A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (6 page)

“You're being mean,” Bryan said.

“How is that mean?” Jay asked.

He continued to scream at me, full volume. But I knew that Jay wasn't being mean, he was just frustrated. He'd been prepared for maybe three or four weeks of sadness and endless
repetition of the same story (“And I was the one who wanted to start over again. Make a real commitment to the marriage ... but then suddenly he was just gone ... like a bad movie ... called
My Life
...”), but now that we were entering the second month, the novelty was wearing off. He wanted Fun Lauren back. So he kept shaking me like I was a toy whose batteries had died.

We'd been stuck at a red light for what seemed like half an hour when Jay turned to Bryan and me.

“Remember when you were fat in high school? I miss Fat Lauren,” he said. “She was more fun. She was jolly. And so easy! You could give her a cookie and she was happy for hours. Is Fat Lauren going to be coming back again?”

I was about to assure him that Fat Lauren would be coming back with a vengeance when I noticed two homeless men pummeling each other back and forth in the deserted Target parking lot—a sight that would have disturbed me greatly in the past.

“Mathew and I never fought. I'd fight but he wouldn't fight back.” The homeless man without a shirt had fallen onto his back and was kicking at the air. At nobody. Until his opponent graciously staggered up and stuck his face out to let it be kicked.

The light turned green.

“Oh my god!” Jay screamed from the front. “Call the police! Call 911!”

Mathew just wanted us to be husband and wife and love each other—quietly and without drama. But I couldn't handle that. He was just so “okay” and I was ... what's the technical term? “Not okay.”

 

 

“We have a Thanksgiving tradition where we pass a flame around the table,” Dini explains to the table full of family, friends, and me. “You light your neighbor's candle, and say what you are grateful for.”

She reminds me of a sweet kindergarten teacher, explaining to her beloved children how to “hold the frog when it's your turn.” She's talking very slowly and with wide eyes and hand gestures as if for the deaf.

“Oh god” actually slips out of my mouth.

In response Dini puts her arm around me and gives me a little hug. She is all soft corners, no edge at all. Her face glows with so much love and sweetness—or maybe it's some sort of salt scrub—it's painful for me to look at her.

Since she's the hostess, Dini offers to go first. Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a folded out piece of paper. “Oh my gosh, I'm not kidding, you guys. I had to write them all down!” she says.

“Oh god,” I say again, but nobody hears me over the chorus of “That's so Dini!” and laughs and exclamations that have consumed the table.

Dini's family takes in all the animals of the forest. There are Rastafarian boyfriends, crystal meth-addicted cousins,
stepmothers and original mothers, commercial actors, beloved gay uncles like Jay and Bryan, and the soon-to-be-divorced who has found herself living with her gay best friend in Los Angeles, even though she did not plan to live with him ... no, the plan was to live with her husband happily ever after.

 

 

The last time I visited Mathew at the bar where he worked in New York, I made sure to have a few drinks before I got there so I could relax enough to drink some more. I also arrived earlier than he was expecting so I could look through the window and catch him getting a blow job behind the bar. Instead I caught him doing something worse.

When I peeked in through the front window of the bar I saw him standing around with a group of his co-workers and regulars, having what looked to be a really good time. He was laughing, and everybody he was talking to was laughing too. He looked relaxed and happy until I walked in the door. When he saw me, his face fell. But he still went through all his “perfect husband” gestures.

“Hey, my beautiful wife,” he announced. (Looking caught.) He came out from behind the bar to give me a hug. “I'm so glad you came in,” he whispered in my ear.

“Oh yeah? You don't look like you're so glad I'm here,” I spit back.

“Lauren, I'm always glad you come in. Don't say that, okay? What can I get you to drink?” He moved back behind the bar with a tired smile on his face.

“I'll have a vodka and tonic, but I don't want you to pay for it,” I said. “Man, I don't know what the hell was going on when I walked in, but sorry I broke up the little party. Maybe I should just go.” I started to say more but Mathew interrupted.

