Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  “Should we leave breadcrumbs?” he asked.

  “Are you scared?” Diane said. She turned and appraised him.

  “Of course not,” said Paul, and they kept walking in the trees. The August light filtered through the canopy. Paul’s work sweat, drying on his back and between his breasts, cooled him in the sweet warm dusk. His skin was electric, buzzing, humming like drugs, like fear, like New York City sidewalks, like any moment before any time he’d ever kissed anyone important. Paul breathed in the walk-in-closet smell of the forest floor and waited for dark, toggling between the pleasures of trusting and fearing a stranger, as they walked and walked.

  “Look,” breathed Diane, and bridged two fingers to Paul’s wrist.

  He followed her eyes to a doe. He had forgotten about animals. She pressed his wrist again and he looked to the left, saw another doe, and tried to exhale his pent-up air noiselessly but failed. Both animals shot through the trees. Diane ran after, and Paul followed, into the open, out to a dark purple meadow. The deer were gone to wherever deer go. Paul flopped down in the high grass next to Diane, who was looking up at the darkening sky.

  “Smells good,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  They lay in the field, smelling grass and the night. Paul’s mind flooded with questions—What was Jane up to? Had any famous performers arrived? Should he be making himself available to meet other possibly cuter people? Did Diane want to kiss him or was he projecting?—and then the flood receded, unusual for him. Diane moved her head to look at him, and he looked away. He just wanted a lark, to pass, to pass among all these women, to sleep with a bunch of people. And now this girl was looking at him, and seeing something he either was or wasn’t.

  Diane leaned up on her elbow with a kind of tomboy grace. Paul felt nervous. Paul never felt nervous before whatever variation on what he thought was about to happen. He licked his lips, which seemed remarkably soft to him, softer than his normal lips, which so many men had proclaimed so especially soft. Maybe not that many men, but more than a few. And Tony Pinto. Paul touched his bottom lip with his thumb in a gesture he meant earnestly, which is to say he did not mean at all but which he knew to be—had often deployed as—the gesture of a provocative naïf. Words pattered through his mind, and then Diane leaned over and kissed him, which shut all the words up. How hot her mouth was, and how soft her lips! She climbed on top of him, boarded him, lay atop him kissing and gesturing on his electric skin, his breasts, his belly through his deliberately thin tee shirt. He felt the rightness of his tee shirt for the moment and the pounding thrum in his vagina, where he could feel Diane’s leg, electric. He was lightheaded from lack of air and kissed through his dizziness, miraculously still alive. He sneaked his eyes open and, still kissing, stared at the rosy crepe of Diane’s eyelids, until the sleepy pull of the kiss told him that she was lightheaded and sneaking and sleepy too, that they were in league.

  “How long do you think we can kiss for?” Diane said.

  “Hours,” said Paul. “Hours and hours. A hundred hours? Seven hours. I don’t know.”

  They kissed more, with this dare in their heads, and then Paul couldn’t take doing nothing else, her hands all over him. He slid his hand down her workpants into the slidey packet of her, and felt some kind of jittery bursting in his own self, and she jangled out of her clothes to give his hand a better angle to get inside her and he cupped his fingers up inside her, mouth on her nipple, under her pushed-up shirt. His hands somehow knew what to do and he realized that he’d slid his entire hand inside her without asking. She squeezed his knuckles and he tried to tuck his thumb without hurting her, because of how many lectures on safe fisting, and how different could a vagina be? He wondered if she would break his hand with her throbbing and then he surrendered to the immediate need to suck on something and bent to her clit, where he felt exceedingly peaceful for a long time, sucking and slowly moving his fist, so slowly, until she began to come, or come again?, through which Paul just hung on, which seemed to be the right thing. Afterward she smiled at him and they kissed and Paul felt floppy and amped and disturbed in a way he thought might be connected to not having come. Or had he? Things were very sloshy down there and had maybe changed states in some incomprehensible way. Diane was kissing him again, and again this dispelled the thinking and then somehow she had slid between his legs, pulled off his shorts, and was sucking on his girl parts through and then under his hot soaking panties, building to a violent universal bang. Then it was over, and he was just smelling crushed grass and sex and the starry night all over him.

