Self-Made Man (23 page)

Vergil accepted this on some level as right and proper, but to my great surprise his reaction then turned personal, something I hadn't really seen in Vergil before.

“Why me?” he asked. Why had I chosen him, singled him out for special attention?

This was a question that only my female dates had ever asked me before.

“Because I was there?” he asked, hurt, it seemed, just as the others had been, to think that my interest in him hadn't been genuine.

“Well, yes, and no,” I answered truthfully, as I had answered all the others. “That's why I chose to speak to you initially—because you were there. But the feelings I developed later were real. I couldn't have faked those. No way. This may sound like a con to you, but it's not. Very real and profound things can happen—and for me have happened—under the cover of a falsehood. That has been the whole point of this experiment. The truths I've learned and experienced would not have revealed themselves otherwise.”

He agreed, it seemed, though he said nothing. He was calm, his head inclined in conference. I went on.

“Vergil,” I said, “I care a lot. That's why I'm telling you all of this. And I'm truly sorry for the lie. I hope you can forgive me.”

We talked on, going over the particulars, and to his credit, Vergil made it very easy for me. He was receptive, understanding, immediately forgiving, just as Father Fat had been. He showed every aspect of his best and wisest self though he had every reason not to, and I was both admiring and grateful.

“Now I can tell you,” I said finally. “This is a really hard place to be a woman.”

“Well, it's supposed to be,” he laughed. And so did I, though I did so with an underlying sense of puzzlement. I have thought often of that comment in retrospect, and, whether this is fair or not, it does, in a sense, confirm a lot of what I'd felt about the defeminizing of Ned—and Crispin, too—in that environment. It was an odd answer on the face of it. In theory, living together amicably as men didn't necessitate creating an atmosphere that was hostile to women or even to femininity. But that is what the monks had done, and according to Vergil, they had done so by design. Ned's hazing hadn't been imaginary, and this consolidated masculinity that reigned so heavily in the monastery wasn't, it seemed, just the natural result of men living together without women. It was the result of men actively working to squelch any creeping womanly tendencies in themselves and their brothers.

But why? Why this need for such a macho atmosphere? Granted, this was workhorse machismo of a particularly tight-lipped, straight-backed and, as Felix had said, Germanic variety. It wasn't rugby and beer. But it was machismo all the same in its need to obviate its opposite. And that seemed entirely superfluous in a world where the soul was ostensibly God's instrument.

So why? Why the cultural misogyny? The answer, when it came to me, was not at all mysterious. A cliché, in fact. Felix himself had said it. They took refuge in machismo because they feared inappropriate intimacies between men. A feminized man is a gay man, or so the stereotype goes. A feminized man is a weak man, and a weak man who allows intimacies is prey to the assertions of chaos and his libido.

It seemed painfully obvious in my own particular case. The jokes, the paranoia, the shutting out.

The thought that Vergil might be gay had crossed my mind before, but I hadn't been at all sure about my instincts on the matter, not nearly as sure as I had been about Jerome. But now Vergil and I were confessing to each other, so I decided to take the risk that he might be honest if only I asked him the right way. I remembered him talking about his time away from the monastery, about how he'd said he'd had “a really good time,” as if he'd done his sinning all at once at a big party. But he had been carefully non–sex specific about it. I remembered another cryptic remark he had made at the time that now made a lot more sense to me: “We are all God's creatures and love is love and sex is sex and they are not the same thing.”

In other words: Lord, make me straight but not now.

I decided I had to ask, but I didn't want to make him use the word gay. He was uncomfortable with it, I sensed. This wasn't an interrogation. So I just asked him, as if in passing, if the people he'd had relationships with during his time away from the monastery had been men.

The lines were open between us now. Maybe knowing I was a woman had taken away some of his fears, enough to know that I wasn't a threat to him anymore. His physical attraction, if it had been there, would presumably have died with my disclosure, the temptation removed.

He didn't resist the admission. He nodded his assent.

“So you've never slept with a woman?” I asked, more boldly.

He looked at me archly. “Not that I know of.”

Vergil was a comic to the last and, like Father Fat, in his lack of umbrage he was a credit to his order. When it counted most, when he was sorely deceived, he was true to his commandments: to love, to forgive and not to judge.

He was also a soft touch. He'd let me off easy and I was grateful.

