She's Not There Read online

  When I used this symbol (as well as a lot of other highly entertaining argle-bargle) in my report the next day, John Irwin practically fell off his chair. By the time I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from the department secretary: The chair would like to see you, first thing tomorrow morning. And bring that book you used in your report!

  Irwin and I hit it off. I liked his brilliance and his unpredictable imagination. I also liked the fact that he had a sense of humor—he too saw critical theory as something of an exercise of the imagination, and that didn’t preclude thinking the whole business was entertaining. Irwin offered me a teaching position at Hopkins on the spot, right then and there, before I’d even finished my degree.

  I stammered. I didn’t think my fellow writers in the workshop were going to like this very much. Most of them were scared of Professor Irwin. They thought he was demented.

  “I don’t know, John,” I said. “Do you think John Barth is going to be okay with this?”

  “Sure he’ll be okay,” he said. “You want me to call him?”

  “Okay,” I said. His secretary got John Barth on the phone. Irwin told him he wanted to give me a lectureship. He nodded and hung up.

  “Jack’s fine with it,” he said. “You know Jack. He’s pretty mellow about things.”

  Actually, Jack Barth (it took me forever to get used to calling him “Jack”) was an incredible teacher. He was the most articulate man I had ever met and performed stunts with words that were the literary equivalent of what the Harlem Globetrotters did with a basketball. To make matters worse, he was also one of the gentlest souls I’d ever met. Rick Barthelme once described him as “equal parts brilliance and kindness.” He was a lot of things, and mellow was only one of them.

  My fellow workshoppers would not be mellow about this, though, as Irwin knew, and he asked me not to breathe a word of the lectureship he’d just given me. “Things could get ugly if this gets out,” he said.

  Things were already ugly, and since everyone there was pretty smart, they figured out rather quickly that something was up with me. They’d ask me if Irwin had promised me any particular goodies, and I had to lie to them and say, Oh, heavens, no, for the whole year, and of course everyone knew that this was a pathetic lie since I had a face that apparently betrayed every secret about me except one.

  So now I had a secret in my academic life, a secret in my personal, sexual life, and my father was dying. Still, we had a pretty good time. Glenn Blake and I used to go to this little bar and drink Anchor Steam Beer and eat Mrs. Irvin’s Red Hot Potato Chips. They really were hot, too. Glenn would say Texas things like “Well, goddamn!” and sometimes he’d say, “Well, goddamn!” and once in a while he said, “ Well! Goddamn!” He had all kinds of Galvestonian slang. One time he said to me, “Boylan, you’re slipperier than owl shit on a sycamore branch.” Another time he described the work of one of my fellow workshoppers as “farts in the bathtub,” which wasn’t exactly a compliment.

  I spent less and less time at school as my father got sicker. In mid-March I withdrew from Hopkins, unsure if I was ever going back. John Irwin was unbelievably generous to me. “You take care of your family,” he said. “We’ll sort out everything else later.”

  My father died on Easter Sunday 1986. When he died, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was on the radio. After he died I sat next to him for a long time, just holding his hand. I’m going to make you proud, Dad, I told him. You wait and see. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do this, but I intended to keep my word.

  I started therapy again. This time I saw a gender specialist who lived down near Fell’s Point. She was a smart, vigorous, hugely fat woman named Carol. I’d turn into a woman and drive down to the Point in my Volkswagen, and we’d talk. At the end of that year, she said to me, “Well, listen. You’re a transsexual. The condition isn’t going to go away over time. It’s going to get worse. What you need to do is learn to conquer your fear. If you choose, you can live a perfectly normal life as a woman. You’re lucky—you have feminine features, you have good hair, you’re not married, and you’re young. You have a lot going for you, if only you find the courage to move ahead with your life.”

  That was the last time I saw Carol. I didn’t want to be told I had to be a woman. What I wanted from her was the mystery to a solution.

  I wanted to learn how to accept who I wasn’t.

