It was one of those rare afternoons. Patty had gotten up early—3:00 p.m.—to run a series of errands before going off to work. I walked around the house, checked my email (spam), caught up on some bills. The phone did not ring. I sat down again with my work and shuffled words around, making middling progress. Later I lost my temper, throwing papers from my desk onto the floor, generally feeling angry at something indefinable and feeling sorry for myself.
I went to the bedroom—where on most days I would have found a Sleeping Beauty to comfort me—and face-planted onto the duvet. In so doing, I managed to eradicate from my senses all external stimuli but the feel of cool sheets and the sound of my own breathing. With this fetal isolation came just enough mental clarity to help me recognize why I had become so impatient: I was failing. I had barely begun and already I was failing. Patty was slipping away, and Raven’s letter had been little more than a “What do you want from me?” I could take solace in the
fact that he had written back, that some correspondence had been established, but was I any closer to my goal? My last drafts were no good. I hadn’t sent anything out. They seemed so stilted. Where was any sense of femininity, of Lilyness, on that page? It was all
You ask what I want
and
I tell what I want
. Where was the seduction in that? Where was Lily’s voice in all that Owen falsetto?
I had hatched a perfect plan and yet could not execute it. I was not going to give up easily. Lily would be more of a stretch than Lysander, but now I had one advantage: revision. No need to learn how to mimic surprise at a sound behind me. There were no sounds. Only words. I could rely on my strengths with Lily, I could research, then apply my findings. I could write and rewrite my Lily until she was ready for Raven. By the time I rose from the bed I realized I had failed at only one thing: taking seriously the difficulty of my plan. Lily would have to be more than a computerized image, and she would have to be more than a set of cursory answers to Raven’s questions. If he was going to fall in love with her, she would have to be lovable, seductive even, and the letters would have to seem not like some artificial and stiff charade of femininity, but like the by-product of a larger life.
I stood in the middle of our bedroom. The curtains were closed and the late afternoon sunshine had slipped under the hedge outside—the room was suffused with a dim orange glow. It was now a womb in which Lily was gestating. I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser in front of me. Folded and stacked in neat rows, Patty’s panties—lacy or silky or cotton—sang a song of innocence and order, of cleanliness and intimacy. Compared
to my boxers-and-socks drawer, Patty’s underwear drawer was a museum display. I had pictured myself pawing through a mess of her underthings and pulling up from the bottom, by chance, the perfect pair of Lily-panties, but now I could see that pawing would never work—I would never be able to restore this kind of order. I brought my head closer and perused the sides of every stack, looking for a pair that seemed, upon visual inspection, both sufficiently elastic and sufficiently “Lily.” I saw a candidate, stretchy-looking but feminine lavender, a bit older. It was the second from the bottom, and the stack to which it belonged had to be extracted carefully, as to not disturb adjacent stacks. I was not at the mall, after all, where some high school Sisyphus would come by after I was done destroying a perfectly folded pile of jeans to fold them all over again. I left the bottom pair of panties in the drawer (rotated fifteen degrees to mark my spot), dropped the ones I was after onto the top of the dresser, and lowered the remaining stack onto the “marker” pair, careful to maintain—as I had done long ago with my uncle’s
Playboy
magazines—correct orientation so that Patty would not notice the stack had been disturbed.
The panties I had extracted were indeed lavender and indeed stretchy, but they also had a characteristic I was not expecting. They were thong panties. Reluctant to go digging around again lest I disturb my wife’s perfect stacks, I settled on them anyway. I removed my pants and boxers and stepped into Patty’s underwear. I threw my boxers in the hamper and pulled on my pants.
The last of the afternoon’s light came through the trees and shimmered on the grass in that dappled way that reminded
one of life’s little miracles. (Nature uplifts. Cinderblock numbs.) I was no longer the failure I thought I was, even after I reentered my office to face the mess I’d made earlier. I left those papers on the floor and made my way straight to the desk. I had committed myself to being Lily for a while, so I decided to explore her. That evening I wrote something I can only describe as a fictional autobiography, an act of writing through which Lily would tell me about herself. I reproduce it here verbatim from memory.