I'm sure that part of him was relieved, too, and that made it easier for him to greet my news so forgivingly. When Ned became a woman the gay problem disappeared and with it the transgressive masculinity he embodied, as well as the inappropriate intimacy he had provoked. In this context a woman must have felt like a gift, especially since I was leaving anyway. A female was far more acceptable than a fag. She could be held at bay, her needs and emotive untidiness satisfactorily explained, then set aside. But in a man those qualities were far more troubling. They could get inside, infiltrate, threaten and, worst of all, seduce. The odd man out was dangerous, like the slightest touch at a pressure point that could bring the whole edifice down. It was a crisis they were well rid of.

Vergil and I parted on newly intimate terms, awake to another potential in ourselves and each other. He assured me that I had a brother in him if I needed one, and I knew that he meant it. A brother to a sister. Easy. Normal. Good.

We promised to write.

 

Aside from Vergil and Father Fat, Felix was the only other person I wanted to visit before I left. I wanted to tell him about me and I wanted to apologize. I saw him in the rec room and told him that I was leaving the next morning. I thanked him for our time together. Before I could say anything about my true identity, he threw his arms around me and hugged me tightly, very tightly, squeezing me with intense gratitude and immediacy. It was obvious from the way he gave it, that this was a hug he had been longing to give—but hadn't given—for a very long time, because there had been no one willing or able to receive it. In that hug I could feel all that was locked up in Felix and by proxy in Claude and Vergil and in so many other men I had yet to meet outside the abbey.

When we pulled apart I told him that I had something to tell him. I sat him down and abruptly spilled the news. He sat for a second, looking at me with a shock that he was, out of politeness, trying desperately to disguise. I could tell he was uncomfortable. But I could also tell that our friendship was undamaged. The bond that we had established was sexless, and what Felix said next con-firmed this.

“Well, this doesn't really change anything, does it?”

He said this more as a statement than a question and I agreed. It didn't. And this made him the only person in my entire career as Ned who didn't change his attitude toward me when he learned that I was a woman. We hugged again to say good-bye, and the hug was the same hug. He hadn't needed to know that I was a woman in order to give it to me the first time, and he didn't change its aspect when he gave it to me the second time, knowing full well that I
was
a woman. It was a small, but to me remarkable, moment and the perfect parting gift.

I left the abbey the next morning feeling renewed and positive about the real affections I had shared there.

 

Thinking back on it now, I don't pretend that the abbey was a normal place to go looking for male experience, the kind of place you'd expect to find prototypical guy-guys milling around in their element—a sports bar, say, or a bowling alley. The vast majority of American men never come within miles of a monastery, nor do they willingly relinquish their sex lives, autoerotic or otherwise. But as I said at the outset of this chapter, that is part of why I went there, to see what happens to men when they are out of their element, when they are without the company of women.

And what I found there should not, I suppose, have surprised me. But it did. In all its reductive simplicity, it did. Most American men may not be monks, but the monks I knew were certainly American men, or to modify an old adage, I found that you can take the man out of his element but you cannot very often take the element out of the man. At the abbey I expected to find a breed concerned primarily with spiritual matters, a place where one's style or quality of manhood was irrelevant, where the artificial socialized boundaries that stymied male intimacy in the outside world would have long since fallen away, and where locker room fears of homosexuality would be so far beneath the radar as to be inconceivable. But instead I found a community steeped in commonplace masculine angst.

I found masculinity distilled, unmitigated by feminine influences, and therefore observable in a concentrated state. These men were suffering together in silence under a hurt they could barely acknowledge, let alone address. The cause of their distress and dysfunction mostly eluded them, yet to an outsider it was perfectly clear. Or at least it was to an outsider like me who had lived a woman's life, and then had been subjected to their treatment as a boy. I lived in the cloister among them, as one of them, yet I remained myself, and from that peculiar point of view I could see them both from the inside and the outside at once. The contrast was stark.

I felt firsthand the loss of the emotional freedoms that I had enjoyed in my life as a woman, and not just the loss, but the active squelching of those freedoms in the name of masculine order, reserve and isolation, as well as homophobia. I could see that the abbey was indeed a very hard place to be a woman, and I could see, as Vergil had said, that it was intended to be. But as Ned I could see that it was also a very hard place to be an emotional man, and in that sense it was not so unlike the outside world after all.

