Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  “I’m like you,” he said again.

  “You’re not like me,” Diane said. “I don’t lie.”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Paul.

  Diane looked at him with her hard Colossus eyes.

  “I have to go in,” he said finally. “My manager will kill me if I just take off.”

  “I’ll wait,” she said.

  “You will?”

  She nodded.

  He began to change back, and saw her face.

  “I have to, at least a little,” he said. “They all just think I do really good drag sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” said Diane. “You’re really good.”

  She turned to walk back inside and Paul followed. He ducked under the service gate of the bar, poured Diane another whiskey, and began listlessly to take drink orders until James intervened.

  “Oh my dear,” said James, doing his best Eve Harrington. “Are you entirely okay? Let me help. I can open beer bottles for thirty minutes. You go home now and get some rest.”

  Paul agreed, although he knew exactly how James would represent the situation to Greg. He found Diane standing by the pool table, looking so surly he lost his breath.

  “Let’s just go,” he said. “I punched out.”

  Diane nodded.

  Paul directed her, badly, toward his apartment, and they drove in silence past his street and into a strange and depressing cul-de-sac of ranch houses with tricycles and other debris on the lawns.

  “I should have told you,” Paul said. Even though of course I couldn’t, he thought angrily.

  “Yeah,” said Diane, turning the car around. “You think?”

  He didn’t understand this sarcastic Diane, at once familiar and yet so not herself. He’d brought her to this point, he thought, his fear mixed with a secret surprising pride. He’d broken down her cool reserve.

  She didn’t speak again until they were in his room. She sat heavily on the floor in a corner by the window, as if to refuse a chair was to refuse Paul’s…what? hypocrisy? To refuse Paul. He crouched on his futon. He pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders like a cape but he couldn’t get warm. They stared at each other, past unspoken opening lines, past comfort or discomfort, and the night opened into some universal parentheses containing everything there was to be said, all the small moments and passing thoughts, all the excuses, explanations, possibilities of being known—and closed again, like a winking anus or a wormhole. It was really a strangely long time, Paul thought. He didn’t know if he’d ever been silent this long. His leg began to cramp but he didn’t want to move and disrupt what he suspected Diane might consider a new kind of intimacy.

  “You’re a liar,” said Diane finally, into the cold stillness of Paul’s room. “You lied. You knew I wouldn’t want to be with a man.”

  Paul looked up at his wall collage of magazine pages and tried to gather his thoughts.

  “I didn’t fucking lie,” Paul said, shedding the sleeping bag like a boxer or a lady aristocrat. “I never fucking lied. You lied to me first—I know you talked to that bear. You talked to a bear! You talked to a bear and then just pretended nothing happened. Plus I don’t know what I am—so how is that lying? I mean, I’m obviously not some man. Jesus!”

  “Don’t raise your voice at me, Polly,” said Diane, her body taut and almost menacingly still. She spoke his name not pointedly but with a great politeness. Paul wondered for an instant if she could turn him into a punishment animal, like maybe a stag.

  “I’m not,” he said, attempting, and failing, to modulate his voice. “I’m not what you think.”

  Diane made a noise Paul realized must be a “scoff.” She scoffed at him!

  “I mean, I am what you think, what you thought,” he continued, and as he spoke he felt more and more like Dionne Warwick, his words swelling orchestrally, a wave of tears threatening to break. “I’m the girl you met at Michigan, the girl who can’t stop thinking about you, the girl who wants to be your girlfriend.”

  Diane sighed and began to unlace her boots. Paul superstitiously subdued a mental victory yawp, his tears barely a memory. Everything was happening so quickly. He wished he could somehow videotape this entire night, internal and external, to pore over later, to parse, to own. He couldn’t keep up with his own life, he thought. He should really keep a journal.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Diane said.

