The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  The last BART train had gone; I offered to take Isaac back to my shared apartment. Though we’d been talking intensely, our breath hot enough to condense in the warm fog, we became oddly delicate as we crossed the threshold of my sealed and empty living room. I threw open the windows. I thought about Isaac saying, earlier, that a work of literature “changed the way I have sex.” I wanted the night to keep going. But I still set him up on the couch.

  I don’t exactly know why. Maybe I wasn’t absolutely sure then he liked boys who’d been born boys, which is what, at the time, you would have told me I was. Some part of me knew that if this changed I could say goodbye to things at the prestigious university, but so long as I hadn’t told a single soul I was going to transition, the consequences weren’t real. I opened my mouth, but just then Isaac yawned like a teddy bear. I saw how badly I wanted to keep his attention, and I saw that this was not the way. I said, Goodnight Moon. In the morning, my housemate’s box of orange juice was half-empty and on the wrong shelf, and Isaac was gone. I put my bottom lip against the torn eaves of the carton. I did not see him again for two years.

  During those years, yes, I was let go from the university. Not for being transsexual, there are laws against that (or there are now), but for being “unstable,” at least according to the paperwork I received from Human Resources. I began blockers, then hormones and felt my body change, so suddenly I needed to spend a lot of time regarding myself and thinking. I wanted to write about this, thought I could keep a valuable record, but the work of trying to explain felt heavy, even to myself. And my feeling of wonder felt private and in need of protection. I had been short for a man but was tall for a woman and avoided anything more than one-inch heels. The voice training and electrolysis I put on my credit cards after my savings ran out. I spent a lot on salon haircuts but did the color myself, used Ivory soap in the bath and still cooked like I always had, hardboiled eggs with torn up fresh dill on crackers. I figured I’d earned the right to be as I pleased. Still, I thought of Isaac frequently and imagined his reaction to me as I was now, worried he would let through some sliver of revulsion or regret. When we crossed paths again I was thirty and he was thirty-three. I had gone from precocious to lived-in, but I was told regularly I was beautiful, not just by those who knew me but by strangers on the street, only a third of whom must have known I was transsexual. I was slimmer than ever, due to the way I ate and because it made passing easier. And so that year had a waifish look: round almond eyes and talcum soft skin, jewelry that balanced my wider and leaner parts, hands I kept folded so the rose-colored nails hung over the knuckles, making them look smaller.

  He was living here again, he said. He was a partner in a health food restaurant that gave all its profits to groups that fought hunger. I had missed the moment when he saw me again, but when he’d spun me from behind it was clear he recognized me, that I was the same person to him. Moments like these had become rare. He gave me a business card and I went a week later, alone. He was busy in the kitchen, plating ingredients I did not recognize with complete devotion to each dish. I didn’t think he knew I was there, but when I got up to leave he intercepted me, bringing a vodka drink with fresh pomegranate and floating seeds and floating mint and coriander. And so I waited while the rest of the patrons and the waiters and the assistant chefs all left.

  I drank my drink, debating whether I should confess my feelings for him while I pointed and flexed my foot so the wedge sandal released and re-gripped my heel. I thought: this is all of it. This is my life. When he returned he was warm and joyful. He asked me about my writing; I shook my head. He’d begun composing poetry, which was why he was so happy. That’s perfect, I told him, thinking he was so well-read and had had such a difficult life. He walked me home and I almost said something, but I could not be the pathetic transsexual, even if he was one too. The guys have different problems, but for most, including Isaac, passing wasn’t among them. I gave him my email address again, and this time he did contact me, three weeks later when he was accepted into a graduate poetry program. I mourned.

  I developed more confidence in my thirties and began wearing heels. I felt the dawning of a different kind of self-acceptance and began toying with a novel, a very private novel, about my experience as the late and only child of missionaries. I was surprised to find the project had its own momentum. It was a relief not to be watched. Nobody remembered the prestigious appointment from my youth. I’d become simply a never was, a mistake. I began meditating and heard the birds exquisitely in the mornings. Then I moved temporarily to a small town north of the city. It was lonely, but I accepted this; I couldn’t figure out who was supposed to love me.

  When I returned, I wrote to tell Isaac I’d finished a draft of my novel. I had been working, except when I was in Guerneville, in a bookshop, which took a lot of my time but not much of my energy. The pay scale had changed, and I soon had a week’s paid vacation. I suggested a visit, never thinking he’d agree or could commit to a plan. He wrote me with an enthusiastic yes, and though we drove to the Ice Age National Trail, and I learned to camp, nothing romantic happened. I was so struck by him I felt woozy. I’d turned that side of myself off so totally that it now gave me a constant hum, like a machine whose power has been left on, to be around him, day in and day out, for a week. We grew closer, but our discussions were always theoretical—Kathy Acker, the Rapture, why beavers are important ecologically. I never doubted that he loved me as a human being. But as a woman? As a lover? I’d been through too much already; I could not ask.

