She's Not There Read online

  In the evening we went out to dinner at a seafood restaurant. I ordered Chesapeake Bay crabs, which were served Baltimore style, a big heap of peppered crabs just poured onto some newspaper on the table. Everyone else had a demure and proper dinner; the Russo daughters had fish, Barb and Grace had chicken, Rick had a steak. Baby Luke had milk. Long after the time everyone else was drinking coffee and settling into a postdinner quiet, I was still hacking the crabs apart, biting down on their peppery guts. My cheeks were shiny with crabmeat and butter. I had cut my hand on one of the crabs, and blood trickled slowly down my arm.

  With some embarrassment, I suddenly realized everyone was observing me in horror and disgust.

  “What can I tell you, Boylan,” Russo said. “You’re losin’ blood.”

  The magazine Granta came out with a list of the “Thirty Best American Writers Under Forty.” I wasn’t on it. Russo wasn’t on it, either, which was some consolation, but then on the other hand, he wasn’t under forty. A few weeks later, the New York Observer came out with an article slamming the Granta list as “literary beefcake” and put out their own list. I made that one, along with a few other comic novelists.

  I called up my mother and explained the situation. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said. “Now what’s this Granta again?”

  “It’s a magazine, Mom.”

  “Would I see it at the hairdresser’s?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, anyway, it’s still nice. You might as well enjoy it while you can. A few years from now, any list of people under forty is a list you aren’t going to be on.”

  She had me there.

  In our little office, Russo and I used to put our feet up on the desk at the end of each day and complain to each other about the fate of comic writers in America.

  “You know what pisses me off, Boylan?”

  “What?”

  “Well, on the back jacket of your book here there’s this quote from Entertainment Weekly about how the best part about your prose is how it sounds like you’re just making it up as you go along.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, let me ask you, were you just making it up as you went along?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “How many years of work on that book did it take you to make it feel as if you were ‘just making it up as you went along’?”

  “Two or three.”

  “See, this is the worst thing about being a supposedly comic writer. In order for the prose to work it has to feel effortless, almost weightless. And yet, if you do your job right, everyone’s going to think that you didn’t work hard enough. That’s the thing about effortless prose—it feels as though you didn’t put any effort into it.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Sucks for us, doesn’t it.”

  Russo shrugged. “Sucks for you, Boylan.”

  In spite of his artistic handicap, Russo hit it big with Nobody’s Fool, got hired by Scott Rudin and Robert Benton to consult on the screenplay, then co-wrote the script for their next movie, Twilight. One day at the gym, he told me he was quitting Colby and moving out to Camden on the coast. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was sad. I had a feeling I was never going to have as much fun at work again in my life.

  A year later, Russo published his fourth novel, Straight Man , a wicked satire of academic life in general and English Departments in particular. My friend Murphy, a colleague at Colby, read it before I did. One evening I ran into Murphy at a party at the department chair’s house, and he said, “How about Russo, naming that character after you?”

  Rick hadn’t said anything about this to me. I felt my heart quicken. “Which character?” I said.

  “You know, the cross-dresser.” Murphy laughed. “He must know something about you that the rest of us don’t, ha ha ha!”

  A number of my colleagues, standing nearby, laughed along with Murphy. There I was, in the elegant house of my boss, looking at the faces of the men and women I worked with, all of them doubled over in hysteria. It was really funny, I guess.

  I stood there mortified, wondering what on earth Russo knew, how much he had told others. Why wouldn’t he talk to me about it first, before outing me in a novel? It seemed a cruel, terrible thing to do to someone you liked as much as Russo supposedly liked me.

  Eventually, I read a copy of Straight Man, and sure enough, there was a character named Phineas—nicknamed Finney—who had a cross-dressing fetish. He played the role of the villain in the book. It was even worse that it was my middle name he was using, because it was, after all, Grace’s name. I’d taken it for my own when we got married, as a gesture of love.

