Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  “Hmm,” said the writer. “I was expecting a better story. Something more spooky.”

  “Supposedly if you touch it you’ll die,” offered Paul. “I also heard if you kiss it you’ll have good luck, but if you kiss somebody in front of it in the moonlight you’ll both die.”

  The visiting writer snorted through his beard.

  “We’re all going to die,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Paul, embarrassed to be caught out in gothicness.

  The hatchback was freezing when they got back in.

  “It’ll take a minute to warm up,” said the writer.

  He handed Paul the flask, stretched back in the driver’s seat, and closed his eyes.

  Paul swigged the last bit of whiskey, and wondered what River would do.

  The writer nodded his head in time, faintly smiling, still with his eyes closed. Paul dropped his hand on the writer’s leg, and didn’t get punched.

  He proceeded up the writer’s jeans, and thumbed into his button fly.

  “Who was that girl at the party?”

  “Friend of mine,” said Paul, clearing away denim and long-john material.

  He pulled out the writer’s dick, foreskin almost entirely receded, and covered the purple head with his mouth. The writer groaned and cupped Paul’s head to his lap, and Paul felt like a young skier or mechanic in a Falcon video.

  “Did you screw her?”

  Paul shook his head without looking up. The writer’s cock thickened, so Paul breathed through his nose.

  “Did she suck your dick?”

  He shook his head again. He did the special thing with his tongue he knew how to do and the writer stopped talking. The writer’s crotch smelled like high school. The car got hotter. Paul bobbed his head and began to enjoy the crick in his neck and the writer bucked into his face again, hard then salty. Paul sat up and tried to subtly remove a pubic hair from his tongue.

  “I hate the next song,” said the writer, flipping the tape and turning on the engine.

  “Me too,” said Paul.

  They sat listening.

  “I just live over on Gilbert,” said Paul.

  Maybe the writer was going to freak out now. Paul hadn’t been with too many older straight guys. He didn’t know how they behaved after you blew them.

  “I’m hungry,” said the visiting writer. “I’m starving! You hungry? Country Kitchen makes some pretty decent grits.”

  “I’m always hungry,” said Paul.

  * * *

  ×

  “Are you ready?” said Christopher, who’d been up for hours, banging around the kitchen passive-aggressively.

  Paul did not understand Christopher. Look at him right now, for instance, with rice-cake crumbs in his beard and a Patty Larkin tee shirt, which not even Paul, had he wanted to, which he did not, could have re-signified as ironical. Hopeless.

  “I’m not awake,” Paul said, slumping illustratively over the kitchen table. He lay his head on a placemat.

  “We have to go,” Christopher said. “The rally starts in thirty minutes and I have the signs.”

  “Plenty of time,” said Paul, yawning.

  “Also, you have messages on the machine. You can’t just not check your messages ever.”

  “Okay,” Paul said.

  “Some guy has called, like, five times. Tony something?”

  “Okay,” said Paul. “I will listen to my messages. Is there coffee?”

  Christopher held up one of the hand-lettered poster boards, which accounted for the pleasant chemical fog of Sharpie in the apartment. Stop Violence Against Gays and Lesbians Now! the sign read.

  “Too much?” Christopher said. He looked worried. “Should it be ‘Lesbians and Gays’?”

  “Not too much enough,” Paul said. “What about ‘Queers Bash Back’?”

  “But we don’t want to advocate violence as a response,” said Christopher. “We don’t want to alienate people.”

  “I do,” said Paul, more and more awake. “Fuck those queer-bashers. Fuck all those fucking breeders. Write that!”

  “Jesus, Paul.”

  “What? They don’t worry about alienating us when they’re beating the crap out of some baby drag queen.”

  Christopher stacked the signs in the foyer, wooden handles up. Paul realized he’d better hurry or he’d have to walk. He threw on his old Pink Panthers Street Patrol tee shirt and toted a load of mealy-mouthed pacifist signs to Christopher’s ancient red Volvo. He hoped Jane remembered about the rally, so he’d have someone with whom to share his various critiques.

  Downtown at the ped mall, Paul separated himself immediately from Christopher, who, with his earnest friends from Queer Nation/Iowa City, planned to hand out chant sheets, of all things. Chants were spontaneous eruptions of clever queer rage, Paul thought. Nobody in New York used chant sheets. The Church Ladies practiced before singing “Oh, I’m a homophobic socialist, homophobic through and through” to the ISO guys at Pride. He remembered the ACT UP bus to Kennebunkport, how he and Tony Pinto had laid coats over their laps and cum into each other’s hands while mouthing “health care is a right.” When they got off the bus, they knew the chants.

  Paul made a quick lap of the perimeter, ostensibly looking for Jane but really sizing up the crowd in case there was a kiss-in. He saw the two out queers in the Writers’ Workshop; like Paul, they wore their East Coast tee shirts—one No Glove No Love and one Queer N’Asian. He saw a few closeted gays he knew, standing on the sidewalk as if they’d just happened to be in the neighborhood, getting a cup of coffee, and oh, what was this?