This is not to say that I did not also find peace, deep love and elevation of the soul in that place. I did. It was unmistakably present to anyone willing to receive it, and if my experience had been as one-sided as the likes of Father Jerome could have made it, I would not have become as emotionally embroiled as I did. Vergil and Felix and Claude and Henry and Father Fat, among others, were profound human beings who gave me the great gift of genuine contact. They struggled, of course, with masculine as well as everyday human troubles, but they burned very brightly at their cores. They were good people concerned about the well-being of their fellow creatures, trying to contribute what they could to the spiritual awakening of those around them.

I came to care deeply about them and since leaving I have corresponded with several of them as myself. I am told that the general reaction in the community to the news that I was a woman was mostly amusement and some embarrassment. But when it came down to it, I was a minute disturbance, a short episode in a very long stay. I was there for no time at all. They were there for life.

I miss the monks often. I miss taking long walks around the grounds with them and alone, looking for the elusive great horned owls, who reputedly made their nests at the top of the cloister tower. I often heard them hooting at dusk, and I spent many evenings after vespers following their calls, hoping to see them at perch, but never succeeding. On my last night there, I went in search of Father Claude's beehives instead.

Out at the back of the orchard, in a low branch of one of the pecan trees, I saw an abandoned wasps' nest. I was only about seven feet away at most as I peered at it in the dimming light, wondering if Father Claude had seen this. But as my eyes focused I realized that I was not looking at a hive or a nest at all. It was the body of a very large owl. He was napping, his eyes closed, his body swaying ever so slightly as the branch creaked in the evening breeze. I must have stood there for a good minute, amazed. Then sleepily he opened his eyes and saw me standing there, way too close for comfort. A look of actual surprise registered on his face, and then a vague annoyance. He stared back at me for a few seconds, pondering, it almost seemed, how a clodhopping human had managed to sneak up on him. Then disdainfully he spread his massive wings and flew away.

“
Attitude Red Bull.”
That's what the ad said and it said it all. I was looking through the want ads in the local paper trying to find a place where Ned could get what a writer friend of mine so appropriately called the
Glengarry Glen Ross
experience—that is, a balls-to-the-wall sales job in a testosterone-saturated environment where people emasculated each other by saying things like, “My watch cost more than your car.”

I felt sure such places still existed—I knew they did—especially on Wall Street, but a thirty-five-year-old dilettante with a moldering degree in philosophy wasn't going to get past the mailroom at Goldman Sachs when firms like that were recruiting credentialed undergraduates. I had to think smaller and, alas, shadier.

So I was looking for entry-level jobs that required no experience and no pedigree. That's when I fell down the rabbit hole and found myself in the land of the Red Bull. In that Sunday's career supplement, I had circled all the ads for which Ned could possibly qualify, or at least passably interview, and except for a few oddballs, like a nudist colony looking for an assistant (“will train” it said), and a dog in need of a chauffeur, they were all remarkably similar. They wanted steam-spewing go-getters who were “high-powered” and “hungry for success,” champing at the bit to trample the competition. Positive attitude a must. No experience required. They promised “FUN!” and, for those with the right stuff, prompt advancement.

Entry-level management trainees wanted in what appeared to be fast-track corporate environments. This was Ned's ticket to the office bullpen, quick and dirty. I called all three ads first thing Monday morning and got appointments for later that day or early the next. “No business casual,” they said. “Wear a suit.” Even better, I thought. Ned could finally wear his jackets and ties, full male regalia for the first time.

I drank a Red Bull that next morning to get in the mood. It gave me a headache and turned my pee green, but not a lot else. Maybe the mojo didn't mix well with estrogen. Clearly, I was no bull.

But then, of course, bulls are known for their balls. Bulls essentially are their balls. The terms are interchangeable, which is why flabby literati and other blowhards with masculine insufficiencies run with the bulls in Pamplona. It takes balls to run with the bulls, or gives them, as the case may be. This is also why an energy soft drink called Red Bull is made for boys, or would-be boys, and really means blue balls, just as surely as the popular behemoth SUV called the Hummer is made for pinpricks and means blow job. So, when an ad says “Attitude Red Bull,” you can be fairly sure the paradigm is male and you're going to get the
Glengarry Glen Ross
experience, no matter what you or your coworkers have or don't have between your legs.

