Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  But then we finished with what I realized was small talk, and she got around to why she was calling. At first I thought she was trying to warn me, but then I understood she was actually exploring my interest in the idea: She was gauging my willingness. How public was I feeling? Would I talk to another reporter? Would it help if she came along?

  I wondered if her father knew she was calling, and I realized he couldn't. He didn't. He would have told me if he had any idea what the folks at NPR were thinking.

  But it was possible her mother was aware of what was going on. In fact, it was likely: I could imagine Carly calling me before her dad, but--given her mother's and my history together--not her mom. Her mom had to know.

  "What does your mom think about all this?" I asked her.

  "She knows she's welcome to talk about it, but she doesn't have to. I made that really clear. I told her they might not even do anything with the story."

  "I don't see how they could if she didn't talk to them," I said.

  "Uh-huh," she agreed.

  What was it in the two grunts that comprised her response? Was it evasiveness? No, I don't think so. Carly is not an evasive young woman. What you see is what you get.

  Rather, it was the calmness in the acknowledgment. The aplomb. I understood then that she knew more than I did. A lot more. And so--though I do it rarely and am therefore not particularly good at it--I listened and allowed myself to be led. She knew what she wanted, and she knew what the real story was.

  Suddenly, I realized, I was just along for the ride.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Friday, September 28

  WILL BANKS: Hey, I was wrong before. I'm smarter now. Simple.

  Chapter 39.

  will

  WHEN I WAS ALONE, I WOULD FIND MYSELF TAKING deep cleansing breaths. I would take them when I would fall asleep and when I would wake, and I would take them when I would climb into my car.

  I stayed away from the edge of the airport runway as if it were a crack house and I were a recovering junkie. But the planes would come in low near the station, and I would wander outside in the warm spring air with a cup of coffee, and I would watch them circle and approach and descend.

  I thought of my daughter in Bennington, and my ex-wives in Brandon and Bartlett, and the fact that both of my parents were dead. I found myself wishing that my brother and his family hadn't moved to California. I wished, at the very least, that they lived in New England.

  One day my assistant wandered outside, and she asked me what I was doing. A pair of National Guard F-16s had flown by a moment before, and before that a United 737 bound for Chicago.

  "I'm watching airplanes," I said.

  "Why?"

  "I think I've lived in Vermont too long," I answered, which may have been a more honest response than she wanted.

  For a good part of March and April, I viewed myself as a predator. I slept with a woman I met at a public radio conference in Seattle--an executive from another station whose husband had recently died--and I slept with the woman who was the CFO of one of our largest underwriters. It was reckless and stupid. But we fucked in a hotel room chair overlooking Lake Champlain, and every single moment was as good as the sunset we watched.

  I slept with two different members of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra on consecutive nights, when the VSO was in Burlington for a pair of concerts. Both women were younger than me, and they both wore white shirts with pearl buttons. I loved to undress them.

  In the space of a couple of weeks, I had more than doubled the number of women with whom I had slept in my life.

  I wasn't sure whether I was proud of myself or I hated myself.

  I tried to stop having coffee with Dana, but I couldn't. Sometimes we had dinner together. She'd call and we'd talk--I was never impolite--and before I knew it, we had firmed up a place and a time to (and I loathe this word, really I do) chat.

  Always when we would part I would vow that I would never see her again. Never. I was through. And then I would try and seduce an attractive woman who was--and the word's letters would form in my head one by one--real.

  For three weeks in May I dated a woman named Beth, a public-relations manager for a hospital in central Vermont. We had sex on our first date and on every date thereafter, and I stopped trying to seduce every new woman I met. Beth was intelligent and thoughtful and giving in every imaginable way. She was more beautiful naked than with her clothes on.

  Still ... I feared I was losing.

  When we made love for what I knew would be the very last time, I turned on a light in a corner of her bedroom, and--much to her surprise and increasing discomfort--I just stared and I stared at her body. When I went down on her, I never once shut my eyes: I wanted to know forever what her vagina looked like, I wanted to see her tummy in repose. I wanted to have a picture in my mind of her clitoris when she was aroused, and of the way the pink drapes around it would glisten with moisture.

  Sex therapists and psychiatrists say men are more visual than women.

  I wanted images I could take to my grave.

  Does that mean I knew what I was doing? Or, to be precise, does that mean I knew what a small corner of my brain was thinking? Anticipating? Planning?

  Perhaps. But it may also mean I was merely desperate. Afraid.

  Perhaps I was simply trying to convince myself that nothing in the world could compete with the real thing.

  Dana suggested that I read Little Women because she said she was feeling a little bit like Laurie.

  "You know, Laurie?" she explained when she made the request, because I must have looked puzzled. "The lad who lives next door to the March girls?"