  “It’s this way.” Paul waited for her in the dark kitchen, pouring glasses of water and hoping Christopher wouldn’t wake up and wonder why lesbians were fighting in the apartment. When Diane reemerged, he handed her a glass. She put it down and pulled Paul to her by the incline of his waist, running her rough hands over his hips. Paul tipped his head up to be kissed but Diane mysteriously did not kiss him. She wanted to, he thought. In fact, he was sure she wanted to. But instead she bent her head to where the front of his shoulder met the top of his breast, like a weary knight. He could feel her lank hair on his collarbone.

  “Why do you think I drove all the way to Iowa?” she said.

  * * *

  ×

  They didn’t wake up until after two the next afternoon. Thank god Diane had a car. They had to drive way out on South Gilbert to find food, to that all-day breakfast place with the bicycle wheels on the walls and the special vegetarian omelettes. Paul wanted to show Diane everything good about Iowa City and to not see anyone he knew.

  Diane, surprisingly enough, drove like a highly caffeinated cabdriver. Paul buckled himself in, discreetly, and tuned the radio to KRUI, chattering happily about the particular charms of Iowa City college radio.

  “Very cool,” Diane said, accelerating through a yellow light. She was such a surfer, he thought, admiring how her hair fell in her half-lidded eyes even as she recklessly took a corner without slowing.

  The radio played “Atomic Dog.” Paul sang along, barking in the pauses.

  “Your accent is terrible,” Diane said.

  “Grrr,” said Paul, lazily wondering if she was joking. He slipped out of his seatbelt and curled against the door to better watch Diane. She manipulated the gearshift in the desultory manner of an Italian race car driver, and Paul imagined her manipulating something gearshift-shaped inside him with such grace and purpose. How different this morning was from the night before, he marveled, and was unable to banish intrusive nature metaphors (a calm sea after a storm, a single crocus poking up through snow, etc., etc.) from his mind.

  The line of hungover poets, bakers, and seventh-year undergrads stretched out the door, but what did Paul care? More time to canoodle. He was a girl in the daylight where he lived, with his hot lesbian lover who had recently fucked him for three hours straight. He saw some dykes he didn’t know in line, and they nodded at him, the secret head-nod acknowledgment. He knew they were nodding at him because Diane was tracing patterns on his hand. He could smell her unwashed hair; she smelled amazing. He said so.

  “Mmm, you smell amazing,” Diane said. Then: “Oh! I think…Oh, I just figured something out.”

  “What?” Paul said, bracing himself.

  “You always smell the same,” said Diane. “You smelled the same last night when I first saw you as you do now.”

  The waitress approached, smiling the smile of liberal tolerance, and showed them to a booth, where they sat across from each other holding hands.

  “Really? I smell the same?” Paul said, nodding his desire for coffee to the waitress. “Don’t I smell somewhat less like smoke and beer after that shower?”

  “No,” said Diane. “I mean you smell like a girl all the time. You didn’t smell like a boy before. You can’t fake pheromones. I think you’re really female. Like, chemically or something.”

  “That’s cool,” said Paul. “I think that must be true.”

  “Did you always know you were a girl?” Diane asked.<
br />
  The waitress came back, took their order, and left.

  Paul thought. Had he always been a girl?—

  * * *

  ×

  —Paul remembered watching Bad News Bears, feeling like Tatum O’Neal in the face of his gym teacher’s surprise he could hit the ball.

  Paul remembered a girl in kindergarten who wore a tee shirt that said “Anything boys can do, girls can do better!” and he remembered coveting that shirt.

  Paul remembered dressing up in his mom’s maroon-and-lime-green paisley pantsuit.

  Paul remembered babysitting his high-school math teacher’s kids, cleaning the kitchen after they went to bed, but pretending he’d spent the night watching baseball.

  Paul remembered playing house with his Star Wars action figures and knowing not to admit it.

  Paul remembered always wanting to be the medic when the neighbor kids played war.

  Paul remembered Stevie Nicks’s voice, how his voice should sound, and the promise of her name, a secret way around the problem of what to be called.

  Paul remembered Halloween.

