In the Darkroom (16 page)

When we had crossed over the Chain Bridge and started the climb through the Buda Hills, the traffic diminished, and the recording was less broken.

If this were about a house, it wasn't just the one at Ráday 9. There was the other house, a tract home in an American bedroom community a world and a time away, when she was a parent and I was a child. We were cruising the quiet back streets when we finally got to that night in Yorktown Heights. The voices on the tape were clear.

My father was shouting. I was, too, and also crying. Ilonka reached over the seat and began patting my arm, making soothing, clucking noises. I jerked my arm away.

There was a long indecipherable section as a truck went by. Then the tape cut off.

“Excuse me, are you … ?” I debated how to end the sentence: Melanie? Mel?

The woman at the next table was wide-shouldered and sported a Chanel knockoff pantsuit, chunky earrings, and a frosted bob. She had been looking around as if she might be expecting someone.

“… Melanie?” I settled on.

She shook her head. I sat back down and continued my clandestine inspection of the customers and their putative genders.

I'd been home from Budapest for a week, the last twenty minutes of which I'd spent at the Coffee People on Twenty-Third Avenue in Portland, Oregon, waiting for the arrival of someone I'd never met.

“I'm not sure whether I'll be dressed as a woman or a man,” Melanie Myers told me when I set up our meeting. Melanie had been Mel until three years earlier, when he had gone to Thailand to get the same operation as my father, with the same surgeon. Melanie now lived part of the year in Portland, her hometown. “Call Melanie,” my father had advised. “She's practically down the street from you. She would make a good interview for your book.” The rest of the year Melanie lived in Phuket, Thailand, where she ran Melanie's Cocoon, a guesthouse for postoperative transsexuals recovering from surgery. My father had stayed there for several weeks after her sex reassignment surgery. Melanie had been on the scene for my father's transit from one sex to another. I'd only known my father as before and after—suburban über-patriarch or ultra-femme hausfrau—separated by an empty moat of many years. Melanie knew the in-between. If I were searching for the fluidity in my father's story, as opposed to the either/or, Melanie might bear witness to my father's most liminal moment.

I scanned the café. Did this “woman” in a dress look like someone who was once a man? Did that “man” in a suit look like a former man who had become a woman and was now a “man” trying to pass as a man? After a while, everyone seemed to be in drag.

Another quarter hour went by. The door of Coffee People swung open to admit a middle-aged man—or “man”—in a shaggy crew cut, wire-rimmed oval glasses, a striped-blue men's dress shirt, and khaki pants. He had a round face and a charming gap between his front teeth that reminded me of Lauren Hutton's. He hesitated a few steps inside the door and looked around.

I stood up, deliberated. “Are you … ?” To my relief, he nodded and came over.

“I'm going by Mel now,” he said as we shook hands.

“I was a really good-looking guy when I was a man,” Mel told me as he settled in with an iced latte. “A real man, I mean … I mean, I'm going back to being a man now but”—he rolled his eyes at his own verbal tangle—“picture a football quarterback type. Big strong chin, square jaw, Charlton Heston, Marlboro Man.” He pulled out a Palm Pilot and began clicking through pictures, looking for an old photograph.

“Women found me really attractive. But I always dreamed of being a girl. I dreamed of it when I was six years old. I just loved everything about being a woman, the way they got to be treated, pampered, the attention. If I could have gotten that attention as a guy, maybe I wouldn't have done it.”

As he spoke, he punched at the buttons on the Palm Pilot. “It's in here somewhere,” he said. “I've got a lot of pictures. Hundreds.”

“You don't have that square jaw anymore,” I said.

“No, I had the jaw flanges cut off and the chin narrowed. I had my whole face redone.” He pushed back his hairline to show me. “I had several millimeters of bone taken off my forehead. Titanium pins put in my forehead. Seven millimeters off my nose, seven off my chin. They had to peel off the skin, peel off my face basically.”

I winced. “Sounds excruciating.”

“I wouldn't have done the surgery if I couldn't have the face,” Mel said. “I could never be a clown. If I'm going to be seen in women's clothes, I'm going to be genuine. I had one of the best facial surgeons in the country, Dr. Douglas Ousterhout in San Francisco—he practically invented FFS.” Facial feminization surgery. “They say he based it all on his one ideal woman.”

Later, I'd look up Ousterhout on the Internet and find before-and-after photographs of his patients, YouTube promotional videos, and patient testimonials to his magic touch. A website developed and run by “Diane,” one of his former patients, praised Ousterhout's work and trumpeted FFS as the path to “achieving your dream” and enabling “you to pass as the woman that you are. … Dr. Ousterhout will try to improve your appearance so that you feel that you fit back into society as the person you want to see in the mirror.”

