The Chrysalis

by Catherine Deveney

  “I… I want to be a woman.”

  “That is not what I asked.”

  Maurice lit another cigarette.

  “Don’t make the mistake of confusing your gender identity with your sexuality, Zac.”

  “But if I am really a woman…”

  Maurice shrugged.

  “Perhaps you are a lesbian. No, don’t laugh. I didn’t mean it as a joke.” He took an almost furtive puff of the cigarette from behind a cupped hand. It was strange how masculine some of his mannerisms were, thought Zac.

  “I have a partner,” Zac said suddenly. “Her name is Abbie. And I love her but I’m not sure if I’m IN love with her.” He felt a rush of adrenaline hearing the words aloud, literally a ringing in his ears. He’d said them. Maurice did not even appear to realise their significance. He simply nodded, accepting what he said without question.

  “And you?” Zac asked curiously. “Who do you like?”

  “Women,” said Maurice instantly. “But..” Maurice raised his hands helplessly and blew out a quick burst of smoke. “They find it hard.”

  Zac understood the frustration and the helplessness of the gesture.

  “They find it hard that you want to be a woman?”

  “I don’t want to be a woman. I want to dress like a woman – occasionally. I am transvestite, not transgender.”

  “I see.”

  Zac looked more closely at Maurice’s face. How old was he? Fifty perhaps. Fifty-five. His hair was receding and grey at the temples, and there were bags under his eyes that gave him a lugubrious quality without the makeup. The rush of fire in Zac’s belly, the excitement of acceptance, abated. He looked at Maurice and felt suddenly overwhelmed. Fifty-five and he hadn’t done it yet; he hadn’t found peace. It was obvious.

  “Alain!” shouted Maurice again in the silence.

  “So you live alone?” said Zac.

  “With God… and myself,” said Maurice, in a tone that suggested to Zac that he had said it many times before. “Do I need anyone else? “He turned and shouted over his shoulder. “Alain! Where the hell is our coffee?”

  “I need more than God and me,” said Zac.

  “Or you think you do,” said Maurice. He stubbed out the partially smoked cigarette. “It is amazing how little you can survive on. Your family… are they supportive?”

  “My mother is. She is…very special. And my sister, though of course she’s less invested in my happiness than my mother. But it’s hard for them to understand. How could it not be? Not even I understand. And my father…”

  Maurice sighed. “Yes, fathers are a problem. As far as they are concerned, if you question your sexuality, you question theirs too.”

  “He doesn’t like being in my company,” said Zac.

  “Do you like being in his?” asked Maurice.

  No, answered Zac in his own head, but he remained silent.

  “You are allowed to dislike him as much as he dislikes you.”

  Maurice’s words suddenly flicked a switch. This was not just about what his father felt; what Zac felt was important too. It surprised him that such a simple exchange could hand him back some control.

  Alain arrived from the kitchen with two cups.

  “Sorry, the machine broke down.”

  “No matter,” said Maurice. “We have been getting to know one another. Zac was telling me about his difficult father.”

  Zac felt uneasy. It was one thing to say these things aloud, another to hear them repeated. “You two have something in common then,” said Alain.

  “Is your father still alive?” Zac asked Maurice.

  “No. He died, maybe ten years ago. I was not part of his life, until the end, that is.”

  “What happened?”

  “He asked to see me when before I had not been welcome.” Maurice picked up his discarded cigarette and relit it unthinkingly. “Insurmountable problems suddenly become surmountable when death knocks on your door. It is a shame that we have to wait until then.”

  A bead of sweat was rolling down his forehead. Maurice fished in his pocket and took out a checked cotton handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “I think I am going to die,” he said to Alain. “”Remind me never to touch your filthy alcohol again!”

  Alain glanced at Zac and raised his eyes with a sarcastic smile.

  Zac smiled back at Alain. It was strange, he thought, how he and Alain had addressed very few words to each other yet there was silent communication flowing between them. He knew that he was being appraised, and that he was doing the same in return: quietly watching and interpreting the nuances of Alain’s expressions and reactions.

  “What about your father?” Zac asked Alain. “Are you close?”

  Alain glanced at Maurice.

  “Alain grew up without his father,” Maurice said to Zac. “He died when Alain was a baby.”

  “I am sorry,” said Zac awkwardly.

  Alain shook his head.

  “I never… knew him,” he explained. “Long time ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mon père…” he said before turning away. His voice dropped and all Zac could hear was a mumble.

  Zac looked at Maurice for explanation.

  “What did he say?” he asked with a frown.

  Maurice drew the handkerchief over his eyes and face.

  “He said his father was murdered.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Marianne

  Memories fill this flat; the elusive scent of the past. When you first spray perfume, the vibrant, pungent cloud fills your nostrils and assaults your senses, sometimes not altogether pleasantly. But after a while, when the wearer has long stopped smelling it, it settles into something more mellow and mature, a vague residue that every so often catches you unaware, drifting softly into your consciousness when you turn this way or that. A puff, a whiff, a moment when the scent is real, then gone again. My memories feel like that; mature now and settled into something richer but slightly evasive. But oh, every so often I can smell them clearly, the lingering intensity of what they once were.

