She's Not There (15 page)

I liked the freedom of tears. But it was unnerving how close they were to the surface.

Above all, I was aware of a change in the way I occupied my body. I felt raw and vulnerable, exposed to the world. One day I was walking in a skirt through Lewiston, Maine, as rain fell and the wind howled around me, and I
thought, There is nothing in a man's experience that is like this, and I didn't mean just the physical sense of cold wind on my legs.

The thing that I felt testosterone had given me more than anything else was a sense of protection, of invulnerability. I had never imagined myself to be particularly invulnerable when testosterone had free rein in my system, but this new world I was approaching seemed to have no buffers. Things that used to just bounce off me now got under my skin. There were a number of occasions when I wished I still had that male shield standing between me and the harshness of the world.

I began electrolysis of my beard that summer. Electro is a process by which one kills off hair follicles by placing a burning hot electric needle deep into one's pores and basically deep-frying the roots of each individual hair like an onion ring. It was unbelievably painful, like being shocked and jabbed and barbecued all at the same time. It left my face looking like a Quarter Pounder, without cheese. I'd endure two and a half hours of this a week, for a year and a half, then I did it for an hour a week for another year. My electrologist estimated that I had about forty thousand follicles on my face. Each one had to be char-grilled four or five times. All told, I probably spent about 250 hours, over two and a half years, in the fryer.

I also tried, on three occasions, the new “laser electrolysis,” which was performed by a plastic surgeon who scorched my face with something that looked like a Jedi light saber. It felt as if I were placing my face into one of those giant steel cauldrons one sees in foundries, a gargantuan bucket filled with white-hot molten lava. This left me beardless for a few months, then it all grew back again. I asked the plastic surgeon about this, and he said, “Yeah, that's the problem.” Apparently you had to keep getting smelted, again and again.

I tried to explain the horrors of this process to a few people who knew what I was going through, but they weren't particularly moved. Their attitude seemed to be, “Well, sorry you're in such agony, but if you don't want to be in such agony, stop having your beard burned off like an imbecile.”

Their attitude, toward electro as well as toward the entire condition of transsexuality, resembled the spirit behind an ancient Henny Youngman joke:

Guy goes in to see a doctor, he says, “Doc, you gotta help me, I get a terrible pain every time I go like
this.
What should I do?”

Doctor says, “Don't go like
that.”

I began to play regularly with a rhythm-and-blues band called Blue Stranger. The brains behind the band were a couple named Nick and Shell. Nick was the bass player, and his wife, Shell, beautiful and fearless, was the lead singer. She regularly charged out into the audience with her remote mike and danced on top of the bar.

It was a great band to be in; everyone was an adult with a job and a family, and we played only for the sake of having fun. For all that, they were excellent musicians. Playing music with Blue Stranger was more fun than almost anything else I could imagine, and best of all, we played only covers—no annoying original material whatsoever. We played “Brown-Eyed Girl” in seedy Maine bars for drunken working people. What could be better than that?

Shell, who could swear like a sailor when she was in the mood, was one of the first people to ask me directly about the changes in my appearance. “You look weird,” she said. “What are you on, the AIDS diet plan?”

“I've been losing some of the weight I picked up in Ireland,” I said.

“You're not dying, are you?”

“I'm not dying.”

“'Cause if you are, and you're not telling your friends about it, all I can say is
Fuck you
.”

“I'll let you know if I'm dying,” I said.

“You'd better,” Shell said. “Or I'll fucking kill you.”

Grace, of course, was also acutely aware of the changes in me, and they frightened her. The rapidity of my body's response to estrogen, which was not entirely typical, further reinforced her sense that I was on a “runaway train.” It was true that I'd begun hormones, begun electrolysis, begun this transition, all with a sense of experimentation, to see, as Dr. Strange had suggested, whether being increasingly female in the world was what I had expected it would be. I still had the sense that I could suspend or reverse this journey at any moment, if I found that the world I was coming to inhabit was one in which I did not wish to live. Yet Grace didn't see that, and if I said as much— that all of this was still on a trial basis—she did not believe it.

