She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  “You know what?” Grace said later, when we left the hospital in search of whatever the town might have to offer by way of dinner. “She’s going to get all the good drugs. We’re not going to get any.”

  Barbara, my wife, happened to be away visiting family when Jim told me. She returned a couple of days later, and I drove down to Portland to meet her evening flight. We’d spoken a couple of times, but I’d said nothing about Boylan because it wasn’t the sort of news you impart over the phone and also because I myself had only begun to process what I’d been told. The first person I always want to tell important news to is Barbara, partly because I can trust her reactions, which are often more generous than my own, and partly because I often don’t know what I truly think about things until I do tell her. Which was why it now felt so strange to possess knowledge that I badly wanted to conceal from her.

  I waited until we’d loaded her luggage into the trunk of the car, gotten through the worst of the Portland traffic and safely onto I-95 pointed north, and only then, when the other cars fell away and the tall, dark pines began to enclose us, did I lean forward, turn off the radio, and tell my wife to prepare for a shock. (“This is not about us,” I hastened to assure her, fearing she would leap to some terrible conclusion.) As I told her that our friend Jim Boylan believed himself to be a woman; that he’d understood this to be the case all his life and was only now discovering the courage to admit it; that Grace knew and was, of course, devastated; that he’d consulted doctors who had diagnosed his condition; that he intended to enter into a “transition” from male to female, from Jim to Jenny, that would involve hormone therapy and, quite possibly, gender surgery—Barbara said nothing until my voice finally fell. Then she said, “Oh, this is just insane. There has to be something else going on. We know this man.” She was looking over at me now, though it was very dark in the car, as if I, too, at any moment, might be revealed to her as a stranger. I understood all too well what the news was doing to her. What she knew—what she knew she knew—was being challenged. The ground beneath her feet had shifted, was no longer stable. Of all the couples we knew, the Boylans had the marriage most like our own, and if Grace had not known the truth, never even suspected it, then what in the wide world was truly knowable? If you can be so wrong about something so fundamental, what could you trust? Or, more to the point, who?

  We drove on for many minutes, adrift in time and space. I speak here not in metaphor. We were supposed to have gotten off the interstate at Brunswick and taken Route 1 up the coast to Camden, but I’d missed our exit. I know now that this is what must have happened. At the time, though, we were simply flying down the pitch black interstate, peering out the windshield at a newly unfamiliar world. It occurred to me that what I’d told my wife—that none of this was about us—wasn’t true. It was about us.

  II.

  Over the long months that followed, as Jim confided in more and more people, it became clear that, as one friend remarked, he’d become a walking Rorschach test. As he revealed who he was, we revealed who we were as well, and in doing so, I suspect, surprised ourselves almost as much as Jim had surprised us. When Barbara and I talked about it—and it was impossible not to—we often ended up clinging to each other, reassuring each other that everything was okay with us, that we did know each other, that we weren’t harboring some terrible secret capable of atomizing our marriage should it ever come to light. But every now and then I’d catch Barbara regarding me strangely (or, more likely, I’d imagine her doing so) and immediately conclude that she’d been thinking about Jim and Grace and the fact that nothing in the world was quite as certain as she’d once imagined.

  When things spin out of control, when the familiar becomes suddenly chimerical, our instinct is to restore order. Jim’s sister, conservative by nature and efficient by habit, immediately set her own world aright by telling her brother she wanted nothing further to do with him. Problem solved, order restored. For the rest of us, encumbered by decency and affection, it wasn’t so simple, though I suspect most of us, in our own ways, also would have preferred “the problem” to go away. Looking into our crystal balls, we concluded there was no way Grace and Jim’s marriage could weather a storm of this magnitude. Sure, they loved each other, were devoted to each other, but they would end up divorced. Thinking of Grace, we decided that sooner would probably be better than later. She was going to have to invent a new life, a new happiness, and the sooner she got started on this necessary task, the better. It was Jim we always imagined moving away, to New York or Washington, some big city where he would find “a support group” of people who had themselves survived their own transsexuality, or were in the process of doing so. Interestingly, we didn’t immediately see ourselves as Jim’s natural support group, nor did we imagine that Grace would be the one to move to New York or Washington, because that scenario did nothing to restore order to our world.

  My own Rorschach reaction to Jim’s revelation was both surprising and disturbing because it revealed an emotional conservatism in my character I’d have surely denied had anyone accused me of it. After the day Jim first trusted me with the truth and I’d promised always to be his friend, I began to wonder if I’d made a promise I’d be unable to keep. Almost immediately, I began to feel like Nick Carraway after Gatsby’s murder; I wanted the world to be “uniform and at a sort of moral attention.” Jim had explained, and at some level I even believed, that his was a medical condition, not a moral one, but I discovered I was unable to sever that medical condition from its moral consequences. When I asked myself if he (I had not yet even begun to think of my friend as “she”) didn’t have the same right to the pursuit of happiness as anyone else, my response was no, not if it meant Grace’s unhappiness, not if it put their children at risk. He’d made his choice when he took Grace, to have and to hold, until death. “Conduct,” Nick Carraway says, “may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on,” and I agreed, almost proud that my tolerance, like Nick’s, had found a limit. My friend’s moral duty was to be a man, in every sense of that term. I tried to imagine myself telling him this. Saying the words: Be a man.

