She's Not There (29 page)

Of course, Jim himself was a novelist, a fine one. As Professor Boylan of Colby College, he too had sought solace and understanding in narrative. Not surprisingly, as this memoir details, he'd been drawn to imaginative literature, the heroic quest, which so often involves a revelation of the hero's true identity. Only when the hero thoroughly understands who he is can his final dragons be slain. Such stories, of course, are not the only ones in Western literature that deal with transformation, and just as Jim had been drawn by his circumstance to a certain type of story, I found myself drawn by my own to another sort. Probably no people embrace change more enthusiastically, at least in theory, than Americans. Who we are at birth is less important to us than who we will become. We are expected—indeed, obligated—not just to be, but to become. This, in a nutshell, is the American dream. But we are also by nature a cautious, pragmatic people. After all, Gatsby's need to transform, to reinvent himself, is his downfall. We are, Fitzgerald suggests, what we are, regardless of our need to be otherwise. Ironically, this was what Jenny herself kept reminding us, though she was applying the wisdom differently.

I wish I could honestly say it was exclusively great literature I turned to for understanding, but the truth is that I was equally attracted to more lurid, archetypal fictions, especially in the language of film, which has for decades provided numerous cautionary parables of transformation, of men who turn into wolves, into vampires, even into insects. Often these stories are not just about the man who is transformed, but also about the faithful, loving woman his transformation will inevitably endanger. At the climax of these stories, the “creature” must choose between what he's become (a monster) and what he was (a man, someone's lover). Often he's asked by his beloved to deny his new nature, to remember who and what he used to be, and to be a man again. In these stories it is always clear that the creature is not to blame for his cruel fate. He did not ask to be bitten by the wolf, the vampire, the spider. He cannot make himself human again. Rather, the man he was is still “in there,” and it is to this former self that the heroine appeals.
Remember
, she begs him. Remember me. Remember love. Do not harm me. Even now, changed though you may be, you have a choice.

Such is our credo. As social and natural scientists continue to erode our
belief
in free will by revealing the extent of our genetic and cultural programming, novelists continue to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. This is the fiction writer's manifesto, because without it, there's no story.

III.

Jenny's operation seemed almost an anticlimax. For her it was a natural conclusion, a resolution, really. She wasn't “changing genders” or “becoming a woman.” She's always been a woman. A skilled surgeon was simply going to help her move about in the world. If the surgery was scary, well, all surgery was scary. Even for Grace, Egypt wasn't as dramatic as I'd imagined it would be. For her, the point of no return had come and gone incrementally, undramatically, over the long months during which she'd come to understand that this operation was going to happen because it had to. Also, as if to suggest that nothing all that momentous was occurring, the operation itself went without a hitch. Jenny'd been wheeled into the operating room singing “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and come out clutching a button that controlled her intravenous pain medication. (Grace had been right. Jenny did get all the good drugs.) Within two hours of being wheeled back into her room, she'd talked to her mother and several friends who'd called to find out how the operation had gone. Her voice didn't have much strength (we could hear Melanie moaning as she stood atop the commode on the other side of the bathroom door more clearly), but she laughed and joked on the phone and clicked her button, and by the next morning she had no memory of any of it. She seemed, more than anything, very, very happy. “Jim was always The Golden Boy,” Grace remarked wistfully when Jenny nodded off into another morphine dream. “And Jenny's going to be The Golden Girl.” From inside the bathroom came the sound of Melanie climbing off the commode, then she herself emerged without a flush, suggesting that again no business had been conducted.

You had only to look at Melanie, now haggard and frightened and dispirited, to know that she'd never been a golden boy and wouldn't be a golden girl, either. She'd not had a boob job to go along with her GRS, as many transsexuals did when hormones left them flat chested, and as a result, she did not look, postop, much different from the way she'd looked a year before when some guys on the basketball court had offered to kick the shit out of her because she looked like a girl. She claimed to be content with an androgynous look, but I had my doubts, since she also admitted to having spent very nearly her last dime on her surgery. She'd come to Egypt alone, the way she'd done her entire transition. Her family and friends, after organizing an intervention in the hopes of preventing her from going through with the operation, kept on belittling her right up to the moment she boarded the plane and continued, incredibly, even now, to call her at the hospital to belittle her further.