She, too, saw me as increasingly female, and as a result, she began to react to me as she might react to another woman, which is to say, as a close friend or relative rather than a lover. Her eyes no longer sparkled when I entered a room, and the embraces and kisses I gave her she endured rather than enjoyed. By the end of that summer, we were quickly becoming like sisters—sharing a home, a family, shepherding children, but without a physical relationship.

The last time we slept together we were at the lake house, in autumn. The dock had been pulled out of the water, the canoes were overturned in the boat rack, and the loons had headed south. The red leaves of the maples and the soft brown needles of the pines were fallen on the lawn.

We lay in bed after making love, lying back on our pillows, the sheet covering us at the waist. Grace was curled onto me, but her head was resting on a female breast.

I felt something liquid on my ribs, and I leaned forward to see the tears, flowing quietly from her face and rolling down my body.

“Grace,” I said. “It's okay.”

She didn't say anything for a long time.

“It's just . . . ,” she said at last. “Each time we make love now, I'm afraid—it's going to be the last time.”

“I'm not going anywhere, honey,” I said. “Don't worry. I will always love you.”

But my words to her only made clear how little I understood what she meant. I
had
gone somewhere, whether I loved her or not. And the fear she spoke of, that each time together would be the last—was not the fear that I would lose my affection for
her.
It was the fear that she would lose hers for me.

Someone who did not know us, who might have looked through the window at us lying there, might have seen two women, curled in each other's arms, one of them in tears.
What a shame,
such a stranger might have thought.
I wonder what's come to make those women so sad.

I saw a review in
The New York Times
of a film that had been the highlight of the New York Film Festival,
Being John Malkovich.
The screenwriter and co-producer was one Charlie Kaufman.

I thought of my old roommate on 108th Street, remembered us trying to catch the mice that lived inside the upright piano. The sound those little feet made as they sprang across the strings.

I gave Charlie a call at the last number I had for him in Los Angeles, and I got his answering machine. “Hey, Charlie,” I said. “I saw the review of your film in the
Times
, and I just wanted to say congratulations. Give me a call sometime if you want to be in touch.” I thought about explaining the whole sex change business, but it didn't seem like the right thing to stick on an answering machine. I'll tell him the story if he calls back, I thought.

He didn't.

One day the doorbell rang unexpectedly when I was at the lake, and I looked out the window with apprehension. The unannounced visitor was what I always feared when I was there “as” Jennifer. Out in the driveway was a car I did not recognize, a boat on its trailer. A woman sat in the passenger seat.

A voice called from downstairs. “Hello? Anybody home?”

I decided,
Well, here goes nothing
, and went downstairs. I was wearing a green skirt and a T-shirt and a minimum of makeup.

“Hi,” said the visitor. “It's me, Italo Calvino [not his real name]. I'm your neighbor?”

Italo had the house in back of us—he lived in New Jersey and always came up to Maine for a few weeks each summer.

“I'm Jenny Boylan,” I said.

“Hello. Are you Jim's sister?”

I nodded. Okay, that was a good idea. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm Jim's sister, Jenny.”

“Well, listen, I just needed some help getting my boat in the water. Is Jim going to be back later?” he said.

“I don't think so.”

“You're his sister?” He looked at my breasts. “You ever read his books? They're funny.”

“I've read them,” I said.

He reached forward to shake my hand. “I live up the street. We live in Jersey, come up here every summer.”

He looked out at his wife, sitting there in the car. “You married?”

“Yes,” I said.

He thought this over. “Well, you see Jim, you tell him I said hi. Maybe the four of us could do something sometime.” I tried to figure out which four he meant. Was he counting my husband? His wife? Of the four he had in mind, was I two of them?

“I'll tell him.”

He shook my hand again and held it for a little too long, then he headed down the steps. As he did, I suddenly realized he hadn't asked
me
to help with his boat. I guess the way he figured, being a woman, I'd only screw it up.

