” I said. “That's all I ask.”

“Ah, James,” he said. “You
sang
it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Was there anything I didn't sing?”

“No,” said Eoin, “I can't say as there was.”

So there, drunk in the street, lay the emergent transsexual. Before we left America, Grace and I had gone shopping together. I'd assembled a small wardrobe of women's things that looked all right on me. I had a couple of skirts from Coldwater Creek, a knit top from Territory Ahead. Some nights at home in the Colby flat, after the children were asleep, I would put this stuff on, and Grace and I would sit by the peat fire reading books together or playing Boggle.

Grace was strangely tolerant of all this. She thought of it as a hobby, like playing in the rock-and-roll band. For all that, though, it wasn't a hobby she particularly wanted to share. There didn't seem to be a place for her in it.

When I came out to her, I had not told her I was transsexual. I told her what I hoped could be true, which was that expressing just this much of myself would be enough. I didn't want it to threaten our marriage or our lives.

Still, for much of that year I felt like a chalk painting dissolving in rain.

I stood and picked up my bicycle off the sidewalk. The horizon swayed, as if I were on board a ship on the high seas. Interestingly, the car that had stopped in front of me was still sitting there. I was annoyed with the driver for having pulled up so suddenly. I might have been hurt. For a moment I considered having words with the man behind the wheel.

Then I noticed that the car was unoccupied. The car that had surprised me by stopping so suddenly was
parked
there.

I spent that year in the traditional Irish manner—drinking heavily, singing songs, and wearing sheer-to-waist panty hose.

By mid-September I had fallen in with a crowd of people who followed several bands around Cork. There was Nomos, a traditional group that included both a sixty-year-old ex-policeman on fiddle and a nineteen-year-old teen idol on guitar. There was North Cregg, which included the teen idol's older brother on silent movie–style piano and a man named Christy Leahy on the box. Christy physically resembled a short Herman Munster, but his features were transformed by the music into something delicate and serene. The best place to hear these bands was the upstairs of the Lobby Bar, which was across the street from the Cork City Hall, on whose steps John F. Kennedy had stood early in 1963.

Another good venue was the Gables pub on Douglas Street, where Christy, along with North Cregg's guitarist, Johnny Neville, sat in a corner on Thursday nights and played their brains out. Frequently all sorts of their friends showed up as well, and there in the corner would be Christy on the box, Johnny on guitar, a piper, a banjo player, a mandolinist, and six fiddlers, their bows waving through the air in unison. I usually sat at a table about three feet away from this menagerie and just listened, transfixed. Every now and then Johnny would look over at me and say, “You liked that one all right, then, Boylan?”

On the surface of things, I was simply enjoying what I felt was the finest music in the world—traditional Irish—in the finest of venues— old pubs where Murphy's and Beamish were slowly poured by bar-maids who knew my name. Beneath this, though, there was a sense of urgency and desperation in my heart. Slowly I was becoming aware of how little time might be left to me as a man. I feared that our return to America, in July, would begin a period of transformation and loss.

One night I was taken to a ceili where North Cregg was playing. There were about three hundred people all packed into a dance hall, and everyone was drinking pints of Murphy's and shots of Jameson's and Paddy's and Tullamore Dew. The band started playing well after midnight. For a few moments there was elegant set dancing, an elaborate kind of square dance that everyone had clearly learned in grade school. After a few moments of this, however, the whole business fell to pieces, and drunken madmen crashed through the lines like asteroids. Everyone else dove in, transforming the scene into a hilarious melee, a seething mass of arms and legs and women being lifted in the air and spun.

Riverdance
, it wasn't.

At one point, North Cregg's banjo player busted a string, and without pause he just threw his banjo aside like it was a piece of junk and dove into the crowd, where he was properly fielded, then passed around on everyone's shoulders.

A girl asked me to dance late in the night, and I said, “I don't know how to dance to this music.”

She beckoned toward the crowd, where punches were being thrown and giant rugby players were doing back flips in the air, and she just said, “Ah now, I'm sure somethin'll come to ye.”

On the whole, I liked ballads and songs better than the jigs and the reels, because the lyrics seemed to speak to me. In the ballads I heard the constant theme of emigration. Surely they had me in mind when they sang about having to leave the land of one's birth because of the Great Hunger. Standing on the deck of a coffin ship, waving farewell to one's sweetheart. Making a difficult ocean crossing. Arriving at last in a new world, the land of promise, the land of freedom. But never quite fitting in, in the new land, always speaking with a trace of a foreign accent.

Sometimes I think the best way to understand gender shift is to sing a song of diaspora.

Our ship at the present lies in Derry Harbor
To bear us away—o'er the wide swelling sea.
May heaven be our pilot, and grant us fine breezes
Till we reach the green fields of Amerikey.
Oh, come to the land where we shall be happy.
Don't be afraid of the storm, or the sea.
And when we cross o'er, we shall surely discover,
That place is the land of Sweet Liberty.

One night I sat in the Four Corners, listening to a boy I did not know sing this song, tears coursing down my cheeks.
Don't be afraid
of the storm, or the sea
, he says. How could I
not
fear the storm, or the sea? Surely, before I reached the green fields, I would perish in the briny ocean. Or, even if I did successfully
cross o'er
, how could I live without the love of the girl I'd left behind?

