A Kind of Justice (7 page)

We tidy up the salon and as people leave I go into my office to shut down my computer. Our new hire, an assistant named Jalela, follows me in. Jalela is a transwoman, eighteen, African-American. Someone at TransRising suggested she apply for work here, figuring since I'm trans I'd be sympathetic. I wasn't. She came in looking like a streetwalker, all mumbles and attitude. I didn't see any way she could fit in here. We're multiracial, but we're also snooty and we have a snooty clientele. Plus hiring someone just because we're both transsexuals is a good way to get an employee who doesn't think she has to work hard.

In the end, though, she seemed like a good kid who needed a break, so I took a chance.

“Will you have to fire me?” Jalela expects the worst, but she's able to look me in the eye without being confrontational. She has only been here a few weeks, but her evolution has been rapid and her motivation is off the charts. She loves working in a salon the way I did when I first got started. It would be a tragedy to lay her off.

“No layoffs of anyone, if I can help it, Jalela.”

She ponders this for a moment. “How am I doing?”

I smile inwardly. Jalela is learning to be assertive in a positive way.

“You are doing great, kid.” She is. She's quiet and conscientious and she never stops working, from the time she comes in to the time she goes home. I don't know how she manages to spend the day in high heels and bend that long, elegant frame of hers to do shampoos and scalp massages all day, but she does. I share these observations with her and she beams. She's heard them before, but the feedback
is important. Her happiness makes me glow inside. Even though I'm sliding toward a financial cliff I may not be able to avoid.

That thought accompanies me as I make my way home. Robert Logan, business executive, workout king, and all-around hotshot—the former me, the male one—would be absolutely fixated and anguished over the business situation. He would have been able to think about nothing else. Bobbi Logan feels the pressure but still cares about the human things. In fact, most of the pressure I feel is in letting down Roger and the staff.

*    *    *

T
HURSDAY
, A
UGUST
7

In the middle of a blow-dry Samantha comes to get me. Very unusual that she would interrupt a service. She stands watch over the sanctity of our beauty emporium like a Knight Templar guarding Jesus' remains.

“Bobbi, you have a call. It's important. I'll get one of the girls to finish the service.”

Sam's face is serious and puckered with concern. Not like her. Her tone is insistent. The call must be very important. I ask Jalela to finish the service for me. In my office, I pick up the phone and say hello. All I can hear is sobbing, I can't tell whose.

“Hello? Are you okay? Who is calling?” I try not to be impatient. Whoever this is has enough problems already.

More sobbing. I'm thinking this can't be a client complaint. Our mistakes produce anger but never bereavement.

“Can I help?” I say it softly, like an offer of a hug.

“Bobbi!” My name is spoken in a long, thin voice so filled with anguish it makes my eyes tear up. The voice belongs to Betsy. Oh God, I think, not Robbie!

“Betsy?” My voice cracks.

More sobbing and weeping, then the reedy, shattered voice again.
“Bobbi, he's dead.”

It's not Robbie. I'm so selfish I rejoice for a moment. “Who's dead, Betsy?”

“Oh, Bobbi, it's Don. He's been killed . . .” Her syllables become muted by grief. I glean he was killed in a car accident.

My tears erupt spontaneously as I comprehend what she's saying. I get out most of a condolence before my voice breaks with a sob. I can't understand how something so horrible could happen to three people who are so good.

I get my emotions under control. I'm of no use to Betsy if I'm as brokenhearted as she is. “What can I do to help?”

“Bobbi, what am I going to do? This . . . this shouldn't happen. These things don't happen to people like us.” Meaning, she's not prepared to lose her husband in the blink of an eye. Who is?

“He was such a good man, Bobbi. He deserved so much better.” Her high, tinny voice gives way to sobs. I agree with her. There are a million or so outright bastards who should die before anyone like Don. Life isn't fair, and death is even worse.

I struggle to get information from her. She is having a hard time being coherent. Grief is numbing her brain and her senses. It comes out in bits. She got the call fifteen minutes ago. He had been taken to an Emergency Room in Evanston and was pronounced dead on arrival. Betsy has to do an identification, make funeral arrangements, break the news to her daughter, start her life as a widow with a small child. She can't will herself to move, to go to the hospital, to descend into the pit of heartbreak where the next day of her life begins.