  When I finally confronted Russo about this a few weeks later, he kind of turned pale for a moment, then laughed.

  “Holy shit, Boylan,” he said. “That is your name. It never even occurred to me!” He laughed as though it were funny, which, since he assumed I wasn’t a transsexual, it ought to have been. “Oh well!”

  Years later, after I became a woman, a lot of people told me they assumed Rick had known all along. Why else would he name that cross-dresser after me?

  Why indeed. Looking back on it now, Russo’s a little chagrined about the whole business, at least he says he is. It was just a weird coincidence, that’s all. Probably lots of transsexuals are named Finney.

  Oh well.

  One October, when Grace was three months pregnant with science project number two, we drove down to Freeport to a pumpkin patch. A farmer pulled us around in a hay wagon and let us off in the middle of the patch, which was miles and miles wide. In every direction were brown vines, the huge orange globes of the pumpkins. A red barn stood at the top of the hill.

  Luke picked out a pumpkin, but it was too heavy for him, and a moment after standing up with it he fell over. He thought this was funny. We got back in the hay wagon and the farmer pulled us up to the barn, and we drank hot mulled cider and bought apples and chrysanthemums. Then we drove home and carved the pumpkin. Luke couldn’t believe all the gunk inside.

  After he went to sleep, Grace and I ate dinner. She made my favorite dinner, which was Thai shrimp with cracked black pepper, and string beans with spicy pork. The food was so hot that tears streamed down my face. Like Walter Cronkite after the moon landing, I lost the ability to speak for a while.

  Later we sat by the fire and played Scrabble and listened to Maine Public Radio—Prairie Home Companion, The Thistle and Shamrock, World Café, Music from the Hearts of Space.

  “’Tis a good life,” I said to her. “The life at sea.”

  Grace had a cesarean when she had Patrick, same as with Luke. She didn’t mind. By that point it was all the same to her. I watched the whole thing. It was a surprise that I was not squeamish. I held my wife’s hand and tried to be reassuring. The doctor squished around for a while, then announced, “I’m going for the baby.” A moment later a small human looked around, sizing up the situation. He cried.

  After that they started piecing Grace back together again. I asked the doctor what that pink thing was. “Oh, this?” she said. “This is the uterus.”

  That’s what I thought, I said.

  Dr. Gross decided it was time for an anatomy lesson. “And these here are the fallopian tubes,” she said, pulling back the incision to display my wife’s guts. The fallopian tubes looked like a drawing from science class, little hands clasping the ovaries.

  Man, look at that, I thought. Ovaries.

  “Hey,” said the anesthesiologist. "You know that little girl, the one who was flying the plane by herself across the country?”

  Yeah, I said, I knew about it.

  “She crashed,” he said, and shook his head. “Died.”

  Aw jeez, I said. That’s too bad.

  “Yeah, well,” said the anesthesiologist. “Some parents, you gotta wonder.”

  Patrick’s birth ushered in a fortnight of catastrophes. The baby was born with supraventricular tachycardia, which meant that his pulse raced up to 250 beats a minute and stayed
there. The morning after he was born, he was taken from his mother and rushed away in an ambulance. They wired him up to a dozen machines. I went to visit him in the Portland hospital, nearly two hours away, just as my father had visited me when I was a newborn in danger.

  Russo was waiting for me at the hospital when I got there. I hadn’t even told him that Patrick was ill. He’d been out of town, had heard that we were in trouble, flown home, and driven to the ICU. The tiny child was there behind glass, covered in wires and tubes.

  “Jesus Christ, Boylan,” Russo said.

  Grace got a spinal headache from the epidural, which had fallen out in the middle of the cesarean. This meant that she spent a week with a jackhammer in her head. The only cure was caffeine, which Grace wasn’t allowed to have, because it might wind up in her breast milk and overstimulate Patrick’s heart.