  Strangely, there was no euphoria when Raymond had his surgery. Not at first anyway. There was too much pain for that. The morning he was due to go into hospital, I found him sitting at the French window in a shaft of sunlight, watching the world quietly. He had turned when I came into the room and smiled, holding out his hand to me without a word. I joined him and we looked out at a sky still streaked ominously with the deep red of dawn.

  “I watched the light come up,” he said, “watched it rise to create a new day.”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “The two-spirit people of the native American Indians had a special role in sun dances,” he said.

  “Two-spirit people?”

  “People like me. Those with a male and a female identity.”

  I suppose he was telling me that transgender people were in every culture; that he was not some abomination of the decadent West.

  It was not as if Raymond left that morning as a man and returned as a woman. Really, it was already all over by then. The surgery was simply the final icing on the cake. After a year of hormone therapy and extensive electrolysis, he already looked more female than male. I had grown almost accustomed to his outwardly female persona, though I cannot lie: even now I find it difficult to think of him as Rae - as anything, in fact, other than my Raymond. But we had settled into an almost sisterly existence, and I did not dare to say that I missed the masculine dimension, even though I did.

  “Any second thoughts?” I asked and he simply shook his head.

  “Are you scared?”

  “A little.”

  We held one another for a moment, my cheek on his, and his skin was soft and feminine. I longed for the stubble that had once rubbed like an emery board against my cheek.

  “Time to go,” I murmured, but he kept his hold when I tried to move.

  “Thank you, Marianne,” he murmured.

  “For what?”<
br />
  “For always accepting me. For being here.”

  “Who else was going to be here?”

  “Only you,” he said.

  I had hours and hours to replay that conversation as I sat in a bare hospital waiting room with a selection of well-thumbed magazines. The place was warm enough but the walls were painted in a pale, cold blue that made me feel chilled and anxious as the seconds, minutes, hours ticked interminably by. Who else was going to be there? Only me. We seemed to alternate, Raymond and I, between moments of intense intimacy and solidarity, when he appreciated me as the rock he clung to in every storm, and moments of anger when he wanted his freedom and saw me as part of his problem: the obstacle blocking his way.

  I was allowed to sit by his bed when he came back from theatre, just watching him breathe. In and out, and in and out, until I was terrified that an ‘in’ would not be followed by an ‘out’, or an ‘out’ would not be followed by an ‘in’. Sometimes, there seemed to be a pause when his breathing hung, suspended, and I lurched forward only for him to take a sudden gasp. He’s fine, a nurse had said lightly, with what seemed to me to be careless indulgence, when I asked. In the end, I had to stop watching him. I took hold of his hand which lay on a starched white sheet and a peach coloured blanket that was the shade and roughened texture of fabric Elastoplast.

  When his eyes opened, I leant over him immediately – leant over HER I suppose I have to say from this point on – and smiled.

  “How do you feel?” I asked softly, stroking her hair off her forehead.

  Her lips barely moved and I could see they were dry and uncomfortable.

  I leant closer.

  “What?”

  “Bloody awful,” she murmured.

  “Don’t try to talk any more. Close your eyes. Rest.”

  She was hooked up to a morphine drip for 24 hours but it was then removed - to avoid dependency, the nurses said.

  “I’ll risk it,” Rae pleaded, but they replaced it with only Paracetamol and Ibuprofen which would have struggled to see off one of Rae’s headaches on a bad day. It was increased to a stronger cocktail when she was unlucky enough to get an infection and her temperature was raised. She lay, miserable and still, and I watched her silently as she tried to move her flushed cheeks to a cool part of pillow. I suppose it was the anticlimactic nature of the transition that distressed her most. The genital area was swollen horribly and the whole thing was seeping blood and pus. She was miserable, and eventually the tears began to cascade. It was not as she had imagined; the butterfly emerging effortlessly from the chrysalis to be the creature nature always intended. The blossoming of Rae’s new identity didn’t quite happen in the calm, triumphant way she had dreamed of.

  “You feel bad?”

  She nodded miserably and I took a risk.

  “Oh pull yourself together,” I said. “You’re a woman now - you can’t whimper at the least little thing like men do!”

  She giggled through her tears and turned her face into the pillow when the laugh turned into a painful cough that put pressure on her stitches.

  “Sorry.” I lifted her hand and held it in mine and we sat in a bubble of silence.

  “This will pass Rae,” I said eventually, soothingly. “In just a short time, it will seem like nothing at all.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  A nurse came in, carrying something in her hand.

  “Rae,” she said, “we need to do your first dilation.”

  Losing Raymond was like a bereavement. I mourned for him and the awful thing was that I had no-one to share that pain with. I certainly couldn’t tell Rae. But I recognised that essentially, Raymond was still with me and I had to be grateful for that. I imagine it was a little like losing someone to one of those awful dementia illnesses, where the person appears to still be there physically but in reality is quite gone. The person who is left is still them – and yet is an imposter too.

