Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (9 page)

"Look, I just think you should know there are people at the school who believe he shouldn't be teaching. There are people there--"

"Will!"

"There are people there who say he's a transvestite!"

"Dana? Oh, please."

"Have you noticed his eyebrows?"

"Clearly you have."

"Look, I'm sorry I had to tell you."

I shook my head and sunk as low in my seat as I could. "You're not one bit sorry," I said.

"I am."

"Well, in that case, let me reassure you: Dana has never worn a dress in his life. And he is an absolutely fabulous lay."

I know now I was wrong about the first part. But the second part remains undeniable. Indisputable.

I am cocksure.

Certainly I thought about Will's allegations off and on in the first two weeks of September, but I never gave them much credence. I was busy with the start of the new school year: nineteen new students, the committee meetings that appear out of nowhere, the first field trips of the fall--including an excursion to a maritime museum on Lake Champlain, which was in reality an absolutely terrific day, but seemed to strike everyone who hadn't been there as a disaster.

We were in the midst of a glorious September heat wave--one of those last, wondrous tastes of high summer--and the temperature must have hit ninety degrees. The kids always love the replica of the Revolutionary War gunboat and the actual artifacts that have been pulled from the deep water, and that class was no exception. Unfortunately, when it was time to return to school, the bus driver couldn't get the vehicle to start, and it was clear it was going to be an hour before another bus would arrive. Since there wasn't a whole lot else to do at that point, I let the kids go swimming in the lake in their school clothes. I was present, and so were four adult chaperones, and only nine or ten kids chose to dive in. No one was going to drown. But two of the girls decided to take off their shirts so they were swimming in what amounted to sports bras--the sort of opaque halter tops in which grown women exercise all the time. And though I insisted that both girls put their shirts back on immediately, the rumors that spread throughout town were astonishing. Two parents called the school, and I ended up spending more time dealing with the aftermath of the field trip than I'd spent planning it.

Meanwhile, when I wasn't at school, I was getting used to living in my house without Carly. I was not, however, getting used to living alone. Dana spent three nights with me the first week Carly was gone, and four nights with me the second. He would be there when I returned home from school, and he would insist on cooking me the most astonishing meals. This wasn't dinner, this was dining: Smoky pumpkin soup and sweet potato vichyssoise, a loaf of walnut beer bread he baked himself. A wild mushroom tart, with hen-of-the-woods sickle puffs he found growing on one of our hikes. Pastas with salmon and pine nuts and fennel.

Once, when I'd had a few glasses of wine, I found myself examining his face in the candlelight--first with my eyes, and then with the tips of my fingers--and I believe I almost asked him something.
Why are you so beautiful?
perhaps.
Why are you so smooth? What is it about your face that I love?

But I didn't. A big part of the allure was the mystery: A magic trick loses its luster once you know the secret.

In the middle of the month we went for a picnic up in Lincoln. High in the mountains, yet no more than a half-hour hike from the road that coils through a gap near the summit of the four-thousand-foot Mount Abraham, is a ledge that faces west. Its views of sunsets and smaller hills are certainly not a secret, and yet only once in the dozen times I've been there have other people stopped to picnic, too. It may be too close to the road for the hikers who want to take on the Long Trail or venture to the top of the nearby mountain.

But it is indeed a wonderful spot. We went there on a Saturday, and Dana insisted upon preparing everything. The only contributions I was allowed were the plastic wineglasses he'd found in a kitchen cabinet, and the ratty cloth napkins I saved for exactly this sort of occasion.

"So, you plan on bringing along a little wine?" I asked, half kidding, when I was turning the plastic goblets over to him that Saturday morning. I actually assumed we'd be drinking bottled water from them, and he simply wanted to add a little elegance to the event.

"Nothing like getting a really good buzz at the edge of a cliff," he said, and he surprised me by pulling from the refrigerator a bottle of wine he'd hidden there the night before.

We set off from my house in his car just after noon, and we were settled in at the ledge before one. Midway through lunch a young couple with a golden retriever wandered near our perch, but they hadn't brought a lunch and it was clear that they didn't plan on staying. And so we were, most of the time, completely alone.

We had probably been at the cliff for close to an hour when he told me. I had never completely emptied my glass in the time we had been there, but I'd still consumed a good third of the bottle of wine: Dana had topped off the goblet almost every time I'd taken a sip.

When he leaned over once more with the bottle in his hand, I blanketed the rim of my glass with my fingers and shook my head no.

"You either think you're going to get lucky up here, or you have something on your mind," I said. I hadn't planned on adding the second part, it just came out. But he had been unusually quiet that morning, and I had the distinct sense that it was because there was something troubling him that he wanted to share.

"Get lucky? No, I'd be afraid we'd roll off the cliff," he said.

"And I don't think it would do my career any good if somebody saw us."

"Probably not."

"So you do have something to tell me, don't you?"

"I do."

"And it's the sort of bombshell that demands a little wine."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. Actually, I think it might be the sort that demands a lot of wine."

I nodded, and a litany of possibilities crossed my mind. He was married. He had a child--no, he had children. He had teenage children, fathered when he himself was in high school or college.

