She was a wisp: fifty pounds of blue eyes, the rest all sass and twat. She’d anchored just to the right of the channel. She lay back against a pink polka-dotted cushion and, with her eyes closed, sang along at the top of her lungs to Gillian Welch. She was begging for someone to burn her stillhouse down. She was tanned and freckled and had on a swimsuit small enough to fit a sparrow.
I slowed my motor to an idle, just sat there staring at her. She stopped midnote, opened them big blues, looked at me bow to stern, and asked without rancor, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
“Well, that’s a good question,” I said, taking off my ball cap and wiping the side of my face with my forearm. I repositioned the cap, settling it back on my head with a wiggle of the brim. “If I were an honest man, I guess I’d have to say I’m gazing at about the prettiest little thing I ever did see.”
“Is that right?” She sat up on her elbows, shaded her eyes. As she studied me, a bemused smirk lightened her features, solid features that—I surmised—had only just begun to suggest a life hard-lived. “So, are you?”
“Am I what?”
“An honest man?”
I cleared my throat. My balls tightened. A line of sweat eased down my cheekbone. “Hell yeah,” I said. “The most honest you’ve ever met.”
She laughed, deep and throaty. Oak-rich. Tobacco-cured. “Wanna beer?” she asked, but her flat tone and stubborn jaw suggested she was challenging me, testing to see if I’d say yes, and not to a woman I’d just met, but to the possibilities that churned dreamlike in the air between us.
I smacked a mosquito off my forearm. She smelled like tangerines. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it: My lips curled into a smart-assed grin. “Your skiff or mine?”
She tossed me a Bud. “Stay where you’re at and we’ll do just fine.”
That’s it. That’s how our love affair began. In the middle of the Matanzas River—the tide rising—she and I in separate boats.
Oh yeah. Listen to me, Jesus. Let me say this again: July 14, 2001, was the finest fucking day of my life.
Edith Piaf
Zachary broke the news. I mean, he tried. But I was too fast. I saw the ghost before he did. C’est vrai.
I was doing my nails, enjoying the quiet cool morn that placidly welcomed in the New Year. Oui. January 1, 2002. The world was coming apart—war and plagues and the ranks of the have-nots were growing ever larger, ever more voiceless. But what did I care? I owned my very own piece of paradise, an old rambling beach house situated on a whisper-thin rise of undiscovered land, a refuge that seemed so far, far away from that other world. The real world. And what greater thing to do at the dawn of this New Year, before the guests arrived for hoppin’ John and honey-glazed ham and champagne, but put a fresh coat of lacquer on my nails?
Holding the applicator just so, working on my index finger of my left hand, feeling pious and whole and lucky to be a woman at the dawn of yet another renewal of life’s circle, I and all of Iris Haven were jolted by the wail of sirens. I looked up, at first confused by the piercing noise. What on earth? And then came the rustling, the sound of great wings, sudden and reluctant, frenzied and violent. Out of the corner of my eye, by the door, I saw the white bird. It had entered my house. I had not given it permission. This was a very bad sign. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Wings tolling death. Chiming death. Announcing death. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
I dropped the lilac polish. The bottle spun across my tile floor but did not break, coming to rest against the lion’s paw of my piano stool. I did not dress. There was no time. Out into the cold morning, barefoot, clothed only in my robe, the door slamming behind me, I ran down the south path, through the brambles and sticker burrs, over the dunes, toward Dr. Z’s dock.
The sirens and wings. What a horrible jumble. And soon added to that would be the heart-shattering song of human wailing.
As I drew near, I saw that Iris Haven on New Year’s Day had been transformed into la scène tragique. Police, fire, ambulances. The chaos! The stupidity! There was no fire. And why two ambulances? Two. There was only one body. This came to me. One body. Not two. Pourquoi deux?
The whooshing of the wings forced me to cry out. I saw Z, his face stricken as he stood huddled with police officers, talking intently, like he knew something. Oui. He knew something huge. I flew past Lucinda’s house. I saw her at her French doors, staring out, her eyes big and worried. She knew, too, but not the way I knew. Not like all of a sudden the blood inside your cells begins to vomit. And your head splits wide open in grief and disbelief. You don’t know the details. Those will come later. But you do know this: Murmur. Murmur. My sweet child Murmur. I broke into a pell-mell run, cutting my bare feet on the oyster shells.