  "No, I don't know," I confessed. "I never read Little Women." She pretended to be incredulous; she pretended to be appalled by my unfamiliarity with what she considered a seminal work in the transgender canon. But, the fact is, I knew the basics and I understood what she meant. I knew that in Alcott's story Laurie spent years wooing the tomboy Jo March, and then, after she finally rebuffed him, he simply moved on to her kid sister Amy and married her. He believed that he was destined to become a part of the March clan, and it was the last name that mattered more than the first.

  In Dana's eyes, the parallels were obvious.

  "Allie's not a tomboy," I said.

  "You're a philistine," she told me. "And a literalist."

  I did not kiss her then, but I found myself gazing at her mouth as she spoke, at the lipstick that looked like burgundy wine. My sense is that had we not been in a coffee bar north of Burlington, had it not been three-thirty in the afternoon, I would have kissed her at that moment. I would have leaned as far as I could across the wrought-iron table, and I would have pressed my lips against hers.

  I have no doubt that people were talking. I have no doubt that people like Rebecca Barnard, one of Dana's peers on the faculty and my station's right-wing radio pundit, were murmuring that Will Banks had lost his mind. Or, at the very least, that he was intent in some way on the destruction of his career and his life.

  First it was Allison, his ex-wife. And now it's him. There must be something awful in the drinking water in Bartlett.

  But throughout April and May, Dana and I were merely having coffee or dinner together. That's all that was happening. We went to one movie together.

  And always, at the end of the night or the end of the day, we went our separate ways. Often when I would see Dana in the afternoon, in the evening I would go out on a date--a real one. Never did Dana come back with me to Bartlett.

  Together, we talked often about Allie. There was my Allie and there was her Allison, and we compared notes about what we loved in the woman and why we would always worry about her.

  Together, we talked about her career and mine. We talked about Carly, and we talked about Dana's family in Florida. We talked about teaching and radio.

  We did not, I realized, talk about my divorce, and I wondered if there was nothin
g there I needed to discuss. Briefly that concerned me, and I worried that I had grown cold. She reassured me I hadn't.

  At some point I confessed that I needed desperately to get out of Vermont, and I was planning to extend feelers that summer throughout the NPR station network. She understood there would be advantages for her to leave Burlington, too, not the least of which would be the chance to begin her life as an anonymous woman, versus Dana Stevens, the local teacher-transsexual. But she wasn't sure that she ever would. She had tenure where she was. Now that she had her sex change, would she ever get tenure anyplace else? She wasn't sure.

  Did we flirt? I don't believe so. But one's mind can't help but wander to sex around a transsexual, if only because you know the person beside you has had a sex change. Your mind will, of its own volition, wonder about the penis or the vagina that once was there and now is gone, and the penis or the vagina that has replaced it.

  Even now I wonder if that's the real reason why transsexuals make the rest of us so uncomfortable. Though many are wholly indifferent to sex, they think more about genitalia than everybody else, and they are considerably more comfortable with that reality.

  Nevertheless, I am quite sure that only a small percentage of my attraction to Dana was lust. Like a holograph image that mutates with the flick of your wrist, in an instant the beautiful woman before me could become a man with a ponytail--a man I hadn't much liked. All it would take was a tiny movement: Her fingers on her chin. A deep inhalation. An adamant nod.

  And then the notion of kissing her would become considerably more unappealing. And unlikely.

  In June I invited Dana to the edge of the airport runway. Recently I'd started taking my laptop there, and I would write the necessary station memos from the front seat of my car--memos about fund-raising and programming, about personnel hires and the use of our new performance studio--while the planes departed and arrived.

  "You need a vacation," she said when I suggested she join me. We were having coffee together at a shopping mall in a restored woolen mill just outside of Burlington, and the mall was near enough to the airport that the planes roared overhead no more than four hundred feet above the ground.

  "I need more than that," I admitted. "But it's more fun than you'd realize. Little kids love watching the planes come and go. Teenagers are hypnotized by them. It's just grown-ups who won't allow themselves to be wowed by the miracle of flight."

  "That's not why you sit there."

  "I don't know why I sit there," I said. "But that is at least part of it."

  It was nearing late afternoon when we finished our coffee and left the mall. By the time we got to the dirt by the chain-link fence near runway one-five, it was after four o'clock. The wind was warm and the sky was blue, and we leaned our backs against the front grill of my Explorer. I told her what airplanes were due momentarily, and which ones were worth waiting for: I didn't much like the angry whine of the engines that powered the Delta Connection's Saab 340s, but I enjoyed watching their slow, gradual ascent. There would be three before dinner. And there would be a pair of the smaller Dash 8s. And USAirways would have a DC-9 arriving from Philadelphia and a 737 from Pittsburgh, and everything about the planes--their size and their speed and the noise from the jet engines almost as tall as a man--would dwarf the opening acts.

  There was no haze that afternoon and there weren't any clouds.

  I realized that because she was wearing her loafers, Dana and I were about the same height. Had she been wearing heels, she would have been taller.

