Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (37 page)

He shook his head, and I could see that I had depressed him a tiny bit. I hadn't meant to. "It all comes back to Allison, doesn't it? Even now," he observed.

I knew what he was driving at, and I ignored it. "In this radio series, it shouldn't. At least in the first half--on day one--Allie is completely irrelevant. Completely. On day two, she should certainly come into focus. So should a lot of people. But, in my mind, she's only a part of the program."

"I wasn't talking about the program."

"I was aware of that."

"Okay, fine. Has Patricia found a new home yet?"

"She has. She has a glorious apartment. In Brandon, of all places."

"Lousy spot to meet people."

"Ah, but it isn't Bartlett, and I think that's all that mattered. She wanted out of our little town, and I really can't say I blame her."

"Have you seen it?"

"Her place? No. But I know the building. It's gorgeous. She has the top two floors of some monster Victorian near the library. Right now she's planning to stay there for a couple of months and regain her bearings. Through the summer, probably."

"And then?"

"I don't know. But this isn't a trial separation. I wish it were. Sometimes. But it's not."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too," I said, and I tried to recall the last time we had made love. I couldn't, and for some reason that scared me. I knew it had been in December, but our last few intimate moments had blurred together like so many leaves on the collages Carly would make in the autumn when she was a little girl. Quickly I returned to the subject of the radio series. "Explain that she can pass for a natural woman. Dana, of course."

"And leave it at that?"

"Tell people she's attractive."

He sipped his coffee and then nodded. "Yeah, I think that's important."

"It is for the radio," I said. "But not in reality."

Oh, but it was. Whenever I saw Dana, and I saw her quite a lot in February and March, I would have to remind myself that she was a transsexual. I would have to focus upon the phonetics of the word, murmur it to myself in my mind, and conjure the genitalia that once had been there. Otherwise ... and sometimes I would cut the thought off right there:

Otherwise ... otherwise, nothing
.

And I would allow myself to hug her as a friend. I would touch her the way I might have touched any of Allie's or Patricia's female pals, or the various women I knew who were married to my male friends. I would give her an embrace that was warm but not overtly sexual. I would shake her hand gently. I would not touch her legs or her hair, which for male friends are off-limits, but I would graze her arm with my fingers when it was appropriate.

But aren't even those touches sexual?

That was the
otherwise:
For men, on some level it's all sexual. It might be that way for women, too, but I can't speak for women. For men, however, it's always about sex. We are what we are. Whenever I thought about touching Dana, I realized that I hadn't ever touched a woman without understanding on some plane that we were different genders, and succumbing to the sexual charge--sometimes awkward, sometimes teasing, sometimes downright thrilling--that was as involuntary as it was inevitable. It was, in its own way,
pro forma
. Men don't hug women without thinking of sex. It may be for the merest second, the flutter of a hummingbird's wing. But it's there and it's real. After all, that's a woman's shoulder blade you are touching or patting or caressing for the briefest twinkling. Those are a woman's breasts that are pressed against your chest when you squeeze her to you after a dinner party. That human being in your arms for an instant? Your bodies fit together, and the genome that limned you and the memes that control you ... they understand this and crave her.

And so when I'd hug Dana or touch the inside of her palm with the inside of mine (a handshake, yet so suggestive) or my fingers would find their way to one of her arms, I would experience a sexual ripple and wonder why I had felt such a thing--why I had
courted
such a thing. And the answer would be because she was pretty and she was smart and she was feminine. The
otherwise
that was the euphemism in my mind for penis and balls and a chest with a rug would be subsumed by the scent of her perfume and the softness of her skin. The small of her back. The feel of her body forming itself next to mine for the split second that it takes to embrace as ... friends.

Even the word
transsexual
had grown less disconcerting. Less foreign. It began to seem less like a scientific abomination--man into woman with the aid of hormones and scalpel--and more like medicine. A woman healed.

One time when Dana was with Kevin, and Allie and I were alone, I asked her if she thought she was gay because she was attracted to Dana.

"No," she said, and then she asked the question of me that only my Allie would ask. "Do you think you are?"

I wasn't sure what I expected when I went to see Glenn Frazier. Probably I shouldn't have called first. I should have surprised him. But he knew I was coming and he knew why I was coming, and so he was ready.

I stopped by his house after dinner. He'd said his family was usually done eating by seven or seven-fifteen, and so we agreed upon seven-thirty.

His house was part of a small, relatively elegant development that had been built on what was once a modest dairy farm just outside of town. Ten or eleven houses, all one-and two-and three-acre lots. They'd been built in the early 1990s, and they were vaguely Colonial: inappropriate for northern Vermont, but they were well landscaped and they were not unattractive.

The Fraziers had lived there just about eight months. They were the second family to live in the house. I knew Glenn because Bartlett is a small town and we were men about the same age, and because he worked with my ex-wife at the school. We knew each other well enough to make small talk when our paths would cross at the bakery in the morning or--obviously--when we ran into each other at the supermarket. But we weren't friends, and I had never before been to his house.

When I arrived, Glenn's teenage son--a boy a few years younger than Carly--was doing some sort of math homework in the den off the front hall. He left me standing in the entryway when he went upstairs to tell his father I was there. And then, a moment later, he came back downstairs and informed me that his father was on the phone and would be with me in a minute. Then he returned to his homework, stopping once to pet the side of a puppy that was asleep on the floor by the woodstove.