Zachary yelled, “Edith, no! Don’t go down there.” He started toward me, tried to head me off, but he didn’t stand a chance. I hurled myself down to the river, along the dock. The bird ferried me.
There the men worked. At the dock’s end. Divers yelling and EMTs scrambling and detectives with cell phones making horrid calls to horrid places about a horrid event. All on New Year’s Day. They were hoisting her out of the water, bringing her into the clear, waterless air. Please, no! Murmur, Murmur. A strand of seaweed curled across her forehead, as if placed there by a careful God.
“Murmur!” I heard myself scream. My voice echoed off the water, the sky. It rearranged the wind. “Murmur!”
Her blue eyes were open. Oh God, no, not that. She was watching her own death.
“Murmur!” I made the wind shudder. But I could not bring her back.
Here I sit on my beloved porch, gazing out at the haunted landscape, the real oiseau chanteuse spinning away on my hi-fi (I can’t bear to listen to Edith on anything other than a record player), and I keep trying to scrape away my grief. Obliterate it. Shoo, shoo, grief, shoo! But it remains stalwart, an ugly, terrifying thing—a bone eater. I stare, gaunt-eyed, at the empty horizon, wondering again and again, Pourquoi la mort? Pourquoi? Pourquoi Murmur?
She was the only one who came to see me in those drug-hazed days postsurgery. Charlee was gone, trying to find God in Boston, of all places. And what’s her name? That little cuntress who was terrified of me? I tended to forget her name, just to mess with her. Oh, yes, Lucinda the Nameless. I really should have been kinder to her when she first moved here. The poor dear, I was the first transsexual she’d ever met. But whatever, no, she never stopped by. Not once. So I am free to say it loud and proud: cuntress, cuntress, cuntress! Now, it’s true that Dr. Z visited. But it was, by nature of his training, a necessary act. So he doesn’t count in this particular litany of who did me wrong.
The operation was performed in Canada. Actually, in an attempt to be précis, I should say operations. Oui. At the opulent age of sixty-two, I had my nose straightened, narrowed, and a hint of an upward curve sculpted at the tip, à la Michelle Pfeiffer. At the same time, I received my breast implants; I tend to think of this phase of my transformation as akin to being crowned. Joie! I am forever grateful to be free of that tedious ritual drag queens and adolescent girls refer to as “bra stuffing.” I do pine, however, for a term other than breast implants. It sounds so, so—I don’t know. Agricultural. We need a feminine word. Say fleuraison.
Anyway, on that very same day, January 3, 1999, my penis was—how shall I say? Amputated. Cut off. Whacked. Penile-ectomized. Surgically removed. Chop chop. Well, a portion of it. The surgeon left enough of the old guy hanging that he was able to fashion from it my new sex organ. Oui, oui! C’est vrai! The surviving cock was inverted, tucked, trimmed, and turned into a functioning vagina. A less-than-orgasmic but perfectly adequate cul-de-sac, if you will. Ten hours on the table and—voilà!—a whole new me. The real me. The one who had wandered for six anonymous, soul-wrecking decades inside a stranger’s skin. Je suis femme. Hear me roar.
Friends who knew me preop urged me to drag out the change (aren’t puns delicious!). But I refused, and I have never regretted the decision to cut, cut, snip, s
nip, plump, plump in one fell swoop. For starters, I am a former marine. And once a member of the Corps, always a member of the Corps. We are nothing if not tough. Semper fi, motherfucker, and all that.
But really, teasing aside, my time in the Corps helped prepare me for my journey into womanhood. When I, Gunnery Sgt. James MacHenry, stared through the scope of my M2 .50-caliber machine gun and engaged the enemy—one shot one kill one shot one kill one shot one kill—and my subconscious tried to rip into my real world the way the 700-grain bullet was ripping into the enemy who was dropping to the ground—poof!—barely a human at all, ever, just a target whose ability to inflict damage on us was now neutralized, I disappeared into a truth every marine knows: Pain is weakness leaving the body. So is death. And when my metamorphosis—thanks to the surgeon’s scalpel—was complete, when I’d journeyed from redneck Palatka wuss to USMC sniper, to Edith Piaf the drag queen, to the penultimate woman I now am, the same truth saw me through the psychological and physical minefield. Pain is weakness leaving the body. You bet, motherfucker.