As a result, she was starved for human kindness, and she attached herself not just to Jenny, a natural ally, but more surprisingly to Grace and me. The sliding curtain that divided the room and had been drawn when we first arrived was now thrown open so that when we visited, Melanie could be part of the conversation, which among other things helped take her mind off the fact that she couldn't pee. “They're not going to let me out of here until I do,” she confided sadly, as if she'd spent her entire life disappointing people as a man and was now doing the same thing as a woman. She'd been scheduled to be released from the hospital the day before, and she had no idea how she'd be able to pay for the additional stay, not to mention the several outpatient days she'd be required to spend at a nearby hotel, the same one where Grace and I were staying.

For me, Melanie, like the other transsexuals on the ward, posed a paradox. They might not look much like women, but I had little trouble thinking of them as female, whereas Jenny, who could (and did) pass for a woman anywhere, even before her surgery, still seemed like my old pal Jim in drag. As I regarded the two of them in their adjacent beds, I began to suspect that I might be lacking in imagination, the very quality in which, as a novelist, I most prided myself.

No doubt one of the reasons I was among the first people Jim confided in was that if anyone was equipped, by both training and inclination, to understand his plight, it was a friend who also happened to be a novelist, whose stock in trade is moral imagination. The problem, as this memoir illustrates, is that the transgendered person's experience is not really “like” anything, and Jim was to discover, alas, that no one would have more trouble imagining what he wanted us to imagine than his closest friends, and that my being a novelist counted for less, at least in the beginning, than either of us could have guessed. It wasn't that I was unable to imagine anything or that my imagination had taken a holiday when confronted with intractable reality. Quite the opposite. From the start I discovered myself to be in imaginative overdrive. During the first week of my new knowledge, my imaginings were so powerful and relentless that I had trouble sleeping. Though I knew Grace to be a strong woman, I imagined her shattered as she watched her husband disappear, like an old photographic image, into terrible blank whiteness. I imagined their children ridiculed in the schoolyard, told by adults that they were no longer suitable friends for their own children. During this period, I was working on
Empire Falls
, a novel about the terrible weight that kids today have to bear, and it was not difficult to imagine Luke and Patrick, thus tormented, driven darkly inward, like my fictional victims, by what they could not explain, even to themselves. And worse. The Boylans lived out in the country, and it was easy to imagine them awakened in the night as rednecks in pickup trucks with the windows rolled down, full of last-call courage, bellowed their unsolicited opinions into the still night. And even worse. Three-in-the-morning night terrors that were only slightly less lurid than werewolf tales, but full of “respectable,” real-world violence. Gradually, they went away.

But as I regarded Jenny and Melanie in their adjacent beds, I realized that banishing phantasms is not the same as imagining a happy ending, something I'd somehow written off as impossible from the start. I'm not talking here about the kind of happy ending that makes everything all right, that negates loss, that squints at reality in order to substitute a fantasy. Rather, I mean the kind of qualified happy endings that my friend and I had always managed to eke out in our own novels, the kind that allows Huck Finn, after witnessing just about the worst that human nature has to offer, to “light out for the territories” armed with little but his own hard-won decency for a moral compass, as fine and true an ending to a comic novel as we're ever likely to see. That's what Boylan and I were, after all—comic novelists—and comic novelists traffic in hope. More important, this was the kind of imagination that Jim had asked of me from the start, and it was what Jenny needed of me now. She needed those who loved her to share her ridiculous, buoyant hope for her future, for the future of her family. The problem was, I not only hadn't imagined a hopeful future for Jenny. I hadn't really begun to imagine Jenny.

IV.

A couple of days after the surgery, Grace and I began to take turns at Jenny's bedside. The tiny hospital room accommodated two visitors only if one of them stood, and having two visitors at the same time was also more tiring for Jenny, who, whacked-out on painkillers, felt the need to entertain us. So Grace and I would both drop by in the morning, then I'd leave the two of them alone, returning an hour or two later to take a shift while Grace grabbed something to eat or returned phone calls.

One afternoon when I returned to the hotel from lunch, there was a voice mail message. “Don't forget to check on Melanie,” Grace reminded me. The day before, Melanie had finally peed and by way of reward had been discharged from the hospital.