“You know what? Maybe you should.” He took the drink he'd just made for me and threw it out in the sink. “I'll see you at home,” he said. Then he turned away and went back to his friends at the end of the bar.

In the five years that I'd been with him, that moment was the harshest that Mathew had ever been to me. And that was it. He wasn't going to play anymore. He was done. I sat at the end of the bar, in total shock. Mathew had been trying to love me for a long time and now he was done.

 

 

“I'm grateful to have Lauren here!” Dini begins.

She's kicking off her list of thanks with the saddest situation she knows of, and it's me. I thought there would at least be a “grateful the prostate cancer is in remission” for some uncle somewhere before she got to me.

Dini puts her arm around my shoulders and gives me half a mama hug. “At Thanksgiving, we just love to open our home to strays and—” She stops herself, but not before the entire table feels mortified on her behalf. When Dini realizes what she's done, she leans in and whispers, “Oh Lauren, you are not a stray. I say that little speech every year. Hear me when I tell you, you are
not
a stray.”

Just then it hits me that for as long as I've known Jay (about twenty years), he's been known to take in strays of all shapes and sizes—mostly dogs, cats, birds, and fish. He takes them in and they run away or get eaten by coyotes living in the canyon behind his house. The last stray he took in, Chancy, was a seventeen-year-old nearly dead dog that did nothing beyond lie under a tree. Jay would gesture toward him with a sad face and say, “He's dying. But I couldn't let him die alone.” I remember thinking that he just loved to be able to tell everyone that he took in a dying dog—it offset his debauchery in the gym locker room.

Now I understand: I am Chancy. Except I'm slightly hairier and in dog years I should be long dead.

“I am grateful for my beautiful family,” Dini is saying. She starts to cry with joy.

 

 

The therapist that was recommended to Mathew and me held his sessions in his apartment on East 41
^st
Street. His name was Samuel, and he defended every disgusting or disturbing aspect of his practice as his gift to us “in order to keep costs down.”

I would have paid twenty dollars more to have him not answer his telephone in the middle of a session. Ten more on top of that for him not to put an entire Entenmann's coffeecake on his lap and pick at it for the entire hour. One hundred and twenty dollars more for him not to say, “These
cakes are so moist” in the middle of my talking about my abandonment issues.

“You have severe ADD,” he told me. “She must be driving you nuts,” he said to Mathew.

Mathew did not respond to his question. He just lit a cigarette. (One reason Mathew agreed to keep coming was that Samuel let him smoke.)

“I'd like to know if that's true, Mathew,” I said. “Am I driving you crazy? I wish you'd say that. Tell me to shut the fuck up or—”

The phone rang and Samuel put a finger up to pause me.

“I'm in session,” he said into the phone. “Okay. Okay. 2:00 p.m. is fine. Okay. Bye.” To me he said, “Where were we? Oh, I want you to read the book
Driven to Distraction,
which will help you to control your ADD.”

I sighed loudly.

“What's your problem?” Samuel growled, in his delicate therapist manner.

“Mathew bartends until 6:00 a.m.,” I said. “And even on the nights he's not working he's out all night talking to his bartender friends. I feel like he's always trying to get away from me.”

“Well, he probably is,” Samuel said, stuffing a crumbling piece of cake into his mouth. “Aren't you, Mathew?”

Mathew chose not to answer, which I'd never before realized was actually an option when someone asked you a question.

Someone knocked on Samuel's door.

“Come in!” he yelled at the door. “This is my lunch,” he said to us. “I'm hypoglycemic—I have to eat.”

A slim young man walked in and handed him a grilled cheese. Samuel explained it would settle his upset stomach.

Mathew and I were there because the only conversations we seemed to have went like this: A said, “You hate me,” and B said, “No, I don't. I love you.” We took turns playing A and B.

