She's Not There (8 page)

Twenty years later, the phone rang on a Saturday afternoon. I had spent the morning raking snow off my roof.

“Hello? Jennifer? This is Casey. From New York?”

It took me a moment to recall my date with the woman who had observed the people fishing for the fish that lived on shit. But I remembered her.

“Hi, Casey,” I said. “How are you?”

“I was doing a Web search for all the people I used to know? And I found your Web site and read about your transition and saw your photograph. And all I could think was,
whoa.
”

“Whoa. Yeah, well, that's what I thought about it myself, actually.”

“Anyway, the reason I'm calling? I don't know if you know this, but—did you know, back when we went on those dates, twenty years ago—did you know I was a transsexual, too?”

I held the phone, not saying anything for a while. I saw the Little Red Lighthouse, fallen under the shadow of the great gray bridge.

No, I told her. I hadn't known.

The silence that transgendered people cloak themselves with had hidden us then, even from each other.

I met Casey again in the spring of 2002. I was in New York visiting some film people, and Casey and I made plans to meet in a bar in midtown. I sat there waiting for her to come through the door. I wondered how she had changed over twenty years. There weren't many other people in the bistro, just some tourists, a woman at the bar, the bartender.

After a long time, the woman at the bar and I looked at each other closely, then smiled. She picked up her drink and came over to my table.

“Hello, Jenny,” she said.

“Hello, Casey,” I said.

Casey had gained some weight. Her blond hair was now mostly gray.

“You look good,” she said. “Whoa.”

“So do you,” I said.

“Liar,” said Casey.

Casey was drinking single-malt Scotch. She finished the Scotch she was drinking and ordered another. I told her the story of the D'Angelos, of my roommate John Flyte, of my encounter with the Snail.

“Tin Pan Alley,” Casey said. “I remember that place. They tore it down, though. They razed everything on that block to build the Marriott Marquis.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her. “When we went out on those dates. When I was your friend? Why didn't you tell me you were transgendered?”

“I knew what you'd do,” said Casey, withdrawing into herself. “You'd do what guys always do, you'd run away in horror. You'd tell everyone.” She sipped her drink, and tears filled her eyes. “You know how people are.”

I didn't say anything for a while. I thought about how beautiful she'd been in her early twenties, how we'd walked into that Chinese restaurant and all the beautiful people had seemed to recognize her. Two Kinds Meat.

The bar we were in was nearly empty now. Outside, in the late afternoon, people were streaming through the streets of midtown.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know how people are.”

Casey's eyes dripped big fat tears, and she wiped her cheeks with the table napkin. Then she lifted her water glass to her face, and the water poured down either side of her chin. In exhaustion, she put both elbows on the table and flopped her face into her palms. The pressure of her head in her hands knocked over the table, and a moment later, her Scotch was on the floor.

I righted the table, then looked at my watch. “Listen, Casey,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Listen, Jenny,” said Casey. “I want to tell you something. Things are very new for you. You have a lot to learn. It's going to get bad— terrible things are going to happen to you, in the years to come. And when they do
—you're going to need me.
”

I let this sink in. I got to my feet and put on my coat. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Casey.” We hugged. I remembered sitting in the D'Angelos' house, asking myself, Is this what I'm going to become? Is this what the future holds for me?

“Remember,” Casey whispered again.
“You're going to need me.
”

I walked out into the bright sunlight of the spring day and rode the number one train up to 110th Street. Then I walked over to Amsterdam to look at the facade of my old apartment building. I looked at the roster of tenants in the foyer next to the doorbells, but my name wasn't there anymore.

It all seemed like a long time ago.

A few years after we were roommates, John Flyte killed himself with a shotgun, walked up into the mountains and pulled the trigger with his toe.

I thought about the time we'd lived together, about those dark early days of trying to be a writer, of sitting on the radiator eating a banana and holding the bars on the window with one hand.

Crazy vurld.

House of Mystery (Summer 1987)

Graduate school turned out to be a lot like
The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, with me in the Jimmy Stewart role. A short-story writer from Texas, Glenn Blake, played the part of John Wayne. Liberty Valance, in the black hat, was Don DeWilde, a brilliant magic-realist who'd grown up not far from my mother's house in Narberth, Pennsylvania.

I had expected that Johns Hopkins would be a lot like Wesleyan—doing bongs with your professor, everyone giving each other back rubs, the university chartering schoolbuses to take everyone to the Dead concert. Instead it was this cowboy movie, poets hiding behind rocks and firing off pistols, and crazy drunken people burning down the saloon, and constantly meeting people in the street at sundown with your guns drawn.

Glenn Blake and I met in a bar every night and talked about the skills one needed as a writer:
Ya don't jerk the trigger, pilgrim.
Ya squeeze it.

I don't know why graduate school was like this. Don never did a single unkind thing to me, and neither did any of the other people in his gang of henchmen. But we all just hated one another. People tell me grad school is always like this. You put a bunch of smarty-pants together and the next thing you know you're living in the Wild West. It creeped me out, though. I had never had enemies before.

