The waitress came over. “How’s your steak, sir?”
“It’s really good, thank you,” said the young man. He turned to look me in the eyes again. “So what do I do? Do I just keep waiting for her, forever? Or do I try to forget what I feel?”
My throat closed up again. I thought back to my early twenties, when I had lived in New York City and shared an apartment with another young writer named Charlie Kaufman. Years later he became a revered filmmaker, the writer of, among other things, a movie called Adaptation. In that film, Nicolas Cage turns to his twin and says, “You are what you love, not what loves you.”
I remembered Charlie and his girlfriend back in the day, the three of us going out to close down bars in Morningside Heights after long evenings pounding our respective typewriters. Eventually Charlie had moved out of the apartment we shared and moved in with his girlfriend in an apartment way uptown. That had left me living in our apartment on 108th Street by myself, occasionally sitting on the radiator by the window, wearing a pair of pearl earrings.
“You are what you love, Zach,” I said to my son. “Not what loves you.”
Zachary thought this over. He looked at the waitress, who was now pouring the wine for another couple at a table across the room.
“What does that even mean?” he said.
“It means you love the people that you love, Zach,” I said. “Sometimes it means you hurt.”
A few years before I took my son to dinner, I was a long way from home, doing a story for a magazine. I pulled my rental car into the lot of a hotel in Kentucky. I was ready for bed. As the clerk handed me my room key, I noticed a sign: WELCOME NATIONAL VENTRILOQUISTS’ ASSOCIATION CONVENTION.
Oh for God’s sake, I thought.
“Lady,” said a high-pitched voice.
I turned to my right. There in the lobby was a good-looking young man with short hair, twinkling eyes. “Hey, lady, hey, laaady!” said his dummy.
I turned back to the man at the front desk. “Ventriloquists’ convention?” I said.
He nodded back at me, with a subtle roll of his eyes, like, Sweet weeping Jesus, don’t get me started.
“Laaady!”
The dummy stuck his tongue out at me. I didn’t even know they had tongues, dummies.
I was exhausted from the road. I’d spent the day looking at covered bridges. One of them had been built by my great-great-uncle. His name was Elmer.
“You want to get out of here?” said the dummy, and it wasn’t bad advice, considering what followed. The figure cast a glance at the guy whose hand was up his neck. “This guy’s a real drag.”
There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses where one cowboy says to another, I’m goin to tell you somethin, cousin. Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it.
I could have kept my mouth shut at this moment, taken my bag and headed up to my room.
Instead, I said, “What’s your dummy’s name?”
“Spike,” said the dummy.
“No, I mean—the other dummy.” Spike smiled, and as he smiled I realized: The ventriloquist is cute. “This here,” he said, “is Mikey Splinters.”
Mikey spun his head all the way around, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. He wiggled his ears.
“So,” Spike asked, “where’s your dummy?”
I stood there for a moment, unexpectedly tongue-tied. All at once, it struck me as a damned good question.
AT THE TIME I stumbled into the ventriloquists’ convention, I was a forty-four-year-old woman who’d never had sex with a man. I’d had sex as a man, of course, but as it turns out, that’s hardly the same thing. I was curious about men, though. Wouldn’t you be? I had lots of friends who’d say things to me like, Jenny, you just spent twenty thousand dollars on a new sports car. Now you’re going to just leave it in the garage?
The Drawbridge Inn—site of the ventriloquists’ convention—had a nice bar down in the basement. There, at eleven that night, I could have been found drinking a pint of Guinness. It was a big place, with a disco dance floor and a wide-screen TV in the corner. I was about halfway through my second pint when the voice spoke to me again.
“Lady. Hey, lady.”
I looked over. There they were.
“Hey,” said I.
“Hey, lady,” said the dummy. “What’s your name?”
“Jenny?”
I love you, Jen-nay, said a voice that appeared to be coming out of a trunk on the floor. For a moment I was confused.
“We call that the muffle voice,” said Spike. His dummy got the bartender’s attention.