He'd been involved with a student, and there was going to be some legal problem.

He had a criminal record.

Perhaps--and Will's allegation in the car came back to me--he really was a transvestite, and he'd been caught in some public and embarrassing way.

If that was the case, I wondered how much I would care. If I would care. No, I knew it would disturb me; I knew, on some level, it would frighten me.

But would it lead me to push him away? I doubted it. I doubted it seriously. At that moment on that ledge, I doubted seriously that there was anything he could tell me that would lead me to break off our affair.

And so I told him that. I realized how desperately I loved him, and I told him. I said that short of informing me that he wanted us to be merely friends--short of putting an end to our two-month romance--there was nothing he could possibly say that could upset me.

"Maybe now is exactly the wrong time to tell you this," I heard myself murmuring, a quiver of need I wasn't sure I'd ever noticed before in my voice, "but I love you. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone except Carly."

I had surprised myself with my frankness, and I found myself looking into the sun so I wouldn't have to look at him.

And, ironically, it's clear now that I had surprised him, too. My sense is he would have led me to his confession with greater care if I hadn't told him how I was feeling. He would have told me a story about his childhood or his adolescence, he would have tried to describe for me the horrific longing for something he had thought for most of his life he couldn't have--but something he needed almost like air.

Perhaps he would have gingerly worked his way through the drinking and the drugs, and how, somehow, he had finally come out on the other side, unscathed. Miraculously.

Maybe he would have recalled how much he had hated his erections when he was a teenager, how much they had reminded him that his body was wrong. All wrong. An error that howled every time he felt himself growing hard.

Maybe he would have told me the fantasies he had now when we made love, he would have confessed to me where his mind roamed when he was inside me.

But he didn't. He didn't say any of that. He reassured me that he loved me, too, and then he plunged ahead, assuming--in the euphoria that enveloped us both like a fog after my candor--that our particular love could shoulder anything.

"Okay, then," he said.

"Okay," I said.

"Well," he began, and he blinked. "You're in love with a woman. In a little less than four months--just after the first of the year--I'm going to Trinidad, Colorado, to have a sex change."

"You're kidding," I said, though I had a sense that I didn't get the joke. Clearly what he had said was meant to be funny, and I was missing the point.

"No. I'm not. I've been on female hormones since Valentine's Day."

I turned to face him. "If this is some bizarre story because you want to break up with me ... I'd rather you just told me the truth."

"No, that's not it at all! I love you, too, Allison! My God, you can't begin to imagine how much! That's why I'm telling you this. I'm telling you because I want you to know everything about me. I'm telling you--"

"Telling me--"

"Look, I'm a woman: a woman who's been saddled since birth with the body of a man. But in my mind, it's a fact: I'm female. Just like you. Well, not exactly like you, because you're straight and I'm gay. At least you've been straight up until now. But my hope and my prayer is that none of that matters anymore, because in a couple of months, I'm finally going to take care of it. The penis. I'm finally going to have the surgery that will make me as much of a woman on the outside as I am on the inside. And I know this is a huge stretch for you, but I'm hoping with all my heart you'll still love me. After all, I'll still be me. Dana. I'll be the exact same person I've always been, except I'll be dressing the way I'm supposed to, and I won't have to endure public bathrooms with urinals."

He'd tried a joke because he must have seen he was losing me. He must have seen I was slipping away. I heard what he was saying, but I was no longer listening. I was listening instead to my ex-husband's accusations in the car, I was listening instead to my instincts from July. I was listening instead to the sighs he would make when we would make love, and wondering at the way his body, abruptly, had begun to repulse me. What sorts of people had he been with, what kinds of hands had stroked him? Whose mouths had been there before mine?

What, exactly, had Dana done?

It suddenly seemed that I'd been sleeping with a person who was either deeply perverse or profoundly insane.

A person who, either way, was capable of harboring inside himself all manner of errata. Insanity. Secret.

I think that's when I started to feel ill, and I think that's when he tried to touch me.

And I think that's when I grew angry and told him to get his hand off me.

But I wasn't nearly that polite.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Monday, September 24

DANA STEVENS:
I told her when I told her for a lot of reasons. Honesty. Decency. The fact that in a couple of weeks I was going to start wearing a dress.

CARLY BANKS:
Transition?

STEVENS:
Girl's gotta start sometime.

Chapter 8.

will

ALL IN ALL, I THINK I TOOK THE NEWS RATHER well. Rebecca Barnard told me toward the end of October.

"I assume this has something to do with Halloween," I said.

"Nope. Mental illness," she said.

Rebecca knew Dana Stevens from the university. She didn't know him well because they were in different departments, and they were constitutionally likely to have very different friends. Rebecca teaches political science, and she's built a career rehabilitating the reputations of Coolidge and Harding and Hoover. But certainly their paths crossed periodically.

"You saw him?" I asked.

"Everyone saw him; there must be fifteen of us on the committee. He arrived a few minutes late, and the only seat left was across the room from the door. And so he had to sashay past us all."