And so it was. Ned tied one of his four tasteful, patterned Perry Ellis ties in a Windsor knot with a dimple, matched it to his sage green shirt, his gunmetal gray trousers, his ever so faintly mottled earth-toned blazer and his black dress loafers polished to a plaque shine, and appeared on time for his interviews, résumé in hand.

His résumé was my résumé, a little toned down and fudged here and there—impressive enough to get me in the door, but not so impressive as to make my application seem suspicious. As it turned out, there were no worries on either count. My education got me to the front of the queue with a nod, and nobody questioned my story about wanting to try a new career at thirty-five simply for the challenge of it. But then these places were interviewing just about anybody, and they were interviewing constantly. Most of them had standing ads in the paper every Sunday. This alone should have told me something about their turnover. So should a chance encounter in the restroom.

At one of these places, all of which rented tiny suites in office parks, I arrived early for the interview, so I went to the john to check my beard and adjust my tie. A guy from another office on that floor followed me in, pretending to wash his coffee mug. I pretended to wash my hands.

“Hey,” he said. “What do you guys do in there, anyway?”

“I don't know yet,” I said. “I'm here to find out. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I just see a lot of people coming and going out of there all the time.”

“You think maybe it's a prostitution front?” I ventured.

He didn't crack a smile.

“No.”

But it might as well have been. And it was in a way, but I had yet to find that out. At this point I was just happy to have a chance to try out my duds in an office and enjoy the rush they were giving me.

I was walking taller in my dress clothes. I felt entitled to respect, to command it and get it in a way that Ned never had in slob clothes. The blazer neatly covered any chest or shoulder worries I had, filling me out square and flat in all the right places, allowing me to act with near perfect confidence in my disguise. A suit is an impenetrable signifier of maleness every bit as blinding as the current signifiers of attractiveness in women: blond hair, heavy makeup, emaciated bodies and big tits. A woman can be downright ugly on close inspection, and every desirable part of her can be fake, the product of bleach, silicone and surgery, but if she's sporting the right signifiers, she's hot. She is her disguise, not a person but a type. A suit, I found, does very much the same thing for a man. You see it, not him, and you bow to it.

I, in turn, responded to these shifts in expectation. For the first time in my journey as Ned I felt male privilege descend on me like an insulating cape, and all the male behaviors I had until then been so consciously trying to produce for my role, came to me suddenly without effort.

My voice moistened instinctively, loosening me into the pose of someone who doesn't need to speak up to be heard. I spoke more slowly, and with what seemed to me to be an absurd authority, especially in my interviews, where bluster was expected of me. I met that expectation with embarrassing ease. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs wide, ankle over knee, resting my arms on the arms of the chair or letting them fall by my sides. My hands felt heavier somehow, more knowing, swinging as I walked, lazy with self-importance.

Nobody ever thought
this
Ned was gay.

My manner changed, too. I stopped obsessively saying sorry, please and thank you in restaurants, gas stations and shops the way I always seem to do as a woman. Instead, I just asked for what I wanted, right out, no apology, no squirm. Just “give it to me now the way I want it.” And the oddest part was that somehow, even without these words of courtesy, I didn't do it rudely, and no one ever interpreted it that way. It was like partaking in a common understanding that that's just how guys are. That's how they talk. They're direct, terse. No need to explain. We understand.

To the gas station attendant I'd say, “Give me a pack of that gum, too,” as she cashed out my order. To the waitress at the steak house where I ate a business lunch with one of my male coworkers I said, “Get us two filets.” Even my “thanks”—never “thank-yous”—were brusque when I said them, but they managed to sound magnanimous, as if I were gracing a servant who was beneath my deference.

As a woman, I so often speak in qualifiers. “You know, I think we're going to try the steaks. Are they good here?” I try to establish a connection with the servers, an implied apology for their job and my orders in everything I say. “I hate to bother you, but could we have some more water when you have a chance?” The thank-yous are ubiquitous and the tone of voice more pleading than perfunctory. To the gas station attendant I'd have said, “Oh, you know what? Could I have a pack of that gum, too?” And if it came too late in the ring-up I'd append an extra “sorry” to the request.

 

Ned got away with a lot, and people liked him for his balls when he showed them. But I feel sure he sometimes benefited from a subtle dose of Norah on the inside, a mitigating slide or soft touch, like a knuckleball, that distinguished him from the boys around him. He had a strange mix, as one pair of female coworkers put it, of cockiness and humility that they found very charming. “I don't think I've ever encountered that before,” one of them said. “But I like it.” Women saw something in him that was less repellant than the juggernaut come-ons and trash talk of the other men in the office. Their eyes softened on him and pleaded with him humbly as if he was the new guard on prison row and they hadn't seen a male human being in a very long time.

