She's Not There Read online

  Then I met some other musicians who didn’t have anything to do with Colby. Pretty soon I was playing with the Smelts, and then the Roy Hudson Band, and then Blue Stranger. I spent my days teaching the poetry of Keats, the afternoons playing Candyland, and the nights performing “Brown-Eyed Girl” for millworkers.

  Sometimes, when I played in bars, people would buy me a pint. Occasionally the beers would stand in a row on top of the sound module.

  I thought about Mr. Pitiful’s, and the night I met Donna Fierenza, the rain hammering down in the streets of London. There are women and women and some hold you tight / While some leave you counting the stars in the night. . . .

  One day I autographed a copy of The Planets “To Donna and Neal, with love” and sent it off to the last address I’d had for Donna and her husband, a studio in Boston. I defaced the picture of myself on the back flap, so she couldn’t see what I looked like now.

  She didn’t write back.

  There was a large tract of forestland across the street from our house, and I used to take long walks there on the fire road. Sometimes I’d follow the stream into the forest as far as I could go. Frequently I’d run into moose. They’d give me a dirty look, then lumber off.

  As I walked through the woods, sometimes, I worked on the “being alive” problem. I’m still transgendered, I thought. Even though my life has been transformed by love. I still feel like a woman inside. At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie. It was there on the tip of my tongue as I taught my classes; it was there as I made meatballs for the woman I loved; it was there as I took the car through the car wash and shoveled the snow and built the fires and played piano and flipped pancakes. It was fair to say I was never not thinking about it.

  Now I had two problems. One was being transgendered, which was stupid enough. But worse than this was the problem of having a secret, of having something so vital about myself that I had withheld from Grace. How am I going to tell her? I wondered as I walked among the pine and maples. This would destroy her, would destroy us, would destroy all the gifts we have been given.

  Sometimes I’d think, Say, are you insane?

  I’d get back to the house and Grace would say, How was your walk?

  Good, I’d say. It was good. My children would come over and wrap their arms around my knees. Daddy’s back.

  One fall a friend of the family stopped by with his grandson. They were doing the college tour of New England. We all went out to dinner. I remembered visiting colleges with my own father in the summer of 1975, drinking beer with him in Oberlin, Ohio, him treating me like a grown-up for the first time. The next day I started writing a short bit about taking the college tour with a dysfunctional family.

  In less than a year I’d finished the book, which I called A Guide to the Colleges of New England: A Novel, which follows a high school senior named Dylan as he and his father visit, in order,Yale, Harvard, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan.

  Each of the main characters in the family is keeping a very important secret from the people he or she loves the most.

  My agent got the book on a Friday. The following week she’d closed a film deal with Geena Davis and Renny Harlin. A few weeks later, she sold the manuscript to Warner Books, and a month or so after that, New Line Cinema had hired me to write the screenplay. It was a hilarious and lucky time, money just raining down out of the sky.

  The publisher didn’t like the title, though. Could I think of a new one? Grace said, “How about Getting In?”

  Great idea, I said. It’s just disgusting enough to work.

  With the money from the film deal, we bought a summer house by Long Pond, which doubled in the wintertime as my writer’s office.

  I spent all of my days there when I wasn’t teaching. It was a beautiful post-and-beam house, built entirely out of pine and pegs. There wasn’t a nail in the thing. From a second-floor balcony I could see all of Long Pond twinkling before me. I set up my desk in an atrium next to the porch and started work on a new novel.

  Sometimes while I worked I put on a skirt and a knit top, just so I could work without being distracted. Then I’d think, Why am I doing this?

  And the response came, the same one as when I was fourteen: Because I can’t not.

  I was chosen to direct Colby’s program in Cork, Ireland, from 1998 to 1999. It was a great gig. The college would pay to move the whole family over to Cork for the year and provide us with a house to live in and a car to drive. As an exchange professor, I would teach at University College, Cork; I’d do a course in the fall for graduate students and a course in the spring for undergrads. And I would shepherd several dozen American students through the UCC system, take them on field trips to Dublin and Connemara and the Aran Isles.

