Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  It was 1968, and the world was going up in flames. Luce held one of the torches. Two thousand years of sexual tyranny were ending in the blaze. Not one coed in his behavioral-cytogenetics lecture course wore a bra to class. Luce wrote op-ed pieces for the Times calling for the revision of the penal code regarding socially harmless and nonviolent sex offenders. He handed out pro-contraceptive pamphlets at coffeehouses in the Village. That was how it went in science. Every generation or so, insight, diligence, and the necessities of the moment came together to lift a scientist’s work out of the academy and into the culture at large, where it gleamed, a beacon of the future.

  * * *

  From deep in the jungle, buzzing in, a mosquito skims past Luce’s left ear. It’s one of the jumbo models. He never sees them, only hears them, at night, screaming like airborne lawn mowers. He closes his eyes, wincing, and in another moment, sure enough, feels the insect land in the blood-fragrant skin below his elbow. It’s so big it makes a noise landing, like a raindrop. Luce tilts his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, and says, “Aye-yah.” He’s dying to swat the bug but he can’t; his hands are busy keeping the kid away from his belt. He can’t see a thing. On the ground next to his skull the penlight sputters out its weak flame. Luce dropped it in the scuffle that’s still in progress. Now it lights up a ten-inch cone of the mat. No help at all. Plus, the birds have started up again, signaling the approach of morning. Luce is in an alert fetal position, on his back, holding a twiglike ten-year-old Dawat wrist in each hand. From the position of the wrist he estimates that the kid’s head is somewhere in the air over his navel, lolling forward probably. He keeps making these smacking sounds that are very depressing to listen to.

  “Aye-yah.”

  The stinger’s in. The mosquito thrusts, wiggles its hips contentedly, then settles down and starts to drink. Luce has had typhus vaccinations that felt more gentle. He can feel the suction. He can feel the bug gaining weight.

  A beacon of the future? Who’s he kidding? Luce’s work casts no more light today, it turns out, than that penlight on the floor. No more light than the new moon not shining above the jungle’s canopy.

  There’s no need for him to read Pappas-Kikuchi’s article in The New England Journal of Medicine. He heard it all before, in person. Three years ago, at the annual convention of the SSSS, he had arrived late to the last day’s talk.

  “This afternoon,” Pappas-Kikuchi was saying when he came in, “I’d like to share the results of a study our team just completed in southwestern Guatemala.”

  Luce sat in the back row, careful about his pants. He was wearing a Pierre Cardin tuxedo. Later that night, the SSSS was presenting him with a lifetime-achievement award. He took a minibar bottle of J&B out of his satin-lined pocket and sipped it discreetly. He was already celebrating.

  “The village is called San Juan de la Cruz,” Pappas-Kikuchi continued. Luce scanned what he could of her behind the podium. She was attractive, in a schoolteacherly way. Soft, dark eyes, bangs, no earrings or makeup, and glasses. In Luce’s experience, it was exactly these modest, unsexual-seeming women who proved to be the most passionate in bed, whereas women who dressed provocatively were often unresponsive or passive, as if they had used up all their sexual energy in display.

  “Male pseudohermaphrodites with five-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome who were raised as females serve as exceptional test cases for studying the effects of testosterone and the sex of rearing in the establishment of gender identity,” Pappas-Kikuchi continued, reading from her paper now. “In these cases, decreased production of dihydrotestosterone in utero causes the external genitalia of the affected male fetuses to be highly ambiguous in appearance. Consequently, at birth many affected newborns are considered to be female and are raised as girls. However, prenatal, neonatal, and pubertal exposure to testosterone remains normal.”

  Luce took another swig of the old J&B and threw his arm over the seat next to him. Nothing Pappas-Kikuchi was saying was news. Five-alpha-reductase deficiency had been extensively studied. Jason Whitby had done some fine work with 5αR pseudohermaphrodites in Pakistan.

