Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  Then, in Paul’s second year, Justin Rosenblum arrived from Atlanta, flaming like a comet. Justin flamed so helplessly and with such a sweet and foreign Southern drawl he was almost tolerated by the other boys, and by Paul’s third year, he was willing to meet Justin in the school library to “study,” Paul’s code for trading copies of gay books they’d found at the used bookstores in town.

  Like all underclassmen, Paul was prey to the older boys, especially the hockey players and the Junior ROTC guys and, for some reason, the Model UN members, who coughed “fag” at him in multiple languages. Paul felt, at those moments, a revulsion for the terrible cliché of high school, a revulsion no number of John Hughes movies or New Wave mixtapes could heal.

  Yet those same hockey players and glee club heroes and future Masters of the Universe came to Paul hat in hand when they needed a nickel bag. Paul had learned after his first semester to play up his townie street cred, buying a few dimes at a time from his half-cousin Dmitri with money from summer caddying. He supplied freshmen and sophomore boys too scared to buy from the juniors and seniors. Paul might be small and too graceful, but he knew how to talk like a kid from the projects and scare the shit out of the overgrown Nordic sons of judges and doctors.

  In tenth grade, Paul lost his straight virginity strategically, to Heather Federson, sister of one of Beckett’s friends, a girl prettier and fancier than a boy in Paul’s category could reasonably be expected to date. Heather Federson was the sort of rich girl for whom the effortless things (her beauty, intelligence, and appeal to others) were worth little. She liked Paul’s ice-cream-social monologues, his comparative subtlety in the field of high-school boys, and even, he suspected, his girlish looks. They’d bonded over their shared appreciation of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Dead Kennedys and Heathers. Paul suspected Heather Federson thought going to her junior prom with Paul was her big Winona Ryder moment, which he did not begrudge her. At the after-prom party at Tom Minard’s house in Grafton, they’d found a guest room and locked the door.

  Paul was naturally curious about girls; he didn’t know how to find a boyfriend; and sex was sex, he thought. Later, other gay men would find this remarkable; they would make their endless fish jokes, or confess proudly their inability to get hard with some cheerleader. Paul didn’t understand that. What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always. Having sex with Heather Federson had been hotter than sucking off the fourth guy he’d ever gone down on. Not as hot as the first three, the newness there trumping their less-appealing qualities. Fucking Heather Federson had been scary and dangerous and even humiliating, and he’d felt brave to do it and protective of her and scared of her and all of that was fun, right? And it was fun to put his dick inside her, a different kind of masturbation, and she was sarcastic and had cute clothes, and so what if he couldn’t ever fall in love with her? She didn’t love him either, and wouldn’t. She was proving something on him too. Boys were harder, easier, more dangerous, and mostly Paul just wanted them more, but something was better than nothing, when it came to sex, and always, always he was curious. As a kid he’d been as interested in girls’ bodies as boys’: the thrill of information versus the thrill of the unspeakable.

  What he shared with the gay men he met later was the claustrophobia of doing what everyone else did. He had the prison nightmares of his bedroom shrinking, of living in a ranch house outside Albany with some expectant and then expecting woman asking him to fix the car and mow the lawn and go to a job and come back and never do anything fun. Heterosexuality = marriage = death, Paul knew.

  When Paul first fled Troy he didn’t get far, just two hours away to Binghamton, home of the safety school. He’d applied to NYU and Bennington, places he’d heard mentioned in conjunction with gays or artists, but not Vassar or Sarah Lawrence—even expressing an interest in places like those was tantamount to a declaration Paul wasn’t prepared to make, not with a full year of high school to survive. In his optimism, Paul discounted the importance of his mediocre grades and junior year peach-schnapps-related suspension.

  Binghamton was a comedown, a slap, a reminder of who he’d always be. Paul smarted his way through two semesters before realizing the combination of daily harassment, no interesting film classes, and serious dearth of cute boys meant he was wasting his student loans. He dropped out and planned to spend a summer in Troy, saving money, but when he took the train down to New York City for Pride, he knew he couldn’t go back. He crashed for two weeks with a gay guy who’d just graduated from Binghamton, friend of a friend of a friend, who edited a well-known drag-queen zine and rarely left his room. Paul spent a year bussing tables at a series of restaurants in the East Village, sharing a subletted squat on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side and mooning after older go-go boys at Queer Nation demos.

