Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  Paul biked down the unusually warm, even balmy, two o’clock streets in his paint-dirty bibs. The rain stopped; a few long-weekenders appeared, walking aimlessly down the middle of Commercial Street. Friday to Monday, Paul had learned, were the days he could count on the relief of seeing strangers, some measure of anonymity.

  He went to the post office, picked up his mail, marked General Delivery, at the counter. It was as if this was the ’50s, he thought, and he a mysterious drifter. Christopher had sent him a manila envelope containing bills, carefully marked so Paul could see his share; a list of phone messages, including another one from Tony Pinto, oddly enough; and a packet of SASEs requesting Polydoris Perversity. Paul reflected on Christopher’s reliability as he threw the bills and messages away; he only had room in his pockets for the SASEs, and he didn’t have any extra money right now anyway. He’d send Christopher a money order once he got paid, surprise him by rounding up.

  Hungry after the day’s work, Paul stopped by Spiritus for a slice. He lounged in a booth while he waited, eating pepper flakes straight just for the rush. He read the handwritten blackboard menu, then scouted the restaurant for a copy of the Banner with which to distract himself while he ate. He caught the eye of a gray-haired construction worker with a neat little ACT UP goatee and a single earring. Paul had pulled his hair back into a ponytail and shoved it in a baseball cap for work, and so maybe it wasn’t surprising that the older gentleman looked, looked away, looked back. Paul took off the cap and shook out his lustrous dark hair like Brooke Shields. He leaned curvaceously into the wall, and smiled at the man.

  The older gentleman looked down, paid for his slice, and left. Gotcha, thought Paul. He’d enjoy reporting on this to Zoe and Gerty, who’d be delighted and a little envious. Better not to mention it to Diane. She’d be home late, he remembered; she was working a job two towns away, in Wellfleet. He ate the last bits of sausage off the paper plate and headed back to the bathroom. Inside, he locked the door and concentrated on letting Polly fall away. At first nothing happened, so he closed his eyes and tried to sense his cock, his boy-nipples, just enough fuzz. When he’d changed back, he turned his tee shirt inside out to hide the Virago Painters logo Zoe’d stenciled so they’d seem more professional. He looked in the mirror—not quite right. He rolled his sleeves up and puffed his biceps out, but not too much. Better.

  Paul left the bathroom, left Spiritus, walked his bike (or, rather, Gerty’s bike) across the street and down the alley to the beach, a straight line of pure focus. He dropped the bike on the sand and leaned against a post in the time-honored invitation. He unfastened one of his overalls’ straps. His bikini-brief underwear were too tight with cock and balls, and getting tighter, the cycle of tightness. He watched men stroll the beach past the dock, eyeing each other with bad intent. Eyeing him. He hadn’t been eyed like that in weeks.

  A sinewy knife-faced houseboy Paul had seen around ambled by, radiating the timeless allure of the delinquent. He stared at Paul as he lit a cigarette, kept staring as he leaned against a post a few feet away, inhaling with great intention and gazing out at the bay. He finished his cigarette, heeled it deep into the sand, and ducked under the deck.

  Paul knew what to do: wait a genteel moment, then follow. He leaned against his post, watching the tide roll in, considering.

  * * *

  ×

  The first day of the semester came and went, and Paul continued to live his new life of early morning coffee, painting with Zoe, vegetarian dinner parties, and nights in Diane’s bed—now their bed, as he’d begun chipping in for rent. Paul had stowed his unused return ticket, along with his license, in his frayed and foxed copy of A Lover’s Discourse, already bursting with dried lilacs and obsolete love notes and wedged alongside his other books and clothes on the cinderblock shelving in Diane’s room. Tony Pinto had said stay, and Paul had left. Diane had said stay, and Paul had stayed. Maybe Paul was growing up.

  Diane came in and hugged him from behind.

  “Polly,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  That was an understatement. Diane talked comparatively little but read so much, always political books, books about the environment, books about animals. She was a slow reader, Paul thought, not without a hint of judgment.

  “We need to take action,” said Diane.

  “We should totally fuck up those navy labs where they make soldier dolphins,” said Paul.

