A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (7 page)

“I know,” I said. “I feel so lucky that my friend David could play the Irish music, and I picked out the vows—”

“Mathew could barely get through his vows because he was crying,” the bar friend interrupted. “That's when I really
lost it. Seeing him cry just tore me up.” All the girls in line for the bathroom agreed.

“I cried too,” I said. I was trying not to sound defensive as I defended myself.

“Really? It looked more like you were laughing,” she said. All the girls in line agreed about that too.

“Wow, everyone's already siding with him,” I said. “I can see it's going to be a rocky divorce!” I joked.

The ladies in line all groaned. A few actually yelled out, “No, Lauren!”

I guess nobody likes divorce jokes at weddings.

“I was laughing because I was so happy,” I explained. “It was joy.” I picked up my dress and cut to the front of the line.

“No, from where I was sitting it seemed more like you were laughing at Mathew for crying,” the relentless barmaid said. Everyone agreed that it was “So Lauren!” to do that.

In the bathroom my veil fell in the toilet so I had to rinse it off in the sink. I decided maybe I did laugh. But it wasn't like I was really laughing at Mathew. It just felt so vulnerable up there, with the bouquet forbidding any hand gestures, and Mathew looking so emotional, and in the front row, my mother and my birth mother holding hands and crying. I had to laugh or I would have fainted.

 

 

My candle has been lit (by someone's new husband) and is shaking a little in the grip of my trembling hands. My first
instinct is to blow it out and sit down. But when I realize everyone is looking at me with sad faces, I feel like I should lighten the mood.

“Uhmmm ... well. I'm grateful that I dated so many gay men in high school, because now I have a fabulous place to live. Thank you, Jay and Bryan! Though I didn't plan on living there. But it's still fabulous!”

The room gets very quiet and very focused on me. Even the kids—who have been screaming and chasing each other around the table during the other “I'm grateful” speeches—have suddenly gone completely still.

“Uhmmm ... I'm grateful I'm not pregnant right now!” I say. “That would make everything pretty awkward. So I guess I'm grateful I'm barren! Ha ha!” I hold my candle in the air like it's a champagne glass for a toast. No laughter.

“Well, I don't know that I'm technically barren. Uhmmm, let's see here. Geez. How hard should this be?” I give a weak fake laugh and make a joke that the candle is a microphone. (“Is this thing on?”) And then suddenly, I don't know where it came from, maybe it was the power of the flame, or the pain of the hot wax dripping onto my hands, but I start pouring it out:

“I don't know if you all are aware of the situation, but my husband was supposed to be here today. Wait, I should go back a little bit. Mathew and I were going to move to Los Angeles from New York to start our lives all over again. Buy a house. Have a baby. But what he did instead was pack up our
car with all our shit and drive off and disappear into the desert for three days. Three days! And nobody had any idea where he was—not me, not his family. He was just gone. And all I had was this voicemail message from him saying, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I do want to see you again, okay? I do.' Isn't that hilarious? It was so formal. Like he didn't even know me! Or like he was trying to convince himself that he wanted to see me again. So I'm calling him and calling him and calling him. Then finally, after
three days
, he answered his cell phone. At which point I started sobbing because I was so relieved that he wasn't dead. And I told him that I needed to hang up so I could calm down—get my breath—so I could actually speak to him. So I hung up, calmed down, and called him back. And when I called him back—THAT CHICKENSHIT MOTHERFUCKER HAD TURNED HIS CELL PHONE OFF!”

I grab the edge of the table to balance myself and notice that my angry breath has taken a toll on not merely the entire table's appetite but my candle too.

“Um, I don't know what the procedure is here,” I say, “but my candle blew out.”

 

 

When Mathew asked me to marry him in front of the Circle K, I screamed “No!” and started running toward the street. That's how much I loved him. I didn't want him to be asking me in some sort of kitschy way. Because the way he said it
sounded like he was suggesting something wacky. Like, “Hey, let's wear our shoes on our ears!”