“Get her another round,” the dummy said magnanimously. “Get everyone another round!”
“Who’s in the trunk?” I asked. From the box on the floor the voice came again. Let me outta here. Hey! Let me outta here!
“Yeah,” said Mikey Splinters, giving Spike a hard look. “Who is in the trunk?”
There were a lot of guys sitting at the bar with dummies in their laps. Some of the dummies were talking to each other. On the dance floor were a half a dozen people dancing with their figures. It was a strange sight, both touching and pathetic.
As I watched the ventriloquists dancing, though, it was hard for me not to view them as distant relations. Back when I was a guy, there’d been plenty of times when I’d felt a little like a ventriloquist’s dummy myself. For forty years I’d been at the controls of an unwieldy figure, rolling my eyes and sticking out my tongue and raising my eyebrows. Sometimes I spoke in a funny voice. You had to admit there were times when I had been very entertaining.
Spike took the puppet off his hand. He gave me a look that Mikey Splinters could not duplicate. “So, Jenny,” he said. “You want to dance?”
I said, “Sure.”
And so Spike the ventriloquist and I found ourselves on the dance floor, swaying to a slow song. I felt something that I’d never felt until I was forty—the scratch of a man’s stubbly face against my smooth cheek. The weird thing is how natural it all seemed to me, as if I’d been dancing backward all my life.
“I don’t think I’ve ever danced with a girl so tall before,” said Spike, and it was true. I towered over him.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“Nothing wrong with being tall,” he said. “There’s more of you to enjoy.”
While all of this was going on, I had not forgotten my sons or my wife, back in Maine. I didn’t particularly want to have an affair, or a one-night stand, in a motel full of ventriloquists. But did I really want to live my entire life without ever having sex with a guy—not even once? A stupid thought went through my head, a thought that I knew was wrong, but I thought it anyway: Maybe I’d never be wholly female until I’d experienced what it was like to have sex with a man. I’d come this far on the journey, I thought—shouldn’t I go the final six inches?†
It took no time at all to counter these ridiculous thoughts with common sense—that womanhood comes from within, not from your relations with others. If Betty Friedan had taught me anything, it’s that who I am in the world is for me to define, not the men I’m with.
Still, Spike was cute. There was no getting around that.
“What do you say, Jenny?” he asked at last. “You want to get out of here, head up to my room for a while?”
As I considered the question, I looked again at all the other couples around us—men and women, some of them clutching puppets, some of them dancing alone.
I don’t know. What would you have done, if you were me? If you were a forty-four-year-old virgin, would you have slept with him, just the one time?
On the wide-screen TV in the corner I noticed that they were playing the old Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, the scene where John Lennon encounters the showgirl, backstage, who says, You don’t look like John Lennon at all.
Lennon sighed and walked away. As he walked, he muttered. She looks more like
him than I do.
When I was a man, there were times, with my long hair and round wire-rimmed glasses, that I looked a little like John Lennon.
“Well?” said Spike. “What do you say, Jenny? Do you want to do it?”
I’D BEEN DRIVING home with Sean. He was just about to turn fifteen. He had a funny expression on his face.
“What?” I said.
“I had a conversation after morning meeting today,” he said.
“With whom?”
“Shannon,” he said.
Shannon was a friend of his who lived not far from the school. She and Sean had the top two GPAs in the freshman class. They had spent much of the fall Skyping together, reviewing their notes for biology, preparing for their tests in Western Civilization.
“What was this conversation about?”
“Well,” said Sean, “Robbie came up to me after morning meeting and told me, ‘Dude. It’s time to step up your game.’ ”
“It’s time to what?”
Sean didn’t go into details. “Step up my game,” he said. “So I went up to Shannon, and I asked her if she wanted to go out with me.”
We drove toward home in silence for a moment.
“And?” I said.
“And what?” said Sean, and he gave me that mysterious smile of his again.
“And what did she say?”
At this moment, a huge grin broke out all over my son’s face. “She said yes.”
