The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  One afternoon, DJ and I went to see the National Museum of Natural History because Sacha said there was amazing taxidermy there. Hordes of chic, shrieking French children ran around the stuffed elephants and bobcats, the Noah’s Ark–like procession of all creatures great and small and stuffed.

  DJ

  Sometimes I watch children laughing and playing and think: I’m so glad I don’t have any.

  ME

  It would be inconvenient right now.

  DJ

  I don’t understand why people do it to themselves! I feel sorry for people with kids.

  ME

  I don’t know—I think it would be cool. To have another person in your family who just came out of nowhere? Who you made?

  DJ

  It’s not a gingerbread man. It changes your entire life.

  ME

  I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. This [motioning to myself] can’t be all there is.

  DJ

  Well this [motioning to himself] can. I’m very disappointed in you.

  —

  WHAT I DID WITH the things Lamar Van Dyke told me in Seattle was write a story—make a meaning, impose a narrative on the information I’d gathered. That’s what I do. That’s what I’m doing right now. (That’s also what DJ and I did when we got back from Paris: We wrote a screenplay about our trip that we were briefly convinced was going to make us rich and famous, or, at the very least, would be made into a TV movie for a gay cable channel. None of that happened.) In the narrative in my head, that trip with the Champagne in the melted ice at the Hôtel Montalembert happened when my life still fit and my marriage was imperforate. Whether that is the truth or merely my truth, whether everything would be different if I could only go back to that hotel room and warn my younger self, I’ll never know.

  9

  One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else. By that point, many of my friends had already been working on their reproductive ambitions for quite a while.

  Elisa tried for six miserable years—going to the doctor’s office every morning before work to have her blood tested and her uterine lining measured. She was distraught pretty much all the time and talked of little else. Nature owed her this: She wanted to be a mother, which was her most basic right as a woman who’d bled once a month for twenty years. When she finally found out that she was pregnant, she ran to her boyfriend’s office and pulled him out of a meeting, and they jumped up and down in a frenzy of elation and relief. A month later, she fainted on the doctor’s table when he told her it was ectopic.

  Erika used up all of her savings on IVF. Every other month, another twenty thousand dollars was swallowed up. We would go for long walks up the Hudson and she would cry bitterly, enraged with herself for waiting so long, furious at her body for denying her the child she was desperate to produce. Her twenties and early thirties suddenly seemed to have been utterly squandered on whatever it was she’d been doing instead of getting pregnant.

  Samantha went the craziest of all of them while she was getting shot up with hormones. She was always on the brink of hysteria and entirely obsessed with having a baby—something she had been ambivalent about just months before. She hated the needles. She hated sitting in waiting rooms full of discouraged women who were hemorrhaging time and money, wondering with increasing panic after every failed attempt, Did I miss my chance?

  For all of them, it seemed that nothing else mattered now. Only motherhood was meaningful.

  —

  OUR REPRODUCTIVE POWERS WERE first made known to us when we were early adolescents, pubescent children, really. We waited for our periods with excitement! I used to trade maxi pads with my friend Mitsu Yashiro as if they were stickers—our mothers had bought us small boxes of sanitary napkins so that we’d be ready when the big day came. We were delighted by the different silky weaves, the various crotch-conforming shapes, and the promise they held: The future is coming. That was even more exciting than the related frisson of our burgeoning sexuality. (But then, strangely, suddenly, there it was: the power to attract erotic attention, a particular kind of admiration. A kind that made you feel feminine—ladylike, even. Too loud, too assertive, too much, too male, is really what I had been told I was for years by teachers, other kids, my extended family. But with the arrival of this new power, I was all woman.)

  After the initial thrill of the many kinds of panty liners, the sprouting breasts and blossoming hips, we were faced with the Sisyphean task of managing our fertility. Pregnancy—we were taught, if we were privileged—was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.

  From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

  With modern science it could be resurrected, though, made fire-breathing once more! We would go to the clinics and the hospitals; we would flood the offices and the coffers of the reproductive endocrinologists and the obstetrician/gynecologists and soon we’d look up and see a sky full of flying forty-year-old dragons. (Then we’d look down and see sidewalks crowded with double strollers full of twins.) The shots and the pills, the sonograms and the ultrasounds, the ICSI and ovulation induction, the treatments at the very edge of modern technology, were miserable in a way that seemed, ironically, medieval. But they were not without a whiff of excitement. Because we were playing with a power much greater than even sexuality: nature herself.

  —

  WHILE MY FRIENDS WERE becoming outraged by their inability to have children, I was tormented by a different kind of primal acquisitiveness. I was racked with lust—afflicted with and addicted to it. The entire world had shrunk down to a single point for me, the way your field of vision closes in when you’re getting a migraine. And the point was sex.