He ran after me yelling, “I'm serious! What are you doing?”

What I was doing was trying to avoid the “Oh my god, Lauren, I thought you knew I was kidding” second part of the conversation. But as I neared the rural street that we'd walked down from his parents' house in the small might-as-well-be-Mexico town in Southern California, a monster truck swerved toward me going about fifty miles per hour. So I turned back and ran to him.

“I mean it,” he said. “Let's get married. You're who I want to be with for the rest of my life. Forever.”

There it was: that word. Forever. Immediately I saw the twin sisters from
The Shining
joining hands and beckoning me, “Forever ... and ever ... and ever.”

I hated that word. It was so “and then you're dead.” I wanted to believe that Mathew was as good as he seemed. That when he rocked me in his arms and told me I could “relax, just relax,” he wasn't just saying that to relax me enough so he could chop my head off and bury it in the backyard. (Or worse, my real fear, that he was saying it just to have conquered another lady—one that didn't want to be conquered by his bartender charm. But he did it. He charmed me.)

Is it really this good? I wondered. Do I really get him? Could I really get the sweet sexy novelist bartender boy? The one that everyone lusted after?

It was like I'd won the husband contest. “He's our prince,” his mother kept telling me. “No, he's my prince!” I wanted to say, and push her against the wall and scream, “MINE!”

My parents treated him like royalty too.

“Your dad and I were talking,” my mom once said, “and we decided if our family was ever on
Survivor,
Mathew would be the last one we'd vote off.”

Then she told me I'd be the first one they voted off because I lied and exaggerated for the sake of a good story. And if she were playing, she'd be playing to win.

The combination of my running and the monster truck stirred up the pit bulls in the yard next to the Circle K. All three of them came tearing toward the way-too-low fence and started attacking the chain link, biting and trying to pull it down. For a second I confused pit bulls with bears and froze, hoping I didn't have my period.

But Mathew was unfazed by what to him was “just a little piece of home” and, using the voice he usually saved for the drunks at his bar, commanded the dogs to “Cut it out!” And they did.

It reminded me of how he always did this thing where he would grab me and throw me over his shoulder and run down the middle of the street, dodging in and out of traffic, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. People would be shouting from their car windows (“Is she okay? Do you need help?”) and he would just keep running with me bouncing along. My underwear would work itself into a painful wedgie,
but I loved it. He made me feel like a light, girly flower. Like I could be his light, girly flower.

“Okay,” I answered. “Okay, I'll marry you.”

I
t's been two months since a tiny Texas psychic told me what I already knew: Mathew and I were over. “He can't do it,” she said, her voice sounding like Loretta Lynn's (as played by Sissy Spacek). “It's like you're screaming at a paraplegic to get the phone—he just can't. So leave him alone and move on.”

So far, moving on has meant moving into Gay Jay's guestroom, where I've been staying for the past three months. He painted the walls a beautiful Tibetan orange to create a healing space just for me. (At least I thought he did, until his boyfriend told me, “Yeah, Jay said the same thing to our
crystal-meth friend who was detoxing here right before you arrived.”)

But it doesn't matter, because over the past two months, I've developed my own sort of healing ritual. It goes like this: wake up, look at clock, remember I'm divorced—cry.

Today, however, the tears and snot just aren't coming. Maybe I'm sick. Maybe I froze to death.

The soothing color of my room is somewhat offset by the fact that it is always freezing to the point that you can see my breath in here. It's like a scene from
The Exorcist.

Jay claims he hides the space heater from me because I can't afford to help pay the five-hundred-dollar energy bill. But I've seen the look of “ew” on his face whenever I mention taking a shower while he's home, so I know it has more to do with his wanting to guarantee that I'll be sleeping in a snowsuit and not in the nude.