  What I felt was, being a man might be the second best life I can live, but the best life I can live will mean only loss and grief. So what I wanted was to learn how to be happy with this second best life. My mother’s boundless optimism still buoyed me. In spite of my father’s death, in spite of spending a year in Tombstone, in spite of the constant, private grief that I felt, I still believed that it was a life full of blessings. People can’t have everything they want, I thought. It is your fate to accept a life being someone other than yourself.

  I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have.

  In March I ran into Grace Finney again at a party in Boston, up at Moynihan’s house. We traded numbers again, and this time I did connect with her. We went out on a few dates, sometimes in Washington, sometimes in Baltimore. We didn’t see the Orioles, though.

  One hot spring night, Grace Finney and I went out to dinner at a place called Niçoise, in Washington. It was upscale French cuisine, served by waiters in black tuxes and roller skates.

  Grace was that rarest of creatures, the native-born Washingtonian. Her father,Tom Finney, had been true Democratic Party royalty. He’d come east from Oklahoma in the 1950s to work for Senator Mike Monroney, then he’d worked on the Adlai Stevenson campaign; he was one of the key players who helped draft the compromise that seated the Mississippi delegation at the national convention in 1956. Later, he advised JFK on trade legislation and went into private law practice with Clark Clifford and Paul Warnke. In 1968 he was national campaign chairman for Eugene McCarthy; in 1972 he held the same position for Edmund Muskie.

  “He was there in the trailer in Manchester,” Grace said proudly, “when Muskie cried in the snow.”

  In short, the Finneys had a long tradition of championing noble, lost causes. Grace’s father had died in 1978 of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her mother, Sally, had died in 1984 of emphysema.

  Tom Finney had liked to smoke cigarettes and tell stories after dinner, just like my own father. They would have got along well, our fathers, even though my dad had been a Republican delegate to the national convention in 1952 for Robert Taft and had voted for Nixon three times.

  “How do you get over missing your father?” I asked Grace as we ate our salades niçoises. “What’s the secret?”

  Grace looked at me with her large green eyes. “There’s no secret, Jim,” she said. “It just hurts. After a while, it hurts a little less.”

  I could tell from the way she said this that she didn’t especially like the fact that bereavement was something we shared. It wasn’t the thing she wanted me to find interesting about her. But she shouldn’t have had to worry about that.

  Grace was half Dutch, half Irish, equal measures elegance and salt. She drank Jameson’s Irish whiskey and could whistle with two fingers in her mouth. She liked Little Feat, the Nighthawks, the Seldom Scene, and Bruce Springsteen. When her car broke down she could open the hood and fix the engine by herself. At black-tie theater galas, she wore elegant gowns and pearl earrings; she moved through a room with a poise and style that made people turn their heads and blink. She had shoulder-length blond hair, an infectious laugh, and freckles.

  After dinner, we went to see the final performance of As Is at the Studio Theatre, where she was the production manager. I sat in the house afterward and watched the crew, including Grace, tear down the set. They were a tight group, the Studio crowd, and I felt a little like an outsider, in spite of the fact that Grace very nicely introduced me to everyone. From the lighting booth, during the show, I had seen the manager of the theater, and the
director, and the light board operator, all eyeing me with suspicion. They weren’t in the mood to start sharing Grace with anyone.

  At the end of the night, a large crowd of people from the production had burgers and beers in a local diner called Trios, which was run by three elderly women who called you “hon.” By my count there were at least two other guys there auditioning for the part of Grace’s boyfriend. Her real boyfriend was now in the Peace Corps, serving out the year in Africa. She thus viewed all her suitors with tender suspicion.

  Toward two A. M., Grace remembered that she’d neglected to throw a large bag of trash from the theater into the Dumpster. So we all—the other boyfriends and I—climbed back into a car and drove to the Studio and waited in the parking lot as Grace hauled a large bag of trash out of the theater and toward a giant Dumpster. We all offered to do this for her, but she just looked at us as if we were crazy. “I got it, I got it,” she said.