  We were completely alone. And when the first of the Saabs had flown over us, their propellers whipping up just a hint of dirt and dust, I kissed her. My hands were folded across my chest as if I were bored, but that's simply how I keep my hands when I stand. I don't recall exactly where hers were. We pulled apart briefly, and then I kissed her a second time, and when I did, her hands came up from wherever they'd been, and I felt them on the back of my neck. They were gentle and soft and there wasn't a hint of strangeness.

  I knew then that I would see her apartment for the first time that night, or she would return with me to Bartlett for the first time since March. But my sense was, we would go to her apartment in Burlington. My home was too close to Allie's. My home was too close to people who'd loved Dana and people who'd hurt her, and to that period in her life when she had bid farewell, once and for all, to the man in whose skin she had lived for thirty-five years.

  When we pulled apart, I was aware that my tongue was tingling and my legs had started to shake.

  Chapter 40.

  carly

  MY MOM HASN'T DATED MUCH THIS FALL, BUT I don't read anything into that. She hangs out with her friends, mostly. And she's happy to have her classroom packed with students once again. She'd forgotten how much she likes the chaos, how much she thrives on the energy you get from a roomful of kids.

  Because of All Things Considered, I only came home for three days before I had to start my sophomore year. I got home from Washington late on a Thursday night and was home through Sunday afternoon. And I actually worked a good part of Friday morning, listening over the telephone to segments of tape that Kirsten and Sam--the producer and the engineer--were splicing together on the computer.

  But my mom and dad didn't mind that I was only home for a couple of days, because they'd gotten to see me in late July and the middle of August, when I returned to Vermont to interview both of them and Dana and some of the people who'd been a part of their story earlier that year.

  My dad was going to leave for New Mexico a few days after I'd returned to Bennington for the fall. He was going to be the general manager of the public radio station in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and I think he was very excited. He'd been running Vermont Public Radio for a long time, and it was clear he needed a change. And so he'd rented his house to a young professor at Middlebury College and her husband for the coming year, while he decided whether he liked the Southwest enough to move there once and for all.

  Dana, too, I guess. The plan was that she'd fly out there a weekend a month, and my dad would fly home every third or fourth week for a couple of days. They expected to spend all of their vacations in Santa Fe, so they could see if they liked the area.

  They actually talked about Dana moving west when the spring semester was over.

  The main thing that struck me about Dad was how happy he was. This is an awful thing to discover when you're nineteen years old--pretty close to twenty, actually--but it's true: It was only when my adolescence was all but over that I figured out how unhappy my dad had been for most of my life. It was only when I was a grown-up myself that I understood the fog in which he'd been living since I was about seven years old.

  And so I loved seeing him that weekend at the end of the summer.

  The fact is, I had loved seeing him in July when we all descended upon him and Dana with the microphones and tape recorders, and when we spent hours in the studios of his very own station. Nothing at all had seemed to faze him, and he was a much funnier man than I'd realized. He held hands with Dana when they were walking down the long corridors between the offices and the studios, and he hugged her in the parking lot as if they were married when we were done with a segment and Dana had to return to the university for some committee meeting.

  Sometimes people asked me how I felt about my dad's decision to head west with a transsexual. Molly Cochran said she thought it was the most interesting midlife crisis she'd ever seen.

  I told her--I told anyone who asked--that I didn't think it was a crisis at all. I told people I was very proud of my dad.

  And, in a lot of ways, I was proud of Dana, too. Just like Dad, she had to see past the anatomy. She had to give whatever spark they shared some kind of chance, despite the fact that my dad's a man and she'd always been interested in women. That can't be easy, especially since Dana had always labeled everyone and everything, and put us all in these neat little boxes. Gay. Straight. Transsexual lesbian.

  Let's face it: In re
ality, it's all just about muscle spasms that feel really good.

  My sense is that my mom will start dating again when she's ready. She's smart and she's beautiful and she's an incredible amount of fun to be around. She'll never have trouble finding men.

  Or women either, I guess, should her interests ever wander that way.

  But she, too, seems pretty happy these days, and that's great to see. I'd worried about her in July. We all had. But she's resilient. She's tough.

  And someday she might even fall in love.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Friday, September 28

  WILL BANKS: ... So far I like the Southwest. I could settle down here. I think we both could.

  DANA STEVENS: Definitely. It's so warm, I could wear a sundress almost year-round. I like that idea: I think my collarbone is among my best features.

  CARLY BANKS: Stevens insists that she wouldn't mind giving up tenure at the end of the school year if they decided to stay.

  STEVENS: It would be a trade-off. But I'd be fine. Hey, I've done far crazier things in my life--at least in some people's eyes.

  CARLY BANKS: For love?

  STEVENS: Nothing--and I mean nothing, Carly Banks--is crazy if you're in love.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the members of the transgendered community--transsexuals, their partners, and in some cases their parents--who were kind enough to endure my questions, and read all or parts of this novel in manuscript form. I am especially grateful to D. C. Merkle, Kara Forward, and Liz Trumbauer. Ms. Forward and Ms. Trumbauer allowed me to spend time with them in not one but two states.