  When I battled with those feelings, I tried to work out the nature of love. What it meant. What it depended on. I only ended up with a headache. I knew that I loved Rae partly for Raymond’s sake, rather than her own. But I would have taken any part of Raymond that I was allowed to keep. If he’d been paralysed in an accident I would have loved him still. If he’d become ill with a debilitating disease, I would have loved him still. The spirit would have been the same inside the changed body. Was it so different to have the same spirit inside a body with a different gender? Rae was enough for me. She had to be. How did Shakespeare put it? “Love is not love which seeks to alter when it alteration finds. Oh no, it is an ever fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

  She was grateful, so grateful. For a time. But it is a fickle emotion, gratitude. It co-exists with dependency, and when dependency flees, it drags gratitude with it. Like a reprieve from illness, or narrow escape from an accident, when you swear you will live your life differently, be marked forever with the stain of thankfulness on your forehead for the gaining of a life that might so easily have been lost. Until the process of living drains your good intention, and eventually you forget it was ever there. So it was with Rae.

  In the weeks of painful vulnerability, when Rae needed me, we were as close as we had ever been since before Patrice Moreau died. It seemed impossible that we would ever part. She leant on me, both physically and metaphorically, and I gladly accepted her weight and supported her as best I could.

  But gradually, she blossomed, both physically and emotionally. I kept hearing that conversation with Professor Mitchell in my head. “What is your deepest fear, Marianne?” “That he will be reborn and I will die.” Rae’s new body was everything she had wanted and she could not pass a mirror without looking in it and smiling.

  “Oh Marianne, I look like me,” she said, turning this way and that in front of the glass. “At night, when I dreamt, I was almost always a woman. And I looked like this.”

  “You never told me that,” I said, “about your dreams.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  She was happy, brimming with the confidence that fulfilment brings, and her need for me waned. It was not as conscious, as deliberate, as simply discarding me. It was casual thoughtlessness, rather than deliberate cruelty. No matter; the effect was the same. She was not aware of how much she was changing, whereas I saw every tiny detail: the first morning she failed to consult me anxiously on what she was wearing; the day I found her giggling coquettishly with a delivery man on the doorstep.

  I walked past her into the kitchen and waited until I heard a cheery ‘goodbye’ and the sound of the front door closing.

  “Is that your impersonation of a woman?” I said, when she walked, humming to herself, into the room. I couldn’t help myself.

  “What?”

  “Oooohhh,” I simpered, mimicking her giggle. “Oooohhhh!”

  Rae flushed with hurt.

  “You’re just jealous,” she said, walking back out past me.

  I was.

  It didn’t happen overnight; these things rarely do. And it didn’t matter how many deals we’d done over the years, or how many promises we’d made, or what was right and what was wrong. When it happens, it happens, and no emotions from the past can prevent it.

  There were no tears, and no big scenes, because neither of us admitted what was really going on. I loved Raymond, but he was always an emotional coward. Rae was no different in that respect.

  “Let’s go back,” she said impetuously one night, when we were sitting in front of the television.

  It was such an oblique remark that it shouldn’t have made sense. But it did. Instantly.

  “Go back where?” I said, not taking my eyes from the screen.

  Rae smiled.

  “Saint Estelle!” she said with a flourish, as if it was an idea that had only just occurred to her rather than the well thought-out plan that I knew it was.

  “No.”

  “Don’t be so quick to make a decision, Marianne,”
she pleaded, taking hold of my hand. “It could work.”

  “For you, not for me.”

  “I need to… go back. I need to finally be there as me.”

  Maybe it was a kind of pilgrimage. Maybe it was a spiritual – or sentimental, depending on how you look at it – impulse to visit Patrice’s grave and show that she had finally completed the journey they had embarked on together. For me, it was just an unnecessary return to the scene of the crime.

  “I won’t go,” I said calmly. “I don’t want to be there.”

  Rae was silent, but I knew she was not surprised. It was all planned. She knew she asked me to do the one thing, the only thing, I would not do for her. Could not do for her. When I refused, it would liberate her. I resented the cleverness of the trap she laid for me.

  “It is too risky to go back. What if Charpentier calls on you?”

  “Charpentier!” she exclaimed scathingly. “The man will be retired by now. In fact, he may be dead. I hardly think he’s going to come calling on an unknown woman.”

  “Yes, Rae,” I said. “It is different for you. You are no longer who you were. But I am not an unknown woman, am I? And what if the police come knocking on my door asking about ‘Raymond’?”

  She said nothing.

  This was the moment she could have pushed things, engineered an argument, flounced out. She behaved more subtly.

  “Maybe,” she said, “I could go over for a while. See how things are, and if we could make a life there. And if being there for a few weeks is enough, then at least I will have got it out of my system.”

  “You mean we should split up?”

  “No, of course not. Just temporarily. A holiday. A break. Then we can talk again. I will find out what possibilities there are for jobs for both of us.”

  “I see.”

  She stroked my hand.

  “I want your permission, Marianne. I want you to support me in this.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you have a choice.”

  Even the day she left we continued with the pretence that she was coming back. I put a Chanel suit on to go to the office that morning. A pair of black patent kitten heels. A string of smooth, creamy pearls that I asked Rae to fasten for me. I remember the touch of her fingers on the back of my neck, the way she lightly put both her hands on my shoulders for a second when she had closed the clasp.