Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  * * *

  ×

  Paul sat at Flore, sipping his milky coffee and gazing about in satisfaction. He’d met Robin Suarez and Robin had basically acknowledged that they had business with each other. Paul was both triumphant and calm, and turned his attention to his studies. He examined the crew-cut dyke behind the counter, having already arrayed his books and papers on the table as cover, and now periodically fussed with them. Maybe he’d get it together to read the application for SF State, but first he needed to thoroughly investigate the situation with this counter person.

  There was no way the counter girl was butch, even strutting to and fro in her Levi’s and poly-blend Colma Tigers Little League uniform shirt. Her crew cut framed her face too prettily, her eyelashes were too long, the shirt too snug. She did not achieve that true androgyny some butches have, where you look once and see a boy, look again and see a girl, look again for the pleasure of the trompe l’oeil. No, this girl was one of the many femmes who’d moved to the city and cut off her hair in order to participate fully in the urban pleasures. A dyke with short hair was noticeable even from across a street; any woman with short hair was worth a second glance. A femme with long hair wouldn’t register in a quick scan, unless of course she was high-femme, picking her way down Valencia at 10 AM in heels and dark lipstick, carrying a shopping bag of performance art supplies. A regular femme with long hair, you’d have to cross the street—but how would you even know to do so? Her signifiers were so much subtler, harder to decode. To wit: baggy 501s = butch, whereas baggy overalls = femme. A crew cut = butch, a crew cut with ten or twelve silver hoops piercing the top of one ear = femme. One or even two silver piercing hoops could still signify butch, of course, but then you were also getting into SM territory, and SM butch in some cases = less masculine butch. There was something a little faggy about someone who made a point to identify as a top, instead of just being a top. All of which was to say, you had to be a particularly good reader of signs to find a femme by sight alone.

  Paul bobbed his head to the music: they were playing the whole Queen Latifah album, which he hadn’t heard in months. He caught the counter girl’s eye when she walked around wiping down tables. He wondered with minimal self-interest if she was looking for anything, what that might be. He could be a butch, he thought, bulking up his biceps and breasts under his jacket, then shrugging it off to reveal his cut-off flannel. He spread his legs and bit one thumb thoughtfully, and the counter girl, walking by with a rattling bus tub, took a second glance his way.

  A new crowd of people walked in, and as they fanned out Paul sensed Robin among them, as if the air around Robin had a texture. Paul busied himself with his papers, a model of concentration. When Robin sat down at Paul’s table, Paul appeared surprised, happy enough to see Robin yet insouciant. He breathed carefully, regulating his heartbeat so the adrenaline wouldn’t pump.

  “Hey, you,” said Robin, setting down a copy of the SF Weekly and leaning over to kiss Paul on the cheek. They were kissing on the cheek now.

  “Hey,” Paul said. He noticed a smell, light and musky and floral at once, like songbirds and pink frosting with a hint of wolf. Paul looked into Robin’s big brown eyes and knew his every thought was printed on his face; as usual, Robin had the upper hand. Still, Paul reveled momentarily in the new attention of the counter girl and patrons. Paul was a player in the city, a dark horse. He became worth noticing the minute Robin approached his table. Paul fussed more with his papers as Robin squeezed next to him on the bench.

  “What are you up to?” said Robin.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “I’m applying to State?”

  “Oh, well, don’t let me distract you.”

  Distract me! Paul thought, but Robin was off, stopping by the table with all the cool people. Paul tried to concentrate on the question If you could have dinner with one person, living or dead, who would that one person be? Who could possibly answer that question, who had ever loved? The overlords of San Francisco State University’s transfer admissions did not want to hear about Paul’s desire to have dinner with Robin, of this he was fairly certain. Paul held his fingers up to his face in a pose which both looked thoughtful and allowed him to watch Robin more thoroughly, for longer.