As he got to his car, I heard his wife say something. Italo responded to her with a phrase that seemed to seethe with diminution. “Naaah,” he said to her. “It was only his
sister
.”

And the way he said this showed me exactly how little a person of importance he considered me to be. It hurt my feelings. I'm
only
my sister? I thought, What am I, chopped liver? I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. An average-looking woman in her early forties stared back at me. I held up one finger and wiggled it like the possessed child in
The Shining.

“Jimmy isn't here anymore, Mrs. Boylan,” I said.

It was a sentiment that Grace increasingly shared, as the months went by and she watched her husband slowly disappear from sight.

Boygirl (Winter 2000–2001)

The Coffin House hadn't changed much in twenty-five years. The steps up to the third floor still creaked, and most of the posters I'd hung on the wall in tenth grade were still there. The dog door still led into the kennel, although the dog had been dead twenty years. Everywhere there were framed pictures of the family—of my parents in their youth; of my grandfather, still sternly standing watch above the fireplace; of me wearing a mortarboard at Wesleyan graduation. The keyboard cover on the Cable Nelson in the living room still bore the scratches made by my fingers a long time ago. A low C still had a small chip in the ivory. That was where my tooth had hit the keyboard one night in eleventh grade, when I'd tried to play the low notes with my nose.

In the morning I would tell my buoyant mother that I was a transsexual.

I slept in the bed in which I had lost my virginity to Donna Fierenza in 1979, the same bed in which Grace and I had conceived Patrick. The bathtub where Onion had bathed was still there, although the walls of the bathroom had been painted a cream color. On a bookshelf was still the thick volume
Art Masterpieces of the World.
The pages still fell open to
The Turkish Bath.

The house was just as haunted as ever. At night it groaned and creaked; soft footsteps padded through the attic above my head. The wind rushing through the drafty windows suggested the soft voices of whispering children.

I am not sure what time it was when I felt my father standing next to my bed, but when I opened my eyes, there he was, just as he had been in life.

Dad had always been a shy, polite man, and for a moment he looked almost embarrassed to be materializing, as if it were such a tacky and clichéd form of behavior for the dead.

He raised one hand as if to tell me not to worry. I could smell the Alberto VO5 he used to use on his hair. He glowed.

“Jenny,” he said.

I wanted to respond to him, but I could not find my voice. Still, for all that, his presence wasn't frightening. As in life, my father seemed incredibly gentle in spirit. Being dead didn't seem to have particularly embittered him.

“I want you to know,” he said, “I've been looking out for you, protecting you, for these last fifteen years. Being your guardian. I know a lot of things now I didn't used to know.”

He looked sad.

“I know that you have to become a woman, Jenny. It is going to be all right. Your mother will always love you, and so will I.”

He stood there floating for a while.

Then he said, “But you need to know this. If you become a woman, as I know you must, I'm not going to be looking out for you anymore. You will be on your own.”

Then he looked at me coldly, harshly, and faded.

I sat bolt upright in bed, terrified. I turned on the light. The room was full of the smell of his hair gel.

Russo and I went out drinking at our usual place, the Seadog in Camden. I wore a white T-shirt and jeans. We occupied a booth near the bar. The Red Sox were on television. We drank something called Old Gollywobbler.

Russo was finishing up the novel he then called
Nantucket,
later to be renamed
Empire Falls.
He'd asked me to take a look at one chapter in it, a scene in which the hero, Miles, goes in to visit Mrs. Whiting, who wields all sorts of power over him. Her daughter, who hobbles around on crutches, is desperately in love with Miles; in that particular scene, among other events, her cat scratches Miles until he bleeds.

“So I need to know if you think this is too cruel,” he said. “It's supposed to be funny, but I don't know. My work seems like it's getting darker and darker.”

“What, now
that's
my fault, too?”

He laughed. “I don't think it's your fault,” Russo said. “Although . . .” He paused, happily, to consider what might, after all, not be his fault.

“I don't know if the cruelty issue is the right question,” I said, and sipped the beer. “I think the issues are whether it's funny, and whether it's real.”