Our quality time meant going out for Manhattans and seeing how long before I melted down and told him I was too fat for my knees. Or that I was so heavy I needed a wheelchair. I'd name and show photos of all the women I thought he should be with—women who I told him were as good-looking as he was. Then I'd ask him if he'd ever thought he was an alcoholic. He'd get insulted and I'd spot an attractive woman whom I'd try to set him up with. We'd end the night with Mathew drunkenly going on about Noam Chomsky as I stared out the bar window, tears streaming down my face, because I was sure—I was convinced—he didn't love me anymore.

I told all of this to Samuel and suddenly he jumped up.

“Time's up!” he announced. “You two could make it but it's gonna take a lot of work. Did I tell you guys how I was John and Yoko's personal assistant for years? I procured young black
men for him and young surfer boys for her. That's completely true. I'll see you next week.”

 

 

Dini is finishing up her list. (“And I'm thankful for our ...
summer home!
We got it! We close on December 13, so you all must visit. You guys! You have to!”)

The flame is making its way toward me at a rapid pace. Everyone is grateful for their beautiful baby and their beautiful husband. I'm going pass out. Where the fuck am I? I'm watching everyone's lips move—watching everyone wink at loved ones, saying, “Grateful for blah blah blah
husband
blah blah blah
baby.”
The flame is passed. “Blah blah blah
husband
blah blah blah
baby.”
It's like a horror film—a scene from
Rosemary's Baby.
Who are these people? What is happening? All the faces are being shot through a fisheye lens, and the only word that I can make out in this secret language of contentedness is
“husband ... husband ... husband ... husband ...”

 

 

“He's not crossing!”

“He's going back!”

“What's he doing?!”

Mathew and I were screaming at a squirrel that was darting back and forth in the middle of the road in front of our wedding caravan. If the furry rodent didn't make up his mind immediately he'd be hit by three generations of Mathew's
family. We'd do the initial killing, then his father would back us up, and his sister and grandma would finish the job.

“STOP! JUST STOP!” I yelled, trying to grab the wheel. The squirrel froze with a look on his face that said, “Fuck it, just go around me!”

Mathew plowed onward with a dazed look on his face. He had had to make so many decisions in the past forty-eight hours he simply couldn't make one more (should he convince his brother to take his medication—just for the weekend—or respect his wishes to not take it and listen to his frequent high-pitched announcements of “I'm losing it, man. I'm losing it,” while constantly scratching his face?).

So onward we went, sure that squirrels knew they should move.

Mathew looked in the rearview mirror as I glanced to the side of the road, looking for signs of the squirrel running away.

“Oh my god,” Mathew said. He put his hand up to his mouth and bit it. “I hit him,” he said through teeth clenched on his own skin.

I turned around to see the squirrel's tail sort of waving in the air. (“Goodbye, you guys! Have a good wedding!”)

Mathew looked like he was about to cry. “I've never hit anything in my life,” he said. “I killed him. Oh my god.”

Tears came to my eyes and I grabbed Mathew's shoulder to comfort him. I couldn't figure out what to say because I was caught up in trying to figure out how to view what just happened as “not necessarily a bad sign.” It couldn't have been. It was just ritualistic. Like a sacrifice. Hell, if our backyard were bigger I'd have been sacrificing goats every time I had a job interview. I was determined not to freak out.

If at the next stoplight the car was suddenly covered in baboons—jumping on the hood and licking the windshield—I was going to see it for what it was. Baboons wanting to taste the windshield. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

 

Everybody agreed that our wedding was amazing. (“Orcas Island, what a perfect choice! And the ferry ride—so cleansing. And—oh my god—look up! Eagles! Eagles, you guys! That's such a good sign for you two!”)

But the big talk of the actual ceremony was how Mathew cried and cried and could barely get his vows out.

I'm in line for the bathroom at the wedding reception when a friend of Mathew's from the bar tells me, “Lauren, the ceremony was the most beautiful I've ever seen. I'm not kidding.”