But back to me compressing my transformation into the span of one single stint on the table: Let us not overlook the catch-22 we call time. As a species, we may be living longer, but individually we can’t count on it. Immortalité? Non! Look at Mur. She didn’t live to see a hot flash. I have forever been blessed with a keen sense of the old mortality clock. And I would have gotten my sex change when I was twenty had it been available and affordable. Alas, drag queens don’t, as a general rule, make big bucks. Especially aging drag queens. It was left to my dear estranged papa—a man who was so ashamed of me that he denied my existence to both friends and strangers, a prideful old fool who refused to speak to me for the last thirty years of his life—to come up with the bucks to pay for my transformation. He may have hated what I was, but he still had enough sense of family to leave me his dough. Par conséquent, having served my prerequisite sentence of two years in counseling and one living as a woman, I wanted all of me to exist. Without delay. Tout de suite. AARP, incisions, morphine drips, catheters inserted into brand-new orifices, probing latexed fingers: All of it be damned!
So, oui, at first friends of many ilk abandoned me. I understood. Indeed, I anticipated such behavior. Never have I felt that I deserved to be accepted. My God, we still hate one another over such mundane matters as class and race and religion. Please! The fact that I chose to live my life as a woman—no, that’s incorrect, for the feminine gender chose me (my right to flourish as a female was ripped from my embryonic fingers through a laughable accident of one kinked curl of the double helix)—and that my psychological, primordial self was so immersed in my inner goddess that I was compelled to have my dick whacked off and a vagina constructed does not in any way imply that I can operate outside the bounds of normal human cattiness, meanness, and strife.
Did it hurt my feelings when not a single resident of Iris Haven, save Mur, came to visit me during my convalescence? Bien entendu. Granted, we have only three full-timers out here, four if you count the nameless painter, but still. And how do you account for the fact that no one from St. Augustine except for my great-aunt sent me so much as a card? It’s simple: People tend to be heartless, cruel, and profoundly stupid when it comes to something as basic as a sex change. Was I surprised, embittered, angry? Not really. Non. I’ve lived too long snapped up in the amused, disgusted, and outraged glances of strangers to let my friends get to me.
So, for a few weeks in the unusually warm winter of 1999, I spent my days and nights cocooned in fresh ocean breezes, in my four-poster bed, which I had moved into the living room before I left for Canada, surrounded by pillows and lace that smelled of lavender and patchouli, my windows flung open, Edith spinning round and round on my old phonograph, her chestnut voice wafting like the scent of sex over all of Iris Haven.
Dr. Z would stop by on his way back from visiting the migrants in Elkton, Corona, Hastings. We’d sip sherry and he’d show me the strange assortment of treasures he had collected that day on his journeys through northeast rural Florida (Dr. Z is a pack rat extraordinaire; there is barely a pop top along his route that escapes his notice), and then—as circumstances would permit (meaning the alcohol gave us permission)—he would inspect my newly minted breasts and baby vagina. He’d make animal noises, as though he were a squirrel happily secreting away nuts for the winter. He’d mumble, “Wonderful, wonderful! Hmm? How did they do that? Oh, I see! What a marvel!”
I never wanted to know what he learned from inspecting my new privates. I was happy simply contributing to his education. And I didn’t want to know the nitty-gritty medical details. To be a woman was enough. And the fact that I fed his infinite curiosity helped to heal me. By exposing my wounds, I was nurturing the good doctor. You see, it’s a maternal thing. I’m bursting with motherly impulses. Just call me la mère nature.
Every evening at dusk, just before sunset, as Dr. Z and I debated whether or not I was truly a woman, given that my DNA suggested otherwise (he can be such a hardheaded bore, really), Mur would arrive, indigo skirts flowing, her arms full of groceries, clucking away about what she planned to cook.