  “Polly, this is serious,” Diane said. “You don’t mess around with stuff like that. You probably shouldn’t talk about it, to be honest. And that’s not even what I mean.”

  “Oh! Okay,” said Paul, ashamed of his naïveté. “What are you talking about, then?”

  “We need to do something about that dog.”

  “Which dog?”

  “The lounge singer’s dog, remember?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course, I remember.”

  “I think we might need to get him away from her,” Diane said.

  “Like go to the police?” Paul said.

  Diane glared.

  “I mean, of course not the police. What’s our plan? Should we protest?”

  “I was thinking more of a rescue mission,” said Diane.

  “Wow, okay,” said Paul. “Okay. Yeah, let’s do that.”

  He’d do whatever Diane thought best; first he just needed to get a tight black ribbed turtleneck sweater. He could do Silkwood-era Cher, maybe, if he grew his hair out. She had really long feathered hair in Silkwood and went out with Meryl Streep. He’d heard the Cher thing before, usually more in a Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean way. It was his nose. He’d never changed his nose, he realized. He almost said the thing about the turtleneck, but Diane was being serious and revolutionary.

  * * *

  ×

  The next morning, over coffee at Express, Diane brought up the dog again.

  “Hey, Polly,” said Diane. “Can you make yourself look like someone else?”

  “Like Mystique, you mean? Like take someone else’s face? I don’t think I can do that,” said Paul.

  “Oh,” said Diane.

  “Did you know Mystique was gay?” said Paul. “Her girlfriend was Destiny. They never said it, but it was obvious.”

  Diane was not interested.

  Paul smoothed his skirt down over the growing rip in his tights, and spun around on his stool.

  “Come with,” he said, gesturing toward the bathroom.

  The pretty counter girl smirked as Paul and Diane went in together and Paul smiled back, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly.

  “Who should I try to be?” said Paul.

  “Well, not me,” said Diane. “What about Elena, who you just cruised?”

  Paul had noticed Elena, it was true. He often saw her walking through town with her kid. She was not unattractive, he had to admit.

  Paul kissed Diane.

  “Don’t be jealous, baby,” he said. “Don’t look for a minute, and let me try this.”

  Elena was more stacked than him, that’s all he could remember. He opened the door and skulked another look. She was a little bit darker, maybe Puerto Rican, and a lot shorter. Muscular, with curly hair, long lashes, and a pouty bottom lip. He shut the door, closed his eyes against Diane’s scrutiny, and concentrated. He felt his weight shift. He became more solid, packed in tight. He felt gravity in his belly and breasts. He touched his hair and opened his eyes.

  “You, with bigger breasts,” said Diane. “And curlier hair.” She sounded disappointed and impressed at the same time.

  Paul looked in the mirror. His skin was maybe a shade darker, he thought. His lips were sort of puffier or maybe he was just holding them that way. He tried to remember what she looked like. Maybe a picture would help.

  “Keep trying,” said Diane, pushing him against the bathroom wall
and separating his legs with her knee.

  “Oh my god,” said Paul. He laughed in angry surprise and turned his cheek from her kiss. “You want me to look like her so you can fuck her?”

  “No,” said Diane. “No. No. That’s not it.”

  Paul didn’t believe her. He felt one-down, uncomfortably so. Should he be cool, offer himself like a kinky treat, a birthday blowjob? Could it be that Diane was not his Malone but his Mr. Benson? He let his Polly self return, and made his face seem like he didn’t want to cry. Should have followed that houseboy, he thought, and in the background of his mind, he began to rake loose resentments into an armament for later.

  * * *

  ×

  When Diane had a plan, Paul noticed, she evinced high levels of organization: she set alarm clocks, transcribed marginal notes to index cards, checked tasks off neat lists, and—most disturbing—delegated.

