We Learn Nothing

by Tim Kreider

  Acting any differently toward women than I did around men—even just softening my voice when I talked to them—made me feel faintly calculating and fake. It was the same kind of shame I felt if I caught myself dropping g’s around black people or lowering my diction with mechanics or repairmen—or, for that matter, feeling more confident around girls I wasn’t attracted to. In retrospect it’s obvious I was confusing a lot of different issues and making myself crazy second-guessing pretty common and innocuous behavior. But when Jenny came out to me, I was still clinging half-consciously to some belief that I treated people entirely on the basis of their individual personalities rather than incidentals like gender. So when one of my closest guy friends unexpectedly switched sexes, it called me on my bullshit.

  Think, for a moment, just about how you’d act toward a female friend who’s in the hospital versus the way you would toward a man in the same situation. I, for one, feel freer to be tender and solicitous toward a woman who’s sick or injured. With a man there’s a little more joshing and shoulder punching, concern disguised as its opposite. When my friend Kevin was about to go in for an angioplasty we had a conversation about whether his friends would be allowed to eat him if he died. All this goes back to our earliest experiences of being comforted as children when we bang our heads or skin our knees: girls are fawned and cooed over and kissed to make it better, boys told to stop crying now and act like a big boy.

  I got the opportunity to test this gedankenexperiment in real life when Jenny asked me if I would travel to Neenah, Wisconsin, for nine days to keep her company through her convalescence from what’s formally called “gender reassignment” surgery. My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes.

  There wasn’t much that wasn’t irreal about my time in Neenah. Jenny’s surgeon had the implausible mad-scientist name of Dr. Schrang. A Schrang, Jenny assured me, was the Cadillac of vaginas: “sensate, mucosal, and orgasmic.” Jenny shared a room with a transgendered woman from Virginia whose family occasionally phoned to remind her that she was a freak and an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Several times a day Jenny had to insert a stent, an object not unlike a dildo, into her new vagina, to keep it from closing. She named her stents after recent Democratic presidents of the United States, ranging in size from Jimmy Carter, the starter model, to the formidable Lyndon Baines Johnson. During this procedure I would usually go for walks around the hospital corridors. Patients recovering from gender reassignment shared a floor with the cardiac ward, and my perceptions of gender had by this time become so thoroughly unmoored that I would see a grizzled, gray-faced man with a sagging belly in a hospital gown making his way laboriously down the hall with a walker and think, I hope that guy had a heart attack. Ever since Neenah, the efforts of would-be subversive persons at “gender-bending” have left me feeling less fucked with or challenged than condescended to, like a veteran getting mugged by some punk.

  One little test of my mettle came when Jenny, who turned out to be allergic to hydrocodone, broke out into shingles and asked me to rub moisturizer on her back. Obviously I realized this was a nonsexual request, strictly a medicinal procedure, except a man probably wouldn’t ask another man to do it for him. What do you do when a friend of yours, formerly a male friend but now a female, asks you to rub lotion on her back? “My heterosexuality is hanging by a thread,” I mostly mock-lamented, smearing the lotion into her red scaly skin, while she laughed her same old snickering laugh in triumph. I appropriated the rest of the hydrocodone as compensation.

  It should be pointed out that, for someone who likes to pretend that that he treats men and women the same way, 100 percent of the people I’ve ever had sex with have been female. It’s hard to believe that, if Jenny had always been a woman, we could’ve been friends for twenty-five years without sex ever at least presenting itself as a possibility. The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others. Not to say that friendship between men and women is impossible, but there are few of these friendships in which sex doesn’t at some point become an issue, if only to be acknowledged or dismissed.

  The question of sex has since loomed into view on one or two occasions over the years—I’m remembering a harrowing episode when Jenny and I were more or less propositioned over shots of Jägermeister by a sailor and a woman claiming to be Cal Ripken Jr.’s niece—but the only time I ever addressed it directly was when Jenny, who’d been writing some freelance travel pieces, was offered the assignment to fly to Venice, and asked me whether I’d like to go along. I delicately tried to clarify whether we were talking about going to Venice or, you know, Going To Venice. I’d thought it was only taking her seriously as a woman to ask; if any other woman I knew had invited me to stay with her in one of the world’s most legendarily romantic cities I would’ve made sure I understood the conditions before agreeing to go. Often such invitations are left deliberately ambiguous, but in this case I felt like I ought to err on the side of clarity. (Some of my trepidation may have dated back to a episode years earlier when I had traveled to Greece with a woman who, it turned out, had no intention of having sex with me, after which I declined an invitation to go to Italy with another woman who, in retrospect, pretty obviously did.) Jenny’s reaction was: It is so like a man to assume that going to Venice together would mean having sex. I thought: Only a woman could imagine that it didn’t. We never went to Venice.