  Colby and University College, Cork, swap one faculty member each year. The year I was in Ireland, Colby got a zoologist, which most of my colleagues thought was a fair trade.

  Several months before we left for our year in Ireland, I took a long walk through the woods.

  I thought about Grace and the life we shared. I thought about how much I loved her. I thought about the two of us driving back from Charlotte and passing by the House of Mystery, stopping to kiss at every red light from North Carolina to Washington. How my eyes filled with tears when she made Thai shrimp with black peppercorns. The expression on her face as she’d walked down the aisle in the National Cathedral. I’d slipped a ring on her finger; inside the ring were the engraved words Bright Star, from the sonnet by Keats.

  Her voice, soft and hushed as Luke cried for the first time in the delivery room. “That’s amazing,” she’d whispered.

  I came back inside, my face ashen. “What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  I sat at the dining room table. Grace was looking at me with a worried expression.

  “What is it, Jim?” she said. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s better you talk about it.”

  Is it? I thought. Is it really better if I talk about it? Isn’t keeping this hidden the only way I can protect you, can protect this family? Isn’t that my job, taking care of us? Sometimes you can do that better with silence than with words.

  Wouldn’t it be better, after all, to be like the couple we saw on our honeymoon, the husband who couldn’t talk and the wife who couldn’t hear?

  “Okay, listen,” I said to the person I loved more than anyone in the world. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  The Troubles (Cork, Ireland, 1998–1999)

  I fell off my bicycle on the way home from An Spailpin Fanach and lay there in the streets of Cork, looking up at the clouds. Soft rain fell on my cheeks. I felt completely contented lying there, the wheels of my bike spinning somewhere nearby.

  Son? Are you all right, son?

  I rode my bike to the pub only on those nights when I knew that, as they said in Ireland, “drink would be taken.” On this particular evening, I fell off the bike because a car in front of me had stopped quite suddenly. I jammed on the brakes and was, moments later, launched skyward.

  It was an evening on which I had sung “Fooba Wooba John” in public. In the mornings, in the office of the chair of the English Department at UCC, I would often be able to tell just how drunk I’d been by the songs I’d sung.

  “I didn’t sing ‘The Dog Crapped on the Whiskey,’ did I?” I’d ask my friend Eoin, whose name, by the way, is not the name of one of the dwarves from The Hobbit but is, in fact, a perfectly respectable Irish one pronounced the same as the English “Owen.”

  “Ah, sure you did,” Eoin said with immeasurable delight.

  “I didn’t sing ‘That’s the Way You Spell Chicken,’ did I?”

  Eoin nodded again. “Ah, but a carse ye did!” he said.

  I sighed. “Just tell me I didn’t sing ‘Fooba Wooba John,’ please,” I said. “That’s all I ask.”

  “Ah, James,” he said. “You sang it.”

  “Jesus,�
� I said. “Was there anything I didn’t sing?”

  “No,” said Eoin, “I can’t say as there was.”

  So there, drunk in the street, lay the emergent transsexual. Before we left America, Grace and I had gone shopping together. I’d assembled a small wardrobe of women’s things that looked all right on me. I had a couple of skirts from Coldwater Creek, a knit top from Territory Ahead. Some nights at home in the Colby flat, after the children were asleep, I would put this stuff on, and Grace and I would sit by the peat fire reading books together or playing Boggle.

  Grace was strangely tolerant of all this. She thought of it as a hobby, like playing in the rock-and-roll band. For all that, though, it wasn’t a hobby she particularly wanted to share. There didn’t seem to be a place for her in it.

  When I came out to her, I had not told her I was transsexual. I told her what I hoped could be true, which was that expressing just this much of myself would be enough. I didn’t want it to threaten our marriage or our lives.

  Still, for much of that year I felt like a chalk painting dissolving in rain.