  Of course, my emotional conservatism, if that’s what it was, had more than one source. I was not just a recovering Catholic and, as such, prone to see the world in moral terms, but also a fiction writer, and no matter how liberal a writer’s politics may be, the act of story-telling is not an inherently liberal enterprise for the simple reason that storytellers believe in free will. A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: “A” followed by “B” followed by “C” followed by “D.” Rather, it’s a series of events linked by cause and effect: “A” causes “B,” which causes “C,” and so on. True, a person’s (or a fictional character’s) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices—fate and luck play a role as well—but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People in life—and therefore in fiction—must choose, and their choices must have meaningful consequences. Otherwise, there’s no story. Jim’s medical condition—his insistence that it was a medical condition and nothing more—was pure fate; if what he claimed was true, then his circumstance was preordained, which removed the whole thing from the realm of narrative, and doing so ran contrary to my own belief system, not just to my residual Catholicism, but also to my novelist’s sensibility.

  Of course, Jim himself was a novelist, a fine one. As Professor Boylan of Colby College, he too had sought solace and understanding in narrative. Not surprisingly, as this memoir details, he’d been drawn to imaginative literature, the heroic quest, which so often involves a revelation of the hero’s true identity. Only when the hero thoroughly understands who he is can his final dragons be slain. Such stories, of course, are not the only ones in Western literature that deal with transformation, and just as Jim had been drawn by his circumstance to a certain type of story, I found myself drawn by my own to another sort. Probably no
people embrace change more enthusiastically, at least in theory, than Americans. Who we are at birth is less important to us than who we will become. We are expected—indeed, obligated—not just to be, but to become. This, in a nutshell, is the American dream. But we are also by nature a cautious, pragmatic people. After all, Gatsby’s need to transform, to reinvent himself, is his downfall. We are, Fitzgerald suggests, what we are, regardless of our need to be otherwise. Ironically, this was what Jenny herself kept reminding us, though she was applying the wisdom differently.

  I wish I could honestly say it was exclusively great literature I turned to for understanding, but the truth is that I was equally attracted to more lurid, archetypal fictions, especially in the language of film, which has for decades provided numerous cautionary parables of transformation, of men who turn into wolves, into vampires, even into insects. Often these stories are not just about the man who is transformed, but also about the faithful, loving woman his transformation will inevitably endanger. At the climax of these stories, the “creature” must choose between what he’s become (a monster) and what he was (a man, someone’s lover). Often he’s asked by his beloved to deny his new nature, to remember who and what he used to be, and to be a man again. In these stories it is always clear that the creature is not to blame for his cruel fate. He did not ask to be bitten by the wolf, the vampire, the spider. He cannot make himself human again. Rather, the man he was is still “in there,” and it is to this former self that the heroine appeals. Remember, she begs him. Remember me. Remember love. Do not harm me. Even now, changed though you may be, you have a choice.

  Such is our credo. As social and natural scientists continue to erode our belief in free will by revealing the extent of our genetic and cultural programming, novelists continue to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. This is the fiction writer’s manifesto, because without it, there’s no story.

  III.

  Jenny’s operation seemed almost an anticlimax. For her it was a natural conclusion, a resolution, really. She wasn’t “changing genders” or “becoming a woman.” She’s always been a woman. A skilled surgeon was simply going to help her move about in the world. If the surgery was scary, well, all surgery was scary. Even for Grace, Egypt wasn’t as dramatic as I’d imagined it would be. For her, the point of no return had come and gone incrementally, undramatically, over the long months during which she’d come to understand that this operation was going to happen because it had to. Also, as if to suggest that nothing all that momentous was occurring, the operation itself went without a hitch. Jenny’d been wheeled into the operating room singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and come out clutching a button that controlled her intravenous pain medication. (Grace had been right. Jenny did get all the good drugs.) Within two hours of being wheeled back into her room, she’d talked to her mother and several friends who’d called to find out how the operation had gone. Her voice didn’t have much strength (we could hear Melanie moaning as she stood atop the commode on the other side of the bathroom door more clearly), but she laughed and joked on the phone and clicked her button, and by the next morning she had no memory of any of it. She seemed, more than anything, very, very happy. “Jim was always The Golden Boy,” Grace remarked wistfully when Jenny nodded off into another morphine dream. “And Jenny’s going to be The Golden Girl.” From inside the bathroom came the sound of Melanie climbing off the commode, then she herself emerged without a flush, suggesting that again no business had been conducted.

