Or, perhaps, it was all nurture: I'd been conditioned from an early age to be heterosexual. Once I renewed my relationship with a post-op Dana Stevens, I'd see how possible it was for me to fall in love with a woman.
But then I would back off. I was forty-two: Did I really want to travel down that path at midlife? Not likely.
After all, I'd certainly never had those sorts of desires.
But alone in one's bed, the mind wanders into some very strange corners. Once, I climbed out from under the sheets and turned on the light, and took an antique silver hand mirror from the top of my dresser. I then sat on the edge of the bed and spread my legs, and used the mirror to study my vagina. How in the world could a doctor build such a thing? It wasn't like breasts; it wasn't the sort of item you could fake with a pair of silicone implants.
Maybe a surgeon could shape skin into labia, but how do you begin to construct a clitoris? How do you fabricate a G spot, a cavity, inner walls that grow moist?
It was beyond me, completely unfathomable.
And while I thought I loved Dana, would I really want to make love to a doctor-built vulva? I wasn't even sure I wanted to make love to one made by God.
None of this would have been an issue, of course, if I'd known Dana's plans when I met him that summer. I know I would not have grown interested in him if I had realized he was on female hormones and planned to have a sex change soon after Christmas.
And the fact is, at first I wasn't romantically interested in him anyway. I merely saw him as a professor who was smart and funny and just a little bit catty. I thought he was cute, but I also thought he was gay.
I should be precise: I thought he was a gay male.
The signals? No wedding band. No references to a partner or spouse. Eyebrows that clearly were plucked.
When I invited him to my house for a party, it never crossed my mind we might wind up as lovers. Inviting him was a spontaneous gesture, because I thought there might be a friendship in the offing. He made me laugh in class all the time, and I was certainly learning a good deal more from his course than I'd ever expected.
At some point at the party, however, it crossed my mind that he might be straight after all. Clearly my daughter thought so. I'm not exactly sure what he said or did that changed my mind, but it may have been as simple as the way he touched my side at one point when we were chatting. We were outside on the terrace, and he was holding his plate and telling me how wonderful he thought the pasta was, and with his free hand he touched the small of my waist--just above my hip, his pinkie within a millimeter of the elastic at the top of my panties. And then he held his hand there for a long moment, and I felt a slight rush. I was wearing a thin cotton dress, and I could almost feel how warm his fingers were through the fabric.
And when he asked me out after class on the following Tuesday, it felt nothing at all like a platonic overture. I remembered well the feel of his touch from my house Friday night, and I was open to whatever possibilities he had in mind.
Looking back, if anything at all surprises me about our first date, it's the idea that somehow we managed not to make love. I've always been a sucker for smart men, and the first thing he did at dinner was seduce my mind. We had dinner on the deck of a restaurant in Burlington that looked out upon Lake Champlain, and we had a glorious view of the sunset over the Adirondacks. We talked about teaching children and teaching adults, and how one taught that murky group in between: college students of traditional age. We talked about Carly and college and my fears of wandering alone for months at a time through my musty old house in the village.
He told me little bits about his adolescence in Florida, and the relief he felt when he arrived in New England. He didn't tell me why his teenage years had been difficult--why, I know now, they had been a horror--but I understood that his adolescence had not been pleasant.
It would be some months later before I would learn about the drinking and the drugs and the powerful self-loathing. Toying with the notion of suicide after he saw a photograph of a transsexual in a magazine when he was seventeen, and realized that was what he was--minus the requisite surgery.
He took me back to his apartment for coffee and dessert after dinner, and we had the very last fresh strawberries of the season. He made whipped cream for them, and he put out a small plate with melted chocolate. And then, as if we were teenagers, we actually necked on the couch. He lived on the top floor of the closest thing Burlington has to a luxury high-rise, a seven-story co-op smack in the center of the city. His living room faced the hill section of town, and when I would open my eyes, I could see the lights on in the windows of the one-and two-century-old houses to the east.
We never left the couch for the bedroom, but I would have followed him if he'd made the slightest gesture in that direction. I had never in my life been with a man whose hands were that gentle or whose mouth was that soft. He would spend long minutes tracing my lips with his tongue, before probing just the tiniest bit inside me. Men sometimes have a tendency to offer substantially more of their tongue than is really necessary, but not Dana. Not at all. And he would massage my body with his fingers as we kissed, at one point actually pulling me off the couch and onto his lap so I was straddling him, and he rubbed my back that way until I was--for the first time in my life--aroused and satiated at once.
I'm not sure how or why we stopped. I have a feeling I said something about having to get home. I believe I said such a thing because that part of me that was the mother of a teenage girl thought it would be an inadvisable moral precedent to sleep with a man on a first date.