  But we’ll always have Neenah. I had feared that my week there might be awkward, or at the very least boring, but I remember it now like one of our old summer vacation capers. We watched Buster Keaton comedies and Busby Berkeley musicals. Jenny illicitly split her Demerol with me and we washed it down with obscure midwestern beverages like Werner’s Ginger Ale. And I read her The Princess Bride aloud. Reading to someone is an intimate thing to do; most of us have fond associations with being read to by our parents when we were children. The only other people I’ve read aloud to as an adult were girlfriends or my mother. Whenever anyone’s tried reading to me I’ve fallen asleep within four pages, still classically conditioned by bedtime stories. Jenny always snuggled down under the covers to listen with the cozy entitlement of a favored daughter. She liked to yell “The Cliffs . . . of Insanity!” whenever we came to this phrase in the book. She later described it as “the girlhood she never had.”

  On our trip home from Neenah, Jenny hired a limousine to drive us both from the Portland airport to her house in Maine. There were three cassette tapes in the back of the limo; we chose Yanni Live at the Acropolis. Jenny told me the story of the death of her childhood cat Ba-Boing!, who was run over by the school bus as young Jim and his sister watched in horror. Their mother made them get on the bus and go to school and then rushed the cat to the vet’s, where she was asked, “What is this animal’s name?” Holding the cat’s limp and flattened body in her arms, her face streaked with tears, like a demented pietà, she had to answer: “Ba-Boing!” All this told to the glittering synthetic crescendi of Yanni. This had always happened to Jim and me—every time we got together we were reduced to the state of kids getting punchy at 3 A.M., unable to breathe, feebly writhing, our faces red and wet and mushy with weeping. (Did I mention that we still had plenty of leftover painkillers? Well, we did.) Laughter is one of those intimacies, like orgasm or tears or just getting completely snockered with someone, that bares our most helpless, undignified selves. It’s what’s bound and consecrated all my friendships, the way that sex consummates a love affair.

  For a few years Jenny and I talked about what she called “the ol’ Presto Change-o” all the time, the same way we’d talked about me getting stabbed quite a lot after that happened. But eventually we ran out of things to say. She got her sex change and finally got to be herself, and for a while she was euphoric, just as I’d been after I didn
’t get killed and got to go on being me. But lately we talk a lot more about the impossibility of knowing which of the things you’ve done in life have really mattered, the sadness of seeing your parents disengage from the business of living, the grotesque unfairness of getting old—the same insoluble problem of being a person in the world. The sex-change issue resolved itself the way most of life’s most vexing problems do: not because I ever figured it out or came around to some conclusion, but because it simply got obviated, without my noticing it, by time and experience. I finally exhausted myself with all my efforts to divvy up and pin down and label and just gave up, the same way our chatterbox brains can be dumbstruck and freed by a koan. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Ba-Boing! It turned out I’d been asking the wrong question; it was never is she a woman or is he a man, but what is a friend.

  I worry sometimes, such as when we’re annoying an entire bar by playing Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots (a spirited game that unavoidably involves a lot of mechanical noise as well as some ritual shouting), that the extent to which I feel at ease around Jenny is a measure of my denial about anything having changed—that, on some level, I still think of her as One of the Guys, which is not exactly what any woman wants. But this sort of silly puerility is hardly limited to my male friendships: Annie and I are always conniving some illicit caper like leaving her ex’s belongings piled on his porch or photographing her at the vacation home he never took her to, and my conversations with my ex-girlfriend Max revolve around topics like World War I flying aces and The Count of Monte Cristo.* On one of our evenings in New York’s East Village of drinking Belgian ale, eating chicken vindaloo, going to the Russian baths, and smoking cigars, Jenny pointed out to me: “You know, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think I was a very interesting woman.”

  Jenny Boylan might be the one person in this world whom I now think of purely as a human being, free of all the corporeal baggage of chromosomes, hormones, and footwear. I certainly don’t think of her as a man anymore. It may be that I’ll never think of her as a woman in quite the same way that I do my friends who were born as girls. But then I’m not sure the difference between my relationship with Jenny and these women is any greater than the difference between my relationship with Lauren, with whom I fell in and out of love and never so much as kissed, and my relationship with Lucy, both of us so well defended and fond of each other, always angling to connect across the gulf between us, or with Annie, who’s like my evil twin sister. The longer you live, the more involuted and unique all your friendships become, until each is as exotic and alien from the others as creatures on widely divergent evolutionary branches, bearing as much resemblance to one another as a lightning whelk and a gnu.

