Woman as a Foreign Language

by Katherine Wyvern

  I realize that my mouth is hanging open, and I shut it with an embarrassingly loud click.

  How is it possible, how, how on earth is it possible that I didn’t realize? I so wanted to be like Julia, that self-assured, sexy, confident, elegant woman. I was so sure she was the woman. Maybe that is why I saw a woman, and never doubted it. I almost laugh hysterically at the thought that the woman I finally wished to “become” was a man. It’s so typical me. It would be really funny if it were not so fucked up.

  Truth be told, now that I look at him in better light, it must be said that even as a man he looks more than a little like a girl. A narrow, pointed face, with high cheekbones and luscious full lips, wider than Julia’s lips. Those long, slender, elegant hands. Julia is slim for a woman, and Julian is almost disturbingly skinny for a man, but somehow, it adds to his riveting presence. Everything that was slightly odd about Julia is falling into place, too. Her height, her leanness, her peculiar charisma. I realize all of a sudden that there is something slightly masculine about her that is not just her outrageous height, as there is something quite feminine about Julian, and that that incongruous, undefinable masculine zest actually spiced and accentuated her flamboyant femininity and made it shine the brighter.

  I suppose that it would be unsettling for some, but for me this slight gender-overlap it is part of their allure.

  I am still staring at him blinking stupidly for a minute, before I can find my tongue again. He is just quietly standing there. He is not trying to evade my scrutiny. It’s like he is resigned to people needing some time to process things.

  Well, he would be, I suppose.

  “O-ok,” I say, hesitantly, and I immediately hate myself for the tone. He might think I am uncertain what to think of him. In fact, I am just uncertain whether my knees will hold me up much longer.

  He gives me this slightly tentative, but unbelievably winning grin. “Please, do tell me that this does not come as a complete surprise. I am good, I know, but not that good, eh?”

  His voice is not really much deeper than Julia’s, and not much louder either. He still talks in a half whisper that makes my backbone shiver, like a caress, like a promise of … of what? Silk and candle-flame, the heart of the darkest rose, midnight, velvet, fingertips.

  I don’t know what to say.

  It never crossed my mind…

  How was I to know? I never met anyone like you…

  We’re Italian. The only man in a dress we ever saw is the Pope…

  I never really thought you were a woman, ah ah ah, no, because that would have been really stupid, right? No, actually, I thought you were a goddess…

  And maybe, just a little bit, I thought you might be the woman I would have loved to be if… If only I knew how…

  I am feeling so foolish that I just want to disappear in a hole in the ground.

  And yet I know what I saw. I know that Julia is real. She’s not a mask this man is hiding behind… If there is a disguise at all, it is the disguise of a sylph wearing human skin. For a moment I feel almost angry, made game of. Not because he impersonated Julia, but because he seems to imply that Julia was an impersonation. I know better than that. He must know that, too, surely?

  By now I have been silent for so long that I fear we will never speak again. But he puts out a hand, not as if for shaking, but as someone offering a gift, or a peace token, palm up, and open. After a second or two I take it, and he smiles again.

  “Tea?” he asks, and I nod, returning his smile, a bit tremulous at first, and then, as his slim, dry hand closes around mine, I feel a bit better. By touch, somehow, it’s easier to know that this is Julia, Julia, who held both my hands, and taught me to walk in heels less than a week ago.

  “I am sorry to spring it on you like this,” he says a minute later, from the kitchen, his back towards me. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I tried out all manner of scenarios in my head, but I couldn’t hit on the right note, really. So I thought I’d just go for the what-the-fuck moment and be done with it. I hope it’s not too unsettling. I thought that perhaps you knew. I was not sure.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “I suppose I should have known. If I had looked. I did look. At you. A lot. But.”

  This isn’t going too well, I think, blushing.

  He turns, kettle in hand, and smiles that portentous grin of his.

  “I noticed.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s ok. People look at me all the time. I am used to it.”

  “I am not. Not used to look at people much, I mean. Or people looking at me, for that matter.”