There was an E-mail from Dana waiting for me the next morning when I logged on to my computer at home. We'd talked a good deal about movies the night before, and in his E-mail he'd listed exactly when the films I wanted to see were showing at different cinemas. He suggested we go out Sunday evening, but he said he was open to any nights at all when he wasn't teaching.
Initially, I considered writing back that while Sunday night would be fine, why wait another whole day? Why not go out again that very night? But I concluded that that draft was too forward, and never sent it. Instead I simply agreed that Sunday night would be lovely.
We chose a movie that was showing in Middlebury, so he could pick me up on the way. And then I decided to invite him to dinner at my house first, at least in part so I wouldn't have to miss my daughter two out of three nights in a weekend. Though I would be going out on a date, at least Carly and I would have dinner together Sunday night.
Dana and I made all the arrangements without speaking a single word to each other. We did it all by computer.
Sunday afternoon Carly surprised me by knocking on the bathroom door while I was taking a bath. She hadn't joined me while I'd bathed in a very long time, and though I immediately told her to come in, I found myself slipping under the bubbles that remained on the surface of the water. Had I really aged so much in four years that I'd grown uncomfortable with my body? Had I really grown shy?
Carly, too, was uneasy, I could tell. She sat on the john the way she had when she was younger, but she stared out the window at the afternoon sky as we talked, instead of looking at me.
"A second date with the prof," she began, and I understood instantly why she had felt compelled to venture once more into the bathroom while I was taking a bath. "I know if I were one of the other kids in the class, I'd expect a really good grade just to keep my mouth shut."
"Trust me: It's okay if Dana fails me."
"You like him now, don't you?"
"I do."
"Is he the first man you've ever dated with a ponytail?"
I thought for a moment, and reached for one of the brass handles at the edge of the tub with my foot. I let the hot water run for a couple of seconds and warm the tub. "As a matter of fact, he is," I said finally.
"Do you think it's sexy?"
"No, not necessarily. But I like his hair."
"Either his shampoo or his conditioner has a ton of fragrance in it
."
She was right, and I nodded. I tried to recall the aroma from Friday night. It was definitely from an expensive brand: Dana certainly wasn't using some lonely guy's price club shampoo.
"And his hair's longer than yours," she continued. "A lot longer. Is that a first, too?"
"I think so. Your father had pretty long hair in college. But back then so did I. And your father would never have put his back in a ponytail."
She curled one of her legs up on the seat and toyed with the leather straps of her sandal. "Dad doesn't think you should go biking in Maine," she said.
"I don't know if I will. The fact is, I probably won't. It was just an idea Nancy and I were tossing around. But whether your father thinks I should go really doesn't matter."
"Guess not. How come you changed your mind? Dana?"
Carly has always had astonishing instincts, and I was impressed that she had, yet again, understood something about me before I had. Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I had changed my mind. But I had. Clearly. It wasn't that the idea of biking along the Maine coast no longer interested me: It was that I now had a more interesting playmate than Nancy Keenan.
"Maybe. Maybe I'll just go for a day or two in the Adirondacks in the fall--over Columbus Day weekend."
"Maybe you'll go with Dana."
"Maybe. He's about to begin his very first sabbatical. When he finishes teaching this summer, he won't be in the classroom again until next September. Thirteen months. So he'll certainly have the time."
"Is a sabbatical paid?"
"You bet."
"What a racket. Remind me to become a college professor."
"I'm sure he'll be working. He's already published two books, you know. I'm sure he'll be researching. Writing--"
"Biking with you."
"I'll have a lot of time on my hands, sweetheart. You know how much I'm going to miss you."
For the first time since venturing into the bathroom, she looked at me, and she gave me the smile of hers that I've loved her whole life--a grin that is impish and mischievous and knowing at once.
"Yeah," she said, "so I guess you'll just have to replace your daughter with some hunk who wears a ponytail."
Chapter 5.
will
THE YEAR ALLIE AND I SEPARATED WAS A NIGHTMARE. On the surface it was all very congenial, and I put on a good face. And while, looking back, it's pretty clear that Allie wasn't happy, I'm not sure I knew at the time that I was leaving for good. It was one of those decisions we made after a counseling session had gone particularly badly, and we were livid with each other.
Before I found an apartment--and then the home in which I live now--I moved back in with my father in Montpelier. I was there about a week and a half, and I stayed in the room I'd lived in as a boy. Thirty-three years old, I thought, and I'm living in a room that still has thumbtacks in the wall from Grand Funk Railroad and Moody Blues concert posters. Worse, the dog my parents had gotten when I'd left for college had grown used to sleeping on what had been my bed, and the animal--geriatric by then--was flatulent. The mutt was a biohazard, but it would have been inhumanly cruel to kick him out. The result? One night I went to bed wearing swimmers' nose plugs, and while I eventually nodded off, I woke up a moment later gasping for breath as if I had sleep apnea.
