She's Not There Read online

  “Those are people fishing,” she said, “for the fish that live on shit.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the West Side. One of our dishes was entitled Two Kinds Meat. It was pretty clear to both of us by then that I wasn’t quite in Casey’s league. She knew lots of other people in the restaurant, many of them photographers or agents or models. Some of them looked at me, then her, then smiled.

  “Listen, Jim,” she said finally. “You’re sweet. But what’s up with you? I mean, really? What’s your story?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Liar,” she replied.

  Once a week I walked up to see Dr. Smegala, my psychiatrist. “Well, it sounds to me,” he suggested at the end of one session, “like you’re a transsexual.”

  “Don’t say that,” I told him. “Please don’t say that.”

  My mother helped me pay for the shrink, which was embarrassing, since I didn’t want to tell her why I needed one. I just told her I was sad. “That’s okay, honey,” said Mom. “You’ll cheer up.” Still, she gave me the money to see Dr. Smegala. I wasn’t sure she’d keep paying for it if I told her what the problem was.

  My mother’s whole life seemed to be a lesson in the transformative powers of optimism and faith, and this lesson had not been lost on me. Even then, as I stepped over dead junkies en route to Dr. Smegala’s, as I killed mice by dropping the Columbia Encyclopedia on their heads, as I interviewed the incomprehensibly bitter director of the Skunk Club, I still believed that somehow, everything would work out for the best. I wasn’t depressed, most of the time. Instead I felt lucky and blessed, ridiculously grateful to be having such an adventure.

  The Skunk Club was a support group for people in Manhattan who had skunks as pets. The woman who directed it had black hair, tied back in a tight bun.

  “Listen,” she said, infuriated by the mere suspicion that I seemed to think the Skunk Club was funny. “People shouldn’t have skunks! They don’t make good pets!”

  Toward the end of the interview, she mentioned that skunks weren’t the only pets that made their owners’ lives unpleasant. There was a couple in Pennsylvania, she said, who had a monkey orphanage. They had about a score of monkeys down there, all of whom had been abandoned by their owners.

  Turned out, monkeys didn’t make good pets, either.

  I got the phone number for the monkey orphanage, which was run by a couple whose name was D’Angelo. The husband answered. “Monkeys, sure we got monkeys,” he said. “Come down for a visit, we’ll show you around.” To my surprise, they didn’t live all that far from my parents’ house. All the time I’d spent growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I didn’t know a monkey orphanage was just around the corner. It’s possible to live in the same town as a monkey house, I thought, and never even know it.

  A week later, I went down to Philly on the Amtrak train, stayed the night in the Coffin House, and drove off the next morning to see the destitute monkeys. Prior to leaving, I’d confirmed all the arrangements with the D’Angelos by phone. Just before I hung up, however, the husband said something peculiar. “Listen. Do you know about me? I’ve ...” His voice faltered. “Well, you’ll see when you get here.”

  Whatever it was that had happened to Mr. D’Angelo, it sounded scary. I imagined that he had third-degree burns all over his body. Either that or bite marks from the chimps.

  I got to the D’Angelo house just before noon, and a large woman ushered me in. Her name was Samantha. Something about her suggested that she was a professional nurse, the nurse of the husband, I assumed. A woman hired to rub salve into his scars.

  Samantha talked about monkeys while I wrote in my notebook. “You know what people think?” Samantha said. “They think they can give a monkey to the zoo.” She shook her head sadly. “You know what happens to domesticated monkeys in the zoo? They get beaten. They starve.”

  At that moment another woman came in. Her name was Maria, and she had a thick eastern European accent. Maria and Samantha talked about monkeys for quite a while. As it turned out, the orphanage was limited to monkeys—no chimps allowed. “Ve had vun cheempanzee,” Maria said. “Zen eet suffocate in eets pajamas!” She shook her head sadly. “No more cheemps!”

  I was sitting there wondering where Mr. D’Angelo was when suddenly it hit me. The big woman, Samantha. With the deep voice. And the huge hands. That was Mr. D’Angelo.