  The Dumpster was so large that she had to climb a small wooden ladder to get the trash bag in it. Up the rungs she went, as we watched from the Honda. Grace reached the top of the ladder, threw back the lid of the Dumpster, and teetered.

  The driver of the car, aka Auditioning Boyfriend #1, said, “She isn’t going to—”

  “No, don’t worry,” interrupted Auditioning Boyfriend #2 with authority. “I’ve seen her do this before, lots of times.”

  Grace windmilled her arms around.

  “Lots of times,” said AB #2 again, to make sure we got the point.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t look good.”

  Alone among these gentlemen, I had imagined the future correctly. Grace teetered off to one side, then disappeared completely into the Dumpster. The last we saw of her was a pair of feet sticking straight up. Then these too vanished.

  Interestingly, the men stayed in the car. No one leaped to his feet to rescue her. I think we all knew Grace well enough to understand that she would prefer to rescue herself from this predicament, and we were right.

  After a few moments, Grace’s head appeared out of the top of the Dumpster. There was a banana peel on one of her shoulders. Her face was lit by an enormous, proud smile. She looked as graceful as a flamenco dancer, as if she were sitting there with a rose between her teeth.

  Grace climbed down the ladder and got back into the front passenger seat.

  “Don’t. Say. Anything,” she suggested.

  We didn’t. We drove up 16th Street, toward our homes. As the out-of-town guest, I was sleeping on Grace’s couch that night. Halfway there, AB #1 very gently rolled down all the windows in the car, to provide us with some badly needed fresh air.

  “Sorry,” Grace said with unquashed charm.

  I sat in the backseat, hopelessly in love.

  That summer, my friend Curly got engaged to the heiress to a whiskey fortune, a wild debutante named Mary Catherine. The wedding was going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, about as high society a wedding as one could imagine. Curly asked me if I’d be his best man. It would involve lots of toasting. I asked Grace if she’d accompany me to Charlotte, and she said she’d think it over. She wasn’t sure if she was busy or not.

  I called her in the weeks following the Dumpster incident, but I didn’t get through. She didn’t call me back, either. I left messages, then stopped. I figured that by not returning my calls, she was letting me know how things stood.

  I sat in my father’s black leather chair in my apartment in Baltimore one night, after I’d left Grace a message asking her to call. The loudest sound I’d ever heard was the sound of that phone not ringing.

  On the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, I loaded all my things into the Volkswagen and started driving north. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I knew I wanted to get away from the Maryland spring, with its cherry blossoms and its bursting tulips and all that bullshit. I figured I’d keep driving farther and farther north until there weren’t any people. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do then, but I was certain something would occur to me that would end this business once and for all.

  My first stop was New York City, where my mother and my sister and I had dinner at what had been my father’s favorite restaurant, the Leopard, on the East Side. It was one of those restaurants where there weren’t any menus. This very large Frenchman simply came over and told you what he was going to bring you. The three of us sat there like pilots flying in the missing man formation. I had a steak.

  The next morning I drove up to Maine. I’d set my sights on Nova Scotia. The only ferry was the one out of Bar Harbor. As I drove farther north, the spring receded. It felt better that way. In the afternoon I drove onto the SS Bluenose and stood on the deck and watched America drift away behind me.

  There was someone walking around in a rabbit costume on the ship. He’d pose with you and they’d snap your picture and an hour or so later you could purchase the photo of yourself with the rabbit as a memento of your trip to Nova Scotia. I purchased mine. It showed a sad-looking young man with long hair reading Coffin and Roelof’s The Major Poets as a moth-eaten rabbit bends over him.

  In Nova Scotia I drove the car east and north. When dusk came, I’d eat in a diner, and then I’d sleep either in the car or in a small tent that I had in the back. There were scattered patches of snow up there, even in May. I kept going north until I got to Cape Breton.