  “I know. It’s all right, really. I am glad it’s sorted out. I hope it’s sorted out… So, do you still want to do something together? With Julia, I mean. Are you still ok with it?”

  Am I “ok” with it? “Ok” was never really the right word. Ecstatic? Incredulous? Exhilarated? Yes.

  “Yes. I’m ok with it. I don’t think that you are a different person since the other day, are you?”

  His smile has a slightly stunned look to it this time, as if I said something unexpected.

  “No. I am still me,” he says, dropping a tea ball in a mug. “Both of me.”

  “Ok, then,” I say, relieved that he didn’t laugh at me for being so hopelessly vanilla. “I suppose I can give this to you. I made it for Julia. Well, for you, as it turns out.”

  I hand him the small parcel I brought in my bag together with Lizzie’s clothes.

  He takes it with a surprised expression. “That’s … thank you!”

  “I hope you like it,” I mumble. For some reason, in the presence of steel works, I feel every bit a kobold again. I don’t dare making eye contact while he unwraps the box. He undoes the packaging (brown paper and twine) without destroying the paper or cutting the string, with delicate, precise fingers. When he opens the box under the lamp over the kitchen hobs, a shaft of golden light gleams from it. He extracts the ball with an almost reverent look.

  “You made this?” he asks, perfectly nonplussed

  “Yes.”

  I don’t mention that it took me most of the week’s lunch breaks to get it just that perfect. The sphere is 120mm across, two hemispheres of 1 mm thick 316 stainless steel, welded together (a bitch to weld them without any hole blowing into the seam), the weld sanded perfectly smooth with finer and finer sandpaper and then the whole thing polished and re-polished with sisal wheels and pink paste, and then buffed on a spiral-sewn cotton wheel with my most precious steel-working treasure, a tiny piece of the finest greaseless blue paste, salvaged from a neglected old toolbox years ago, and always reserved for that one special thing I would make one day… When I rubbed it all clean with lime dust, the sphere was flawless, perfectly mirror bright, even in the dingy workshop. In Julia/n’s gleaming flat, every surface in the room plays on it, and it is a kaleidoscope of black, white and red, shot with warm lights. As Julian holds it on his fingertips, his long fingers are reflected on the sphere surface like a bizarre convex mirror.

  “I am sorry, but it’s just mindboggling. How? How on earth did you make this? It’s exquisite!”

  I shrug. “It’s what I do. I make steel things. Mostly kinda boring things. Pieces of this and that. But sometimes in my spare time I make pretty things. I just wanted you to know.”

  “You are an artist! You are an absolute artist. I had no idea!”

  He lays the sphere back in the box gently and then goes and clears the coffee table, dumping all the books and papers unceremoniously in a corner of the room. Only then he carefully adds the silvery ball to the stone globes in the bowl on the table. He smiles at me. “Thank you. It is just—thank you.”

  I spread my hands and shrug again. “I wanted to give you something I made, is all.”

  “I really love it. Really. I will treasure it forever.”

  I laugh at that. “It’s just a piece of steel.”

  “It’s a fucking gorgeous piece of steel, if I you don’t mind th
e language. Do you often make things of this sort?”

  I shrug once more. “Sometimes, if there is some inspiring piece of junk lying around in the workshop that I can filch without pissing anybody off. In my lunch break, mostly. I have one hour off, but it takes me just ten minutes to eat a sandwich and then the guys are not really great conversationalists… So, if I can, I go and do stuff. Else I just read.”

  “Read what?” he asks with a smile.

  “Er, you will think it’s silly, but mostly, fantasy. And legends from here and there. Norse sagas and Celtic myths. That sort of thing. I like all those weird mythological creatures. Dragons and goblins and elves. Sylphs and kobolds. Fenrir. The tree of the world. The Ents. Fawkes the Phoenix. I am reading the One Thousand and One Nights right now. All these treasure chambers and caves and magical palaces. Sometimes I think I would like to make something like that, Aladdin’s cave, with steel things, dangling and sparkling … maybe copper too, although it’s a bit of a wuss as metals go. Well, that’s not going to happen, but it’s an idea that I keep having.”

