Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Then I thought it was a fabrication to let me down easy: We were about to break up.

  And then I began to fear I was insane, because I was in love with a lunatic.

  The mind, I can tell you, reels. It reels, then recoils. It begins a retreat into a series of images and ideas that are clearly related to the news you've been given, but not exactly relevant. He is sick, he is ill, he is deranged. He needs help.

  No, he is beyond help, he is way too far gone. He is a deviant beyond therapeutic salvation. He is delusional.

  Then: He can't possibly be serious. He is, outwardly, much too normal for that sort of surgical mutilation.

  But because you don't instantly stop loving a person--our history, albeit a short one, didn't simply evaporate on that ledge at the edge of the woods--you begin to wonder about yourself. You wonder first how you missed all the signals, because certainly the signals were there. They had to be.

  Hadn't your ex-husband warned you?

  And then you begin to consider the possibility that, on some level, you didn't miss a thing. You heard the hints, and you understood them. But you didn't care, because, deep down, you are that way, too.

  Whatever that way is.

  Finally you just get sick. At least I did.

  I didn't vomit, but I did put my head between my knees and stared down at the white and silver and gray of the rock, and allowed the waves of nausea to roll over me. And when he tried to touch me, when he tried to rub the back of my neck, I believe I told him to get his hand off me.

  His disgusting hand off me.

  I was angry, and I wanted to hurt him.

  Before Dana told me his plans, we had a glorious late summer together. His course ended on the first day of August, and he wouldn't be in a classroom again for over a year.

  And so we were like two teenagers for the entire month: four-plus weeks with no jobs to attend to, and really very little responsibility. Oh, I was going by my own classroom for an hour or two every day--getting the room the way I wanted it, revising my lesson plans, weaving what I had learned the past year into my curriculum--but I've never viewed my August responsibilities as work. I'm too excited about the imminence of a new semester, and the arrival of my new students.

  And so Dana and I went to movies and dinner two and three nights a week, we read on my terrace in the afternoons, we went for hikes all over the state.

  My best friends--women, all--told me they no longer saw me, and the single ones confessed they were jealous.

  Dana and I were making love, it seemed, all the time. I'd never had a lover as attentive as he was, I'd never been with a man who was so relentlessly focused on me. My pleasure. What I wanted. We didn't spend a whole night together until the second Saturday in August, but as I recall, we saw each other every single day up until then that month, and almost every time we were together, we would find a moment alone to seduce each other. Once, in a largely empty movie theater in Middlebury, of all places, when our interest in the film was starting to flag, he crouched between my legs on the floor of the cinema and pushed up my dress, and I shocked myself by coming in public.

  I would never have allowed a man before Dana to do such a thing. I would certainly have been incapable of an orgasm.

  But--and this matters in ways that say much more about me than about Dana--he was the first man I'd ever been with who had absolutely no hair on his chest. (At the time, of course, I assumed it was simply genetic. I hadn't a clue it was hormones and electrolysis.) There was something about Dana that was at once exotic and safe and--almost like an aura--tender. He was, without question, the most unthreatening man I'd ever been with.

  We spent lots of time with Carly, too. I knew I was going to miss her madly when she went away to college, and I was prepared to spend considerably less time with Dana in those weeks if the two of them hadn't gotten along. But they had. Dana, obviously, spent a large part of his professional life around teenage girls, and he was at once completely at ease with my daughter and capable of making her comfortable with him. The three of us went biking on her days off, we went to band concerts at the gazebo on the green. Dana had a friend with a sailboat, and he still remembered enough about sailing from his childhood in Miami that he took us across Lake Champlain one day, and bought us lunch at a marine restaurant on the New York side of the water.

  And though he never actually went shopping for clothes with us, he did accompany us twice to the mall, when we embarked upon shopping expeditions in the weeks before Carly was due at school.

  I know now he was indulging one of his favorite whims. While Carly and I were picking out sweaters and shirts and jeans, he was at a lingerie store. Ostensibly he was there to buy something slinky for me--and on both occasions he did--but he spent most of his time just rubbing silk and nylon and spandex against the sensitive skin on the palms of his hands.

  Will and I drove Carly to college. I thought it was inappropriate for Dana to join us, and he agreed. Though there was no question in my mind by those last days of August that I had fallen in love with Dana, he had still been a part of my daughter's life for barely a month.

  I had assumed there was a pretty good chance that Patricia would take the day off and join us, too. I hadn't relished the prospect, though that certainly wasn't because I disliked Patricia: I simply took pleasure in the notion that the family unit that would send Carly off into the world on her own would be the very same one that had conceived her in the first place, and nurtured the newborn that was now almost five and a half feet tall.

  A week before we were to leave, I asked Will if Patricia was going to come along, and the idea that she might seemed to surprise him.

  "No, I think she thought it would just be us," he'd said. "Besides, I'm pretty sure she has depositions that morning."