  Diane led Paul through the night woods to the main path, and pointed him toward his campsite. Paul wanted to get away from her so he could gloat and also relax his guard, and only after they’d said a chaste goodbye at a fork in the path did he wonder if she wanted to get away from him for some other reason.

  He made it back to the tent and collapsed on top of his sleeping bag. Where was Jane? He needed to debrief. He let his body relax into his normal shape, and realized how tired he was from the effort of concentration during sex and over the last two days. His soft penis felt strange in his bought-for-the-trip panties, like an overgrowth. What would Diane think if she knew? How long could he stay a girl without relaxing? And so on, until sleep took him.

  * * *

  ×

  He needed to piss and—whose body? oh, Jane, phew—white morning light through the tent flap and birds, shockingly loud birds, how loud those birds!—and he was up. In every way.

  Paul had always considered the piss hard-on obnoxiously, frattishly sexy in others and a biological imperative in himself, but now it was one more element to control. He concentrated on shifting back into his girl body but couldn’t get beyond the breasts. He pulled on his navy blue hooded sweatshirt, glanced at Jane drooling on her pillow of balled-up clothes, and wriggled out of the tent hoping like a middle schooler that his pants were baggy enough. The campsite was quiet, no signs of life from the two other tents. Paul sneaked through the brush to a large tree he hoped was out of sight, pulled down his pants, and squatted with his hand covering his half-hard dick, hoping he could avoid wetting his panties. The more he tried to squeeze out the piss the harder he got. He watched the tents like a sniper, furiously rubbed out a teaspoon of sperm into his palm, buried it in the black dirt beneath him, and then finally, finally the great release. His bladder empty, he found he could let his vagina return, still dripping piss. The leaves seemed dirty, so he wiped with his hand. He looked up and realized people were stirring at the tents, building campfires, returning from their own peeing missions. He wasn’t ready to be discovered; when he’d come into his hand he’d thought, unbidden, of Diane, and he wanted more of whatever was here. He’d need to be careful.

  Jane was up, looking like a field hockey player in her sweatpants and creased sleep face. Paul told her so and she punched him on the arm and he squealed.

  “You’re going to have to rein in the faggotry,” Jane said.

  “Can’t I just be a femme?” said Paul.

  Jane rolled her eyes.

  “Seriously,” said Paul. “I think I’m a femme.”

  “You’re not a femme,” said Jane. “Trust me.”

  Paul wondered if she was right.

  They tidied up their tent and headed to the breakfast area, briefly sketching their respective conquests while eyeing the scene. He and Jane were well matched as conquistadors, Paul thought, because neither took the other’s wandering eye personally. He felt a surge of appreciation for Jane. None of his fag friends could do that; when he went cruising with another guy he ended up competing with or fucking him. Maybe women are less competitive, he thought, and felt a pleasurable second-wave sisterliness.

  Early-rising crews of workers roamed the paths, hammering down rugs on the dirt for wheelchairs and shouting into walkie-talkies to prepare for the first day of the festival week. Paul and
Jane ate gloppy oatmeal at one end of a picnic table, silently discussing the surrounding talent with a system of eye and eyebrow gestures. Jane had a night shift and headed off to leisurely scope new arrivals, in case she wanted to trade up from Frog. Paul headed to his day shift. He pictured Diane, moments away, and shivered internally. But when he arrived it was no Sheela, no Diane—just some new shift leader, the Hummus Butches, and women’s music. Torture! He sneaked a look at the posted schedule: Diane wasn’t due in until the next day. And they weren’t scheduled together again until Wednesday. She was probably off right now meeting someone else.

  Paul chopped his pile of carrots carefully, languishing in the sad earnestness of the woman who was driving away from something upsetting in a fast car, the one who was closer to being fine, the one for whom life was like a brook, and all the others, those amber divas of lesbian melancholy so different from his gayboy ideas of women who were every woman, women for whom no mountain was too high, women who remembered the ways things were. Those hard sneering punks with their chains would never get it, not like sensitive Paul, suffused Paul, Paul of the slow hand and the capacious heart. Where was Diane? Why did he care? He resolved to look around for a better catch once his shift was up. One of the butches (he still couldn’t tell them apart) popped a new tape into the box. Paul identified the early strains of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside just before the shift leader punched eject.