I went to a lot of interviews and in them I honed my arrogant behaviors in response to the cues I was getting from my interviewers, all of which were very different than any cues I'd ever gotten as a female interviewee.

As a female I'd been interviewed and hired by (and hence had bosses of) both sexes. The men were almost always stiff and formal, well trained not to say or do anything that might be interpreted as offensive. They were like that as bosses, too. All business. Equal opportunity to the hilt and not a shred of innuendo. Of course, later, after I'd worked in a place for a while, some male bosses, usually the top dogs and those for whom I did not work directly, flirted with me harmlessly in their corner offices when I brought them papers to sign. I would play along with just enough youthful indiscretion to let them know that I knew my place, but I'd return the compliment with enough sass to keep them at bay. It was an easy game. Never serious and never anything I couldn't handle.

Often I had a much harder time with my female bosses. In the interviews these women were all smiles, full of the fakest girl talk you can imagine. “Oh, we have this in common…. Oh, we'll have such fun.”

And I was just as bad, making nice and smoothing over, as we women are socialized to do and often feel obliged to persist in doing, at least on the surface, even in competitive or hierarchical environments. Meanwhile, they were exactly the right age to be thinking, “All the old knives that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur
!”

And boy, we stabbed. They did and I did. We fought the kind of underhanded bitch fights that sororities are famous for. They were insecure in their power, and I wouldn't quite stand down to it, and the ameliorations of meaningless flirtation couldn't smooth the works.

But in Ned's interviews, people didn't expect him to make nice. They expected him to brag about himself, to be smugly charming and steadfast, and so I did and I was. I got away with a lot, and I was able to be a far better actor than I really am. Confidence is everything, and in his interviews Ned was nothing if not a shit storm of confidence.

Most of these interviews, especially the ones for the Red Bull jobs, required you to fill out an application rehashing most of what was on your résumé. To that was attached a questionnaire designed to determine your attitudinal fitness for the position. Almost invariably one of the questions was: on a scale from one to ten how would you rate your people skills? These were sales jobs, after all, managerial sales jobs eventually, and your ability to manipulate people would be the key to your success both in the field and in the office. I always gave myself an eight and a half for my people skills, and when asked what I meant by that I could always back it up with some crap about being a chameleon.

“I can talk to anyone,” I'd say.

Yeah, right. The truth is I hate people. I especially hate people who use phrases like “people skills.” And when I do talk to people it's usually to crazy people on the street in New York, because I can be rude to them without them noticing. But Ned was a con artist, and he hid my contempt. His female interviewers flirted with him, exercising the subtle control of their positions, but enjoying the subtext of traditional male domination all the same. His male interviewers gave him the full-on man-to-man treatment. “Hey, buddy, how ya doin'?” We speak the same language.

In one interview with a male interviewer and another male applicant, the interviewer said, “Well, you know how it is with most television advertising. When the commercials come on you reach for your remote and change the channel, unless, of course, it's Cindy Crawford, right?”

Har. Har. Boys being boys. But this was just a precursor to what I'd find on the job when we boys were bonding full tilt. Guys in this environment expected you to swear and make sexist jokes. Women didn't, of course. But even when I said things that were inappropriate, somehow even they managed to work themselves to my advantage. In answering a question about my people skills with a female interviewer I said, “Well, you know, I talk to everybody. Maybe it's something I picked up in New York. You know how it is there [she was a New York transplant], you can just talk to people spontaneously in the check-out line or whatever and they don't look at you like ‘What the fuck is up with you?'”

“Well, Ned,” she said, laughing coquettishly, fanning her face, “I must admit, the New Yorker in me is even blushing. I've never heard anyone say ‘fuck' in an interview before. It's kind of refreshing actually.”

I was sure I'd tanked that job, but that evening I got the call-back for it. In fact, Ned was offered every job for which he applied, a half dozen in all. Not that this was much of an accomplishment since the Red Bull job interviews were basically cattle calls. But for a person with a serial killer's people skills, a Schopenhauerian outlook on life and a bottomless loathing for salespeople of every kind, Ned pulled off the performance of a lifetime.