28. J'accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block: all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,” “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now: it’s been how long? Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here. Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here. With or without a man. Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her. No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here. Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears. The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh. But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another. My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze: It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily. Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her: whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins. Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other. She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved: her supple touch. I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains: I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so. That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind. Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven. I’d always known that. There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not. After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after. No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man. Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met? I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else.

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch. There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women. And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it: only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window? Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then: the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small. The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed. Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her. Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want. The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man. They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends.

27. Time

Now that I’m coming closer to my surgery, I realize that I am probably not going to become a better, wiser or more capable person, ever. I’ve also been released from the illusion that I hate men. These days, they just don’t figure much into my life. I could even say, perhaps, that I have no need for them. The funny thing is that they’ll have even less need for me, as a woman, than they did in my male existence.

Those guys—the ones who fucked me when they saw me in a dress—won’t come near me after my surgery, any more than they’d do it with any woman who’s not a wife, or perhaps a sister. Actually, most of them would lose interest in me soon even if I were to keep my male apparatus intact: I’m getting to be too old for their tastes.

Actually, I’ve felt too old for most people for a quite a while now. If I am, I don’t mind. Mrs. Littington seems not to’ve noticed me at all, and that woman whose name I never knew squinted in my direction as if I were somehow familiar, but she wasn’t quite know how. Or does she? Then maybe I’ve become another of her secrets like the ones she kept with my mother, or that mother had with her.

There’re some things that bind people more closely than the secrets they tell each other: the true secrets; that is to say, the intimate knowledge that they both know but never speak of. Now I know why mother never begged me to come back, not even in her last days. I think she always knew I wasn’t another boy, another man, from this block.

They’d had no need of me, nor I of them. And I think mother didn’t need to see me as I was, as I was becoming, as I am about to become. In any moment, there is only what I am and what she is and whatever anybody else may be. And the moment passes; I pass; I’m passing. So was she; so she is.

What would she’d’ve known about me had she seen me through the years that have just passed? What do people know about those whom they see regularly? Hobbies? Fact is, I’ve never had any. Or favorite TV shows, or favorites of much of anything else. None of that stuff matters, anyway. You can have in common with another person, usually a man (if you’re a man), the most banal compulsions—namely, the collecting of objects and the emotions and connotations attached to them, from one’s own or someone else’s past.

That’s the reason I don’t save things. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t stayed in one place long enough to store them. But the first bras, the first pumps, sandals and skirts I acquired have no sentimental value for me. In fact, I don’t even remember what color they were or what, if anything, I paid for them. I needed them, or something like them, and they were the best—which is to say all—I could get. Some things wore out; some stopped fitting and other things I just couldn’t stand anymore. The time for change inevitably comes, and it’s all you can do if you expect to stay alive.

So it is with becoming a woman. The male aspects of my body’ve outlived whatever usefulness they had: they never protected me, and I’m not going to use them to propogate. So I’m going to change, and I’ve been changing the chemistry of my body to prepare for my surgery.

And mother doesn’t need for me to be a man any more than I do.

26. Display

She doesn’t look bad. A little better than I expected—no, I wasn’t really sure of what to expect. I know that no embalmer, no beautician can ever preserve your recollection of somebody. Painters and sculptors never do, either, and the further they are from the truth of their subjects, the more they’re loved, or at least respected, at least by those who spend their days being experts.

But that’s neither here nor there. Mother’s expression, in the casket, mirrored the one I saw in my mind when we spoke on the phone. Calm, if not cool, like the twilight of the longest summer day. The end of something, for someone who’d only known fate. If she didn’t know anything else, she knew I’d leave and that I’d never come back, at least while she was alive. There was nothing she or anybody else could do about it. As I’ve mentioned before, she was never one to rage against the dying light or get involved with any other kind of nonsense.

If she’d been sick, she hadn’t mentioned it. Near the end, she’s said, “I won’t be here much longer.” But she’d never explain. How could she’ve left the block, I wondered. Or why would she do such a thing: She herself said, “It’d be the same anywhere.” And followed it with, “There’s no reason for you to come back”: something I knew in my mind and hoped she would continue to believe.

Actually, she didn’t believe it, any more than I believe in anything else. She knew it, far better than I could’ve. It was a warning, or more precisely, a way to preclude the idea of coming back, should it ever occur to me.

But she knew I wasn’t coming back. If I’ve tried to avoid anything in my life, it’s the circumstance of loneliness without the luxury of living alone. I’ve always dreaded the holiday season, or any other occasion for the gathering of my relatives: Nothing is worse than forced camaraderie in airless rooms. And the only thing as bad as the physical presence of forced relationships is the recollection of such people when you’re seeking solitude.

Or—here’s another thing I never could stand—people trying to convince me that I want company when I don’t. That’s a regular feature of the holidays once you get to know a few people wherever you land, however briefly, after springing away from this block. To recall, and to be forced to recall: those are the greatest curses of all.

So even though mother wasn’t (as far as I know) dying of some dreaded disease or particularly old (or old at all) I must say that I feel, however selfish it may seem, relief that she’s on her way out of this block, at least physically. Perhaps the sadness will come later; perhaps I will mourn her in another year, or even the coming year (which isn’t far away). I never again will have to wonder whether I should be visiting her, or anyone else, and she no longer has to deal with the inevitability of my life. I’m feeling no loneliness, no desolation, at least not now. And this Christmas, this New Year, I won’t owe—or feel that I owe—anybody. I can finally treat each holiday as what it is: Simply another day to survive, another day when I have the same needs and desires I’ve had on any other day. I’ll finally not have the need or obligation to meet them in more ornate or convoluted ways than I otherwise would.

Not that I don’t enjoy ornamentation, even a little spectacle. I wear the most striking or ornate clothing I have. And if anyone takes a photo, I don’t look at it.