  “Oh, come on,” said the punk. “It’s only one guy and all he does is play the guitar.”

  “No men’s music on the land, you know that,” said the shift leader. She handed the cassette to the butch and put in Joan Armatrading. “Did you get a break yet, Polly? Go, go! Don’t be shy.”

  Paul, grateful, made himself a cheese sandwich and walked outside the tent for the first time in hours. His shift was almost over, which was always the best time to take a break anyway. Funny to come all the way to Michigan to work in a restaurant, he thought. He wondered if he’d ever get away from the smell of chickpeas.

  Paul finished up his shift without talking to the other workers, and he realized that he’d been uncharacteristically quiet for two days straight. He knew only two people to talk to in the whole state. Why was he even here? He walked back to the tent, got his towel, and headed to the showers to remove the food-service residue. The shower area was quiet; most people were at dinner but Paul was full and antsy. He cleaned up and dressed carefully in everything cut off: tee shirt, sweatshirt, and low-slung Levi’s. His hair was rocker shaggy and he wore ball-bearing chains around his neck and delicate wrists. He applied black eyeliner and mascara to make his point, using Jane’s abandoned sunglasses as a mirror. He would go see bands, he thought, and hunt there.

  Down in the stage area, people crowded in from all sides, cozily, and Paul realized—again—they were all women. They were all women, except him, including him. No one was looking at him strangely. He was being paranoid. He was a girl, just like these girls. And they were all so hot and, yes, beautiful.

  He saw Diane standing next to a short curly-haired butch, but she didn’t see him, and he looked away, “lost in thought.” A moment later he felt her hot hand on his bicep. They looked at each other with impossible-to-hide giddiness. Paul understood the expression “to throw oneself at someone.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “This is kind of amazing,” said Diane. “It’s like a world within the world.”

  “Temporary autonomous zone!” Paul said. “Space travel!”

  She was taller than Paul, and he followed her as they wended through the tattooed love children, the women’s studies professors, the raucous catcallers, the quiet swayers, the breastfeeders, the cliques of the fat-positive and the scent-free, the disability activists and the suburbanites. Paul knew what Jane would say about so much of this. She’d be so full of disdain for those she imprecisely called “softball players,” who she thought were lowering the aesthetic bar. Paul wasn’t sure how he felt. Jane was angry about something that didn’t bother him. Paul was aware of wanting to stand out and wanting to sit down amid the happy throng. He liked being in on the secret. He picked his way around foldout chaise longues and blankets, between coolers and clumps of standers, and stood still.

  Diane pressed his hand. There was music but they weren’t listening to the music. The music was like a rip in the sky, far and impenetrable.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” she said. “I might have just hit capacity of humans.”

  “Okay,” said Paul.

  She threaded them away from the stage. Diane was leading him he didn’t know where. Paul imagined they looked to the assembly of good listeners like delinquents, and was pleased. On the dirt paths, they encountered other derelicts and evaders, sneaking away from one exaltation toward some other.

  They repaired to Diane’s tent, where they had sex until the sun came up. Diane raced off to her breakfast shift and Paul headed back to his own tent woozy with adrenaline.

  * * *

  ×

  They moved Diane’s tent to the field where they’d fucked for the first time; they made a fort with a cache of food, a tape player and batteries, and firewood. Paul had maintained his girl body for five days straight now, sleeping lightly until Diane went off to a work shift without him.

  Paul woke in their tent alone, still in girl form. He got up to pee, victorious over his erstwhile penis but still urgent. It was very early, pink sky early. Diane was nowhere to be found. Paul squatted at the tree line and breathed in the morning, letting hot urine spill out of somewhere in his vagina, a little turned on by the pressure. Blood pounding in the soft red walls, swelling. Where was Diane? He heard an animal noise somewhere to his left. Flash of brown fur. Bear?

  He pulled up his panties and cutoffs and stood up fast, too fast, pee dripping down his leg, and the bear’s fur raised up on its neck in spiky tufts.

  Those are hackles, Paul thought. And those are teeth.

