by Brian Hodge
It’s all Alex can coax out of him, and Dad repeats it several times, and finally his old man clambers atop the worktable and starts flailing at model airplanes. His arms wildly windmill about and plastic clatters and then plastic flies and airplanes are going into crashdives left and right. Dad looks like King Kong at the end of the movie as he snatches a Sopwith Camel free of its little cable and flings the bi-plane across the room to shatter against the fireplace hearth.
Dad can reach no more, so he leaps down in a rage and grabs a cue stick from the pool table and trashes yet more planes and Alex covers his ears and wails as if he really were in a war zone, and finally Dad falls sobbing to the floor, his fury spent. Alex looks up, and most of the planes are downed, with occasional chunks of debris still dangling from the wires, and now Dad looks like what he really is: a demented little boy in a room full of broken toys.
Dad cries for several more moments and then scrambles about the floor, scooping up the broken models and cradling the wreckage to his chest. He stares off into space, damp lines running down his cheeks.
“What am I doing?” he whispers. “What am I doing?”
He gathers what he can, whatever he hasn’t overlooked because it’s too little or too far-flung, and he carries the whole jumble back to the work table and lets it clatter into a heap. And there he sits, while Alex stares, Dad, looking sorrowfully at all the broken pieces.
“I need more glue,” he says at last and gives a decisive nod of a chin that used to seem a lot firmer and a lot stronger to Alex’s eyes. “That’s it. I need more glue.”
Without another word, he rises and walks past his son and a minute later comes the sound of the BMW starting up and then Dad is gone.
Alex rises too, wanders over to the worktable and delicately fingers the broken plastic. Last remnants of a mismatched squadron, sleek on the outside and hollow on the inside.
In the last few years, Alex has been astounded at how little he weighs. At least it seems that he should weigh more, that there should be more mass to him since he’s flesh and blood and bone. Now, though, he’s not so sure. And he wonders if maybe he’s hollow too, because now it feels that over all these years, these fifteen years, he was just another model. Dad’s big project from 1982.
Is he real? Does he exist? He wonders like he’s never wondered about anything. Just one word from Dad would clarify matters. Just one word might work wonders. Just one word.
Alex goes to the garage and brings in the ladder and sets it up in the rec room. He looks at all the tiny wires hanging down and frees up the few that still have bits of plastic attached. Dozen and dozens of tiny cables. And their hooks.
Maybe it will hold and maybe it won’t. At least he knows he’s certain to get a good distribution of weight.
He positions himself at the apex of the ladder and lies out flat, balancing precariously, and now he’s parallel to the ceiling and looking at all the eye-screws Dad has imbedded up there to hold his treasures.
Alex takes each cable and meticulously hooks them into the safety pins.
And when he pushes away the ladder he feels important at long last, and thinks that whenever Dad makes it back home, he’s bound to take notice this time.
Androgyny
The afterglow fades, always.
The quicker it happens, the more compulsively you’re left to wonder about the night’s beginnings. Even if the object of earlier affections is still lying beside you, cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions turn cruel and demanding:
How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?
Gary knew it would happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, past the French Quarter’s upper boundary. Fewer than a dozen drinkers, most of them hardcore, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria grew on the floor.
Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged. Look in her eyes and you reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the fun of whatever waited to be found.
It took twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, taking the stool next to him. This he took as a good omen: She was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.
“What are you?” was the first thing she said.
“Career? Astrologically? How do you mean?”
She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off. No tourist ever comes around here unless it’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native, either. Are you.”
“Long-term transient,” Gary said, and clinked his glass to hers. “But not all who wander are lost.”
One eyebrow ticked upward as she appraised and approved, or pretended to. “You’re literate enough to read bumper stickers, at least.”
Talk progressed, easy and loose and non-binding. They traded names, Gary for Lana, and libidos simmered during the seductive ballet. He liked best these encounters where roles were blurred. Who was predator, and who the prey? A tossup, one answer as valid as the other. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter, as long as the orgasms were mutual.
Six years of high-ticket vagrancy had shuffled him through a succession of primary, secondary, and graduate schools of one-night stands and short-term loves. Money was no problem; an umbilical credit card kept him linked to the New England bank account. He never had to stick around when it no longer seemed wise. He didn’t want to leave behind a legacy of pain any more than he wanted to lug one around inside.
“You like riddles?” she asked after four rounds of drinks had worked their magic.
“Usually. Let’s hear it.”
“It’s not easy.” Lana smiled mischievously. “But. Do you know what the worst part of being me is?”
“The worst thing, let’s see.” He studied her a moment, the fine-boned face, the tall straight posture, the so-black hair, shoulder length. She didn’t appear to have lived too harsh a life thus far. Her eyes knew pain, though, and her soul was evidently as on display as her small cleavage. “You don’t know how to love.”
A coy shake of her head. “Wrong. So wrong.”
“You’ve never been in love.”
Another shake. She was enjoying this immensely. Sometimes this was the most fun game of all, opening yourself like a maze and escorting strangers into blind alleys.
