Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  “Oh, shit,” said Paul. “I’m late. I have to open.”

  He ostentatiously returned Radio Ethiopia to the rack, and bade Christopher farewell. He made it to the shop on time, took the key from Madge, the owner, who was off to scout rural Salvation Armies. Paul settled into the big leather chair to think, because no one bought expensive snap shirts before noon.

  Patti Smith—why was she such a genius? The cover of Horses was tacked to the shop wall. He tried to imagine the day Mapplethorpe took that picture, what Patti Smith had been thinking. He wished he had a cigarette. He thought about the smell of piss baking on the August streets of the East Village. He imagined drinking Patti Smith’s piss, then Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Then Jean Genet’s. Then River Phoenix’s. He poked through the clothes on the recent arrivals rack, trying on anything that didn’t require him to take off his difficult pants. He discovered that Madge’s ancient Polaroid had film, and so took a picture of himself, looking almost exactly like Brad Davis. He had a million-dollar idea: he would dress up like every character in Fassbinder’s Querelle and take pictures of himself. Maybe he could do a photo-essay for his film class instead of a final paper. He shook his picture desultorily while flipping through the racks of dresses with one hand, looking for anything that said Jeanne Moreau. When he unearthed an appropriately baroque dress (black lace on top, clingy polyester underneath), he took a picture of himself in that too, camera tilted down for the most flattering angle. He looked good, he thought. People should see these pictures. He could do a zine! When he was sure the pictures were dry, he tucked them into the copy of S/Z he was carrying around these days.

  Around two, a high-school burnout kid named Zero showed up to talk about comics. They listened to Zero’s Pantera tape for a while and Paul said that it was pretty good, which he truly believed while he spoke the words. He gave Zero two dollars to go get him coffee and let him keep the change. At two-thirty Paul counted out the cash box and then paced in front of the full-length mirror trying on hats until three, when Seth showed up for the late-afternoon shift.

  “How much you sell today?”

  “Just a pair of cords.”

  “Shit, Madge is gonna be bummed.”

  Paul shrugged and paid himself out twenty-four bucks. He had the whole afternoon free, and he was locomotive with desire for more more more. He might go back for that tape now, or first he’d stop by the ped mall to talk to the new girl at the coffee cart, or he’d hit the men’s room at the Old Capitol. There was somebody he needed to talk to on just about every block and in just about every coffee shop. He established a cover story of looking for Christopher (or Jane, if he found Christopher first) and set out to find what he could find.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul sat at the Java House with Jane, drinking a regular coffee out of one of their giant-sized mugs. He felt dainty, liked to look at his slender girlish fingers in contrast to the cup. He sneaked a look at Jane’s fingers. Mannish, he thought, unwillingly. Even the femmes are a bit mannish. The minute he had confirmation (besides his own gaydar) that a subject was a homosexual, Paul compulsively searched for the flaws in that person’s gender. Every gay had these flaws, Paul thought, although sometimes the flaw was being too perfect. Paul noticed this most often in men. Most women weren’t very good at being women, he’d learned when he started to really study them. Like Jane, with her mannish hands. If you didn’t notice her hands or know anything about her, you’d see a pretty white girl in combat boots and a Lilly Pulitzer golf skirt. Paul wondered why pretty girls were always doing stuff to look less pretty. He didn’t get it at all. The prettier the girl, the more likely she was to dye her hair odd colors, to wear relentlessly out-of-style or ill-fitting clothes, to adopt unnecessary and overbearing eyeglasses. Why did pretty girls want to hide? What was so wrong with glamour and the days of old? But Jane was different; Jane embraced and enhanced her own glamour. Jane undoubtedly knew her hands were mannish and endeavored to disguise that fact.

  “Dude,” said Jane. “Dude, seriously.”

  Paul swiveled like a hairdresser in his chair. He had not been paying attention to the correct thing, in this case Jane’s disquisition on wanting-to-be vs. wanting-to-do, which as it turned out when he made her repeat her point had something to do with Barthes’s distinction between a readerly and a writerly text.