  Paul remembered the pink extra blanket, huddling underneath and making sparks with his legs.

  Paul remembered letting his family call him Pauly well into high school, and discouraging the practice only after the appearance of Pauly Shore, “the Weasel.”

  Paul remembered Boy George. And Marilyn.

  Paul remembered the split second in Tootsie where Jessica Lange thinks Dustin Hoffman is a lesbian and considers it.

  Paul remembered Rocky Horror.

  Paul remembered turning the channel to Bosom Buddies when no one else was in the rec room.

  Paul remembered feeling excited during certain parts of Freebie and the Bean, the second Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, and Victor/Victoria—perhaps especially Victor/Victoria.

  Paul remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside, taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.

  Paul remembered alibis and secret victories: he remembered dressing up as one of the guys from KISS to wear makeup; he remembered pretending to like punk rock in order to pierce his ears; he remembered New Wave eyeliner.

  Paul remembered watching a foreign movie he now knew to be Fanny and Alexander on public television one Sunday afternoon and when Kostas and his mom walked in saying he “liked history.”

  Paul remembered the dollar theater which showed movies like Some Like It Hot and Cabaret on Saturday afternoons, and telling Kostas he wanted to be a filmmaker.

  Paul remembered Stanley’s department store downtown, buying the smallest bottle of Chanel No. 5 with his snow-shoveling money one year, “for my mother.”

  Paul remembered how he kept the bottle in the stomach of his Trojan horse bank, taking it out only if no one else was home.

  Paul remembered that paper on being a feminist man he wrote for his first women’s studies class; he remembered faking it; he remembered his undeserved A.

  Paul remembered Kostas’s face when he took away Paul’s flea-market Barbie, the socked-away Barbie boa and shimmery evening gown Paul kept in his Hot Wheels suitcase, under the bottom layer of Toreros and Karmann Ghias—girl cars!

  Paul remembered the time he had sex with Heather Federson, how jealous he was she got to feel a dick inside her, how she got to feel hands on her breasts.

  Paul remembered reading about British public school boys, and how they had to act the girl parts in their school plays, and how it was no big deal.

  Paul remembered playing Puck his freshman year of high school, tights and glitter and the pancake makeup hiding his lack of facial hair.

  Paul remembered the day in sixth grade the substitute yelled at him for being in the boys’ line for recess, and her mean face apologizing. And the other sixth graders’ looks of shame at knowing Paul.

  And farthest back in the recesses of time—the first recess, the first freedom!—Paul remembered Paphos, barely, remembered running down the beach in his tie-dyed tee shirt with his long salty hair his mom hadn’t cut until they moved back in with his grandparents, and all the old Greek ladies pinching his mom’s pretty little darling; Paul was pretty, darling, a girl, yes—

  * * *

  ×

  —“Yes,” said Paul. “Did you?”

  Diane laughed, delighted.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “As long as it’s permanently unclear what it means, I’ve always been a girl.”

  Now Paul laughed. The waitress delivered them their respective American cheese omelet and oatmeal, which they dug into.

  “I had you pegged as a kind of a hippie-artist-antitheory person,” said Paul. “Maybe even an essentialist.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” said Diane. She reached over and stole a forkful of hash browns.

  Paul arched one eyebrow.

  “Expropriations,” she said, and shrugged.

  “I’m not the enemy,” said Paul. In his peripheral vision, he noticed Greg and James walk in. That was an odd pairing. He slid down in the booth and banked on the likelihood they wouldn’t notice girls.

  “To each according to her needs?” Diane offered.

  “Why can’t you stay a few more days?” Paul said.

  He drank the last of his coffee and waved unobtrusively for the check. He couldn’t invite Diane to move to town, but he didn’t want her to leave either. She didn’t have a real job or an apartment; she was a renegade traveler; she was kind of a hippie. If she thought he was open to it, she might just decide to stay. It was a fine line. He pushed it gently.

  “What’s so great about Provincetown?”