So I'm under the covers trying to warm my face with my morning breath, and even that isn't bringing the tears. It's so odd. The sadness just seems to be gone, which leaves me wondering,
Now what am I gonna do?
Before the universe can answer “get cancer,” I try to look busy. I fluff the pillows and dust off the bedside table.

I decide that the best thing to do is to jump back into another relationship. It's like at Thanksgiving when you think, “Well, I don't feel like throwing up anymore—I guess I'll have some more of that pie.”

Within two hours I am on the Internet, signing up on various dating sites. It's the first day of the rest of my life, and oh my goodness, would you look at all the men looking for company. My profile is hilarious. Celebrity I most resemble? “Madonna. From behind.” Last book read?
How to Fake a Pregnancy.
I save my only sincere response for the question,
What are you looking for?
“Someone who has his own wonderful life and is happy with it.” (I remembered from my dating years that as flattering as it may feel, the last thing you ever want to hear from a date is, “I didn't know I could smile, or feel happiness, or not punch people in the face before I met you.”)

The first time someone sends me a response, saying, “You sound kind of interesting. I like your profile. Can I see a picture?” I feel sick and immediately take my profile off all the sites.

Dating is so—queer. So “Oh man, all the good ones are married or gay. Am I right, girls? High five!” But I'd just like to do something that isn't literally queer. Since I'm new to town and crashing at Jay's, every activity I do is gay-centric. Gay coffee, gay gym, gay porno, gay-themed kitchen magnets. It's time for a change. Time to create a new life, away from the gays. Time to get my butthole waxed.

The only problem with this rebirth strategy is that I can't be naked in front of people—even after living in Holland, the most naked-loving country in Western Europe. You can't keep clothes
on
the Dutch people. Of course, if I were tall and
thin with uncomplicated nipples, I might be happy to answer my door nude too.

When I first moved to Amsterdam, between the red light district, television, and my roommate, Mauritz, I saw a naked person every three or four hours. If I tried to close the door at a friend's house while using the restroom, I was accused of having something to hide. When I shared this observation at a dinner party, the other guests asked me why I felt I had something so different than what they had. “What?” they'd say. “You think yours is some big party that we wouldn't understand? Guess what, big news, mine's a party too!” Then they'd hand me a stack of photos from their last family vacation where naked Oma and Opa stood with their arms around the naked grandkids.

 

 

At the waxing salon they tell me I have to take my pants off. I ask if they could do it some other way, like through my zipper. (“Just do the best you can, I won't expect the little heart to be perfectly shaped.”) But they insist on my being half naked.

The Russian woman who is about to transform me from Chewbacca into a lady calls me a “virgin” when she hears I've never done this before, and sharpens her special shears and hedge trimmers. Then she calls in all the assistants and waxers-in-training and folks from the coffee shop across the street. “You're about to learn what you do when something like ‘this,'” she says, pointing to my crotch, “comes in to the office and you have not scheduled the extra time.”

To distract myself from my nakedness and the ripping out of my pubic hair, I tell the ladies assembled about the time I made a “sexy video” for my now ex-husband, Mathew.

“Oooooh,” they all say in unison.

We were going to be apart for about a month, so I braved nakedness and made a video of myself taking my clothes off and “making love” to the camera. Mathew didn't know exactly what was on the tape. I just handed it to him and said, “For your eyes only, know what I mean?” Every time I spoke to him on the phone I'd wait for him to mention the tape, but he never did. We always ended up talking about what the dog had eaten that day. Which did not, thank god, have anything to do with what was on the tape. When I returned home I had to flat out ask him.

“Soooooo, what did you think of the tape?”

“Oh, I haven't had the chance to watch it,” he said. “But I'll try to get to it tomorrow.”

He could have told me that he and his mom had watched it together and they both agreed I should talk less ...
anything
but not getting around to it.

 

 

When we lived together in Manhattan, Mathew would be making breakfast and I'd shuffle into the kitchen, completely naked, heading toward the shower, which was conveniently located right next to the stove.