Dr. Z and I so welcomed her presence. I craved the food and friendship. Z needed that and safe shelter. The poor man never wanted to wander home. And who could blame him? His wife had passed away of breast cancer three months earlier. I do believe he held himself responsible. Guilt at not knowing his wife was ill until the disease was too advanced to save her changed Dr. Z profondément. Short of stature to begin with, he grew even smaller under the titanic weight of guilt and grief. His pants had to be hemmed. Mur shortened every single pair he owned. And though he continued his antics (plastic vomit left on the bedsheet of a patient, a fuzzy fake spider slipped into the twilight darkness of my purse, a dreadlock wig artfully plopped on his head when he visited the black potato pickers in Spuds), he did not fool me. I glimpsed into his dark Jewish eyes and knew going home meant facing empty rooms that clanked with memories too bittersweet to sip. How awful for him: avoir le coeur gros!
But let me return to those postop evenings. Mur’s specialty was soup. From my throne of pillows and lace, as she rifled through her willow basket, which brimmed with spices and potions, I would ask, “Quelle est la soupe du jour?”
And sometimes she answered me quite frankly. Minorcan chowder. Bouillabaisse. Roasted tomato with basil. But very often she would squint her tiny nose and say, “We’ll just have to see what happens.”
My point is, she fed us the most marvelous bisques and chowders and even consommé, which I had never enjoyed until I ate hers. Her soups were magic. She dusted them with secret spices, ground by her own hand, and as we slurped away—their essence easing down our gullets—a sense of well-being bloomed in each of us, and even the candlelight seemed to twinkle with uncommon ease.
Dr. Z always brought crusty brown bread that he purchased from a Latvian widow who picked potatoes for a living in Elkton. We slathered thick slices with real butter—never margarine and never guilty—and washed everything down with champagne et vin rouge. Dr. Z monitored my alcohol intake, since I am forever smitten with even the mildest forms of pain medication.
After dinner, as we happily digested and sipped our aperitif, we would listen to Mur read with a full measure of emotion and grace a García Lorca poem. Yes, Federico García Lorca. Mur was nothing if not multifaceted. This child of the lost Florida, the Florida of swamps and piney woods and cypress hammocks, had somewhere during her thirty-plus years run across a copy of The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (in translation, of course—why couldn’t she have fallen for Baudelaire?). And she claimed that not a day went by when she did not read at least one of his poems aloud. “To the stars and bobcats,” she’d say.
Let me set the stage. My living room would be afloat in candlelight, the flames twisting and twirling in the reflection of my crystal goblets. Edith, whom I had spent a career imitating in drag clubs across the country, continued her perpetual spin on th
e hi-fi, her voice seeming to rise out of the blood of angels. I am partial to French lace—I have arranged it précis throughout my house, with the utmost care taken to ensure its placement appears to be merely the inevitable afterthought of a fine mind. Shawls, runners, curtains (not one doily—I’m not a puss) added texture and depth to everything we did.
Imagine how gorgeous the night: the wind blowing in off the Atlantic, candlelight shimmying in the crystal breeze, and my beloved French lace all aflutter, like a sweet young street whore grown suddenly shy yet coy.
And then there was me, stretched out in my four-poster, a lace shawl situated just so around my thin shoulders, ensconced in lavender and patchouli, my tender (dare I say jeune?) breasts and vagina drugged into a comfortable haze as I listened to Mur read a type of poetry (one that was drunk on images and romantic notions of Man and the inevitable sadness spawned from such romanticism) that Dr. Z hated. Or at least he pretended to hate for the sake of argument. And there was nothing Dr. Z loved more than arguing.
Mur would clear her throat, hold the book aloft, and say, “Now, if the real Edith will excuse the interruption, I’d like to read a poem.” She’d jab her head in the direction of the phonograph, which sent Dr. Z rising and huffing up from the white wicker chair that he favored and then striding across the room to the phonograph, which he never turned off—that was not allowed—but he did fiddle with the volume. He would return to the chair and gaze eastward, across la mer Noire, which would be invisible to us if the moon was new. Her eyes shining, lit as they were by a mischievous but fair soul, Mur would begin to read.
If she paused to admire a phrase or line, Dr. Z would fidget in his chair and mutter, “Crap!”
“Zachary Klein, I swear to sweet Jesus, you are the most frustrating man I have ever come across.” Mur would say this without looking up from her book.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 5