My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (15 page)

actually accumulated a nice little wardrobe. Then a funny thing hap-

pened. Once I had this wardrobe in a separate closet, I could lock it,

and I stopped dressing up. Once I was living alone, I remember going

months without feeling the need. I didn’t need the connection any-

more. I don’t know if I actually walked or acted differently, but I just felt freer to think of myself that way.”

One day we’re discussing the past. It’s 2006, I’m still forbidden to

write, and Chevey tells me about a near miss that occurred when we

had moved back to Richmond. It was night or late evening; I was

downstairs and the phone rang. Chevey picked it up and came down

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to get me, forgetting he’d put polish on his toes. As I followed him up the steps, he was in a fit of anxiety lest I should notice his feet, which of course, absorbed in my own adolescent world, I didn’t!

Chevey describes a liminal state, the confusion that continued to

seep in all during his adolescence and young manhood. “There are

moments when you are
ju- u- u- ust
drifting off to sleep, you’re no longer conscious but you’re not really in sleep yet, where I would have these

extremely strong feelings of being a woman. Most nights that probably

happened and I didn’t know it, but once in a while I’d be feeling it and there would be a noise or something would happen to wake me up and

I could still feel it. But after I gave up the idea of trying to change sex, I swore I wouldn’t do it; I said this is insane.”

I ask him what he was doing— thinking and feeling— during that

period from 1974 until the early eighties when he met Eleanor. I know

he went out, since Andrew and I once spent a weekend with him and

a sexy young woman who was clearly crazy about him.

“Oh, Nancy,” he says. “I actually wasn’t dating. I had just left a

wonderful marriage and wasn’t interested in marrying again. I was

simply trying to be normal and hoping my attraction to women would

take over. It was Nancy who came after me. She was very persistent,

very strong— I seem to have a history of strong women— and she

wouldn’t take no for an answer. We had great sex, but I had to end it.

I didn’t want anything permanent and she did.

“And that’s how I felt right up to the time I met Eleanor, and fell in

love. After roughly a year dating her, I told her about the feelings I’d had for years. She and I have different recollections of what I said.

Sometimes she dwells on the differences but I keep telling her ‘It

doesn’t really matter. What we said is irrelevant, because I promised

you I would never do anything about it and I’ve broken that promise.’

She thinks that I said that it was over— that I didn’t have those feelings

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anymore. And I think now, I don’t know how I could possibly have

said that. I mean, the feelings are not something you can get rid of. I might have said I could suppress it. While I can’t remember the words,

I can’t imagine— unless I was drunk— that I could have said that. It’s

just so counter to everything you feel. Again, it doesn’t matter. But she was aware of course all along and every once in a while something

would happen or a subject would come up that would create a mildly

uneasy feeling between us. I’ll make up an example. I don’t recall this happening but it must’ve at some point. There would be a news item,

say, about transsexuals. Well, she’s sitting there thinking and I’m sitting there thinking but we don’t say anything. So things like that

would happen. It was something that was never very far away, but at

the same time, I never did anything that she could see or sense. I

couldn’t help the way I felt. I could suppress it. But I couldn’t erase it.

“It’s like acting as if you don’t have a headache.[Once again the

“you” instead of the “I.”] If you’re good at it, you can walk into a room and be pleasant and no one knows that you have a splitting headache.

But that doesn’t make it go away. And sooner or later you’re going to

have to deal with that headache. You can only go on so long. And over

the course of the years it just gets to the point where it’s tearing you up inside. Now on the outside of course you’re fighting very hard, just like walking into the room where there’s a party with a headache, trying

not to show. I remember once Eleanor said, You know, you got this far

in life, why couldn’t you just go the rest of your life? And I felt that if I knew it was only three more years, say, perhaps I could’ve done that.

But it also showed me that she doesn’t realize, after all she’s read about it, how intense, how overpowering the feeling is.

“And admittedly, from a selfish point of view, you think, I have

given the major part of my life to working hard so that you and the

kids have a great life. I’ve helped you raise them, they are all launched

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now and all that. I think it’s time that I do something for myself. And I think that everyone male and female may feel that way. Mine is obviously much more drastic, so that argument kind of falls flat. It’s not

like I always wanted a sports car so now that all the kids are through

college I can now go out and buy myself a sports car or a boat.

“Divorce is a closer analogy. One person has been wanting to. But

they stay together for the kids, which is not necessarily the best thing.

That’s the same kind of thing, but I don’t pretend for a moment that this is on the same level. But . . .”

“The need is much stronger?”

“The need is a whole lot stronger. Exactly. And the fallout is worse.

You can’t compare the two. It’s something else. But you know, not try-

ing to be melodramatic, but if somebody does something that hurts

you, in time the pain eases and you sort of forget about it and maybe

you forgive them and you go on. But if you hurt someone else, that

stays with you until you die. You can’t ever get away from that. And

the pain doesn’t lessen that much. And there have been so many times

when I was thinking about Eleanor and I would just start crying. You

think what you’ve done to somebody. It’s like, well, I don’t know.

