The Made-Up Man

by Joseph Scapellato

Manny locked his roller bag and sat on it. “But you are here.”

  “Not for this performance, I’m not.”

  “If not for a performance, then for what?”

  My throat caught. “I’m here for T.”

  Manny put his glasses on—I hadn’t noticed that they’d been off. “You are here for Stanley, Stanley.”

  I began to swerve unsafely away from myself.

  “I am here for Manny,” he said.

  Through my swerving I saw myself: choked, ugly, false.

  Being and becoming who I wasn’t.

  Not seeing it, not saying it.

  Lies.

  “T is here for T,” said Manny.

  “I proposed to T and she said no,” I said. “She moved out of our apartment. We’re not broken up but we’re on a break. I don’t know why I’m here: I don’t know why because I don’t want to know why. I’m trying to want to know why. I’m trying to want to know why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

  Manny looked hurt. “T lived with you?”

  I cracked him in the face with the heel of the shoe. He fell off his suitcase—his glasses clattered across the floor—he threw his hands up to cover his head. He didn’t move and he didn’t speak. I tried to speak—I made a sound I’d never made before, a crumpled shout, a strangled bark.

  Manny kept his face covered.

  I took big breaths to plunge my anger down. I put the shoe in front of Manny.

  “The shoe does not belong to me,” he said, carefully.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

  In the hall I saw crushed plates, bowls, mugs, and glasses. They matched sets from my mom’s apartment and my dad’s condo.

  I saw the second envelope, labeled:

  EVIDENCE: COMPLETE EXPLANATION OF THE MADE-UP MAN

  On it was a realistically rendered pencil drawing of my face. I looked too mean and sad to have friends.

  Behind me, down the hall, a door opened. The two men who were meant to be my father rushed out, dressed the same: short-sleeve polos, paint-stained jeans, faded White Sox ball caps. They were backlit, their faces shields of shadow.

  “That’s him,” said one.

  The other spat on the floor. “Don’t talk to whoever that is.”

  “Stanley…” said the first one.

  From behind them popped a camera flash.

  I would be a man who could move out of anything: I went the other way, to the stairs.

  “Help,” said someone through a door as I passed it.

  The stairs groaned.

  Halfway to the ground floor, I stopped.

  58

  Stanley, Remembering How the Made-Up Woman Made Up to Resemble the Made-Up Man “Left” Her Purse in the Apartment, Recalls a Night with Torrentelli

  Last March, a week before I moved in with T, Torrentelli picked me up for an afternoon at the gun range. It was the first time we’d hung out since she’d changed her name to Serenity, since she’d completed the major surgeries. She wore a trendy T-shirt, a skirt, and dressy black cowboy boots. Her car smelled like a hair salon. She leaned across the center console and kissed me on the cheek, plocking me with lipstick. Her face and hair had changed in significant ways, and she had breasts—her voice had risen, her posture had shifted—but she was the same high-energy person, a fidgeter, a storyteller.

  “What do you think?” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.

  To me, the way she looked said: I’m different. And the way she acted said: I’m the same. That’s what I told her.

  “Like usual, you’re only half right,” she said.

  I asked her which half was right.

  “The way I previously looked was ‘different.’ The way I look right now, this is me, this is ‘the same.’”

  We edged onto 90/94, windows down, music up. This was when she told me that she’d seen the Pilsen gallery’s exhibition of my uncle’s pissing politicians project. There’d been audio recordings in which my family and I could be heard talking while we ate. She’d heard me say, “Thanks a lot.”

  “If you didn’t sign a waiver, you can sue the shit out of them,” she said.

  The lawyer she worked with the most did privacy.

  We exited the expressway, took a hard left onto a frontage road, and pulled up to an indoor range in the suburbs, just outside the Cook County line. She waved to a nerdy man in camo behind the counter. We clapped on ear protection, shared a stall, and fired away, taking turns with her handguns—the high-capacity 9mm semiautomatic her mom had given her when she’d turned eighteen, and the chrome-plated .357 revolver she’d bought brand-new to celebrate her transition.

  With a gun in her hands, she was focused, still, precise. Every target we ran back to examine proved how thoroughly she’d outshot me—her groupings were always in the inner rings. I only hit a bull’s-eye once.

  Afterwards we grabbed some sushi takeout and a twelve-case and went back to my apartment, where most of my things were packed for my move to Lincoln Square with T. We sat on the floor by the coffee table. I didn’t bother to put the case in the fridge—we piled the empties on the table. The more we drank, the more Torrentelli talked about her transition, about how she’d been having the sincerely holy experience of guiding her body into who she was.

  “This might sound fucked up,” she said, “but I keep thinking about Catholic school, how the priests said that if you believed, and you behaved, you could feel the holy spirit during Mass. I always believed and I always behaved, and I could never feel it. I wanted to, I wanted to so badly. And now it’s like I’m finally feeling that. It makes me want to go to church again! That’s the fucked-up part.”

  “The body of Christ,” I said, presenting her with another beer.

  She chanted a raunchy “Our Father,” the one that’d landed us in detention our freshman year.

