by Lynn Ames
Her last relationship, with Cody, had ended months ago. After seven years, they’d drifted apart. What else could Joan say? There was no argument, no fire, no yelling. It burned itself out. Without the deep friendship to buoy it up, their relationship vanished like smoke. Cody left, and Joan was sad, but not too much and not for too long. There was her work, there was the summer stretching golden and endless before her, and there was Sheila and Chris. She’d be fine.
Joan hadn’t wanted to take over Sheila’s writing seminar, but Sheila had asked. That was all there was to it; her friend needed her. Not that Joan would be a saint about it; she’d grumble and bitch until she was sure Sheila had suffered along with her, then she’d let it go.
“One class a week, Wednesday nights, for a non-major, summer creative-writing seminar, mostly chock full of Women’s Studies majors,” Sheila had said to a pouting Joan.
“I hate creative writing. More like adolescent masturbatory exercises. I don’t give a damn about the content of their souls, the depth of their personal insights. They are teenagers.”
“You are such a curmudgeon, I want to pinch you. Most of them are grad students, and two of them are our age.”
“What do I do with them?”
“Enflame their minds. Ignite their souls. And do a basic write-a-letter-to-a-mythological-figure writing exercise.”
“Can I include Jesus and Santa Claus?”
“No. You’re a classicist. Do Zeus and that junk.”
“Lovely. Do I talk about your work this way?”
“All the time. Blame Chris. He got me the stupid dog that decided to lay down on the stupid second step in the dark, and thus helped me along to my stupid torn tendon. We could say it is his fault.”
“No, I’m not willing to do the bloodguilt back seven generations. I’ll do your letter thing. Is there anyone I should watch out for?”
“No troublemakers. There is one standout, reminds me of you actually. A young you, brilliant and focused, but unlike you in personality. Impish. I won’t tell you who, I want to see if you spot them.”
The art annex was supposed to provoke creativity with the rusting insectoid welded sculptures in the courtyard and the muddy local bucolic paintings. Joan’s nostrils flared slightly, unconsciously. The modern world offended her aesthetic sense. For Joan, the world ended with the fall of Rome. Her dissertation had been on Hadrian.
It was always the same, walking into a new class. She had to remember to smile after she set her briefcase down, or they would stay closed off, unsure of her, until well into the second hour of the class. These weren’t her students; she didn’t need them to be scared of her. This was a creative seminar, what Joan imagined to be as touchy-feely as an empowerment weekend. So she was expected to make them feel good, not her normal burden. It gave her an awkward sweetness of which she was entirely unaware.
There were fifteen people in the class in a room designed to seat fifty. The chairs were arrayed on risers in a circle, ascending from the central stage. Joan noticed that the students tended to map out a great deal of space for themselves, even after entering together in friendly bunches. This class was used to working alone. Good.
“Good evening. I’m Dr. Ligurious. I’ll be covering the seminar for the next two weeks. Dr. Cross will return after that.” Joan picked up the stack of assignments and started handing them out.
“What happened to Sheila?” The boy sat with his feet hooked over the back of the chair in front of him, retro canvas sneakers artfully untied, which annoyed the living hell out of Joan. She didn’t bother to look at the rest of him; she swatted his sneakers off the chair.
“Dr. Cross is attending to some personal matters.”
Most of his head was a baseball cap, pulled low, brim rolled but at least, Joan thought, facing forward. It was summer; nearly everyone wore the uniform of t-shirt and jeans or shorts. He had jeans on, and two t-shirts, layered despite the heat. Foolish things we do for fashion, Joan thought. The edge of his jaw was spiky with stubble, days’ worth. With the cap tilted back his eyes were as disturbingly blue and large as a child’s picture on a bottle of mashed apricots. He grinned and held out his hand for the assignment.
“I hope Sheila feels better soon. Her ankle, right?”