“You don’t think,” he tried slowly, “you’ll ever find the right one to love.”
Lana tapped her chin, half conciliatory. “You’re still off, but you’re getting warmer.”
He offered a few more stabs at it, then gave up. Lifted his drink and swirled it, watched it in near-hypnosis. “I can think straighter later.”
“Love and friendship,” Lana mused, obliquely avoiding the answer to her challenge. “They’re opposites, in a way, you know.”
He professed skepticism.
“Really. Joseph Roux, in Meditations of a Parish Priest, said, ‘What is love? Two souls and one flesh. Friendship? Two bodies and one soul.’” Lana nodded. “I believe that, with all my heart.” She dropped her hand to his thigh — that thrilling rush of first contact. “How ‘bout you? Do you believe it?”
“It could work on me, give it time.”
And what would it soon be for them, he wondered. Love, or friendship? Two bodies, or one?
Snap judgments were risky, but he thought he’d be amenable to either. Something about her eyes, her manner, her tip-of-the-iceberg hints that, for the right person, she was much more than someone who merely wanted compatible flesh to sustain her until morning light. A needle-in-the-haystack find among French Quarter sin — someone worth sticking around for.
Gary watched, listened, through dual filters: The Romantic longed to believe her, while the Cynic thought it mere puffery. Or worse yet, sweet bait so she could lure him to a partner in hiding and they would mug him.
He would bite. He would swallow. Have a little faith.
Soon they danced, pressed close as they leaned together and slow-shuffled about the floor, glowing with neon bleedthrough from the street. They were watched by the dismal eyes of other drinkers, weary survivors clinging to rafts of Jim Beam and Gilbey’s. The jukebox scratched out the mournful, gin-soaked laments of Tom Waits, the quintessential skid row troubadour.
She later led him out back to an alley with too little light, and for a moment he was sure that his judgment had failed him. But no knife appeared, no lead pipe fell from the shadows.
Lana drew down his zipper and, heedless of her dress, dropped to both knees before him in the grime. Overhead, the moon looked sickly, the color of whiskey.
Yet finally he knew that, for a while at least, he’d found a new home.
*
The afterglow faded, as always.
To his credit, it had taken longer than usual, four months of cohabitation in Lana’s apartment. Contact with the seductive unknown usually had that effect.
Lana had shared her most intimate secrets a couple of days after that first night. Stunningly unexpected though they’d been, they hadn’t been enough to send him packing. He was, by then, head over heels in … fascination, he supposed. This was too different to turn away from just yet, without exploration.
Scratch the surface of the mundane, and the underground of counterculture was revealed, rich and teeming. This was the landscape Gary had sought to travel, making up for the stultified upbringing of his first twenty-one years.
Scratch the underground and peel it back, and there was the land where Lana dwelled.
But the afterglow fades. He had bitten, he had swallowed. Best to move on before the emotional hooks barbed him any deeper. April had brought the warmth and renewal of spring after a winter of oddities. Now came the famous final scene, lovers at bittersweet poles, opposites that once attracted and now repelled. Gary had played it out any number of times. Never pleasant, just inevitable.
“How can you do this to me now?” Lana wailed. “My operation’s just a week away!” Her eyes were dazed and wide, glassy with psychosexual trauma. Tears were abundant.
In the center of the living room, Gary held her tightly. That desperate agony of final contact. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You knew what I was like before…”
Lana, snuffling and huge-eyed: “I … I just wish I could have children with you, that might make all the difference in the world … wouldn’t it?”
He bit his lip, hating it when she talked this way, blind to her limitations. It wasn’t healthy.
“Don’t live in a fantasy world, Lana,” he said gently. “Climb out, please.”
He crushed his eyes shut a moment, and when he reopened, Lana seized him by the shoulders, a peculiar fire seeming to ignite within her. One last, savage kiss, and when she tore away it was not without disdain.
“Then go.” Her voice had grown uncharacteristically husky.
Gary retrieved his two bags; a tendency to travel light. What is love? Two souls and one flesh. There was no worse pain than the rending of one back into two.
Out the door, then into a musty corridor whose air always seemed yellow. It led him to the elevator, an ancient suicidal machine, a wrought-iron cage that clanked and shuddered down a gloomy open shaft. A rehearsal for death, condemnation, descent.
The gunshot seized him head to toe.
Hand shaking, Gary levered the elevator to a grinding halt and reversed directions. Dust sifted from the cage’s upper frame. He knew what he would find back upstairs. It had been no ruse, no shot fired into a pillow to plead for attention.
Strange. Mode of suicide was traditionally a great divider between the sexes. Severe bodily damage — gunshot, car crash, and the like — was usually the province of men. Women tended to opt for neater methods — pills, carbon monoxide, or at least precisely opened veins in the bathtub.
Gary was too shocked to weep just yet. He stood in the doorway, one pale-knuckled hand clenched on the knob. This was the most masculine thing Lana had ever done.
The tableau before him was grisly, fodder for scandal and legend had it occurred in a small town. Here, though, few would care at all; back page news at best. The only sensibilities that would get a tweak were those of the police.