  “What do you want to know?” she said. “Ask me anything, seriously anything. Don’t be PC.”

  I asked her if she felt like she was “performing female” or if she “really felt female.”

  She smiled at me like my question was cute. “I’ve been ‘performing male’ for so long that ‘really feeling female,’ at least for a little while, is going to feel like a performance, sure.”

  She noted that even born-female women felt unsure, sometimes, about whether or not they were “being real women.”

  “Do you feel like you’re ‘performing male,’ or like you ‘really feel male’?”

  I thought about it. “Performing.”

  This surprised her.

  “But you’re so comfortable with who you are!” she said.

  This surprised me.

  I opened a beer for myself. Torrentelli was sitting in such a way that I could see her underwear, a triangular flag. “I don’t perform with T,” I said. “I can’t. It’s really great, and it’s really frustrating.”

  Torrentelli gushed about T, about how she’d like to find someone exactly like her, only a man.

  “‘T’ is for ‘Truth’!” she said.

  “Tell her I said that,” she said.

  We killed the case.

  Sleepy pauses started to enter our conversation.

  Torrentelli wobbled up to go—she gave me a long hug and thanked me for being her best friend. She tried to kiss me on the cheek, but caught my ear. She left.

  I changed for bed, poured a glass of water, and sat on the couch. I felt uneasy. It had something to do with Torrentelli thinking I was comfortable with who I was, and something to do with me being her best friend and her not being mine. I had misrepresented myself.

  I texted T: Thank you for knowing who I am.

  She texted back: you’re not so hard to know:)

  No I don’t think my friends know who I am but you do.

  i know you pretty well, but they’ve known you longer. they know other stanleys, more stanleys. a cast of stanleys!

  No.

  oh doll. what happened?

  The door buzzed; it was Torren
telli.

  “I forgot my purse!” she said through the speaker.

  The purse was right there on the coffee table, somehow unseen. I grabbed it and went downstairs. Torrentelli stood outside on the stoop.

  I saw in her face that I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Still not used to those things,” she said, meaning the purse.

  I handed it over. She hesitated.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  I felt my face break into a blush.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t want to be your girlfriend!” she said.

  I told her that she’d misread my reaction, that I wasn’t anticipating a declaration of love. But it was a lie. She’d read me right.

  “I ran into your mom,” she said.

  A month ago, Torrentelli had worked a table at a College of DuPage career fair. She represented her law firm, talking to legal-minded students, and when her shift was up, she remembered that my mom taught there, in Languages. She hadn’t seen my mom in years, and certainly not since her transition. Since grade school, Torrentelli had been the friend my mom liked most. My mom had called her “Sweet Tony” and sometimes “Sweet-tonio.” This continued through high school. Even though Torrentelli’s grades were much worse than mine, and she spent every day of senior year stoned, my mom liked to say, “Why can’t you be sweet, like Sweet-tonio?”

  On her way out, Torrentelli dropped by my mom’s office, just to see. My mom happened to be there, grading exercises, eating crackers and canned tuna.

  “She didn’t recognize me,” said Torrentelli. “Which I’m used to. But when I told her who I was, she kind of got this thoughtful look. Then she said, ‘Did you lose a bet?’”

  This had really hurt. Torrentelli could have pretended to laugh it off—she could have walked away with nothing more than a wave goodbye—but she’d reoriented her life to honesty. Honest thoughts, honest actions. So she told my mom no, this was her.

  If my mom was embarrassed, Torrentelli said, she didn’t show it. She didn’t apologize, she didn’t offer a supportive statement. She said, “Does Stanley know?”

  Torrentelli poked me on the chest. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “We don’t talk to each other much.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know how.”

  “Okay, but why did she think you didn’t know?”

  “She doesn’t think I actually know how to have friends.”

  Torrentelli frowned. “I’m not the best person for advice on this—you know how things were for a while with me and my mom—but for Christ’s sake, call the woman.”

  I said I should, yes.

  “Tell her things! Tell her true things.”

  She slung her purse.

  “Heavy, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Moms,” I agreed. “They fucking made you.”

  “No, my purse, I’m talking about my purse!”

  She unclasped it to show me why: a third handgun.

  Her concealed-carry permit had been issued. This was news to me—I wouldn’t have guessed that she’d apply for one, or even approve of the law.

  “I don’t want to forget what it’s like to conceal important information about myself,” she joked.

  I asked if carrying a hidden gun made her feel safe.

  Her smile went stale.

  “No. I feel just as threatened. I feel just as afraid. ‘Safety’ has nothing to do with it.”

  “Then why do it,” I said.

  “Stanley, I have so many reasons. All of them are awful.”

  59

  Stanley, Remembering the Shoe That Manny Left on the Bed, Recalls When Barton Lived with Him

  After he came back from college out of state, Barton moved into my Edgewater apartment. He stayed for a year, then found his own place in Rogers Park, just one neighborhood away, where he lived until he moved to Bridgeport. When we shared the place, almost every night was a late one—we played video games and board games, we drank beer and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, we binge-watched TV. We ripped on each other like we hadn’t left high school. I don’t know how it started, but a running prank emerged: we hid each other’s shoes under each other’s pillows. One of us would go to bed late, drunk, or high, and not notice that he’d slept on his shoe until the next day when he was on the way out and reached for half a pair. At that point, the victim would laugh. The prankster, from somewhere else in the apartment, would laugh back. We’d laugh at the fact that we were laughing, that we were laughing at our laughter, that one of us had tricked the other in the most predictable way, again.