  We stayed in the Ronald McDonald House, and I was humiliated to be the benefit of the burger conglomerate’s charity. Every few hours I’d push Grace’s wheelchair up the hill to the hospital and she’d nurse the baby. Afterward I’d hold him and sob, saying, “Paddy, am I never not going to worry about you?”

  The children’s ICU was kind of like a prison. “What’s yours in for?” other parents would ask us. There were all sorts of cases, all of them heartbreaking. One child, Drano Baby, had swallowed Drano at five months, which burned out his entire digestive system as well as his larynx. They were building him a new esophagus out of his small intestine. Then there was Traction Baby, whose pelvis and femurs were unfused; the baby had to lie on his back with both legs in casts and elevated, as if he had had the world’s smallest skiing accident. Then there was Small Pale Baby. No one knew what the deal was with Small Pale Baby. Sometimes she was accompanied by Small Pale Mommy, who sat by the child’s crib each night and cried.

  They eventually got Patrick’s heart rate stabilized using digitalis, and we were allowed to go home. The other parents were glad for us, but not really. There was a sense we’d been pardoned by the governor, perhaps unfairly.

  The disasters continued when we got home, nearly a week after going into the hospital. Grace got mastitis, an infection of the breast. Then Patrick got a clogged tear duct, so that gunk gathered in his eye. We called him Little Gunky Eye, affectionately, for a while. Then he got a cold, and Grace got a cold, and Luke got a cold, and I got a cold.

  Two weeks after he’d been born, we took Patrick back to the hospital to see if we should put him on drugs for the flu. We were seen in the very same ward where Grace had been in labor—were seated, in fact, in a room exactly across the hall from the place where two weeks earlier Patrick had been delivered by C-section.

  Another couple was now in that same room. We heard the husband shouting, “I can see the head, darling! I can see the head! It’s coming! It’s coming!” The wife screamed. “It’s a boy! Honey, it’s a boy!” Then the tiny cry echoed in the space. Everyone was crying and hugging.

  Grace and I looked at each other. We hadn’t slept in two weeks. We’d been through a cesarean, supraventricular tachycardia, a spinal headache, a failed epidural, mastitis, a gunky eye, and four head colds.

  I wanted to go across the hall, where Perfect Mommy and Perfect Daddy were having their Perfect Newborn Baby moment, and say to them, “Do you people mind? Do you think it would be possible if, just for a moment, you could all shut up?”

  The doctor came into our room. “Ah, the Boylans,” she said. “And how are we doing?”

  I made a lot of pizza. Luke liked watching the hook on the Mixmaster punch the dough around. Often he’d ask if he could have a small piece of dough to walk around with. Even at age three, he was aware that dough contained yeast, which made it a living organism.

  One night Luke formed a particular attachment to a baseball-size glob, which he named My Friend Dough. He tried to take My Friend Dough into the bathtub with him, but I drew the line at bathing with it. My Friend Dough sat in the soap dish and watched as Luke scrubbed up. At bedtime, it sat in a glob next to the bed, watching over Luke while he slept.

  In the morning I was awakened by bitter, heartbroken sobbing. Luke was standing by the side of my bed, the glob of dough in his hand. During the night the dough had fallen and a hard crust had formed where the moisture had escaped.

  “My Friend Dough,” Luke sobbed. “He got hard and died.”

  I often woke up and lay there in the dark. Usually this was about a quarter to four. I’m the wrong person, I thought. I’m living the wrong life, in the wrong body.

  To which I would respond: You’re a maniac. An idiot. You have a life a lot of other people dream about, a life so full of blessings that your heart hurts.

  To which I would respond: I know. Still.

  To which I would respond: Well, what do you think you’re going to do about this now? Have a sex change, at age forty? Abandon all the love that has made your life whole, so that you can enter into a new life, about which you know nothing? What kind of woman do you think you’d be now, having never had a girlhood? What kind of person do you think you’d be, leaving your children without a father, your wife without a husband?

  To which I would respond: I know. Still.

