She's Not There (28 page)

“Hi, Pete,” I said.

“Well, hel
-lo,
Jenny,” he said.

“By the way,” Nick said, “I don't think I told you, I finally found out what was wrong with Jim Boylan.”

“Yeah?” said Pete. “And what was that?”

My friend took a deep draft of Shipyard before answering. He looked at me and smiled.

“Not a damn thing,” he said.

One winter night, Luke swallowed a marble. I called Poison Control. “How is he, ma'am?” the woman asked. “Can he breathe? Is the object lodged in his lungs?”

“Luke,” I said, “can you breathe?”

“Of course I can breathe,” he said, annoyed. He looked up from his Game Boy.

“He says he can breathe,” I said.

“Can he talk?”

“Luke, can you talk?”

“Maddy . . . ,” he said, annoyed.

“He can talk.”

“Well,” said Poison Control, “he sounds all right. You could take him to the doctor, but if you want my opinion, you can probably just wait for it to come out by itself.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I had a pretty good idea what she was getting at.

When Gammie died, she'd left me her good silver. This was just before she gave herself to science. I kept the silver in its wooden box on the lowest shelf in the hutch. There were dozens of salad forks and demitasse spoons and pie slicers in there, all engraved with an ornate
B.

In the days that followed, I found a new use for the silver serving fork, one unimagined by my grandmother. Each evening I examined that which Luke produced, using the fork as my instrument. I felt like a California forty-niner during the leanest days of the gold rush. Patiently I searched for Luke's marble, but each night my panning efforts proved nugatory. I decided, after a while, that I probably wouldn't be seeing that marble again. The thought made me restless, though. What had become of it? Is it possible for things to just vanish inside us? That hadn't been my experience.

Then we awoke one morning to find the ground covered with snow, all the color taken out of the world. Pieces of lawn furniture and sandboxes nudged above the surface, like the dorsal fins of sharks. The snow crystals sparkled in the sun. Grace came into the bedroom with two cups of coffee, and we sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window at the changed world.

That evening, my efforts bore fruit. The marble rolled around the metal bowl I was using as a sieve. I washed off the marble and held it in the palm of my hand. It was small, the marble. It was surprising how small it was.

It was late at night, and I was the last one up. I'd set the coffee robot for five-thirty A. M. I'd made the children's lunches for school, put them into the Jimmy Neutron lunchboxes, and placed these in the refrigerator, next to the Go-Gurt bars and the juice boxes and the cheese sticks.

I walked into Luke's room, a forty-four-year-old woman with bifocals, and I sat on the edge of my son's bed. He was already asleep, and his long eyelashes fluttered in dream.

I ran my fingers through the blond mop of his hair. Luke looked a lot like I had when I was eight. I remembered the moment he was born, Grace hearing the cry and whispering, “That's amazing.”

The house was full of sleeping creatures. Patrick lay in his Buzz Lightyear sheets, clutching Big Pig and Big Pig's friend Mystic, a unicorn. Lucy, the dog, lay on the floor of Patrick's room, barking in her dreams. Grace was upstairs, the
New York Times
crossword on her stomach, a pen in one hand, her eyes shut. The fish swam in their tank.

The chimes of Aunt Nora's clock rang from the living room. There were faint embers glowing in the fireplace.

Luke opened his eyes and looked at me. “Hi, Maddy,” he whispered.

“Hello, Luke,” I said.

We stared at each other for a moment.

“You're a pretty great kid, you know that?” I said, my voice catching slightly.

He smiled. “So . . . are you in here for any particular reason?” he said.

I opened my palm. “Does this look familiar?”

He sat up. “Whoa,” he said. “Is that the marble?”

“That's it all right.”

“But wait. Maddy?” He looked confused. “This isn't the one I swallowed.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Believe me, it's the one you swallowed. Unless you swallowed two.”

“But this marble isn't blue,” he said. “It's red. The marble I swallowed was blue.”

We sat there for a moment, thinking things over.

“Well, somehow it changed, inside you,” I said. “I can't explain it.”

Luke looked at me with his wide, young eyes. The winter wind blew against his window.

“Maybe it's a miracle,” he said.

I kissed my boy. “Maybe,” I said.

Afterword: Imagining Jenny by Richard Russo

September 2002. “Don't worry, Russo,” I said.
“We'll always have Paris.”

I.

Jenny had been given to understand she'd have a private hospital room in which to convalesce. The next day she'd be operated on by Dr. Eugene Schrang, who'd pioneered “gender reassignment surgery,” a term that still cracked me up (if it didn't work out, you'd be reassigned again, this time to the motor pool). I don't know if Schrang was the one who actually came up with the idea of using a penis to create a vagina, of turning one highly sensate organ in upon itself to produce another, but if so, he gets points for imagination in my book. Either that or he just lived through the Depression and, like my maternal grandmother, hated to waste anything. He was also very expensive, though as Jenny herself pointed out to me, if you're in the market for new genitalia, you really don't want to shop in the bargain basement. Still, I had some doubts about the good doctor. His Web site featured a giant vagina on its home page, and I'd begun to think of him as “Big Pussy,” like the character on
The Sopranos.
One thing was for sure. He had a thriving practice. Dr. Schrang did some eighty male-to-female gender reassignment surgeries a year, and June had apparently been a particularly busy month. When we arrived in Egypt, he had a wardful of postop transsexuals, which meant that Jenny would have a roommate.

