She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  One afternoon when I returned to the hotel from lunch, there was a voice mail message. “Don’t forget to check on Melanie,” Grace reminded me. The day before, Melanie had finally peed and by way of reward had been discharged from the hospital.

  I had not forgotten. Actually, after lunch I’d taken a stroll through town and picked up a couple of things for her at the drugstore. When Grace had spoken to her earlier that morning, Melanie had complained of a headache and a terribly parched throat. Could we stop by later with some lemon candies? Well, of course we could. “We” was, to my way of thinking, the operative word, and since Grace was just then at the hospital, there was no “we” available to check on her, just “me.” I was already late for my afternoon shift at Jenny’s bedside, having dallied over lunch and spent too long talking to my wife and daughters on the cell phone. If I went directly to the hospital, I could spend a few hours with Jenny, give Grace her break, and then “we” could drop by Melanie’s room on our way to dinner that evening. That had been my plan.

  Melanie’s room was right across from the elevator. I pressed down, then, while I awaited the elevator’s arrival, went over to her door to listen for sounds. Music. The television. Something. If she was sleeping, I told myself, Melanie’d need the rest more than the bag of hard candy I held in my hand. I paused, considered, then finally knocked. Behind me the elevator dinged, and when the doors opened a middle-aged couple got off, smiled at me, rather quizzically I thought, as if trying to connect a man like me with the sick transsexual they’d seen wheeled into 302 yesterday. Just dropping off this bag of candies, I wanted to explain as they slipped their card key into the door to 304. Inside 302, not a sound. I’d done my duty, had I not? I could tell Grace I’d stopped by the room, knocked, and gotten no reply. Melanie was either resting or she’d gone out for a walk. Except she hadn’t gone out for a walk. She was still far too weak for that, and I’d knocked loudly enough to wake her unless she’d been sleeping very soundly. I knocked again.

  Unless she’d been sleeping very soundly. Odd, but I hadn’t slipped with Melanie, not once referred to her as “he.” I’d goofed twice with Jenny just that morning. My only consolation was that Grace still messed up occasionally herself. Still, was it stubbornness on my part? Refusal to let go, even now, of Jim? To all appearances Jenny had been, these many months, a woman. People who didn’t know she’d been a man were slack jawed with amazement when told. Now, postsurgery, she was anatomically a woman as well. Between me and full acceptance stood only geneticists and fundamentalist Christians, two groups whose wisdom I’d never before paused in rejecting. It was clearly past time for me to jettison what was holding me back, that midwestern, Nick Carraway desire to see the world stand at moral attention that, when allowed to thrive unchecked, turned otherwise decent people into someone like John Ashcroft, who couldn’t bear to be in a room with a statue of naked Justice, who had to cloak her lest she corrupt him, poor, pathetic boob that he was.

  These were my thoughts when I heard, finally, stumbling movement behind the door of room 302. When it opened, I took a quick, involuntary step back. The woman who stood framed in the doorway was Rochester’s mad wife, down from the attic, barefoot, her hair wild, her eyes frantic and unfocused, clad in a thin nightshirt.

  “Melanie?” I croaked, but her eyes had rolled back in her head and she slumped, first sideways into the door frame, then forward into my arms.

  V.

  Story endings, I used to tell my students, are often inherent in their beginnings. In the year that preceded our journey to Egypt, I’d found I was able to imagine the past—that is, imagine the young Jim Boylan before he and I had met. True, my initial reaction to my friend’s news may have been, as I said, conservative, but I soon discovered I had little patience with people who were more sternly moralistic than I when they learned of Jim’s circumstance. When someone asked how he could have kept such a secret from Grace all those years ago, I found I knew the answer. As I said, to the novelist, life—both fictional and real—is a series of dramatic moments, and this was one I had little trouble imagining. Jim, tormented since childhood and diagnosed with a condition he simply refused to accept, one day meets the very woman he’s been dreaming of and praying for since he was that small boy beneath the pier, watching the approaching storm— the woman who frees him from himself. For the first time in his life, he himself simply doesn’t matter anymore. She matters. She is not merely Grace, she is his grace—that gift from God that can never be earned, but must be rather freely and gratefully accepted. Perfectly radiant, she is not just the love of his life, she is his cure. When she smiles, he can feel what he’s always regarded as his illness melting away. It’s not just women’s clothes he gathers together from his closet for disposal before he proposes marriage, it’s a shameful self that can now be shed, like a suit of clothes. Not just hidden out of sight, but swept clean away.

  Who cannot imagine such a moment? The weight of the self simply vanishing, banished by the power of longed-for love, the promise of family, of normality. Does he tell her about the clothes in the Dumpster? The self in the Dumpster? To do so would be to suggest that maybe those clothes are not really gone, that the discarded self may one day reemerge. To tell is to doubt the power of the love he can feel coursing through his veins, routing the virus, making him well. What patient does not want to believe the treatment has worked, that he’s clean, that he can now live a normal life? Tell his beloved that he’s been ill for a very long time, that the illness may return, even though he’s convinced it never will? Tell her, now that his faith, which has never flagged since he was a child, has finally been rewarded? No, and it’s in his not telling, surely, that we recognize our shared humanity. This is what I attempted to explain to people, barely containing my annoyance that such an explanation should be necessary.