  And so the last Friday in August, the three of us piled into Will and Patricia's massive Explorer. It was the first time we had been alone together in an automobile in almost a decade. Once, two years earlier, the three of us had been in a car with Patricia, when we were driving to and from Will's father's funeral. But Carly hadn't even been old enough to be one of my students the last time the Banks family had soloed inside an automobile. Almost reflexively, therefore, I hopped into the backseat before Carly: I didn't want my daughter to feel like the little kid in the back on her first day of college.

  Since much of the freshman class had considerably longer drives before them than we did, we didn't leave until late morning. Carly didn't want to be the first kid on campus.

  For most of the two-hour trip she was quiet, and Will and I babbled about our memories of our freshman year--though we did not, I noticed, discuss the fact that we had met soon after we'd arrived at Middlebury, and were seriously involved by the spring. Since our stories were meant to offer Carly one final booster shot of confidence, we both focused instead on how we had met the different adults around her who had been our friends for over two decades, and the strategies we'd employed to manage a workload that seemed, at first, overwhelming.

  Occasionally, I studied the boxes and suitcases that were piled beside and behind me and inventoried their contents in my mind. I think I was trying to reassure myself that Carly had everything she could possibly need.

  By the time we arrived, the unloading was well under way. It was early afternoon, the sun was warm, and I felt impossibly old. The Volvos and minivans stretched like wagon trains along the thin roads that surrounded the lower campus, and snaked between the renovated barns and white clapboard dormitories. We parked on a patch of grass perhaps thirty yards from the entrance to Carly's new home, and I focused on the parade of consumption and privilege of which we were a small part so I wouldn't wind up weeping because my child was leaving home and I was irrevocably middle-aged.

  Instead I joked about the skis and snowboards that sparkled in the summer sun, and the Frisbees and tennis balls that coursed through the air all around us. I noted the different makes of computers that were carried in by fathers and sons, and
the easels and butterfly chairs that were carted inside by mothers and daughters. There were endless boxes of CDs and CD players, televisions and VCRs and--protruding from the pockets of sundresses and shorts--their black plastic remotes.

  And, of course, there were armloads and hangers of clothes. Like those remotes, frequently they were black, too, because this was, after all, Bennington. Carly's new friends would have hair that was purple and orange and green, some would have literally dozens of studs in their ears. But their clothes would largely be black. Some would, in fact, dress like a close branch of the Addams Family.

  "There's Morticia," Will observed at one point, when Carly was not within earshot. Sure enough, wandering toward the front door of the dorm with a silver mountain bike in her arms, was a young girl with waist-length black hair wearing an ankle-length sheath the color of soot.

  Will and I were younger than many of the parents, but that helped little as I stood in the frame of the door to Carly's room and watched her decide where on the bureau to put her coffeemaker, or in which drawer she should place her bras and panties and socks. And though I managed to say good-bye to her without crying, Will and I were barely beyond the stone pillars at the edge of the campus when I could feel my eyes starting to tear.

  Sometimes we joked about age on the way back to Bartlett, and sometimes we reminisced about how little the ritual of the first day of college had changed in a generation. Sometimes I just sat back in the seat and closed my eyes behind my sunglasses and tried not to think about how awful it would be when I got home and saw so much of Carly's life gone from her room.

  We'd been in the car a little over an hour when Will surprised me by bringing up what he described as my new beau. Both times he'd dropped by my house in August, Dana had been there.

  "I wouldn't have guessed he was your type," he said, shrugging.

  "The ponytail?"

  "That's part of it."

  "Sometimes you need a change."

  "And he's so theatrical."

  "Theatrical?"

  "He's always using his hands when he talks."

  Certainly I knew what Will was driving at, but Dana's sexual orientation wasn't a question in my mind. I hoped if I ignored the insinuation, he would understand that I didn't want to discuss my new boyfriend with him. And so I simply stared at the hills that rolled up toward the mountains to the east.

  "Look, I know it's none of my business," he went on when I was silent. "But you know how much I care for you."

  "You're right. It is none of your business."

  "But I can't help myself. I want you to be happy."

  "Then you'll change the subject. Or you'll let me change it."

  "Can I say one more thing?"

  "Not if it's about Dana."

  "Well, I'm going to, I have to. And it's the last thing I'll say, I promise. But some people I know at the university think he's a tad odd. They say he's changed over the last year or two."

  "I really don't care to discuss this."

  "They say he's started to look different. They say--"

  "They? Who are they? Is they your idiot friend in the Poli-Sci Department? The one who does your Wednesday-morning radio commentaries? Well, of course she's not going to like Dana. She's a baby step away from bombing Planned Parenthood!"

  "Oh, she is not."

  "She is! And if she's your they, I just don't care."

  "And if she's not alone?"

  "I still don't care."

  "Look, I just think you should know there are people at the school who believe he shouldn't be teaching. There are people there--"

  "Will!"

  "There are people there who say he's a transvestite!"

  "Dana? Oh, please."

  "Have you noticed his eyebrows?"

