She's Not There Read online

  When Grace and her sister returned from London, we took a ferry to the Aran Isles and were shown an ancient fort on Inishmore by a man we called Seamus O’Twotimes because he said things like “The population here is nine hundred. Nine hundred.” He was like a Celtic-fried version of a character from Goodfellas.

  The highlight of this tour was climbing a path to a mountain fort high above the sea, overlooking vast cliffs. Seamus O’Twotimes gleefully explained how several years earlier a Danish student had gone off the edge. “He just walked right out into space. Into space.”

  I said to him, “Excuse me, but I have a question. This is a remarkable fort. But I was wondering, who was it the people who lived here were defending themselves against? I mean, who’d want to take over—this place? Wouldn’t most warriors look at this cliff a half a mile in the air at the top of an island in the middle of nowhere and just say, ‘Okay, you guys can have it!’ Who was it they were being attacked by?”

  Seamus O’Twotimes thought long and hard about this question. Then he said, “Persons such as themselves.”

  At Reidy’s Wine Vaults, Grace and my friend Eoin and I celebrated my birthday in June. Eoin noted that forty-one is the “age of a villain.” And, further, “If you wanted to make someone a villain in a work of fiction, all you would have to do would be to tell the reader that he or she is forty-one and the reader will guess the rest.”

  A week later, I went to Amsterdam by myself for a few days to clear my head. I brought all of my girl things and stayed in a fine hotel and spent four days as a woman. On this occasion I decided to leave the confines of my hotel room, and so it was that in June of 1999, for the first time since my Baltimore days, I went out in the world wearing a skirt.

  I spent about two hours getting ready, making sure I’d covered every nuance, shaving my arms, my legs, my face. I made sure my makeup was perfect. I looked in the mirror. I looked like a very nervous American tourist, like a mom from Connecticut who walks around with her passport in a money belt.

  Then I stood by the door, trying to muster the courage to go outside.

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and a moment later, it swung open.

  “Oh,” said the bell captain, “pardon me, madam. I thought you were the chambermaid.”

  Then he left, and I thought, I’m not the chambermaid.

  I walked down the hallway and pushed the down button.

  I stood in the elevator and watched the numbers descend. In a matter of moments, the doors were going to open in a crowded lobby. There I’d be, standing as a woman in a room full of people.

  The door opened. I walked forward. No one looked at me twice.

  I walked out into the streets of Amsterdam. I had forgotten what it felt like to wear a skirt outside and was frightened and chilled by the feeling of the breeze on my bare legs. I walked through the city, did some shopping. I walked over to Vondel Park and sat on a bench and watched the swans.

  At the end of the day, I walked over to the Stedelijk Museum and there found the Violinist of Chagall, the green man who stands with his violin atop the rooftops of a city.

  I stood there for a long time, looking at that man hovering, weightless, levitated by music above the sorrows of the world.

  The Ice Storm (Winter 2000)

  Back in Maine again, our family stood on the banks of Great Pond, watching fireworks, as the millennium came to a close. In the house behind us were the voices of our friends, the music of Jimmy Durante: Don’t you know that it’s worth, / Every treasure on earth, / To be young at heart. . . . Corks popped off of champagne bottles. Couples slow-danced, their arms wrapped around each other.

  Our children looked up at the night, their breath coming out in frozen clouds. Rockets exploded in the sky above us. Fiery blue streamers fell toward earth.

  A few days later, I dropped Patrick off at day care and drove back through the snow toward home. I passed through the Colby campus, where a woman was doing a figure eight on the ice of Johnson Pond. Across the street, the Colby Woodsmen’s Team was throwing hatchets at a large wooden bull’s-eye. An ax struck the center of the circle as I drove past. Thunk.

  I drove down the icy hill on Rices Rips Road and crossed the Messalonskee Stream, its small waterfalls frozen into cascading stalactites. As I approached the railroad tracks, the lights began to flash at the crossing. A long freight train lumbered past, and I stopped and looked and listened. The boxcars were covered with various legends: Bangor and Aroostook, Georgia Pacific, Chessie System, Southern Serves the South.

  I reached for the radio and turned it on. From Blue Hill came the sounds of the Zombies on WERU, “She’s Not There.”

  I turned off the radio. There were all sorts of sounds already—the squeaking of the wheels of the freight train, the idling of my engine, the caboose rolling into the distance. The soft dinging of the crossing bell ceased. Horns honked from behind me, engines gunned angrily. People shouted as they drove around the Audi: Hey, what’s the matter with you? Why are you just sitting there? Snow fell on my windshield. The wind howled.

  I pulled the emergency brake. I stayed in the car, motionless, for a long time.

  Okay, I said. Okay, okay, okay. Enough.

  That night I said to Grace, “Listen, would you mind if I got back into therapy again?”

  She looked perplexed. “How could I mind it if you went into therapy?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just that I feel like I’m being crushed, with the whole gender thing. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe what I need is to be a woman full-time. But even just thinking about that makes me crazy, all the losses it would mean for us. All I know is, I can’t do this alone anymore. I need to talk to someone.”