  * * *

  ×

  Many years ago, a fleet of currachs bearing poor farmers and their beasts sailed neatly across the small mild sea. The people on the mainland greeted the farmers happily, for they had land to spare and a delight in the new. They intermarried, traded goods, and learned to speak each other’s tongues, and all was easy in the little kingdom. Even the old king welcomed the newcomers; his own mother had once left the other world for this one, and the lilt of the farmers’ speech made him wistful for his childhood.

  One day, the king’s eldest son took off riding with his royal companions. They rode for hours and hours, far out into the land. The prince grew tired of his companions and their dull talk of serving girls and farmers’ daughters. When his hounds tore off into a grove of oaks, the prince broke from the others and followed the echoing howls.

  The young prince came finally to a clearing, where he found his hounds baring their teeth at another pack. The stranger dogs, handsome in their fine red collars, were feasting on a freshly slain stag. The young prince reared back his horse and brandished his sword, and the handsome stranger dogs ran off. His own hounds set upon the stag, pausing only to gaze up at the prince in bloody-mouthed gratitude.

  Before his hounds could finish their meal, the prince heard a powerful galloping, then a horn. A medium-sized man, clad in velvet robes and a simple but elegant coronet, rode a sleek black palfrey into the grove and stopped in front of the young prince.

  “Your dogs have stolen my stag,” said the unknown king. “How do you propose to atone for their crime?”

  “Oh,” said the young prince. “I suppose you should tell me what I must do.”

  “Very well,” said the mysterious king. “I have heard of your prowess as a fighter. If you defeat my rival in one sure blow, I will consider your obligation fulfilled.”

  “Very well,” said the young prince. “I accept your challenge, sire.”

  “There’s one more condition,” said the mysterious king. “You must defeat this rival in my own form.”

  The king snapped his fingers in a special formation in the direction of the young prince, who shivered and shook his head involuntarily. When the young prince looked again at the mysterious king, it was as if he were gazing in a mirror—the prince saw his own thick black hair, his own aquiline nose, his own scarred cheek. He looked down at his newly soft hands, felt his breeches suddenly loose around a smaller man’s thighs.

  “What have you done?” said the young prince.

  “Don’t worry,” said the mysterious king, handing the prince his own coronet and robes. “Now take off your clothes.”

  * * *

  ×

  Paul was going to be late for the drag fashion show in that warehouse on Harrison. On the way out of the house he rummaged unsuccessfully for his striped scarf. He had the idea that Robin might attend this fashion show and he wanted to arrive on the early side, to position himself to be run into. He had already declined invitations from Ruffles and Silver to go together, but felt cozy knowing they’d be there and happy to see him.

  As Paul biked down Hayes and through the Mission, he loved the city painfully. He didn’t want to jinx anything or ruin a moment through expectation, but even the whisper-image of Robin was husky and thrilling, deeply meaningful in a completely obscured way.

  Like being in love but not, Paul thought, experimentally articulating the thought he’d incubated for weeks now. He waited a few beats to see if his feelings would change immediately after exposure to air, cycling slowly past the strung-up lights of Community Thrift and down 18th Street. Oh San Francisco, land of treats and portals
. Robin was more a portal than a person; if Paul could get through Robin he’d know something new on the other side.

  Paul watched the traffic lights change from red to green in the blue-gray dusk. The contrast made him think of Nan Goldin photographs and he wanted to tell someone, to marvel at the beauty with someone at whose beauty he could also marvel. Tony Pinto. He turned his mind forcibly to Diane, feeling around for the edges of that pain. But no, he was alone amid all this beauty.

  He thought of Robin, a test thought, and a surge of feeling shot through his fingertips, chest, and inner thighs. After a few more blocks he coasted a bit down Harrison and stopped to check the address on the flyer. He was close.