He seemed like a nice enough kid. Awkward. Not particularly well socialized for a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old. But the fact that he was doing schoolwork at seven-thirty at night was encouraging to me. I read nothing into the fact that he didn't invite me in to sit down, or offer me something to drink. I read nothing into the fact that his mother didn't appear to say hello while Glenn wrapped up his conversation on the telephone.

At least I didn't at first.

I leaned my back against the front door with my coat in my arms and wondered if I should take off my shoes. Then I decided not to: The boy had his sneakers on. And my loafers were reasonably clean. I glanced around the hallway, noting the way the brass fixtures still had a bright shine to them, and the wallpaper on the stairs had not yet begun to separate at the seams. There was a copy of the day's newspaper, unread, on a small table by a mirror.

At twenty to eight, I asked the boy in the den if his mother was home.

"Yup. You want me to get her?" he asked.

I shook my head no. "Just curious."

He nodded, donned a pair of small headphones, and continued to work.

At a quarter to eight, I decided to read the newspaper. I had already read the paper once that day, and so the articles I read at the Fraziers' were the stories that hadn't interested me at first. In most cases, they still didn't. But the waiting was less awkward when I had something to do with my hands, when I had something to look at other than the wallpaper and the fixtures and a boy with his homework.

At ten of eight I sat down on one of the bottom steps on the stairs, still holding the newspaper and my coat. I resolved not to give Glenn the satisfaction of sending his son up for him again, and I resolved not to leave. I resolved I would not be stood up.

But at eight o'clock Glenn's son took off his headphones, snapped shut his math book, and turned on the television. He was watching a prime-time soap opera aimed at teens, and I found the dialogue I could hear in the hallway unbearable. I didn't believe the boy was a part of a little conspiracy his father had engineered, I didn't believe he was intentionally trying to torment me, but the show was quickly growing unendurable. Adult angst is bad enough; teen angst is pure torture.

And so at ten after eight, when I'd been kept waiting for forty minutes, I finally yelled up the stairs:

"Hello? You off the phone yet, Glenn Frazier?"

I'd tried to keep my voice light, but I doubted I had. At the very least, I saw, I had made the dog's ears twitch, and I might very well have sounded livid. Because, of course, I was. I was furious.

The boy came out of the den and said he'd go see what was keeping his dad. Then, a moment later, they both appeared at the top of the stairs. The boy retreated back into the den, and Glenn stood before me for a moment in the hallway. He managed not to apologize.

"That phone call was endless, wasn't it?" he said.

"Yes, it was. It must have been very important."

"Actually, it wasn't. I just couldn't find an out to escape," he said, and he shook his head as if he felt bad. But it was clear he didn't feel bad, and it was clear he wanted me to understand that.

"Where would you like to talk?" I asked.

"Will this take long?"

"It shouldn't."

He looked around the hallway, and for a second I thought he was going to suggest we stand where we were. Finally he motioned toward the kitchen, and so we went there and I assumed we were going to sit around a mahogany table fresh from an Ethan Allen showroom. But he remained standing, his back to a sliding glass door.

So I stood, too, still with my coat in my arms.

"I guess you know why I'm here," I said.

"You were pretty clear on the phone."

"Was I?"

"Yeah. Perfectly. Is there something you want to add?"

I considered asking him how I had insulted him in that conversation, but I knew that wasn't the issue. The issue was that I had told him I wanted to stop by to discuss Allie and Dana, and that I wanted him to give them his support. To stop making their life any harder than it already was. Perhaps, I had even hinted, to intervene with Judd Prescott and the school board, and get them to stop pressuring Allie to take a leave of absence.

And, somehow, that had not simply irritated him: It had, in his mind, demeaned me. In his eyes, I had become a traitor to the cause. Gone native, so to speak.

I realized that I had endured the indignity of standing in his front hall for forty minutes for absolutely nothing. There was no reason for me to be polite, because there was no way I was going to change his mind. There was no way he was going to ask anyone or anything to back off. Not the school board, not the parents. Certainly not his own sense of right and wrong.

"I guess not," I said, "I guess I was clear." Then I walked myself to his front door and I left. I figured he was still standing in his kitchen when I started my car.

Usually by the time a program we have produced has aired, I've lost interest in it. By then it has come up in so many meetings at the station and I've heard it in so many stages that it no longer holds any surprises. Moreover, by then I'm usually immersed in something else: the next series, the new hire, the latest transmission crisis.

The story about Allie and Dana was different, in part because I had made the professional decision to distance myself from it as much as possible during production. But there were other reasons, too. The subject matter was--as Kevin had said--all very strange, especially since it was a story that hit so close to home. Certainly I had understood that when I first had the idea, and then when I proposed it to Allie and Dana. But I hadn't realized how much I would change as the program date drew near. Something was different for me now, and I wanted to grasp what it was. I wanted to fathom that strangeness.

Moreover, I actually wanted the program to help Allie and Dana. I wanted it to get the people in Bartlett off their backs. That was a lot to ask of a story, and I honestly didn't have any expectations that it would accomplish such a thing. Has any newspaper editorial ever changed anyone's mind? I doubt it. And it didn't seem fair to put that kind of pressure on this series.