  There was a clatch of fresh-faced white girls with their radical-for-Iowa bobbed hair whom he recognized as women’s studies majors. There were a few day-shy regulars from the 620, on lunch break from their short-order-cook or gun-store jobs. And there was Jane, resplendent in her knockoff Chanel suit over a Dyke Action Machine tee shirt topped with fake pearls. At least he thought they were fake. Thank god for Jane.

  The speaker—a local politician—made her remarks, a pony-tailed bisexual man stood up and read a poem, Christopher led the motley assemblage in a few rounds of “Two four six eight, stop the violence, stop the hate,” and everyone dispersed to make it to their next class. No rage, which was disappointing, and no kiss-in, which was just as well if you looked at the available talent.

  The women’s studies majors had hung a clothesline of solidarity between two trees: strung-up tee shirts with the puffy-painted names of all the queers murdered in the last year. Transvestite hookers in Chicago, street kids in the Meatpacking District in New York, sissies in Washington, DC, boys strangled by johns, girls shot in the face, and then, of course, that kid in Ottumwa, just last week. All the queers who weren’t as lucky as Paul.

  “Coffee,” Jane said, coming up next to him.

  “Out of the streets, into the café!” Paul said.

  “You look tall today,” said Jane. “Are you wearing lifts in your shoes? Bold!”

  “I am tall,” said Paul. He might have given himself just a little height this morning, so his pants would fit better, but he hadn’t thought anyone would notice. Lately Jane had been positively nosy. Should he just tell her? he wondered for the hundredth time.

  * * *

  ×

  “And then?” said Jane. She sorted her index cards into neat piles (psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist) and then re-sorted them (French, American, postcolonial), but she was listening.

  “We fell madly in love, of course, and he’s asked me to marry him, and of course you’ll be my maid of honor,” said Paul, sipping his milky tea. He threw his scarf Frenchly over his shoulder and sighed. “Nothing. He’s old. He’s like thirty.”

  “You don’t even know how lucky you are,” said Jane. “It is virtually impossible to get a girl to have a one-ni
ght stand even, let alone just hook up in a car, without having a whole conversation.”

  “That is such a lie, Jane, and you know it,” said Paul, pushing his chair back from the table and taking one last look around the café. “You have one-night stands all the time. The butch girl from Toronto? Or that poet with the teeth? I have to be at work. Come down to the bar and lie to me more later, okay?”

  Jane abandoned her index cards momentarily and sidled up to the counter, where one barista was cuter than the next. She liked that word, “barista,” in part because it infuriated Paul, who thought her déclassé when she said it out loud. She ordered a double latte; she had work to do. But the baristas were like television stars up close, so attractive, with such dramatic character arcs. Jane wanted to be in the show with them. She wondered how they talked about the customers, if they noticed her, who was sleeping with whom. She liked the look of the short-haired girl with the glasses. Glasses were always a good sign. She took her latte and sat back down, glad you could finally get espresso in Iowa. She’d been spoiled at Sarah Lawrence; she’d defected to the coast only to end up in graduate school mere states away from her parents and their Folgers crystals.

  The espresso replaced Jane’s blood with something cold and fulgent, like liquid mercury. She started to have some very interesting ideas about Leo Bersani’s article “Is the Rectum a Grave?” but before she could write them down she realized that in fact she could use not only Bersani but also Bakhtin to talk about grotesque bodies in the New Queer Cinema. Bs! She decided to write a paper in which she only used theorists whose last name began with B: Bersani, Bakhtin, Butler, Lauren Berlant. Ooh, and Barthes. Yes! She needed another latte.

  “Hey,” said the short-haired glasses girl, bussing the table next to Jane.

  “Hey,” said Jane.

  “So, you’re friends with Paul?” said the girl.

  Jane nodded. Everybody knew Paul.

  “Does he have a boyfriend?” she said. “My friend likes him.”

  “He’s very single,” said Jane. “You should bring your friend down to the club tonight—he’s bartending.”

  “That sounds fun,” said the barista. “Maybe I’ll see you later, then.”

  Jane felt daring, and couldn’t concentrate on her index cards. The barista had thick brown glasses, like a German graphic designer, and a haircut that said she—or someone she knew—had even been east of Indiana. She didn’t have any of the obvious signs of Midwestern lesbianism (labrys jewelry, Indigo Girls tee shirts, softball haircut) and Jane hadn’t seen her at the club or anywhere but the café. Jane experienced a feeling to which she attached first the word abundance, then the word plenitude, and she considered how this might indeed be the best of all possible worlds.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul could make himself be attracted to anyone. This was one of his virtues. This was one of his virtues and one of his skills. He practiced, as a kid and later in life, in elevators, but the game could be played anywhere one was trapped with people. The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.