“Okay. So is it funny?”

“Yeah, Russo,” I said. “It's a riot.”

He laughed again. “Good. I'm glad you think so. I'm crazy about it.”

“Well, that's probably a pretty good sign right there. But, see, the reason it's funny is because it's serious. And that makes it feel real, too. I think the reason you can get away with the comedy is that you've got that terrible cruelty of Mrs. Whiting simmering underneath the scene. It acts like ballast, to keep the silliness of the business with the cat from getting out of hand.”

“Well, I wanted to know what you thought, Boylan, because that's what your fiction does, too, when it works.”

“Right,” I said. “On those rare occasions.”

“Yeah, on those incredibly rare occasions.” He laughed. “You love that place between what's funny and what's terribly sad.”

I nodded. “It's a great place for a story to be,” I said. “Keeping a reader unsure whether to laugh or cry.”

He drank his pint, looked at me. “I guess there's a reason you write that way, huh.”

I nodded.

He said, “You know, of all the writers I know, it's always seemed to me that, there's the least of you, personally, in your fiction. I mean, some authors I know, all they really do is change the names of the characters in their own lives, and that's it, that's the novel. But you, Boylan, whenever we have dinner together, you always tell these amazing stories about your own life, that just have everyone on the floor. But those stories never wind up in your novels. Your stories are always about people a million miles away, acting like maniacs. I mean, your friends would recognize a certain entertaining
voice
in your work, but the actual events and the characters seem to come from someplace very far away from you.”

I finished my beer.

“I used to wonder why it was you didn't write about your own life, examine your own emotional center. But now I know why.” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, do I know why.”

The waitress came by. “Would you like another one, miss?” she asked.

I smiled. “Please.”

She took my glass and walked back toward the bar.

“Jesus, Boylan,” Russo said. He turned deep red and looked around the Seadog. All this time he'd presumed we'd just been two guys sitting at a booth drinking. Suddenly it occurred to him that people thought he was sitting with some girl, getting drunk. Did people think I was his date?

“I gotta go to the men's room,” he said, and stood up.

“I gotta pee, too,” I said, and followed him. As we walked toward the bathrooms, he seemed to take another hard look at me. “Which one are you going to use?” he said. “Will you at least do me that favor, and tell me before we get there?”

“Which would make you more uncomfortable?” I said. “I'll use that one.”

“Tell you what, Boylan,” Russo said. “If you get back to the table first, you leave a mark. If I get there first, I'll rub it out.”

Our children ran around the house, pursued by their friends Carrie and Sam, carrying water guns. There was a squirting sound, then a scream. Luke and Patrick came running back in the other direction, soaked to the skin. Grace and I sat on the porch, watching the sun reflect off the lake.

Sam came running up on the porch, holding his Super Soaker. He paused when he saw me.

“Why are you wearing those earrings?” he said to me.

“Don't you like them?” I said.

Patrick and Luke came up on the porch behind him, out of breath.

“They make you look like a girl,” said Sam. “You look like a girl!”

“Our daddy's a boygirl,” said Patrick, smiling. It didn't sound like a bad thing, the way he put it.

“But we love him anyway,” said Luke. He came over and gave me a big hug.

Then the kids ran inside to fill up their water guns again.

Grace looked over at me. “We're going to have to tell them something,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But what can we tell them?”

“Well . . . ,” said Grace. She sounded more confident and clear than she'd seemed the previous winter. “I've tried to do some research on what families do when someone changes genders. I checked with some other therapists.”

“And?”

“There's no research whatsoever.”

I shrugged. “I'm not surprised,” I said.

“I tell you what,” she said. “When all else fails? Use common sense.”

From inside came the sound of a terra-cotta planter smashing into a thousand pieces.

“Oops,” said a voice.

“What was that?” Grace called inside.

“Nothing,” said Luke.

They all ran out the door, soaking one another with the squirt guns.

“What do you mean, common sense?” I said.