  Paul was flattered Jane thought he could understand what she was saying, did understand some percentage of what she was saying, and was bored by having to think that hard. He preferred to coast, when he could, on a clever association, a double entendre. He aced his film classes, in part because as a young homosexual he’d seen all the classic Hollywood movies but also because he had a dirty mind. His talent for spotting the door to sex in any situation garnered praise from college professors! He was a natural-born semiotician slash feminist-psychoanalytic reader. The dirty-mind method also worked in English classes, with the younger professors.

  “Barthes was really into wrestlers,” said Paul, although Jane had not been talking about wrestling.

  “I know,” Jane said. “Everybody knows that, Paul.”

  “Oh, burn!” Paul said. He felt good-naturedly dumb. Let Jane be the smart one. She liked that; she was that sort of pretty girl.

  Jane, he suspected, had actually read all the books on her shelves, but when they went to Jane’s department parties, all the assistant professors laughed at Paul’s jokes. He loved being treated as a precocious child and found ways to work into the conversation that he was only a sophomore. No one had to know he’d taken time off, that he was the same age as some of the grad students.

  “You look different,” Jane said. “Did you get a haircut?”

  “No,” said Paul, running his fingers through his hair to check. “Oh, wait, no, I did snip a little here and there. Makes such a difference!” He’d actually just forgotten to change all the way back after his encounter with the youth, but he could hardly tell Jane that. He casually crossed his arms in front of his small breasts, hunching his shoulders very slightly in a gesture of elegant repose.

  “Want another coffee?” Jane asked. “I’m buying.”

  Paul nodded. He knew she wanted an excuse to stare at that counter girl up close; he could grant that the counter girl had cute glasses, but she couldn’t handle a crowd, always had to ask for your order twice. His mind wandered to the youth he’d seen in Chicago—the youth was one of the thoughts he had on heavy, if involuntary, rotation today. He mentally planned an itinerary for his next trip to Chicago. He’d go to all the places he himself would be likely to go. The youth was like him, must be. Paul would go back to Foxy, would spring for a ticket to see that Pomo Afro Homos show, would see Sister George play at Homocore. He could place a Missed Connection in the Chicago Reader, but what would he say? If he could find the youth, he’d know what to ask.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul was never very good at having friends. If he liked someone enough to get to know them, he’d want to suck their cocks or even just make out after weeks of prolonged staring. That might be his favorite. Paul perfected his stalking in Iowa City: on line for ice cream at the Great Mid, on line for the bathroom at Gabe’s, on line for coffee at the Cottage, in the study carrels across from the fifth-floor men’s room of the university library, in the English-Philosophy building, on the ped mall. He’d see some sparking boy in a crowd of bodies and he’d register that boy’s walk, his locks, his red jacket. Now he’d pick that boy out in any size crowd, out the Cambus window, on bikes. He’d home in on the boy, ask around for his job, what bands he liked. Paul would arrange himself to be regularly just at the periphery of that boy’s vision. He’d drop by the café or movie theater or departmental office where the boy worked and he’d not say hi. He’d ignore the boy pointedly at shows, in the Student Union, at any bar in town. One day, he’d approach the boy on the ped mall and ask for a cigarette or
the time or a dime for the phone, and the boy would laugh shyly and give Paul whatever he’d asked for and agree to meet him later at the club. Sometimes Paul would wait until he saw the boy across a party or a bar and then he might muscle up to the boy in a small space and say “Who are you?” to which the boy might reply, “You’re Paul, right?” or “What took you so long?” or “I have to be at the airport at 5:30; do what you have to do.” Paul kept lists of his crushes by name or identifying feature in a special red composition notebook. Every few months he’d flip through the pages, marveling at a time when Felix had been only The Boy with the Limp, Martin Williams The Comp Lit Guy, and Ryan That Girl’s Boyfriend. Paul regularly rewrote his lists, both to neaten his printing and to adjust the rankings of his desires. He’d read a novel about a guy who kept track of everybody he’d hooked up with, kept score, and Paul thought maybe he should keep track. But in life, as in the book, Paul had lost count—