  The game was best when hard, when he had to sell himself on a stranger. He sneaked evaluating looks at shoes, at jewelry, at haircuts; he searched for clues about the sort of lover each person would be. In every single person in the elevator he looked for something he could, if not love, fetishize. That man’s hands were so large: Paul imagined the hands covering his small back, pulling Paul into the man’s face. That man’s eyes were so blue: Paul imagined drinking cocoa at a ski lodge in the man’s native country, where they conveniently would be ready for après-ski hot-tub adventures. That boy was so awkward, shifting nervously and trying to cover his tented pants in math class: Paul imagined the boy’s secret jerky confidence, pulling Paul’s hair and forcing Paul to gag on his long thin dick. That girl’s skirt was so short: Paul imagined fucking her with his strap-on, through the leg of her panties, in the stall of the girls’ bathroom at a nightclub. That man was so dirty: Paul imagined huffing his armpits while masturbating them both in the stairwell of a construction site. That swaggering butch in the red hooded sweatshirt and black leather jacket—Paul imagined deep-throating her plastic cock at a sex party in a basement dungeon while a crowd of dykes looked on. That fratboy’s ass was so round in his black and yellow sweatpants: Paul imagined sliding his cock in between the fratboy’s butt cheeks, holding them apart, and coming bitter handsfree spunk onto his outer ass-ring, eating it because it was his own.

  Paul liked to play the elevator game fast and hard. Step into the elevator, maneuver to the side wall, scan each body before the doors closed, choose by the next floor. Sometimes his choice was immediate: there was an actual angel in the box. Paul liked to work for his supper. He believed in trying in this life. As a matter of principle (feminist, queer, anti-phony, anti-bourgeois) Paul stared. He smiled at strangers. He held whoever’s glance he shouldn’t. When they held back, that was an easy point. Paul had practiced eye contact on girls at his high-school dances: look, look back, hold, score. It was all tricks. There was a trick to it all. Why didn’t other people know that? Why did people think Paul was so strange, so easy, so lucky? He wasn’t. He was just willin’, like Linda Ronstadt. Paul had spent nights with men far out of his league in terms of looks and social status: men who were blindingly good-looking, with gym-toned bodies; men with new European sports cars and pockets full of gold-colored credit cards; men whose names and faces appeared in the Village Voice. Just look back; that was the whole trick. Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want. He couldn’t always maintain, of course, but if you try one hundred times and you score five times, that’s five more times than if you didn’t try. And Paul tried for something every day, pretty much. Paul tried for a smile, a look back, an eyeful, a number, some illicit hallway kiss, a blowjob, a romance, a massage, a handjob, a finger up an ass, a free show, a licked lip, a passed note, a present, a surprise, something good, something better than the nothing he had.

  Another of Paul’s tricks: spot the former fatty, the hot gay man with the soft edges, the man who could have been arrogant but wasn’t, who had the credentials for haughtiness but was unsure, who welcomed advances, who was flattered by attention. Like all the most successful attention-seekers, Paul was good at paying out attention, exchanging attention for attention. Attention is a price you pay for services, a currency, a mirror held up to deflect. Paul relied on his ability to attract only the sorts of attention he desired. This was how Paul had avoided the regular beatings he knew other sissy boys had endured, how he avoided the bashings, the police, the hall monitors, the store detectives, the teachers, the informants, the landlords, the bosses.

  Paul had honed his skills, and by the time he was twenty-one, he could fairly accurately tell which regular-looking guy in any given elevator would be up for a bit of felching (active) or fingerbanging (passive), which shy girl was secretly dirty and which dirty girl was secretly shy. He could tell within a very close margin of error whose cock he could suck, who would drop to his knees the minute everyone else left the bathroom, which girl would beg him to shove his pussy in her face, which girl would probably expect him to lie on top of her like a man and pump for three minutes before leaking bare sperm into her vagina, that unassailable proof of the heterosexual success of all parties. Paul could tell this last type and he knew he couldn’t provide what the situation required.
This was the type he generally picked last in the elevator, all other factors (age, smell, gender, relationship to any socially accepted standard of beauty) being equal. Paul considered “not having a type” to be a point of pride. He was an omnivore, an orange-hanky flagger, an aficionado of all-you-can-eat buffets.

  In the elevator Paul just as often imagined the hand-holding, the running down the rainy street with, his hot palm on the striped shoulder of some boy, the being cruised, the reading Proust to, the picnicking, the kissing, the eating takeout, the spending the day in a borrowed bed—not that anyone needed to know that.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul amused himself privately in Iowa City, budding barely noticeable breasts and walking around town feeling the unfamiliar jounce under his layers, the distracting chafe of nipples against shirt. He spent afternoons at the public library, watching Taxi zum Klo and The Hunger in open carrels and enjoying the freedom from unwanted displays of public arousal his temporary vagina afforded. He tried on every abandoned prom dress at the Goodwill, a Superman of the changing stalls. He looked for opportunities, his favorite pastime.

  His Intro to Film Theory class had night screenings in the new hermetically sealed Comm Studies building, a building so full of charcoal-gray carpet and expensive locked editing suites that Paul always got a little hard when he walked through the heavy swooshing door. Tonight, they were watching Pink Flamingos.

  It was almost the end of the semester, and the long-haired grad student who TA’d the class said they could bring “beverages,” so Paul brought a six of Red Stripe from the bar. He’d hoped to impress the handsome grad student with his imported taste, but the grad student turned off the lights and left the room. Paul regarded his classmates judiciously, then pushed the cardboard carton toward them.