  But of course it begged a question. If I could imagine the past with compassion, why couldn’t I breathe hope into an imagined future?

  It was Saturday, but Dr. Schrang was in his office, and he answered his own phone. “Rick,” he sounded pleased. “Of course I remember you.”

  “Melanie’s in bad shape,” I told him. “She’s burning up.”

  “Put her on. Let me talk to her.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. She keeps passing out. Also, she’s sort of hallucinating.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Do you think it could have anything to do with the fact that you cut her dick off last week? I didn’t actually say this, just thought it.

  “Bring her over,” Schrang suggested. “Let me have a look at her.”

  “I don’t have a car, doctor,” I reminded him. Also, I wanted to add, this is not my transsexual. This is a whole other transsexual from the one I came here with. Jenny Boylan is mine. This one’s yours.

  “Use the hotel van,” he advised, perhaps as an alternative to slinging Melanie over my shoulder and walking the half dozen blocks through traffic. I hung up and told Melanie, who was now stretched out across the bed, her eyes twitching, that I’d be right back. She groaned.

  There was a young man on the desk in the lobby. “I’m going to need your help,” I told him, and my expression must have revealed that I was dead serious, that I wasn’t giving him an option, that he wasn’t going to enjoy the task I had in mind for him, that I knew that it wasn’t any more a part of his job description than it was part of mine. “We’re going to need a wheelchair, and you’re going to want to pull the van right up outside the front door. Room 302,” I added.

  He seemed to know what that meant.

  To my surprise, Grace was in the waiting room half an hour later when I came out of Schrang’s office. “I realized after I left the voice mail, it wasn’t fair to ask you to do it alone,” she said. She’d been to the hotel, heard what had transpired there.

  “I almost didn’t,” I confessed, feeling the chill of that truth.

  Later in the afternoon, we abandoned Jenny altogether in order to visit M
elanie in the emergency room. A massive infection was the diagnosis. But Grace suspected there was more, and she was right. Late that morning, Melanie had gotten yet another phone call from home, from a loved one who wanted her to understand that she was now a freak. Already feverish and shivering and light-headed, she’d been about to call the hospital. Now instead she drew the curtains against the harsh sunlight, crawled under the covers, and went to sleep. Another couple of hours and her kidneys might have failed. “I could have died,” she told us. “If it hadn’t been for the two of you. . . .”

  When Grace went over and took her hand, Melanie broke down. “My partner,” she said, sobbing, “she’s not a bad woman. This is just so hard for her.” Incredibly, she seemed to have little comprehension of the fact that the woman she was confiding in knew precisely how hard it was. “But my friends,” Melanie went on, looking more like a frightened little girl than a woman, “I don’t understand why they have to say such terrible things. Why do they have to make me feel like this, over and over?” She was regarding me now, as if I might know the answer to this one. I thought about the advice I’d nearly given my friend. Be a man.

  And suddenly I was as angry as I could remember being in years. Angry at those friends of Melanie’s who’d allowed her to come here alone, because of course it was easy to be angry at them, having never met them. And angry at Jenny’s sister, also for not being here where she belonged, and because I’d never met her, either. Even angry at Melanie herself for being so oblivious, for thinking she needed to explain to Grace how hard it was for the wife of a transgendered person to accept her loss. And, I had to admit, angry at myself for not once having fully imagined how afraid and lonely Jenny had been throughout much of her life. I’d grasped it intellectually, but I’d somehow not felt it until I saw that fear and loneliness reflected in the eyes of a stranger. And finally angry at the whole brutally unfair world, which distributes its blessings and burdens so unequally. Moe, you bastard.

  Back in Jenny’s room, we gave her the good news (that Melanie was going to be okay) and the bad (that after Jenny’s one blissful day in a single room, Melanie was specifically requesting to move back into her old room with her old roomie). “If that’s okay with you,” the nurse added.

  “Of course it is,” Jenny said, as if the question were absurd, as if people were never unkind, or intolerant, or selfish, or ignorant, as if she’d heard once as a child that people could be this way, but never witnessed such behavior personally. It was, of course, the same generosity of spirit, neither masculine nor feminine, that Jim had shown in welcoming me to Colby College, to a job that should have been his, the same generosity that had for too long allowed him to suffer alone rather than share his burden, that allowed him to forgive, again and again, those who trespassed against him. Against her.

  And so, an hour later, Melanie, looking sheepish, was wheeled in, and we again pulled back the sliding curtain so we could all be one big happy family.

  VI.

  According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed (like gender, some would argue), while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world in awkward bodies that betray us at every turn. This is not the special dilemma of the transgendered person; it’s all of us.