  In Cape Breton I hiked around the cliffs, looked at the ocean. At night I lay in my sleeping bag by the sea as breezes shook the tent. I wrote in my journal, or read The Major Poets, or grazed around in the Modern Library’s Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. I read one up there called “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

  In the car I listened to the Warlocks sing “In the Early Morning Rain” on the tape deck. I thought about my father asking for a blindfold. I thought about Grace Finney falling into the trash. I thought about Onion drying herself off with that towel, one arm raised. I thought about the clear, inescapable fact that I was female in spirit and how, in order to be whole, I would have to give up on every dream I’d had, save one.

  I stayed in a motel one night that was officially closed for the season, but which the operator let me stay in for half price. I opened my suitcase and put on my bra and some jeans and a blue knit top. I combed out my hair and looked in the mirror and saw a perfectly normal-looking young woman. This is so wrong? I asked myself in the mirror. This is the cause of all the trouble?

  I thought about settling in one of the little villages around here, just starting life over as a woman. I’d tell everyone I was Canadian.

  Then I lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody would ever believe I was Canadian.

  The next morning I climbed a mountain at the far northern edge of Cape Breton Island. I climbed up to the top, trying to clear my head, but it wouldn’t clear. I kept going up and up, past the tree line, past the shrub line, until at last there was just moss.

  There I stood, looking out at the cold ocean a thousand miles below me, totally cut off from the world.

  A fierce wind blew in from the Atlantic. I leaned into it. I saw the waves crashing against the cliff below. I stood right at the edge. My heart pounded.

  I leaned over the edge of the precipice, but the gale blowing into my body kept me from falling. When the wind died down, I’d start to fall, then it would blow me back up again and I didn’t. I played a little game with the wind, leaning a little farther over the edge each time.

  Then I leaned off the edge of the cliff at a sharp angle, my arms held outward like wings, my body sustained only by the fierce wind, and I thought, well, all right. Is this what you came here to do?

  Let’s do it, then.

  Then a huge blast of wind blew me backward, and I landed on the moss. It was soft. I stared straight up at the blue sky, and I felt a presence. Are you all right, Son?

  This time it wasn’t a cop, though.

  I headed down the mountain and got into the car and started driving home. There wasn’t a r
abbit on the ferry this time.

  I had a big party for Curly in New York a month or so later. It was a kind of anti–bachelor party featuring performances by all the musicians and writers and actors we knew. I played “Good Lovin’” on the Autoharp: I said doctor (doctor) / Mr. M. D. / Now can you tell me (doctor) / What’s ailing me? . . . I hired a set of twins who played trumpets to perform a duet. I also hired something called the Mini-Circus, which consisted of a clown named Winky who had performing monkeys. Her boss, a domineering woman with a wig, demanded that we turn on all the lights when Winky was performing. “We don’t work in the dark!” she shouted. Winky made us all join a parade, and then everybody on the groom’s side marched behind Winky and the performing monkeys, one of whom was named Zippy.

  All of the people on the bride’s side remained in their seats, not joining the parade. They were deeply frightened. At one point a monkey jumped off Winky’s shoulder and landed in the maid of honor’s hair.

  There was a party after the party at the home of a journalist down in TriBeCa. Everyone except me got drunk and danced. I went into an empty bedroom and sat on the radiator and looked out at the dark streets of the city.

  “Hey,” said a woman’s voice. “Where did you go?”

  It was Grace Finney. I hadn’t known she was there.

  “I just came in here to sort of catch my breath, I guess,” I said.

  “I don’t mean just now. I mean this last month. You were around, and then you weren’t. How come?”

  “I went up to Nova Scotia,” I said.

  “What was that like?”

  “Kind of depressing,” I said. “I thought I was going to get away from everything, just kind of groove on the ocean and the trees and everything, but all I felt was sad.”

  “I had a trip like that last summer,” Grace said. “I was climbing Mt. Rainier with my boyfriend, before he went to Africa. I told myself I was doing it for my mother. I kept saying,‘Do it for Sally. You’ve got to do it for Sally.’ Then I stopped halfway up the mountain and realized, Sally doesn’t care if I climb the mountain. Sally could care less. Sally would want me to come down and sit at the table and eat lobsters and corn.”