  To which I would respond: Well, you go on and have a sex change, then. Just leave me out of it. I’ll just say my prayers so I can appreciate the things I have and not launch off like an imbecile into a life of lurid marginality.

  To which I would respond: You know, don’t you, that no amount of wishing that this were not the case can make it not the case. No amount of praying that you are not transgendered will make you something other than what you are. No amount of love from anyone will make you fit inside a body that does not match your spirit.

  To which I would respond: Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to break anybody’s heart. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let my family down. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to give up everything I’ve always wanted just so I can fit.

  To which I would respond: I know. Still.

  To which I would respond: Well, all right, then. You’ll be goddamned.

  Some nights, Luke and Patrick lay in our bed, their eyes all sleepy. Grace sang a song to them that I did not know, but which she remembered from her own childhood, called “Two Little Boys”:

  Do you think I could leave you crying?

  When there’s room on my horse for two?

  Climb up here, Jack, quit your crying,

  We’ll mend up your horse with glue.

  When we grow up we’ll both be soldiers

  And our horses will not be toys.

  Maybe then we’ll remember

  When we were two little boys.

  One fall day the phone rang. “Hi, it’s Charlie Kaufman,” said a voice long-distance. My old roommate from 108th Street had seen the review of The Planets in The New Yorker, and he’d called up to congratulate me. Charlie had moved out to Los Angeles since last we talked and was now one of the writers for a new Chris Elliott TV show called Get a Life.

  I thought about our room on 108th Street, the bars on the windows, the little pieces of film all over the floor. Working at the American Bystander , all that time dreaming big dreams that had, in the end, come to nothing. Still, Charlie and I had been friends. It made me feel a little better about that lost time.

  “Let’s stay in touch,” he said.

  One night Russo and I went out drinking in Camden, and after dinner, decided to work off the weight we had presumably gained by taking a long walk through the town.

  It was unimaginably dark. We heard the roar of the ocean through the trees, the sound of bells on buoys.

  “I just hope I know where I’m going,” Russo said as we left town.

  “It would be a first,” I said.

  “Shut up, Boylan,” Russo suggested.

  We turned down a street at the edge of town that wound through woods. As we walked it got even darker, something that didn’t seem possible. “This is one of my favorite walks,” Russo said. �
��You have to trust me, when the sun’s out, it’s really beautiful.”

  “Since when have I trusted you?”

  I had never known the world to be as dark as it was that night, as Russo and I walked down that road through the woods. I could literally not see my hand in front of my face. There were no stars, no moon, and the black sky was covered with invisible clouds. We stumbled through the dark like blind men, aware that we had strayed from the pavement only when our shoes touched soft earth. We reached out for each other and walked with our arms on each other’s shoulders, lurching drunkenly through the void.

  “You know, it would be good for Grace to see you getting us lost for a change,” I said to Rick. “She admires you so much. It would be good for her to know the real you.”

  “What are you saying, Boylan, that if she knew the real me, we wouldn’t be lost in the dark?”

  “No, we’d still be lost, she’d just be able to hold you responsible for it.”

  “I’m going to get us home just fine,” said Russo. “I know exactly where we are.”

  “Where are we?” I said.

  Russo’s voice came through the darkness.

  “Up shit’s creek,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s reassuring.” I squeezed his shoulder. It was good knowing he was there.

  “You know, come to think of it, if Barbara were here, she could see the real you, Boylan.”

  “Which is what?”

  “A pathetic coward.”

  Rick did finally get us home, but it took hours. We weren’t on the road he’d thought we were on, either. Somehow we’d taken a wrong turn and walked miles out of our way. Rick now claims he knew this at the time but didn’t want to tell me. The other thing he didn’t tell me was that on one side of the road, as we walked through that haunted darkness, was a huge, creepy graveyard, its headstones bearing skulls and angels crumbling into dust.

  I started playing rock and roll again. I hadn’t been in a band since the Comfortable Chair. My new group, put together by a guy in the Geology Department, was called Diminished Faculties. We broke up when he didn’t get tenure.