  * * *

  ×

  —At the Old Capitol Mall food court, Paul follows a handsome dark-haired youngman into the men’s room. The youngman stands at a urinal, unzips his pants, eyes on Paul the whole time. Paul stands two urinals down, hand on his fly. The youngman watches Paul, strokes his thick cock. He frisks Paul with his eyes and Paul looks away. He’s seen the youngman’s cards: he—Paul—is desired. The youngman will risk beating or humiliation for the chance to touch Paul, and so Paul has won. Paul tries and fails to remember the very first time a man approached him in a restroom. He has never approached a man in a restroom, or anywhere else, has never given anyone the pleasure of knowing they were hunted by him. Paul is the game; Paul hunts only hunters. He hunts to be hunted.

  Paul turns cruelly from the youngman and his thick cock, unzips, and pisses a bus-ride’s worth of pop onto the white cake.

  “Whatever,” says the youngman.

  Another man, thin and balding, has noticed the youngman and has taken what would have been Paul’s place at the adjoining urinal. A math teacher, thinks Paul. The balding man stares at the youngman’s cock, then glances at Paul. Is his expression one of triumph or invitation? What does he think, that he’s Paul’s competition? That he and Paul are competing for the youngman? The youngman is competing for Paul and he has lost. That’s reality.

  Paul is disturbed but he won’t show it. He shakes off abruptly, half-hard and fluttering pissdrops. He stuffs his cock back into his low-slung Levi’s, admiring his bulge. He broadcasts his disdain as he stands at the sink. He runs a pocket comb once through his hair, putting the youngman and the balding man in their places as he attends to his ablutions. Their sexual activity is petty, worthy of no attention. Paul is sex, he is effortlessly sexual, effortlessly masculine.

  Paul possesses the sort of masculinity that distracts men and women, that makes some men angry. This has always been true. There is a type of man, often the father of a friend or a coach, who upon meeting Paul disapproves of him and will not say why. There is a type of woman who will not be able to stop herself, who will reach out and stroke Paul’s face, who will try to ascertain if Paul is as young as his hairless cheeks make him seem. There is a type of person, man or woman, who will approach Paul on the street and ask him straight out to identify himself. They’ll say: What are you, Hispanic? Ay-rab? or Are you a boy or a girl? Paul is accustomed to these reactions, these ministrations; his body is public property, his face a test.

  Paul leaves the bathroom and the mall, unsated—

  * * *

  ×

  “I’m not a fag hag,” said Jane. She could tell Paul wasn’t listening. “I can’t stand that people think I’m a fag hag.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re a fag hag,” Paul said, in his soothing voice.

  “Ugh,” said Jane. “They do, and what’s worse they think I’m your hag. I can’t stand it. I can’t bear it. Do I have to stomp around town in a three-piece suit? I will do it. I will. Who do I have to fuck to get seen around here? These people act like Joan Nestle never existed.”

  Jane sucked on her straw, considering herself as a possible hysteric. She should put in a chapter on reclaiming the hysterical woman. Or was that too ’80s?

  “These people have never heard of Joan Nestle,” said Paul, with a calm Jane found enraging, a calm that echoed her brothers’—the puerile, penile calm of success. Even the best ones are patriarchal, Jane thought.

  They sat in the creamsicle still of the Hardee’s on the ped mall, relishing the free air conditioning. Paul claimed to like the free pop refills, but Jane suspected he just liked saying “pop” for trade realness. Frat and farm boys loitered at the other orange tables, scowling at Jane with lust and displeasure. Even before she’d had a conscious sexual thought about a woman, she’d been wrong to men. All her life. Smelled wrong or something. Jane was alternately drawn to and horrified by Darwinism, and often found herself attributing phenomena to the unseeable (hormones, pheromones) despite her strict identification as a social constructionist. This was one of her sore places. Was biology destiny, in fact? That might really fuck up not only her identity but her dissertation.