My Life
by Lily Hazelton
My name is Lillian Echo Hazelton and I was born in Central California in 1970. My mother died in a hospital when I was very young and my father showed no interest in raising me, so before I even started school I came to Southern California to live with my mother’s sister and her husband, who had a son a little older than I was. From then on my family life was stable in that we didn’t move and no one died. But the sting of my early childhood in Central California never really left me. So I know what someone means when they say that trouble tends to follow them around. I am wearing a lavender thong. I live in a one-bedroom apartment, built in the 1950s and decorated by me. I like to cook but don’t seem to do it that often. I have many acquaintances, a few of whom I would call close friends. I work
at the local elementary school, as a teacher’s aide, so I know children. I believe in a God but do not attend church, finding it too wrapped up in the affairs of man.
I had a short-term sexual relationship with my cousin when we were both in our teens. He was my first true love. Before love could be broken down into categories, we had the real thing together, the pure thing. But he was my cousin, and we were discovered, and now he is no longer with us. I am a liberal until threatened. Sometimes I forget to eat lunch. I rarely drink alcohol alone. I go months without masturbating and then diddle myself twice a day for a week. I want to know that you are not going away. When I’m in trouble, I call my aunt, who is difficult to talk to. When I need someone to talk to, I call my friend Francine, who despite her intense competitiveness usually provides a sympathetic ear. I have no one to talk to. My mouth moves, words come out, people nod and respond, but I never really get to talk to anyone. Since childhood, I have prayed for God to take my life. I have two cats and will not get a third because I do not want to be a single woman with three cats.
It was a thrill, creating her out of thin air, setting the trap for Raven. Life was going to be different soon. I was typing away under my desk lamp, the rest of the house dark, when I heard the familiar but unexpected creak and groan of the garage door. I looked at my watch and at my calendar. Tonight was a work
night. Patty was supposed to go straight to work after running her errands.
I heard her footsteps in the hall, and then she appeared in the doorway with a peculiar look on her face.
“I’m ditching work tonight,” she said.
I knew the look—the tight smile of a very responsible person doing something barely irresponsible—the shell of liberation. It was Patty’s belief that if she were to act less responsible now and then, she would find herself to be a freer, happier person. But being irresponsible seemed to strain her and the consequences of her irresponsibility always came down on her as if totally unexpected. “Why do I always have to be the responsible one?” she would ask. “Other people get by just fine.” She could never get used to the idea—she could never be convinced of it—that we irresponsible masses were constantly paying for our irresponsibility with additional heaping portions of stress, heartbreak, and bankruptcy. We did not lead the carefree lives she imagined for us.
She took in the disorder of my office.
“Jesus, Owen,” she said. “What happened?”
Did she envy my devil-may-care attitude at that moment? She tiptoed across the archipelago of open carpet and pulled my head to her stomach.
“Are you finished for the day?” she asked.
“I could ditch, if that’s what you mean.”
“And if you did, what would you want to do tonight?” she asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“You,” she said, “and Frisbee, and dinner.”
“Three things that can happen in only one order.” She looked disappointed for a moment, then went to the front closet and retrieved the Frisbee. Sex first would have meant no Frisbee, and dinner first would have meant no sex or Frisbee. Even in our limited experience we had learned this. Our sex life was a disaster. We went through great droughts punctuated with spasms of activity, based on how Patty was feeling. In the beginning, she would break down and cry during sex, claiming an overflow of emotion. CJ’s ghost standing at the end of the bed.
It was one block to the park in the cool night. I walked as naturally as I could.
“You seem distracted,” she said.
“I’m fine.” The panties were a vice. When we got there we threw the Frisbee back and forth a few times. As was inevitable, it ended up on the ground. I couldn’t bend to fetch it. I managed to flip it up with my foot, but could not get it high enough to retrieve it. I kicked it in a circle.
“Owen, what are you doing?”
I couldn’t bear to look at her. I left the Frisbee on the grass.
“I should have gone to the bathroom before we left,” I said.
“There’s one over there.”
