The only other open place Paul could find was the library, an old-timey white house set back from the street like a secret. He settled in for a few hours reading a well-worn copy of Beebo Brinker. When his ass began to ache, he headed out, stopping on the way to inquire about a library card. The nice old showtunes queen behind the desk advised Paul to send himself a postcard in order to establish residency. No ID needed! This was indeed gay utopia, he thought, walking back to the house to eat whatever he could find and wait for Diane.
Zoe was already back, and offered him some split pea soup, which he accepted gratefully. She’d run into one of Gerty’s friends at the laundromat, she said, this older townie real estate agent who’d offered Zoe a steady job prepping rentals for the season if she could get another person, and what did Polly think?
“It pays decently well and it’s under the table,” she said. “So we don’t have to declare anything. We’d have to clean sometimes but we’d also get to paint.”
“Definitely,” said Paul. “I used to have a cleaning job.” Again, no ID necessary. He’d never have to show anyone in this town his driver’s license with its laminated M, its Paul Polydoris. How many more signs of welcome did he need? “I’m so in.”
“Sweet,” said Zoe.
“I don’t actually have a ton of experience painting,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Zoe said. “That’s just your female socialization talking. It’s easy. I can show you in a day.”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “Let’s do it.”
He was in, totally on the inside. Diane’s friend liked him, Diane wanted him to stay, he could spend the whole break with all these cool townie dykes. He could be Polly for four weeks straight, he was pretty sure. The longest he’d gone so far was at Michigan, a week, and that had turned out fine. The switching back and forth was the hard part, not so much the being. At first he was always conscious of his concentration, but eventually he’d plateau, he’d hit his stride and maintain. Paul imagined this was how long-distance runners felt. He’d read a book about running once, or seen a movie title at the video store; anyway, what he knew was that those runners were supposed to be so lonely, but he was less lonely with Diane than he’d been in his whole life.
* * *
×
By the end of the week, Paul was stir-crazy. He’d been either painting cottages with Zoe or up in Diane’s bedroom with Diane. He felt strange in the living room or kitchen, intimidated by Gerty and her rotating-nightly cast of fancy college-girl visitors, and as a rule, he preferred the street. When Diane proposed they go read at the café in the rain on Saturday afternoon, Paul was suffused with love for her. She drove them down, luxuriously, so Paul wouldn’t have to change out of the black crinkled silk Mao-collared dress he’d put on in the morning without taking the weather into account. He could tell she liked that he was girlier than her, liked that she was so much bigger than him, liked to do little things for him, but sometimes he did wonder if she liked liking what she liked.
Inside the cramped, steamy café, they commandeered one of the window tables, defending their territory against middle-aged Boston gays who wandered in unsure of what to do when it rained on their save-the-relationship weekends. Every townie who came in for to-go coffee smiled at Paul and Diane; everybody knew who they worked for—even though they were new, they had been vetted. Old and young townies, queers and fishermen, fags and dykes and daytime drag queens with their plucked-chicken heads—all were aligned against the tourists and willing to accept all comrades. Paul had never lived anywhere so small; he found the surveillance almost shocking, shades of prep school in loco parentis, but also pleasing like minor celebrity.
They sipped their lattes, a gift for Diane from the spiky-haired dyke behind the counter. Paul wondered exactly how well Diane had known her before he got to town.
Out the windows of the café, they watched a glum Spuds Mackenzie dog tender-paw through the rainy street, a muddy ball in its mouth. The terrible lounge singer from New Year’s followed a few paces behind.
“That would be her dog,” said Diane.
“Why, what’s that dog thinking?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Diane. “I don’t have supersonic hearing. But you don’t have to be Aquaman to know that animals need shelter in the rain.”
Paul wondered if this was true. Also, he was pretty sure Aquaman did not technically have supersonic hearing—he used sonar or something.
PJ Harvey’s voice bounced off the tiny café’s high ceiling, the song about wearing leather boots. Paul caught another girl behind the counter checking out him and Diane, and imagined them from her perspective. Did they seem like girlfriends? Sometimes Diane could hold herself aloof. He scootched his chair closer to hers to make their sex vibe more visible.
“So what should happen to all the dogs and cats?” he said. “We can’t free them all from human bondage. They’d starve. The streets would be teeming with vicious starving puppies and kittens.”
“No,” said Diane. “Just the ones people are abusing or testing stuff on.”
“Right,” Paul said. “No, obviously that’s wrong, testing things on animals.” He wondered if it was wrong to test AIDS drugs on animals. He remembered one thin whiskery ACT UP guy he’d met at a gay bar in the Village who’d lectured him about Americans and how they cared more about animals than gay people. What was that bar? Uncle Charlie’s, the Ninth Circle? No, Julius. A lifetime ago.
Rain beat down romantically against the windows. A gray sliver of bay was visible between the post office and Seamen’s Bank. Paul suppressed a queeny giggle, as he did every time he saw the bank.