I talk her through it. She will take a cab to the hospital. I'll meet her there. I'll be at her side for the formalities. I'll come home with her and help tend to Robbie, then help her call her attorney, Don's family, the funeral home. Whatever she needs.

*    *    *

Betsy's house is a sprawling, light-filled ranch on an oversized lot in tony Northbrook. It looks like a palace, with white stone floors and decorator walls and beautiful area rugs and modern art in blazing colors hanging on the walls. A million-dollar home before the recession. They picked it up for less after the real estate bubble burst, but they bought too soon. Betsy once laughed that they could have saved another quarter-mill if they had waited six months. That is proving to be more of an epitaph than a quip.

It is eerily silent now, with Robbie put to bed. Betsy sits across the table from me, red eyed, mourning the husband she lost just hours ago. Even with bloodshot eyes and dressed in black, she is one of the most beautiful women on earth.

We go over the funeral arrangements again. I offer to meet her parents at the airport and squire them to the visitation. It might get their minds off the tragedy that has befallen their daughter, seeing her first husband as a buxom transwoman. They were aghast when Betsy told them about my evolution. They would have been less bothered if I had taken up violent crime.

Betsy declines my offer. I ask if she would prefer that I not come to the visitation. She answers that she wants me there. I ask if I should make my stay a brief one. She says no. With Don gone, the only person between her and unbearable isolation is me. Her parents are decent people and they love her, but their relationship is based on judgment and advice, not nurturing and comfort. She has friends, but not the kind of friends you sob your heart out to.

I am her sole surviving soul mate. Since we reconnected during my transition, we have bonded like sisters, intimate, but not sexual, like our spirits have merged in an unending hug.

Which is why, even with my business sinking deeper every day, I will take time off to help Betsy get things done, and be there when she needs a shoulder to cry on.

She will need me in the weeks and months to come. I don't know how much insurance Don had, but it won't be enough for Betsy to carry on without some changes. She'll be going back to work full-time—that offer has been there since she went on leave to have Robbie. But her salary won't begin to cover the lifestyle she and Don had.

I get up to make hot chocolate. Betsy tidies some of Robbie's toys in the corner of the living room. It is like the FAO Schwartz of toddler playrooms. Robbie's corner is swathed in a deep plush carpet that's as soft as a cloud. The rest of the room is white marble with subtle throw rugs and modern furniture that manages to be beautiful and comfortable at the same time. An elegant fireplace graces one wall, chic chairs and a couch just in front, separated by a handmade teak coffee table.

They invited me here for Thanksgiving the year Robbie was born, along with Don's parents and some family friends. There was a warm fire in the fireplace, taking the edge off a frosty day. We had a lovely, quiet dinner and sat in front of the fire afterward, sipping wine, talking about babies and favorite Thanksgiving memories, the economy, sports, whatever came to mind. I got to hold Robbie for much of the time, making an ass of myself with baby talk and funny faces and tender kisses to her tiny forehead.

We were somewhere between mellow and tipsy when Betsy took the child to bed. Don and I were quiet for a while, then, out of nowhere, he said it.

“I know she named Robbie after you,” he blurted out. Robbie's formal name is Roberta, which is the name I took when I stopped being Robert Logan. “I won't lie about it, I had a hard time with that . . . because, you know . . . it felt like she was cheating on me.”

I told him she would never cheat on him, and would never do anything to hurt his feelings. I wouldn't either, but that wasn't important to him at the time. He said he understood, that he'd gotten over it. He never held it against me. He didn't let it stop him from giving me
the full benefit of his business expertise, and he always welcomed me into his home.

For my quid pro quo, I will make sure his wife and child are safe and secure for as many years as I'm around. No matter what it takes.