I had not forgotten. Actually, after lunch I'd taken a stroll through town and picked up a couple of things for her at the drugstore. When Grace had spoken to her earlier that morning, Melanie had complained of a headache and a terribly parched throat. Could we stop by later with some lemon candies? Well, of course we could. “We” was, to my way of thinking, the operative word, and since Grace was just then at the hospital, there was no “we” available to check on her, just “me.” I was already late for my afternoon shift at Jenny's bedside, having dallied over lunch and spent too long talking to my wife and daughters on the cell phone. If I went directly to the hospital, I could spend a few hours with Jenny, give Grace her break, and then “we” could drop by Melanie's room on our way to dinner that evening.
That
had been my plan.

Melanie's room was right across from the elevator. I pressed down, then, while I awaited the elevator's arrival, went over to her door to listen for sounds. Music. The television. Something. If she was sleeping, I told myself, Melanie'd need the rest more than the bag of hard candy I held in my hand. I paused, considered, then finally knocked. Behind me the elevator dinged, and when the doors opened a middle-aged couple got off, smiled at me, rather quizzically I thought, as if trying to connect a man like me with the sick transsexual they'd seen wheeled into 302 yesterday. Just dropping off this bag of candies, I wanted to explain as they slipped their card key into the door to 304. Inside 302, not a sound. I'd done my duty, had I not? I could tell Grace I'd stopped by the room, knocked, and gotten no reply. Melanie was either resting or she'd gone out for a walk. Except she hadn't gone out for a walk. She was still far too weak for that, and I'd knocked loudly enough to wake her unless she'd been sleeping very soundly. I knocked again.

Unless
she'd
been sleeping very soundly. Odd, but I hadn't slipped with Melanie, not once referred to her as “he.” I'd goofed twice with Jenny just that morning. My only consolation was that Grace still messed up occasionally herself. Still, was it stubbornness on my part? Refusal to let go, even now, of Jim? To all appearances Jenny had been, these many months, a woman. People who didn't know she'd been a man were slack jawed with amazement when told. Now, postsurgery, she was anatomically a woman as well. Between me and full acceptance stood only geneticists and fundamentalist Christians, two groups whose wisdom I'd never before paused in rejecting. It was clearly past time for me to jettison what was holding me back, that midwestern, Nick Carraway desire to see the world stand at moral attention that, when allowed to thrive unchecked, turned otherwise decent people into someone like John Ashcroft, who couldn't bear to be in a room with a statue of naked Justice, who had to cloak her lest she corrupt him, poor, pathetic boob that he was.

These were my thoughts when I heard, finally, stumbling movement behind the door of room 302. When it opened, I took a quick, involuntary step back. The woman who stood framed in the doorway was Rochester's mad wife, down from the attic, barefoot, her hair wild, her eyes frantic and unfocused, clad in a thin nightshirt.

“Melanie?” I croaked, but her eyes had rolled back in her head and she slumped, first sideways into the door frame, then forward into my arms.

V.

Story endings, I used to tell my students, are often inherent in their beginnings. In the year that preceded our journey to Egypt, I'd found I was able to imagine the past—that is, imagine the young Jim Boylan before he and I had met. True, my initial reaction to my friend's news may have been, as I said, conservative, but I soon discovered I had little patience with people who were more sternly moralistic than I when they learned of Jim's circumstance. When someone asked how he could have kept such a secret from Grace all those years ago, I found I knew the answer. As I said, to the novelist, life—both fictional and real—is a series of dramatic moments, and this was one I had little trouble imagining. Jim, tormented since childhood and diagnosed with a condition he simply refused to accept, one day meets the very woman he's been dreaming of and praying for since he was that small boy beneath the pier, watching the approaching storm— the woman who frees him from himself. For the first time in his life, he himself simply doesn't matter anymore.
She
matters. She is not merely Grace, she is
his
grace—that gift from God that can never be earned, but must be rather freely and gratefully accepted. Perfectly radiant, she is not just the love of his life, she is his cure. When she smiles, he can feel what he's always regarded as his illness melting away. It's not just women's clothes he gathers together from his closet for disposal before he proposes marriage, it's a shameful self that can now be shed,
like a suit of clothes.
Not just hidden out of sight, but swept clean away.