He brought out the stern in her, in that instantaneous animal bristling she could neither explain nor address. It was the type of thing teachers never tell their students. They strive to confront and root out their own biases, be aware of treating students differently, of favoring or disfavoring any individual or group. Despite all that, when two people meet, and for reason neither of them might be able to explain, there might spring up an instantaneous reaction light years ahead of rational thought, where liking or disliking is sealed. He evoked such a reaction, though guarding against it, Joan wasn’t sure which. He was used to being liked, she could tell that at once, much as a puppy is used to being liked. His sunny lounging body language didn’t change; he seemed unfazed by Joan’s scrutiny.
“Tendon.” Joan answered automatically, walking away.
The boy mumbled something that might have been, “Can’t count on Achilles in the clutch.” He might have said “The Achilles”; Joan wasn’t sure.
“Your assignment for tonight: write a letter to a mythological figure. You may ask them the truth about a myth or legend; you can praise them, warn them, and scold them, as long as you interact on a personal level with the figure,” Joan said evenly. There, it should be quiet for a while. Joan went to sit at the desk.
“What do you mean by mythological figure?” This was one of the older women, clearly returned to school after her kids were grown and gone. Joan addressed her with careful respect.
“Why don’t we stick with the Greek gods for ease? Zeus and the Olympians primarily.”
The woman nodded, satisfied, and Joan was pleased.
“Can we be mythological figures too, writing the letter?” It was the sneakers boy. This was why Joan hated creative writing. You could argue for endless exceptions to any rule. It was all arbitrary. If things did not have the decency of being evidently true, they should at least be overwhelmingly possible and most plausible.
“Fine,” Joan said, not giving a damn. He seemed to take this as a triumph, grinned again, and set to work.
It was blissfully quiet for more than an hour. Ten minutes for coffee and cigarettes and cell phones, then back to it with a vengeance. She had to hand it to Sheila, these were devout students. That spoke well of the environment she created. At the end of the class, sunlight going from gold to bruised orange crept across the rows, turned the students in that moment into castings, bronzed like baby shoes in Joan’s memory. The end of day in summer always brought out her melancholy, brought out the yearning for the brief golden years of noble friendships, the unified trunk of humanity before it is split into men and women. “Are we nothing but the scars left on us by love’s passing?” Joan thought, very much in the creative writing mood, influenced and buoyed up by the enthusiasm and seriousness of the class.
Students dropped their papers off on the desk as they headed out, nodding to Joan, most shyly. They hadn’t had any time or interaction to bond; they were being polite for Sheila’s sake. But when sneakers boy came up to the desk, last and five well-documented minutes past the end of the class, he was more than polite. He held Joan’s gaze longer than necessary, smiling broadly as he handed the paper in as if they were already old friends, no time or distance between them. It was an inclusive camaraderie—warm, fast, generous. Familiar. He didn’t respond to any of Joan’s distancing signals, as if they weren’t directed at him. They were coconspirators already. Joan looked down at his paper. His scrawled name, in a broad and careless hand, was Billy. Joan glanced back up and saw as he exited in profile, backlit, the clear outline of breasts beneath his shirt. Joan nodded to herself, feeling foolish. Of course. It was the instant intimacy of the tribe. He read her, and was letting her know he was family. He’d seemed very happy about it.
Joan brought the papers over to Sheila’s two nights later. Chris was cooking and Sheila was recovering and refusing to sit still, so Joan was imported to keep her entertained. This ended up being reading student papers while Sheila was altered on pain meds and Joan on a few glasses of wine.
“What have you got?” Sheila asked, tossing a paper on the pile.
“Oh, an eco-fable about Gaia. Polemic, but good. As far as I can tell. How do I rate these stories? By how much I like them?”
“In vino veritas,” Sheila said, pouring Joan more wine. “You don’t have to grade them. I’m just flaming bored. I’m glad to hear that they were well behaved. You met our Billy, I take it.”
Joan frowned. “Yes. Bit too casual for me. This was the student who reminded you of me?”