The people are saying that these two were wed,
But one had a sorrow that never was said.
He moved away from me, with his goods and his gear.
And that was the last that I saw of my dear.

On New Year's Eve, our children went to bed early, and Grace and I were able to say good-bye to 1998 like adults. I made Peking duck for dinner. After we'd finished the last of the plum sauce, we snuck off into the bedroom and made love. We lay there in the warmth of each other's bodies for a while and then heard, far off, muffled in the Irish rain, the sounds of midnight as it was celebrated throughout the city.

“Happy New Year,” we said to each other.

“You know what this year feels like, 1999?” I said.

“What?”

“It feels like a sneeze coming on.”

Grace laughed and then rolled over and went to sleep.

The boys went to a Montessori school that year, where they learned to sweep the floor and put sponges in cans. Grace had an early morning workout at the gym, which she often followed with a trip to the English market in Cork's downtown. That left me at home in the Colby flat, where I would frequently put on the Coldwater Creek skirt and a black top and sit in the office and work on a screenplay. Occasionally Grace would come home to find me
en femme,
and she'd just shake her head and laugh. “No pearls before five,” she'd say nervously before heading out again.

More often than not, though, I was alone in the house as a neo-female. I'd pay the bills for the program or I'd sit at the upright piano and sing “I Wanna Be Like You” from The Jungle Book.

Sometimes I would put on my pumps and my coat, and I'd stand there in the front hallway, thinking about going out into the world. I looked in the mirror. I thought I looked fine, if you didn't look too close. Still, I stayed indoors. I did not want to jeopardize the program or my own professional integrity by risking intrigue. Instead I waited on this side of the door, the Irish rain coming down outside, wondering when, and if, I would ever be able—as a woman—to feel that rain upon my face.

In March, we went to the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Morocco, with our children. There we played on purple black sand volcanic beaches. One afternoon I lay by the pool with a family of German tourists. All of the women took off their tops, even the grandmother, and I pretended not to look on amazed. Later that afternoon, over the loudspeakers at the resort, I heard the theme from
Shaft
in Spanish:

“¿Quién es el detectivo negro?”

“Shaft!”

“¡Sí!”

(This is merely an approximation.)

We returned home for several weeks, then left our children with a friend for several days while Grace and I went to Venice, then Florence. Venice, in particular, was haunting. Grace and I rode in a gondola, drank Chianti at a table in the Piazza San Marco, viewed the rising Venus. Then we passed across the Bridge of Sighs.

Grace's sister arrived from Oklahoma, and the two of them went off to London for a few days. I felt unbelievably mournful in Grace's absence, though. I spent the days in Cork in an absolute dark purple despair, playing the illean pipes in our apartment while the children were at school, or drinking at the Gables in the evening when I had a sitter, listening to Christy and Johnny play “Arthur MacBride and the Recruiting Sergeant.” Songs of forced conscription also touched me deeply and seemed to speak to my condition.

But says Arthur, ye needn't be proud of your clothes,
For you've only the lend of them as I suppose,
And you dare not change them one night, for you know
If you do you'll be flogged in the morning.

Forced conscription, I thought as I drank yet another pint. You've got it, lads.

One afternoon, I walked around the city in a mournful private fog, eventually winding up on top of the spire of St. Ann's Cathedral, and there I stood above the city as the church bells began to ring, deafening me. On every side was the great city of Cork, the Beamish brewery and the college and the English market and the river Lee, rolling down to the sea.
What am I going to do?
I asked myself as German tourists below me banged out “You Are My Sunshine” on the carillon.
What am I going to do?

When Grace and her sister returned from London, we took a ferry to the Aran Isles and were shown an ancient fort on Inishmore by a man we called Seamus O'Twotimes because he said things like “The population here is nine hundred. Nine hundred.” He was like a Celtic-fried version of a character from
Goodfellas.

The highlight of this tour was climbing a path to a mountain fort high above the sea, overlooking vast cliffs. Seamus O'Twotimes gleefully explained how several years earlier a Danish student had gone off the edge. “He just walked right out into space. Into space.”

I said to him, “Excuse me, but I have a question. This is a remarkable fort. But I was wondering, who was it the people who lived here were defending themselves against? I mean, who'd want to take over
—this
place? Wouldn't most warriors look at this cliff a half a mile in the air at the top of an island in the middle of nowhere and just say, ‘Okay, you guys can
have
it!' Who was it they were being attacked by?”

Seamus O'Twotimes thought long and hard about this question. Then he said, “Persons such as themselves.”

At Reidy's Wine Vaults, Grace and my friend Eoin and I celebrated my birthday in June. Eoin noted that forty-one is the “age of a villain.” And, further, “If you wanted to make someone a villain in a work of fiction, all you would have to do would be to tell the reader that he or she is forty-one and the reader will guess the rest.”

A week later, I went to Amsterdam by myself for a few days to clear my head. I brought all of my girl things and stayed in a fine hotel and spent four days as a woman. On this occasion I decided to leave the confines of my hotel room, and so it was that in June of 1999, for the first time since my Baltimore days, I went out in the world wearing a skirt.