Self-Made Man (15 page)

We met for dinner at her house. During dinner I told her right out, in the blurted way our conversations tended to go, that there was something I wasn't telling her about myself, and that I couldn't tell her what it was. I told her that if we were going to go to bed together she would have to be willing to accept the untold thing and the physical constraints it required. She took this well. She was curious. Not frightened. She didn't need to know, she said.

We talked about other things over dessert, and circled back to the topic of going to bed together, or whatever approximated version of that I could do without divulging my secret. We talked about our letters and the subject of lesbianism came up again.

“Your response was pretty vehement,” I said. “You might have just said you weren't interested. Why heroin?”

“Let me put it this way, then. I think of lesbianism like India. It's enough for me to see the special on PBS. I don't feel the need to go there.”

“Makes sense,” I agreed.

The conversation moved on to something else and then back again to the prospect of sex, and my visible discomfort with skirting the edge of full disclosure. I had told her as much as I would. She had asked if my secret was something physical and I had told her it was. She reached her hands across the table and took my hands in hers. Would she see that my hands were small for a man's? I wondered. If she did, she said nothing.

We decided to go into the bedroom. Once there, she lit several candles by the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, which was low to the ground, and asked her to sit with her back to me on the floor. She did so, leaning against the mattress between my legs. I gathered her long hair in my hands and draped it over one shoulder, exposing one side of her neck. I eased down the V-neck of her sweater, exposing the shoulder, and traced her skin with my fingertips, behind the ear, along the hairline, the collarbone. I leaned down to kiss the places I'd touched. She moved in response, lolling her head to the side. She reached up behind her and placed her palm on my cheek. She would feel the stubble now for sure and know that it didn't feel like stubble should. The jig was probably up.

“Do you feel it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How does it feel?”

“Soft,” she said.

She didn't seem alarmed or surprised.

This was about as far as I was willing or able to take it—the makeup was smeared now for sure—so I took her hand away then and got up from the bed to move around in front of her, to face her on the floor.

“Do you want me to show you or tell you?” I said.

“Whichever you prefer.”

It took me longer than I'd thought it would to spit it out. I was holding her hands when I finally did.

“I'm a woman.”

She didn't pull her hands away.

I went on immediately to fill the space. I told her about the book project and why I was doing it. Then I waited.

She was still quiet. Then she said, “You're going to have to give me a few minutes to get used to this.”

We sat in silence. Clearly, whatever physical deformity she'd been expecting hadn't been femaleness.

“I'm not a transsexual,” I added by way of help. “This is makeup and my tits are strapped down. I don't actually wear glasses either.” I took them off. My glasses usually had a kind of reverse Clark Kent effect. Without them people always felt I looked more like myself, whereas with them, Ned stepped out of the phone booth. The tortoiseshell plastic frames I'd chosen helped to square my face and hid my eyes, which everyone found too soft for a man's. This, and the knowledge that I was a woman, helped shift the look enough for her to see the woman underneath.

“Yes. I can see it now,” she said.

She took up one of my hands, which she was still holding, and examined it.

“These aren't a man's wrists,” she said, caressing them, “or a man's hands, or a man's skin.”

She looked me over for a few minutes in the dim light, making out the feminine parts and nodding.

“I always thought you weren't very hairy for a man,” she said. She laughed a little and said, “Well, now I can tell you that my nickname for you in the past few weeks has been My Gay Boyfriend. You set off my gaydar the first time I saw you. Your hair was too groomed and your shirt too pressed, and your shoes too nice.”

A lot of women had noticed and complimented me on my hair and my shoes. For Ned's dates I groomed my hair to the last strand. The women I dated seemed to appreciate the effort quite a lot, and seemed unduly glad to find a man with a manageable bush on his head.

My shoes were just basic black leather loafers, but I wore them with black socks and jeans and a black button-down dress shirt, like some slob made over by the Fab Five on
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
The trendy term
metrosexual
came up a lot in my company during my dating career as Ned. But it was on this point that I was sorely disabused of one of my preconceptions about heterosexual women and what they were really looking for in men. When I started the project, I had suspected that I would find hordes of women for whom Ned would be the ideal man, the ideal man being essentially a woman, or a woman in a man's body. But I was wrong about this. It wasn't that simple. Women's desires were stubbornly kaleidoscopic and their more subtle proclivities even more uncategorizable.

Sure, you could make generalizations about men and women, what they tended to do and want, buy and consume, but all of that was really just frosting, and it wasn't until you got down deep inside the individual that you began to see the contradictions emerge and announce themselves. The concept of either/or isn't very helpful when you're trying to understand men and women, because every time you try to boil them down to their tidy habits, their anomalies poke through and leave you with a mess you can't write up very neatly in a conclusion, except to say that both are true and neither.

Ned wasn't everybody's type by a long shot. Sure, some women—like Sasha, as it turned out—still wanted to go to bed with him once they knew he wasn't a guy. But plenty of others didn't. They were just flat out heterosexuals, tried and true. As one date, Anna, explained it to me once I'd told her I was a woman: “I was not immediately sexually attracted to Ned. I thought him good-looking and likable and the date was so very enjoyable and commanded a repeat performance, and the writing, God, the writing, was what got me off. But in the end, Ned himself did not elicit an immediate visceral sexual response from me. Ned was too slight for me, too metrosexual. I would never have guessed in a million years that you were not a boy, but I like boys that weigh two hundred pounds. And yes, I find them emotionally disappointing, especially in bed, but the physical strength, the roughness I find erotic and I do not prefer sex otherwise.”