  I stood and picked up my bicycle off the sidewalk. The horizon swayed, as if I were on board a ship on the high seas. Interestingly, the car that had stopped in front of me was still sitting there. I was annoyed with the driver for having pulled up so suddenly. I might have been hurt. For a moment I considered having words with the man behind the wheel.

  Then I noticed that the car was unoccupied. The car that had surprised me by stopping so suddenly was parked there.

  I spent that year in the traditional Irish manner—drinking heavily, singing songs, and wearing sheer-to-waist panty hose.

  By mid-September I had fallen in with a crowd of people who followed several bands around Cork. There was Nomos, a traditional group that included both a sixty-year-old ex-policeman on fiddle and a nineteen-year-old teen idol on guitar. There was North Cregg, which included the teen idol’s older brother on silent movie–style piano and a man named Christy Leahy on the box. Christy physically resembled a short Herman Munster, but his features were transformed by the music into something delicate and serene. The best place to hear these bands was the upstairs of the Lobby Bar, which was across the street from the Cork City Hall, on whose steps John F. Kennedy had stood early in 1963.

  Another good venue was the Gables pub on Douglas Street, where Christy, along with North Cregg’s guitarist, Johnny Neville, sat in a corner on Thursday nights and played their brains out. Frequently all sorts of their friends showed up as well, and there in the corner would be Christy on the box, Johnny on guitar, a piper, a banjo player, a mandolinist, and six fiddlers, their bows waving through the air in unison. I usually sat at a table about three feet away from this menagerie and just listened, transfixed. Every now and then Johnny would look over at me and say, “You liked that one all right, then, Boylan?”

  On the surface of things, I was simply enjoying what I felt was the finest music in the world—traditional Irish—in the finest of venues— old pubs where Murphy’s and Beamish were slowly poured by bar-maids who knew my name. Beneath this, though, there was a sense of urgency and desperation in my heart. Slowly I was becoming aware of how little time might be left to me as a man. I feared that our return to America, in July, would begin a period of transformation and loss.

  One night I was taken to a ceili where North Cregg was playing. There were about three hundred people all packed into a dance hall, and everyone was drinking pints of Murphy’s and shots of Jameson’s and Paddy’s and Tullamore Dew. The band started playing well after midnight. For a few moments there was elegant set dancing, an elaborate kind of square dance that everyone had clearly learned in grade school. After a few moments of this, however, the whole business fell to pieces, and drunken madmen crashed through the lines like asteroids. Everyone else dove in, transforming the scene into a hilarious melee, a seething mass of arms and legs and women being lifted in the air and spun.

  Riverdance, it wasn’t.

  At one point, North Cregg’s banjo player busted a string, and without pause he just threw his banjo aside like it was a piece of junk and dove into the crowd, where he was properly fielded, then passed around on everyone’s shoulders.

  A girl asked me to dance late in the night, and I said, “I don’t know how to dance to this music.”

  She beckoned toward the crowd, where punches were being thrown and giant rugby players were doing back flips in the air, and she just said, “Ah now, I’m sure somethin’ll come to ye.”

  On the whole, I liked ballads and songs better than the jigs and the reels, because the lyrics seemed to speak to me. In the ballads I heard the constant theme of emigration. Surely they had me in mind when they sang about having to leave the land of one’s birth because of the Great Hunger. Standing on the deck of a coffin ship, waving farewell to one’s sweetheart. Making a difficult ocean crossing. Arriving at last in a new world, the land of promise, the land of freedom. But never quite fitting in, in the new land, always speaking with a trace of a foreign accent.

  Sometimes I think the best way to understand gender shift is to sing a song of diaspora.

  Our ship at the present lies in Derry Harbor

  To bear us away—o’er the wide swelling sea.

  May heaven be our pilot, and grant us fine breezes

  Till we reach the green fields of Amerikey.

  Oh, come to the land where we shall be happy.

  Don’t be afraid of the storm, or the sea.

  And when we cross o’er, we shall surely discover,

  That place is the land of Sweet Liberty.