  “My friends already have a house,” she said, pulling out a twenty and waving Paul’s money away. “And I found a painting job for the off-season but it starts on the first. So I have to get back.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “Okay, but what’s another couple days?”

  “Maybe one more day,” said Diane.

  “Two,” said Paul.

  He’d have to tell Christopher something. Or maybe Jane would let them stay in her place and she could crash with the barista? Ugh, now he was saying the dread word. The counter girl would let her crash, he was sure of it. That would be good for Jane, an excuse to get laid. He’d be doing her a favor.

  He put on his jacket quickly, turning away from Greg and James. Outside, Diane leaned Paul up against the side of her car and stared at him.

  “I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” she said. “I can’t believe you want to go out with me.”

  Paul squirmed under her scrutiny. He leaned forward quickly, offering himself to be kissed, and was obliged.

  “Okay,” Diane said. “One more day, but maybe you can come visit over your break.”

  * * *

  ×

  Jane unlocked the front door of her studio loudly to avoid surprising Paul and Diane, but they were gone. She took stock—she’d definitely have to do laundry, and, of course, go grocery shopping. She found a pair of lacy panties that must belong to Paul, and she used her salad tongs to pick them up and throw them away. She didn’t mind when Paul ate all her food and fucked some random in her bed, but Diane just bugged her. She had never once acknowledged Jane, which seemed at best a violation of the ancient laws of hospitality and at worst a serious misunderstanding of a butch’s job. What did she even see in Paul? He was pretty, Jane gave him that.

  * * *

  ×

  As the semester waned, Paul realized he had a homework situation—three overdue response papers for feminist film theory (a class he loved, so why didn’t he just write them?), two other term papers, and a chemistry midterm to make up. He also had a post-office box
full of SASEs and looseleaf-wrapped dollar bills for his zine. He should really make more copies and send them out. After the review in Holy Titclamps and the mention in the queer zines listing in Factsheet Five, he’d been swamped with fan mail and requests for a second issue. Being a star was extremely stressful, he thought. He had the sophomore slump.

  More alarming, however, was his cash flow situation in the wake of his last phone bill. Paul studied the Press-Citizen’s classifieds. Nobody was hiring except Mondo’s for dishwashers. He needed to make money fast if he was going to take the whole winter break off and go hang out in Provincetown with Diane. He put on his ironic/dirty Iowa Hawkeyes Wrestling baseball cap and biked downtown. Mondo’s was a sports bar off the ped mall, across from the creepy parking garage; Paul instinctively avoided this entire block of East Burlington and had never been inside Mondo’s (the name alone a deterrent). He said very little to the polo-shirted manager who interviewed him, not trusting his inflections to sound heterosexual. Not speaking seemed to send the right message, and Paul was immediately hired, two shifts a week starting the next night. He wouldn’t have any nights off now, with his shifts at the club and the Linn Street, but that was fine by him. Like Alicia Bridges, Paul loved the nightlife, loved the disco round. Working nights let him out efficiently into his own secret world.

  The guys in the Mondo’s kitchen were very different from the guys in the Linn Street kitchen. The cooks at Mondo’s compiled pulled pork sandwiches or bacon double cheeseburgers or plates of nachos with sour cream, green paste from a tube, and bacon bits. Almost everything Mondo’s served included pork, a proud nod to Iowa’s industry—the Other White Meat. Paul pretended not to know Mondo’s wasn’t fine dining. As a basic safety precaution for his first—and all subsequent—shifts, he stripped himself of style, wrapped a Deadhead bandana over his hair and wore a plain but not faded black tee shirt and baggy jeans. He spoke minimally: he accepted his shift meals, inquired after scores of Hawkeye sporting events (except swimming), and once offered an Iron Maiden tape for the kitchen boom box—all standard dishwasher behavior in this town. He was particularly proud of the Iron Maiden move; he’d bought the tape for a quarter at the Salvation Army, for the name’s camp value. He supposed he could invent a computer science major, but he thought maybe that was de trop.