I nodded. “Sean Boylan,” I said. “I am so proud of you. You—” I wasn’t quite sure how to put it.
Sean nodded. “I stepped up my game.”
SEAN’S STEPPING up his game was a delight, of course, and not least because Deedie and I were already crazy about Shannon. She was thoughtful, smart, and elfin.
Zach, however, was perhaps just slightly unsettled by it. For one thing, it irked him that his younger brother had landed a girlfriend before he had. For another, it wasn’t clear to Zach what the nature of Sean’s relationship was. “When they’re together, Maddy?” he said, with disbelief. “I think they study.”
Studying probably wasn’t all they were doing. At various moments Deedie and I tried to have the Big Talk with Sean. The irony of having teenagers, of course, is that at the exact moment they need to know the things that you alone can tell them, they have reached a moment in their lives when you, as their parent, are the only person they cannot get this information from. There were plenty of dinners when Deedie or I would turn to Sean and say, “You know, speaking of bodies—”
Sean would raise his hands to his ears until we stopped talking. Then he’d lower them and say, in a tone of voice that was less reassuring than he intended, “Mommy. Maddy. I got this.”
“But you need to know how to—”
“Mommy,” Sean said firmly. “I said I got this.”
The advent of Shannon in our lives, I admit, helped put my mind at ease regarding at least one important question. I had wondered what effect having a transgender parent—not to mention having two loving parents who weren’t particularly physically intimate with each other—would have on my sons. Would they, obliquely following our example, be afraid of falling in love?
A few days later, Zach told me some news of his own. “I joined the GSA,” he said.
“What’s the GSA?”
He couldn’t believe I didn’t know this. “The Gay-Straight Alliance?”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s great.” I was driving him home. Sean wasn’t there. He was over at Shannon’s. “I guess I should ask you—does that mean you’re interested in guys?”
Zach looked at me as if I were crazy. “No, Maddy,” he said. “I’m an ally. I’m trying to work for justice.”
He was given to saying things like this now and again, particularly since he’d become part of the school’s Amnesty International chapter. He’d even gone on a trip to New York earlier in the fall in order to march around in front of the Chinese embassy, holding a sign that said, SHAME ON CHINA! HUMAN RIGHTS NOW!
“Well, I’m very proud of you,” I said. “And you know, Zach, if you ever feel like—”
“Maddy,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder. “I know.”
I LOOKED AT SPIKE. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
The ventriloquist smiled. “I love you Jen-nay,” he said, in Mikey Splinters’s voice. He gave me a kiss, and all the hairs on my arm stood on end. Then he said, “Give me one second, okay?” He headed to the men’s room.
I waited for him at the bar. Mikey Splinters sat on the stool next to me, looking at me with his hungry, lascivious expression. What do you think, Mikey? I asked the dummy. Is Spike going to be able to tell?
This was more than a minor concern. A lot of men would find it disconcerting if they learned that the woman they’d had sex with had once been male. You want to know how I know this? Because back when I was a man, if a woman I’d had sex with told me she used to be a man? I’d have found it disconcerting.
Maddy, said the figure next to me at the bar. You tell him the truth.
I don’t think so, I replied. Not this time.
It wasn’t as if Spike was going to be able to conclude anything from my anatomy, thanks for asking. Everything looked just like it was supposed to. I’d even seen several doctors for checkups since the exciting days of the big switcheroo, who did not know my history and could not tell. One of them wanted to know if I was pregnant.
Anyhow, between the surgery and the hormones, it was unlikely that Spike would be any the wiser simply on the basis of my appearance. But then, it wasn’t my appearance I was worried about. It was that I was a virgin, at age forty-four, an innocent, a wide-eyed thing who, since the transition, had somehow stumbled through the world protected from danger by little more than her own naïveté and a healthy portion of luck. What could I say if he asked me, as he inevitably would, if he was the best I’d ever had?
Hey. Let me outta here! Let me outta here!