  Grace looked pale. “If you need therapy,” she said softly, “you should get it.”

  I saw a therapist not far from my home who claimed to specialize in gender issues. He had an office in a building that more than anything else resembled the Island of Misfit Toys. Beneath a single roof was a massage therapist, an aromatherapist, a polarity therapist, and a numerologist. And then there was my advocate, a concerned-looking man I called Dr. Strange.

  Strange listened to my story for six weeks, twice a week, two hours a shot. He took a lot of notes, talked about Greek mythology, lectured me on the nature of the soul, and asked me how I felt about my penis.

  At the end of our sessions, I got a hug.

  He gave me dozens of diagnostic tests. Some of them were relatively straightforward, others seemed completely obscure. Later, he asked me to find archetypal images of masculinity and femininity and to bring them in and talk about them. I brought in prints of twenty Impressionist paintings, including After the Bath by Degas.

  “Very interesting,” said Dr. Strange.

  He asked me to talk about the differences between male and female and how I imagined that these were distinct from the differences between masculine and feminine. He asked me to trace my entire history as a transgendered person, from my earliest memory to the moment when I froze at the railroad crossing. We talked about sexuality, about marginality, about culture and archetype, about the difference between reality and fantasy. He researched my medical history, inquired about any history of abuse or neglect, searched my life in vain for symptoms of pathology.

  I tried to comply with all of this and told him the truth, as best I knew it. He seemed startled by how well-adjusted I was. There didn’t seem to be any explanation for it.

  At the beginning of March he sat me down and said, “All right, look. We’ve been talking for a while now, and I think I have a pretty good sense of where you fall along the scale.” He looked out the window. “You want to know what I think?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “First of all, let’s agree on what you’re not. You aren’t a cross-dresser, or gay, or intersexed, or suffering from any other condition, like multiple personality disorder, or dissociative disorder. You operate at a strangely high level of functionality, actually, consideri
ng what you’ve been dealing with.”

  Dr. Strange cleared his throat.

  “I would consider you a strong, positive candidate,” he said, “for gender shift.”

  It was snowing outside, and the flakes ticked against the windowpanes. The radiator pipes clanked and hissed.

  “Are you surprised?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re familiar with the Benjamin Standards of Care?”

  “Yes, I know about them.” The winter wind shook the windows.

  “Well, the standards provide you with a safe and cautious manner of proceeding, if proceeding is what you want to do.”

  “If proceeding is what I want to do,” I said. I felt like punching him. “How can I know if proceeding is what I want to do?”

  “Do you doubt that this is what you want?”

  “Of course it’s what I want. But that’s not the point. If I do this, I’m going to lose everything, don’t you understand that? Everything. ”

  Dr. Strange reached forward and squeezed my hand. I snapped it back from him. I didn’t want to be squeezed.

  “Listen, Jim. You can start by doing what the standards suggest, which is talking the situation over in a therapeutic setting. You need to understand what you need to do, and the consequences. You can, if you so decide, start taking bigger and bigger steps out into the world as female, monitoring your reaction to that experience, and observing whether being female in the world is what you expect it to be. You don’t have to do everything at once.”

  “Doing everything at once isn’t the problem,” I said. “The problem is doing anything at all.”

  “You need to talk this over with Grace,” he said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “It seems, from everything you’ve said, that you want to stay with Grace. And yet, you should know that most couples don’t survive this. The ones that do aren’t exactly couples after transition. They’re more like friends, or sisters.”

  “I don’t want to be sisters with her.”

  “Well, that’s not a choice that’s necessarily yours to make.” He looked sad. “You also should be prepared for this to be the thing that others most misunderstand about transsexuality. People generally have a hard time distinguishing between sexual orientation and gender identity. But as it turns out, gay and lesbian people don’t necessarily have that much in common with transsexuals.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except for the fact that we get beaten up by the same people.”

  “You should be ready for people who don’t get this to say, ‘Oh, well, he was really just gay and couldn’t deal with it.’”

  “I know.”

  “Let me ask you. If you weren’t married to Grace—if you didn’t know her—and you were female . . . whom would you be attracted to, men or women?”

  “I can’t imagine not knowing her.”

  “Humor me.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, my world has always revolved around women. I’ve never thought about men that way. I mean, it’s never even crossed my mind.”

  “Well, be prepared for it to cross your mind. Once you start on hormones, it’s likely you’ll see the world in a different way. Of the previously heterosexual male-to-female transsexuals I’ve known, about a third of them remain attracted to women after transition, another third make the leap to men, and another third become kind of asexual. The best thing you can do is to just keep an open mind.”

  “I’m not sure I want an open mind,” I said, “if it means destroying my relationship with Grace.”

  “Well. The very first thing you have to do, as far as I can see, is to begin including Grace in your transition. From the little work I have done with you already, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you and Grace split up, the results will be atomic. ”

  “Atomic,” I said. “Yeah, that’s a pretty good word for it.”