  When I slipped back into contact with my old lover on the morning of the lions in South Africa, I found out that she had changed. “If you saw me you might not recognize me,” she wrote. She had “transitioned” into a he. I was stunned.

  When we dated, Jen had never once said that she didn’t feel female—I had dismissed her initially as insufficiently butch. (And then I had been shocked to find that even though she looked nothing like anyone I’d ever been attracted to before, there was a chemical current between us that kept pulling me back, whether I approved of her or not.) Who would she be as a man? What did that even mean? I had to see.

  The transformation was astonishing. Instead of the girl with a catlike face and heaving gait I remembered, she—he—was a fit young man with a handsome angularity to his visage and muscular shoulders. He had stubble on his cheeks. His voice was deep and confident, nothing like the sound that had come out of her mouth when her name was Jen. It was Jim now. But I kept getting it wrong: calling the manifestly male person sitting across from me on a park bench in Greenwich Village by the name of a girl I’d known years before. And had stopped seeing because she freaked me out.

  Whatever I had given Jen of myself was always insufficient. If we were spending time together and I said I had to leave, she would invariably say she was heading in the same direction and want to walk me wherever I was going. She would sometimes call and say she was in my neighborh
ood, and if I told her I was working, busy, whatever, she would ask if she could come up just to use the bathroom, get a glass of water—something that would make me cruel and unreasonable if I refused. Whenever possible, I had gone to her little apartment instead of inviting her to mine, because that way I could leave: If she was at my place, I would feel panic creeping up when I wanted her to go, because I knew that it would entail a protracted negotiation, probably a fight.

  These examples sound benign. But everything with Jen had an unsettling undercurrent, because her fundamental drive was to push until she felt resistance, and then blast past it. She liked invading, intruding, conquering: finding what a person didn’t want to relinquish and then taking it anyway. She didn’t so much want to walk with me or come upstairs with me as she wanted to control me.

  When the lights were off, that was not a problem. It was as if Jen had access to a user’s manual for my body and brain that nobody else had known existed. I found her objectionable by all normal standards, but the way we connected wasn’t normal: It was uncanny, extreme, unnerving. “I like that dress,” she said once, about a blue terry-cloth beach cover-up I used to wear around the East Village as if it were real clothing. “I bought it for you,” I told her. When I’d tried it on at the store on East Seventh Street, I knew the second I looked in the mirror that I was seeing the version of me that she craved. I wore it constantly.

  Here, now, sitting in front of me, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, drinking coffee from a paper cup, was that person—but without breasts, without the defining edge of desperation. I had met him at the worst time in his life, he said. He (she?) had been unmoored, new in New York City and bewildered by who to be. I had been something to grip, much too tightly, he admitted.

  The hydrangeas around us in the Jefferson Market Garden were just letting go of their summer color. Jim seemed calm and self-assured and self-contained, an improvement on his former self in every way. He was like an ungainly shrub that had died down over the winter and come back in the spring, beautiful.

  When I got home, I wondered if whatever had happened surgically, hormonally (I didn’t ask for the details), had cured him of his craziness. If I had been born in a form that didn’t fit, wouldn’t it have made me feel—and seem—nuts? Sex used to transform what I couldn’t stand about Jen into what I desired about her. Maybe a change of sex had likewise made any number of Jen’s deficiencies into Jim’s strengths, the way it had changed her shoulders from a blocky woman’s into a strapping young man’s.

  I didn’t tell Lucy about Jim. I didn’t tell her because even though I decided I wouldn’t see him again (and then decided, after he emailed several times, that I would have dinner with him just once), I knew at some level from the moment we got back in touch that I was about to do something terrible.

  —

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LUCY’S affair with me, and my affair with someone I was sure I’d never love, is that Lucy thought I was a ladder to a new life. I thought I was having a smutty daydream. It is Lucy’s vision that sounds like fantasy—like midlife crisis, when you consider that she was in her forties, and I was in my twenties, and that we fell in love the first night we met. But it was my vision of infidelity that turned out to be delusional.

  I thought I could be like a French man with a mistress in a movie…that I could step outside of my life for a few gleaming hours from time to time and then return to it, without consequence, or with the sole consequence being my own satisfaction (or reduced dissatisfaction). I would rush to the subway at West Fourth Street, crafting lies about where I was going the whole way there in case I ran into someone I knew. I’d take the thrilling ride across the Manhattan Bridge on the B train and look out the window at the Statue of Liberty, feeling gorgeous, treacherous, lascivious, doomed.