  “There’s no one cute in this entire town,” said Jane. “I am so desperate for temporary love I am actually considering the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.”

  “But you disdain Michigan,” said Paul.

  They left Hardee’s and headed to the miniature indoor strip mall of alternative culture shops where they spent most of their student loan money.

  “I do disdain Michigan, but there’s nobody here. We live in a desert of androgynous softball players. A butchless desert.”

  “Maybe we should both go to Michigan,” said Paul, with an irksome confidence.

  “It’s daytime too, you know,” Jane said. “I’m not saying you don’t look great in drag, but…”

  Paul was unnaturally quiet. They walked into the magazine shop and perused the zines and alternative comics and glossy art magazines and other expensively made limited-edition paper goods.

  “Ooh,” said Jane, holding up a package of serial killer trading cards for Paul to admire. “Sometimes I wish I did American Studies. They get everything nice.”

  They moved on to the vintage clothing shop next door. Jane tried on a rabbit fur vest. Paul tried on a moddish white leather jacket.

  “Isn’t this so Emma Peel?” he said. “Don’t I look like a spy?”

  “It’s darling,” said Jane, and immediately experienced a spasm of impostor shame. She knew she camped it up around Paul, and wondered if he camped it up around her, if they were anxious collaborators in a consolidation of something supposedly shared rather than actual friends. She wondered if anyone had any real friends, when it came to that. How could straight people, for instance, have real friends when their entire lives were an inhabitation of a myth? She felt better, as she always did when she brought herself around to a critique of the heteropatriarchy. Paul hadn’t noticed anything; he was admiring himself in a large wood-framed mirror studded with antlers. The jacket fit him so well Jane was annoyed, then guilty.

  “Okay, we’ll go to Michigan together,” she said. “It’ll be like Just One of the Guys in reverse. I’ll create diversions so you can pee. We’ll get you a bra and stuff it with tissues!”

  “I have to show you something,” Paul said. He folded the jacket over his arm and fingered a sweatshirt from the 1950s. “But not here.”

  * * *

  ×

  Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?

  He had begun to read Anne Rice and Octavia Butler books—maybe he was a vampire? or an immortal body snatcher?—with the intensity with which he had once read James Baldwin and Edmund White and checked out stacks of videotapes (The Lost Boys, Cat People, The Company of Wolves) from the public library, looking for something, anything, that mig
ht speak to his condition. The closest thing he found was Orlando, but Paul wasn’t some count slash ess who could just instruct the servants in his castle to be cool. He had to think logistically.

  He’d sensed his own nascent malleability for years, since childhood. At first, he’d assumed all gays were like him and had quietly decided not to mention that they could choose. But he had pieced together over time, without revealing too much, that he was even to the gays a freak. He was alone in this world. He regarded other gays now with mild condescension. He had gone through the door in the last adventure in Narnia, and they were like poor Susan with her nylons, stuck on the train (although what was wrong with “nylons and lipstick and invitations” Paul had never quite worked out). For instance, Jane was a Susan. But she was also his friend. And she’d been starting to suspect something, Paul could tell. He’d decided to confide in her; maybe it would feel good, maybe he could relive those high-wire blasts of relief he’d felt in his previous big gay milestones.* Maybe if she knew, she could help him take better pictures for his zine.

  Back at Paul’s house, Jane smoked a clove cigarette coolly, tapping her ash into one of Christopher’s floral-print teacups as she watched Paul take off his shirt and unbutton his jeans’ first two buttons.

  “I’ve seen you naked, Paul, and it doesn’t do anything for me.” She sat back on the futon, narrowing her eyes like a stockbroker at a titty bar, and blew a series of spicy smoke rings.

  “Just wait,” he said, concentrating. He thumbed his jeans and briefs down to mid-thigh, exposing his pussy to the cold air. His ass clenched a little.

  “Dude,” said Jane. “You’re tucking. Nice tucking.”