Her name was Melanie, and to Jenny, she couldn't have been more encouraging. “Don't be scared, hon, you're doing the right thing,” she counseled in a southern drawl from behind the drawn curtain that divided the room. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, I thought, wishing I could whisper this advice to Jenny, who shared my devotion to
The Wizard of Oz.
Over the last two years there'd been plenty of tense, strained moments in our friendship, and lately we clung to laughter like drowning men
(sic)
to an inner tube. It usually wasn't long after an argument that I'd get an e-mail from Jenny that would restore our equilibrium. One such said, “Russo. I've come up with a title for Larry Fine's autobiography. It's Moe,You Bas
tard,You Bastard, Moe,You Bastard.”
Reading it, I found myself grinning from ear to ear, and not just because at age fifty-three I still took pleasure in the Three Stooges. It was, of course, the way Jim and I had communicated right from the start—that is, elliptically. To be Larry Fine was to be poked in the eye, cuffed in the head, knocked down, ridiculed, and buffeted by a malicious force of nature over the course of a lifetime, and never to know why. By the time you came to writing your autobiography, all you'd know is that you'd had enough. Moe, you bastard.

Melanie's operation had gone well enough, but her recovery had been dicey. Since her catheter had been removed, she explained to us, disappearing into the small bathroom located on Jenny's side of the curtain, she actually had to stand on the commode to pee. How the added elevation could possibly help in this enterprise I neither understood nor wanted to understand. When the door closed behind her, we could hear the seat drop and Melanie climb aboard. “It's worth it, though,” she assured Jenny ten minutes later as she limped back to her own bed, bathed in sweat from the fruitless exertion. “It's
so
worth it.”

In what sense? was what I wanted to ask, but I bit my tongue. Jenny, herself in a hospital gown now, was beginning to look panicked, all too ready for the sedative she'd been promised. Grace sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. “How do you feel?”

“Terrified,” Jenny admitted, her voice all but inaudible. “Brave. I couldn't do this without you.” Her eyes shifted, kindly, to include me. I searched for something to say, failing utterly, and not for the last time in Egypt. It was language—easy, thoughtless words between friends—that I'd most felt the loss of over the long months. We value our friendships in part, I suspect, according to their ease, and Boylan and I had hit it off from the start. Ten years earlier he'd been the very first visitor to our rented camp on Great Pond, where we were staying until we could find a house in Waterville. He'd arrived, bearded then, with a six-pack of beer by way of a calling card, to welcome me to Colby College after I'd been given a job he himself had applied for. He might have been coming to check me out, the way you'd look over the guy your wife left you for, but by the time we'd shaken hands, I'd known this wasn't the case. By the time we'd drunk half of that first beer, our feet up on the railing of the deck, before I'd read his two sad, hilarious companion novels (
The Planets
and
The Constellations
) about souls adrift in the wide universe, I knew I'd made a friend. Here was a man (I thought) who spoke my language, to whom I would seldom have to explain myself, who was predisposed to give me the benefit of every doubt. By the time we'd finished that beer, we'd formed, it seemed to me, an unspoken pact, the exact nature of which we'd figure out later, the details being unimportant. It'd be easy. And until recently it had been. Now, though, I had to watch every word I said, especially the pronouns, not because Jenny got upset when I messed up (she never did), but because my mistakes, especially public, social ones, caused her both pain and embarrassment. Worse, such blunders were evidence that I missed my old pal Jim and wanted him—and our old, thoughtless ease—back again. Which I did.

“You know what?” Grace said later, when we left the hospital in search of whatever the town might have to offer by way of dinner. “She's going to get all the good drugs. We're not going to get any.”

Barbara, my wife, happened to be away visiting family when Jim told me. She returned a couple of days later, and I drove down to Portland to meet her evening flight. We'd spoken a couple of times, but I'd said nothing about Boylan because it wasn't the sort of news you impart over the phone and also because I myself had only begun to process what I'd been told. The first person I always want to tell important news to is Barbara, partly because I can trust her reactions, which are often more generous than my own, and partly because I often don't know what I truly think about things until I
do
tell her. Which was why it now felt so strange to possess knowledge that I badly wanted to conceal from her.