Lana lay half-sprawled onto the sofa, legs askew at odd angles. One small breast bared. Smoking gun in hand, its barrel having left a crimson fan on the wall behind her. Eyes open, bulging violently. Adam’s apple absurdly prominent. Her skirt was bunched messily around her hips, showing silken panties.
And that unmistakable bulge of male genitalia.
*
“What you’ve got to keep remembering is that you are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness but your own.”
Gary nodded like a man who’d heard all this before. “It’s not the happiness part I have a problem with. It’s the responsibility for her killing herself.”
Across the desk, uncluttered and orderly, Dr. Thatcher laced her fingers. “But it was Lana’s decision. You didn’t put the gun in her hand. You never even knew she owned it.”
Gary slumped in his chair, glanced about the room. For a psychiatrist’s office, it appeared remarkably non-academic. The furniture was shiny and modern, more in keeping with a corporate reception lobby. Even the couch was out of the way, in a corner in case someone felt their therapy mandated the horizontal — a nod to tradition, but only grudging. Of this, Gary approved, being no respecter of tradition. Tradition was too often a mask worn by regression.
“She was an adult who made her own decisions. And as painful as it may be to come to terms with, she lived and died according to those decisions. Her own. Not yours.”
“God knows I’ve never been the most reliable guy to get involved with. I’ve always tried to make that understood up front, at least.” Gary had been giving his hands a workout, tugging at fingers and knuckles. “But Lana … I’ve never had anybody place so much importance on me. I wasn’t used to that. Almost like she idealized our relationship.”
Dr. Thatcher nodded. Her hair was trimmed into a short blond helmet, and it wavered as one distinct mass. “That’s common among transsexuals. When a relationship is going well, there’s no greater person on earth than their partner. If it’s going badly? Then their partner is just this side of an ogre.”
Gary rose from his chair and paced to the window. Outside, Spanish moss swayed from willow branches in warm spring winds, like tattered flags on the masts of rotting ships.
Painful business, this visit to Lana’s psychotherapist. Catharsis, purging the guilt, whatever. Lana was two days gone, and on a whim Gary had phoned Thatcher to beg for the slot that Lana would never honor this week. There had been no mutual friends to speak of, none that he could open up to. Family? Laughable. He wasn’t even sure that he could’ve confided with Lana’s shrink had it been a man. That underlying shame of admitting the masquerade’s success, of having been duped into lusting for a guy in drag … and after he found out, it didn’t matter. Difficult to own up to that before another male. When he had entered Thatcher’s office, first greeted her, he’d had a brief impulse to request that she hoist her skirt. Double checking.
“It might also help you to realize that transsexuals can be suicidal over a long timespan. Feeling trapped in the wrong body isn’t a problem they can resolve as easily as a nose they don’t like. They’re at constant war with themselves, and with the perceptions of what their families and society expect them to be. Not all of them can shoulder that heavy a burden for long.”
Gary leaned against the window. “Lana didn�
�t much care what anybody on the outside thought. She had her friends in the same position she was in, these people she used to hang out with at some club called the Fringe. That seemed all the acceptance she needed.”
“I know. She was very stable in that respect.”
Gary turned from the window. “Lana wanted to have children with me. Does that sounds stable to you? The biggest miracle since the Virgin Birth?” He shook his head, his voice hoarse. “How could you approve her final surgery under those conditions?”
Dr. Thatcher smiled gently. She was good at that — years of practice, he reasoned. “Because it wasn’t a delusion. She wanted it desperately, but I never felt she for a moment believed it possible. Other than that, she was one of the most psychologically sound candidates for gender reassignment I’ve ever counseled.”
Gary slid along the wall, idly stopping to tinker with the fronds of a fern. To straighten a de Kooning print, level to begin with. Gradually easing back to the chair.
“She had this dream of perfection. Once she was healed from the surgery, everything was going to be perfect. Kept saying, ‘We’ll be wonderful, everything’ll be perfect, as soon as I get my pussy everything’ll be perfect.’”
“That’s another thing, Gary. People like Lana often have an unattainable ideal of perfection. Just as an anorexic always sees herself as too heavy. Some transsexuals are never satisfied with the results, particularly with the male-to-female procedure. They can go through years of cosmetic operations trying to reach a pinnacle of femininity. That hope can be all that keeps them going.”
“What happens if the hope runs out?”
Thatcher flexed her fingers, rested composed hands atop her desk. “Sometimes they kill themselves then.” An uneasy pause. “Lana’s emotions wouldn’t necessarily have stabilized after the vaginoplasty. For her, perfection might’ve been one more operation away. Or another. Or the next. Your continued presence in her life would not have been her salvation … because it had no bearing on her self-image.”
Gary ran his hands through his hair until it stuck out in mad winglets. Maybe he could shave it off, buzz it to stubble, the rudely bared head a sign of penance. He was finding absolution tough to come by here. This was like a hydra. Hack off the head of one source of guilt and another two sprouted to take its place.