  “The scrotum of these newborns is unfused, so that it resembles the labia,” Pappas-Kikuchi soldiered on, repeating what everyone already knew. “The phallus, or micropenis, resembles a clitoris. A urogenital sinus ends in a blind vaginal pouch. The testes most often reside in the abdomen or inguinal canal, though occasionally they are found hypertrophied in the bifid scrotum. Nevertheless, at puberty, definite virilization occurs, as plasma testosterone levels are normal.”

  How old was she? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Would she be coming to the awards dinner? With her frumpy blouse and buttoned-up collar, Pappas-Kikuchi reminded Luce of a girlfriend he’d had back in college. A classics major who wore Byronic white shirts and unbecoming woolen knee socks. In bed, however, his little Hellenist had surprised him. Lying on her back, she’d put her legs over his shoulders, telling him that this was Hector and Andromache’s favorite position.

  Luce was remembering the moment (“I’m Hector!” he’d shouted out, tucking Andromache’s ankles behind his ears) when Dr. Fabienne Pappas-Kikuchi announced, “Therefore, these subjects are normal, testosterone-influenced boys who, due to their feminine external genitalia, are mistakenly reared as girls.”

  “What did she say?” Luce snapped back to attention. “Did she say ‘boys’? They’re not boys. Not if they weren’t raised as boys, they’re not.”

  “The work of Dr. Peter Luce has long been held as gospel in the study of human hermaphroditism,” Pappas-Kikuchi now asserted. “Normative, in sexological circles, is his notion that gender identity is fixed at an early age of development. Our research,” she paused briefly, “refutes this.”

  A small popping sound, of a hundred and fifty mouths simultaneously opening, bubbled up through the auditorium’s air. Luce stopped in mid-sip.

  “The data our team collected in Guatemala will confirm that the effect of pubertal androgens on five-alpha-reductase pseudohermaphrodites is sufficient to cause a change in gender identity.”

  Luce couldn’t remember much after that. He was aware of being very hot inside his tuxedo. Of quite a few heads turning around to look at him, then only a few heads, then none. At the podium, Dr. Pappas-Kikuchi ran through her data, endlessly, endlessly. “Subject number seven changed to male gender but continues to dress as a woman. Subject number twelve has the affect and mannerisms of a man and engages in sexual activity with village women. Subject number twenty-five married a woman and works as a butcher, a traditionally male occupation. Subject number thirty-five was married to a man who left the marriage after a year, at which point the subject assumed a male gender identity. A year later, he married a woman.”

  The awards ceremony went on as scheduled later that night. Luce, anesthetized on more scotch in the hotel bar and wearing an Aetna sales rep’s blue blazer that he’d mistaken for his tuxedo jacket, had walked to the podium to an absolute minimum of applause and accepted his lifetime achievement award—a crystal lingam and yoni, hot-glued onto a silver-plated base—which later looked quite beautiful catching the lights of the city as it fell twenty-two floors from his balcony to shatter in the hotel’s circular drive. Even then, he was looking west, out over the Pacific, toward Irian Jaya and the Dawat. It took him three years to get research grants from the NIH, the National Foundation, the March of Dimes, and Gulf and Western, but now he’s here, amid another isolated flowering of the 5αR mutation, where he can put Pappas-Kikuchi’s theory and his own to the test. He knows who’ll win. And when he does, the foundations will begin funding his clinic the way they used to. He can stop subcontracting the back rooms to dentists and that one chiropractor. It’s only a matter of time. Randy has persuaded the tribal elders to allow the examinations to go forward. As soon as dawn breaks, they’ll be led out to the separate camp where the “turnim-men” live. The mere existence of the local term shows that Luce is right and that cultural factors can affect gender id
entity. It’s the kind of thing Pappas-Kikuchi would gloss right over.

  * * *

  Luce’s hands and the kid’s are all tangled up. It’s like they’re playing a game. First Luce covered his belt buckle. Then the kid put his hand over Luce’s hand. Then Luce put his hand over the kid’s hand. And now the kid covers the whole stack. All these hands struggle, gently. Luce feels tired. The jungle is still quiet. He’d like to get another hour of sleep before the morning cry of the monkeys. He’s got a big day ahead.