  As a rule, Paul neither had plans nor was organized and while he didn’t mind going-along-with other people’s plans he did not enjoy thinking of himself—or being thought of—as a sidekick. Paul preferred to think of himself as easygoing, flexible, not tied down. Strictly speaking, however, going along with was sidekick behavior. He could do abject (pleasurable flash of Tony Pinto), and he’d certainly bottomed hard for Diane—the grimy second-floor bathtub, how she stood over him as he fucked her with his fingers, then sucked on her wet pussy and begged her to piss in his mouth, swallowing her ejaculate instead, begging again for her piss. The Governor Bradford bathroom, her no-longer-new fist inside him, a line outside the door, her calm questioning, Like that? Want more? In bed, most filthy of intimacies, how she fucked him with her silicone dick and slid her hand in so she was fucking her hand inside him, had lost track of his pleasure, was greedily cumming, was using him for her pleasure, which put him over the edge. But he didn’t want to be her sidekick. Eyes on each other, he thought—not looking together at something she saw first.

  Now she was asking him to make a trip to the hardware store, and he wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. Paul had always hated hardware stores, the smell of chemical fertilizers and grease-fingered overgrown gaybashers in the aisles assuming Paul couldn’t find a stud in a wall or take apart an engine or whatever. Which he couldn’t. Why was she making him go to a hardware store?

  Paul was cooking up a fun dinner of fake eggs and fake bacon; what more did she want from him?

  “Maybe we should wear dog costumes and picket!” he said. “Animal costumes with glitter. I could be an angry glittery puppy. Maybe we should start with a protest.”

  Diane clicked the Pretenders tape into the boom box on the cinderblock bookcase, still wearing her peacoat. Sometimes Diane would leave her peacoat on for hours after she got home, like a blanket or armor. To warm her or to keep him out, Paul wondered.

  He wiped his hands on his A Woman’s Place Is in the House and the Senate apron and stared at Diane. He couldn’t believe he knew her; she was so pretty and tough. He spelled it t-u-f-f in his mind, calling up images of the girls in Times Square, Patti Smith, a girl from any French movie, those Lower East Side dykes in the little collarless leather jackets he and Tony Pinto had so admired. Diane looked like a child sailor, a red-cheeked, creamy-skinned European boy. Eyes like chocolate saucers, he thought. Eyes like bonbons, like brown velvet with black lace, like an alien, like a whale. And she’d chopped a few inches off her lank brown hair in the bathroom last week, hadn’t washed in days, maybe a week; her hair was slightly greasy and always good-smelling and soft, sometimes held back rakishly with a bandana. How was it possible Diane was his to stare at so closely, whenever he wanted?

  “We need at least one more person,” Diane mused, as if Paul hadn’t said anything. He felt a stab of shame. Maybe he was superficial. Maybe his true colors were beginning to show. Maybe he didn’t have what it took to be a lesbian punk rocker Riot Grrrl activist.

  “Yeah,” said Paul. The fake eggs were smoking. He put the hot sauce on the table and agreed to go to the hardware store to purchase tarps and kibble and gallon jugs of fresh water for the dog, once they freed it.

  After dinner, they went right to bed, confident in their honeymoon right to fuck all the time and leave the dishes in the sink. Paul screwed in the black light and Diane put on the Nina Simone and they drank red wine out of mugs Diane had made in college. Smooth Paul curved two fingers inside Diane like he’d read about, and found a spongy sort of button. He could see it with his fingers, a perfect red circle the spiderwebby texture of lip insides. He pressed on the button and Diane barnacled onto him. Cause and effect.

  With Diane, unlike with his other lovers—and who were they, he thought? who were those other lovers? all tricks, numbers, marks on a wall, notches on his lipstick case, excepting Tony Pinto, so say that—with Diane, unlike with Tony Pinto, Paul derived his satisfaction from learning to please. With Tony Pinto, Paul had fallen entirely, fallen down Tony’s rabbit hole, fallen into Tony’s asshole that one terrifying night, fallen out of his rules and bounds and into Tony’s hands, mouth, bed. Paul had been unable to resist Tony Pinto and Tony Pinto had not asked to be resisted, had flown to Iowa and to Paul’s bed so that Paul could fall, or more accurately crouch, onto him without resistance.