  Okay, I thought. Focus. You’re working for the American Bystander. You’re doing a story about a monkey orphanage. One of the owners of the monkey house has had a sex change, just like you want to have. That shouldn’t affect the story. Not much, anyway.

  I tried to focus on the questions I’d written down, although these were now not the ones I wanted to ask. What do they eat? Purina Monkey Chow. Where do they sleep? They all sleep in the shed in the backyard, except for Marbles, the vicious one, who sleeps in a cage in the kitchen. Can they do tricks? No, mostly they try to get near your face and bite you.

  After a while the D’Angelos took me to a shed out back. There was a fair amount of screaming and swinging from trapezes. Other monkeys sat motionlessly, looking through the bars of their cage, their hands thrust through the bars and folded quietly in front of them. Some of those hands held bananas.

  We went back inside and the D’Angelos asked me if I wanted a drink. “Yes,” I said very quickly. Samantha opened a bottle of red wine. “You know who I am?” she said after a while.

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said nonchalantly.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to tell.”

  Oh, I could tell all right.

  I talked with Samantha and Maria for a while. It was the first conversation I’d ever had with another transsexual. “It’s hard for people to understand,” Samantha said, drinking her wine. “But in the end, you are what you are. You fight it for your whole life. Eventually you accept yourself. That’s really all there is to it.”

  I nodded. The longer we talked, the more I began to recognize a certain bravery and dignity in Samantha. Still, she filled me with melancholy. Was this what the future held for me?

  Maria seemed to accept everything about her husband with a certain sad grace. She just said, “Crazy vurld,” and shook her head. “Crazy, crazy vurld.”

  Before I left the D’Angelos’, I used their bathroom. There on top of the commode was a bottle of prescription pills. Samantha D’Angelo, read the label. Premarin 2.5 mg/day. Conjugated Estrogen.

  I opened the canister and shook a Premarin into my hand. For a moment I thought about swallowing it, just to see what it would feel like. I didn’t, though. It would be eighteen years before I held another one in my hand. That time I did swallow it.

  Twenty years later, the phone rang on a Saturday afternoon. I had spent the morning raking snow off my roof.

  “Hello? Jennifer? This is Casey. From New York?”

  It took me a moment to recall my date with the woman who had observed the people fishing for the fish that lived on shit. But I remembered her.

  “Hi, Casey,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I was doing a Web search for all the people I used to know? And I found your Web site and read about your transition and saw your photograph. And all I could think was, whoa.”

  “Whoa. Yeah, well, that’s what I thought about it myself, actually.”

  “Anyway, the reason I’m calling? I don’t know if you know this, but—did you know, back when we went on those dates, twenty years ago—did you know I was a transsexual, too?”

  I held the phone, not saying anything for a while. I saw the Little Red Lighthouse, fallen under the shadow of the great gray bridge.

  No, I told her. I hadn’t known.

  The silence that transgendered people cloak themselves with had hidden us then, even from each other.

  I met Casey again in the spring of 2002. I was in New York visiting some film people, and Casey and I made plans to meet in a bar in midtown. I s
at there waiting for her to come through the door. I wondered how she had changed over twenty years. There weren’t many other people in the bistro, just some tourists, a woman at the bar, the bartender.

  After a long time, the woman at the bar and I looked at each other closely, then smiled. She picked up her drink and came over to my table.

  “Hello, Jenny,” she said.

  “Hello, Casey,” I said.

  Casey had gained some weight. Her blond hair was now mostly gray.

  “You look good,” she said. “Whoa.”

  “So do you,” I said.

  “Liar,” said Casey.

  Casey was drinking single-malt Scotch. She finished the Scotch she was drinking and ordered another. I told her the story of the D’Angelos, of my roommate John Flyte, of my encounter with the Snail.