“Not the grim, dour Puritan you, the remarkable force of your mind. Strip the flesh away. He doesn’t think like anyone I’ve ever met, except you. You can tell him anything, and he will listen, and nod, and smile, and go do whatever he was going to in the first place. He’s following his own drummer.”
“Better than his own Pied Piper. Still think it’s funny that golden retriever of a boy reminded you of me. He’s trans?”
“Yes. His voice is starting to crack; I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”
“I wasn’t looking for it. He needs a shave.”
Sheila poured Joan another glass of wine. “He’s pretty enough for a boy band.”
“He probably looked great as a girl too. Why are so many young dykes changing these days? Is it just me? In our day, half these kids would have stayed in the community, instead of leaving us.”
“Funny you can say ‘us’ while my husband is in the kitchen. Once upon a time, you wouldn’t have been able.” Sheila’s tone was even, but there was a hint of reserve in it, a hint of pulling back, that Joan missed.
“You know what I mean. The lesbian tribe, which you still belong to. You’re a better dyke than I am.”
“He’s still in the community, he IDs as queer. Ridiculously open. Enviable. Kids these days.”
Joan put her wine glass down and tossed the papers in her lap onto the couch. “Kids these days forget what it was like, a generation ago. Queer indeed. Don’t you wish we had the internet when we were coming out? God, one dog-eared copy of Rubyfruit Jungle and a videotape of Desert Hearts were all I knew of lesbianism before college.”
“Billy might have been in the lesbian community, Joan, but he wasn’t a lesbian. He wasn’t a girl. He was a boy; he just wasn’t public about it yet.”
“Sheila, I felt like a boy at that age, if you recall. From twelve to twenty-five, I’d say. I hated being a girl.” Joan wasn’t sure why she was getting heated, but she was. Her blood started to kick up, moving from a walk to a trot.
“You hated being treated like a weak fool, as I recall. You can hate women’s oppression and be female or male. Hating being treated as an inferior doesn’t make you trans, it makes you sane.”
“So what does? I’ve always felt more masculine in my interest and pursuits, and I don’t fit any of the basic female requirements. I don’t relate sexually to men. No husband. No kids, and more heinous still, no desire for kids, of my body at least. No biological clock. If that can be disconnected—and not through effort, I never remember having one—then why am I still female? Am I some in-between thing now, by the queer definition?”
“By the queer definition you get to tell us, sweetie, we don’t tell you. And if you change your damn mind in a week, you get to tell us that too. Your identity, your sense of being in the world, is mined from within, and then expressed externally. Tell me, Joan, if there were no impediments, and you could do it relatively painlessly and quickly, would you transition?”
“Men have it differently. I would think about it. But, no. I don’t think I would. It took me a long time to learn to live in this body, but I think I’ve achieved that. I wouldn’t want to change.”
“Then you likely aren’t trans. But Billy has already answered that question publicly. It isn’t easy or inexpensive or without consequences to change. Quite the opposite. With all that, knowing all that, he chose to pursue it. For him, it was worth everything to be himself. I know you respect courage.”
“Of course I do. I liked the boy, Sheila, I did. I don’t begrudge him his path. It makes me wonder how I ended up where I am, and if I’d have made a different choice if I were coming up now. I was so relieved when I found out there was a place, no matter how small or hard to find, that respected and admired women like me, masculine women, butch women. That I could be both a member of a community and a desired romantic partner.”
“You were so damned serious. It was adorable. An eighteen-year-old girl trying to look like a forty-year-old man. A priest, with your black coat that you never took off, and your face above it pale as bone, library pallor. I knew you read yourself to sleep every night of your life.”
Joan tilted her wine glass and looked down at it. “Why, though? Why did you talk to me? I was a monk, a wallflower. I noticed you right away, you were laughing. I’d never heard anything so lovely. I would never have approached you. If you hadn’t spoken to me, I’d still be waiting to come out.”