  We spent two days of the trip at his house in Madison, and on the last night one of the women he lived with took me to bed, surprising no one more than me, though it must have been my hum she noticed. She was very butch and had no idea about me, though I assumed she knew or that he would have told her. There was a moment of awful, throat-tearing silence, and then we had the most authentically delightful sex. I’d been with people in the five years since transitioning but mostly one night stands, encounters that left me with some kernel of sadness. This person simply did not care that I had a penis. She was a terrifying, deeply silly lover, whose growling turned me on and made me giggle, and after I left she got my postal address and wrote me love letters.

  I considered moving to Wisconsin and knew I had to do it. Life was now unbearable, and it seemed as though every experience I’d had—including my writing, my corporeality, the birds in the morning—was a waste or an error or a regrettable preface to this present, which must have been waiting for me all along. Love shattered the filthy glass I hadn’t realized had been standing between myself and the world. Sexual, romantic love could bestow personhood, I now understood, and suddenly I belonged not only to her but to everyone: to those around me on the street and in grocery stores, just the whole human race.

  It was spring in San Francisco when I applied for a teaching position at the college in her town, but without a published book I did not receive a response. So I sent my draft to agents. I inquired about bookshops in my letters to her and abruptly the tone of her replies changed. They became less frequent and, after I spent two terrible months waiting for one, I knew it would not come. Or if it did, it would not be enough to give me back the lust and security I’d known. My pride was like a sword buried to the hilt in my body, making me want to faint when I looked in the mirror. I wished I was a kid again, a teenager or a person in their twenties, so that I could travel to her, beg her to love me again, if she ever had. But I was thirty-four and sick with pride and with the understanding that I could not change the situation. I even understood that the world had not wronged me. But I did not know what to do.

  I considered telling Isaac, but all he knew was the shadow of my legs on her wall as I walked to her bedroom; he’d never asked what happened after. And I did not want to seem desperate or hysterical or uncool. Also, I was very good at suffering very quietly. So I retreated to my San Francisco studio, and said I could not get off work when he suggested I visit that summer, and slowl
y I felt my soul wash the grit out of my body. Isaac graduated from the program and could not get a job.

  I’d turned thirty-six. He was thirty-eight. I told him America did not want us, that we should go to Barcelona or to Mexico City, which I still had faint, fond memories of, notwithstanding my current estrangement from my parents. Isaac lived on my couch and though my feelings for him had not changed, he soon became the person I was closest to. I saw I would soon be forty. I did not tell him I loved him. It’s different for men. He and his old lover reunited, and together saw me as an important friend and resource because if they lived together they would fight.

  An agent found me. I’d misspelled my email address on my postal queries. She wanted to sell my very private novel and in the end she did, not for an enormous amount of money, but the way I lived, it was a year’s expenses. That spring Isaac received a fellowship to England, the first of many we assumed, and when he took it I went to Spain. But being outside the Bay Area was a shock for me. I felt invisible as a transsexual woman, then suddenly afraid. I understood in a new way my world had gotten smaller. When I returned four months later, they gave me my job back at the bookstore and I should have been grateful; the economy was not good. But I was angry. I rebelled and had sex with a number of people I met online, some of whom were very nice and some of whom dehumanized me, but I’d become obsessed with certain kinds of sex, and I did not have enough intelligent people to talk to. The world is always smaller than it ought to be.

  When Isaac came back from England he looked for jobs for a year. Though he could have stayed on my couch forever, he went to Oakland to live with his lover. My publicist hadn’t known I was transsexual (why would she?). There was a brief storm, me fielding calls in the empty apartment because, as luck would have it, transexuality was in vogue that year, on talk shows. The book came out but, transsexual or not, few people noticed. Some of my old colleagues got in touch and a few of the more esoteric places had good reviews, but it came nowhere near earning back its advance. I continued working at the bookshop. The butch in Wisconsin contacted me; she wanted to be friends. I had so many lovers now, I thought it wouldn’t hurt, but it did.

  Isaac went back to the woods and began building a shack on a friend’s land. He believed in his work, but his values were very different from the values around him; he typed poems onto postcards and sent them away in the mail. I began another novel, discouraged, a transsexual coming-of-age story. I owed my publisher a second book; this was the publicist’s idea. I remember feeling like I was lying though I knew I was writing things that were indeed true, for myself and other people. It was a very confusing process, from drafting through publication, and against all odds it became a mainstream success. I was offered a faculty position at a less prestigious and less stodgy university in the city than the one where I had begun. They were progressive for the time, and the health insurance paid for the surgery I’d despaired of ever getting. So quite rapidly I was where I wanted to be at forty-two—but I was forty-two. I was called striking. But my skin was becoming that of a middle-aged person, I had a waddle under my chin, and though I still I kept myself scrupulously thin, my face was gaunt because of it. I was a popular enough teacher but aloof; I had passed the point when I could have learned to trust other people on contact. But I had coffee with a few of my colleagues from fifteen years before, and, now that I was one of the more successful of our group and the lines had been well-drawn, they were comfortable with me. What I was surprised to find: I was comfortable with them, too.