  Two days after Melanie returned to Jenny’s room, Grace and I boarded the plane that would take us home. I had less than twenty-four hours before I was to embark on a long, grueling book tour. Grace was returning to work and the children and a life she was reinventing, a life she’d been reinventing now for nearly two years. As she stared out the window at the flat midwestern landscape below, I regarded her with wonder. Years earlier, her heart had inclined in the direction of another soul, and now, against the advice of many friends and well-wishers, she’d had the wisdom to understand that when our hearts incline—often in defiance of duty, blood, rationality, justice, indeed every value we hold dear—it’s pointless to object. We love whom we love. In the past two years, for Grace, everything had changed and nothing had changed. Her heart still inclined, as was its habit.

  The same was true for Jenny. I’d witnessed this earlier in the week, the night of her surgery, at the end of the very long day she’d been envisioning, in one way or another, for forty years. She’d been slipping in and out of drugged sleep all afternoon and evening, awakening with a joke to tell and then falling asleep again in the middle of its punch line. Finally, as it got later, she grew serious. Time, she knew, for Grace and me to return to the hotel. When her eyes filled with tears, Grace went around the side of the bed and took her hand, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek. “Grace,” Jenny whispered, “sing me a song.” As she began to sing “Two Little Boys,” a lullaby she often sang to Luke and Patrick at bedtime, her voice sweet and low, the words themselves inaudible to me, I found myself backing toward the open door. Jenny was gazing directly into Grace’s eyes, Grace into Jenny’s, and their intimacy in that moment was so wholly unguarded that I felt myself to be an intruder. At the doorway I stopped, though, unwilling, perhaps unable, to leave.

  What I was witnessing, I realized, was a great love story. Jenny had told me, many times, about how he—Jim—as a boy had walked beneath the Surf City pier as the storm approached and there prayed for love to save him. As I watched the tableau before me, it was hard to ignore the possibility that this prayer had been answered, ironically, of course, the way our prayers are all too often answered, the result perhaps of our not understanding what to ask for, or how to ask for it. And it occurred to me, too, that if this was a great love story, I had no idea where we were on its time line. For all I knew, we might be nearer its beginning than its end. How was it that I’d failed to imagine a scene such as the one I was witnessing? Was it so implausible? Hadn’t I been witnessing this same love and tenderness throughout all the years I’d known these lovers?—for that’s clearly what they still were, in the sense that mattered most. Is it the fact that the world so often disappoints us that makes hope seem so far-fetched? What makes imagining the worst so easy? Is it really so much more plausible? Or, frightened children that we are, do we imagine the worst as a kind of totemic magic, in the hopes of fending it off in reality?

  When the lullaby was finished, Jenny, still holding Grace’s hand, looked over at me. She was visibly exhausted, no more than a second or two from deep sleep, though a small, impish smile creased her lips. “Russo,” she said, “Sing me a song?”

  It was a joke, of course, which was just as well. Sing? I could barely speak.

  Notes

  This is a true story. In order to make its rendition tolerable, certain moments in it have been gently altered—by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary. All private individuals mentioned in this memoir appear with different names, and some of them have been obscured still further in an attempt to ensure their privacy. Public figures have largely been left to fend for themselves.

  The author may be contacted via her Web site, members.aol. com/Jfinneyboy, e-mailed via JennyBoylan@aol.com, or written to care of her publisher, Doubleday Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc.

  A READER’S COMPANION TO She’s Not There

  by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  From the Editor

  Dear Reader,

  Have you ever walked into a cocktail party and felt you had no one to talk to? That your clothes were all wrong, your gestures uncomfortable? That you needed to be witty and charming so no one would notice how o
ut of place you were?

  For Jim Boylan, life was a perennially awkward cocktail party. Funny and smart, he was often the life of the party, but in his heart he knew that his true self and his external persona were at odds.

  This is a book for anyone who has felt uncomfortable, out of sorts with the world, misunderstood by peers. As Boylan says, “While the dilemmas of transgendered people are arcane to most people, it’s my hope that this book will connect to anyone who has ever wanted to do something they feared was impossible, to anyone who has ever been guided along a difficult path by the people that they love.”

  She’s Not There is startling for the universality of Boylan’s human emotions—and the exuberance and ease with which they are presented.

  Best,

  Deb Futter

  Questions for Discussion

  Do you feel that Boylan had a choice in becoming a woman to the world?

  What responsibility does Jenny have for Grace and their children? What responsibility do they have to her?

  Have you ever known someone who made a gender transition? How did the change affect people who knew the person before?

  How central a role do you believe gender plays in our identity? How much different, and in what ways, do you believe you’d be if you were a member of the opposite sex? Do you think that some traits are inherent in one gender?

  Discuss Boylan’s experiences buying a car and buying a pair of jeans. Have you witnessed or experienced similar situations? Do you notice the differences in expectations and attitudes in the ways people of other sexes are portrayed?

  What role does humor play in Boylan’s life and in this book?