  After Barton moved to Bridgeport but well before T and I moved in together in Lincoln Square, I invited everyone over on a weeknight to watch a Bulls playoff game. T was just beginning to get to know Torrentelli and Barton. I cooked a gigantic pot of bigos, Busia’s recipe, a stew that called for more meat than I ate in a month. We ate and drank and booed and cheered. At halftime, I argued that we weren’t good enough to be in the playoffs, and Barton argued that being in the playoffs meant, by definition, that you were good enough to be in the playoffs, and I argued that that was the system, yes, but systems allowed for mistakes because systems were themselves mistakes, and Barton said, “Your approach to life is a mistake.”

  Torrentelli said to T, “They’re going through a divorce.”

  “That’s devastating,” said T. “Please don’t tell me they have kids?”

  “Just two big babies,” said Barton.

  “We thought it would save our relationship,” I said.

  The Bulls lost but everybody left in a good mood.

  In bed, T said, “Wait a minute, sit up.”

  She extracted a dirt-crusty workboot from under my pillow.

  “How did you not notice that!”

  Laughing, I explained the gag.

  “I don’t know why we do it.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Lay it on me.”

  She yawned. “It’s how you say, ‘I love you.’”

  In the apartment above us, a little boy cried out, scared. His parents thumped over to his bed.

  “Poor kid,” I said. “Every other night, bad dreams.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Stanley-Change-the-Subject.”

  I tried not to grin.

  “When you’re ready to say it,” said T, “don’t go saying it with some fucking shoe. Okay?”

  “What if I just say: ‘I love you, T.’”

  “That’ll do.”

  The parents upstairs thumped back to their own bed.

  “I love you, T,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I touched her waist—she snored.

  “You’re faking it,” I whispered.

  More phony snoring.

  I wrapped her up in a half-submission. Then I very slowly made like I was going to tickle her.

  She squealed and thrashed.

  I held her tight and tickled her hard.

  “I give up, I give up!” she said. “I love you too!”

  60

  Stanley Stops to Think

  I sat on the stairs. Footsteps clattered into the hallway above me, a rickety cascade.

  Manny said what might have been, “Get out!”

  61

  Stanley, Remembering Manny’s Questions About Uncle Lech, Recalls Leaving His Aunt’s Birthday Party Last July

  Our dad and my brother and I stood in the backyard, finishing beers. We were almost drunk. The sun had dropped behind the neighbors’ houses—it was too dark to play bags. My aunt, who hadn’t said a word to me since telling me she’d talked to T, had darted inside as soon as I’d come back out, and we hadn’t seen her since. It wasn’t unusual for her to disappear near the end of a party, even if the party was for her. At any moment, my dad or my brother or I would say, “What time is it,” and we’d leave, and it wouldn’t be until my brother’s birthday in October that the three of us would be in the same place at the same time again.

&nb
sp; Music flipped on inside the workshop-garage, a distorted symphonic theme. Then off.

  My brother said, “Want to do the crosstown classic next week?”

  Our dad made indifferent sounds, I made indifferent gestures.

  “I think I can get free tickets from my boss…?” said my brother.

  Right then, Uncle Lech popped out of the garage, closing the side door behind him quickly. Last I’d seen him, he’d been in the kitchen, pouring himself another double from the bottle of Chopin I’d bought for my aunt. He wore the same suit, only he’d swapped his black tie for a white one. He clutched a stout leather briefcase.

  He eyed us like we were informants he had no choice but to trust.

  I hadn’t told my dad or my brother that an hour ago I’d agreed to apartment-sit for him in Prague.

  “That man is a coward,” said our dad, loudly.

  Uncle Lech strode over. His warm and saintly expression from earlier, when he’d offered his proposal, had burned down to a business-only scowl.

  He shoved the briefcase into my arms.

  “Open in private,” he said, his voice low and firm. “It is actual.”

  “Give it back to him,” said my dad.

  My brother connected a few of the dots: “Stanley got a Lech proposal?”

  Uncle Lech walked back to the side door of the garage and knocked three times, with a flourish between each knock, as if enacting a secret sequence. He was let in.

  “Give me that goddamn fucking thing,” said my dad.

  I took the briefcase to the overloaded garbage cans at the side of the house and crammed it into the least-crowded one. Only after I forced the lid back on did I notice that the briefcase had been oozing what looked like blood.

  I turned to my dad and my brother. They hadn’t seen the leakage.

  “Do you know how he gets those desperate fucks from Poland to work for him?” said my dad.

  I didn’t.

  “Do you know what he holds over their goddamn heads?”

  I didn’t.

  “You tell him no,” he said.

  He was exhausted.

  “I’ll text you guys about the game,” said my brother.