“Well,” said Grace,“first off, they should know that they're loved. They shouldn't question whether any changes in you mean that your love for them is different. I think that's probably the most important thing.”

“That sounds good.”

“And they should know that this won't happen to them, that it's rare. They should know they didn't cause it. They should know they can talk about it whenever they want, and that it's all right to find the whole thing pretty weird.”

I nodded.

“And most of all, I guess they should know you aren't going anywhere.” The sound of our children's voices grew distant as they ran toward a neighbor's.

“I'm not?”

“Well, of course not.”

“Does that mean we're not getting divorced?”

Grace sighed. “I don't know what the future is, Jenny. But we're all going to be together for the foreseeable future. That isn't going to change. I mean, who knows, one day it probably will. But not for now.”

“Is that what you decided?” I said.

She shrugged. “It's not a decision. It's the only choice we've got. I mean, I don't want to be apart from you, and I don't want the children to lose you. And you don't want to leave. So what can we do? We have to figure out a way of making this work as a family.”

I reached out and took her hand. “It sounds like you're coming to terms with things.”

She squeezed it and let it go. “I don't know what I'm doing. I am so totally pissed off at you, I don't know what to say. Except I can't be pissed off at you, because it's not your fault. So I just sit and steam at everything. I feel totally gypped, like I've been cheated out of my husband. It's not fair!”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I know you're sorry,” she said. “But your being sorry doesn't help. There aren't any good choices for me. Every choice I have
sucks
.”

The children came running back. Patrick had somehow lost all of his clothes. Water dripped down from his hair. “Can we go to the toy store?” he asked.

Patrick's phrase
boygirl
became the personal shorthand that I used to describe the place I was in during 2000–2001. I made up a little joke during this boygirl period, namely: What are the three phases of male-to-female transition? Step one:
Hey, that guy looks a little weird.
Step two:
Hey, that person looks
really
weird.
Step three:
Whoa, that chick is
ugly!

By now I was hovering, it appeared, between steps two and three.

I seemed to pass from being perceived as male to female at a moment's notice, depending on whom I was with, where I was, whether my hair was tied back or loose, how I crossed my legs. During the boygirl period, I gradually increased the amount of time I spent “presenting” as a woman. By the end of that year, the only places I was consistently male were on the Colby campus and around my children.

My voice had always been somewhat androgynous, and after two or three sessions with Tania Vaclava, the voice coach at Bates College, I became relatively content with the way I sounded. I managed to perfect, with the coach's help, a spectacularly convincing female voice; my coach said it was because I was a musician and a writer. My pianist's ear helped me hear the appropriate female pitch and modulation; my author's sensibilities showed me inflection and phrasing. For a while, it was like learning a whole new language.

Yet after a few months I gave up on this new voice. It sounded convincing, but it didn't feel authentic, I suppose. My voice dropped back into a more androgynous place, and although its resonance and inflection became more feminine, as a matter of course I no longer gave my voice any thought. This was much to the relief of my friends, who'd found that the “Jennifer voice” sounded like the voice of a stranger.

Above all, I wanted my friends and family to know that Jenny was not a stranger, that she was someone they already knew. It was a puzzle, though—if Jenny was so very much like James, didn't that mean she was not really female? And if she really was female, didn't that mean that she was someone unknown? That I could be both unambiguously female and, at the same time, the person they had always known seemed impossible. Yet it was an impossibility that was largely true.

I was aware, during the time of boygirl, that I had been given a rare and precious gift, to see into the worlds of both men and women for a time and to be able to travel almost effortlessly between them. I taught my classes at Colby with my baggy, button-down shirts hiding my figure, I wore a tweed coat and my hair tied back in a ponytail. In the parking lot, after class, I would take off the coat and the shirt (leaving on my undershirt), slip in a pair of earrings, and shake my hair loose, and I would then be seen as female, at least by people who did not know me. It was like being Clark Kent and Superman, in a way. I really did have that sense of “Into a nearby phone booth . . .” and could move from one world to another with an ease I found uncanny.