  "Clearly you have."

  "Look, I'm sorry I had to tell you."

  I shook my head and sunk as low in my seat as I could. "You're not one bit sorry," I said.

  "I am."

  "Well, in that case, let me reassure you: Dana has never worn a dress in his life. And he is an absolutely fabulous lay."

  I know now I was wrong about the first part. But the second part remains undeniable. Indisputable.

  I am cocksure.

  Certainly I thought about Will's allegations off and on in the first two weeks of September, but I never gave them much credence. I was busy with the start of the new school year: nineteen new students, the committee meetings that appear out of nowhere, the first field trips of the fall--including an excursion to a maritime museum on Lake Champlain, which was in reality an absolutely terrific day, but seemed to strike everyone who hadn't been there as a disaster.

  We were in the midst of a glorious September heat wave--one of those last, wondrous tastes of high summer--and the temperature must have hit ninety degrees. The kids always love the replica of the Revolutionary War gunboat and the actual artifacts that have been pulled from the deep water, and that class was no exception. Unfortunately, when it was time to return to school, the bus driver couldn't get the vehicle to start, and it was clear it was going to be an hour before another bus would arrive. Since there wasn't a whole lot else to do at that point, I let the kids go swimming in the lake in their school clothes. I was present, and so were four adult chaperones, and only nine or ten kids chose to dive in. No one was going to drown. But two of the girls decided to take off their shirts so they were swimming in what amounted to sports bras--the sort of opaque halter tops in which grown women exercise all the time. And though I insisted that both girls put their shirts back on immediately, the rumors that spread throughout town were astonishing. Two parents called the school, and I ended up spending more time dealing with the aftermath of the field trip than I'd spent planning it.

  Meanwhile, when I wasn't at school, I was getting used to living in my house without Carly. I was not, however, getting used to living alone. Dana spent three nights with me the first week Carly was gone, and four nights with me the second. He would be there when I returned home from school, and he would insist on cooking me the most astonishing meals. This wasn't dinner, this was dining: Smoky pumpkin soup and sweet potato vichyssoise, a loaf of walnut beer bread he baked himself. A wild mushroom tart, with hen-of-the-woods sickle puffs he found growing on one of our hikes. Pastas with salmon and pine nuts and fennel.

  Once, when I'd had a few glasses of wine, I found myself examining his face in the candlelight--first with my eyes, and then with the tips of my fingers--and I believe I almost asked him something. Why are you so beautiful? perhaps. Why are you so smooth? What is it about your face that I love?

  But I didn't. A big part of the allure was the mystery: A magic trick loses its luster once you know the secret.

  In the middle of the month we went for a picnic up in Lincoln. High in the mountains, yet no more than a half-hour hike from the road that coils through a gap near the summit of the four-thousand-foot Mount Abraham, is a ledge that faces west. Its views of sunsets and smaller hills are certainly not a secret, and yet only once in the dozen times I've been there have other people stopped to picnic, too. It may be too close to the road for the hikers who want to take on the Long Trail or venture to the top of the nearby mountain.

  But it is indeed a wonderful spot. We went there on a Saturday, and Dana insisted upon preparing everything. The only contributions I was allowed were the plastic wineglasses he'd found in a kitchen cabinet, and the ratty cloth napkins I saved for exactly this sort of occasion.

  "So, you plan on bringing along a little wine?" I asked, half kidding, when I was turning the plastic goblets over to him that Saturday morning. I actually assumed we'd be drinking bottled water from them, and he simply wanted to add a little elegance to the event.

  "Nothing like getting a really good buzz at the edge of a cliff," he said, and he surprised me by pulling from the refrigerator a bottle of wine he'd hidden there the night before.

  We set off from my house in his car just after noon, and we were settled in at the
ledge before one. Midway through lunch a young couple with a golden retriever wandered near our perch, but they hadn't brought a lunch and it was clear that they didn't plan on staying. And so we were, most of the time, completely alone.

  We had probably been at the cliff for close to an hour when he told me. I had never completely emptied my glass in the time we had been there, but I'd still consumed a good third of the bottle of wine: Dana had topped off the goblet almost every time I'd taken a sip.

  When he leaned over once more with the bottle in his hand, I blanketed the rim of my glass with my fingers and shook my head no.

  "You either think you're going to get lucky up here, or you have something on your mind," I said. I hadn't planned on adding the second part, it just came out. But he had been unusually quiet that morning, and I had the distinct sense that it was because there was something troubling him that he wanted to share.

  "Get lucky? No, I'd be afraid we'd roll off the cliff," he said.

  "And I don't think it would do my career any good if somebody saw us."

  "Probably not."

  "So you do have something to tell me, don't you?"

  "I do."

  "And it's the sort of bombshell that demands a little wine."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that. Actually, I think it might be the sort that demands a lot of wine."

  I nodded, and a litany of possibilities crossed my mind. He was married. He had a child--no, he had children. He had teenage children, fathered when he himself was in high school or college.