  Paul vaguely knew the people who’d organized this fashion show; they all lived together in a squat and were in a band. That Ruffles was bothering to go meant the organizers were connected, old-timers. Ruffles only went out to reunion events, where he could catch up with people from the days when really interesting things had happened. Any party Ruffles attended was worth having gone to, even if it seemed boring to the untrained eye. Paul knew he could have racked up a certain amount of reflected cachet by showing up with Ruffles, but he wanted to keep a lower profile. He hadn’t dressed up, either. He couldn’t compete and so dressed like a designer or photographer; they always looked schlumpy, scowling out of the back pages of Paper or Outweek. Paul wore a navy blue zip-up hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off under a cheap, cracked leather vest, Levi’s, black engineer boots, and his Iowa Hawkeyes Wrestling cap backwards. He locked his bike to a chain-link fence in the parking lot of the warehouse and pushed through the heavy metal door into the throng and thrum and dim lights.

  Ruffles was like a radio tower, pulsing out his signal, and Paul landed next to him silently, listening to Ruffles talk with a gathering of older and more subtly tattooed friends. Apparently two of their acquaintances had been hospitalized with a flesh-eating disease. At first Paul thought they were talking about an opportunistic virus, a variation on the theme of plague, but as he stood nicely listening to the grown-ups, he discovered they were talking about a different new terrible disease junkies could give each other. Ruffles knew a lot of junkies, Paul was discovering, and was angry at them. He wondered when people had the time to take heroin, let alone procure it. Paul was already so busy with drinking, sleeping, cruising, and standing around the bookstore he barely had time to keep up with the monthly issues of Sandman, let alone go to school or make future plans, and forget questing for drugs. He didn’t believe in doing something painful in order to get a pleasure reward. Except maybe for anal sex, where the pain did feel sort of good, at least when Tony Pinto had done it to him, partly because he also felt Tony Pinto’s good feeling, hadn’t separated the two. Ruffles’s friends continued to talk and no one seemed to mind Paul standing there quietly, like Ruffles’s valet, or second in a duel.

  Paul spotted Robin across the room and centipeded his way there, moving by indirection to his target. A few feet away he felt nervous and very unlike a hunter and hid in a group of short people who were trying to see over a group of tall people. Their inadequate and asynchronous movements acted as camouflage. Paul worried he’d overplayed his hand; maybe it was too soon to see Robin again. He began to practice banter-y means of preemptively addressing the situation. “I’ve been stalking you,” he could say with a winsome smile. It wasn’t creepy or desperate if you knew it; obvious stalking could be bold. The story could be Paul was a person who knew what he wanted and went for it.

  Robin sidled up next to him, and Paul pretended surprise.

  “I thought I might see you here,” Robin said.

  “Cool,” said Paul.

  He felt a slight panic rising; he was off script and would have to improvise.

  “I was actually hoping I’d run into you,” he said, experimenting.

  They smiled at each other for a minute, which seemed like a public eternity. Who would break first? That was the power move, Paul knew, but he didn’t want to stop smiling or stop looking at Robin’s smile. He silently conceded Robin’s power, but found himself looking away first anyway.

  The volume in the room decreased and a slinky mistress of ceremonies bounded into the center of the room, which was clearly intended to be the stage. Paths in the crowd appeared, like spokes from a bike wheel. Small creatures covered in white feathers floated down each path to converge around the mistress of ceremonies, looking like a pack of oversized lhasa apsos.

  “What are those?” Paul whispered to Robin.

  “Dogs in bird outfits,” said Robin. “On wheels.”

  “Naturally,” said Paul. Very magical, San Francisco, he thought. Well played.

  A feather drifted past Paul’s nose, and he reached out. The feather was synthetic, he realized, and was briefly sad. Maybe fake feathers were nicer, he thought; Diane certainly would have approved. What would Diane think of Robin, he wondered.

  Tonight Robin was inhabiting the archetype of the San Francisco Black-Haired Girl, clad in a plaid Catholic school uniform skirt, tight white button-down, and black lace-up boots, even a bad-girl platinum streak and bright red lipstick. Robin’s breasts pushed out into the conversation, a tiny gold cross riding the waves. Paul remembered the girls he’d known who went to Catholic Central, their shoplifting and cigarette-smoking and petit-bourgeois rebellions. Paul burned with pride in and envy of Robin’s authenticity. Robin’s eyes were like little slits, but not piggy. How was that possible? Paul wanted to plumb the mystery of Robin’s sometimes-slitty-sometimes-saucer eyes.