“Want to read?” he said, and Diane nodded and reached into her messenger bag. She was still reading that same animal rights book, the one with the particularly handsome giraffe on the cover. Paul piled his reading material on the table: two new comics (Sandman and Books of Magic) purchased on a recent trip to the comics shop in Orleans, a small stack of Zoe’s Riot Grrrl zines he was trying to like, and a xeroxed Judith Butler article which Jane had sent him care of General Delivery. They read.
After a few pages of Sandman, Paul looked up. He liked to forestall the pleasure of finishing something he loved, especially something so short. He had to read in manageable bursts. Diane’s dirty hair was in her face and she bit her index finger as she read. He looked at the ring on her middle finger, a silver snake coiled and biting. Diane wasn’t scared of snakes. They’d stumbled on an enormous and terrifying rattlesnake-looking eastern hognose (according to Diane) just a few days ago, hibernating in a dune shack they’d broken into. Diane didn’t flinch, just politely indicated their nonviolent intentions while Paul quaked behind her. Paul generally enjoyed hiking with Diane, although he preferred the term “walking.” He was a flâneur, not a hiker; he still had standards. Plus people killed lesbian hikers, that was a thing. Diane thought him a bit of a baby, he knew, but she seemed to think it was cute. She thought he was a femme.
Diane looked up. She laid her well-worn copy of Animal Liberation on the table and sighed.
“What’s going on?” Paul said awkwardly. He found himself in the unusual position of wanting to know more about someone’s feelings. “What are you thinking about?”
“Just that fucking lounge singer.”
“Yeah?” said Paul.
“Yeah, I think she’s the one who keeps her dog chained up in this metal outdoor cage thing, and he’s muzzled. It’s medieval. We’re working on the house next door.”
“That’s terrible,” Paul said encouragingly. Diane needed a lot of drawing out, which he found simple enough but somewhat exhausting, like bartending.
“Yeah.”
He waited a beat, then picked up his comic again, just casually enough to signal his willingness to not read, although he was getting to a good part involving Death, who definitely seemed a little queer.
“What?” said Paul.
“Nothing. I don’t know. I feel like I need to do something.”
“About the dog?” Paul said. “Okay, well, what should we do?”
“You’d help?” Diane said. “Really?”
“Of course,” said Paul, with some trepidation. “I love dogs.”
* * *
×
“Did you hear?” Zoe asked. “They just murdered a dyke in Nebraska. That’s where you’re from, right, Polly?”
“Iowa, actually—but I’m not really from there,” Paul said. He lay down his roller carefully in its tray and took the newspaper from her. “Why do you have the Times?”
Paul liked these early mornings with Zoe, driving to the day’s job in her truck, stopping for good coffees at Express. Zoe was organized and appreciated Paul’s attention to detail, his careful cutting before they painted, his precise touch-ups. They kept up a good rhythm, like yoked oxen. Plus she had turned him on to all these West Coast bands he’d never paid attention to, like Mecca Normal and Excuse 17 and Team Dresch. She had Bikini Kill on right now, and he had to admit that for famous punks they were pretty dancey.
“I heard something on WOMR, so I looked in the dude’s recycling and of course he had all these unread newspapers, the poseur.”
Paul stared at the words on the page. He’d gotten paint on the paper and felt strangely guilty.
“This is totally fucked up.”
“I know,” said Zoe. “She was our age, she was twenty-one.”
I’m twenty-two, Paul thought. He felt old. “Woman Who Posed As A Man Is Found Slain With 2 Others,” the headline read.
“I don’t know anybody in Nebraska,” he said. “I’m not actually from the Midwest.”
Zoe poured the rest of the Navajo White into her paint tray.
“Listen to this,” Paul said. “He was in here all the time with girls, and the girls were hanging all over him, Ms. Gresham said. He sounds like a total player.”
“She,” said Zoe.
“Right,” said Paul. “She.”
* * *
×
In a remote fishing village at the end of a long spiral peninsula, a bachelor fisherman spent his nights in a rough shack and his days on a small but nice fishing boat.
In his youth, the bachelor fisherman had been unlucky in love—none of the girls in the village had returned his interest, so he grew accustomed to thinking himself ugly. When he was still a sad young man, his father had suggested he see the world. He secured a berth on a ship as a merchant marine and worked his way up to deckhand in his first year, but he hated the ship, which was high above the sea and away from the fish.
At the end of his first year, he received a letter, already a few months old, from a woman in his village. His parents and siblings had all died in a fire. The fire had destroyed their house, and if he did not return the mayor would auction off his father’s boat. He left the cargo ship at the next port and returned to his village, where he set his attention to fishing.
The bachelor fisherman had an unusual talent for finding fish, and every day brought his catch in to the market, where he was paid handsomely. Because he had no wife or family, he spent very little money. He stored his savings in a hole under the floorboards of his shack, and his shiny hoard grew and grew.