  My mother had it all wrong: to bring that into your home, where it lies on a pile of blankets in the TV room, scaring everyone, polluting everything? Misguided. Unthinkable. But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

  At first, Lucy did not notice. She was preoccupied with her company. She was anxious about it all the time and reluctant to commit to any plan that would take her away from her vigil at the computer screen, where she sat vibrating with anxiety at all hours. When she wasn’t working or worrying about work, she would drink until she knocked herself unconscious, into the mercy of sleep.

  But what about me? Me me me me me?

  Virginia Woolf wrote that “showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow.” My mother glowing in the clinking Mexican glasses full of 7UP. Me in my red shorts in San Francisco—someone’s young and treasured girlfriend, not someone’s neglected, thickening wife.

  Ego. The sparkle of one’s own ego pumped full of bubbles by another person’s ardor, ardor that a spouse of many years can seldom muster, or maybe just doesn’t bother with.

  Ego, sure, but also sex. Sex that takes you—somehow!—through a portal to another world. Not just this world, in which you are this self, only lickerish: a new world, where a new self, who has nothing (but everything) to do with who you really are, comes forth. A world with its own dream logic in which the strangest things are desperately erotic—there is no predicting or explaining this; reason, like language itself, has no purchase here. Gender, too, is meaningless. Not meaningless in the tortured academic sense of being “deconstructable.” Here, gender is simply beside the point. (People sometimes tell me that they’re baffled by bisexuality: They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn’t. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.)

  Reason, language, gender—and also loyalty, morality, decency—simply aren’t currency in the carnal world. This world is value-neutral. This world is inside out.

  Sex that accomplishes this kind of transfiguration is a drug. It is not an easy thing to deny yourself once you know exactly where to get it. When I went to that apartment high in the sky above Brooklyn, the light was always platinum and everything looked lit from within. It was as if I’d stumbled through the door that separates regular life from what could be.

  Anything was possible: A woman could become a man—a rich man, at that, though it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Jim had no real job or career, but he lived in a dazzling apartment with three bedrooms and a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. (When we’d been involved years before, Jen had lived in a crummy apartment, like I did. We had both worked long hours, tied to our desks, and had to be careful how we spent our paychecks. His explanation for this change in fortune was that he had invested well. I suspected he’d gotten access to his family’s money—which I resented and disdained. What I liked very much, though, was having someone else pick up the check.) I could be married but have a whole second life, in a different borough, with another person, whom I had very little in common with besides desire.

  Every time, it was transcendent. But then I started not wanting to leave after I put my clothes on. And then I was destroyed.

  —

  LUCY WOULD BRING ME a cup of coffee in bed in the morning and I would feel the searing truth of how lucky I was to live with this person, to have this ally in life.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about someone else.

  It was unsolvable, unhinging. I was writing and reading about women’s boxing at the time, and I was struck by Joyce Carol Oates�
��s description of two fighters clutching each other in the ring: They form “a knot of sorts, tightly, cruelly knotted, there to be untied. You can’t, but you must, untie it. You must—but you can’t.” I had made myself into that knot. I love my spouse; I will not leave her. I am fixated on another person, whose attention I cannot breathe without.

  What is happening? Lucy asked me.

  Nothing, I told her.

  I feel like I’m going crazy, she said.

  Maybe you’re crazy but maybe you’re right. It was too much: I couldn’t do it. I could cheat on her—man, could I cheat—and I could betray her trust. But I could not tell her that her perceptions were wrong, that the situation around her was other than what she sensed it to be. I couldn’t deprive her of her belief in her own interpretive powers. You aren’t crazy. You’re right.

  I told her that I had cheated. I did not mention that I had also lost my mind.

  I could prevent myself from going to Brooklyn to fornicate, but my thoughts would not stay away from that other, ungovernable world and the person who could take me there—a person whom I found baffling, disturbing, and frequently mortifying. As if you could ever have a child together? I would think, outraged by my own mutinous yearning.

  Jim had said we could—should. A biological child, of sorts: He suggested I carry a baby crafted from his eggs, fertilized by donor sperm. His eggs. The phrase canceled itself out. And the idea infuriated me: Imagine the birth defects risked by a baby conceived from an egg that had spent years bathed in exogenous testosterone! But it wasn’t just that danger or the complexity of the procedures involved that made his suggestion repellent to me. It was his sense of entitlement—his belief that you could just keep choosing whatever you wanted in life, without ever sacrificing a single thing. (And me? What did I believe? That I could be gay and straight? That I could be married and unhindered? A wanderer and a mother?) I wanted to believe I was different from him. (Better.) And I did not want to raise a child with someone who didn’t work for a living and saw every parameter as circumnavigable.