*    *    *

S
ATURDAY
, A
UGUST
9

Our first outdoor demo is attracting a crowd. Our Craigslist hair model is tall and thin and sexy even though she isn't beautiful. She has chestnut-colored hair in great profusion and she sits erect on the stool we set up just outside the salon's front door. Maggie, a gorgeous young stylist, is doing the demo. She is wearing a short dress that flashes some cleavage and spike heels that show off her shapely legs. She is being assisted by Jalela who brings her own sultry flair to the tableau, tall and feminine, with graceful movements.

Maggie is trimming and shaping the model's length, then adding layers to create more shape and movement. She finishes by attacking the hair with texturizing cuts that produce short hairs among the longer locks, adding still more fullness. Maggie performs the technique theatrically, hair flying, shears flashing like the baton in a maestro's hand at the climax the
1812 Overture
. Passersby stop on the sidewalk to watch. More take in the show from a sidewalk café across the street. When Maggie finishes cutting, she does the blow dry with dramatic flair, the brush flying and rolling, the dryer swooping and diving, her body posing and flexing as she works the head.

By the time she's done, everyone who has seen any part of the demo knows this is a fabulous salon that combines beauty and pleasure with sheer artistry.

Samantha is working the crowd, handing out literature touting special discounts for first-time customers. She is a natural. She strikes up
conversations easily, sings the praises of our salon with the sincerity of a preacher, establishes personal contact with each person, and doesn't get bogged down in serious flirtation. The last point is important. We are showing some flesh here, but we're marketing glamor, not a house of prostitution.

In the next few weeks we'll find out if the sidewalk demo got us any new customers. Whether it does or doesn't, we'll keep doing them here and maybe in other locations if we can. I'd like to do them in the subway station during rush hour, but the CTA is nervous about someone getting pushed on the third rail or maybe impaled on the stylist's shears, so for now we're just passing out the promo sheets.

*    *    *

S
ATURDAY
, A
UGUST
9

From the salon I dash to the visitation, which is like waking up in a foreign country. I'm surrounded by more straight white people than I've seen in one place in months.

Betsy sees me enter the room and breaks off her conversation with two well-wishers to come greet me. Her eyes are no longer red, but her lovely face is clouded in a weary melancholy. Her almond-shaped eyes that smolder with personality and sex appeal in normal times are beacons of grief.

She smiles as she approaches, but when we throw our arms around each other, she sobs. My hopes of an inauspicious North Shore outing are dashed, but it doesn't matter. What's important is my brokenhearted loved one.

Betsy thanks me for coming in a voice still trembling and raw. She recovers her poise. We face each other and smile.

“I should get the parent thing over with,” I say. Her parents have been staring at us since she came to me. Her father's face is painted in
disgust, lips downturned at the corners, jaws rigid, eyes blazing. His only child is showing love and affection for a transgender freak.

Betsy's mother tries to avoid eye contact when I glance in their direction. She didn't like me when I was a man. I'm sure the vision of me as a transwoman is just as disgusting for her as it is her husband. I walk toward them anyway, humming
Onward Christian Soldiers
in my mind. I get to the words
marching as to war
when we reach them. Timing is everything in life.

“Hello, Bob,” her dad says, sticking out a hand for a handshake. It's pro forma, not a gesture of friendship. “My, you've changed.” He says it sarcastically, like I'm a joke.

“Hi, Al,” I reply, extending my own hand as daintily as I can. “It's Bobbi now.” He shakes hands as if I am a man, tight grip, up-and-down movement. When I say my name his face wrinkles like he's sucking on a lemon.

The name and the male handshake are deliberate, of course. A way to put down someone you don't understand. Five years ago, such acts of bigotry were devastating to me, but time has eroded their effectiveness. Plus, Betsy's parents are not the kind of people whose approval I value. They hail from a small city in central Wisconsin and believe in whiteness and Christianity and think the only thing wrong with the Ku Klux Klan is that they desecrate crosses.

Betsy's mom averts her eyes when I turn to greet her. She extends a hand, her eyes locked on the floor, and murmurs a hello, no name. We exchange a feminine handshake, fingertips, no pressure, gentle squeeze from me, limp noodle from her. She will run to the lady's room soon and wash her hands, I'm sure of it. I'm not repulsed by her, but I still don't know how someone as warm and compassionate as Betsy came from the union of these two shallow stiffs.