  “And you should start thinking about talking to a larger circle of people about your being transgendered. Not everyone has to know at first, and the people you tell first need not be the most important people in your life. But slowly, you need to start bringing this thing that has always been secret into the light of day, and sharing it with the people you love.”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “After a few months, we can start to prescribe hormones for you, if that’s what you want. Most people going from male to female start out on Premarin, usually a low dosage, increased gradually over time. You might also want to start in on an antiandrogen, to bring your testosterone down. I have an endocrinologist I work with I can recommend; or you can consult your own family doctor. In any case, hormones are dangerous, and you should make sure that you take them in consultation with someone who knows what they’re talking about. You know what hormones will do, don’t you?”

  “I have a pretty good sense of it.”

  “Well, I’m going to say this anyway, just so I know you heard it. Your skin will soften. Your hair will get thicker and fluffier. The hair on your arms and legs and chest will grow finer. Your breasts will start to grow, gradually reverting you to the genetic shape you’ve inherited from your mother and grandmother. A general rule of thumb is that you’ll be about a cup smaller than your female relatives.”

  I nodded again. I came from a family of large-busted, slim-hipped women.

  Dr. Strange continued. “You’ll experience something called ‘fat migration.’ The fat in your body right now is centered in the male places—on your cheeks, in your neck, and on your belly. Over time it will move away from those places toward the female places—your bust, your buttocks, and especially your hips. Your overall weight will probably remain the same, but people will think you’re losing weight since your features, and your face in particular, will change.

  “People who have taken hormones report that the most dramatic effect of all that estrogen is on your brain. There is said to be a distinctly different way that your brain will function, and in which you experience the world. I don’t know if this is true or not, but you will probably want to keep a journal and monitor those changes.”

  “I’m going to be writing,” I said quietly.

  “Your voice may soften over time, more from culture than biology, but you might want to talk to a voice specialist. There is a woman at Bates College who works with transsexuals. Here’s her card.”

  I took it. “Tania Vaclava,” I said.

  “She’s Hungarian,” he explained.

  “Great,” I said. “So I’ll talk like a Hungarian woman.”

  He smiled. “When you’ve been on hormones for a year, the standards require you to seek a second opinion from another mental health care professional. You are specifically required to see someone with a medical degree, either an M. D. or a Ph. D. When you have two letters of recommendation from your therapists, you can schedule surgery, which usually takes place a year or two after that. People in Maine tend to go to Drs. Menard and Bressard in Montreal, but other top surgeons include Schrang in Wisconsin, Meltzer in Oregon, Biber in Colorado, and Alter in Los Angeles. There are others, too. You should research each of the available doctors and see whom you’re most comfortable with. Maybe you’d like to go to Thailand. There are a lot of good surgeons in Bangkok.”

  I shook my head. “Bangkok,” I said.

  “Anyway, before you can have the gender reassignment surgery— or GRS—you are required to live full-time as a woman for a minimum of one year. During that period you may not go back to being a man at any time. You are expected to be psychologically preparing for your new gender. If you have any reservations or second thoughts, the time of your real-life experience, or RLE, is the time to learn of them, not after surgery, which is permanent and irreversible.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Dr. Strange. “Now the first thing you want to do is sit down with Grace tonight and talk this over with her. You are going to need her every step of the way. My own opinion is, you cannot get to where you nee
d to go without her support and her love.”

  “But doc, how can I expect her to participate in a process that by its very definition will take the man she loves away from her? That will destroy the life we have lived?”

  “You can’t expect it,” Dr. Strange said. “But you can ask for it.”

  “I can’t do this to her,” I said to him.

  “Listen,” he said. “You aren’t ‘doing’ anything. You are a transsexual. Amazingly, you have managed to carry this burden all these years. It is time for you to get help. You need to turn to the people you love to help you. You can’t keep carrying this burden alone.”

  “I’d rather keep carrying it alone,” I said, “than cause all this grief to the people I love.”

  “Well,” Dr. Strange said,“that’s your choice, I guess. Do you really think you can keep on the way you’ve been going? How much further do you think you can go?”

  “I can’t go any further at all,” I said to him.

  “Then what you have to do is clear,” he said.

  “No, what I have to do is completely unclear,” I said. “Just because I can’t go any further as a man doesn’t mean I can just pick up and start on the road to being female. I don’t know how to do that. I can’t do that.”

  “Maybe Grace will help you,” he said.

  “Maybe Grace will want to suffocate me with a pillow.”

  “Jim,” Dr. Strange said, “do you really think that’s what’s going to happen?”

  “No,” I said, “probably not. Actually, she’ll probably want to suffocate herself with a pillow.”

  “Jim, Grace is a social worker. These aren’t new issues to her. I’ll bet she has more of a sense of how this works than you think. She does love you, no matter what else is true. She is going to want you to be happy.”

  “You really do live on your own little planet,” I said, “don’t you.” Dr. Strange stood up and spread his arms. “Have a hug,” he said. That evening just before sundown, Grace was in tears, her heart broken in two.