  The B-52 buzzes by his ear again, then circles back and goes up his left nostril. “Jesus!” He pulls his hands free and covers his face, but by then the mosquito has taken off again, brushing by his fingers. Luce is half sitting up on the pandanus mat now. He keeps his face covered, because it gives him some kind of comfort, and he just sits there in the dark, feeling suddenly exhausted and sick of the jungle and smelly and hot. Darwin had it easier on HMS Beagle. All he had to do was listen to sermons and play whist. Luce isn’t crying, but he feels like it. His nerves are shot. As if from far away, he feels the pressure of the boy’s hands again. Undoing his belt. Struggling with the technological puzzle of the zipper. Luce doesn’t move. He just keeps his face covered, there in total darkness. A few more days and he can go home. His swanky bachelor pad on West Thirteenth Street awaits him. Finally, the boy figures it out. And it’s very dark. And Dr. Peter Luce is open-minded. And there’s nothing you can do, after all, about local customs.

  1999

  CAPRICIOUS GARDENS

  I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the singsong voice of a child … I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall.

  —Saint Augustine

  In Ireland, in summer, four people come out to a garden in search of food.

  The back door of a large house opens and a man steps out. His name is Sean. He is forty-three years old. He moves away from the house, then glances behind him as two other figures materialize, Annie and Maria, American girls. There is a pause before the next person appears, a gap in the procession, but at last Malcolm arrives. He steps onto the grass tentatively, as if afraid he will sink.

  But already they can all see what has happened.

  Sean said: “It’s my wife’s fault, all of this. It’s a perfect expression of her inner character. To go to all the trouble of digging and planting and watering and then to forget about it completely in a few days’ time. It’s unforgivable.”

  “I’ve never seen a garden quite so overrun,” said Malcolm. He addressed the remark to Sean, but Sean didn’t reply to it. He was busy looking at the American girls, who, in one identical motion, had put their hands on their hips. The precision of their movements, so perfectly synchronized and yet unintentional, unnerved him. It was a bad omen. Their movements seemed to say: “We are inseparable.”

  That was unfortunate because one of the girls was beautiful and the other was not. Less than an hour before, on his way home from the airport (he had just returned from Rome), Sean had seen Annie walking by the side of the road, alone. The house he was returning to had been closed up for a month, ever since his wife, Meg, had gone off to France, or Peru. They had lived apart for years, each occupying the house only when the other was away, and Sean dreaded returning after long absences. The smell of his wife was everywhere, rose from armchairs when he sat in them, made him remember days of bright scarves and impeccable sheets.

  When he saw Annie, however, he knew immediately how to brighten his homecoming. She wasn’t hitchhiking, but was wearing a backpack; she was a pretty traveler with unwashed hair, and he suspected his offer of a spare room would surpass the ditch or clammy bed-and-breakfast she would find to stay in that night. At once he stopped his car beside her and leaned across the seat to roll down the passenger’s window. As he leaned he took his eyes off her, but when he looked up again, already bestowing his capricious invitation, he saw not only Annie but another girl, a companion, who had appeared out of nowhere. The newcomer wasn’t attractive in the least. Her hair was short, revealing the squarish shape of her skull, and the thick lenses of her glasses glinted so that he couldn’t see her eyes.

  In the end Sean was forced to invite the regrettable Maria along as well. The girls climbed into his car like affectionate sisters, having stowed their backpacks in the trunk, and Sean sped off down the road. When he arrived at his house, however, he encountered another surprise. There, on the front steps, with his head in his hands, was his old friend Malcolm.

  * * *

  Malcolm stood at the edges of the garden, eyeing its neglect. The garden was mostly dirt. Brambles covered the back portion and, in the front, there was nothing but a row of brown flowers crushed by the rain. Sean blamed it all on his wife. “She thinks of herself as having a green thumb,” he joked, but Malcolm didn’t laugh. The garden made him think of his own marriage. Only five weeks earlier, his wife, Ursula, had left him for another man. Their marriage had been unhappy for some time; Malcolm knew that Ursula was discontented with him and their life together, but he had never imagined she could fall in love with someone else. After she was gone, he fell into despair. Unable to sleep, beset by crying jags, he began to drink to excess. On one occasion, he had driven to a scenic outlook and got out of his car to stand at the edge of a cliff. Even then, he knew he was being dramatic and that he lacked the courage to throw himself off. Nevertheless, he remained at the cliff’s edge for almost an hour.