  I suddenly shut up. I don’t know why I am rambling out of control like this. Jesus, he just asked me what I like to read.

  But he doesn’t seem put off. He just smokes quietly, listening, while waiting for the kettle to boil.

  “Make it happen,” he says, when he sees that I am done rambling. “Someone needs to make beautiful things. Most of us can’t. I can’t even draw stick men.”

  “But you play the piano. Everybody says you play the piano.”

  He grimaces. “They do? I try not to piss off anybody, but … is it really that loud?”

  “Ah, they’ll be pissed in any case. For one reason or another. It’s endemic around here. But I never heard you playing. I’m always out. Until it’s too late. Or in the weekends. Can you play something now? Just a small little thing?”

  “I don’t know… It is a bit late. Just a small little thing. I’m hardly done moving in. I’d hate to have to move out again already,” he says with a grin.

  So he pours my tea (it smells of crushed leaves and wood-smoke, like an autumn day in the countryside), hands me my mug, and then he plays.

  And I know that I could spend the rest of my life just listening to his music, but, most of all, watching his long, pale fingers dancing on the keyboard.

  ****

  “So, what would you like to do?” he asks.

  The impromptu piano concert was abruptly interrupted five minutes ago by someone banging on the other side of the kitchen wall. We exchanged a glance in silence as his last chord hung crookedly and lopsided in the air, but he didn’t comment.

  I shrug. “Anything you like is fine with me.”

  I would like to say that just being out of my flat is like a holiday; that I need nothing more than being here with him; that I would be fine just sitting on the rug while he does whatever it is that he does in the evenings, alone. But even I know it is not a socially acceptable answer.

  “There is a bar I know where they have live music on Fridays. Mostly classic jazz. It’s not Diana Krall, mind, but it might be acceptable.”

  I nod. “Ok.”

  I don’t know who Diana Krall is, and my appreciation of jazz has always been tepid at best, but now any form of musical entertainment that includes Julia/n’s presence sounds downright brilliant. I am ready to embrace all jazz musicians ever spawned, and kiss them, too, on both cheeks.

  “And would you rather go out with a guy or a girl?” he asks, trying to sound jaunty, but actually coming across as a little uneasy.

  I smile at him.

  “Whatever you choose to be, it’s perfect for me,” I say, and his face lights up with that slightly stunned smile, a little incredulous, a little taken aback.

  “Ok. I will, well, go and pretty up a little then. Er, this might take a while. There’s books of every sort, and music, of course… Don’t play it too loud, you know.” He rolls his eyes and throws a glance toward the kitchen wall. “Just make yourself at home. And if you want to change, feel free. You know where your boots are.”

  He smiles at me, with a quick glance to my regular woolen socks, t-shirt, and slacks. It’s all a bit drab, even for a jazz bar.

  After that he disappears. It takes me two minutes to change, and retrieve my boots. Another two minutes to get into them and get a feel for those absurd heels again. I wish there was a mirror in the room to see how I look in Lizzie’s clothes. But then on second thought, I am glad that there isn’t. I am afraid that if I see myself in female-wear, I might chicken out. It feels like a strange masquerade, and it’s not carnival. I have never been so acutely conscious that I am wearing something, and yet felt so naked.

  Then I am left with some thousand books and more music CDs that I knew ever existed. Ms. Diana Krall appears to have deserved a shelf to herself. I pick a CD from her collection (she’s a strapping gorgeous blonde who plays the piano, I notice) and, a bit nervously, I pop it in the stereo. I hope not to break anything. These musical types are always prickly about their machinery. It takes me less than a minute to understand Julian’s reverence for his favorite musician, and I lie down on the sofa, with my feet out over one armrest. It is fantastic to relax in this clean flat, on a sofa absolutely free from moldering food litter, with this beautiful music instead of a blaring TV. I find myself wondering if all civilized humans live like this. Ms. Krall sings on, about sweet, slow time and temptation and smoke, in a voice like grainy amber and old gold, and I dream of Julia, whose voice has a bit of the same quality, Julia, who is so close, so close now that my heart is almost breaking.