Sasha and I spent hours that night talking about the book, why I was doing it, and how fascinated she was by what she'd learned about herself. Sasha was very interested in the implications of the experiment. She was curious about her lesbian tendencies or lack thereof. She wasn't in the least frightened or threatened by the switch or her attraction to Ned and her ongoing attraction to me. She was extremely pleased to have happened upon an experience that had shaken up the norm.

Sasha and I went to bed together, and obviously Sasha had to thereby revise her hard ideas about lesbianism and her desire to “go there.” Yet she did so with stunning alacrity for someone who, I'm fairly certain, was not a closeted lesbian all along, or even a genuine bisexual. In our weird stilted exchanges, we had connected mentally in some way. Maybe I'd come to admire the adventurer and even the oddball in her. Maybe she just desperately needed a good friend. There could be a thousand reasons good or bad, but I think none of them had much of anything to do with sex. And this, I'll maintain in an entirely unscientific manner, is a stubbornly female tendency.

For most women sex is an epiphenomenon, the steam that issues from the engine. And the coal is mental. It's: “Do you make me laugh? Do you make me think? Do you talk to me?” It's not: “Are you handsome? Are you rich and accomplished and well hung?” I suppose, more often than you might think, it's not even: “Are you male or female?” It's really just: “Are you there and do you get me?”

But that's the quantum paradox of sexuality right there. Because just as soon as I say that, just as soon as I say that three of the women I dated and revealed myself to, three heterosexual women, wanted to or did sleep with me once they knew that I was a woman, I remember that one of those three women, Anna, didn't sleep with me because I didn't weigh two hundred pounds.

She struggled to plumb that conundrum as hard as anyone. We went back and forth on it trying to understand the nature of the attraction we both felt, an attraction that was physical, but physical because it had first been mental.

Anna was by far the best date I had as Ned. Given what I've described thus far, that may not sound like the choicest of compliments, but I mean it as one. She was a joy, and proof that real chemistry could exist between two people from the instant they met. Of course, she was also proof that chemistry was just that, particles mixing and sparking a buzz on the brain, but it wasn't a good predictor of fit or anything else, for that matter, beyond itself. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what two people would want from each other or what would work logistically when the high wore off. You could be entirely unaware of who or what you were to each other, or even, in our case, whether you were man or woman, gay or straight, and it could still be there between you, plain and undeniable. But momentous as it sometimes felt, maybe in the end it didn't mean anything at all.

We met for dinner at a cheap Chinese place I knew. All these dates were breaking me financially, and based on past experience, I was hoping it would be a short evening. But the minute Anna sat down I was so immediately at ease with her that I wished I'd taken her to a place where the prices weren't even on the menu—the kind of place where blind daters who click get slowly soused on top-shelf martinis until they're canoodling on their bar stools and feeding each other oysters by the end of the evening.

By the end of the evening we were canoodling at the bar at a place down the street. I asked her if I could touch her hand. She nodded and smiled drowsily, faintly pityingly, faintly nurturingly—the way she might have looked at a lot of imploring men—placing her hand on the bar palm up between us. And there it was. The thing sought. The simple favor granted, and a mountainous relief contained in it.

I held it and kissed her fingers. That was all. Nothing serious. We talked mostly, and thereafter we wrote a lot of e-mails back and forth, until I finally told her the truth. And then nothing changed and everything changed. I met her again later as myself, and the thing between us was still there, but she was a little afraid of it by then, uncomfortable with it in anything but the mind, for reasons I both understood and respected. That was the beauty of the experiment. It was different for everyone.

The third straight girl who still wanted to keep seeing Ned (even after she knew that he was a woman) was the only girl I succeeded in picking up in public.

Sally worked behind the counter in an ice-cream parlor. I was there buying ice cream and while she was scooping my cookies 'n' cream, I told her that I really liked her glasses. It was true, the kind of thing I would have said as myself, but also the kind of thing that would be taken much more to heart by a straight woman when I said it as Ned.

She was affable and direct. She responded to Ned's compliment with flirtatious thanks and a story about how she'd picked her frames out of the bargain basket at the optician. I gave her my phone number on a napkin and asked her to call—probably not the manly thing to do, but I thought it was the polite thing to do. My feminine empathy knew how awkward it could be to refuse someone your number, yet how much more awkward it could be to give it to him and then have to play phone dodge for the next two weeks until he either dropped the chase or turned stalker.

She called the next day. Her voice on the phone was tentative. She'd never done this before, she said. No one had ever just asked her out on the spot. She was floating on the attention. She would be mad later, I thought, and she'd have every right to be.

Sally and I went out three times together. Three chatty dates on which we talked about nothing much at all. There wasn't much to say. She was thirty-five and still living at home. Still working in the ice-cream shop she'd worked in as a teenager. She'd been engaged, but had broken it off a year prior, or he had, or they'd let it atrophy until someone moved out, it was hard to tell. She hadn't been on a date since, but she wasn't bitter, or not so as you could tell.

She coasted over things and smiled and laughed at Ned's jokes. She didn't intimidate him. She knew enough not to. There were always girls like that. I'd known them all my life. The ones who didn't challenge a boy, or later, even a man, because he was really still a boy, and the slightest sign of backbone would chase him away. In high school that's what I learned as a girl. Make light. Hide your intelligence.

But having felt so small and intimidated with women as Ned, and that despite being a grown woman, Sally's coquettishness was a mercy to me, a small kindness and a comfort, even if it was mostly an act.