  Isaac suffered. He began to mention recurrent muscle tears and debts, to express bewilderment that the same financial and professional struggles were still waiting for him each morning. Men became more attractive in their forties, and the physical labor he did living out on the land made me feel so much older beside him when I went out to visit, though I was more than two years younger. My footing was off on the mud slope that led to his cabin. He apologized but I knew it was my fault, not the slope. In an awkward moment one night toward the end of that trip I thought he might kiss me, but I was wrong and we got over it. His mother died and he used the money to buy the land; he was there permanently now. He wrote poems six months out of every year, but journals rarely wanted to publish them. They published the most obvious poems instead. This enraged me and I tried to pull a string or two for him, but the tide of my influence had receded. I’d been overrated, some said, hired only for the novelty of having a trans professor.

  But I had tenure. I was shocked to find my days portioned out, to be going to sleep at night without fear. I began work on a third novel, unterrified. I’d ripened as a writer enough to cover my own shortcomings, and I no longer worried about a certain style of humiliation from reviews. I knew the window I’d been given to write something undeniably great had closed, but I still loved my characters, my garden, my stature, my students, my friends, and my city. I reunited with my family, a welcome surprise, and though they were frail it wasn’t poor health that brought them back to me. And I headed towards middle-middle age with less strife then ever before, even dated for a few months or a year here and there, though something about me always made me remove myself. They weren’t smart enough or I could not be loved, or both. But these relationships helped with the loneliness. Surviving what you were never meant to survive creates a hard rock of happiness under the bones of the chest. My happiness wasn’t fanciful or expansive, but I had survived, and I was happy.

  I went to see Isaac for his fifty-sixth birthday and was shocked to find a grizzled, grey-haired mountain man staring back at me. I’d gone grey of course, and dyed it, but the pure white of his temples silenced me. His arms were red and pocked, part muscle and part soft. He’d never gotten surgery on his chest and because he’d thickened, his small breasts bunched at his lower ribs. It had been more than five years, and though I knew enough to buy hiking boots, he had to help me over the rise. I felt an unbearable ache for what had and had not happened. My success; his terminal beauty. He cooked me a meal that night that could not have been purchased in the city for any amount of money. Roast squash and a roast chicken just killed, herbs and garlic under the skin; potatoes dark and purple as a screaming baby; beer he’d brewed in a cool square hole in the earth beneath the table. Tears came to my eyes as I chewed. My throat seized around the food.

  After dinner I read a sheaf of his poetry while he picked at a guitar, a new hobby. He played terribly but his poems were so good I stopped hearing him. When I was done I felt sure I was not happy, that a joke had been played on me. I’d enjoyed writing my last two novels, and I knew they did not matter. My hands around his poems were shaking so I rested them on my knees. I asked him if he’d sent them anywhere. He nodded. I put the papers down on a couch stinking of dog and snow, stood to look through the pane we’d set in the mudbale wall when for two days a long time ago I had helped him work on this house. It was far too late for me to ask him to make love to me. We were such different people. He put his arms around my shoulders from behind. I in hiking boots, he in work boots—we were the same height. I knew because his breath moistened the hair directly behind my mouth.

  A feeling of pure joy flooded me, but I felt my body stiffen. He let go. He put me to bed in the hut he’d built for guests, and when I awoke to the sound of the birds it was with an intensity of sorrow I didn’t know one could feel and not shatter. I was only fifty-three. I opened my journal and made a list of everything I wanted to do before I died, putting lines through what was no longer possible.

  I was never asked to be a visiting professor, though others with my rank left every year or two for this purpose. Still, I had my place in the Bay. I was thought of as outspoken, a situation I found darkly comic. I dated a man for four years and at last he wore me down and we moved in together. He made more money than I did, and I gained all sorts of new problems—to vacation or redo the kitchen? The Galapagos or San Miguel de Allende? There is much less violence against older people, and I was rarely scared when we traveled.
We took cabs everywhere and people were paid to respect us. He’d been wealthy and male all his life, my lover, whereas I covered my discomfort at being waited on, and after a period I ceased to feel it. I added to and crossed things off my list, especially when both Publisher’s Triangle and the Lambda Association awarded me lifetime achievement designations within the span of three years. This was after my sixth book, a memoir, I liked to joke, about the first five. I offered to pay for Isaac to attend the second awards ceremony, in September, but I think he was involved in harvesting marijuana. He could not come.

  When he came the next year, for my sixtieth birthday, I noticed he had no table manners. He just began eating when the food was handed to him, though my lover was still in the kitchen. He liked my lover, he liked everyone, but they had little to talk about. When the three of us stayed up late with a bottle of wine, I was impatient, as uncomfortable as when the butch from years ago had abandoned me, as when I was in my twenties and applying for the fellowship, begging an institution to save me from the prospect of life as a Mormon husband and father. I asked my lover to go to sleep, and after making a face, he did.

  Isaac and I then talked about: bitterness. What leaves you satisfied, I asked him, and what isn’t yet done?

  “I am angry because if they want to kill us they can. Still.”

  I frowned because I hadn’t been thinking about that. Everyone where he lived carried a gun. If I’d convinced him to touch me so many years back, I might be there too.