  Robin interrupted Paul’s reflections to offer him a menthol cigarette. Menthol! Was Robin unstoppable?

  The fashion show had begun. The rule, of course, was break-the-rules, so anyone butch in a dress, anyone femme in a suit. Paul yawned. Victor/Victoria was so late ’80s. He’d expected San Francisco fashion to be more daring than that of Iowa City, but the ped mall had been a nonstop fashion safari: punk-rock drag queens and dyke fashion models and boy poets in tight polyester Sansabelts and all those rhetoric or painting graduate students with their unpredictable fabric combinations. Maybe you had to be more inventive in the country; you had to learn to hem and rip and sequin, to sift through the cast-offs of the exotic manual laborers of middle America, those corn-husking teens, cereal factory third-shifters, and Monsanto janitors.

  Then a herd of space-child androgynes in Angela Bowie jumpsuits giraffed by, and Paul had to admit he was impressed. Robin’s face betrayed nothing, a mirror looked into from an angle.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” said Paul.

  “Not really,” said Robin, turning a high-watt smile on Paul almost as an afterthought.

  Robin did what Robin wanted, and Paul had misjudged his own currency. He remembered how Kostas had once had his credit card rejected at the Red Lobster in Albany. The waiter said, “What would you like to do, sir?” and then just stood there, mask of service fallen away. Paul would never have a credit card; he didn’t like to do math, would rather just keep track of his holdings.

  He attempted to recover his balance by pretending he hadn’t made a play. He cupped his mouth conspiratorially, using a finger across his nose to subtly point out one of the models to Robin, as if they were straight girlfriends or fag-n-hag.

  “Look at that fantastic top hat,” Paul said, in such a way as to leave unclear his true estimation. The music was very loud guitars, and Paul wished he could go somewhere private for five minutes and cry, just get it out of his system before he was poisoned by his own sincerity. He needed a green room.

  “I’m going to go say hi to Candice,” said Robin, placing a friendish hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  “Oh, cool,” said Paul.

  He started to say “Me too” and bit the words off just in time. This was not an invitation. He didn’t actually know Candice, and possessed, in fact, too much inf
ormation about this person he’d never met. He knew, for instance, that Candice hung around with a group of long-haired metalhead butches, and that they all drove trucks for Veritable Vegetable and drank at the 500 Club. He thought he’d heard that Candice was from the Bay Area originally (always notable for a queer), maybe Daly City, maybe had been kicked out by a homophobic Filipino family? Candice was definitely working class, had come by the studded belts and dirty boots honestly.

  Paul had never seen Robin on the prowl. He wasn’t even sure he was seeing the prowl now, just something urgent in Robin’s movement toward Candice. Robin was somehow magnetized, feline—predatory and muscularly vigilant. Was Paul now discovering some truth about Robin, some revealing taste? He watched Candice buddy around with those other butches, jockish and tall and black-haired themselves, a little gang of cool boys practicing punches. They had it down, shouldering one another, strutting about in their caddishly askew or earnest forward-pointing trucker caps and Bad Brains tee shirts. Butches must be working class, ideally also vaguely alcoholic, with an undercoat of physical menace, whereas femmes could be—maybe even should be—from privileged backgrounds, slumming it in collective houses. Robin approached for the parlay like a general of the opposition forces, and the butches pretended not to see. Robin punched Candice’s shoulder in the universal greeting of tough girls to tough boys, and the others fell away into a horseshoe, a rakish chorus line. Paul wanted to be Robin and Candice, couldn’t choose. He didn’t have that in him, he thought. They were playing at a much higher level. He watched them leave, Candice tucking one motorcycle helmet under one sturdy bicep and carrying another, free hand languidly cupping Robin’s hip. Paul felt himself both truly provincial and hopelessly effete; what made him think he could compete with a motorcyclist?