  The next day, Malcolm had taken a leave from his job and had begun to travel, hoping to find, in freedom of movement, freedom from pain. Quite by chance he had found himself in the town where he remembered his old friend Sean lived. Wandering the streets, his shirt spotted with coffee, he had made his way to Sean’s house, knocked on the door, and found no one at home.

  He had been there less than fifteen minutes when he looked up to see Sean striding down the front path with a girl on either side of him. The vision filled Malcolm with envy. Here was his friend, surrounded by youth and vitality (the girls were laughing musical laughs), and here was he, sitting on the doorstep, surrounded by nothing but the specters of old age, loneliness, and despair.

  The situation grew worse from there. Sean greeted him quickly, as though they had seen each other only last week, and Malcolm immediately sensed he was in the way. With a flourish Sean opened the door and led them on a tour of the house. He showed the girls where they would sleep, and indicated a bedroom in another wing that Malcolm could have. After that, Sean took them into the kitchen. He and the girls searched the cabinets to see what there was to eat. All they found was a plastic bag of black beans and, in the refrigerator, a stick of butter, a shriveled lemon, and a desiccated clove of garlic. That was when Sean suggested they go out to the garden.

  Malcolm followed them outside. And now he stood apart, wishing he could take the failure of his own marriage as lightly as Sean took the failure of his. He wished he could put Ursula behind him, lock her memory in a box and bury it deep in the earth, far beneath the soil he now turned up with the toe of his left shoe.

  * * *

  Sean stepped into the garden and kicked at the brambles. He had forgotten the cupboards would be bare, he had nothing to offer his guests now, and he had two more guests than he wanted. He gave one last kick, disgusted with everything, but this time his foot caught on a network of brambles, pulling them up in the air. They lifted as a lid lifts off a box and underneath, hiding against the wall, was a clump of artichokes. “Hold on,” he said, seeing them. “Hold on one minute.” He took a few steps toward them. He bent and touched one. Then he turned, looking back at Annie. “Do you know what this is?” he asked her. “It’s Divine Providence. The good Lord made my wife plant these poor artichokes and then made her forget about them, so that we, in our need, would find them. And eat.”

 
* * *

  A few of the artichokes were blooming. Annie hadn’t known that artichokes could bloom but there they were, as purple as thistles, only larger. The idea of eating them made her happy. Everything about the evening made her happy, the house, the garden, her new friend, Sean. For a month she and Maria had been traveling through Ireland, staying in youth hostels where they had to sleep on cots in rooms crowded with other girls. She was tired of the budget accommodations, of the meager meals scraped together in the hostel kitchens, and of the other girls rinsing out their socks and underwear in the bathroom sinks and hanging them on the bunk beds to dry. Now, thanks to Sean, she could sleep in a big bedroom with lots of windows and a canopy bed.

  “Come look,” Sean said, beckoning her with his hand, and she stepped into the garden. They bent over together. A tiny gold cross slipped out of her T-shirt and hung, swinging. “My God, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Yes,” said Annie. “And Irish?” She nodded, smiling. He lowered his voice as he grasped one of the artichokes and presented it to her. “That makes us practically family, my dear.”

  * * *

  If Sean perceived the implications of the girls’ body language, even more so did Maria. For it wasn’t true that the two of them had put their hands on their hips simultaneously without meaning to. Annie had started the movement and Maria had mirrored her. She did this in order to proclaim the very message of inseparability that Sean had read. Maria wanted to inhabit Annie’s being as closely and as intimately as possible, and so, in this instance, she transformed Annie and herself into two identical sculptures set side by side on the grass.