  Meanwhile, Kostas left Paul’s mother, after seventeen years. She stayed in Troy with Paul’s little brother, Ari, and Kostas moved home to Des Moines. He’d gotten a new job as a bookkeeper for a construction business and quietly moved in with his high-school sweetheart, with whom he’d apparently been exchanging letters this whole time.

  Paul was more offended by the sentimentality than the cheating, by Kostas’s low expectations of life. How could he love someone he met in high school? He didn’t feel protective of his mother so much as relieved his baby brother was there to tend to her, to hate his dad for her. Ari was good at that. Paul knew gays were supposed to be super-close to their mothers, confidantes, best little boys in the world, but he had never been close to either of his parents. They were alien species to each other: Kostas, with his secrets and his associate’s degree, so happy to be out of Dubuque Works, where his own father and brothers all made articulated loaders (whatever those were), so happy to add up numbers for the physical plant at Hudson Valley Community College, to wear a suit to work, to try to pass as a professor at the diners near campus; his mom with her developmentally disabled students and her night classes and her all-day-every-day goodness and disappointment and morning Mass.

  Still, when Kostas offered to claim him as a dependent so he could go to Iowa, with its low tuition and its film department, Paul found a way past his scorn. New York would eat him up, Paul thought. He’d already had anal sex one time (insertive) and he knew he’d have it again (receptive) if he stayed and then that would be it for him—waitering and eventual death. He would hide out, instead, in the safe Midwest, the flown-over lands where no plague could find him.

  * * *

  ×

  During an hour layover at the Providence bus station, Paul ducked into the first stall in the women’s room. An elderly lady in a bedazzled white Portugal sweatshirt did a subtle double take, like she might say something, but when Paul came out all breasted-up and began to wash the six hours from Albany off his face, then apply eyeliner and creamy bright pink lipstick, she just looked relieved. He bummed a cigarette from a solicitous college boy in the parking lot and then reboarded the bus, waiting to be questioned about the orange plaid mod sweater dress he knew was just visible beneath his peacoat—Wait, you’re not the swishy gay boy who was just sitting here! Thief! Imposter! Where are your pants?—but neither the bus driver nor Paul’s seatmate batted an eye. People saw what they wanted to see and wanted to see what they expected to see, and Paul could do whatever he wanted, like some sort of non-murderous Raskolnikov. His lipstick tasted rough, chemical, like nighttime. He’d begun The Price of Salt earlier in the trip, and now finished it, tearfully, right as the bus crossed the Bourne Bridge. He packed up and put on his special amp-up tape of the moment—The Best of the Runaways—for most of the remaining minutes to Barnstable, sneaking strokes of his angora thighs, imagining Diane’s hands. He was going to see his dyke lover and meet all her cool dyke friends. The bus pulled up to a darling little clapboard cottage, which turned out to be a Mini-Mart.

 
“Next last and final stop on this coach is Barnstable, Mass.,” said the bus driver. “Barnstable, Mass., folks, everybody will disembark here I repeat this bus will not stop at Hyannis Transportation Center today the next last and final stop is Barnstable and a happy holiday to you and yours please take any soda bottles or candy wrappers with you everybody off Barnstable, Mass….”

  So that was how you pronounced Barnstable, Paul thought. He accepted, somewhat flattered, the unnecessary help of the across-the-way solicitous college boy in retrieving his duffel from the overhead compartment, and then found himself in a standoff when he tried to let the boy leave first so he, Paul, could check his look one more time in the bus’s dark windows. He hoped the boy wouldn’t try to talk to him in front of Diane. He really didn’t need that.

  He spotted her right away, leaning against her VW in a blue flannel under a blue-and-tan western-style ski vest. She looked like the promise of a mustachioed young truck driver who’d take you to IHOP and play Gram Parsons in the cab on the way, minus the mustache.