The public restroom at the park consisted of a cute outbuilding—more handsomely appointed than the concrete hellholes down by the beach—and appeared very clean from the outside. I went in expecting the worst possible odors, graffiti-covered metal “mirrors,” pooling fluids in the corners, but it was better maintained than I thought it would be, especially considering the half dozen or so homeless men who inhabited the park
with their dogs, sleeping bags, malt liquor, and weed. The only thing I would have asked for, aside from a nice floormat, was a higher stall door. The city had equipped the toilets with thigh-high stall dividers and doors, just enough to provide a modicum of decency for the average sitting citizen while also not providing enough privacy for shooters to shoot, taggers to tag, lovers to love, or me to doff my wife’s underwear in privacy.
I had removed my pants very carefully to avoid their touching the floor or the bottom of my shoes, and I had just slung said pants over my arm in order to pull off the panties when I heard a shuffling at the door. My first thought was Patty. The ball of guilt in my chest was being whacked back and forth by the twin paddles of justification and fear of discovery, and I had to remind myself that I was doing all of this for her, that she loved me, that I loved her, that I could explain everything and make everything okay again.
I was on the verge of explaining myself to the invader when I realized it wasn’t her—it was a homeless man. We had seen him down at the corner coffee shop many times. He had a crew cut, a sharp square jaw, and his eyes were a tad too close together. He wore a military helmet from time to time and his cardboard sign usually read “please help $1 anything,” though he seemed too able-bodied to be living on the streets and begging. He looked like a cartoon soldier, thus his sobriquet: the Cartoon GI. He spent most of his time—in residence at the coffee shop—drawing multicolored diagrams (with a four-color click-pen) of various worldwide conspiracies, with arrows joining a Union Jack to a (well-drawn) rat to the Stars and Stripes, with the words
FLOW OF CAPITAL
written over one of the arrows and
U.N. GLOBAL P.O.W. CAMP
written
over another. He posted these diagrams on telephone poles in the area. I used to collect them.
One evening I was dozing in the quiet cocoon of my home office when I heard yelling outside. Yelling was rare, a thing of the city. I went to the front door and poked my head out to see what was going on, and there he was, the Cartoon GI, making his way down the sidewalk with his helmet, his tightly rolled sleeping bag, his olive-drab pack. He screamed at random intervals, at the sidewalk ahead, although no one was there: “Niggers!” and “Mother fuck your nigger ass!” and so on, each phrase punctuated by the same racial epithet. Now I am sure there are white people in the world for whom the sound of that epithet means the safety and comfort of a redneck home, but for me it had the opposite effect—I understood, upon hearing the Cartoon GI screaming these words, that he was not as harmless as I thought he was. Ever since then, I had made a point of avoiding him, no longer peering over his shoulder to see what his latest diagram contained.
We locked eyes for a moment, he recognizing that I was standing in a pair of women’s underwear, me recognizing him. He turned and walked out, cursing under his breath. I slipped out of the painful thong as quickly as possible and pulled on my pants, careful not to streak the insides with whatever was on the bottom of my shoes. The secret was to roll each pant leg into a donut and get the shoe through all at once. As for the panties, I didn’t want to risk keeping them in my pocket. And I couldn’t throw them away—I couldn’t bear to imagine my wife’s panties sitting atop a landfill somewhere. (Birds pecking at them.) There was a ledge at the top of the concrete wall, just under the roof.
By straddling the stall—standing on the too-low stall walls—I was able to reach up and tuck the panties there, under the eaves (but indoors) for safekeeping. I would get them in the morning. Mission accomplished, I hopped down and walked briskly—how free my parts felt!—out the door, almost bumping into the Cartoon GI, who’d been waiting outside for me to finish so he could go in.
There stood Patty, Frisbee in hand, eyes on me. I wanted to collapse at her feet. I have stolen something from you, sweetheart. I have deceived you. Sometimes I feel that nothing human is foreign to me, but at other times, I can be unsettled by the pettiest deception. Look at her. She stood before me and, relieved of the torture in my crotch, I could see her again. Why had I deceived her like this? I had to remind myself that all deception would fall away soon enough.