Mikey Splinters gave me the eye. I thought about my family, about Deedie and the boys and the two black Labs. Our house in Maine. The tears my wife had cried when she realized that she was going to lose her husband, even if she got to keep me. For a while it seemed as if we’d spent the better part of three years lying in our bed in Maine, one of us holding the other, as we wept and wept.
Mikey Splinters, sitting there with his gin and tonic, stared at me with his sad, blank face.
Please? I asked him. Just once?
But the dummy had nothing to say.
I grabbed my purse. Halfway back to my room I kicked the wall. Goddamn it. My shoe made a small dent in the wall, and I realized, as I looked at the hole, that there was another one just like it, only a few inches away from mine. Apparently I’d entered a world where people kicked the walls all the time.
I opened the door to my room and lay down on the bed alone and stared at the ceiling. This went on for a while until at last I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
I stared at the person reflected before me. Laady, I said.
WE SAT THERE in the former church, Deedie and me, Zach and Shannon. The conductor held his baton aloft. I looked at Sean and his halo of curls with a sense of wonder. I thought of my father, who had wanted to be a professional pianist in his youth. The week before Dad died he claimed he’d seen a specter dressed in tails come into his room and stand next to his bed. Come away with me, said the maestro. He reached toward my father with one skeletal hand. And conduct my orchestra.
I was afraid, my father later told me, through his morphine haze. It was one of the last things he ever said. Because I did not know the tune.
Tears flickered in my eyes, and Deedie took my hand. I love you, Jenny, she whispered.
The conductor’s hand swept through the air, and the chamber filled with music.
* This name has been changed. Later in this chapter, the name of the character “Spike” has been changed as well.
† Or, in the case of a ventriloq
uist, three?
I was in a hotel in New York when I found it first. This was winter of 2010—the boys now in eleventh and ninth grades, respectively, Deedie and I in our fifties. I was in the fancy hotel bathroom, in a shower with seven different showerheads and mood lighting and a cluster of votive candles. I had twinkly New Age music playing on the stereo, the kind Thomas Pynchon once described as mindbarf. If you’re going to find a tumor in your breast, this was a pretty good space for it.
I’d felt it before, during one of those monthly self-exams you’re supposed to do. Given the fact that I hadn’t had any breasts in the first place until I was forty, and given the fact that, compared to most women, anyhow, my estrogen level had been well below average until I reached the same age, the chances of my contracting breast cancer were less than that of other women I knew. So the first time I felt the lump I thought, This? Oh, this must be nothing.
Then I found it again. Every now and again I’d check it out and think, This thing isn’t still here, is it? Sometimes it seemed to disappear.
But there in the hotel, the hot steaming water surrounding me, I put my fingers right on it. It seemed larger.
I got out of the shower and turned off the twinkly music. Somehow it wasn’t relaxing me anymore.
I STARTED PLAYING rock ’n’ roll with a new band called Nasty Habits in January of 2011. I’d known the guitar player, Steve, from another band, the Deadbeats. We started playing in a bar near my house, where they were the house band on Friday nights. We sounded good, and they even gave me a chance to play a Farfisa effect in a couple of Doors tunes, “Riders on the Storm” and “Light My Fire.” Fun. Over the years, I’d played with a half dozen other bands, and been thrown out of every one. Sorry, Jenny, they’d tell me, although they never sounded sorry. It’s just not working out.
As I played with Nasty Habits, popcorn popping in the popcorn machine, Boston Bruins slapping the puck around on the big bar television, I felt that thing still throbbing in my left breast. I’d called up my doctor when I got back from New York a month earlier, tried to get an appointment. I have a lump in my breast, I said. The receptionist at my doctor’s office said she couldn’t get me in to see her for a month. They finally slotted me in for an appointment at nine o’clock on a Friday morning, but they warned me I had to call in at eight that morning to confirm. They said that if I didn’t call them they’d give the appointment away. It was only fair to the doctor’s other patients, they said.
Stuck in the Middle with You Page 18