  You had only to look at Melanie, now haggard and frightened and dispirited, to know that she’d never been a golden boy and wouldn’t be a golden girl, either. She’d not had a boob job to go along with her GRS, as many transsexuals did when hormones left them flat chested, and as a result, she did not look, postop, much different from the way she’d looked a year before when some guys on the basketball court had offered to kick the shit out of her because she looked like a girl. She claimed to be content with an androgynous look, but I had my doubts, since she also admitted to having spent very nearly her last dime on her surgery. She’d come to Egypt alone, the way she’d done her entire transition. Her family and friends, after organizing an intervention in the hopes of preventing her from going through with the operation, kept on belittling her right up to the moment she boarded the plane and continued, incredibly, even now, to call her at the hospital to belittle her further.

  As a result, she was starved for human kindness, and she attached herself not just to Jenny, a natural ally, but more surprisingly to Grace and me. The sliding curtain that divided the room and had been drawn when we first arrived was now thrown open so that when we visited, Melanie could be part of the conversation, which among other things helped take her mind off the fact that she couldn’t pee. “They’re not going to let me out of here until I do,” she confided sadly, as if she’d spent her entire life disappointing people as a man and was now doing the same thing as a woman. She’d been scheduled to be released from the hospital the day before, and she had no idea how she’d be able to pay for the additional stay, not to mention the several outpatient days she’d be required to spend at a nearby hotel, the same one where Grace and I were staying.

  For me, Melanie, like the other transsexuals on the ward, posed a paradox. They might not look much like women, but I had little trouble thinking of them as female, whereas Jenny, who could (and did) pass for a woman anywhere, even before her surgery, still seemed like my old pal Jim in drag. As I regarded the two of them in their adjacent beds, I began to suspect that I might be lacking in imagination, the very quality in which, as a novelist, I most prided myself.

  No doubt one of the reasons I was among the first people Jim confided in was that if anyone was equipped, by both training and inclination, to understand his plight, it was a friend who also happened to be a novelist, whose stock in trade is moral imagination. The problem, as this memoir illustrates, is that the transgendered person’s experience is not really “like” anything, and Jim was to discover, alas, that no one would have more trouble imagining what he wanted us to imagine than his closest friends, and that my being a novelist counted for less, at least in the beginning, than either of us could have guessed. It wasn’t that I was unable to imagine anything or that my imagination had taken a holiday when confronted with intractable reality. Quite the opposite. From the start I discovered myself to be in imaginative overdrive. During the first week of my new knowledge, my imaginings were so powerful and relentless that I had trouble sleeping. Though I knew Grace to be a strong woman, I imagined her shattered as she watched her husband disappear, like an old photographic image, into terrible blank whiteness. I imagined their children ridiculed in the schoolyard, told by adults that they were no longer suitable friends for their own children. During this period, I was working on Empire Falls , a novel about the terrible weight that kids today have to bear, and it was not difficult to imagine Luke and Patrick, thus tormented, driven darkly inward, like my fictional victims, by what they could not explain, even to themselves. And worse. The Boylans lived out in the country, and it was easy to imagine them awakened in the night as rednecks in pickup trucks with the windows rolled down, full of last-call courage, bellowed their unsolicited opinions into the still night. And even worse. Three-in-the-morning night terrors that were only slightly less lurid than werewolf tales, but full of “respectable,” real-world violence. Gradually, they went away.

  But as I regarded Jenny and Melanie in their adjacent beds, I realized that banishing phantasms is not the same as imagining a happy ending, something I’d somehow written off as impossible from the start. I’m not talking here about the kind of happy ending that makes everything all right, that negates loss, that squints at reality in order to substitute a fantasy. Rather, I mean the kind of qualified happy endings that my friend and I had always managed to eke out in our own novels, the kind that allows Huck Finn, after witnessing just about the worst that human nature
has to offer, to “light out for the territories” armed with little but his own hard-won decency for a moral compass, as fine and true an ending to a comic novel as we’re ever likely to see. That’s what Boylan and I were, after all—comic novelists—and comic novelists traffic in hope. More important, this was the kind of imagination that Jim had asked of me from the start, and it was what Jenny needed of me now. She needed those who loved her to share her ridiculous, buoyant hope for her future, for the future of her family. The problem was, I not only hadn’t imagined a hopeful future for Jenny. I hadn’t really begun to imagine Jenny.

  IV.

  A couple of days after the surgery, Grace and I began to take turns at Jenny’s bedside. The tiny hospital room accommodated two visitors only if one of them stood, and having two visitors at the same time was also more tiring for Jenny, who, whacked-out on painkillers, felt the need to entertain us. So Grace and I would both drop by in the morning, then I’d leave the two of them alone, returning an hour or two later to take a shift while Grace grabbed something to eat or returned phone calls.