There is no other good analogy, except that I’ve always wondered what

it would be like to accidentally kill somebody you love. You’re driving, you drop a cigarette in your lap, and the person next to you is killed

and you are alive. Same type of thing. I just can’t imagine what that

would be like for the rest of your life. You would rather have someone

cripple
you
because you can forgive them. But if you do it to someone else . . . and I’ve done that twice. Only two promises I can recollect breaking.”

“What was the first?

“Beth.”

For all his obvious empathy, there’s another side, almost its oppo-

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site. From the accounts I’ve read, transsexuals, for all their sensitivity, can, and perhaps
must
, have a special blind spot when it comes to the reactions of those closest to them. They feel they are “the same person inside,” and
they
still love their partners. And because they’re finally fulfilling their lifelong dream, goes their reasoning, the people who

love them
must
be happy for them.

Eleanor describes the moment of the fatal announcement. It was

April of 2005, they were sitting in the sunroom, and Chevey said he’d

decided to have surgery. Since he’d just come back from his internist,

she was alarmed and asked what was wrong. When he told her he had

decided to become a woman, she broke down completely. But to make

matters worse, Barbara was marrying in May.

“I asked him if he couldn’t have waited until after the wedding to

tell me, and he just looked surprised, as if he’d never thought about it.”

The plan would have to be kept secret. She couldn’t tell Adam or

Barbara, who loved Chevey and thought the two of them were happily

married. Eleanor would have to go through the whole affair with a

happy mother- of- the- bride smile on her face.

“I can see now,” Eleanor says, “that he was just so wrapped up in

the euphoria of finally being able to realize his dream, he couldn’t

think about the feelings of others at that moment.”

It’s as if transsexuals have to wear blinders because they must de-

vote all their mental and emotional energy to the frightening and con-

suming job ahead, and simply can’t allow their feelings of guilt and

obligation (obviously strong in Chevey’s case) to stop them.

I’m having trouble understanding this until I’m struck by an anal-

ogy: the autobiographical writer. We live also in a state of almost willed and necessary denial as to how our work will be received by those

close to us. We write about and hurt the people we love . . . and a host of others as well. But we forge ahead, our regard for the consequences

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momentarily repressed. Otherwise we’d be paralyzed by inhibitions;

we simply wouldn’t or couldn’t write. Proust understood that the

writer is not so much a person who writes as a person
made
by writing; it’s something to which we surrender, as Chevey is being made, or re-made, by his femaleness. It’s a terrible paradox. What gives us our

deepest feeling of value often involves treading on the sensitivities of others.

When I wrote a book about Andrew’s mysterious illness (the ill-

ness was in 1984, the book came out in 1991), Mother and Chevey

both came into it, but not, I was sure, in any way that could offend.

How could I have been so obtuse? Mother was furious and deeply

wounded. She didn’t say anything at the time, but much later, one eve-

ning when she’d had three or four scotches, she sat down and wrote

out a list, three pages, single- spaced, of all the “errors” she’d found.

These were but a cover for what I grew to feel were deeper wounds.

Still, the surface attacks were bad enough; when I read this scorching

list of indictments I could hardly breathe.

When she died in 1998, we had a small service, then family and

friends came over to her apartment. Afterward, Chevey, Eleanor, An-

drew, and I went out for dinner. We took Mother’s wallet, letting her

pay for it (and surely chastise us from the Other Side for choosing such an expensive restaurant). We had some wine, were feeling very close

and mellow, sad and happy, when I mentioned I might write a memoir

about Mother. Suddenly Chevey, who I’d never even seen really angry

before, exploded. “You just can’t do it,” he said, concluding, “Suppose you got raped in New York and I wrote about it!”

I was stunned. Tears came to my eyes. Andrew got furious at

Chevey on my behalf. We all finally calmed down. We loved and

needed each other too much to let this interfere. But it stayed with me and haunted me.

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Afterward, I relayed his words about rape to a psychiatrist friend

in New York. “He felt violated by your book,” he said. Of course! And

he felt violated on Mother’s behalf. This was what prompted the vehe-

mence of that first injunction, when he came to New York in 2005 and

told Andrew and me of his plans: “You have to promise you won’t

write about this.”

But as I thought about it now, and took notes and notes, it seemed

I needed to
write
about it as he needed to
do
it.

He was about to take a radical swerve that would have not only a

huge impact on his life, but a sizeable one on mine as well. I would be losing my brother without any concrete idea as to what sort of human

being would replace him. Answers and explanations were in short

supply: I still had no real understanding of the urge that might help

me accept it, and no way of talking about it to others. If he felt driven to make his life right by becoming a woman, I was no less driven to

seek meaning through words, and the drive to create was no more a

question of conventional “happiness” than transsexualism was. My

compulsion may not have been a matter of life and death, as it was for

Chevey, but this “vital impulse to order” (as James Olney described

the autobiographical urge) stemmed from my unconscious and was

just as mysterious and inexplicable as Chevey’s.

At least some questions will soon be answered. In April the heroic El-

eanor will accompany him for the eleven- hour operation by Dr. Oust-

erhout, and six months later, Beth will join him in California for the

follow- up surgery. Ousterhout, the pioneer in the field, grew interested in facial reconstruction from extensive work as a dental surgeon. I

look him up on the Internet; the descriptions are hair- raising. “Scalp advancement surgery,” which shortens the distance between eyebrows

and hairline, is done, under general anesthesia, with an incision made