  An Insult to the Brain

  In Which I Am Tasked with Reading

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Aloud to My Mother, an Invalid

  I’d failed twice to read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It was my friend Harold who first urged me to read it, claiming it was his favorite book. He would quote allegedly hilarious lines like “Pray, my Dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” and name-drop characters like Dr. Slop. I was dubious. Harold had read the thing in graduate school, where I suspected his boredom threshold had been unnaturally raised by a program of study designed to render the love of reading into something joyless enough to be respectable. I was sure that Tristram Shandy was a laugh riot compared to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (a title Harold still uttered like the name of a Vietnamese hamlet where his entire platoon had been wiped out), but I was having some trouble making it through the first chapter, which was just over one (1) page long.

  I knew about Tristram Shandy, of course—anyone who studies English literature or writing at least hears about it. Everyone knows about the black page that represents death, the white page on which you are invited to draw your own ideal of feminine beauty rather than have Sterne describe his beloved. It’s a nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness story, appropriating outside texts and nesting stories within stories—self-referential, metafictional, and postmodern two hundred years before anyone thought up names for those things. It deconstructs the novel at the same time it’s inventing it. There are even little doodles. It sounds like fun!

  I gave it another chance because of an aesthetic crush I developed on a bust of its author I found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This bust, carved from life by Joseph Nollekens, made Laurence Sterne look like the best person in the history of the world to be seated next to at a dinner party. The line where his marble lips met was perfectly straight, revealing nothing, but the subtle molding and shadow around one corner of the mouth gave it the quirk of an incipient smile. (German humorist Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of Sterne’s prose: “The reader who demands to know . . . whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression.”1) He looked to me as if he were politely maintaining a straight face while mentally refining the devastating aside he was about to mutter out of the side of his mouth about whatever blowhard you were both stuck listening to. That guy, I told myself, has got to be funny.

  This time I got bogged down somewhere around page 12. The eighteenth-century diction and elaborate circumlocutions were exhausting; I reread whole paragraphs and then had to re-reread them. Most of Sterne’s satirical references to scholarly works and intellectual debates of his day were lost on me; by the time I’d flipped to the back of the book to read the endnote explaining the allusion it was a little too late to slay me. And its bawdy humor, which must’ve been very titillating indeed in the eighteenth century, consists mostly of arch double entendres involving puddings, very long noses, and nuns’ “placket-holes.” I was still carrying my copy around, pretending I hadn’t given up on it yet, when my mother almost died.

  You know it’s that phone call right away. It’s the call you’ve always known was going to come someday but, you hoped—to use the same phrase your parents used long ago to reassure you about your own hypothetical death—not for a very long time. “Tim,” began the message, “this is your brother-in-law.” My sister’s husband, a pediatrician, is an easy-to-like guy with whom I usually talk about things like Batman. Ordinarily he’d just say, “Hi, this is Scott.” This was the first time I’d ever heard the voice he must use to deliver bad medical news—clear, direct, affectless. My mother was in the hospital, he told me. She’d collapsed at home, delirious, and been taken to the ER. My sister, who is also a doctor, was already at the hospital. When I called her, she told me that our mother was suffering from septic shock. Apparently she’d had a kidney stone, a calcite deposit the size of a sand grain that had caused a potentially lethal backup of toxins in her blood. She’d been found only by chance, by a county deputy she’d called earlier in the day for an unrelated reason. It had been, my sister said, “a rough night,” which I understood to be the same kind of professional euphemism as “experiencing some discomfort.” Mom was in an ICU now, on intravenous antibiotics, and we were waiting to see if the infection could be brought under control and the fever would break. “If I were talking to the relative of someone in Mom’s condition,” said my sister, “I would tell them to come.”

  Hospitals are like the landscapes in recurring dreams: forgotten as though they’d never existed in the interims between visits, but instantly familiar once you return. As if they’ve been there all along, waiting for you while you’ve been away. The endlessly branching corridors and circular nurses’ stations all look identical, like some infinite labyrinth in a Borges story. It takes a day or two to memorize the route from the lobby to your room. The innocuous landscape paintings that seem to have been specifically commissioned to leave no impression on the human brain are perversely seared into your long-term memory. You pass doorways through which you can occasionally see a bunch of Mylar balloons or a pair of pale, withered legs. Hospital beds are now just as science fiction predicted, with
the patient’s vital signs digitally displayed overhead. Nurses no longer wear the white hose and red-cross caps of cartoons and pornography, but scrubs printed with patterns so relentlessly cheerful—hearts, teddy bears, suns and flowers and peace signs—they seem symptomatic of some Pollyannaish denial. The smell of hospitals is like small talk at a funeral—you know its function is to cover up something else. There’s a grim camaraderie in the halls and elevators. You don’t have to ask anybody how they’re doing. The fact that they’re there at all means the answer is: Could be better. I notice that no one who works in a hospital, whose responsibilities are matters of life and death, ever seems hurried or frantic, in contrast to interns at magazines I’ve known who weren’t even allowed to leave for lunch lest they be urgently needed.