  Diane hadn’t seen him yet, so he took a minute to check his lipstick. He looked over at her again. Her dirty dark urchin hair fell out of her watch cap and onto her face. Paul was a snare drum, and somebody played a gravity roll on him. He didn’t want to alert her to his presence, wanted to keep watching as she chewed up and swallowed her bit-off nails. She was biting her nails over him, he thought with a mixture of guilt and resentment which he immediately banished.

  Diane looked up and saw him—smelled him first, she said later. He waved a little half-wave then walked over to her, trying not to trip on the platform Frye boots he’d “borrowed” from Jane.

  When he was close enough, she took his ’70s thrift-score Lady Trojans softball duffel and slung it over her puffy blue shoulder like a team captain.

  “I guess chivalry isn’t dead,” he said.

  “I can’t wait to fuck you,” she said right in his ear with her hot breath. Paul also couldn’t wait to be fucked and had suffered through nine-plus hours on a stale-smelling bus from Albany to the Cape for that express purpose. He followed her to a stall in the public bathroom at the back of the Mini-Mart, and they curled their fingers into each other, mouths on necks, backs against metal walls, boots braced against the toilet.

  They didn’t talk in the car. Diane drove with only her left hand, impressing Paul greatly. She reached over, tucked her right hand down Paul’s jeans, causing him to come again almost immediately. He liked this feeling of being subject to Diane and sat nicely in his seat for the rest of the trip, feeling very French, like Genet or Violette Leduc, a classy submissive.

  He gazed out the window at the romantic desolation of the Cape in December. He’d only been here once before, as a child, to stay in a Hyannis motel called the Shamrock Inn with his grandfather, who’d passed the summer week in the motel bar while Paul shoplifted Sweet Valley Highs from a nearby strip-mall Waldenbooks. It had been one of the best weeks of his childhood. Nothing had changed, he thought.

  With laser, almost cannabinoid focus, Paul noted the gradual shift from tidy roadside ranch houses and White Hen Pantries to shuttered fried-clam shacks and snow-coated cottages named for flowers, as if they were traveling back in time, passing the ’80s and landing squarely in the ’70s, clearly Diane’s turf. She pulled into a clearing in what appeared to be a scraggly stretch of woods across from a boarded-up beachfront motel.

  “Here we are,” Diane said.

  “Where?” said Paul. This woodsy isolation was not exactly what he’d been expecting when she invited him to stay with her in P-town for his break. He sincerely hoped he wasn’t going to be asked to camp again.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said, smiling in such a way that Paul felt himself to be truly known. She raised one finger, and he looked up to see a sprawling weather-beaten Modernist house, tucked into a small hill. He could make out Christmas lights strung in the window, the thumping bass of a party in process.

  “We don’t have to hang out with everybody right now,” she said, behind her the vast gray of gloaming light and sea. “They’ll understand.”

  Diane grabbed Paul’s backpack and duffel, leading him up the rickety steps, through sliding glass doors, past a blur of girls (women!) reclining in front of a fireplace in the open-plan living room, past a low-lit kitchen of half-open wine bottles and recently abandoned dishes, up a set of winding stairs, past a slightly ajar bedroom door through which Paul could just make out a few figures dancing in a black-lit room to what sounded like Digable Planets, past another door festooned with a taped-up sheet of butcher paper graffitied with a women’s symbol with fist inside it and the anarchy A, up a second flight of stairs, and into a sort of crow’s nest attic room, where they embarked on a thirty-six-hour reunion sex fantasia, breaking only to tiptoe down to the kitchen to retrieve plates of vegetarian lasagna or tofu curry left on the stove by Diane’s thoughtful and now-absent housemates.

  By Thursday noon, they were ready to breathe outside air. Diane drove them up Commercial Street to the only open restaurant, a little bayside diner called Dodie’s, adorned with antique toys, where Paul ordered a giant all-day breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and sausage. Pleasingly, this was called the “Hungry Woman’s Breakfast.”

  Diane frowned and ordered the tofu scramble. She regarded Paul icily.

  “Are you okay?” Paul said.

  “I’m fine,” said Diane.

  “ ’Cause you don’t seem okay,” Paul said.