  The bear lowed and lumbered toward him. Paul took a step back, toward the field. Another flash of brown fur, closer to him. A smaller bear. Paul emitted a stench of fear he himself could smell. He wondered if he could change himself into a bear, or a deer, something swift or large, but he was paralyzed.

  The cub walked clumsily toward Paul. Paul was fucked. Here was the natural world, the world his cleverness had conquered, and it was in fact unconquered, was instead annoyed, retaliatory, possibly hungry.

  Another animal noise, sharp and authoritative, then gentle.

  In his fright-blindered vision Paul saw Diane. He couldn’t stop her, couldn’t shout. He tried to shout with his eyes.

  But Diane walked up to the bear. She was the one making the gentle bear sounds. The cub ambled over to its mother, and the mother led the cub away. Paul exhaled.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit holy shit holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Diane. “You’re lucky that little cub decided to leave you alone.”

  Paul stared at her.

  “You weren’t trying to pet her, were you?” Diane said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Paul.

  “No, but you are a city slicker, slick.”

  Paul couldn’t argue with that and anyway he was trying to work out what was happening. Something was wrong; Diane was trembling, high and heady; she was someone else. He realized for the first time how slow she usually was, how even.

  “What did you do to that bear?” asked Paul.

  They looked at each other.

  Paul wanted to ask her what she was, but the words gummed up in his mouth.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” he said, to say something. He sat down.

  “You’re too beautiful to die,” Diane said, so Paul guessed he’d said the right thing. “I don’t want you to die.”

  “I don’t want you to die, too,” said Paul. He hadn’t been thinking abo
ut death but now he was. He reached for her hand and pulled her down so they were facing each other on the grass. “Let’s never die.”

  “Everyone dies sometime,” said Diane. “We’ll be in the earth, one with everything. But not until we’re very old.”

  “Okay,” said Paul, with a little thrill. “When we’re very old.” He’d never said “we” to anyone before, not even Tony Pinto, with whom he’d thought but not spoken words like “we” and “very old.”

  Now Diane had said the words, and they were bound to each other in this field, like a hippie wedding. He didn’t know what else to say, so he pulled her on top of him.

  * * *

  ×

  “I can’t believe I took you to Michigan and you turned into an earnest, monogamous lesbian,” Jane said, once they got on the highway.

  “Stop,” said Paul. “Don’t mock. I actually feel like I belonged there as much as anywhere I’ve ever been. More even.”

  “Lesbian,” said Jane. As usual Paul was having a peak experience and Jane was stuck driving. You won’t fuck me and I always have to drive, she thought. Or is it, you never fuck me and I always have to drive.

  “I think I might love her,” Paul said.

  Jane had spent the entire festival chasing Frog, who turned out to be the star top of the Twilight Zone, and, apparently, of the Austin SM scene (who knew they had one!). Frog had been happy enough to act out many of Jane’s best-loved, most-read-about sex-positive feminist fantasies. Tied to a tree and whipped? Check. Boot-licking? Done. Public ejaculation contest? But of course. Spend the night? Not Frog’s scene, sorry. Jane felt sorely misunderstood. She wasn’t trying to cuddle, for Christ’s sake. She just wanted to stay up all night getting her brains screwed out. She considered the phrase. Yes, that was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be fucked so thoroughly that she couldn’t think, but instead she had these souvenir bruises and the second-place ribbon from an ejaculation contest. And the image of Paul in the passenger seat, fondling and sniffing the sweatshirt that girl had given him. Jane had been extremely nice about it, pulled over when the potter had come running up behind the car like some desperate movie lover, sat there watching the digital clock tick off seven minutes while they kissed and whispered against the trunk. She’d even squealed with him about Diane, whom Jane privately thought unclean. That was a hippie thing, Jane knew; she wasn’t fooled by Diane’s deployment of such punk rock signifiers as bedraggled Jack Purcells, an eyebrow piercing, or cut-off men’s pants. Ultimately, essentially, Diane was a potter and had BO, which equaled hippie, which equaled earnest, which was the enemy of all Jane and Paul had once held dear. She preferred herself as one of the fags, and now her best friend, her entrée, was fucking with her scene.