I waited until we'd loaded her luggage into the trunk of the car, gotten through the worst of the Portland traffic and safely onto I-95 pointed north, and only then, when the other cars fell away and the tall, dark pines began to enclose us, did I lean forward, turn off the radio, and tell my wife to prepare for a shock. (“This is not about us,” I hastened to assure her, fearing she would leap to some terrible conclusion.) As I told her that our friend Jim Boylan believed himself to be a woman; that he'd understood this to be the case all his life and was only now discovering the courage to admit it; that Grace knew and was, of course, devastated; that he'd consulted doctors who had diagnosed his condition; that he intended to enter into a “transition” from male to female, from Jim to Jenny, that would involve hormone therapy and, quite possibly, gender surgery—Barbara said nothing until my voice finally fell. Then she said, “Oh, this is just insane. There
has
to be something else going on. We
know
this man.” She was looking over at me now, though it was very dark in the car, as if I, too, at any moment, might be revealed to her as a stranger. I understood all too well what the news was doing to her. What she knew—what she
knew
she knew—was being challenged. The ground beneath her feet had shifted, was no longer stable. Of all the couples we knew, the Boylans had the marriage most like our own, and if Grace had not known the truth, never even suspected it, then what in the wide world was truly knowable? If you can be so wrong about something so fundamental, what could you trust? Or, more to the point, who?

We drove on for many minutes, adrift in time and space. I speak here not in metaphor. We were supposed to have gotten off the interstate at Brunswick and taken Route 1 up the coast to Camden, but I'd missed our exit. I know now that this is what must have happened. At the time, though, we were simply flying down the pitch black interstate, peering out the windshield at a newly unfamiliar world. It occurred to me that what I'd told my wife—that none of this was about us—wasn't true. It
was
about us.

II.

Over the long months that followed, as Jim confided in more and more people, it became clear that, as one friend remarked, he'd become a walking Rorschach test. As he revealed who he was, we revealed who we were as well, and in doing so, I suspect, surprised ourselves almost as much as Jim had surprised us. When Barbara and I talked about it—and it was impossible not to—we often ended up clinging to each other, reassuring each other that everything was okay with
us
, that we
did
know each other, that we weren't harboring some terrible secret capable of atomizing our marriage should it ever come to light. But every now and then I'd catch Barbara regarding me strangely (or, more likely, I'd imagine her doing so) and immediately conclude that she'd been thinking about Jim and Grace and the fact that nothing in the world was quite as certain as she'd once imagined.

When things spin out of control, when the familiar becomes suddenly chimerical, our instinct is to restore order. Jim's sister, conservative by nature and efficient by habit, immediately set her own world aright by telling her brother she wanted nothing further to do with him. Problem solved, order restored. For the rest of us, encumbered by decency and affection, it wasn't so simple, though I suspect most of us, in our own ways, also would have preferred “the problem” to go away. Looking into our crystal balls, we concluded there was no way Grace and Jim's marriage could weather a storm of this magnitude. Sure, they loved each other, were devoted to each other, but they would end up divorced. Thinking of Grace, we decided that sooner would probably be better than later. She was going to have to invent a new life, a new happiness, and the sooner she got started on this necessary task, the better. It was Jim we always imagined moving away, to New York or Washington, some big city where he would find “a support group” of people who had themselves survived their own transsexuality, or were in the process of doing so. Interestingly, we didn't immediately see ourselves as Jim's natural support group, nor did we imagine that Grace would be the one to move to New York or Washington, because that scenario did nothing to restore order to
our
world.

My own Rorschach reaction to Jim's revelation was both surprising and disturbing because it revealed an emotional conservatism in my character I'd have surely denied had anyone accused me of it. After the day Jim first trusted me with the truth and I'd promised always to be his friend, I began to wonder if I'd made a promise I'd be unable to keep. Almost immediately, I began to feel like Nick Carraway after Gatsby's murder; I wanted the world to be “uniform and at a sort of moral attention.” Jim had explained, and at some level I even believed, that his was a medical condition, not a moral one, but I discovered I was unable to sever that medical condition from its moral consequences. When I asked myself if he (I had not yet even begun to think of my friend as “she”) didn't have the same right to the pursuit of happiness as anyone else, my response was no, not if it meant Grace's
un
happiness, not if it put their children at risk. He'd
made
his choice when he took Grace, to have and to hold, until death. “Conduct,” Nick Carraway says, “may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on,” and I agreed, almost proud that my tolerance, like Nick's, had found a limit. My friend's moral duty was to be a man, in every sense of that term. I tried to imagine myself telling him this. Saying the words:
Be a man.

Of course, my emotional conservatism, if that's what it was, had more than one source. I was not just a recovering Catholic and, as such, prone to see the world in moral terms, but also a fiction writer, and no matter how liberal a writer's politics may be, the act of story-telling is not an inherently liberal enterprise for the simple reason that storytellers believe in free will. A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: “A” followed by “B” followed by “C” followed by “D.” Rather, it's a series of events linked by cause and effect: “A” causes “B,” which causes “C,” and so on. True, a person's (or a fictional character's) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices—fate and luck play a role as well—but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People in life—and therefore in fiction—must choose, and their choices must have meaningful consequences. Otherwise, there's no story. Jim's medical condition—his insistence that it was a medical condition and nothing more—was pure fate; if what he claimed was true, then his circumstance was preordained, which removed the whole thing from the realm of narrative, and doing so ran contrary to my own belief system, not just to my residual Catholicism, but also to my novelist's sensibility.