One day was much like all other days for the bachelor fisherman, until there came a day that wasn’t. On this day, the bachelor fisherman had caught so many fine plump fish by midday that he had no more room for fish in his boat. He decided to explore the coves a few leagues south of his village, and to eat his peanut butter sandwiches in the company of the seals there. He found a rocky spot not far from shore, where seals sunned themselves, and dropped anchor. As he ate his sandwiches, he spoke to the seals, telling them about his enormous catch and suggesting they might find fine plump fish where he’d just been. The seals brayed their responses, but the bachelor fisherman could not understand them.
He fell asleep in the hot sun, and woke to a mournful, almost human, sound. The sky had clouded over and the seals were gone. The bachelor fisherman pulled up his anchor and turned his boat around. Just then he saw a swimmer, very far from shore.
“Are you in distress?” he called out, but the swimmer did not seem to hear him. The bachelor fisherman steered closer.
“Do you need help?” he called out again.
The swimmer raised her head and her bare shoulders from the sea.
“Do you have a towel?” she said. “I’ve swum too far out and left my clothes on the beach.”
The bachelor fisherman cast about on his fishy boat for something clean, and finding nothing, began to strip off his vest and overshirt, down to his clean-smelling undershirt. He threw the rope ladder down to her, and handed her his undershirt without looking at her nakedness.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she said, climbing aboard the boat. The bachelor fisherman looked up and saw that the swimmer, standing before him on his boat and dripping through his undershirt, was a beautiful woman, perhaps a few years older than himself.
“How can I repay your kindness?” she said.
“Allow me to make you dinner,” said the bachelor fisherman, surprising himself.
“Gladly,” said the swimmer.
At the dock the lady swimmer climbed gracefully out of the boat and followed him up the dunes to his shack. He offered her clean clothes and built a fire on which to cook their fish. He had never had a woman in his shack and now saw how lonely his life had been.
“Would you like to stay the night?” said the bachelor fisherman, and the lady swimmer nodded.
The next morning, the fisherman felt himself to be no longer a bachelor. The lady swimmer had cooked breakfast, had sung a strangely familiar wordless song in his outdoor shower, and had declared him to be her husband.
“Husband,” she said. “Will you make me dinner again tonight?”
By this, the fisherman knew the lady swimmer would stay with him, and so she did. Months passed, and the fisherman now returned every night to his swimmer wife, cooked her an elaborate dinner of his day’s catch, and woke up every morning to hear her singing in the outdoor shower. She rarely wore clothes and never worked, but lounged happily in his shack all the day and night, walking down the dunes to the sea and swimming whenever the mood struck her. When they kissed, he could taste the ocean on her lips.
As the months passed, the fisherman noticed his wife was growing larger, and finally he realized that she was going to have a child. He was overcome with happiness at his good fortune.
He began to think about a suitable house for their new family. He wanted to surprise his wife, who had already brought him so much happiness. He took his savings from his hiding place and built a little cottage on the land where his family’s house had been, in the center of town. Soon the cottage was finished. Every day he caught more and more fish and he used his earnings to fill the cottage with comfortable furniture, toys for the baby, a real kitchen instead of a campfire, and a closet full of delicate clothes specially made for his wife.
Finally the baby arrived, beautiful and healthy. The fisherman was overjoyed and could barely believe his good luck. There was something that puzzled the fisherman—the baby was covered in a light layer of fuzz. His wife said as the baby grew, it would disappear. The fisherman began to worry that some harm would come to the baby out there in the dunes, so far from the village. Whenever he kissed the baby’s face, he tasted salt. He knew babies should not taste of salt. The fisherman decided to move to the village as soon as possible. When the baby was a few weeks old, he said to his wife, “Come with me, my love.”
He led his wife and baby down to their dock, sailed them around the cove to the village harbor, dropped anchor, and led them to the cottage in the center of town.
Hi
s wife began to weep, very quietly, which he took to be a sign of her appreciation for him. He lay their baby in the cradle and showed his wife all around the cottage. She did not speak much, just looked carefully at all the preparations he’d made.
“This is all for you,” said the fisherman proudly.
“But we’ll go home tonight, won’t we, husband?” she said.
“We can sleep right here,” said the fisherman. “We never have to go again to that shack.”
“As you wish,” said his wife, and she lay down on the feather bed he’d bought with his savings and went to sleep.
In the morning, the fisherman awoke to birdsong from the cottage’s kitchen garden. He listened for his wife’s shower-singing or the baby’s cries but heard nothing. He looked all around the cottage, but he was alone.
“Perhaps they have gone for a walk,” he said to himself, and he walked throughout the village, looking for his wife and child, to no avail.
“Perhaps they have gone to the shack, to fetch the rest of our things,” he said to himself, and walked up the path. The shack was empty.
“Perhaps they have gone down to the beach,” he said to himself. He walked to the beach and looked for a sign of them but saw none.
* * *
×
Paul and Zoe finished up a job early, the boxy Commercial Street condo of some closeted Back Bay lawyer. Zoe was heading to the Governor Bradford for ironic afternoon beers with fishermen but Paul begged off. He needed to go to the bookstore, he said; he’d see her back at the house.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Page 15