“It cost thirty-two thousand dollars,” Mel said. “For the face surgery, I mean.” He spent tens of thousands more for the breast and genital surgery, hair implants, speech therapy, and an extensive new wardrobe. “I was like the poster child for Best Trans Person in Portland.”

He held up his Palm Pilot. “See, there I am. Don't recognize me, do you?”

As advertised, the original Mel looked like a high school quarterback.

He clicked some more. “See that?” Three women stood arm and arm in the picture, two petite Thai girls and a Caucasian who towered over them. “I showed this picture to my brother and he said, ‘Who's the woman in the middle?' And I said, ‘That's
me
.' ”

“How did your family handle it?”

Mel was quiet for a moment. “My daughter doesn't speak to me anymore.” He looked back down at the Palm Pilot. “I have a picture of her in here somewhere.” He searched for a while and then gave up. “This thing has six hundred pictures.” He smiled, a sheepish gap-toothed grin. “Most of them are of me. When I first came out, I went overboard. I dressed like eye candy, the best makeup, the most expensive wigs, beautiful clothes from Nordstrom. I got attention all the time.”

“And now?”

“Well, I had my dream. It was a great three-year dream. But now it's back to reality.”

After the operation, Melanie lost her job as a commercial printing salesman—a firing that she suspected was prompted by her change in sex: “My boss caused me to lose clients by not delivering my orders on time and used that to slide in the knife.” Before sales, he'd worked ten years in a lithography darkroom, “manipulating photographs for the big catalogues—Macy's, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus. I was brightening, darkening, kind of like what you say your father did.” The two never connected over their previous work lives: that was in the past. Now Mel was “flat-out broke,” in danger of losing his condo, and trying to make ends meet with a part-time telemarketing gig, selling enrollments to “remote learning opportunities” for an online university. He was desperately looking for more remunerative employment, and to improve his chances, dressed as Mel for job interviews. In the sales profession, he noted, a woman had to contend with sex discrimination.

He was also lonely. He yearned to be reunited with his longtime Thai girlfriend, who worked as a cocktail waitress in Phuket. She had planned to move to the United States so they could live together. But she couldn't stay in the country without a green card—or a marriage certificate to an American man. Mel wanted to marry her, but his operation had foreclosed that possibility, or at least it did in 2004. Besides, he said, “The whole dressing-up-as-a-woman thrill, I just don't have the same interest in it anymore. It wasn't real. I was just buying approval.” In the last several months, Mel had begun looking into “getting the papers to change back to a man.”

“But it's what you felt you were?” I asked. “A woman?”

“I don't want to get into that.” Mel gave me a sidelong look. He'd checked into me online, he said. He knew I was a feminist. Which evidently suggested to him that I didn't believe in gender distinctions. “But there
are
differences between males and females,” he said. “There
is
a feminine nature.”

“And do you have a feminine nature?”

Mel slowly clicked through another set of pictures on his Palm Pilot. Melanie in a tube top. Melanie in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. Melanie in a strapless evening gown. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I used to think so. Now I think there's a spectrum. And I'm right at the midpoint, a five. I feel that I'm androgynous. …” He paused on a shot of Melanie in shorts, arm in arm with her girlfriend under some palm trees in Phuket.

“I feel I'm androgynous, but I don't
want
to be,” he continued. His gaze was stricken. “People can't survive without categories. Even people on the fringes need categories, so they can be on the fringes. You have to have an identity.”

————

Portland had been something of a transsexual destination since the early 1990s, when Dr. Toby Meltzer, a local plastic surgeon, was one of only twenty physicians in the country performing sex reassignment surgery. He operated on thousands of patients until, in 2003, conservative owners took over the hospital where he had admitting privileges and Meltzer decamped to Scottsdale, Arizona. When I moved to Portland in the early aughts, I often saw transitioning patients nursing coffee after hormone treatments outside my neighborhood supermarket. Several bars nearby were transsexual redoubts, and the Portland public library's shelves contained an unusual number of volumes dedicated to the transsexual phenomenon. When I returned from my first trip to Budapest, I logged many hours in the library's wood-paneled reading room, under the oil paintings of the city's stern founding fathers, working my way through the collection—305.3. 306.76. 617.520592—the Dewey Decimal classifications where books on gender identity “disorders” and sex reassignment surgery were filed. After a few days prowling the stacks, I had the numbers memorized.