  “Tin Pan Alley,” Casey said. “I remember that place. They tore it down, though. They razed everything on that block to build the Marriott Marquis.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked her. “When we went out on those dates. When I was your friend? Why didn’t you tell me you were transgendered?”

  “I knew what you’d do,” said Casey, withdrawing into herself. “You’d do what guys always do, you’d run away in horror. You’d tell everyone.” She sipped her drink, and tears filled her eyes. “You know how people are.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. I thought about how beautiful she’d been in her early twenties, how we’d walked into that Chinese restaurant and all the beautiful people had seemed to recognize her. Two Kinds Meat.

  The bar we were in was nearly empty now. Outside, in the late afternoon, people were streaming through the streets of midtown.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how people are.”

  Casey’s eyes dripped big fat tears, and she wiped her cheeks with the table napkin. Then she lifted her water glass to her face, and the water poured down either side of her chin. In exhaustion, she put both elbows on the table and flopped her face into her palms. The pressure of her head in her hands knocked over the table, and a moment later, her Scotch was on the floor.

  I righted the table, then looked at my watch. “Listen, Casey,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Listen, Jenny,” said Casey. “I want to tell you something. Things are very new for you. You have a lot to learn. It’s going to get bad— terrible things are going to happen to you, in the years to come. And when they do—you’re going to need me.”

  I let this sink in. I got to my feet and put on my coat. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Casey.” We hugged. I remembered sitting in the D’Angelos’ house, asking myself, Is this what I’m going to become? Is this what the future holds for me?

  “Remember,” Casey whispered again. “You’re going to need me.”

  I walked out into the bright sunlight of the spring day and rode the number one train up to 110th Street. Then I walked over to Amsterdam to look at the facade of my old apartment building. I looked at the roster of tenants in the foyer next to the doorbells, but my name wasn’t there anymore.

  It all seemed like a long time ago.

  A few years after we were roommates, John Flyte killed himself with a shotgun, walked up into the mountains and pulled the trigger with his toe.

  I thought about the time we’d lived together, about those dark early days of trying to be a writer, of sitting on the radiator eating a banana and holding the bars on the window with one hand.

  Crazy vurld.

  House of Mystery (Summer 1987)

  Graduate school turned out to be a lot like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with me in the Jimmy Stewart role. A short-story writer from Texas, Glenn Blake, played the part of John Wayne. Liberty Valance, in the black hat, was Don DeWilde, a brilliant magic-realist who’d grown up not far from my mother’s house in Narberth, Pennsylvania.

  I had expected that Johns Hopkins would be a lot like Wesleyan—doing bongs with your professor, everyone giving each other back rubs, the university chartering schoolbuses to take everyone to the Dead concert. Instead it was this cowboy movie, poets hiding behind rocks and firing off pistols, and crazy drunken people burning down the saloon, and constantly meeting people in the street at sundown with your guns drawn.

  Glenn Blake and I met in a bar every night and talked about the skills one needed as a writer: Ya don’t jerk the trigger, pilgrim. Ya squeeze it.

  I don’t know why graduate school was like this. Don never did a single unkind thing to me, and neither did any of the other people in his gang of henchmen. But we all just hated one another. People tell me grad school is always like this. You put a bunch of smarty-pants together and the next thing you know you’re living in the Wild West. It creeped me out, though. I had never had enemies before.

  Partly it was the atmosphere of Johns Hopkins, a place that was famous for taking itself too seriously, and partly it was because I was psychotic. I was sitting on top of a mountain of secrets so high that it was almost impossible to see the earth anymore. For one thing, now that I lived alone, I was living as a woman about half the time. I’d come home and go female and pay the bills and write and watch television, and then I’d go back to boy mode and teach my classes. I didn’t venture out into the world much en femme, although I did get out now and then. It was unbelievably frightening. The first time I ever went outside wearing a skirt and a knit top, I thought I was going to perish from fear. The world felt raw and intimidating; the cold wind howled on my bare legs.