“Total crap, you were a lesbian from the time you could walk.”
Joan smiled, a relaxed, easy smile, a transformative one. Years fell away from her face; the deep grooves at the corners of her mouth were hidden in the smile. Like many faces designed for sorrow, designed to stab the heart of the watcher with the translucent suffering in great dark eyes, in a mouth made firm by habit, not nature, a genuine smile transformed Joan. Beauty strode out, all the more potent as it was mixed with relief that such a vehicle for pain—that pale, suffering face—could host such unguarded human joy. The rarity of the smile made it a spear.
“See, that’s what I mean. You see me. That’s always startling to people who feel like windows.”
“It takes no special insight to see the dyke in you, Martina.”
“Very funny.”
“Butcher than Steve McQueen, if he were playing St. Francis.” Sheila fished through the pile of papers, selected one, and tossed it to Joan. “Ouch, too much movement. Here, read his.”
Joan took up the paper. Dear Zeus, she read.
Dear Zeus,
Hey, how’s it going? Yeah, it’s beautiful here on Mt. Ida, and I’m totally having a ball hanging out and being a shepherd and all, but people tell me I’m far too pretty for this farm-boy life, and I should get my blond self off to a city, so I can be appreciated for my beauty, grace, and charm. How’s about it, Sugar Daddy?
Kidding, Cloud-gathering Zeus! Put the bolts down. Let’s just talk, man to man. Man to twink. You are a hot, commanding, masterful, older man. You are the authority in your realm. Me, I’m just a pretty boy hanging out in a sunlit field, royalty that doesn’t know itself. Exposing every inch of my smooth, golden flesh to the bright light of Apollo, my thighs causing more duels than Hyakinthos. Waiting to catch a fierce eagle’s eye and be borne up to Heaven. We’re Greek; you can see where this is going. I’ve always had a thing for kings, for the majestic masculinity, strong, experienced, protective, honorable, leaders and shepherds of their people. Oh, Daddy!
But that’s not what I wanted to ask you. Why, Lord Zeus, do men and youths who meet in love have example in the divine ranks, such as Apollo and Hyakinthos, Herakles and Hylas, Hermes and, well, lots of folks, but women and girls do not? Experience and guidance met with beauty and eagerness, Eros and Anteros, love given and returned in that most noble of loves, the love that is sacred friendship, the love that defeats tyranny and builds cities, the love that pleases the gods with its fidelity, the love that creates honor and glory for the lovers and the people. Is this not what the gods themselves envy—love from the soul, love that recalls us to our wings?
I see you, sitting at the desk, with your dark eyes holding the look of eagles, proud, commanding, under your Caesar’s hair. Send for me. Have a drink with
me, Zeus; I’ll pour. Let me be your cupbearer.
- Ganymede
“I think the little bastard is playing with me.” Joan set the paper down and then picked it back up.
“If he is, it’s your game he’s playing and your language he’s speaking,”
“Is he always like this?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk to me like that, I wouldn’t follow it. He’s very good at reading people. You must bring out the best in him.”
Joan took up the red pen of judgment and answered Billy in precise handwriting on the bottom of the page.
Ganymede,
Can’t spare the eagle.
Regards,
Zeus
It would do. It handled him by cutting him short, but it answered him in kind. If he were playing with her, it was now done. If he’d been asking what Joan thought he was asking? No, it was part of the exercise, and he was merely being young and clever and a bit of an ass. He wasn’t actually asking to be Ganymede and comparing her to Zeus. Absurd. She was a woman, a dyke, twice his age. He was a brand new boy. It was the camaraderie of the tribe he was invoking. In that case, no offense to take, he was just young and likely lonely. Though why youth should be lonely made no sense. It had youth. The loneliness she carried she’d earned over years of trial and error, honed at last to a distance that kept even in relationships. No lover had ever known her the way Sheila did. Flesh and friendship did not mix.