  Whereas Diane was all resistance. What they did with their bodies was just one part of it, for Diane. Diane’s mind was elsewhere a frustrating fifty-one percent of the time, by Paul’s reckoning, and she wanted him in the elsewhere with her. She wanted more from Paul, more seriousness of purpose. She would respect his process if he were an artist, he thought, but what did he do besides “make commentary” and dress himself variously? His life was superficial, surfaces to be polished and re-seen. He’d painstakingly assemble an outfit that told a story (willful debutante experimenting with heroin, say, or cowgirl gone to town on a Saturday night, or revolutionary princess) and then he’d take it for a walk, possibly rework elements of the outfit on the fly if one of the thrift shops was open, catalog responses both verbal and otherwise. That could be a whole day. A good day. He was happy enough to have abandoned his schooling, greedily reading in a lineage of his own devising and necessity. He considered putting together a new zine, maybe a girl-power type of thing, though he was a bit old for Riot Grrrl. They were mostly teenagers, three or four years younger than Paul. A cultural eternity. He didn’t want to intrude. Was he already intruding on their gender? Maybe, but it was his too, right? His body did whatever he wanted, so he belonged in all the genders.

  Paul thought about straight people occasionally, not that he personally knew very many people he could really call straight. Straight culture, he guessed he meant. Movies, books, songs—especially songs. TV shows too, he surmised, not that he watched TV except for X-Files, which at least switched up the butch–femme dynamic. Men and women alike confounded Paul; they were so rule-bound. Straight people seemed confused by each other, so anxious to find camaraderie within their gender, so startled by differences between their bodies, always pinning explanations for the inevitable gulf between humans on chromosomes. Diane wasn’t like that. For Diane, women were the norm. She never mentioned what she once called Paul’s “body of origin.”

  “Water?” she said now.

  Paul took the water glass carefully and drank a tiny sip without sitting up. They watched the sun come up, huddled low on the bed, the window a rectangle of sheer light.

  “You never let me get any sleep,” Paul said. He never let her get any sleep, they both knew. Paul thought, if we do it enough times, enough ways…

  “If you’re tired, you should sleep,” Diane said.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul had been Polly now for almost a month straight. He would’ve been at two months, but then after he’d changed at Spiritus he’d had to restart the clock. After that incident in the bathroom with Diane, he’d decided not to change for her, not that she’d asked him again. Dia
ne, in turn, seemed to have given up her idea of Paul as her key operative, her infiltrator. They’d been tender and avoidant with each other since, at least on the topic of Paul’s body.

  He’d hoped that if he stayed in Polly form for longer than a month he might have a period, and had bought anticipatory variety packs of tampons and pads. Then she’d trust him. He’d been reading the house copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and had spent an hour in their room with a mirror and a plastic speculum and a flashlight, checking out his vagina. He had all the parts just like in the book, he discovered with relief: clit, peehole, fuckhole, g-spot. His insides felt to his fingers like Diane’s insides: spongy button, ribbed in some places, smooth in others. When Diane wasn’t home, he occasionally fucked himself with his fingers or other implements. He snuck-rubbed out an orgasm or two whenever he could. He snuck-rubbed in the bathrooms at the condos he painted, in their bed while Diane went to pee. One Sunday night when they’d all gone down to eat free popcorn and watch Mrs. Doubtfire at the Holiday Inn, he’d jerked his clit to coming in the fully occupied multistall women’s room (thighs hard, left bicep pressed against the stall wall, right middle finger pumping, ragged breathing shut into his mouth until he popped with a whippet-style head rush) just to compare it to his tearoom adventures in what he’d begun to think of as his old life.

  So far Paul’s vagina did everything advertised but bleed: expanded and contracted; was more or less red, more or less wet, more or less smooth; clamped down and opened wide; emitted a variety of smells; encompassed fingers, hands, silicone implements, a hard white plastic vibrator, a cucumber wrapped in a condom. His clitoris begged for attention if he had to pee or saw an even mildly attractive human or read words directly related to sex or words spelled like words directly related to sex. He didn’t seem to have ever had a hymen, if you used blood from fucking as evidence; he’d worried about this until he’d read a Riot Grrrl zine Zoe’d left in the living room and Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, which he’d bought at Ruthie’s. Apparently hymens were a patriarchal control myth.