  I got as far as an Esso station, where I filled up my tank at the self-serve pump. I waited in line to pay for the gas, and no one looked at me twice. “Thank you, ma’am,” said the attendant.

  Then I drove home.

  I lived in constant fear of detection and kept waiting for the chair of the program to call me up and say, Boylan, we’ve heard stories. I hope you understand the consequences.

  I knew what the consequences would be. If word got out I was transgendered, I’d disappoint everyone who had put their faith in me.

  My father was dying of cancer all that year. In addition to switching back and forth from male to female, I was also constantly taking the train up to Philly to check on him. He had a brain seizure the day after the Challenger accident. I rode up to Philly on the night train, and there in the Coffin House was my father, bald from the chemo, emaciated, his kind eyes still shining as he lay in his bed. “Dad, what can I do?”

  “You can get me a cigarette,” he whispered. I got him one, and lit it, and stuck it in his mouth.

  “What else do you need?” I asked.

  He smiled grimly. “How about a blindfold,” he said.

  In January I traveled up to Wesleyan to attend a memorial concert for a friend of mine who had died of lymphoma. Tim Alcock, a gentle, funny man, had also been a brilliant guitarist and African drummer. There was a big reunion of friends who had gone to Wesleyan in the late seventies and early eighties, and there was a performance of a composition written in memory of Tim. The lyrics to the piece were a single phrase that Tim, in his final days, had written in a notebook, again and again, over a hundred times: I, Tim, am now a channel for the music which comes through the light.

  I was supposed to go on stage at one point and play “Beautiful Dreamer” on the Autoharp, but I was too sad to do it.

  After the concert, there was a reception at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Middletown, and there at the table next to mine was a woman named Grace Finney. She’d gone out with a couple of my friends, years ago. I’d thought about her since college, wondering what had become of her. She wasn’t the kind of woman you forgot. The first time I’d ever laid eyes on her, she was on stage in Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and all I could think about for days afterward was, Whoa. Who was that?

  Grace had moved back to Washington, her hometown, after working in a theater she’d helped found in New Haven. Now she was working at the Studio Theatre in D. C., which was only an hour’s drive from Baltimore. We talked about getting together so
metime and exchanged phone numbers. Maybe we could go to an Orioles game, she suggested. Old Memorial Stadium was not far from my house.

  I left the party early and headed down to New Haven to catch the sleeper train back to Tombstone. I called Grace once I got back, but we never quite connected. After a while I lost her number.

  Aside from being psychotic, the worst problem facing me at Johns Hopkins was the fact that the chair of my department liked me. I had been in John T. Irwin’s class on Poe and Borges in the fall, and I had loved it. Irwin was a genuine eccentric and something of a genius. His speculative readings of Faulkner had produced a classic in American scholarship: Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge. I had the fortune—which later became my misfortune—to discover, wholly by accident, a key missing work that would help Irwin complete his Borges book, which was entitled The Mystery to a Solution.

  I had to do an oral report for the class on the Astronomicon and its influence on the Egyptians, which would in turn further shine light on the mutually constitutive bipolar opposition of spectral doubles which inhabits Poe’s work and which is then recapitulated in the analytic detective tales of Borges. It was that kind of class, people talking like that. One night I was researching the Astronomicon in the very lowest level of the Hopkins library, a frightening building that was built down into the ground like the world’s largest military bunker. On the lowest, darkest, most oppressive floor of the library—literally on the bottom shelf (where I’d been looking for something else entirely)—I put my hand on a collection of fifteenth-century lithographs of what Talmudic scholars imagined the universe to look like. One of them was a quincunx-shaped diamond, divided in half so as to form two triangles, each one reflecting the other. In the middle was the name of JHVH written in Hebraic script. The tetragrammaton.

  To me these etchings looked about as crazy as the seal with the Pyramid and the eye on back of the dollar bill, but I recognized the tetragrammaton from a story by Borges. The two triangles represented the mind of God, which is perfect (triangle number one), and the universe, which is an imperfect reflection of that mind (triangle number two).