  One night I sat in the Four Corners, listening to a boy I did not know sing this song, tears coursing down my cheeks. Don’t be afraid of the storm, or the sea, he says. How could I not fear the storm, or the sea? Surely, before I reached the green fields, I would perish in the briny ocean. Or, even if I did successfully cross o’er, how could I live without the love of the girl I’d left behind?

  The people are saying that these two were wed,

  But one had a sorrow that never was said.

  He moved away from me, with his goods and his gear.

  And that was the last that I saw of my dear.

  On New Year’s Eve, our children went to bed early, and Grace and I were able to say good-bye to 1998 like adults. I made Peking duck for dinner. After we’d finished the last of the plum sauce, we snuck off into the bedroom and made love. We lay there in the warmth of each other’s bodies for a while and then heard, far off, muffled in the Irish rain, the sounds of midnight as it was celebrated throughout the city.

  “Happy New Year,” we said to each other.

  “You know what this year feels like, 1999?” I said.

  “What?”

  “It feels like a sneeze coming on.”

  Grace laughed and then rolled over and went to sleep.

  The boys went to a Montessori school that year, where they learned to sweep the floor and put sponges in cans. Grace had an early morning workout at the gym, which she often followed with a trip to the English market in Cork’s downtown. That left me at home in the Colby flat, where I would frequently put on the Coldwater Creek skirt and a black top and sit in the office and work on a screenplay. Occasionally Grace would come home to find me en femme, and she’d just shake her head and laugh. “No pearls before five,” she’d say nervously before heading out again.

  More often than not, though, I was alone in the house as a neo-female. I’d pay the bills for the program or I’d sit at the upright piano and sing “I Wanna Be Like You” from The Jungle Book.

  Sometimes I would put on my pumps and my coat, and I’d stand there in the front hallway, thinking about going out into the world. I looked in the mirror. I thought I looked fine, if you didn’t look too close. Still, I stayed indoors. I did not want to jeopardize the program or my own professional integrity by risking intrigue. Instead I waited on this side of the door, the Irish rain coming down outside, wondering when, and if,
I would ever be able—as a woman—to feel that rain upon my face.

  In March, we went to the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Morocco, with our children. There we played on purple black sand volcanic beaches. One afternoon I lay by the pool with a family of German tourists. All of the women took off their tops, even the grandmother, and I pretended not to look on amazed. Later that afternoon, over the loudspeakers at the resort, I heard the theme from Shaft in Spanish:

  “¿Quién es el detectivo negro?”

  “Shaft!”

  “¡Sí!”

  (This is merely an approximation.)

  We returned home for several weeks, then left our children with a friend for several days while Grace and I went to Venice, then Florence. Venice, in particular, was haunting. Grace and I rode in a gondola, drank Chianti at a table in the Piazza San Marco, viewed the rising Venus. Then we passed across the Bridge of Sighs.

  Grace’s sister arrived from Oklahoma, and the two of them went off to London for a few days. I felt unbelievably mournful in Grace’s absence, though. I spent the days in Cork in an absolute dark purple despair, playing the illean pipes in our apartment while the children were at school, or drinking at the Gables in the evening when I had a sitter, listening to Christy and Johnny play “Arthur MacBride and the Recruiting Sergeant.” Songs of forced conscription also touched me deeply and seemed to speak to my condition.

  But says Arthur, ye needn’t be proud of your clothes,

  For you’ve only the lend of them as I suppose,

  And you dare not change them one night, for you know

  If you do you’ll be flogged in the morning.

  Forced conscription, I thought as I drank yet another pint. You’ve got it, lads.

  One afternoon, I walked around the city in a mournful private fog, eventually winding up on top of the spire of St. Ann’s Cathedral, and there I stood above the city as the church bells began to ring, deafening me. On every side was the great city of Cork, the Beamish brewery and the college and the English market and the river Lee, rolling down to the sea. What am I going to do? I asked myself as German tourists below me banged out “You Are My Sunshine” on the carillon. What am I going to do?