Partly it was the atmosphere of Johns Hopkins, a place that was famous for taking itself too seriously, and partly it was because I was psychotic. I was sitting on top of a mountain of secrets so high that it was almost impossible to see the earth anymore. For one thing, now that I lived alone, I was living as a woman about half the time. I'd come home and
go female
and pay the bills and write and watch television, and then I'd go back to boy mode and teach my classes. I didn't venture out into the world much
en femme
, although I did get out now and then. It was unbelievably frightening. The first time I ever went outside wearing a skirt and a knit top, I thought I was going to perish from fear. The world felt raw and intimidating; the cold wind howled on my bare legs.

I got as far as an Esso station, where I filled up my tank at the self-serve pump. I waited in line to pay for the gas, and no one looked at me twice. “Thank you, ma'am,” said the attendant.

Then I drove home.

I lived in constant fear of detection and kept waiting for the chair of the program to call me up and say,
Boylan, we've heard stories. I hope you understand the consequences.

I knew what the consequences would be. If word got out I was transgendered, I'd disappoint everyone who had put their faith in me.

My father was dying of cancer all that year. In addition to switching back and forth from male to female, I was also constantly taking the train up to Philly to check on him. He had a brain seizure the day after the
Challenger
accident. I rode up to Philly on the night train, and there in the Coffin House was my father, bald from the chemo, emaciated, his kind eyes still shining as he lay in his bed. “Dad, what can I do?”

“You can get me a cigarette,” he whispered. I got him one, and lit it, and stuck it in his mouth.

“What else do you need?” I asked.

He smiled grimly. “How about a blindfold,” he said.

In January I traveled up to Wesleyan to attend a memorial concert for a friend of mine who had died of lymphoma. Tim Alcock, a gentle, funny man, had also been a brilliant guitarist and African drummer. There was a big reunion of friends who had gone to Wesleyan in the late seventies and early eighties, and there was a performance of a composition written in memory of Tim. The lyrics to the piece were a single phrase that Tim, in his final days, had written in a notebook, again and again, over a hundred times:
I, Tim, am now a
channel for the music which comes through the light.

I was supposed to go on stage at one point and play “Beautiful Dreamer” on the Autoharp, but I was too sad to do it.

After the concert, there was a reception at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Middletown, and there at the table next to mine was a woman named Grace Finney. She'd gone out with a couple of my friends, years ago. I'd thought about her since college, wondering what had become of her. She wasn't the kind of woman you forgot. The first time I'd ever laid eyes on her, she was on stage in Mamet's
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
, and all I could think about for days afterward was, Whoa. Who was that?

Grace had moved back to Washington, her hometown, after working in a theater she'd helped found in New Haven. Now she was working at the Studio Theatre in D. C., which was only an hour's drive from Baltimore. We talked about getting together sometime and exchanged phone numbers. Maybe we could go to an Orioles game, she suggested. Old Memorial Stadium was not far from my house.

I left the party early and headed down to New Haven to catch the sleeper train back to Tombstone. I called Grace once I got back, but we never quite connected. After a while I lost her number.

Aside from being psychotic, the worst problem facing me at Johns Hopkins was the fact that the chair of my department liked me. I had been in John T. Irwin's class on Poe and Borges in the fall, and I had loved it. Irwin was a genuine eccentric and something of a genius. His speculative readings of Faulkner had produced a classic in American scholarship:
Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge.
I had the fortune—which later became my misfortune—to discover, wholly by accident, a key missing work that would help Irwin complete his Borges book, which was entitled
The Mystery to a Solution.

I had to do an oral report for the class on the
Astronomicon
and its influence on the Egyptians, which would in turn further shine light on the
mutually constitutive bipolar opposition of spectral doubles which inhabits Poe's work and which is then recapitulated in the analytic detective tales
of Borges.
It was that kind of class, people talking like that. One night I was researching the
Astronomicon
in the very lowest level of the Hopkins library, a frightening building that was built down into the ground like the world's largest military bunker. On the lowest, darkest, most oppressive floor of the library—literally on the bottom shelf (where I'd been looking for something else entirely)—I put my hand on a collection of fifteenth-century lithographs of what Talmudic scholars imagined the universe to look like. One of them was a quincunx-shaped diamond, divided in half so as to form two triangles, each one reflecting the other. In the middle was the name of JHVH written in Hebraic script. The
tetragrammaton.

To me these etchings looked about as crazy as the seal with the Pyramid and the eye on back of the dollar bill, but I recognized the tetragrammaton from a story by Borges. The two triangles represented the mind of God, which is perfect (triangle number one), and the universe, which is an imperfect reflection of that mind (triangle number two).

When I used this symbol (as well as a lot of other highly entertaining argle-bargle) in my report the next day, John Irwin practically fell off his chair. By the time I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from the department secretary:
The chair would
like to see you, first thing tomorrow morning. And bring that book you used
in your report!

Irwin and I hit it off. I liked his brilliance and his unpredictable imagination. I also liked the fact that he had a sense of humor—he too saw critical theory as something of an exercise of the imagination, and that didn't preclude thinking the whole business was entertaining. Irwin offered me a teaching position at Hopkins on the spot, right then and there, before I'd even finished my degree.