The next day, Allie and I met for coffee after school, and when she broke down sobbing in the little bakery cafe on Main Street, I realized we really were finished. She insisted I hadn't done anything wrong, which was a sure sign. She said she just didn't love me the way she had when we'd met, and we'd probably gotten married too soon. We'd been, pure and simple, too young.
It was most likely a defense mechanism of sorts, but I decided she was probably right. I said so to myself, and then I reached across the little glass table and took her hands and agreed with her. I stared for a long time at her wedding ring, and then at mine.
The fact was, I'd spent the last year or year and a half unreasonably angry at something I never could quite identify: My mother's losing battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. The construction firm that was behind the radio station's new home and was constantly finding reasons to go over budget. The station's board of directors, who seemed to want me--a very young and green station president--to listen to every whiner who sent in his twenty-five-dollar annual membership check.
I was even squabbling with my older brother that year, snapping at him without reason whenever we'd speak on the phone. I was giving him parenting advice that he certainly didn't need, and telling him how I thought he should deal with the building contractor who was adding a couple of dormers to the west wall of his house--and, because he was only working on the project every third or fourth day, had been at work on it all summer long. The scaffolding had been there since Memorial Day, making whole rooms shady even at noon.
Given my attitude, I decided right there in the bakery that perhaps it was time to try something new. Maybe, like Allie, a part of me longed for something more.
Or, perhaps, somebody else.
Maybe that would even be best for Carly. It can't be healthy to watch your parents snap at each other like angry turtles in a terrarium, or to see your mom sad.
This is, of course, what every parent in the midst of a divorce says to himself. At least every decent one: I'm actually doing my kid a favor by leaving. In the long run, she'll be happier, right? Right?
A little more than a decade later, long after my ex-wife and I had settled into a pretty terrific friendship, I think I began to understand what Allie had been feeling back then. And while I didn't believe I was especially morose the summer that Allie started to see Dana, I probably wasn't a great blessing to be around. I was growing so desirous of being alone that instead of going straight home after work, some evenings I'd stop and park at a patch of dirt just beyond the high wire fence that marked the edge of a runway at Burlington Airport, and I'd watch the planes swoop down just above me. I'd tell myself I'd only stay for one more Saab 340, one more Dash 8, one more Boeing 737--a jet that seemed absolutely massive, compared to the commuter planes, with their primitive propellers, that linked Burlington with Boston. But I never kept my word to myself, and some nights I would get home half an hour or forty-five minutes late.
One evening when Patricia asked me how work was, and I mumbled--as I did always that summer--that it was fine, she accused me of being incommunicative.
"Why do you say that?" I asked.
"Because your own radio station reported the battle you had with protesters today over your tower on Mount Chittenden!" she answered, referring to the hikers who were complaining, yet again, about the radiation from our broadcast tower on a mountain that was a part of the state's Long Trail.
"Oh."
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
"How was work?"
I shrugged. "It was fine," I repeated, and on one level I was telling the absolute truth. I'd been president of the station since I was thirty-one. It would have taken an earthquake that brought down the building for work to be anything but fine.
Looking back, it's easy to see that I, too, was ready for a change--at work, maybe, or perhaps at home. Maybe simply in bed.
Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I merely assumed I was going through a phase.
Chapter 6.
dana
THERE ARE TWO WORLDS OF PEOPLE AROUND ME. There is a world in which everyone knows I was born a man, and there is a world in which no one has any clue whatsoever.
Sometimes the two orbits will overlap, and a person will discover rather suddenly my history with gender. If that person is particularly brazen--or, it seems, a reporter--he (and yes, in my experience, more times than not it has indeed been a he) will ask one or both of two questions:
Does it work? (Translation: Do you have orgasms?)
Did I ever assume I was merely a homosexual? (Translation: Isn't this just about penetration? About wanting to be penetrated?)
The first question is act
ually much easier to answer than I imagine it is to ask. Yes, I can answer honestly, it works just fine. (Translation: Touch me right and you'll have to peel me off the ceiling.)
The second question is more complicated, and it seemed to me that some of the folks from NPR--one engineer in particular--were always coming back to it. It was clear they were trying to be tolerant and open-minded, but their inquiries implied they suspected that I'd been driven to my decision by an army of unbearable homophobes.
Always, of course, they were forgetting completely one teeny-tiny detail: I was gay! I just happened to be a gay woman.
Now, in all fairness, I had indeed toyed with the notion that I might be a gay male at different times in my life, but it was always a desperate, and increasingly pathetic, fantasy. After all, even in this world it's a hell of a lot easier to be a gay male than a transsexual.