  Temptation. Oh, don’t I know?

  My eyes are closed, and I am lost in the music, lost in the voice, lost in temptation and honeyed dreams, but a sultry tropical scent like flowers, vanilla, and coconut warns me that I am not alone in the room anymore, and when I turn to look, she is there, as stunning as ever, impeccable in skinny black jeans, tall black boots and a long, sheer, silvery, floaty shawl over something black that hugs her trim figure tightly underneath. She’s like a lean, black panther clad in starlit mist. Her long hair is loose and full of life.

  “Wow,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t. But she only laughs.

  “Ta-dah!” she says, with a theatrical flourish of her hands and a bow. Then she looks at me and smiles the sweetest smile.

  “That is very, very pretty,” she says, appraising my choice of evening-wear, and I can almost see Lizzie’s ghost floating in a corner of the room, winking at me.

  I sit up on the sofa, and she comes to sit by me, still examining me so closely that I feel I might blush.

  The thought makes me blush. That’s how it always goes.

  ****

  Julia

  Julia sat by Nina and looked her up and down with stunned satisfaction. There was nothing overtly seductive or pretty in her choice of dress tonight, but it was a long, long shot from anything she had seen Nina wear before. It was … elegant. Understated, but smart, exactly right for her boyish looks. Julia knew only too well how girls (of any sex!) could go rather overboard their first nights out en femme, but Nina seemed to have as good an instinct for fashion as for metal working. That came as a surprise.

  She gave Nina a bright smile, hoping to put her at ease for what was to come.

  “You are really, really pretty, you know?” Mh, that came out a bit creepy.

  Nina gave a snort of laughter and opened her mouth to reply, but then didn’t speak.

  “Can I please try something with you? Do you trust me?” Jesus, definitely creepy. What’s wrong with me? “Nothing scary, I promise!”

  Nina looked at her with those smoky brown eyes, questioning, uncertain, but curious.

  Julia got up again and beckoned Nina to follow. In her bathroom, she gestured her to sit on the toilet lid.

  “Sorry, it’s not very comfy, I know. But it won’t take long. You don’t have a million freckles to hide.”

  Nina looked at her, with panicked un
derstanding dawning on her face.

  “It’s ok, really. You have such lovely eyes. I just want to do them justice. Please?”

  Julia had plenty of practice at makeup, but this was rather a new experience. She had not, ever, “done” another girl in her life. She thought that it felt more like painting a blank canvas than doing her own makeup. In a way, it was dead easy. Nina had no pesky five o’clock shade to bother her (admittedly, Julian’s beard was too pale and sparse to be much of a bother), nor freckles (those were a plague of Egypt). At some time in her teens Nina must have been sorely afflicted with acne, and some scars still marred her skin, but that was nothing very hard to cover, with the right stuff and a bit of practice. She was winter-pale, like everybody else, but her skin had a sultry, southern olive cast to it underneath. Abbie had provided the exactly right foundation for it. What Julia found challenging was deciding how to make Nina’s strange, subtle beauty shine out.

  She was not a girl to wear pink blush and colorful eyeshade. There was a sort of blackness hidden in her, a shadow. It was heartrending in a way, but it was part of who she was, and Julia thought it better to make that darkness beautiful than to disguise it. So she cleaned Nina’s face with a wipe, applied moisturizer, primer, a bit of concealer where needed, stippled a liquid foundation on, shaded and highlighted here and there until Nina’s cheekbones stood out sharp and exotic, like the gipsy Julia saw in her sometimes. Then she made an almost Goth-girl job of her eyes with coal black kajal, smoky dark eyeshadow blended softly out towards her eyebrows, and mascara galore. It was fantastically difficult to put mascara on another person. But at the end, it was just right. It was what she had always imagined Nina might look like, if only, if only…

  “Now, that’s not bad at all. Look,” she said, pulling Nina to her feet and turning her towards the mirror.

  Nina looked at herself with astonished eyes. Her jaw dropped. Then she recovered and she just stared. Finally, she turned to look at Julia.