I stammered. I didn't think my fellow writers in the workshop were going to like this very much. Most of them were scared of Professor Irwin. They thought he was demented.

“I don't know, John,” I said. “Do you think John Barth is going to be okay with this?”

“Sure he'll be okay,” he said. “You want me to call him?”

“Okay,” I said. His secretary got John Barth on the phone. Irwin told him he wanted to give me a lectureship. He nodded and hung up.

“Jack's fine with it,” he said. “You know Jack. He's pretty mellow about things.”

Actually, Jack Barth (it took me forever to get used to calling him
“Jack”)
was an incredible teacher. He was the most articulate man I had ever met and performed stunts with words that were the literary equivalent of what the Harlem Globetrotters did with a basketball. To make matters worse, he was also one of the gentlest souls I'd ever met. Rick Barthelme once described him as “equal parts brilliance and kindness.” He was a lot of things, and mellow was only one of them.

My fellow workshoppers would not be mellow about this, though, as Irwin knew, and he asked me not to breathe a word of the lectureship he'd just given me. “Things could get ugly if this gets out,” he said.

Things were
already
ugly, and since everyone there was pretty smart, they figured out rather quickly that something was up with me. They'd ask me if Irwin had promised me any particular goodies, and I had to lie to them and say,
Oh, heavens, no,
for the whole year, and of course everyone knew that this was a pathetic lie since I had a face that apparently betrayed every secret about me except one.

So now I had a secret in my academic life, a secret in my personal, sexual life, and my father was dying. Still, we had a pretty good time. Glenn Blake and I used to go to this little bar and drink Anchor Steam Beer and eat Mrs. Irvin's Red Hot Potato Chips. They really were hot, too. Glenn would say Texas things like “Well, god
damn
!” and sometimes he'd say, “Well, goddamn!” and once in a while he said, “
Well!
Goddamn!” He had all kinds of Galvestonian slang. One time he said to me, “Boylan, you're slipperier than owl shit on a sycamore branch.” Another time he described the work of one of my fellow workshoppers as “farts in the bathtub,” which wasn't exactly a compliment.

I spent less and less time at school as my father got sicker. In mid-March I withdrew from Hopkins, unsure if I was ever going back. John Irwin was unbelievably generous to me. “You take care of your family,” he said. “We'll sort out everything else later.”

My father died on Easter Sunday 1986. When he died, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was on the radio. After he died I sat next to him for a long time, just holding his hand.
I'm going to make you
proud, Dad
, I told him.
You wait and see.
I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do this, but I intended to keep my word.

I started therapy again. This time I saw a gender specialist who lived down near Fell's Point. She was a smart, vigorous, hugely fat woman named Carol. I'd turn into a woman and drive down to the Point in my Volkswagen, and we'd talk. At the end of that year, she said to me, “Well, listen. You're a transsexual. The condition isn't going to go away over time. It's going to get worse. What you need to do is learn to conquer your fear. If you choose, you can live a perfectly normal life as a woman. You're lucky—you have feminine features, you have good hair, you're not married, and you're young. You have a lot going for you, if only you find the courage to move ahead with your life.”

That was the last time I saw Carol. I didn't want to be told I had to be a woman. What I wanted from her was
the mystery to a solution.

I wanted to learn how to accept who I wasn't.

What I felt was, being a man might be the second best life I can live, but the
best
life I can live will mean only loss and grief. So what I wanted was to learn how to be happy with this second best life. My mother's boundless optimism still buoyed me. In spite of my father's death, in spite of spending a year in Tombstone, in spite of the constant, private grief that I felt, I still believed that it was a life full of blessings. People can't have everything they want, I thought. It is your fate to accept a life being someone other than yourself.

I don't think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have.

In March I ran into Grace Finney again at a party in Boston, up at Moynihan's house. We traded numbers again, and this time I did connect with her. We went out on a few dates, sometimes in Washington, sometimes in Baltimore. We didn't see the Orioles, though.

One hot spring night, Grace Finney and I went out to dinner at a place called Niçoise, in Washington. It was upscale French cuisine, served by waiters in black tuxes and roller skates.

Grace was that rarest of creatures, the native-born Washingtonian. Her father,Tom Finney, had been true Democratic Party royalty. He'd come east from Oklahoma in the 1950s to work for Senator Mike Monroney, then he'd worked on the Adlai Stevenson campaign; he was one of the key players who helped draft the compromise that seated the Mississippi delegation at the national convention in 1956. Later, he advised JFK on trade legislation and went into private law practice with Clark Clifford and Paul Warnke. In 1968 he was national campaign chairman for Eugene McCarthy; in 1972 he held the same position for Edmund Muskie.

“He was there in the trailer in Manchester,” Grace said proudly, “when Muskie cried in the snow.”

In short, the Finneys had a long tradition of championing noble, lost causes. Grace's father had died in 1978 of Lou Gehrig's disease. Her mother, Sally, had died in 1984 of emphysema.

Tom Finney had liked to smoke cigarettes and tell stories after dinner, just like my own father. They would have got along well, our fathers, even though my dad had been a Republican delegate to the national convention in 1952 for Robert Taft and had voted for Nixon three times.