  “Well, you never told me you ate meat.”

  “Um,” Paul said. “I eat meat.”

  “Meat comes from animals, Polly,” Diane said. “You should hear how they talk about us. We’re like Nazis to them. If you could hear what cows say, you wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger ever again.”

  “Okay,” said Paul. “But what about animals that eat other animals? Like cats or wolves or something? Aren’t we just like them? Should cats not eat mice? Should lions not eat gazelles?”

  “Jesus, Polly!” Diane said. “Don’t make a game of this. I’m telling you something about my life.”

  Paul considered. He could lose her over this, he began to realize. And he liked animals, so why not take the moral higher ground? He’d go vegetarian, at least in front of her.

  “Okay, no meat,” he said. “But can I still eat eggs?”

  “Sure,” she said. “If you like eating chickens’ periods.”

  Paul’s stomach heaved slightly.

  “No eggs!”

  He changed his order to the tofu scramble, and Diane leaned across the booth to French him her approval. Paul was soft and acquiescent. He could change for love. There was a right answer. There was a scripted next line, and he could get it right. He was superheroic.

  Their delicious vegan breakfast platters arrived.

  “Will you teach me to cook vegetarian food?” he said.

  Diane nodded happily.

  “And if you’re vegetarian, you could even maybe move in officially,” she said. “If you wanted. The only house rules are you have to be vegetarian and a woman.”

  “Hmm,” said Paul, licking his fork. This tofu scramble thing wasn’t bad with hot sauce. And as soon as he could, he’d sneak off and get a burger somewhere.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul sat back deep in the couch in his New Year’s outfit, intentionally dressed down to signal that New Year’s Eve was for amateurs, watching all these cool Provincetown girls pass around an elaborate handblown glass bong in preparation for going dancing. Another carful of shockingly attractive disheveled girls arrived from New York, corduroy-clad and brandishing bottles of Rene Junot. From what he could make out, the new arrivals either currently attended or had recently graduated from Wesleyan, and were engaged in an unspoken coolness-battle with the Evergreen girls. A strapping androgynous Britishy girl (Wesleyan) slid Bettie
Serveert’s “Tom Boy” into the CD player and was seen and raised one by a girl with a homemade bowl cut and a Kim Wilde cassette (Evergreen). Paul didn’t know where to look; Diane brought him a Flintstones jelly glass of wine, which he sipped happily, relishing the protective weight of her arm over his shoulder.

  The rival gangs all turned for approval to Gerty, the townie sous-chef who’d rented the house cheaply for the winter and whom everybody else had met at Michigan. Gerty herself didn’t engage in the coolness-off, instead holding forth about her plans to open her own restaurant that summer, or maybe the following summer, all the while eyeing the preening dancers. She was clearly the powerbroker, a little older than the rest, a working-class butch fox in the college girl henhouse. Paul felt annoyed that she hadn’t flirted with him yet. He was a college girl, he thought—but he knew those Wesleyan girls had something he never would have.

  Diane didn’t have whatever “it” was either (a trust fund, Paul thought, or maybe a childhood spent in Westchester), but she had something else, something different from everyone in the room, something different from other girls. Diane was as fascinatingly blank as any man. And as frustrating. A shiny reflective surface and Paul a magpie. The mystery of her cheeks, her dimples ever-shocking when she’d smile at him from across the bed or table. Jane had been the first person to explain to Paul about dimples. It was a category of desirable attribute he hadn’t before considered, but now he saw dimples everywhere and—what were her eyes, chocolate syrup? Paul squirmed and shifted until the crotch seam of his cords pressed pleasurably against the soft triangle of his cotton panties. Diane had recently bought a pack of tighty-whities and he saw the yellow-and-blue-striped waistband sneaking out of her workpants. What was she? She was girlish but not womanly, she was an androgyne off the Left Bank, her choppy blunt cut like a WASPy little girl or a Dutch man, her signature red hooded sweatshirt zipped all the way up under her black pleather bomber jacket. Her huddled concentration, her finger in her mouth as she read, her brow furrowed—over what? what were her emotions? did she have emotions?—